FPI / August 12, 2024
The U.S. national counterintelligence strategy, released on Aug. 1, calls for shifting from a defensive to offensive posture to disrupt or compromise foreign spies before they can act to damage American national security.
Counterintelligence is the task of identifying and neutralizing foreign spies operating as diplomats, business people, media representatives, and other forms of cover.
The 24-page strategy report notes that spying and technology theft by Chinese intelligence operatives is the most significant threat by hostile foreign spy services.
Geostrategy-Direct.com reported in January 2023 on the demise of an active and offensive U.S. counterintelligence function following the firing of legendary American counterspy James Angleton in by CIA Director William Colby in1974.
Angleton’s impassioned efforts to reorient the CIA as a strategic counterintelligence service that would target the KGB and related spy agencies in seeking to take down the Soviet Union was branded “sick-think” by his leftist critics.
Critics say the CIA has never recovered, with the spy agency suffering major failures in the years following Angelton’s departure.
Related: Released JFK files recall James Angleton and ‘golden decade for counterintelligence, January 2023
New details of Angleton’s tenure and exit at CIA were revealed with the release by the U.S. government of once-secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Before being forced out by the CIA in December of 1974, Angleton’s strategy of focusing on the agency’s counterintelligence function was downgraded and removed as an independent function.
A 1975 report to a presidential commission probing the agency’s domestic activities includes testimony by the former CIA counterspy chief who was forced out of his job in December 1974.
In the document, Angleton warned the commission headed by then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller that U.S. anti-Soviet counterintelligence efforts had been severely weakened at CIA after his departure.
More accurate intelligence could be gleaned by intelligence analysts if they relied less on public or overt reporting on Soviet intentions in reports from diplomats, and instead turned to secret information from sources within the Soviet system “whose warnings regarding disinformation have been universally ignored,” Angleton said.
Michelle Van Cleave, a former senior U.S. counterintelligence official, said the new strategy announced in the Aug. 1 report is well crafted but will be worthless unless agencies have the means to implement it.
“Ever since the Cold War ended, America’s CI resources have become an afterthought — and it shows,” she said.
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