CIA Urges Officers Not to Underestimate Foreign Spy Agencies as Informant Networks Collapse - Report
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) admitted in a rare agency-wide cable that it’s suffered a severe problem of losing informants in recent years, urging its stations around the globe to pay more attention to the counterintelligence efforts of other nations.
The top secret cable, described to the New York Times by “people familiar with the matter,” warned that a large number of CIA informants had either been killed, arrested or otherwise compromised over the last several years.
According to the sources, the cable accused CIA officers of placing “mission over security” by being too quick to trust new sources and moving too quickly to recruit them, while at the same time underestimating the spycraft of rival intelligence agencies. The Times noted Langley’s cable gave a specific number of informants lost - a rare moment of transparency intended to highlight the seriousness of the situation.
Biometric scans, facial recognition technology, artificial intelligence and improved hacking tools were all mentioned as new challenges for the CIA to overcome, which had made it easier to track the movements of CIA officers and to uncover their sources’ identities.
Experts have long called attention to the CIA’s technology shortcomings. John Reidy, a former government contractor, called attention to what he described as a “catastrophic failure” in a 2006 report. “Upwards of 70% of our operations had been compromised,” he told McClatchy in 2015; still, the CIA fired him rather than address the problem.
According to Yahoo News, that system came crashing down between 2009 and 2013, after Iranian counterintelligence experts cracked the CIA’s extremely simple internet communications system and figured out how to identify the websites the agency used to lure potential informants into contact with CIA officers. Using little more than a simple Google search, Tehran was able to destroy an entire CIA information network in the country. Once the information was shared with China, at least two dozen CIA operatives were killed.
https://sputniknews.com/20211005/cia-urges-officers-not-to-underestimate-foreign-spy-agencies-as-informant-networks-collapse—1089691961.html