CIA Keeps Having Disastrous Failures

FPM: Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that democracies would have a tough time with foreign policy, in large part because it was so hard for them to maintain secrecy.  Recent events show how prescient he was. Indeed, the story reveals one of the most chilling developments in the history of our secret intelligence services.

You wouldn’t know it from the “news coverage,” but the CIA’s global secret internet communications network was uncovered by Iranian spooks between 2009 and 2013 (that would be the first Obama term), thanks in part to Iran’s enlisting an American double agent who knew all about the system.  A very big deal, as Yahoo reported and Breitbart summarized:

According to Yahoo News, CIA officials were stunned at how quickly and thoroughly the Iranians penetrated the system, which relied on phony corporate websites. One of the report’s cringe-inducing details is that once the Iranian double agent pointed out a disguised CIA website, Iranian intelligence unraveled the rest of the CIA network using Google searches for similar sites and monitoring traffic to those websites.

This was quickly followed by China’s catastrophic compromise of America’s spy network in 2011 and 2012, which culminated in the arrest and execution of about 30 U.S. agents and sources, essentially destroying the American network in China.

It seems the Iranians were in cahoots with the Chinese, and you should not be surprised to learn that the Russians were part of the anti-American operation. Indeed, there seems to be no known limit on the global catastrophe, from the dozens of men and women who risked—and often lost—their lives for American security, to the knowledge our enemies gained about our sources and methods.  All over the world.

With dawning horror, U.S. officials realized that once Iranian or Chinese intelligence officials were able to pinpoint CIA assets within their own borders, they were almost certainly capable of zeroing in on similar digital signatures in other countries, former officials said.

Former officials said the fallout from the compromises was likely global in scope — potentially endangering all CIA sources that used some version of this internet-based system worldwide.

American agents were identified, rounded up, and executed.  There does not seem to have been the sort of drastic remedial action you might expect in such a disaster.  Instead, according to a bevy of former intelligence officials, there was a “near-total lack of accountability” in the intelligence community.  more here