are also skilled at hunting down informants. But the results of the study showed that countries being targeted by the U.S. The memo sent last week suggested that the agency underestimated its adversaries - the belief that its officers and tradecraft were better than other intelligence services. Former officials said that counterintelligence officials typically like to keep such details secret even from the broad C.I.A. Still, the memo outlining a specific number of informants arrested or killed by adversarial powers is an unusual level of detail, one that signals the importance of the current problems. stations and bases that note troubling trends or problems, or even warnings about counterintelligence problems, are not unheard-of, according to former officials. But his new book, “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence,” argues that the C.I.A.’s shift toward covert action and paramilitary operations undermined traditional espionage that relies on securely recruiting and handling agents. “Sometimes there are things beyond our control but there are also occasions of sloppiness and neglect and people in senior positions are never held responsible.” “No one at the end of the day is being held responsible when things go south with an agent,” said Douglas London, a former agency operative.

case officers to think about steps they can take on their own to do a better job managing informants.įormer officials said that there has to be more focus on security and counterintelligence, among both senior leaders and frontline personnel, especially when it comes to recruiting informants, which C.I.A.

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The agency has devoted much of its attention for the last two decades to terrorist threats and the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but improving intelligence collection on adversarial powers, both great and small, is once again a centerpiece of the C.I.A.’s agenda, particularly as policymakers demand more insight into China and Russia.

Case officers are not typically promoted for running good counterintelligence operations, such as figuring out if an informant is really working for another country. Recruiting new informants, former officials said, is how the C.I.A.’s case officers - its frontline spies - earn promotions. has many ways to collect intelligence for its analysts to craft into briefings for policymakers, networks of trusted human informants around the world remain the centerpiece of its efforts, the kind of intelligence that the agency is supposed to be the best in the world at collecting and analyzing. officers in order to discover their sources. The large number of compromised informants in recent years also demonstrated the growing prowess of other countries in employing innovations like biometric scans, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and hacking tools to track the movements of C.I.A. In recent years, adversarial intelligence services in countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan have been hunting down the C.I.A.’s sources and in some cases turning them into double agents. The cable highlighted the struggle the spy agency is having as it works to recruit spies around the world in difficult operating environments. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies - a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables. The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said. WASHINGTON - Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A.

Its been lost to time