Merchant of Death
Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

Blood from Stones

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The Failure of Counterintelligence
As my colleagues have noted, the case of Nadia Nadim Prouty and her ability to illegally acquire citizenship, security clearances and sensitive employment in the FBI and CIA, raises many disturbing issues.

But underlying this failure and numerous other penetration efforts by Islamist groups is the large-scale failure of U.S. counterintelligence efforts for many years. There are numerous cases of Chinese infiltration agents, Islamist penetration and Russian penetrations that underscore the shrinking ability to monitor or detect the spies working in this country.

The capacity has been rapidly shrinking for several decades, and, despite the threat of Islamist terrorists and the growing activities of the Chinese in both traditional and industrial espionage, the entire concept of a counterintelligence has withered on the vine, from before the Clinton administration through the current administration. Currently, that capacity barely exists, according to my friends in the intelligence community.

This does not mean spying on everyone or running roughshod over our constitutional rights. But it does imply a realistic view of how the world works, and basic measures to protect ourselves. There are historic examples of counterintelligence efforts run amok, too, and safeguards must be put in place to guard against that.

One of the fundamental problems goes back to the basic conceptualization of the problem. When the Cold War ended it was assumed that counter-intelligence capacity was no longer needed. The Soviet Union was gone, the world was becoming flat and the capacity was redundant.

The trade craft was lost or atrophied. The modest efforts to revive the ability to monitor the spies spying on us have run into the problem that we are no longer familiar with the new, modern methods and technologies being used against us.

There must be a basic understanding that our enemies, including radical Islamists who have spent decades learning our system, want to know what we are doing and how to foil that. This implies that clearance processes, immigration standards and basic operational security measures be taken seriously.

Radical Islamists, as the British, Spanish and others are discovering, burrow into their host societies with the intent to wage a type of asymmetrical warfare that will cause large-scale damage with few resources. We have been largely unwilling, for reasons of political correctness, to acknowledge that radical Islamists have operational units and designs on the United States.

This comprises only a tiny fraction of the Muslims in this country, as Chinese espionage efforts comprise only a fraction of the Chinese community, or others operating here. No witch hunt is necessary. Only the recognition of the need to be aware there is a real problem.

To me, this is one of the great challenges posed by groups affiliated with the international Muslim Brotherhood operating in this country. They have proved themselves to be masters of penetration on behalf of a theology that espouses the destruction of our way of life. They are not illegal groups nor have they been designated, but they have, by their own admission, hostile intent and a desire to penetrate institutions.

The mission of penetration has been greatly aided by these groups' ability to gain open access to the White House, the FBI, DOJ, DHS, State Department etc., etc., etc. ad nauseum.

As an open society with large immigrant population, penetration is far easier than our penetrating radical Islamist cells. Good counterintelligence requires acknowledging that there are those, like Ms. Prouty, who get into the system with intent to aid other parties that want to hurt us.

What is striking in the Prouty case is that she was conducting unauthorized classified searches in 2003, and yet was not shut down until 2007. It seems that it took a long time for the dime to drop on that one.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH
The Criminal-Terrorist Pipeline to the United States
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