Espionage and Counterespionage

Requirements

As a policy-driven enterprise, requirements—the initial phase of the intelligence cycle—originate with policymakers who set the overarching national intelligence-gathering agenda. This includes identifying the intentions and deceptions of other actors (e.g., Does country X have chemical weapons, though it claims it does not? What banks are laundering money for terrorism financiers?). It also includes the need to guard one's intentions and deceptions. Guards against hostile agencies' human intelligence collection activities (versus, for example, satellite intelligence collections) are known as counterespionage. However, counterespionage is a subset of a much larger effort to guard one's intentions and deceptions, formally known as counterintelligence (CI).

Counterintelligence

The requirement for counterintelligence is composed of actions to guard against threats from outside the intelligence community (agents from hostile organizations) and from inside it (moles). The CI mission is to conceal state secrets, including their sources and the means by which they were collected. In the process, CI officers must overcome the tendency to trust others—including those within their organizations who have passed security clearance screenings—to assume that virtually anyone can be a spy.

There are two safeguards present in all U.S. intelligence agencies to protect against CI. The first is the process of personnel screening. This includes background checks of job applicants and current employees to weed out those whose allegiances are deemed too risky to be entrusted with state secrets. Often, these background checks involve questioning personnel with the use of a polygraph. However, the polygraph—which measures physiological changes—can be manipulated or defeated by interviewees. Aldrich Ames, among the most famous of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) moles, passed several polygraph interviews during his tenure, during which he fed voluminous amounts of intelligence to his Soviet handlers.

The second CI safeguard is the classification system whereby sensitive information is labeled (e.g., confidential, secret, or top secret) and securely compartmented according to the risks it poses, were it to be compromised. Even within a given classification tier, materials are further compartmentalized (e.g., in sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs), whereby access to information is granted on a need-to-know basis. The goal of this system is to reduce individuals' access to information, hence reducing the damage that could be done by any given source of information leakage. Critics of this system point out that it has been deceptively used to conceal from the public illegal activities and professional mistakes made by government personnel.

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