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The US Intelligence Community Is Being Disrupted


American intelligence needs a new business model that’s better suited to an era of novel threats, abundant information, and changing user preferences. The next generation of national security leaders expects more—more customization, more contribution, and above all, more access.

Intelligence officers are likely to bristle at the comparison—intelligence isn’t a business, nor are its officers motivated by profit. But the intelligence community’s leaders should borrow a few of the private sector’s concepts to help them better understand and adapt to the successive waves of disruption that are undermining the foundations of their institution they lead.

Business models are stories about how an enterprise works. They are built from assumptions about the competitive environment and the kinds of problems that people need to solve. Good business models have compelling value propositions that explain how a product or service the business offers solves those problems. Successful businesses offer better solutions than their competitors.

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The Ties that Bind: Theodor Heuss and American Intelligence

Theodor Heuss was America’s favorite German. Shortly after the US Army occupied Heidelberg, the American military government appointed him minister of culture for the state of Württemberg Baden. Heuss was elected president of West Germany in 1949, but his cordial relationship with the United States may have had a covert side to it, Dr. Thomas Boghardt explains.

Theodor Heuss was America’s favorite German. Shortly after the US Army occupied Heidelberg, Heuss’s hometown, the American military government appointed him minister of culture for the state of Württemberg Baden. When Heuss was elected president of West Germany in 1949, the American press praised his opposition to the Nazis and lauded his intent to make Germany “a living democracy.” And when Heuss visited the United States in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who led the Allied forces to victory in World War II, welcomed him “with unusual warmth” to the White House.

Heuss’s cordial relationship with the United States may have had a covert side to it. A record of the East German intelligence service (“Stasi”) suggests that Heuss served as an informant of the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps from 1946 to 1947. According to the Stasi document, Heuss provided the Americans with information about the political situation in Württemberg Baden and received remuneration for his services. Eventually, the CIC discontinued its secret association with Heuss because his information proved of “little value.” Nonetheless, the East German document avers, the CIC kept his reports on file in case the Americans wanted “to put pressure” on Heuss in the future.

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Russia's GRU: Spy agency known for brazenness back in the headlines

For an intelligence service that is supposed to operate in the shadows, the GRU seems to attract a lot of headlines.
The GRU -- formally known as Main Directorate of the General Staff -- has long been accused by the West of orchestrating brazen and high-profile attacks, including the hacking of Democratic Party email accounts during the 2016 US presidential election and the 2018 nerve agent attack in Salisbury, England.
Now the spy agency is again at the center of international attention, after reports that US intelligence concluded GRU operatives offered cash incentives to the Taliban to kill American and British troops in Afghanistan.
The news has already caused a political storm in Washington, with congressional leaders demanding answers from the Trump administration. But observers also wonder why the Russian intelligence agency would run an operation that potentially conflicts with Russia's own stated goals to bring warring parties to the table in Afghanistan and avoid a precipitous collapse of the central government.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the story -- first reported by the New York Times -- was a "hoax," echoing President Donald Trump's suggestion that the reported intelligence may be "phony" and the story false.

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Spies can eavesdrop by watching a light bulb’s variations

The list of sophisticated eavesdropping techniques has grown steadily over years: wiretaps, hacked phones, bugs in the wall—even bouncing lasers off of a building's glass to pick up conversations inside. Now add another tool for audio spies: Any light bulb in a room that might be visible from a window.

Researchers from Israeli's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science today revealed a new technique for long-distance eavesdropping they call "lamphone." They say it allows anyone with a laptop and less than a thousand dollars of equipment—just a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor—to listen in on any sounds in a room that's hundreds of feet away in real-time, simply by observing the minuscule vibrations those sounds create on the glass surface of a light bulb inside. By measuring the tiny changes in light output from the bulb that those vibrations cause, the researchers show that a spy can pick up sound clearly enough to discern the contents of conversations or even recognize a piece of music.

"Any sound in the room can be recovered from the room with no requirement to hack anything and no device in the room," says Ben Nassi, a security researcher at Ben-Gurion who developed the technique with fellow researchers Yaron Pirutin and Boris Zadov, and who plans to present their findings at the Black Hat security conference in August. "You just need line of sight to a hanging bulb, and this is it."

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Who was ‘Miss KGB’ who won a secret beauty contest in 1990?

One October morning in 1990, a photo of a woman appeared on the front page of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. The woman on the cover — Katya Mayorova, as she was presented in the article — looked young, attractive, but also dangerous… posing with a gun.

“Miss KGB” — the headline read. But who was Katya Mayorova, the world’s only holder of an unusual title of a “security services beauty?”

The new face of the KGB

Despite the newly adopted policy of glasnost — Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to make the Soviet government more transparent — the KGB remained one of the most secretive state institutions of the USSR. The all-powerful agency had an image of a serious, widely feared security apparatus that was alien to any sort of frivolity.

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Intel shared among US allies indicates virus outbreak more likely came from market, not a Chinese lab

Intelligence shared among Five Eyes nations indicates it is "highly unlikely" that the coronavirus outbreak was spread as a result of an accident in a laboratory but rather originated in a Chinese market, according to two Western officials who cited an intelligence assessment that appears to contradict claims by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

"We think it's highly unlikely it was an accident," a Western diplomatic official with knowledge of the intelligence said. "It is highly likely it was naturally occurring and that the human infection was from natural human and animal interaction." The countries in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing coalition are coalescing around this assessment, the official said, and a second official, from a Five Eyes country, concurred with it. The US has yet to make a formal assessment public.

The assessment from members of the exclusive intelligence-sharing group seems to undermine forceful claims by Trump and Pompeo in recent days, as they have doubled down on the assertion that the outbreak originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than a market in the same region.

It will likely increase pressure on the Trump administration to provide evidence to back up its claim, which it has failed to do so far despite the increasingly aggressive rhetoric from the President and his top diplomat.

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What Happened to the KGB When the Soviet Union Folded?

If you're passing the time by binge-watching episodes of the critically-acclaimed TV series "The Americans," you may have grown fascinated with the story of a married couple living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs during the 1980s, who struggle to protect a dark secret. They're actually operatives for the KGB, the Soviet spy agency that during the Cold War battled clandestinely with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and other Western nations' intelligence organizations. The KGB — a Russian acronym that stands for Committee for State Security — became infamous in those years, thanks to its prowess at stealing secrets and assassinating perceived enemies abroad, as well as crushing domestic dissent. In the process it provided subject material for numerous movies and literary thrillers by novelists such as John le Carré and Martin Cruz Smith.

Since the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist back in 1991, you might assume that the KGB vanished with it. Indeed, after the hammer-and-sickle flag on the Kremlin was replaced by the tricolor of the Russian Federation that nation's first president, Boris Yeltsin, dismantled the agency and dispersed its functions among various other parts of the new government. In reality, though, intelligence experts say the KGB never really went away. Instead, like spies often do, it simply has resurfaced with a different name, FSB, whose letters stand in Russian for Federal Security Service. And today, with a former KGB agent and FSB head named Vladimir Putin as the head of state, the organization once known as the KGB seems to have regained much of its old reach and power.

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Spies Are Fighting a Shadow War Against the Coronavirus

The coronavirus pandemic currently sweeping across the world is more than a public health emergency. It poses unprecedented threats to national and international security, and fighting it, as the leaders of several countries have stressed, will resemble a major war involving similar numbers of fatalities. Intelligence services will have a major role in this struggle, just as they have in previous wars throughout history. That role will largely be played in the shadows—but it will be no less significant for its secrecy.

There are four ways that intelligence services will contribute to the war against COVID-19. First, they will provide policymakers with assessments about the virus’s spread and impact. The U.S. intelligence community already has a dedicated facility now at the front line of fighting COVID-19, the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), based at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Staffed with epidemiologists, virologists, and other experts, the NCMI acts as a clearing house for all-source U.S. intelligence about the virus. Building on its Cold War predecessor, the NCMI has been America’s eyes and ears when it comes to biological threats since 2008, up to and including COVID-19. According to public reporting, in January and February this year, the U.S. intelligence community warned the Trump administration about the threat of the virus spreading from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where it originated, and becoming a pandemic...

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Before this pandemic ends, intel agencies should prepare for a world of threats

Few people regard the novel coronavirus pandemic as an intelligence failure. And, judging by conventional standards, it is not one. The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) was created to collect and analyze secret information about our adversaries’ capabilities and intentions that pose strategic threats to American national security. Despite allegations by some foreign propagandists and domestic conspiracy-mongers, COVID-19 was not dreamed up in some biological weapons laboratory and unleashed diabolically on the world. Its origins in Chinese “wet markets” were far more prosaic. Today’s rapidly emerging global dangers could not have been uncovered by intercepting secret Chinese communications or capturing their plans for biological warfare.  

In such situations, traditional approaches to gathering and analyzing intelligence can only make limited contributions. They can help to determine what secretive governments, such as those in China and Iran, actually know about the spread of COVID-19 and its lethality, and to what degree they may be hiding the truth. And some spinmeisters, evidently intent on both polishing the IC’s image and tarnishing that of President Trump, already have been portraying classified briefings in January and February as an intelligence success because they did just that. 

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US spies having trouble assessing coronavirus spread in China, Russia: report

With nearly 800,000 coronavirus cases worldwide, intelligence agencies in the U.S. are having difficulties determining the outbreak situation in countries such as China, Russia, and North Korea, government sources told Reuters.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo previously suggested there might be a lack of accurate information on Russia and Iran. He also accused China of a disinformation campaign amid an absence of new cases, which Beijing denies.

An understanding of the COVID-19 outbreak in those countries could help the U.S. and international efforts to limit the impact of COVID-19.

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A Spy Agency's Challenge: How To Sort A Million Photos A Day

...Today, the NGA, one of the nation's least-known spy agencies, is undergoing another revolution. It's working closely with private, commercial satellite companies, and this has generated an endless stream of imagery from space.

Dave Gauthier, the director of the NGA's commercial and business group, explains how governments and militaries worldwide will have to adapt their thinking in an environment of constant surveillance.

"We will all be observed every second of every day by something. And so we have to learn how to operate in the open. And it makes strategic surprise very difficult for everybody," said Gauthier.

After a briefing by Gauthier, NPR was invited inside one of the NGA's most sensitive spaces — the operations center — but only to look, not to record.

Dozens of analysts were working. Yet it was dark, and as quiet as a library. A second-floor sky box overlooked the cavernous room. All overhead lights are off. The darkness eliminates glare for analysts who pore over satellite images on their computers.

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America's national security machine stares down a viral threat

As a lethal virus sweeps the globe, U.S. national security officials are closely monitoring how the disease is affecting closed societies like China, Iran and North Korea, trying to gauge to what extent officials in those countries have been covering up the extent of the outbreak.

They’re also wrestling with a complex question closer to home: how to prevent the virus from spreading inside the nation’s intelligence and defense agencies themselves.

The novel coronavirus, which has now popped up in at least 100 countries and killed more than 4,000 people worldwide, poses a vexing problem for the government’s national security apparatus, which has to protect its own workforce even as it races to analyze the threat, combat misinformation promoted by hostile governments, and inform a president not known for his command of facts and figures.

Many of these efforts have been coordinated through the National Security Council, which has been holding regular meetings on the response strategy since mid-January, according to an administration official.

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Exclusive: Nukes, malware and bots: US intelligence races to stay ahead of adversaries

Imminent nation-state threats to U.S. national security, pernicious cyberattacks and looming global health crises, like the 2019 novel coronavirus, are but a small fraction of the burgeoning front-line intelligence challenges facing the nation.

“You have your big four — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — all the challenges that they present and some of the newer things that have really risen in the last few years, things like counterintelligence,” said Walsh.

Of that quartet of adversaries, each has a formidable military, has nuclear weapons or is intent on developing them, operates a robust suite of cyber weapons, is believed by the U.S. intelligence community to have spies on American soil, is adept at anti-U.S. rhetoric and perhaps most worrying, appears to be growing more aggressive toward the U.S.

“Whether it’s the nuclear capabilities in North Korea or Russian intentions and the Chinese movements in the economic space, those are things that we’re watching every day,” Walsh said.

There are also urgent and potentially damaging election security threats, disinformation campaigns and espionage plots quietly churning away in the shadows.

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CORRECTED-U.S. spy agencies monitor coronavirus spread, concerns about India -sources

U.S. intelligence agencies are monitoring the global spread of coronavirus and the ability of governments to respond, sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday, warning that there were concerns about how India would cope with a widespread outbreak.

While there are only a few known cases in India, one source said the country’s available countermeasures and the potential for the virus to spread given India’s dense population was a focus of serious concern.

U.S. intelligence agencies are also focusing on Iran, where the country’s deputy health minister has fallen ill during a worsening outbreak. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday the United States was “deeply concerned” Tehran may have covered up details about the spread of coronavirus.

The role of U.S. intelligence agencies in responding to the coronavirus epidemic at this point principally involves monitoring the spread of the illness around the world and assessing the responses of governments.

They are working closely with health agencies, such as the U.S. Center for Disease Control, in sharing information they collect and targeting further intelligence gathering.

One source said U.S. agencies would use a wide range of intelligence tools, ranging from undercover informants to electronic eavesdropping tools, to track the virus’ impact.

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The CIA's ‘Minerva’ Secret

The U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA and the German intelligence agency, BND, according to reports today by the German public television channel, ZDF and the Washington Post.

Declassified records posted today by the National Security Archive show that among those secretly surveilled countries were military regimes of the Operation Condor nations—led by Chile, Argentina and Uruguay—as they conducted regional and international acts of repression and terrorism against leading opposition figures.

Today's posting reveals that Operation Condor—the network of Southern Cone military regimes which targeted opponents around the world for liquidation in the mid and late 1970s—conducted their encoded communications on those encryption devices made by the CIA-owned Swiss company, Crypto AG, without realizing the U.S. might be listening in.

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U.S. counterintelligence chief warns of broadening spy threat

The United States faces espionage threats from a growing range of adversaries that are employing new technologies to undermine the country's interests, according to a new document released Monday by the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC).

Threats from "foreign intelligence entities are becoming more complex, diverse, and harmful to U.S. interests," the National Counterintelligence Strategy for 2020-2022 says. "Foreign threat actors have become more dangerous because, with ready access to advanced technology, they are threatening a broader range of targets at lower risk."

The strategy, which updates a version last released in 2015, lists Russia, China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea as notable state adversaries. It says non-state organizations like Lebanese Hizballah, ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as other criminal and ideologically motivated entities pose "significant threats."

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Spies Like AI: The Future of Artificial Intelligence for the US Intelligence Community

America’s intelligence collectors are already using AI in ways big and small, to scan the news for dangerous developments, send alerts to ships about rapidly changing conditions, and speed up the NSA’s regulatory compliance efforts. But before the IC can use AI to its full potential, it must be hardened against attack. The humans who use it — analysts, policy-makers and leaders — must better understand how advanced AI systems reach their conclusions.

Dean Souleles is working to put AI into practice at different points across the U.S. intelligence community, in line with the ODNI’s year-old strategy. The chief technology advisor to the principal deputy to the Director of National Intelligence wasn’t allowed to discuss everything that he’s doing, but he could talk about a few examples.

At the Intelligence Community’s Open Source Enterprise, AI is performing a role that used to belong to human readers and translators at CIA’s Open Source Center: combing through news articles from around the world to monitor trends, geopolitical developments, and potential crises in real-time.

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A new satellite to produce imagery for the intelligence community

Capella released the design for its new Sequoia satellite design Jan. 21, giving observers a first look at the new satellite the company plans to use to provide synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.

Unlike traditional satellite imagery produced with optical sensors, which can be degraded or denied by adverse lighting conditions or weather, SAR uses radar to provide imagery day or night, regardless of the weather or cloud cover. Additionally, SAR sensors can provide data on material properties, moisture content, precise movements, and elevation, meaning that SAR can be used to build 3D recreations of a given geographical area.

Both the Air Force and the NRO have awarded contracts to Capella. The Air Force wants to use SAR for virtual reality software, missile defense and developing predictive intelligence to foresee foreign threats, awarding a contract to the company in November. Meanwhile, the NRO issued a commercial study contract the company in December as part of its efforts to diversify what types of imagery the agency purchases from commercial companies.

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STYLING SECRETS JONNA MENDEZ LEARNED AS THE CIA'S CHIEF OF DISGUISE

No one understands the power of fashion to communicate — and conceal — better than Jonna Mendez.

Having served with the CIA for 27 years prior to her retirement in 1993, Mendez earned the title of Chief of Disguise, ran a multi-million dollar program and received the Intelligence Commendation Medal for her services. During her career with the agency, she became a specialist in identity transformation and clandestine photography and came up against the KGB in Moscow, the Stasi in East Germany and the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. No big deal.

In the years since she left the agency, Mendez has used her experience with real-life spies to co-write books like "Argo," "Spy Dust" and "The Moscow Rules" with her husband Antonio Mendez, who shared the title Chief of Disguise. Jonna is now a lecturer, consultant and a founding member of the board of advisors at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. — and she's arguably the best person to ask for advice if you're taking a trip to your hometown and don't want your ex to recognize you on the street.

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Will the digital age kill off spying? CIA in crisis as facial recognition, biometrics and AI make it increasingly difficult for agents to maintain their cover abroad 

U.S. spies are no longer being tailed by foreign governments in about 30 different countries because advances in facial recognition, biometrics and artificial intelligence have made it almost impossible for the agents to hide. 

Whereas governments would once physically follow CIA officers, facial recognition at airports and general CCTV surveillance in those countries makes it far easier to track people.

It comes as U.S. intelligence agencies face a growing crisis in intelligence gathering, as developments in technology are making it increasingly more difficult to protect operatives and mask their digital footprints.

In one attempt to tackle the crisis, the CIA created a multi-million dollar program called the Station of the Future, intelligence officials revealed to Yahoo News.