🚨🇺🇸 🇮🇱 The Pentagon just rated Israel a critical counterintelligence threat, and Congress is voting to merge America's military and spy services with it anyway. Anthony Aguilar went to Washington to fight these bills and came back with a warning about how deep the merger runs. Section 224 fuses the militaries through Title 10. The parallel Section 622, out of Tom Cotton's intelligence committee, fuses the spy services through Title 50. The U.S. military melts into Israel's, the CIA melts into Mossad, all in the same few months. And the roots sink too deep to ever pull back out. Aguilar says he's never seen a defense initiative shrink once it's created, and Section 224 even mandates a permanent Israeli "executive agent" inside the Pentagon, saluted like a senior officer. Here's what every American should be appalled by. Wiring a foreign power this deeply into your own military and intelligence core is the kind of thing that gets a person charged with treason if the country were Russia or China. Do it for Israel, and it sails through with a quiet committee markup while almost nobody objects.

We need effective counterintelligence.

Four Chinese operatives got themselves arrested in November 2005 for what the State Department politely calls "espionage allegations," which is diplomatic speak for "we caught you red-handed trying to steal our secrets." The arrests weren't some lucky break or stumbled-upon accident. This was a coordinated intelligence operation that had been running long enough for U.S. counterintelligence to map out the players, understand their methods, and build a case solid enough to move on. The State Department's confirmation came with the kind of measured language that suggests they knew considerably more than they were saying publicly. What makes this case worth revisiting isn't just that it happened, but how it happened. The operatives weren't working alone or freelancing for cash. This was a systematic effort with multiple players, each presumably handling different aspects of what security officials described as attempts to compromise sensitive government information systems. The coordination suggests this wasn't some opportunistic fishing expedition but a deliberately planned penetration operation. The targeting was specific: American personnel and sensitive information systems. That combination tells you something about Chinese intelligence priorities in 2005. They weren't just looking for documents sitting in filing cabinets. They wanted access to the people who had the clearances and the systems that processed the information. Human intelligence collection paired with technical penetration, a approach that would become increasingly familiar in the years that followed. The State Department's language about "sophisticated coordination" and "systematic attempts" points to an operation that had been running for some time before it got rolled up. You don't describe something as systematic unless you've watched it operate systematically. The fact that four people got arrested simultaneously suggests the counterintelligence folks had been patient enough to let the operation run while they mapped the network. Security officials noted this case fit into "broader patterns" of Chinese intelligence services trying to recruit American personnel and penetrate government databases. By 2005, this wasn't exactly news, but the scale and coordination of this particular operation apparently warranted special attention. The recruitment angle is particularly interesting because it suggests at least some of these four may have been American citizens or residents who'd been turned, rather than Chinese nationals operating under diplomatic or commercial cover. The successful identification and arrest provided what officials called "valuable insights into Chinese operational methods and recruitment techniques." That's intelligence community speak for "we learned a lot about how they do this, and we're going to use that knowledge to catch more of them." When counterintelligence cases go public, it's often because the agencies have already extracted whatever operational intelligence they can from the investigation and are ready to burn the sources in exchange for the deterrent effect of public exposure. The timing matters too. November 2005 puts this squarely in the Bush administration's second term, when U.S.-China relations were already complicated by economic tensions and growing awareness of Chinese military modernization efforts. The public confirmation of arrests on espionage charges would have sent a clear message that the U.S. was prepared to treat Chinese intelligence operations as what they were: hostile intelligence activities requiring a robust counterintelligence response. What we don't know is probably more interesting than what we do. The State Department's confirmation doesn't tell us who these four people were, what specific information they were after, how long they'd been operating, or whether they successfully compromised anything before getting caught. It doesn't tell us whether they were Chinese nationals, naturalized Americans, or native-born citizens who'd been recruited. It doesn't tell us what cover identities they were using or how they gained access to their targets. The case also demonstrated something that would become increasingly important in the following decades: the need for enhanced counterintelligence capabilities specifically designed to counter Chinese operations. The successful arrests suggested U.S. agencies were adapting their methods to deal with Chinese intelligence services that operated differently from their Cold War Soviet counterparts. Chinese intelligence operations in the U.S. tend to be more patient, more willing to develop long-term assets, and more focused on economic and technological intelligence alongside traditional national security targets. The 2005 case appears to fit that pattern, with its emphasis on systematic information gathering rather than quick-hit operations. The fact that this case contributed to "improved defensive measures" suggests it was significant enough to change how U.S. agencies approached Chinese intelligence threats. When counterintelligence professionals say a case improved their defensive measures, they usually mean it taught them something important about adversary capabilities or methods that they hadn't fully understood before. Looking back, this 2005 operation was part of a steady escalation in Chinese intelligence activities that would continue through the following decades, culminating in cases like the 2010 arrests of the "Illegals Program" Russian spies and more recent prosecutions of Chinese intelligence officers and their American accomplices. The pattern established in 2005 patient, systematic, coordinated operations targeting both human sources and technical systems has remained remarkably consistent. The brief public acknowledgment of these arrests also reflects the delicate balance U.S. officials have to strike when dealing with foreign intelligence operations. Saying too little fails to deter future operations or inform potential targets. Saying too much compromises ongoing investigations or reveals counterintelligence capabilities. The measured tone of the State Department's confirmation suggests they'd found that balance, at least for this particular case. foreigninterference.org/post… #foreigninterference #AssetRecruitment #GovernmentInfiltration

Always good to ask: "What does the enemy think of it?" In this case, disbanding the Defense Counterintelligence Command pleases both PRC and North Korea very much. Makes spying and subversion in South Korea much easier.