🕵️‍♀️1/ During the 1990s, the CIA began quietly expanding its NOC program, placing undercover officers in U.S. businesses that operate overseas.
The reason is simple: drug traffickers, terrorists, nuclear smugglers, money launderers and warlords aren’t found on the diplomatic circuit.
To penetrate the new threat, unconventional covers were needed.
Energy companies, import-export firms, multinationals, banks with foreign branches and high-tech corporations were among the businesses being approached.
Usually the company president and perhaps another senior officer, such as the general counsel, are the only ones who know of the arrangement.
Their real names will never appear on any personnel list in the agency’s computers at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
If you’re working drugs, thugs or tech transfers, you’re going to be in banks all the time looking at financial transactions”–jobs often better suited for an officer under corporate cover, says a CIA contractor.
The CIA is a byzantine organization made up of secretive fiefdoms that wall out other leaders who come from the outside, fiercely resisting outside reformers.
@DNIGabbard
The Directorate of Analysis (DO) is highly academic, analytical, and frequently at odds with the Directorate of Operations, whose core mission is HUMINT and covert action.
Career officers know that political directors rarely last more than a few years, so they slow-walk reforms until the leader leaves.
Insiders often overwhelm a new director with a firehose of dense, hyper-specific tactical data to distract them from making sweeping structural changes.
If an outside director attempts to aggressively purge leadership, career insiders routinely leak damaging stories to the media to undermine the director's political standing.
@FBIDirectorKash
Bureaucrats can also use strict security clearances and "need-to-know" walls to obscure operational failures or details.
@SecWar @SecRubio
When the CIA joined Twitter in 2014, its first tweet was: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.”
This "Glomar" non-response response has allowed the CIA to skirt meaningful transparency and accountability for decades.
In 1966, a Soviet nuclear submarine went missing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union and the United States raced to locate the missing sub and extract the intelligence likely inside.
@AshtonForbes
The CIA contracted this mission to Howard Hughes, a billionaire (naming the ship built to extract it the Hughes Glomar Explorer).
The “Glomar response” was born. And, in the case of the Glomar Explorer, it worked: Historians claim many documents remain hidden to this day.
Especially in the post-9/11 era, we’ve repeatedly seen CIA use the Glomar response to evade responsibility.
The CIA’s penchant for secrecy continued to expand, with the agency using Glomar to obstruct attempts to obtain records that would publicly shine a light on the agency’s failures and abuse, even when that abuse is well documented by the CIA itself and other sources.
Intelligence officers must weigh the risks of sharing protected information, thus revealing its existence, and endangering the source of the intelligence.
"No intelligence service wants to tell the world where it is weak, and it will have to be a careful performance by whoever assumes the task," says a former CIA case officer. "The alternative to reasonable expectations may well be a complete loss of public trust and a subsequent crippling of the CIA and the intelligence community."