10-23-2019, 09:49 AM
Does anyone remember this ? When I was growing up I think I watched to much Dragnet and really did believe in the FBI being a virtuous entity whose main mission was to be kinda like Dugly Do Right of the RCM...To protect and serve the Constitution and the laws of the land..
Anymore the FBI reminds me of a pack of rabid dogs that you better fear for if just one of them gets a whiff of your presence..... and thinks you look like a NWO political foe the whole darn pack is coming for you... How far they have fallen? Not really as they have always been political and messed up..... they just hide it better since Hoover is gone....
Anymore the FBI reminds me of a pack of rabid dogs that you better fear for if just one of them gets a whiff of your presence..... and thinks you look like a NWO political foe the whole darn pack is coming for you... How far they have fallen? Not really as they have always been political and messed up..... they just hide it better since Hoover is gone....
Quote:A secret investigative team established in 1994 to identify the source of a series of damaging intelligence losses played a crucial role in the counterespionage probe that led to the arrest on Sunday of an F.B.I. agent, Robert Philip Hanssen, officials said today.https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/24/us/sp...agent.html
The ''mole hunting'' unit -- a joint operation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency whose existence has never before been disclosed -- was formed because investigators could not explain why intelligence operations against Russia continued to be compromised even after the arrest of Aldrich H. Ames, a senior C.I.A. covert officer.
Shortly after Mr. Ames's capture in February 1994, they concluded it was unlikely he could have been responsible for all the intelligence losses of the previous few years.
The most damaging was the apparent disclosure of an elaborate and costly technical intelligence program that focused on Russian activities in the United States, officials said. The apparent compromise of that program -- which remains highly classified and which officials refused to describe -- may have cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars, according to current and former American officials.
Other unexplained breaches -- including the 1989 disclosure to Moscow that the F.B.I. was conducting an espionage investigation of Felix S. Bloch, a State Department official -- helped prompt a new search for a spy inside the federal government, officials added.
Yet some officials said that the driving force behind the formation of the new counterespionage unit was the need to learn what had happened to the technical intelligence program; they believe that Mr. Hanssen's arrest may solve that mystery.
In addition to K.G.B. officers working as double agents for the F.B.I. whom Mr. Hanssen is believed to have betrayed, officials say that the loss of that one program represents the most severe damage he did to the United States during what they say was a 15-year career as a Russian spy.
The special investigative unit, which works within the counterespionage group at the C.I.A.'s Counterintelligence Center, was created by Paul Redmond, who had led the earlier effort to apprehend Mr. Ames. The unit was responsible for a series of investigations that led to the arrests of other significant spies caught after Mr. Ames, officials say.
Those include two cases concluded in 1997, when Earl Edwin Pitts, an F.B.I. agent, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for spying for Russia, and Harold J. Nicholson, a former C.I.A. station chief in Romania, was sentenced to more than 23 years.
Officials indicated that the Pitts and Nicholson cases were byproducts of the C.I.A.'s and F.B.I.'s shared desire to solve the mysteries that remained after Mr. Ames's arrest.
Most notably, American intelligence officials began an aggressive effort to recruit Russian intelligence officers who could identify the source of the leak of United States secrets. The effort to find talkative Russians was made easier by the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the severe economic and political troubles of post-Soviet Russia.
That effort paid dividends in the Pitts case. Information from a Russian source led the F.B.I. to run a 16-month sting operation against Mr. Pitts, with F.B.I. agents posing as Russian spies.
Information from Russia also played a role in the Nicholson case, though his troubles in passing a polygraph exam helped identify him as a spy, officials said.
But the two cases were unable to explain the earlier losses, officials said, and the mole hunt continued.
Officials said that the investigation took a series of wrong turns. Some reports from Russia prompted investigators to look for another Russian spy within the C.I.A., former officials said.
In fact, the post-Ames hunt for spies within the agency led to what some former intelligence officials considered crippling excesses, with C.I.A. officers who had worked on Russian operations forced to undergo repeated polygraph exams.
One officer, placed on administrative leave, has been the subject of an investigation to determine whether he spied for Russia. With Mr. Hanssen's arrest, officials said, the status of that case is uncertain.
Over the years, there were also suggestions that the losses could be attributed to a source inside the F.B.I. There was evidence, for example, that the Russians knew of a particular F.B.I. technical intelligence operation that a C.I.A.-based mole probably would not have known.
''It was plain that the K.G.B. knew what it was and went right to it and found it, and it was obvious that a source had to have told them about it,'' said one former intelligence official. ''That was completely an F.B.I. operation, which had produced very good counterintelligence information for the bureau, and it was inconceivable that Ames knew about it.''
After the Ames case, though, the F.B.I. did not impose the scrutiny that the C.I.A. did, officials now acknowledge.
Yet officials said that there had also been some effort to analyze the possibility of a mole in the F.B.I's ranks. Counterintelligence experts were starting to focus on the possibility that the Russians had a source in the F.B.I. before evidence was provided to the United States from a Russian source pointing to Mr. Hanssen, officials said.
The efforts of the joint mole hunt were finally rewarded late last year, when a Russian source provided what seems to be virtually the entire K.G.B. file on the Hanssen case.
The special investigative unit was a successor to an earlier and equally secretive C.I.A. internal investigative team that helped uncover Mr. Ames. The unit is still in operation today because officials believe it is possible other foreign agents continue to operate within the federal government.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence plans to hold its first closed-door hearing about the Hanssen case on Wednesday. According to the committee, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director Louis J. Freeh of the F.B.I. and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, are scheduled to testify.
