Spycraft - Melton [255]
While appearing simple in concept, covcom systems, including the most sophisticated and technically advanced, are difficult to design and exacting in their use if they are to be employed successfully. Each technological advance, from the telegraph to the Internet, added another means of communication, but technical officers had to devise means of assuring security and covertness before the technology could be used in clandestine operations. In the end, whether the secret message is written in the disappearing ink of Caesar’s day or encoded in a radio-frequency signal transmitted by satellite, covert communication between agent and handler relies on both the technique used and confidence that the exchange cannot be detected or read by anyone except the intended parties. However, as the final decade of the twentieth century unfolded, covcom, like the other pillars of tradecraft, would be revolutionized by the electronic tidal wave of digital technology, steganography, and the Internet.
CHAPTER 25
Spies and the Age of Information
The electron is the ultimate precision-guided weapon . . .
—DCI John Deutsch in Senate testimony, June 25, 1996
In mid-December 1991, the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division held its annual Christmas party. The mood was especially jubilant and attendees, including their OTS colleagues, received a campaign-style lapel button depicting the red Soviet hammer and sickle; beneath the red star were the words THE PARTY’S OVER.1 Without media coverage, on December 31, 1991, a small detachment of Red Army soldiers marched to the Kremlin walls and replaced the red hammer-and-sickle flag of the USSR with the Russian tricolors not seen since the 1917 revolution.2 For the CIA and OTS, their main adversary had been vanquished. A year later former DCI James Woolsey stated, “With the end of the Cold War, the great Soviet dragon was slain.” Then he wryly noted that in its place the United States faced a “bewildering variety of poisonous snakes that have been let loose in a dark jungle [and] it may have been easier to watch the dragon.”3 For CIA officers, four transnational intelligence issues had emerged as competitors for intelligence resources and alongside traditional national targets such as North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, China, and Russia. These were:
• Terrorist groups and Middle Eastern Islamic extremist cells
• Proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons
• Criminal and narcotics-trafficking cartels
• Regional instability, particularly in Africa and the Middle East
Less widely recognized at the time was the oncoming technical revolution in intelligence as the Information Age gave way to the Information Society with the accompanying creation, distribution, diffusion, use, and manipulation of information affecting global economics, politics, and cultures.4 Digital information systems, used in the CIA for more than two decades, ceased being location specific and were now being connected and accessed throughout the world in unsecured spaces over an electronic spiderweb named the Internet. Former CIA officer James Gosler observed that because of the emergence of digital technologies in the 1990s, “the conduct of espionage had been irreversibly altered, owing in large part to the rapid expansion of global reliance on information technology.”5 These digital technologies,