Infiltration of al-Qaeda, Powerful New Weapon

The Washington post details what is being called, “the most important new weapon in the Western arsenal”. That weapon is said to be the recruitment of spies inside al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. “Human sources have begun to produce results,” Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations’ al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring group, said Tuesday in the Post’s report. Barrett is the former chief of Britain’s overseas counter- terrorism operations.

HotAir.com say’s,
The real scoop here is that this isn’t a scoop. If you follow the news about U.S. airstrikes in Pakistan even casually, as we do at HA, you know that something unusual’s been going on over the past 18 months. Check out the graph Bill Roggio put together over the summer, then scroll down and examine the dates on which most of the big jihadi fish were caught. Virtually all of them are from January 2008 or later, and Roggio’s list doesn’t even include now-liquidated Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was iced in August.

[...]

Given all the above, I have no objection to intel agents leaking to WaPo that we have spies in place — surely AQ has figured that out by now — and frankly, I wish they’d do more of it as psyops to sow paranoia among the jihadist elite about turncoats in their midst. There are, reportedly, rifts inside Al Qaeda that a shrewd strategist could exploit.

From The Washington Post

Current and former senior U.S. officials, who spoke about intelligence matters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed what one former CIA official called “our penetration of al-Qaeda.” A senior administration official said that success had come “because of, first of all, very good intelligence capabilities . . . to locate and identify individuals who are part of the al-Qaeda organization.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair referred obliquely in an interview with reporters earlier this month to the use of spies, saying that “the primary way” that U.S. intelligence determines which terrorist organizations pose direct threats is “to penetrate them and learn whether they’re talking about making attacks against the United States.” News

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Intellipedia – For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way To Connect Dots

Intellipedia, the intelligence community’s version of Wikipedia, hummed in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in June, with personnel at myriad government agencies updating a page dedicated to tracking the disputed results. Similarly, a page established in November immediately after the terrorist attack in Mumbai provided intelligence analysts with a better understanding of the scope of the incident, as well as a forum to speculate on possible perpetrators.

“There were a number of things posted that were ahead of what was being reported in the press,” said Sean Dennehy, a CIA officer who helped establish the site.

Intellipedia is a collaborative online intelligence repository, and it runs counter to traditional reluctance in the intelligence community to the sharing of classified information. Indeed, it still meets with formidable resistance from many quarters of the 16 agencies that have access to the system.

But the site, which is available only to users with proper government clearance, has grown markedly since its formal launch in 2006 and now averages more than 15,000 edits per day. It’s home to 900,000 pages and 100,000 user accounts.

“About everything that happens of significance, there’s an Intellipedia page on,” Dennehy said.

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Richard A. Clarke on Targeting Terrorists

Not since 1975 when the Church Commission investigated Nixon-era abuses in intelligence agencies, have such unusual things occurred in the world of Washington intelligence agencies as in these past few weeks. The Democratic House of Representatives threatened to pass an intelligence authorization bill which the Democratic White House has promised to veto. The former Democratic congressman who now heads the Central Intelligence Agency has been having a public disagreement with leading House Democrats about whether the CIA lies to Congress.

There is a controversy about a secret CIA program to do something most Americans presumably want the CIA to do, to kill al Qaeda terrorists. The attorney general is rumored to be looking for a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogators, even though the president seemed to have earlier told CIA employees that there would be no prosecutions about alleged torture. Former CIA employees are publicly trotting out the claim that all of this attention “hurts the Agency’s morale” and that damage could result in another successful terrorist attack on the U.S. Even seasoned Washington policy wonks are finding it hard to navigate their way through all of those stories and make some sense of what has been going on.

Unless we understand what all of this drama is really about, we will not get the delicate balance right between the needs of a democracy and the rule of law on one side and the requirements of a secret intelligence service on the other. And this democracy needs a functioning secret intelligence service to protect it against the current genres of threat.

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CIA, NSA Adopting Web 2.0 Strategies

While the United States intelligence community may have gotten a lot of publicity for its Wikipedia-like Intellipedia Web site, agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency are ramping up their use of other social and Web-inspired software as well. Read more

FBI Agents To Gain Extensive New Powers

The Justice Department will unveil changes to FBI ground rules today that would put much more power into the hands of line agents pursuing leads on national security, foreign intelligence and even ordinary criminal cases.

The overhaul, the most substantial revision to FBI operating instructions in years, also would ease some reporting requirements between agents, their supervisors and federal prosecutors in what authorities call a critical effort to improve information gathering and detect terrorist threats. Read more