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Thursday, March 15, 2001

So when Woolsey talks about spies or missile shields, Washington listens. In an interview with United Press International, Woolsey warned against complacency in the U.S. intelligence community in the wake of the arrest of FBI agent Robert Hanssen for allegedly selling U.S. secrets to the Soviets for 15 years.

Woolsey said agencies like the FBI and the CIA – which had its own notorious spy case involving Aldrich Ames – may have been lulled "because they couldn't quite believe that one of their career case officers was a Soviet spy. ... That's one of the things you have to be very humble about, in a sense."

And Woolsey says missile defense, far from being pie in the sky, is evolving to the point where rogue missiles would be "much easier to shoot down" than earlier plans would have allowed.

Currently a partner in the law firm of Shea & Gardner in Washington, Woolsey returned to the private sector in January 1995 after serving two years as director of central intelligence.

Woolsey has also served as ambassador to the negotiations on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, undersecretary of the Navy, general counsel to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and adviser to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.

He also was appointed by President Reagan as delegate-at-large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks.

Excerpts of the interview follow. Woolsey put only one restriction on the questions: "No tunnel talk," a reference to the reported multimillion-dollar secret tunnel built next to the Soviet Embassy in Washington that Hanssen's alleged spying may have compromised.

Hanssen allegedly divulged its existence to the Soviets as early as 1985. If that scenario is correct, the tunnel would have been useless as an information-gathering source during Woolsey's tenure at the CIA.

Q. Can you assess the damage caused by the alleged spying activities of Robert P. Hanssen?

A. It appears from the affidavit, and that's all any of us can go on, that the damage is quite substantial, because it looks as if he got two people killed, though [convicted CIA traitor] Ames got between 10 and 13 killed. Two of the people he fingered were apparently two that Ames had named as well. A third was imprisoned as a result of what he said. Hanssen was apparently exposed to a number of programs in other agencies, including technical collection programs. It's hard to know exactly what these were from the affidavit.

Q. Could you surmise what the technical collections were?

A. No, I probably wouldn't even if I could – just the context of the way they're presented on the affidavit suggests they were quite important. ... It looks as if he gave [his handlers] documents about intelligence planning and what we were focusing on and probably a lot of material that helped the KGB avoid surveillance by the FBI here and the CIA overseas. And he appears to have had access to material from agencies other than the FBI.

Q. The CIA?

A. Some of these documents look like they may be CIA documents, some from the State Department, we don't know. But they do, just from the titles in the affidavit, appear to be of substantial importance.

Q. Do you believe there are currently other counterspies infiltrating intelligence agencies in high positions such as Hanssen's?

A. It's hard to say. One hopes not, but you always have to act as if there may well be. You have to be a little bit paranoid to be in the counterintelligence business. Hopefully it's paranoia that's somewhat under control, because you can't go making wild accusations about people based on flimsy evidence, ruining people's lives and careers.

But on the other hand, you have to follow diligently every lead, including looking at your own organization. I think the CIA had a hard time capturing Ames because they couldn't quite believe that one of their career case officers was a Soviet spy. And I think the FBI had a hard time catching Hanssen because of a similar assumption about FBI agents. So that's one of the things you have to be very humble about, in a sense.

If you are in the counterintelligence business, you cannot assume your organization is completely able to avoid penetration. No matter how fine the barrel of apples – a barrel of both the clandestine service in the CIA and FBI special agents, who are wonderful, talented, extraordinarily able, patriotic people – any barrel of apples can have a bad one in it. And it has happened now two or three times to both the FBI and the CIA. This ought to put to rest the idea that there is no sector of intelligence that does not need to be serious about counterintelligence because a foreign power would not be able to penetrate it. That just appears to be wrong.

Q. In the Ames case, the convicted CIA traitor was living what appeared to be well beyond his means – he had a nice home and he drove an expensive car. To the general public, these things would automatically arouse suspicion. Why was it that following his conviction the FBI did not appear to improve its security and adopt CIA practices such as the use of polygraph tests and regular checks of agents’ financial records?

A. Ames was able to succeed in spying for nine years in spite of the fact that he was spending money on some things beyond his salary. I believe it happened because back after 1975, the CIA's security and counterintelligence operations were heavily decentralized. Before 1975 they had been in the control of a single individual, James Angleton [legendary former deputy director of counter-intelligence at the CIA], who figures prominently in a lot of spy novels, and in many ways was a very successful and able man who did a lot of positive things for the country and the CIA.

But like a number of people, he probably stayed in the job a few years too long; he got a bit paranoid at the end. He did ruin a few people's careers who in fact did nothing wrong. He came to the view, for example, that if you believed in the sign of Soviet split, you may well be suspect. And so, after he was fired in 1974, the CIA overreacted to Angleton's centralization of power and authority and very heavily decentralized its counterintelligence and security operations. And as a result, the milieu that Ames came into when he started to spy in 1985 was one in which the people who knew about his spending on his house did not know about his drinking, and the people that knew about his drinking didn't know about his polygraph [results].

One of the things the CIA did in the aftermath of the Ames affair, in addition to increasing our level of attention to people's finances, was to consolidate substantially the security and counterintelligence responsibilities out at Langley [CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia] so that things wouldn't fall through the cracks.

I don't know how the FBI runs its programs for polygraphs and financial reporting. That's entirely up to them. And I'm sure that as Judge Webster does his review, he will come up with some recommendations for strengthening those procedures.

But I am under the impression that they didn't take the types of steps after 1994 that we did at the CIA.

I think you have to admit, however, [and] anyone who would be critical of the FBI on this issue would have to admit, that Hanssen, assuming he is guilty as charged, was an extremely clever spy. Not only was he in counterintelligence, so he knew about surveillance techniques and the like, but it's also the case that he was able to figure out which Soviet case officers did not have mail cover, so he could go ahead and contact them. He also generally, except perhaps for some of the private school tuition for his children, appeared to live very much within his means. He did not throw money around the way Ames did, and he convinced everyone that he was a devout religious man, family man, and lived that kind of lifestyle. Part of his cleverness was in not showing that he had a lot of extra money that other spies have from time to time.

Q. Do you think the bureau will follow suit and step up its security measures?

A. I'm sure all of their measures will be up for review, and I'd be surprised if there weren't some modifications to them.

Q. Why do you think he did it, if in fact he is found guilty?

A. That's one of the strangest aspects of this case. He seems to be in part motivated by money, but not exclusively, and in part motivated by a sense of arrogance and the challenge – this business in the affidavit about bragging how he had wanted to do this since he was 14 years old and his sense of superiority, as well as denigrating the FBI and the U.S. government. He seems to be an individual whose personality and his arrogance had something to do with his decision to try and make this work.

Q. A recent article in the Washington Post questions the origin of the KGB documents that exposed Hanssen. Do you have any idea where these alleged documents came from?

A. If I knew, I wouldn't say.

Q. Switching gears, in 1996 you testified in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that "ballistic missiles can, and in the future increasingly will, be used by hostile states for blackmail, terror and to drive wedges between us and our friends and allies." It was your judgment then that the Clinton administration was not "giving this vital problem the weight it deserves."

Do you see the Bush administration giving it the proper weight it deserves, and how would they go about doing so, if they are not already?

A. Well, certainly I think their commitment to missile defense suggests more attention. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chaired a commission in '97-98 I served on that called a lot of attention to this problem.

The Clinton administration was in the process of sort of pooh-poohing it when, about six weeks after the report was issued, the North Koreans launched a missile that had a partially successful third stage that then later failed. It flew over Japan into the Pacific, and that suggested that the North Koreans were rather far along in missile development that conceivably would be able to reach the United States, at least at an early stage in Alaska or Hawaii.

That appeared to be the event – the combination of the Rumsfeld Commission report and North Korean test – that finally more or less woke up the Clinton administration. I think the system that they deployed, or were planning to deploy, or might have been planning to deploy, had a lot of weaknesses.

The Bush administration [is] focused on trying to move promptly to do something about this issue. I think this has now spread to the point that it is a serious concern all across the political spectrum.

I think this issue is really catching on, and the question is not whether, but how, the U.S. will deploy some type of missile defense.

Q. Some European countries and Russia have balked, saying that in varying degrees they were not in support of Bush's proposed missile defense plan. Now Germany has changed its stance on the U.S. missile strategy and even Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that it is important for Russia to ally itself with the West to combat rogue states.

A. Our allies, first and foremost, and maybe even Mr. Putin, are responding to American firmness of will. When the United States expresses itself as determined to do something, people tend to take that seriously. The Clinton administration never expressed any sense of determination about this matter. I think it is beginning to seep in that the Bush administration is not planning something similar to its predecessors. The Clinton administration called it National Missile Defense, and their system was solely designed to protect the Unites States.

The reason it was designed that way was due to what's called a mid-course intercept system that could intercept ballistic missiles long after they are launched into space, where they are hard to pick out against the background of space and moving at several miles per second.

The reason the Clinton administration system was designed that way was that they wanted to make them resemble as close as possible the systems that would have been permitted by the 1972 U.S.-Soviet ABM treaty.

If you start from the other end and ask what is strategically useful, I think you don't end up focusing principally on a mid-course system, but rather on something that would shoot down [a] ballistic missile in what's called boost phase, that is, an early stage of flight when they are large, slow and hot.

At those early phases of flight, they are much easier to shoot down. The question is getting the missile that would shoot them or the satellite that would get in their way or laser beam that would destroy them close enough so that it could do the job during the early stage of their trajectory.

A system like that [proposed by the Bush administration] has an added advantage of protecting everybody, not just the United States.

For example, let's say the United States had a missile site in eastern Turkey and could shoot down shortly after it was launched anything coming out of Iraq. That doesn't just protect the United States, it protects Germany and Russia and essentially everyplace in the world.

So I would hope and think that our allies, and maybe even the Russians, would be more favorably disposed toward a system that could protect them as well as us, rather than one such as the Clinton administration was pursuing that could only protect the Unites States. Some of the critics in Europe of the Clinton administration's NMD proposal said it was an expression of ''fortress America,'' and they had a point. As long as you're using a mid-course system based in the United States, you're only protecting the United States, but if you are shooting these things down in boost phase, you're protecting everybody. If I were a German, I would feel more positively about a system protecting me as well as the Unites States, than I would about one that was just protecting the United States.

Q. How closely does the Bush missile plan resemble the Strategic Defensive Initiative, or "Star Wars," plan proposed by President Reagan?

A. President Reagan's initial interest was in directed-energy weapons, satellites in space with lasers or particle beams that would shoot down missiles in boost phase. And that grew to the somewhat derisory term "Star Wars," suggesting that it was a very far-out idea. The Bush administration, the first Bush administration, focused on something called the Global Protection System that they worked on cooperatively with Russians when President Yeltsin expressed interest in it in 1992. That had several components, but one of them was a rather simpler idea, which was boost-phase intercepts using small satellites that would not fire lasers, but would be expendable themselves and move into the path of a ballistic missile as it was coming up in boost phase. That project was called Brilliant Pebbles: The satellites were small, but they had a lot of sophisticated electronics on them for intercepting technologically advanced Russian missiles.

There are other ideas for doing this, including one that I support called Burros, which are also small satellites that move into the path of missiles but aren't as sophisticated. They're designed to deal with missile threats from Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the like.

I don't know what this Bush administration is going to do, but whether you are talking about shooting down a ballistic missile in boost phase from the surface from the earth, or these relatively simple satellites, that technology is somewhat simpler than what the Clinton administration was trying to do. They really were trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.

Q. There has been speculation that the SDI was more or less a scare tactic than a feasible missile defense system, designed to frighten the Russians to spend on defense into bankruptcy.

A. I think it may have had that effect. I think President Reagan thought that something could be deployed relatively quickly, and I think he was committed to it and sincere about it. The Russians, I think, thought we could probably deploy something rather quickly. After all, they went into space first in 1958, and a few years later, President Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And in eight and a half years, you have Americans walking on the moon on live television and by all reports the Soviet Politburo watching it on television were stunned and some of them weeping.

So they knew what the Unites States could do if [we] put [our] mind to it, in space and in technology.

President Reagan's original concept of directed energy in space was a very challenging technology and I think it did have the effect of frightening the Russians into spending a great deal more on their military. It was definitely one of the things that demoralized them and helped bankrupt their system. SDI had a hand in helping end the Cold War successfully.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

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