Internet May Reveal Holes in CIA’s Cover System

She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.

Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the last decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.

The CIA asked that her name not be published in the newspaper because she is a covert operative. However, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her are posted on the Internet and are publicly accessible.

When the Chicago Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of about 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age, its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes -- a discovery that is said to have “horrified” CIA Director Porter J. Goss.

“Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age,” said CIA chief spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck. “There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work.”

Dyck declined to detail the remedies, “since we don’t want the bad guys to know what we’re fixing.”

Information about several “front companies” set up to provide cover for CIA operatives and the agency’s small fleet of aircraft recently began disappearing from the Internet, following the Tribune’s disclosures that some of the planes were used to transport suspected terrorists to countries where they said they were tortured.

The agency apparently was unaware of the extent to which its employees were in the public domain until the Tribune provided it with a partial list of names. The newspaper is not disclosing the identities of any CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk.

The disclosures come as the Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were found are working undercover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives are included on the list.

But an undisclosed number of those on the list -- the CIA would not say how many -- are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.

Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA facilities uncovered by the online search. Most are in northern Virginia, within a few miles of the agency’s headquarters. Several are in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. One is in Chicago.

Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the CIA.

For decades the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary, Va., near Williamsburg, remained a secret. Even after former CIA personnel confirmed its existence in the 1980s, the agency never acknowledged the facility publicly, and CIA personnel persisted in referring to it in conversation only as “the Farm.”

An online search for “Camp Peary” produced the names and other details of 26 people who, according to the data, are employed there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off from Camp Peary’s small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight histories could also be traced.

Although the initial online search for CIA employees turned up only work-related addresses and phone numbers, other Internet-based services provide -- usually for a fee -- the home addresses and telephone numbers of U.S. residents, as well as satellite photographs of the locations where they live and work.

Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had surfaced in the public domain, a senior U.S. intelligence official replied: “I don’t have a great explanation, quite frankly.”

The official noted, however, that the CIA’s credo had always been that “individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they can’t keep their cover, then it’s hard for anyone else to keep it. If someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that’s just stupid.”

Covert operatives who pose as something other than diplomats are becoming increasingly important in the global war on terrorism, experts say.

“In certain areas, you just can’t collect the kind of information you need in the 21st century by working out of the embassy. They’re just not going to meet the kind of people they need to meet,” said Melvin Goodman, who was a senior Soviet affairs analyst at the CIA for more than 20 years before he retired.

The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has worked under “diplomatic cover” into a “nonofficial cover” operator, or NOC -- as was attempted with Plame -- creates vulnerabilities that are not difficult to spot later on.

The CIA’s challenge, in Goodman’s view, is, “How do you establish a cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name ... and find out all sorts of holes?”

In Plame’s case, online computer searches turned up her tenure as a junior diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Athens even after she began passing herself off as a privately employed “energy consultant.”

The solution, Goodman suggested, is to create NOCs at the outset of their careers, “taking risks with younger people, worrying about the reputation of people before they have one. Or create one.”

But that approach has a downside, in that “you’re getting into the problem of very junior, inexperienced people, which a lot of veteran CIA people feel now is part of the problem. Porter Goss has to double the number of operational people in an environment where there are no mentors. Who’s going to train these people?”

In addition to stepping up recruiting, Goss has ordered a top-down review of the agency’s tradecraft following the disclosure that several supposedly covert operatives involved in the 2003 abduction of a radical Muslim preacher in Milan had registered at hotels under their true names and committed other amateurish procedural violations. Those actions made it relatively easy for the Italian police to identify them and for Italian prosecutors to charge them with kidnapping.

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Tribune researcher Brenda J. Kilianski in Chicago contributed to this report.