Congress should investigate the ongoing failure of American counterintelligence to detect moles at the NSA, even if the latest incident turns out to be innocuous, a former agency analyst wrote Wednesday.
“The evidence that Russian moles are lurking inside NSA remains compelling,” former analyst and counterintelligence officer John Schindler wrote in a column for the Observer. “The FBI’s 2010 roll-up of 10 deep-cover operatives of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR … revealed the existence of multiple SVR agents deep inside NSA and the Defense Department. That was six years ago, and nobody’s been publicly fingered as any of those moles.”
The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that it had arrested 51-year-old Harold Thomas Martin III, an employee of NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, on charges of improperly taking classified documents home and stealing government property.
Martin is the second employee of Booz Allen Hamilton to cause problems for the agency in three years. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden worked for the company at the agency’s Hawaii regional operations center when he revealed classified surveillance operations in 2013.
Schindler noted there were indications Russia had been able to obtain information about the agency’s encrypted communication protocols at least from July 2007 to January 2012, and that an August leak from a group calling itself “Shadow Brokers,” which included data dating to October 2013, indicated moles were still in place at that time.
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“Some obvious takeaways present themselves,” Schindler said. “In the first place, despite lots of ink spilled and promises made since Snowden showed up in Moscow in late June 2013, NSA still has security problems, especially regarding contractors. That Booz Allen Hamilton is yet again the source of a possible spy scandal indicates continuing counterintelligence failings of a serious kind. Congress needs to investigate this without delay.”
Martin is likely to face a maximum of one year in prison for mishandling classified information, and an additional maximum of ten years for theft of government property. However, the sentence could extend into decades if he is charged with assisting foreign intelligence.
