For decades, our nation’s tools and policies designed to detect and neutralize foreign intelligence activities have failed to deter our enemies. Instead, they have adapted to our approach.
Despite mounting scrutiny, the Chinese Communist Party continues to use talent recruitment programs to identify and task Chinese students and researchers to steal American research from taxpayer-funded research labs and universities. Russian “illegals” operated successfully for up to two decades before arrest. The Iranians attempt to carry out assassinations of U.S. officials on our soil and across the globe.
State-sponsored cyber-actors routinely target various sectors of our government, critical infrastructure, and economy, and are apparently pre-positioning dual-use facilities inside the U.S., which are equipped to deliver catastrophic effects across our lifeline sectors at a time or place of our enemies choosing.
Our nation’s security apparatus is built on the ability to anticipate, identify, and respond coherently to threats over the horizon. Yet, throughout our history — from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 — we have suffered devastating intelligence failures that cost thousands of American lives. While lawmakers and the intelligence community worked to address the structural failures that contributed to 9/11, we continue to fall short in one critical area, counterintelligence, and all lights are blinking red.
Following the end of the Cold War and with the onset of the Global War on Terror, we not only lost sight of the importance of the counterintelligence mission but also largely reduced it to a more defensive, reactive, and security and law enforcement-oriented posture. While we were distracted, our enemies advanced.
Further exacerbating the issues facing the intelligence community today is the fact that our borders were not secure for more than four years under the Biden administration, with many of these individuals remaining unaccounted for. Our nation saw approximately 200,000 migrants from the People’s Republic of China and Russia cross into our country with little to no vetting.
It would be naive to assume our enemies would not exploit an open border, mass migration crisis, and reduced threshold for entry to embed operatives. Even a handful of highly trained operators could carry out intelligence operations or pre-position to support future attacks on our nation. I asked FBI Director Kash Patel about this particular counterintelligence threat during the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment hearing, and his answer was startling. These counterintelligence failures are not just embarrassing for our country, but they also represent one of our greatest strategic vulnerabilities.
For much of our history, the intelligence community has assumed a counterintelligence posture that is reactive rather than proactive, focused on identifying and prosecuting spies after the damage is done. The system incentivizes prioritizing cases, indictments, and arrests. These metrics become the bar by which some will define winning in the counterintelligence space. Hardening the infrastructure that safeguards our data and protecting research pipelines, supply chains, and intellectual property requires a coherent plan, integrating instruments of national power, a bias toward action, unity of effort, and accountability for delivering results.
But to counter and ultimately defeat a sophisticated foreign intelligence service, counterintelligence must become less risk-averse and adopt a more offensive, proactive, and confrontational posture. Most damaging are the cultural issues within the federal bureaucracy. Agency stovepipes, turf battles, and competition for resources routinely undermine collaboration and partnership.
Time and again, post-incident reviews reveal that compromises or attacks succeeded not because we lacked intelligence, but because our agencies failed to share, worked at cross purposes, or, worse yet, lacked the imagination to believe indicators of our adversary’s plans, intentions, motivations, and capabilities to act. If these cultural barriers remain unaddressed, we are risking another Pearl Harbor- or 9/11-level failure, which will rest at the feet of the counterintelligence enterprise.
My colleagues and I on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have been working diligently under Chairman Rick Crawford’s (R-AR) leadership to find policy solutions that address these issues and to encourage our intelligence community elements to embrace a more proactive and offensive counterintelligence posture.
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The solution is simple. We need a greater whole-of-intelligence community approach, with clear leadership at the top to deliver a vision, inspire a workforce, and to deconflict, coordinate, and synchronize efforts for one purpose: to confront our enemies, drive back their gains, and ensure the nation is secure. We must bring government together, build bridges, and get everyone rowing in the same direction to achieve common goals.
These steps are complicated, but they are urgent. By acting now, we can protect American research, infrastructure, and innovation and ensure we never again find ourselves surprised by an adversary we could have stopped.
Pat Fallon represents Texas’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a member of the House Intelligence, Armed Services, and Oversight Committees.
