The Confession of a Corrupted Spy
James M. Olson. To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence. 234pp, 6X9”, hardback. ISBN: 978-1-62616-680-6. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2019.
*****
While I believe too often those accused of espionage have not been guilty of this crime, an entire book dedicated to explaining how these types of cases are made and specific case studies that exemplify these strategies is a brilliant addition to scholarship. I have previously reviewed books by spies who discuss their efforts abstractly as if they are relating a novel, focusing on their feelings and personal lives, but this book really just presents the facts or the biases that lead to these convictions from a CIA insider. James M. Olson “served for over thirty years in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, mostly overseas in clandestine operations. In addition to several foreign assignments, he was chief of counterintelligence at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.” The previous book I read by a CIA agent specified the author was not allowed to mention her own name or the details of her cases, so it is curious that Olson has been granted clearance to detail his cases, perhaps the cases he describes are a couple of decades in the past. He might have asked for special permission to discuss them as an academic as he has been teaching as a Professor of the Practice at the Bush School of Government and Public Service of Texas A&M University.
The approach this book takes on the caught spies is exemplified in the case of “Chi Mak”. The section opens by stressing that Chinese “intelligence operations” are marked by “predictability”. In other words, agents make biased conclusions regarding what type of people are likely to commit espionage: also known as profiling. Predicting patterns of criminal behavior is an important part of law enforcement, but overvaluation of one’s capacity for prediction tends to be a great weakness, as an erroneous guess convicts an innocent or even worse somebody who was fighting on the investigator’s side. Olson goes on to offer a biography of Mak’s immigrant past, stressing the improbability that an immigrant might have attained a top engineering position in America for reasons other than his connections to Chinese intelligence. Then he mentions a conversation he had while he was the “chief of counterintelligence at the CIA” with a former CI colleague and now a boss at the Power Paragon company the CIA was investigating: “I asked him a question that I knew was politically incorrect but that made sense for a counterintelligence officer: ‘How many of your engineers with access to our sensitive programs are naturalized US citizens born in China?’” The answer was “hundreds”, but Olson did not do anything about this apparent breach at this point in the “early 1990s”. Instead he waited, and then in 2003, the FBI finally “became aware that sensitive US Navy technology was being leaked from Power Paragon to the Chinese”. The investigation immediately chose Chi as their subject and two years later they arrested him after breaking into his files and locating “40,000 pages of work-related documents” that another engineer from this company said did not contain anything beyond what would be “‘found in graduate-level textbooks’”. After the government spent two more years on prosecuting the case, Chi was convicted of “conspiring to violate export control laws” and sentenced to twenty-four and a half years in prison (132-6). The facts of this case stress the flaws in America’s current counterintelligence operations, so Olson has succeeded in delivering useful materials by frankly reporting these details. What were these mistakes? Hundreds of Chinese immigrants were still working for Paragon in 2003 and all of them might have been taking their work home with them. In fact, the CI friend, who Olson asked about this decades earlier, was more likely to have access to the actual secret materials if he was at the managerial level rather than a minor engineer among hundreds doing parts of a larger project. If Olson is disclosing the full picture, why is he excluding the detail that drew suspicion onto Chi? It is far more likely that Chi was one of the only people at the plant innocent of sending the information to the Chinese, as he was merely storing these books at home so he could study engineering in this free time. Those who were really responsible, including probably the manager the CIA had confided in, would have wanted to use Chi as a patsy to avoid being blamed for these leaks. Because a culprit was prosecuted (even if in the end the case proved it did not explain who had caused the leak that started it), the CIA or America’s intelligence community had received four years of positive coverage regarding them actively pursuing spies. Meanwhile, the propaganda these types of cases spreads has meant that every time I have applied for or started a job, every contact asks me where I’m from and rolls their eyes knowingly after I say “Russia”. It is far more difficult for Chinese and Russian refugees to secure employment due to biases this environment creates, but while there are plenty of studies and laws regarding affirmative active for most discriminated minorities, groups from communist countries are as disposable in scholarship as the Japanese Americans were during WWII. By mentioning his premonition regarding the Chinese refugees, Olson is making the case the breach could have been avoid by excluding all refuges from employment with this company even if they were the best-qualified hires for these jobs. The true leaker was far likelier to have been somebody at the top of the company who had enormous wealth from selling secrets such as this one and enormous power, both of which have been corrupted in America. The Chi case exemplifies how America has been shifting blame for the corruption of its political and economic processes by its own members (going up to the president’s office) onto foreign “interference” from Russia, Ukraine, China and other villains in these fictions. Anti-propaganda or the finding of villains to cover villainy has been practiced by CIA-equivalent agencies for centuries. My research into Elizabeth I and James I uncovered that one of their ghostwriters, Dyer, wrote pamphlets both by Martin and against Martin under anonymous names (the linguistic signatures of texts on both sides match); he escaped detection by accusing other writers of being Martin, and then acting on behalf of the government sponsoring his efforts to prosecute these imagined guilty parties. Dyer or the CIA are not the hero in these stories; they are the villains that have always escaped with wrongful prosecution to further their own corrupt interests. Typically, they refrain from writing memoirs or reports on their misdeeds, but in this modern age, so much money can be made from publishing a book on espionage, that this confession from Olson might finally stop the repetition of this repetitive plot.
The blurb commences by warning: “The United States is losing the counterintelligence war. Foreign intelligence services, particularly those of China, Russia, and Cuba, are recruiting spies in our midst and stealing our secrets and cutting-edge technologies.” Given the admissions of widespread scholarly fraud among reviewers that trade positive reviews for citations of their own work, and the stealing of the college admission system by wealthy Americans, the level of intellectual theft in America by Americans is so enormous today that any attempts by international agents are a spec in this vortex of evil. In response to this misdirected threat, Olson “offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets.” Yes, indeed: and this message is xenophobic and accuses immigrants of being nefarious spies. Olson then lectures on the methods he has employed in “running double-agent operations and surveillance.” In other words, he has placed in China or other foreign countries just the type of double-agents that the CIA has accused Chi of being; it is mind-numbing how this can be seriously stated in a book cover. Double-agents are committing the same type of crime as regular spies; they are just doing this work against a different country; to argue that American-purchased counter-agents are right to steal foreign secrets, whereas Chinese-purchased agents are evil for stealing American secrets implies that good and evil is a matter of us-versus-them rather of standardized international laws. The “‘lessons learned’” section that follows Chi’s case states just what I assumed its intent was: “The Chi Mak case highlights the importance of applying good workplace counterintelligence to defense contractors as well as to government employees.” In other words, US companies should ban all refugees from employment to maximize their counterintelligence strategy. This would be a racist and xenophobic policy to pursue verbatim, so Olson has phrased this in a light that suggests he might be referring to some other secret strategies the FBI, DOD and CIA train contractors about left out here (136). I am technically one of these government contractors: the problem for me has been that all government contracts in the US are corrupted by a few agencies with family or bribe-linked connections that helps them win such contracts; it is impossible for a small business like my own to access trillions of funds that the US collects from me and other Americans in taxes prior to unfairly dealing it out to its “friends”. One of the only “strategies” I have encountered in this process to keep things secret is a previous requirement for me to pay $200 annually or so for a special password system that identifies my specific computer’s location rather than merely trusting me to enter the correct password; I was required to purchase this service to gain access to advertise my services. I will not be winning any contracts prior to the expiration of my two-year allowed term without meeting minimum annual sales, so I will have spent $400 and an enormous volume of work to be allowed to advertise my services for $0 return. Meanwhile, the corrupt company that won this special password service made my $200 and millions more from others with similar hopes that America offers equal opportunities for the non-corrupted as for the corrupt.
If as you read this, you are wondering if you have been a victim of unfair espionage or corruption by members of the American government, this is one of the best books for you to buy as it is a confession (if you read it skeptically) of just what they have been up to.