U.S. Intelligence Reforms Seen Posing New Dangers
Sun Mar 6, 2005 12:00 PM ET
By David Morgan

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (Reuters) - Sharing information between intelligence and law enforcement agencies -- changes recommended after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- could backfire and make the United States more vulnerable to al Qaeda and other enemies, former intelligence officials say.

As the Senate prepares for confirmation of a new director of national intelligence, former officials said the broad U.S. intelligence and law enforcement establishment has likely been penetrated by foreign intelligence services, both through human agents and high-tech information-gathering devices.

"It's an absolute certainty that there are spies now in the national intelligence establishment," former CIA agent Paul Redmond told a counterintelligence conference at Texas A&M University that ended this weekend.

There could be operatives tied to foreign nations or followers of al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden in Islam's fundamentalist Wahhabi movement among an estimated 900,000 people with U.S. security clearance, and this would be particularly dangerous in an era of reform-minded information-sharing, officials said.

"I really have been disturbed at the broad use of the term 'information sharing'," said former CIA Director James Woolsey.

"It's good not to be too enthusiastic about how well it could go if everybody in large bureaucracies knew everything. One of them's going to be a Wahhabi or a Chinese," he said.

Greater information sharing between the CIA, FBI and other agencies was a cornerstone of reforms recommended by the bipartisan commission that investigated the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Advocates -- including top Bush administration officials -- view the enhanced flow of national security data as a means of overcoming bureaucratic barriers that critics say helped facilitate the Sept. 11 attacks that killed 3,000 people.

But Woolsey and other former intelligence officials worry that broad information-sharing from the White House to local police could expose clandestine sources and methods to foreign operatives and compromise intelligence capabilities.