In the 21st century, the intelligence business has become one of the largest enterprises, growing uncontrollably at a tremendous speed. Today, no one knows, including the state that finances the intelligence services, exactly how much their maintenance costs and how many people work there.
This is because intelligence agencies use accounting methods that, if used by ordinary civilian enterprises, would result in criminal charges. Another reason is that they work in cooperation with other friendly special services and use each other's personnel, so it is absolutely impossible to establish the exact number.
The current budget of the Central Intelligence Agency is classified, but it is known that in 1998 it officially amounted to about $ 27 billion; the same story with the National Security Agency, whose budget in 2014 was officially equal to $ 45 billion; The FBI in 2014 has mastered only 8, 12 billion. Note, we are talking only about three secret services, and there are 16 of them in the US!
How many people actually work in these special services? And how many in other services controlled by them? And what is the number of their informants? A million, two, ten? We will never know this! One thing is clear: any group of this magnitude has tremendous power and is very concerned about its survival. And given that such communities live best of all in a period of international tension, it must be admitted that any detente is a threat to their existence. Therefore, all 16 US special services are interested in maintaining the temperature of the Cold War in international relations, since career, salary, vacation trips to exotic countries, pensions, the highest standard of living of their employees and funding of the special service itself depend on this.
The American intelligence services justify their existence in peacetime by promising to timely warn of the impending threat to national security. And it does not matter at all whether this threat is real or invented, as was the case, for example, with the discovery by US intelligence of biological weapons of mass destruction in Iraqi warehouses.
The US Secret Services secured themselves and their duality from the normal healthy reaction of the homegrown world community, shrouding their activities in a dense veil of secrecy, which allows them to nip in the bud any criticism addressed to themselves with a simple remark that cannot be disputed: “You are mistaken because you do not know that happened in reality, and we cannot tell you, since it is a secret."
“And yet there is hope,” says Philip Knightley, a recognized authority among researchers of the secret services, “the intelligence community may eventually outgrow itself. Already outside the control of governments, it can go beyond its own control. Now the intelligence services are supplying such a mass of information, papers, photographic materials and computer data that the number of intelligence officers who can understand and generalize all this is rapidly dwindling. Soon they, too, will be drowned in the flow of information. And a super-fast supercomputer won't help. The NSA already has certain difficulties in extracting the materials that consumers need from their computers."
FROM DISTRIBUTION TO COORDINATION
In December 2004, the US Congress, at the suggestion of President George W. Bush and at the insistence of the commission investigating the causes and circumstances of the September 11, 2001 tragedy, approved the assignment of interdepartmental status to the National Center for Combating Terrorism - before that it was only an integral part of the CIA.
In view of the adaptation of the US intelligence community to the pressing problems of the fight against terrorism, all 16 intelligence services were ordered to share information with each other and with law enforcement agencies on the ground - previously this was prohibited in order to preserve the notorious secrets of American personal lives. In other words, the legal barriers between intelligence and counterintelligence, military and civilian intelligence services, and between the surveillance of United States citizens and covert intelligence operations abroad have been broken. The named partitions operated since 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the ouster of President Nixon.
"NOMENCLATURE KING OF INTELLIGENCE"
Congress subordinated the intelligence services to a single center of interdepartmental coordination (along with maintaining their departmental subordination) and at the head of the new system - National Intelligence - put the "nomenklatura king" - this is the label American intelligence officers have stuck to its director. In April 2005, career diplomat John Negroponte became its first "king". When he left the throne in January 2007, he was taken by Michael McConnell, a retired vice admiral and former head of one of the key US intelligence services, the National Security Agency. He ruled the "intelligence kingdom" for two years, and in January 2009 he was replaced by another sailor - "full" Admiral of the Navy Dennis Blair. Today HP is headed by Lieutenant General James Klepper.
The powers vested in the Director of National Intelligence are extremely limited. He can redistribute financial resources between the special services only within 5% of the budget of each of them, and move personnel from one service to another - only in agreement with their leadership.
Only the Pentagon intelligence services retained a greater degree of autonomy. Which is quite logical: in 2004, when the intelligence reform law was passed, it was ruled by the powerful Donald Rumsfeld, who defended a number of privileges for his sinecure. Thanks to him, the National Security Agency and a number of other special services remained in the structure of the Ministry of Defense, and the special forces of the Ministry of Defense, that in general, without the consent of the director of the National Intelligence Service, can conduct secret operations on the territory of foreign states.
The intelligence kingdom is controlled by the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress - the House of Representatives and the Senate, and budgets are approved by the Committees of the Chambers of Budget Appropriations. In general, there is still enough dope, and there is still something to deal with!
JOKER IN THE DECK OF AMERICAN SPECIAL SERVICES
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Formed in 1947 by the decision of President Harry Truman. It is an independent agency that is not part of any ministry. Until the emergence of a single "intelligence kingdom" in 2004, the Director of the Office was the interdepartmental head of the American intelligence community, but now he is subordinate to the "king of intelligence."
The CIA supplies intelligence from overseas to the highest levels of government and the US military, while also coordinating the efforts of other agencies to gather intelligence overseas.
The department obtains information both through its extensive network of agents, and with the help of various technical means, the development and implementation of which is carried out by its Department of Science and Technology, nicknamed by the tsereushniks "the magician's shop".
Since the 21st century, the administration has been placing a special emphasis on enhancing the role of the human factor in obtaining intelligence. And all because the September 11 terrorist attack and the subsequent events - the war in Iraq and Afghanistan - revealed the weakness of the CIA's intelligence positions abroad, especially in Muslim countries. Currently, the recruitment of agents in the countries of the Near and Middle East is under way. However, not only there, because the CIA leadership believes that there are enemies and unfriendly regimes nearby - in the underbelly of the United States: in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua.
The CIA is, of course, not only and not so much intelligence. He is entrusted with the task of waging the so-called psychological warfare, 90% of the multibillion-dollar resources of this monster go to it. Psychological warfare in the directives of the CIA is defined as follows: “The coordination and use of all means, including moral and physical, with the help of which the enemy's will to win is destroyed, his political and economic opportunities for this are undermined; the enemy is deprived of the support, help and sympathy of his allies and neutrals; the support of neutrals and the "fifth column" in the enemy camp is acquired and increased. And espionage is a derivative and subordinate phenomenon to this goal."
Evaluating this passage, issued to the mountain by CIA analysts, we can conclude that the spearhead of the "psychological war" waged by the White House through the hands of the CIA is directed against Russia. This is the raison d'être of this organization, which has no precedent in the entire history of human civilization. In broad terms, the CIA is one of the most important and most acute instrument of the US ruling elite for re-coining the world according to the American model, imposing orders in it that are pleasing to Washington …
It is known from the CIA directive documents obtained by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service that today, when recruiting applicants, more and more importance is attached to the ideological factor: their political reliability, devotion to American ideals and values. Those who have a penchant for profit and alcohol, sex and political adventures or domestic intrigues should be weeded out uncompromisingly.
The headquarters of the CIA is located in Langley (in the professional jargon "Company", "Langley", "Firm"), in the Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia. Since March 2013, this special service has been headed by John Owen Brennan.
CAPTURE THE SPY, DESTROY THE DRUGS!
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). An autonomous division of the United States Department of Justice. Its creation in 1908 was a revolutionary event: never before had there been a federal law enforcement agency in the United States, and police and investigative functions were carried out by the municipal and state police.
The FBI is the federal police force that detects and suppresses crimes that fall under federal jurisdiction, and there are more than 200 articles of such. More than a century of FBI history is a chronicle from the robbers Bonnie and Clyde to the terrorist bin Laden.
The FBI currently has 56 regional branches in major cities, as well as more than 400 offices in rural and small American cities. The FBIs (in the United States they are called "agents" or "J-mens", that is, "statesman", "servant", from the English G-man, Governmentman) work abroad as part of embassies, consulates and other overseas missions of the United States … There they perform counterintelligence functions, acting as "legal attachés" with diplomatic passports, which is no different from the secret police officers, "under the roof" of the American embassy, engaged in intelligence.
Today the FBI combines two main areas in its work: law enforcement and anti-terrorism. While fighting corruption, the so-called white-collar crime on an especially large scale, violations of civil rights, etc., the FBI simultaneously carries out counterintelligence and intelligence activities to protect the United States from a terrorist threat from outside and from within. The bureau is also tasked with combating espionage on American soil.
There are two main differences between the FBI and the CIA. First, FBI agents are considered law enforcement officers and are empowered to make arrests and arrests. The tseerushniki do not have these powers. Secondly, the FBI works only on the territory of the United States, the CIA - all over the world, except for its own country - so, in any case, it is declared in its regulations.
Despite its role as the leading counterintelligence service, the FBI until some time did not have a monopoly on the fight against espionage in the United States. Other members of the "club of interests" were also engaged in counterintelligence and sometimes (!) Did not even consider it necessary to devote the FBI to their operations. This introduced confusion and uncertainty in the activities of the central office and especially in the work of field staff. They lost their independence and in most cases were afraid to take any practical steps against suspects. What if the spy is already "led" by some subcontractor - a related US intelligence service - or employees of the central office? What if this is an operation that the local workers did not consider necessary to devote to? What if the suspect is an American working under control as a double agent? Or an employee of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia, who is being “fed with misinformation” or who is planned to be recruited?
In addition, in 1991, the central office of the bureau compiled a special list of "threats to US national security", where industrial espionage was dominant. The directive top of the FBI pushed traditional espionage to the background for the sake of industrial espionage. As a result, some FBI officers began to interpret the concept of "counterintelligence" in a very peculiar way and, in accordance with their vision of this kind of activity, they got into the habit of visiting libraries and interviewing their employees, asking if readers with Russian or Eastern European names were ordering books on American industry and technology? It all ended with the fact that the library employees, tired of stupid questioning, filed a complaint with the presidential administration, and the search for spies in the reading rooms stopped.
When on February 21, 1994, the FBI arrested Aldrich G. Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, who had been acting in Moscow's favor for nine years, discussions immediately began in the American media that Ames could have been identified earlier, but this was prevented by poor communication between intelligence services in general and between the FBI and the CIA in particular (a traditional reproach against these two departments).
To put an end to the altercations, President Clinton issued a directive in which all responsibility for conducting counterintelligence was assigned to the FBI, and his representative was placed at the head of the national Council on Counterintelligence.
By the way, in the charter of the council it is written that every four years, officers of the FBI, the CIA and the special services of the US Department of Defense will be alternately appointed to the post of its chairman.
The rapid development of new technologies in the field of communications could not but affect the electronic equipment of the FBI and its reorganization. To counter cyber espionage, the Bureau established the National Cyber Crimes Prevention Team.
The FBI also conducts scientific and theoretical work, for example, on the phenomenon of betrayal. The result was the term “decade of the spy,” which the bureau used to designate the 1980s, when a particularly large number of Americans, mostly military personnel, were arrested on charges of espionage or serious misconduct. Only within the walls of the Ministry of Defense there were more than 60 such people.
FBI experts concludedthat since the 1970s primitive self-interest has become the driving force behind espionage: "Selfish espionage is based equally on the client's desire for information and on the recruited agent's desire for cash." Political and ideological motives that guided members of the Atomic Spy Group Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, Bruno Pontecorvo, Alan NunMay or members of the Cambridge Five Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, John Kerncross and Anthony Blunt, almost disappeared over the course of the Cold War.
The FBI director is appointed for a 10-year term not by the Secretary of Justice, but by the President of the United States personally, with subsequent approval by the Senate. Today, the FBI is run by James Brian Comey, who succeeded Robert Mueller.
By the way, Mueller, appointed to the director's post in 2001 by George W. Bush, got an unenviable inheritance: the FBI missed September 11, in its core 15 years, first in favor of the USSR, and then in favor of the Russian Federation, Robert Hansen acted, etc. Under Müller, the Bureau underwent a significant restructuring: it expanded the scale of its operations, increased its staff (officially at present - 35 thousand employees).
Drug control intelligence service. He is in charge of issues related to drug smuggling, drug mafia, etc. Conducts operations on a large scale outside the United States. It has (officially) almost 11 thousand employees working in 86 offices in 62 countries.
PENTAGON IN THE BOUQUET OF SECURITY SERVICES
National Security Agency (NSA). Created in 1952 as an autonomous division of the Pentagon. The most numerous, but also the most secret American special service, about which there are many legends in the West. In the US, pranksters decipher the abbreviation NSA as "No Such Agency", that is, "There is no such agency", the second option is "Never Say Anything", that is, "Never say anything." Wits from the Operational and Technical Directorate of the KGB of the USSR deciphered the name of the NSA as "The Agency Don't Talk!"
The NSA is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, about halfway between Washington and Baltimore. From there comes the control of the entire NSA global listening network, which is armed with satellites, aircraft, ships and ground stations of interception and tracking. They fully control the radio air, telephone lines, computer and modem systems, and also systematize and analyze the emissions of fax machines, as well as signals emanating from radars and missile guidance installations around the globe.
The Maryland structures of the NSA (officially) employ more than 20 thousand specialists, making this organization the largest public employer. More than 100,000 troops are deployed at NSA bases and stations around the world. Administration of the agency to all its employees upon receipt of the question "Where do you work?" recommends answering: "At the Ministry of Defense."
The NSA is dealing with an incredibly huge influx of information. According to his experts, assuming that the funds of the US Library of Congress contain about 1 quadrillion bits of information, then, "using the technologies available to the agency, it is possible to completely fill these funds every three hours."
In fact, the NSA keeps its achievements in the strictest confidence, but sometimes, proceeding from the principle of "hit your own, so that others are afraid", arranges information leakage into the lured media. For example, in 1980, the Washington Post, allegedly criticizing the agency's vulnerability, published a conversation between the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin, which they led by radiotelephone from their ZILs on the way to their country dachas; in 1988, information leading to the identification of the Libyans involved in the bombing of a Pan American plane in the skies over Scotland, killing 270 people; in 1994 - a report how, with the help of "bugs" installed by the agency's techies, it was possible to locate the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
There are other facts that cannot be classified as leaks: as a result of undercover and operational-technical measures carried out by the KGB of the USSR, it was possible to find out that in the mid-1990s, 40 tons of equipment installed on the roof of the US Embassy on the Garden Ring allowed experts The NSA will listen to all the negotiations conducted by members of the Moscow government from their landline telephones.
Defense Intelligence Directorate (DIA). Created in 1961 by the decision of President Kennedy at the suggestion of the head of the Pentagon McNamara. This special service in its profile corresponds to the GRU of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Its staff (officially) is 16, 5 thousand "bayonets", and during the war it becomes the head intelligence agency as part of the Joint Intelligence Center, which includes special services of the most diverse departmental subordination. This was the case, for example, during Operation Desert Storm in the Kuwaiti-Iraqi theater of operations in 1990-1991.
In 1992, the formerly autonomous intelligence services became part of the RUMO: the Center for Medical Intelligence of the Armed Forces and the Center for Rocket and Space Intelligence.
The RUMO employees are dispersed in 140 countries, and they present their conclusions and recommendations in a wide range of areas, not only to the military command and executive structures, but also to the Congress represented by the committees on the affairs of the armed forces.
The DIA, which, in the words of the Langley skeptics, “recognizes that it is operating in the shadow of the more powerful CIA,” has a traditional rivalry with this agency, since their functions in many areas overlap.
The director of the RUMO is traditionally a lieutenant general, which corresponds to the Russian military rank of colonel general. Today it's Michael Flynn.
Army Reconnaissance Corps. In the US Army, ground reconnaissance units appeared at the dawn of American history - in the Continental Army of George Washington, which was formed in 1775. Today, the Ground Forces Reconnaissance Corps consists of 12 reconnaissance brigades and one military reconnaissance group; each of these formations includes from one to five reconnaissance battalions.
Intelligence Directorate of the Naval Forces. Created in 1882, naval intelligence seriously declared itself only in 1898, when the United States declared war on Spain following the Spanish attack on the battleship Maine in the Havana raid. This intelligence service reached its heyday in the Second World War. And although the American Navy underwent significant reductions after the war, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, using his indisputable authority as a fighting sea wolf, managed to maintain a high level of naval intelligence.
Directorate of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance of the Air Force. In its current form, this intelligence service appeared in mid-2007. Its personnel are scattered at 72 air bases, both in the United States and abroad. The command includes several tactical air wings, the National Aerospace Reconnaissance Center (at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio) and other components.
Marine Corps Intelligence Agency. Interacts with the intelligence services of the US Naval Forces and the Coast Guard. The Marines are the most modest in number, but the most efficient type of the US Armed Forces: (officially) 200 thousand troops and 40 thousand reservists. Since the American Revolutionary War, the Marines have been widely used in military operations, as well as to guard military installations and government agencies - from the White House to US embassies abroad.
National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Its staff includes specialists in geodesy, cartography, oceanography, computer and telecommunications technology. It was this intelligence service, armed with the most modern electronic equipment at that time, that took pictures of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, which provoked the Cuban missile crisis.
National Aerospace Intelligence Directorate. Coordinates the collection and analysis of intelligence from spy aircraft. This intelligence service is a product of the US-Soviet rivalry in space exploration: President Eisenhower approved the concept of its creation following the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957. As such, the management became in 1961, shortly after a spy plane piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the territory of the USSR.
IT'S DIFFICULT FOR DIPLOMATS WITHOUT INTELLIGENCE …
Bureau of Intelligence and Research Department of State. Analyzes information from abroad that influences the formulation of US foreign policy. It officially employs two to three hundred elderly analysts with significant experience in scientific and diplomatic work. However, age is not an obstacle for traveling abroad at the request of the CIA stations located in the capitals of foreign states. The Intelligence Bureau of the State Department willingly supplies (of course, not free of charge!) The achievements of its employees to all subjects of the "intelligence kingdom", as well as to foreign state institutions.
The bureau is headed by one of the deputy secretaries of state.
AND MEMBERS WHO JOINED THE "INTELLIGENCE KINGDOM" …
The Department of Homeland Security, which is tasked with comprehensively preventing terrorist attacks on US soil, is a gigantic "echo" formation created in the wake of 9/11.
The departments included in it are customs, immigration service, border guards, etc. - officially have 225 thousand employees.
Intelligence and Analysis Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. Its task is to help ensure the security of the border and its infrastructure facilities, prevent epidemics of infectious diseases and terrorist attacks, including by home-grown radicals.
Coast Guard Intelligence Agency. Designed to promote the safety of seaports, the fight against drug trafficking and illegal immigration, as well as the preservation of biological resources in the territorial waters of the United States.
Intelligence Directorate of the Department of Energy. Analyzes the state of foreign nuclear weapons, the problems of their nonproliferation, as well as the issues of US energy security, storage of nuclear waste, etc.
Financial Intelligence Directorate of the United States Department of the Treasury. Collects and processes information of interest to US financial policy, as well as related to the financing of terrorist activities, financial enterprises of hostile "rogue states", financing the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction, etc.
