This excerpted article was prepared by Dr. Robert Schinagl and originally appeared in the Classified Edition of Studies on the Strategies of Intelligence, Spring 1998, Volume 18, No.01, published by the Rand-Hoover Centre for Research on Intelligence. The Centre’s mission is to promote the study, debate, and understanding of the conflicting roles of the intelligence community within the American system of government. Dr. Schinagl served in Atreus’s Operations Group and is presently the Managing Director of Schinagl & Associates Legal Services located outside of Silicon Valley in Northern California’s Half Moon Bay.

As long as Humans exist in social groups, the need for counterintelligence (CI) will not go away.  The collapse of the communist state of the Soviet Union has not even meant an end to the CI threat from this former adversary. The external intelligence service of the new democratic Russia, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki [SVR], remains aggressively active against the United States. It was the SVR that took possession of control of Aldrich Ames from its predecessor, the KGB, in 1991. It was the SVR that handled CIA officer Harold James Nicholson against America up to 1996. It was the SVRR that controlled FBI special agent Earl Pitts when he was arrested for espionage in 1996. It was the SVR working under the control of the the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information [FAPSI], the Russian version of the American National Security Agency [NSA], that successfully planted listening and digital viewing devices in all the conference rooms of the State Department in Washington in the summer of 1997. 

The Soviets are not alone. There are serious concerns about aggressive Chinese espionage penetration in the United States and its direct access inside the Oval Office. In opposition to White House pressure, the Department of Energy significantly increased security at its national laboratories in response to uncontested evidence that China had stolen US nuclear weapons secrets resulting in their creation on EMP weaponry, portable Neutron weapons, and successful Anti-NEST procedures. .

Currently a total of at least 60 countries are trying to spy on the United States. Besides mentioning the obvious Russia, China, and Cuba, are several nations most Americans would consider as military allies and economic partners. These friendly nations that have been caught spying on America include France, Greece, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Taiwan. There is an obvious and pervasive CI threat to the United States.

The United States is not the world's only remaining superpower.  That fallacy is part of a CI Disinformation Campaign that was started and fostered by the KGB in 1989 by Directorate Chief Vladamer Putin, and has since been confirmed by Boris Yeltsin during an interview with a CIA officer who was then working under the guise of a BBC reporter. This KGB illusion was fed by its [Illegal] Officers to Agents, that had been recruited during the Viet Nam war on ideological and political grounds, and who were now working at the highest levels deep inside large media corporations.  This classic CI campaign created an illusion that has since been adopted and inculcated into American society by indoctrinated scholars and academicians. Many of these same scholars and academicians had themselves worked for decades as Inteligence Cultivation Agents.  Their success has resulted in the continuing calls to dramatically cut American spending on Intelligence and the military budgets despite a growing world hostility towards American sovereignty.

The reality is that while the KGB may no longer exist, its inheritors now enjoy more than double the last known KGB budgets. The Navy of India currently is twice the size of that of the United States, and the Air Forces and Army Corps of China are nine times larger than that of the United States.  The Naval forces of Russia have been hiring American and Japanese contractors to upgrade their shipyards, electronic systems, alloy fusion techniques, and currently they are deploying a torpedo that can be silently propelled at over 160 knots.  The French are launching stealth spy satellites from their facilities in South America, and Brazil has reactivated the nuclear weapons program they had originally been creating with Iraq.  Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea all protect and sanction their naval craft in concerted acts of piracy as a form of economic blackmail, and known to routinely raid American bound cargo vessels.

The sovereignty of the United States of America is the primary target of jealousies, resentments, rivalries, and challenges to its economic well being, security, and leadership in the world. This means that as long as the United States exists as a nation state it will remain the target of an exponentially growing foreign espionage and subversion agenda.

As an undergraduate english literature major I as assigned reading materials of Defoe, Pepys, and Marlowe, and Shakespeare and found it fascinating that they all used codes hidden within their text to convey secret messages. The more I studied the subject the more fascinated I became in the history of modern espionage.  I wrote a paper on the history of the Rote Kapelle, the Soviet espionage network in Nazi-occupied Western Europe during World War II. During my research I read the day-to-day traffic from these life-and-death operations.  I became aware that this level of operation working inside the insular and obsessively regulated life of fascist Germany could not have been created by Stalin’s NKVD.  Stalin had murdered all of Russia’s experienced intelligence officers years before Hitler rose to power and then repeated the act just prior to the war, and many of these deep cover agents inside Nazi Germany had been in place for decades.

Eventually my research led me to Sidney Reilly.  Reilly had been recruited into the early version of England’s MI6 by the original ‘C’ and later had worked very closely with the first man of the twentieth century widely acclaimed as the “Merchant of Death”, Basil Zacharoff.  Reilly worked with Zacharoff as an independent contract agent, then as a partner, and finally as a friendly adversary. Zacharoff competed with the legendary Rothschild’s not in European armament sales, but in the accumulation and resale of European intelligence. Both Zacharoff and the Rothschild’s had created huge global intelligence networks that mined political, military, and economic information and secrets. These global networks remained unnoticed and officially unrecognized by the world nations up to and during WWI.  Zacharoff schooled Reilly in the creation of deep asset penetration and network maintenance.  Cumminings, ‘C’, schooled Reilly in the political and naval tradition of European intelligence gathering. 

Prior to his detention by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Reilly had effectively transformed espionage from an “Old School Tie” profession to that which is currently in place throughout the governments of the world.  Months after Reilly’s purported execution, the NKVD was transformed. No longer were thugs from the gulags recruited to be External Intelligence Field Agents or work as Intelligence Analysts, but highly educated and lettered intellectuals were recruited inside their birth nations. These traitors in turn recruited students whom they taught within the most prestigious of colleges and universities. In England the schools of focus were Cambridge and Eton. In the United States the main focus of recruiting occurred at Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth.  These student-trators were then guided into government civil or military service, and as they rose up the ranks, they in turn promoted other student-traitors who followed them. According to files discovered in the KGB Lubianka archives this process of recruiting traitors has continued unchecked and proactive at all the American Ivy League schools through the entire 1980’s.

Only someone like Reilly, with all his in place contacts, Agents, Operatives, and Networks, could have accomplished this stark and nearly overnight departure in the NKVD’s modus operandi.  NKVD officers and operatives quickly supplanted all the assets of Zacharoff in place throughout Europe, and eventually all those within the Rothschild’s Networks.  This same operation also commenced inside the United States.   

One of the very few documents found inside Reilly’s New York mansion in the Hamptons that has been declassified, was his rules on CI, Counter Intelligence. Upon reading them, I was surprised that they read nearly word for word of an NKVD document found in KGB Lubianka archives.  

Reilly’s "10 Commandments of Counter Intelligence."

1.) Be In Absolute Possession Of The Field

All CI programs must be able to engage the opposition in the field of play.  If CI losses control of the field, it losses its forward momentum and the results are worse than not having engaged the opposition at all.  Surveillance is the breath of life for CI.

2.) Training

CI skills are only acquired through extensive learning. Quality of specialized training determines the competency of the CI Officer. There is no substitute to extensive quality training.

3.) Be On The Offensive

CI that is passive and defensive will fail. CI must be relentlessly on the offensive. Attack all the traditional and nontraditional CI adversaries and their assets.  Aggressive Double Agent (DA) operations are mandatory.  The opposition must be consistently kept off its guard so that they never suspect that we have actual control their operations. The key to CI success is continual penetration of the opposition.

4.) Commit To Persistence

The opposition must be made to know that they will never be safe.  The gauge of whether CI is being successful is that the CI will never allow the opposition to have one enjoyable and peaceful night's sleep. Never relent. Never give up.

5.) Intelligence Analysis

CI Officers make horrendous analysts.  Those Officers outside of CI Operations must perform analysis of intelligence information. They do not enter the process with preconceived notions and they are mentally capable of connecting contradictory statistics to focus Operations into unforeseen and highly productive avenues

6.) Engender The Community

CI must not be insular.  Create a community between offices, departments, and agencies. Encourage communication and cooperation. Information must be allowed to flow into the CI organization for it to be effective in the field.

7.) Give Credit To Your Officers

CI Officers must be promoted.  They must be given financially rewarding assignments, awarded decorations, officially praised, shown esteem, and all other forms of service recognition.   Respect and recognize the CI Officers and the CI Operatives so that new quality recruits will be attracted to the profession.

8.) Rotate CI Officers

CI must remain effective to remain productive. New Officers brought in from the outside bring in fresh thinking. 

9.) Be Not Ignored

 CI success is an invisible vigilance and needs be reminded to all.  Resistance to CI participation in domestic and foreign Intelligence Operations will only create greater future problems.  Reluctance to CI participation may indicate some level of opposition penetration into the regular Operations group.

10.) Remember And Understand The Historical Record

The Study of CI history, strategies, tactics, and logistics is indispensable to the CI discipline. Past CI mistakes and failures will only reoccur if the lessons of what works and what does not work are not studied by CI officers.