There is a significant disconnect between intelligence and geopolitical literature that results in counterintelligence being a little-understood discipline. Intelligence literature often focuses on the tactical, spy-versus-spy aspects of counterintelligence. Meanwhile, geopolitical literature, while often not giving intelligence its due, gives counterintelligence even less attention. Counterintelligence, however, is nothing less than information warfare that has implications for strategic decisionmaking.
Counterintelligence, at its core, is the manipulation of an adversary or competitor’s information environment. This manipulation takes two distinct forms: cutting off access and introducing information.
Cutting off access prevents hostile intelligence actors from gathering information that addresses collection requirements. This deprives a service’s respective government inputs to decision making. Cutting off an adversary’s flow of information takes two primary forms. The first is disrupting operations, whether human or cyber that are exfiltrating data, through counterespionage (the law enforcement aspect of counterintelligence). Second, preemptive security measures can disrupt an adversary from even initially gaining access to sensitive information.
The other objective of counterintelligence is to manipulate an adversary’s decision-making through the clandestine introduction of information. Specifically, manipulation exploits adversarial intelligence collection activities by facilitating their answering of requirements, but on the target’s terms. U.S. double agent operations, starting in the Second World War, fed hostile intelligence actors both true and deceptive data that Washington wanted them to receive, with the intent of eliciting a certain decision. The Soviet Union (and its Russian successor) employed ”active measures” to disrupt Western decision-making by creating controversy around policy decisions.
While counterintelligence has historically focused on government or government-adjacent (for instance, the defense industry) information, the contribution of the independent private sector to elements of national power, especially since the end of the Cold War, has broadened the counterintelligence playing field. State-affiliated companies have become practitioners of economic espionage, the theft of trade secrets, against foreign competitors.
Theft is not the only way counterintelligence plays out in the private sector. In one instance, a Chinese telecommunication company specifically sought to create turmoil in a foreign competitor. This attempt to sow disruption, which could impact decision making, conceptually the same as Soviet active measures. Counterintelligence could theoretically impact the private sector through the distortion of information. For instance, a company, seeking a competitive advantage could corrupt research and development through malicious cyber activity.
Academia has also been a counterintelligence battleground. East German intelligence, for instance, infiltrated a high-profile U.S. think tank, with a recruited agent, in the mid-1970s. The Soviet KGB attempted to do similarly. Such penetrations had the potential to facilitate both collection and influence. China has explicitly targeted the academic sector to effect knowledge transfer, which can support scientific decision making, through its talent programs.
Counterintelligence, therefore, does not exist in a hermetically sealed world of spies and spycatchers. Information warfare – affecting an adversary or competitor’s decision making by restricting or allowing the flow of data – is at the center of the discipline. Although historically centered around government information, counterintelligence increasingly plays out in other venues, as entities beyond government contribute, independently, to elements of national power.
Darren E. Tromblay
MA, MS
Darren E. Tromblay is an independent author, having published a variety of books and peer reviewed articles on aspects of national security, with more than two decades in the U.S. intelligence community as an analyst and historian. He is a member of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence editorial board.
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