Is the Current State of Counterintelligence in the Intelligence Community Adequate?

The major counterintelligence failure in the US was experienced in 9/11 2001 incident. During this time, the US experienced a historic terrorist attack in its own soil. This successful attack was blamed on poor intelligence performance by the agency responsible for that work at that time. This resulted to great reforms campaign in the intelligence department. These reforms define the current counterintelligence system in the US. The main aim of enhancing the reforms is to increase the counter intelligence adequacy and to integrate the terrorism in the list of international and national threats to be considered in the counterintelligence system. One of the major issues that were addressed in these reforms were enhancement of internal counterintelligence to protect the American from any other property destruction, life lost and threats from terrorist related acts in the future. Basically, this has highly been achieved since there has been no any other similar incident in the country since 2001. However, the terrorist related threats are still considered high in America and in the rest of the world particularly among American allies (Hayden, 2010).

There have been a number of changes made even in the counterintelligence operations and protocols. Some of the major changes include the enhancement of information sharing, where all information gathered from different intelligent agencies is shared in a single database and other agencies are allowed to access this information. This has highly enhanced the consolidation of information from different agencies to understand a threat plan in which every agency or a few agencies could be having different clue on. This has highly enhanced the counterintelligence performance since 2001 after which these reforms were enhanced.

Advancement of world technology, particularly the IT technology has also played a great role in the enhancement of the counterintelligence performance. Beside of effective information sharing, this technology has made it easy to employ defensive and destructive counter intelligence in different cases where counterintelligence has been highly needed. This has also improved scanning in different immigration points, tracking of suspect calls and communication trends, and tracking of bank related operations for the suspect among other major advantages. This has made it easy to enforce counterintelligence measures. However, the technology advancement has also favored other enemies that increased their operation techniques, making their moves to be swifter as compared to what was happening during cold war and other major historical incidences that resulted to extensive use of counterintelligence. This great competition has made it harder for the US intelligence systems to effectively attain their goals. However, despite of the challenges the US CIA and FBI among other agencies in the intelligence community have employed all possible measures to suppress counterintelligence threats (    Poteat, 2014).

The current counterintelligence operation can be regarded to be adequate especially due to the number of terrorist plans it has aborted and warned against to ensure right measures have been employed. This applies to terrorist attacks planned against America and other parts of the world. This can be regarded as one of the most successful counterintelligence practice based on the fact that a single success attack can be very expensive in a country and the world at large. The intelligence agencies have employed all possible measures to ensure that they have their employees as part of the major and minor terrorist groups, especially in the high ranks to gather information regarding their operations. This has highly enhances the counterintelligence operation especially in the current world security threat of terrorism. Although there are still a number of successful attacks in different parts of the world targeting the US properties and people, intelligence community have highly managed in minimizing their impacts and the rate at which they take place by ensuring that most of them are unsuccessful. This implies that, although the counterintelligence agencies cannot be regarded to be 100% adequate, there has been a very great improvement on how they handle the intelligence issues and with the control of threats in the world than they were a decade ago (Kalkavage, 2014).

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