"Counterintelligence the way it has been conceived is a very small part of it. It's a subset," one government official told the Wall Street Journal. The paper said the "czar's duties will include identifying and protecting critical corporate secrets and private-sector assets."

The new spy agency will take over and widen activities currently assumed by the National Counterintelligence Center, which was created in 1994 during the Clinton administration, ostensibly in response to revelations that CIA officer Aldrich Ames had been spying for the Soviet Union for nine years. The Journal reported that the plans for a counterintelligence czar had been under way for two years and that it has strong bipartisan backing.

While official statements, unnamed government sources, and articles in the big-business media suggest that the rationale for the latest move is a threat from abroad, their statements do not distinguish the "foreign" from the "domestic." Instead they focus on "protecting national assets" from "national adversaries" and equate "economic security" with "national security."  
 
Intelligence Authorization Act
One example of what Washington is driving at in the United States can be seen in the passage of the annual Intelligence Authorization Act. The bill was originally vetoed by Clinton in November because it included a provision imposing a three-year prison sentence on any government employee who "knowingly and willfully discloses or attempts to disclose any classified information."

In sending the bill back to Congress, the president said such persons "commit a gross breach of the public trust and may recklessly put our national security at risk." He encouraged legislators to draft a "more narrowly drawn provision," stressing that the measure "lacked the thoroughness this provision warranted." Clinton said that what is in dispute "is not the gravity of the problem, but the best way to respond to it."

Rep. Porter Goss, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, protested the veto, saying the legislation, "including the offending anti-leak provision, was approved by the Administration before final passage." The provision was removed from the legislation and subsequently signed into law by Clinton.  
 
Wen Ho Lee frame-up
The announcement also follows the unraveling of the U.S. government's frame-up of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico who was arrested and held in solitary confinement on a range of charges, including stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets. He was released after 10 months in jail when the government dropped all of the 59 charges but one, related to downloading national defense information at Los Alamos. The Times reported that FBI director Louis Freeh pressed for the counterintelligence reorganization in response to the outcome of Lee's case.

Several months later, in describing the National Counterintelligence Executive, White House spokesperson Jacob Siewert said, "The agencies that are charged with the responsibilities for counterintelligence--primarily the CIA, Department of Defense, and the FBI--can work together in a way that's more coordinated and look at new threats, assess them, and decide how to protect our secrets." The appointment of the spy czar will likely be left to the incoming Bush administration, he said.

News articles and administration officials report the National Counterintelligence Executive will pursue "closer ties between the government and private industry in fighting spies," according to the Journal, which added that "with the rise in economic globalization and industrial espionage, government officials now say national security and economic security are indistinguishable."

The New York Times reported that the "executive's central task will be to try to determine which secrets held by the government or the private sector are so valuable that they need to be protected from the nation's adversaries."

At the White House press briefing, Siewert said, "A threat today can as easily come from a laptop as it could from an old cloak-and-dagger spy, and we need a counterintelligence capability that matches that new globalized reality."

According to various press reports, the mandate of the agency is to identify such "secrets," determine who may be interested in obtaining them, identify whether or not anyone is trying to obtain them, and take necessary steps to "protect" them.

To carry out this open-ended mandate would of necessity require widespread spying, extension of the amount of information deemed "classified"; the growth in the number of workers who must receive government clearances for jobs; more collaboration between the government and corporations in setting up and running spy operations in plants, factories, and offices; and witch-hunts against and victimization of workers employed by the government and industry for "revealing" information deemed "secret."  
 
 
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