Leandro Aragoncillo, an FBI intelligence analyst, worked in the office of the Vice President from 1999-2001. He is now in jail and awaiting trial for spying on behalf of the Philippines. Lawrence Franklin, an intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, served as the point man on Iran for Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith. This past week Franklin pled guilty to charges that he spied on behalf of Israel.
While spying among friends is nothing new, both the Aragoncillo and Franklin cases suggest it has become far more widespread of late. Or as the CSMonitor reported recently, "the US appears to be experiencing an unwelcome surge in espionage cases connected to friendly governments." Over the past decade, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and France — in addition, of course, to the Philippines and Israel — are all American allies who have engaged in "friendly" spying.
What's most disconcerting about such espionage, however, is that its underlying causes would appear to be irresolvable. Take, for instance, the two factors most responsible for its rise:
1. The increasing interoperability of economic, political, and military platforms among states with compatible proprietary systems. Or more simply, the unprecedented amount of interaction between allied countries after the post-Soviet proliferation of democracy and the rule of law. On the whole that's a positive development, but it does have the following drawbacks: for one, it allows those who engage in ally espionage to believe they are breaking only the letter of the law, rather than its spirit; for another, the same interoperable platforms that allow for greater efficiency also make it easier to access and transmit both classified intelligence and "actionable" information that is publicly available.
2. An increasingly decentralized enemy. The distinction between state and non-state actors is, at this point, a familiar one. Less understood is that that distinction is not just reflected in the difference between the Iron Curtain and al-Qaeda. MNCs, NGOs, SIGs — the rise of each is just as indicative of a post-Soviet order in which individual organizations have proven far more adaptable and adept than their governmental counterparts. When it comes to counter-intelligence, the result is that it's much more difficult to identify threat areas. Whereas in the past counter-intelligence officers could focus on specific individuals with access to certain information or organizations, now nearly every individual with any access at all has to be viewed as a potential threat.
The main difficulty is that fully addressing either of these factors would require dramatic policy reversals. Yet the consequences of those policies have been so overwhelmingly positive (just ask eastern Europe or southeast Asia) that such reversals would be patently foolish to undertake.
As a result there aren't many ways we can respond effectively. We can certainly bolster our counter-intelligence units, but given the scale of ally espionage, that's essentially a stop-gap measure akin to plugging the holes in a dyke. The only other option left is to take cases of international espionage to a multilateral body — yet for different reasons altogether, that's likely off the table until at least January of 2009.