A Journalist's View: The New Spies

Dramatic changes have taken place in the intelligence community since 9/11. But the media have ignored or mischaracterized those changes, and their disclosure of secret operations has undermined the effort.

When the Cold War ended, spies thought their work was done. The respite was brief. Today, we need spies not only to uncover nuclear proliferation in countries like North Korea and Iran but to hunt down terrorists.

In retrospect, the spy game played out during the Cold War seems almost innocent. Each side played by a certain set of rules. If we caught a KGB officer spying in our country, we detained him but then, because he had diplomatic immunity, we expelled him. The Soviet Union played by the same rules. No one got killed.

Today, all bets are off. While no CIA officers have been killed except in paramilitary operations, agents recruited by CIA officers have indeed been killed, sometimes because of press leaks exposing their identities.

The term spy is, in fact, a colloquialism. It refers to an officer of an intelligence agency like the CIA. The term also applies to an agent he or she may recruit to uncover and pass along secret information. With the war on terror, the FBI has been pressed into service to help uncover terrorists. Broadly defined, the work of the FBI in infiltrating terrorist groups and uncovering plots by gathering human intelligence (HUMINT) can also be called spying. In hunting down terrorists, no form of intelligence is as important as HUMINT.

According to the media, the FBI and CIA don't talk to each other, and we are losing the war on terror. Yet the fact that we have not been attacked for so many years since 9/11 shows how successful the war on terror has been. Every few months, the FBI announces arrests of terrorists. In fact, since 9/11, some 5,000 terrorists have been rolled up worldwide by the FBI, the CIA, and the military. That is a headline you will never see in the Washington Post or the New York Times.

Integrating the Intelligence Community

Rather than not talking to each other, FBI agents and CIA officers now work together at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia. Established in 2005, the NCTC integrated the intelligence community. Here, dozens of analysts from the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), and other intelligence agencies sit side by side sharing intelligence and tracking threats 24 hours a day. In addition, major portions of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division and the CIA's Counterterrorism Center make their offices at the NCTC.

The NCTC is housed in a restricted six-story building not far from the CIA. From overhead, the NCTC building looks like an X—as in X marks the spot, they like to say.

Every weekday morning at 7, Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), picks up the Read Book that lists as many as sixty or seventy potential terrorist threats against the U.S.

The white binder is four inches thick, and each copy is specially numbered for the person receiving it. Admiral Redd gets number one. A string of code words across the cover of the Read Book classify it Top Secret, Compartmented—meaning only a limited number of people can see it.

Inside, a twelve-page to sixteen-page document called the threat matrix lists the latest threats. It changes daily. A kind of terrorism spread sheet, the threat matrix notes the type and reliability of the source for each threat, such as: "a new source, unevaluated, first time reporting" or "an established source, generally reliable, has provided reliable information in the past." Besides listing all the threats, the Read Book contains a situation report produced by the center.

Three times a day, the NCTC holds a secure video teleconference with the rest of the intelligence community—supposedly disorganized, its members not on speaking terms. The conferences are held at 8 a.m., 3 p.m. and at 1 a.m. seven days a week.

The conferences—known as SVTCs, pronounced "sivitz"—take place in...