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192 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

wrote in his book that the ability of Russian intelligence to conceal this penetration for more than half a century "broke the record for secret keeping."

This Russian ability to penetrate U.S. intelligence was not entirely defeated by America's implementation of more sophisticated security procedures, such as the polygraph examination and extensive background checks. In 1995, eleven years before Snowden joined it, the CIA's inspector general completed a study of the KGB's use of false defectors to mislead the U.S. government from the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. It found Russia had dispatched at least half a dozen double agents who provided misleading information to their CIA case officers.

Because the KGB operation went undetected for nearly a decade, the disinformation prepared in Moscow had been incorporated into reports (which had a distinctive blue stripe to signify their importance) that had been provided to Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Even more shocking, in tracing the path of this disinformation, the inspector general found that the "senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources for this information were controlled by Russian intelligence," yet they did not inform the president and officials receiving the blue-striped reports that they included Russian misinformation. What the CIA director John Deutch called "an inexcusable lapse" also reflected a form of institutional willful blindness in U.S. intelligence, borne out of a bureaucratic fear of career embarrassment so well described in Le Carré's spy novels. Detecting intelligence failures has, if anything, become even more difficult in the age of the anonymous Internet.

The Snowden breach demonstrated the NSA had few if any fail-safe defenses against would-be leakers of communications intelligence. In the new domain of cyber warfare, conventional defensive rules do not apply. "There are no rivers or hills up here. It's all flat. All advantage goes to the attacker," General Hayden said in an interview in 2015 with the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. His point was that because there are no defensive positions, the United States in cyber warfare must rely on an aggressive offensive. If fully successful, such an offensive would so deeply penetrate the defenses of

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 192 9/29/16 5:51 PM
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