Contentious Military Spy Office Closed

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Monday officially dissolved an intelligence office that once created a controversial database about potential threats to military bases, shifting it to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Pentagon's six-year old Counterintelligence Field Activity's personnel, budget, and most of its mission has been folded into the newly created Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center.

Human intelligence is military parlance for using people, rather than gadgets, to spy. Counterintelligence refers to actions taken to protect an organization against espionage.

The counterintelligence field office budget was secret, but it was created to protect DoD personnel, resources, and information against foreign influence and manipulation, as well as to detect and neutralize espionage against the department. As such it had law enforcement powers within the Defense Department. Those powers will not transfer to the new center.

The old office maintained the TALON, a database created after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to track potential threats to military facilities and personnel. In December 2005 it was disclosed that the system included data on antimilitary protests and other peaceful demonstrations, including the names of people who attended peace rallies.

A 2006 Pentagon review found that as many as 260 reports in the database were improperly collected or kept there. At the time, the Pentagon said there were about 13,000 entries in the database, and that less than 2 percent either were wrongly added or were not purged later when they were determined not to involve real threats. The data base was closed in September 2007.

Experts say the tie to DIA's efforts and the shift away from law enforcement powers for the new center is a reaction to the backlash from perceptions that the Pentagon was spying on U.S. citizens.

"The memo stresses that 'DIA shall not be designated as a law enforcement activity and shall not perform any law enforcement functions previously assigned to DoD CIFA,' " noted Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy with the Washington, D.C.-based Federation of American Scientists.

"This seems like an attempt to differentiate and distance the new organization from the controversies that dogged the old one," he told Military.com.

"The realignment of CIFA's functions and resources into DIA strengthens the close historical and operational relationship between counterintelligence and HUMINT," said Army Maj. Gen. Theodore Nicholas, the center's new director, in a statement issued by the Pentagon. "Integration under one organization will result in greater collaboration in operational and support areas where both disciplines overlap."

Aftergood agreed, saying the tie between counter intel and spying is complementary, but he warns it could be a thin line to walk.

The new organization "won't simply be defending against foreign spies -- i.e. defensive counterintelligence -- they will be actively attempting to infiltrate, derail and defeat foreign intelligence operations," Aftergood said. "That's a tricky, dangerous line of work but also potentially an enormously productive one."

Military.com Managing Editor Christian Lowe contributed to this report.