IWP 654
4 Credits
Today, U.S. counterintelligence is generally characterized as a national security practice attributed principally to the FBI. However, in the 19th century and until 1908, what we now understand as counterintelligence was then practiced by the Pinkertons, the U.S. Secret Service, the Army, and the Navy as domestic security, negative-intelligence, counter-sabotage, counterterrorism, counter-sedition, counterespionage, and counter-subversion.
By 1908, Congress would outlaw the Pinkertons and prohibit the Secret Service from assuming any role in counterintelligence as the forerunner to the FBI was established as Congress was in summer recess.
For the next 40 years, the Military Services, the U.S. State Department, and the FBI would wage one of the great turf battles in Washington over the proper home for U.S. counterintelligence until the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and, with it, the first time the U.S. Congress recognized the term “counterintelligence.”
As the Cold War took hold, the Eisenhower White House would birth the first national counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. That program, as executed by the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the U.S. Army, would last until the resignation of a President, the death of J. Edgar Hoover, the firing of Jim Angleton, and investigation of the Church Committee would pave the way for the establishment of Intelligence Committees in Congress and Executive Order 12333, which firmly established the modern practice of counterintelligence by the U.S. government.
In IWP 654, we will examine this evolution of U.S. counterintelligence in four distinct eras marked by the country’s struggles with intelligence operations in peacetime and the sovereignty of the individual states, the First and Second Red Terrors, the World Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror.
