Multiple U.S. counterintelligence agencies charged with neutralizing foreign spy operations lack focus and the system needs major reform, according to the chairman of the House intelligence oversight panel.
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford said recent hearings and oversight since 2017 highlighted the need for legislative fixes.
“We’ve seen that we’ve kind of got a disjointed counterintelligence apparatus that just doesn’t work well together,” the Arkansas Republican said in an interview with The Washington Times. “We’re always kind of looking for this smoking gun evidence instead of taking proactive steps against those threats.”
China’s aggressive intelligence-gathering operations in the United States are the main focus of the reforms, he said. Spying by Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba will also be targeted.
The chairman spoke following committee passage last week of a major reform package within the fiscal 2026 intelligence authorization bill. The legislation is awaiting a full House vote.
The measure is called the Strategic Enhancement of Counterintelligence and Unifying Reform Efforts Act, or SECURE Act.
A major element would be the creation of a new National Counterintelligence Center, or NCIC, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The new center would replace the current National Counterintelligence and Security Center that lacks the coordinating power to fuse activities by counterspy branches within the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, military services and other security agencies.
A new mission of the center, in addition to coordinating, would be to direct and conduct counterintelligence operations. A key emphasis, according to the bill, will be setting the doctrine and requirements for the “execution of offensive counterintelligence activities.”
Critics say American counterintelligence has lacked an offensive, proactive focus and relied instead on defensive approaches.
The center will also be in charge of conducting assessments of damage caused by foreign spy cases. Such assessments in the past were often compromised by intelligence agencies that sought to hide their failures in the reviews.
Highly secret counterspy operations include recruiting foreign spies as defectors in place, using double agents or “dangles” to smoke out foreign spies, and aggressively hunting “moles” or foreign penetration agents.
The bill upgrades the definition of counterintelligence in current legislation from protecting against foreign spy threats to a mandate to “deter, disrupt, investigate, exploit,” foreign intelligence operations.
The use of deception to neutralize foreign spies and counter foreign intelligence influence operations also would be part of the new program. The new NCIC also would grant greater power to the director to conduct counterintelligence activities as the principal adviser to President Trump on foreign spying threats, in addition to working for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Mr. Crawford said he worked closely with Ms. Gabbard in drawing up plans for counterintelligence reforms. U.S. counterintelligence has not evolved at the same time foreign spying threats are increasing.
“I mean, it just seems like every week I get another brief on something else that’s CI related,” Mr. Crawford said. “We’re not running our best game.”
One problem is what the chairman called the permissive landscape in the United States that makes it easier for foreign spies to conduct operations with impunity.
“So we just feel the need to reset and start taking a more proactive approach as it applies to CI with particularly our great power adversaries,” he said.
The reforms would also codify in law an interagency National Counterintelligence Task Force currently made up of security officials from various agencies in government. On China, Mr. Crawford said Beijing’s spying operations are the major concern.
“The red lights are flashing critical levels,” he said of Chinese spying.
The Russian intelligence services are no longer the KGB but still a major worry, he said.
Mr. Crawford said the Senate version of the authorization bill does not contain the reforms. But there have been discussions with senators, and he said he is hopeful the reform legislation will be adopted in a final bill during a House-Senate conference.
“We hope that they’ll come along with us there,” he said.
The FBI is in charge of counterintelligence domestically. The bureau has suffered a string of failures, including the recent conviction of Charles F. MGonigal, the former FBI counterspy chief in New York, on corruption charges, and the firing in 2018 of FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, who ran the now discredited probe into Mr. Trump and Russian collusion.
CIA counterintelligence during the 1960s and 1970s was an independent function and played a powerful role within the agency and larger U.S. government under its chief, James Jesus Angleton, who died in 1987. Angleton, however, was forced out following disclosures of domestic spying operations and what his critics said was overzealousness in pursuing then-Soviet moles in the agency.
After Angleton, many in the intelligence community called his brand of spy hunting “sick think,” and led to a downgrading of the function.
What followed has been a seemingly uninterrupted string of extremely damaging spy penetrations. They include CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames who gave away all CIA agents to Moscow, and FBI traitor Robert Hanssen who also spied for Moscow.
Since the post-Angleton period, nearly every agency of the federal government has been damaged by foreign spy breaches, mainly involving the loss of secrets to Russia, China and Cuba.
One major recent intelligence disaster was the CIA’s loss of nearly all its recruited agents in China beginning in 2010. The agent loss was the result of turncoat CIA officers and technical breakdowns that allowed China’s Ministry of State Security to unravel the agency’s spy network.
In 2023, then-CIA Director William Burns said the agency was making progress in rebuilding agent networks in China after the devastating losses.
Former CIA officer Sam Faddis said the reform legislation would be good if U.S. intelligence agencies start to approach counterintelligence with more vigor.
“Fundamentally, though, it begs the question: Who is going to do it? Who will run these ops?” he said.“The FBI has no idea what it is doing in this realm. CIA has lost its edge. If we don’t change that, we are just wishing we could do better,” he said.
Michele Van Cleave, former national counterintelligence director, warned that Department of Government Efficiency efforts to cut waste and abuse pose counterintelligence risks and increases the danger of theft of information by Russia, China and other spy services.
“Having served as head of U.S. counterintelligence, I have no doubt that hostile intelligence services have been working overtime to take advantage of this golden opportunity,” Ms. Van Cleave wrote in The Hill.
“The red carpet rolled out by DOGE to our adversaries would be a difficult CI challenge under the best of circumstances, but today our counterintelligence enterprise is crumbling at the seams,” she said.
U.S. counterintelligence services are only able to provide coverage against less than 10% of the highest priority foreign intelligence personnel in or transiting the United States, Ms. Van Cleave said.
