WASHINGTON, D.C. — House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford (AR-01) joined former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich on his podcast, “Newt’s World,” to discuss the need to reevaluate how the U.S. approaches its counterintelligence (CI) posture to address threats from China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba, which are actively engaging in espionage and intelligence operations within the U.S. homeland.

Chairman Crawford and Speaker Gingrich also discussed the House Intelligence Committee’s efforts to reform the CI enterprise to build a posture that detects, disrupts, and deters activities from foreign intelligence services, instead of relying on a solely law enforcement approach.

Click on the image below or here to listen to the conversation

Highlights

WEAKENED U.S. CI ENTERPRISE: “These threats are pervasive…counterterrorism is one thing, but counterintelligence and espionage are another. And I think we are probably in our weakest position from a counterintelligence perspective that we’ve been in since the Cold War. I think it’s time to revisit our CI posture and [discuss] how we can augment the current CI enterprise.”

U.S. HOMELAND IS CONTESTED SPACE: “I think one of the things that we’re missing out on is that we don’t want to have a conversation about the idea that our adversaries may be engaged in what we call operational preparation of the environment [OPE]. That is prepping the battlefield. If we are to have this conversation, we need to acknowledge that the United States, our homeland, is now a contested space. It stands to reason that our adversaries would be, in fact, engaged in OPE, prepping the battlefield for whatever operations they might want to undertake.”

STATES ARE STEPPING UP: “We’ve really got to harden our targets and redouble our efforts to spread this CI enterprise across not only the federal level…There are numerous states that are now trying to stand up their own counterintelligence posture at the state level because they don’t believe that the federal government is filling the gaps they see. That’s a conversation we need to have, and it really comes down to domain awareness. But we need an all-hands-on-deck, whole-of-government approach to how we counter these intelligence threats across the homeland.”

ENGAGING THE PRIVATE SECTOR IN CI EFFORTS: “China’s whole-of-society is bearing down on us because they own everything. It’s not a whole-of-government. It’s their entire economy because the government controls and owns their economy. Whereas here in the United States, we can’t compel the private sector to do anything. It’s the private sector by definition. The only way we’re going to be able to implement a whole-of-society approach is by being proactive and reaching out into the private sector to say, here are the threats that we see, here’s what you can do to counter that, tell us about what you’re seeing so that we can have better awareness of this problem, and discuss how we continue that communication upstream and downstream so that we’re protecting not only our government assets, but our private sector as well.”

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE FOCUSES ON THE “WHAT IFS:” “So when you think about counterintelligence, you’re probably going to talk about the FBI. And the FBI is a law enforcement agency. You actually brought this point up to me. Counterintelligence assumes the worst. Law enforcement assumes the best. That’s the world we live in because law enforcement is governed by constitutional protections and the assumption that you’re innocent until proven guilty. All those are enshrined in our Constitution. Whereas with counterintelligence, you have to take the worst-case scenario and consider the ‘what ifs.”

CI AND LAW ENFORCEMENT HAVE DIFFERENT GOALS: “The other key difference is that law enforcement has a different end state. Law enforcement wants to arrest people, prosecute them, and throw them in jail. Counterintelligence is about detecting, disrupting, and dismantling intelligence networks as they exist, and determining what we can learn from those networks. The end state is not always the same. In fact, in many cases, we would be doing ourselves a major disservice by arresting someone that we could otherwise glean positive intelligence information from.”

FOCUS ON THREAT MITIGATION: “I’m a former bomb tech. I always try to use this analogy. Anything to the right of boom is consequence management. So what we want is threat mitigation. We want to be left of boom. And how do we achieve that threat mitigation ability? It is by expanding and augmenting our CI enterprise to support what the FBI currently does. That doesn’t always entail arrest authority… So in a sense, you have to have a much more aggressive counterintelligence attitude than you would have if you were law enforcement.”

RIGHT OF BOOM: ARRESTS AREN’T THE ONLY SUCCESS METRIC: “But we don’t know the backstory in many cases of how long they’ve been engaged in espionage against us, what targets they were working on, or what individuals they may have impacted or potentially turned. Because it’s not just about collecting intelligence in the context of pictures and information. Sometimes it’s about them turning U.S. citizens and having them work against us. How do we identify that and exploit those networks? I’m not saying the FBI can’t do that. But what I am saying is we can probably augment what the FBI is doing and have better results.”

BRINGING EVERYONE TO THE TABLE: “I want to identify who’s the best we have available that I can put out on the field right now to address that problem set. And that centralized individual… is basically making that determination. For lack of a better term, I would call them a referee. We’re going to put you here and we want you to get after this problem set as it applies to this particular target…[For example,] last September, during the UN General Assembly, there was an attempt to disrupt telecommunications through a SIM farm in very close proximity to the United Nations, and that was actually thwarted by the Secret Service. They were the ones who intervened on that one.”

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