Tho ommissions in this little news article from last week are astounding.  Many espionage bases are lightly touched and alluded to, except the most important one ; Israel's ongoing espionage against the US.  Dual-loyalty is mentioned, but not in refeence to Israel  and Pollard.  Misguided ideological commitments to another country is mentioned, but never in connection with Israel.  It's most definitely mentioned in connection with espionage  efforts by Arab-American on behalf of Arab/Moslems countries, but esionage by American Jews on behalf of Israel?  Never, ever heard of it! {In each cases, neither comes as any surprise to me]. Remember, Israel is our oft-lauded and self professed ally in The War....  Which, in some eyes, gives them a free pass on the score.  Others could rightfully argue that that simple fact makes this alleged Israeli behavior all the more trecherous and unforgiveable,  Stake out what position you will, my good friends.  [A pity this was published several days before the accusations against Ben-ami Kaddish were made public.  No doubt they still would not heen mentioned.  As far as it goes, it's still a worthwhile perusal.]

Still think Obama's missing flag label pin, or Hilary's sniper hallucinations, or the Rev Wright are all that important?




A Spy’s Motivation: For Love of Another Country
Ross MacDonald


By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 20, 2008

Washington — One day in February 2005, F.B.I. agents fished a pile of paper scraps from the trash of Chi Mak, an engineer for a California defense contractor. Painstakingly reconstructed, the torn-up notes turned out to be what the bureau believed were instructions for Mr. Mak on what technical information to steal and deliver to China.


Changes in Espionage by Americans: 1947-2007

Mr. Mak, who emigrated from China three decades ago and became a United States citizen in 1985, was sentenced last month to 24 years in prison for illegally exporting controlled information and lying about it. Addressing the judge who said he had betrayed the United States, Mr. Mak, 67, protested: “I never intended to hurt this country. I love this country.”

Mr. Mak’s case, described by prosecutors as involving a spy ring that included four relatives, is part of a historic shift in the nature of spying against the United States. A new study by a Defense Department contractor shows that divided loyalty, usually on the part of naturalized Americans with roots in a foreign land, has become the dominant motive.

From 1947 to 1990, the study found, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans charged with spying were acting solely or primarily out of patriotic, as opposed to ideological, loyalty to a foreign country. Since 1990, according to the study’s author, Katherine L. Herbig, divided loyalty has been the sole or primary motive in about half of all cases.

“Dual loyalty is a problem we haven’t seen on such a scale since the Revolution,” when many colonists swore allegiance to the British king, said Joel F. Brenner, the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.

The trend has come to light at an awkward time for the nation’s intelligence agencies. Admitting that they can hardly hope to penetrate Al Qaeda without greater expertise in Arabic or fend off Chinese espionage without more fluent speakers of Chinese, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency are dropping old security policies that excluded many Americans with foreign relatives from high-level clearances.

But even as the government aggressively courts first-generation and second-generation Americans, the new statistics suggest, it must keep a wary eye out for those whose real loyalty is to their native country or to militant Islam.

“The intelligence community has a particularly difficult risk to manage,” Mr. Brenner said. “It’s difficult to do background checks on people from out-of-the-way places.”

Why do Americans betray their country? Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego. Perhaps it’s time to update that to MINCE, adding nationalism to the mix. Or MINCES, with a nod to the consistent contributions of sex, as in the case of Donald W. Keyser, a State Department official whose liaison with a Taiwanese intelligence officer led to a conviction last year for possession of classified documents and lying to investigators.

In the complex human equation that produces a turncoat, rarely is only one motive at play. But different periods have featured different motives in the ascendancy.

The first great wave was ideology, growing from an early fascination with the Soviet experiment, which promised freedom from the grinding inequities of capitalism. Julius Rosenberg, for instance, whose parents worked in New York City sweatshops, joined the Young Communist League as a teenager; he was one of dozens of American and British Communists who fed secrets to Soviet intelligence in the first half of the 20th century.

But by the 1970s, disillusionment with the crimes of Communism meant that few took up the Soviet cause gratis. Money dominated the second wave: hundreds of thousands of dollars for the spy ring led by John A. Walker Jr., a Navy warrant officer; $4.6 million for Aldrich Ames of the C.I.A.; $1.4 million for Robert P. Hanssen of the F.B.I., who once sent his handler a note seeking diamonds, saying cash was harder to hide.

Perhaps no would-be spy was so indiscriminately mercenary as Brian P. Regan, an Air Force master sergeant who worked at the National Reconnaissance Office, overseer of spy satellites, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2003 after seeking to sell secrets to Iraq, Libya and China.

The third wave of spying shows much less greed. Money, the sole or primary motive for two-thirds of spies who got their start in the 1980s, was the main draw for just a quarter of spies from 1990 to date, Ms. Herbig’s new analysis concludes. No money at all was paid in the 11 most recent cases.

The largest share was made up of naturalized Americans who spied out of devotion to another country: Cuba, the Philippines, South Korea, Egypt, Iraq. In a handful of cases, Muslims have been accused of ties to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups; these include Hassan Abujihaad, an American convert to Islam convicted last month of supplying information on Navy ships to a suspected terrorist financier.

Then there is the rash of Chinese cases, notably that of Mr. Mak. Prosecutors called him a classic “sleeper” agent who worked for years in technical jobs before delivering military information to China, including three encrypted computer disks of data. Still, such cases seem murkier than those with a money trail. Mr. Mak, as well as his friends and some Chinese-Americans, argue that his prosecution reflected anti-Chinese paranoia. They noted that the information he provided was unclassified and had been presented at international conferences.

The complications are evident, too, in an indictment for economic espionage unsealed in February in California against another American citizen of Chinese birth, Dongfan (Greg) Chung, a 72-year-old engineer for defense contractors. The indictment quotes a letter Mr. Chung was accused of sending to a technology institute in China in the late 1970s with an emotional offer of help.

“I would like to make an effort to contribute to the Four Modernizations of China,” he wrote.

According to the federal indictment, the Chinese were eager for his help. “We are all moved by your patriotism,” Professor Chen Lung Ku of the Harbin Institute of Technology wrote back in September 1979. “We’d like to join our hands together with the overseas compatriots in the endeavor for the construction of our great socialist motherland.”



-- Modified on 4/27/2008 12:20:00 PM