House bill seeks major overhaul of U.S. counterintelligence system

Multiple U.S. counterintelligence agencies charged with neutralizing foreign spy operations lack focus, and the system needs major reform, said the chairman of the House intelligence oversight panel.

Rep. Rick Crawford, Arkansas Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said hearings and oversight since 2017 have 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,” Mr. Crawford 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, and spying by Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba also will be targeted.

Last week, the committee passed 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 national counterintelligence center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The center would replace the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which 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.

The proposed center’s mission would be to coordinate, direct and conduct counterintelligence operations. The bill says a key emphasis 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 would be responsible for assessing damage caused by foreign spy cases. In the past, such assessments 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 from protecting against foreign spy threats to mandating “deter, disrupt, investigate, exploit” foreign intelligence operations.

The proposed program would use deception to neutralize foreign spies and counter foreign intelligence influence operations. It would also 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 as foreign spying threats increase.

“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 codify into law an interagency national counterintelligence task force made up of security officials from various government agencies. 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. However, senators have discussed the reform legislation, and he is hopeful it 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 domestic counterintelligence. The bureau has sustained a string of failures, including the recent conviction of Charles F. McGonigal, a former FBI counterintelligence chief in New York, on corruption charges, and the 2018 firing of FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, who ran the now-discredited investigation into Trump-Russia 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 was forced out after disclosures of domestic spying operations and what his critics said was overzealousness in pursuing Soviet moles in the agency.

After Angleton, many in the intelligence community called his brand of spy hunting “sick think,” leading 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 P. Hanssen, who also spied for Moscow.

In 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 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 the Chinese Ministry of State Security to unravel the agency’s spy network.

In 2023, CIA Director William J. Burns said the agency was making progress in rebuilding agent networks in China after the devastating losses.

Former CIA officer Charles “Sam” Faddis said the reform legislation would help U.S. intelligence agencies approach counterintelligence more vigorously.

“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.

Michelle Van Cleave, former national counterintelligence director, warned that Department of Government Efficiency efforts to cut waste and abuse pose counterintelligence risks and increase the danger of information theft 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 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.