Failures of intelligence, the leaking of our secrets

ENEMIES: HOW AMERICA’S FOES STEAL OUR VITAL SECRETS — AND HOW WE LET IT HAPPEN

By Bill Gertz

Crown, $26.95, 304 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY JOSEPH C. GOULDEN

In a sense, Bill Gertz is sui generis among Washington reporters who write about national security affairs. For one thing, he does not rely upon for-background-only whispers from anonymous sources. Most of what he writes, as Washington Times readers have come to appreciate, is supported by documentary proof. Further, Mr. Gertz eschews becoming buddy-buddy with his sources on the social circuit in Georgetown and elsewhere. Instead, he is more apt to kick the stuffing out of persons about whom he writes.

Mr. Gertz also has the knack of mustering cold, driving rage about the situations he covers — a rage that fortunately he saves for books such as “Enemies,” rather than venting in his objective newspaper reporting. His disgust is well summarized in the subtitle. And even someone who is reflexively friendly towards intelligence and law enforcement agencies must feel appalled at Mr. Gertz’s account of sweeping incompetence by the men and women who are paid good salaries to protect important secrets.

(A disclaimer: Although I have done book reviews for The Times for more than a decade, to my knowledge I have never laid eyes on Mr. Gertz or spoken to him.)

One of the more disgusting stories, among many, Mr. Gertz tells is the first full account of two agents in the FBI’s San Francisco field office who had “illicit, long-term sexual affairs” with a Chinese Communist agent, Katrina Leung. Code-named “Parlor Maid,” she also worked for the bureau as a supposed double agent.

One of her “lovers” (in context, perhaps a bad choice of words) was William Cleveland, a supervisory agent who ran FBI counterintelligence on the West Coast. The pattern lasted for years: Mr. Cleveland would first debrief Parlor Maid, then take her to bed, at hotels here and there. And Mr. Cleveland suspected, accurately, that the agent directly controlling her, J. J. Smith, also enjoyed her sexual favors.

So Mr. Cleveland had reason to be shocked when he read an intercept by the National Security Agency that clearly fingered Parlor Maid as a communist agent. He confronted her, she confessed — yet he continued to run her as an FBI informer (with sex on the side) because he felt he could control her.

He even took her to Quantico, Va., and introduced her at an FBI conference as a prized agent. As Mr. Gertz maintains, one reason he kept her around — and in her bed from time to time — was that he was terrified that the sexual relationship would be exposed. The bureau, understandably, has a firm rule against agents becoming sexually involved with informants.

One apparent consequence of her spying, as Mr. Gertz notes, is that NSA electronic operations against China “began drying up at an alarming rate” — at least nine of them going completely silent. She gave her Chinese handlers a raft of other sensitive information as well.

Mr. Gertz ably details the intricate counterintelligence work that led to exposure of the case — but even more damning is his description of how senior officials fell over themselves in containing a scandal that have tarnished the bureau. “Cleveland escaped any penalty whatsoever,” Mr. Gertz writes. Smith, who continued having sex with Leung “until their arrests in 2003,” got away with a “slap of the wrist.”

To me, the most disgusting page in the entire book is in the appendix, in which Mr. Gertz reprints an e-mail that Smith sent to friends. There are whining remarks about the mean investigators and prosecutors handling his case.

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