CIA creating special cyberspying division

LANGLEY, Va. – After more than a decade of hunting terrorists, stopping plots and scrambling from crisis to crisis, the CIA has concluded it has been outflanked and outwitted on a critical front: digital tradecraft.

On Friday, the CIA acknowledged that it was time to move into the 21st century, saying it was creating a special division to conduct cyberespionage.

Along with crunching data to help identify and approach new spies to recruit, the CIA hopes to improve its ability to trace the “digital dust” that potential targets leave during activities such as using an ATM card, renting a car or moving through a city with a cellphone.

Rival spy agencies use those digital fingerprints to help track CIA operatives, and the agency wants to find techniques to help officers working undercover hide their tracks online.

“The digital world touches every aspect of our business,” CIA Director John Brennan told reporters at CIA headquarters. He acknowledged that the agency had been slow to adapt to the challenge.

The restructuring at the CIA comes after U.S. intelligence was caught off-guard by a series of high-profile digital attacks, including North Korea’s destruction of computer systems at Sony Pictures and an Iranian-launched cyberassault on Las Vegas Sands Corp., the world’s largest casino company, both last year.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, warned Congress last month that cyberattacks posed a greater long-term threat to national security than terrorism.

The Pentagon, FBI and Department of Homeland Security have stepped up cybersecurity operations, and the White House last month announced a new agency to help analyze and share digital threat information between government and business.

The new CIA division will be called the Directorate of Digital Innovation. It will have the same level of authority as the four long-standing directorates responsible for clandestine operations, analysis, spy gadgetry and logistical support.

“We must place our activities and operations in the digital domain at the very center of all our mission endeavors,” Brennan told the CIA workforce on Friday.

The new focus threatens to put the CIA in direct competition with the mammoth National Security Agency, which specializes in breaking codes, vacuuming up conversations and communications, and analyzing huge troves of digital transmissions. The Pentagon’s Cyber Command is responsible for launching digital warfare.

U.S. intelligence is both at the forefront, and a leading target, of hack attacks. The CIA long has barred people from bringing smartphones, portable hard drives and other digital devices into its headquarters to prevent people from copying or corrupting sensitive files.

Those fears were reinforced when Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who went to work for the NSA as a contractor, copied vast troves of highly classified files about NSA surveillance systems and gave them to journalists. Snowden now lives in exile in Russia.

Officials said the CIA would focus less on collecting so-called signals intelligence and more on how to use digital tools to help protect American operatives and persuade adversaries to spill their secrets.

“We don’t want to invest a lot of time, resources and energy” recruiting sources to steal secrets that are freely available online, Brennan told reporters.

As part of the reorganization, the agency also will create 10 regional and issue-focused “mission centers” that will attempt to break down the traditional walls between the directorates, especially the operators who steal secrets and recruit agents and the analysts who pore over data and brief policymakers and the president.