March 12, 2006: Chicago Tribune Uses Internet to Discover Identities of Covert CIA Officials

The Chicago Tribune uses commercial, Internet-based data search facilities to discover the names and whereabouts of 2,653 CIA officials, many of them covert. It also discovers some 50 internal agency telephone numbers, and the locations of two dozen secret CIA facilities around the US. The CIA is still grappling with the problem of Internet data search facilities risking the covert status of its employees; Director Porter Goss is said to be “horrified” at the prospect of hundreds of his agency’s officials being exposed via the Internet. “Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age,” says CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck. “There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work.” Dyck refuses to give details of the remedies, “since we don’t want the bad guys to know what we’re fixing.” The Tribune declines to publish any personal information on the CIA employees it has unearthed, and is uncertain which of the 2,653 officials it located are actually covert agents. Most of the secret facilities the Tribune found are in northern Virginia, but some are in Chicago, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Washington State. A senior official says of the data searches, “I don’t know whether al-Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could.” The Tribune’s data search began with Camp Peary, the Virginia training facility known as “The Farm,” and only recently acknowledged by the agency. [Chicago Tribune, 3/12/2006]