State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies

State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies is now available in hardcover and kindle book on Amazon.com! To view on Amazon please click HERE.

Debriefs - Robert Booth on underestimating Cuba's spies by Spyscape

 

SpyCraft 101 Podcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxLggUeVABo

The Off The X Podcast hosted by Cody Perron (Former Special Agent (DSS), U.S. Marine)

CNN Declassified One Hour Episode!

Please tune into CNN Declassified on Sunday, October 27th at 9 PM. ET/PT as I will be the lead narrator along with two FBI agents for one hour! 

For more information please visit the CNN Declassified press room for up to date information on the show times! 

https://cnncreativemarketing.com/project/declassified/

Bush School discussion

Former “spy hunter” Robert Booth discusses the threat espionage poses to our national security from the State Department’s perspective, along with economic versus military and diplomatic espionage.

 - The Bush School.

Inside the Mind of a Spy Hunter by Karen

https://counterespionage-news.com/2019/03/25/inside-the-mind-of-a-spy-hunter/ 

The Busch School Flyer

The Grapevine

Click the picture to enlarge! 

Target USA Podcast By WTOP!!

Come visit the Podcastone website to hear episode 78: US Diplomats sickened, Forced to leave Cuba after invisible attacker stuck featuring Robert Booth!

Photo from Podcastone

https://www.podcastone.com/episode/Target-USA----Episode-78:-US-diplomats-sickened;-forced-to-leave-Cuba-after-invisible-attacker-struck

CNN How Russian spies bugged the US State Department

Please stop by to see the article by CNN on How Russian spies bugged the US State Department featuring Robert Booth!

Photos: Snapshots from a US counterintelligence officer

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/us/spyhunter-russia-bug-us-state-department-declassified/index.html

(TIME CHANGE) CNN Declassified

Please be advised there has been a time change to the event! As of August 17, 2017 this even is no longer on the 19th at 9 pm ET/PT. 

Please tune into CNN Declassified on Saturday, September 16th at 8:45 pm. ET/PT as I will be the lead narrator along with a FBI and NSA Agent! 

For more information please visit the CNN Declassified press room for up to date information! http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/tag/declassified/ 

Book review by John D. Stempel

Volume 32, 2017 - Issue 7: The Teaching of Intelligence

Stempel, J. D. (2017). State department counterintelligence: leaks, spies, and lies. Intelligence and National Security, 32(7), 1043. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.1357262

State department counterintelligence: leaks, spies, and lies, by Robert David Booth,

Dallas, TX, Brown Books, 2014, 386 pp., $25.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-61254-215-7

Robert Booth served both in Washington DC and abroad as a Special Agent for the US State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (BDS) for 28 years, from 1974 until 2002.1 The book is an excellent, minutely detailed presentation of several cases he was centrally involved in, as well as an exhaustive look ‘inside the castle’ of State Department security itself. Booth vividly describes the intense and detailed police work needed to unmask those working for foreign governments. The details of bureaucratic stupidity, problems of finding evidence and trailing leads may make slow reading for some readers, but will interest anyone who likes to explore ‘whodunit’ from the position of the security officer. In two of the cases, he works through the problems of gathering evidence without alerting potential targets, and in another, he deftly arranges for his target to produce. 

    In addition to sniffing out an American State Department officer, who was suborned by a Cuban

by sorting through various databases,2 Booth describes the seduction of a senior State Department

officer (Donald William Keyser, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific

Affairs) by a Taiwanese femme fatale called Isabelle Cheng (81), and discussions of the various ways

nets have to be cast. The third case Booth examines, Operation Sacred Ibis, involved an investigation of

how the KGB managed to secretly install a high-quality transmitter in a State Department room (279).

Booth reveals how the transmitter was uncovered, and reveals some unusual post-Cold War security

measures. In each of his case studies, the author reveals breakdowns in the State Department’s pro-

cedures: such as the lack of investigation of wives’ backgrounds. In the process, he acknowledges that

leaks are common in the era of WikiLeaks disclosures, and walks us through several pages of examples

of interrogations and acquiring evidence from wildly improbable places. In the process, we discover

some investigations take months or years, leaving the government open to the spy, sometimes during

critical periods. Much of what he talks about is normal in ordinary crime solving, but the foreign policy

twists make it doubly interesting.

    This book is a must-read for anyone contemplated in a career in foreign affairs, or even public service

generally. In Chapter 13, Booth describes breakdowns which allowed Soviet penetration of the State

Department because of very senior officials (nicknamed the ‘Black Dragons’) whose administrative

decisions open the doors to clandestine intrusion, including some by Soviet officials who had regular

diplomatic credentials to get into the State Department building, but sneaked into otherwise forbidden

areas. Robert Booth may not be universally welcomed into the building from which he retired, but he

has given both insiders and outsiders a revealing and fascinating look at diplomatic security.

Notes

1. When serving as a Special Agent with the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Booth’s overseas assignments included Beijing, Geneva, Tokyo, Haiti, and Paris. He was Deputy Director, Office of Counterintelligence between 1996 and 2002 and acted as consultant to the Office of Counterintelligence from 2003 until 2012. The forerunner of the BDS was the Secret Intelligence Bureau (SIB), created in 1916.

2. State Department officer Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, became Cuban moles. Kendall is now serving

life without parole whilst his wife received an 81-month sentence.

John D. Stempel

School of Diplomacy and Intational Commerce, University of Kentucky Patterson, Lexington, KY, USA

stempeljd@uky.edu

© 2017 John D. Stempel

https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.1357262

Leaks, Spies and Lies with Robert Booth Live!!

Leaks, Spies and Lies with Robert Booth

Rendezvous Info

Thursday, November 13, 2014 6:30 pm 

Tickets: $10  
Members of the Inner Circle: $8
For more information please visit: The Spy Museum Website

Briefing

"What's the worst sin at the bottom of Dante's inferno? Treachery...one who betrays a trust."—a State Department colleague of Cuban spy Kendall Myers

Cuban spies who pass secrets via shopping cart in a grocery store, a Taiwanese honey trap in DC, a Russian bugging device inside the State Department, classified information popping up in the media—scenes from a spy movie? No, these are just highlights from the most intriguing investigations conducted by retired State Department Special Agent Robert Booth and recounted in his new book State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies and Lies.  Booth reveals the inside story of Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers who spied for Cuba for nearly 30 years and Donald Keyser who lied about his personal relationship with a female Taiwanese intelligence officer with whom he shared State Department information while serving as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. He’ll tell how Washington Post and Wall Street Journal articles concerning leaked State Department telegrams impacted diplomatic negotiations and how the Russian Intelligence Service, the SVR, installed a bug inside a conference room in the State Department.  Booth personally managed or assisted in all these investigations, and he will offer guests insight into the courtroom proceedings for the Myers and Keyser prosecutions including background on court room machinations, prosecution tactics, and how the "plea bargains" were reached.

Book Presentation at the International Spy Museum

 

State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies with Robert Booth.

Website: www.spymuseum.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/IntlSpyMuseum
Twitter: http://twitter.com/IntlSpyMuseum

Book review by Hayden B. Peake

Intelligence Analysis and Reporting

Primer on Intelligence Studies

http://spyinggame.me/

Date Posted:      September 25, 2015

Compiled and Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake.[1]

The State Department formed the Secret Intelligence Bureau (SIB) in 1916 to deal with cases of pass-port fraud linked to espionage. The SIB has since gone through several reorganizations and is today called the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (BDS). Retired special agent Robert Booth spent 28 years with the BDS working cases overseas and domestically. State Department Counterintelligence reviews his career and the BDS history with emphasis on three of the major cases with which he was involved.

The first case he discusses concerns retired State Department officer Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, whose affection for Fidel Castro and Cuba led them to become Cuban moles. Kendall is now serving life without parole in a supermax facility; Gwendolyn received an 81-month sentence. Booth tells how he was brought out of retirement as a consultant to BDS in 2003 and ended, up working the case with the FBI. It is a thorough treatment, hiding none of the frustrations endured or tradecraft complexities.

The Taiwanese Femme Fatale, or the case of Donald William Keyser, is the second case Booth discusses. Keyser was principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs and became involved with Isabelle Cheng; “a young, female, Taiwanese clandestine intelligence officer.” (p. 81) He also kept top secret CIA documents at home. (p. 157) Keyser served a short term in prison, but did not lose his pension; Isabelle went on to pursue her doctorate in England. How BDS solved the case and why Keyser was treated so leniently by the judge makes interesting reading.

Operation Sacred Ibis, the third case Booth examines, is still in some ways unsolved. The KGB planted a “high quality transmitter in a seventh floor conference room” (p. 279) in the State Department. Booth reveals how it was discovered and describes some strange post-Cold War security procedures regarding unescorted foreign diplomatic access that may have contributed to its installation. But if it is known just how the SVR did it, Booth isn’t saying. The one benefit was that they found the device—an actuator—that caused the transmitter to function. The details of this device are interesting.

Booth also includes a section on leak cases that reveals how they are treated. It is rather depressing, not because they weren’t all solved) but because they occur so often and some leakers are not disciplined even when caught. Booth speculates that those may have been “authorized.” (p. 250)

State Department Counterintelligence is an interesting and worthwhile account of a relatively unknown organization that shows why it exists) and where it fits in the Intelligence Community.

[1] Hayden Peake, “Intelligence Officer Bookshelf,” The Intelligencer: Journal of U. S. Intelligence Stuidies (21, 2, Spring/Summer 2015, p. 127 )Hayden Peake is the Curator of the CIA’s Historical Intelligence Collection. He has served in the Directorate of Science and Technology and the Directorate of Operations. Most of his reviews cited have appeared in recent unclassified editions of ClA’s Studies in Intelligence. These and many other reviews and articles may be found online at http://www.cia.gov