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
