James J. Smith, a former FBI agent who specialized in foreign counterintelligence at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Field Office, and Katrina M. Leung, a confidential informant he had recruited, were both arrested on Wednesday, 9 April, on espionage-related charges. Leung is alleged to have copied national security documents with the intent of providing them to the Chinese government, and Smith is alleged to have allowed the copying.
This case is likely to have implications for polygraph policy. Today's (11 April 2003)
New York Times features an article by Eric Lichtblau titled,
"F.B.I. Never Gave Agent in Spy Case a Polygraph." Here's an excerpt:
Quote:A former F.B.I. agent arrested on Wednesday in an espionage case had not been given a polygraph test in his nearly 30 years with the bureau, and lax oversight of his relationship with an informer now accused of being a Chinese double-agent appears to have violated numerous policies, bureau officials said today.
The officials added that the informer, Katrina Leung, a Los Angeles political fund-raiser who was paid $1.7 million by the F.B.I. for information on her native China over the last two decades, had not been asked to take a polygraph test since the 1980's.
Ms. Leung and the former agent, James J. Smith, were arrested at their homes in Los Angeles. Mr. Smith, was charged with gross negligence in his handling of national defense documents. Ms. Leung, who officials said was Mr. Smith's longtime lover, was charged with the unauthorized copying of national defense information with the intent to injure the United States or benefit a foreign nation, in this case, China.
Historically, the F.B.I. has resisted the use of polygraph or lie detector tests for its employees, in part because many agents have viewed the procedure as a sign of distrust. In the mid-1990's, the bureau began broadening its use of polygraph tests for employees with access to secret intelligence after the espionage arrest of a C.I.A. official, Aldrich Ames, and it significantly increased their use again after the 2001 arrest of an F.B.I agent, Robert P. Hanssen, on charges of spying for Moscow.
An F.B.I. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that because polygraph tests were not routinely used in the 1980's and 1990's, it appeared that Mr. Smith was never asked to take one, while Ms. Leung had not taken one for many years.
"We just didn't really do it much back then," the official said. "It wasn't a focus."
F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller has requested internal reviews to determine what went wrong.
Officials outside the F.B.I. questioned whether more aggressive use of polygraph tests by the bureau might have raised questions much earlier about whether Mr. Smith and Ms. Leung were having an affair and whether she was improperly gaining access to secret intelligence that could do damage to American national security interests in the hands of the Chinese.
See also
"Ex-FBI Agent Resigns Post at Nuclear Weapons Lab: Officials Examine Link to Spy Case" by Dan Eggen and Susan Schmidt in today's
Washington Post. The following are two court documents filed in connection with the Smith-Leung case that have been made available as PDF files on FindLaw.com:
If Leung was indeed working as a double agent for the Chinese government as alleged, then the question arises as to when she began working for Beijing? The FBI may have been compromised by a double agent who beat the polygraph.
Another recent case of significance to FBI polygraph policy involves the
credible allegations made by Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI linguist who alleged that her colleague, Can Dickerson, attempted to recruit her to work for a Turkish organization that the FBI was monitoring and attempted to thwart the FBI's investigation of that organization. Both Edmonds and Dickerson reportedly passed polygraph "tests." Instead of seriously investigating Edmonds' charges, the FBI retaliated against her.
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Ex-FBI Agent and Informant Accused in Spy Case (Read 26687 times)
