REVIEWED BY JOSEPH C. GOULDEN
In a sense, Bill Gertz is sui generis among Washington reporters who write about national security affairs. For one thing, he does not rely upon for-background-only whispers from anonymous sources. Most of what he writes, as Washington Times readers have come to appreciate, is supported by documentary proof. Further, Mr. Gertz eschews becoming buddy-buddy with his sources on the social circuit in Georgetown and elsewhere. Instead, he is more apt to kick the stuffing out of persons about whom he writes.
Mr. Gertz also has the knack of mustering cold, driving rage about the situations he covers -- a rage that fortunately he saves for books such as "Enemies," rather than venting in his objective newspaper reporting. His disgust is well summarized in the subtitle. And even someone who is reflexively friendly towards intelligence and law enforcement agencies must feel appalled at Mr. Gertz's account of sweeping incompetence by the men and women who are paid good salaries to protect important secrets.
(A disclaimer: Although I have done book reviews for The Times for more than a decade, to my knowledge I have never laid eyes on Mr. Gertz or spoken to him.)
One of the more disgusting stories, among many, Mr. Gertz tells is the first full account of two agents in the FBI's San Francisco field office who had "illicit, long-term sexual affairs" with a Chinese Communist agent, Katrina Leung. Code-named "Parlor Maid," she also worked for the bureau as a supposed double agent.
One of her "lovers" (in context, perhaps a bad choice of words) was William Cleveland, a supervisory agent who ran FBI counterintelligence on the West Coast. The pattern lasted for years: Mr. Cleveland would first debrief Parlor Maid, then take her to bed, at hotels here and there. And Mr. Cleveland suspected, accurately, that the agent directly controlling her, J. J. Smith, also enjoyed her sexual favors.
So Mr. Cleveland had reason to be shocked when he read an intercept by the National Security Agency that clearly fingered Parlor Maid as a communist agent. He confronted her, she confessed -- yet he continued to run her as an FBI informer (with sex on the side) because he felt he could control her.
He even took her to Quantico, Va., and introduced her at an FBI conference as a prized agent. As Mr. Gertz maintains, one reason he kept her around -- and in her bed from time to time -- was that he was terrified that the sexual relationship would be exposed. The bureau, understandably, has a firm rule against agents becoming sexually involved with informants.
One apparent consequence of her spying, as Mr. Gertz notes, is that NSA electronic operations against China "began drying up at an alarming rate" -- at least nine of them going completely silent. She gave her Chinese handlers a raft of other sensitive information as well.
Mr. Gertz ably details the intricate counterintelligence work that led to exposure of the case -- but even more damning is his description of how senior officials fell over themselves in containing a scandal that have tarnished the bureau. "Cleveland escaped any penalty whatsoever," Mr. Gertz writes. Smith, who continued having sex with Leung "until their arrests in 2003," got away with a "slap of the wrist."
To me, the most disgusting page in the entire book is in the appendix, in which Mr. Gertz reprints an e-mail that Smith sent to friends. There are whining remarks about the mean investigators and prosecutors handling his case.
But incredibly, Smith devotes many words to worries about losing his FBI pension and medical benefits, valued at $80,000 annually. As part of his plea deal, he was permitted to walk away with the pension. (Our tax dollars at work? Should we also reimburse hotel bills for his sexual trysts?) And the case against Leung was dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct.
Mr. Gertz describes similar bungling in case after case. The problems are certainly not unknown to anyone who follows national security matters. As Mr. Gertz writes in his concluding chapter, these "problems have been identified in tens of special commissions and reports, most following damaging spy cases or intelligence failures." He further maintains, accurately, that "the fifteen US government agencies responsible for intelligence activities have been severely restricted in trying to stop the danger posed by foreign spies and terrorists."
I've read many of these "commission reports;" they now gather dust in my basement, just as they do all over town. Yet memory says that never in those thousands of dry pages does one find the suggestion: "Punish the erring party, and in a way that hurts, and more importantly, SENDS A MESSAGE to others."
Permit a personal example from my short stint with the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps, at such a low level that I was not issued even a cloak, much less a dagger.
In August 1956, an evening or so before entering the so-called "special agent sequence" at the Army Intelligence School, a chum and I had beers with a fellow who had graduated with the preceding class. Over the hubbub of voices at the Holabird Inn, he offered a warning: "Sometime during your course, things are going to be arranged so that someone screws up with a security violation. And he is going to pay." He would not tell us more.
Segue forward several weeks. Our class spent study evenings in a file room where we drew upon papers classified CONFIDENTIAL. This was low-grade material, to be sure, but we had to sign for it, and make sure it got back in place.
One morning an orderly appeared at our first class and handed a note to the instructor, who said, "Private ____, go with this man. Take your books and other things with you." (I remember his name; why use it after 50 years?) We briefly wondered what was going on. The fellow did not return to class, nor was he in the barracks that evening. His bunk had been stripped.
The next morning, as we stood in formation, a downcast ____ walked out of the orderly room, wearing fatigues, his duffel bag over his shoulder. A pickup drove into the company street, and the sergeant's uplifted thumb ordered ____ into the back.He rode away in a cold rain, and he did not look happy.
A sad sight, to see a man cashiered back into infantry, rather than continuing in what the military considered to be a rather cushy assignment. But no doubt about it: The example taught all of us a lesson.
But to what avail is a private punished, when a director of central intelligence, one John Deutch, puts TOP SECRET material on a laptop computer which he uses at home -- and escapes with a tut-tut reprimand? Until meaningful punishments are meted to persons who commit -- or tolerate -- security breaches, Mr. Gertz is going to have material for a continuing series of books such as "Enemies." Not a pleasant read, to be sure, but a valuable one.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
PARLOR MAID
She's been a Communist since the day she was born. Her bona fides are impeccable. I gradually converted her—she's now a rock-ribbed Republican.
—FBI agent James J. Smith, introducing Chinese triple agent Katrina Leung to FBI China hands in 1993
On July 5, 2000, a brand-new, $120 million Boeing 767 jetliner flew from the Boeing corporation's airfield in Everett, Washington, to San Antonio International Airport. The Chinese military had purchased the jetliner for the leader of Communist China, Jiang Zemin. China Aviation Supplies Import and Export Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist state, purchased the aircraft for China United Airlines, which has been identified in declassified U.S. intelligence reports as a commercial entity operated by the People's Liberation Army. Once in San Antonio, the aircraft underwent a $15 million customization to outfit the plane with all the luxuries of a Middle Eastern sheik, including a special vibrating bed to help Jiang sleep.
On August 10, 2000, the modification work complete, the Boeing took off for Beijing's military airfield. Within weeks, Chinese security officials had found some twenty-seven sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices in the aircraft.
How had the bugs gotten there, when the entire customization had been under the strictest, twenty-four-hour supervision by some twenty-five Chinese military intelligence officials? It turned out that clandestine operatives from the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) had covertly placed the devices in the plane in hopes of gathering intelligence from Jiang prior to a future summit meeting. (To this day, the details of the bugging remain secret.)
For the United States, there was a more pressing question: How had the Chinese uncovered the bugs so quickly? U.S. counterintelligence launched an investigation to find out. That probe led ultimately to the Los Angeles–based FBI counterspy James J. "J. J." Smith and his prized agent, Los Angeles businesswoman Katrina Leung—code name "Parlor Maid." A former FBI official, William Cleveland, would come under scrutiny as well.
The investigation turned up a revelation that would prove highly embarrassing to the FBI: Both of these officials, two of the Bureau's most senior counterintelligence officers, had had illicit, long-term sexual relationships with Leung. Contrary to the bed-hopping image of spies popularized in James Bond films, having intimate relations with a paid FBI informant violates one of the cardinal principles of the spy business, not to mention Bureau rules.
But to focus only on the soap opera element of the Katrina Leung story is to characterize the episode as something only vaguely resembling a spy case. And a spy case it is, without a doubt—a terribly damaging one at that.
The real story of Parlor Maid has never been told. The main reason the full account has not emerged is that the FBI and federal prosecutors mishandled the investigation from the beginning.
A small group of FBI officials did their best to keep the inside story from coming out. Rather than rage against the flagrant counterintelligence failures demonstrated in the Leung case, these officials focused on protecting the FBI's already-battered reputation from further damage. Later, prosecutors made poor tactical decisions that undermined the court case against Leung almost before it could begin.
Ultimately, prosecutors had to settle for a plea deal with Leung. The deal, reached on December 16, 2005, spared Leung from serving jail time or having to admit anything about passing illegally copied classified information to Communist China.
After the plea deal was finalized, Leung's lawyers—having safely escaped a trial that would have aired the overwhelming evidence of Leung's espionage—issued a statement professing that their client wasn't a spy and suggesting that she would have been glad to tell her story in court. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, Thom Mrozek, responded, "It's fair to say the government, by virtue of how this case moved along, was never able to tell its side of the story either."
Mrozek's statement was accurate, but it only obliquely hinted at the reasons the case "moved along" as it did and at the powerful evidence that Katrina Leung was indeed a spy for Communist China.
The real story of Parlor Maid will be told here for the first time. The Leung affair, like many cases from the dark world of intelligence and counterintelligence, is rife with lies and betrayals, half-truths and truths, myth and reality converging and diverging. But this account, based on court papers and on interviews with numerous intelligence and law-enforcement officials who knew the case firsthand, reveals the inside story of what really happened with Katrina Leung, Communist China, and the FBI.
Parlor Maid is the story of a Chinese spy who got away. And not just any spy. U.S intelligence officials close to the case insist that regardless of the outcome of the prosecution, the Katrina Leung case represents one of the worst spy cases in American history—and one of the worst U.S intelligence failures, as well. The evidence buried as a result of the FBI's mismanagement and the prosecution's failures bears this conclusion out.
Further confirmation came in May 2006, when Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn A. Fine issued his report on the Leung case. Fine's highly critical report identified scores of FBI failures. The first among them was the fact that the FBI ignored intelligence from an informant who said a senior FBI agent was being "run" by Chinese intelligence in Los Angeles. The spy running the agent was Katrina Leung, and the agent was J. J. Smith. "The FBI's failure to fully investigate Leung early on," the report stated, "was a lost opportunity to obtain information concerning the PRC's attempts to acquire technology and her contacts with persons of investigative interest to the FBI." The inspector general also made it clear that Leung was in fact a spy for China, not the FBI. The report stated clearly that Leung "provided classified U.S. government information to the PRC without FBI authorization." It revealed that at every step of the way in Leung's career as an FBI informant, for which she was paid $1.7 million, there were glaring signs that she was not who she claimed to be.
The extensive record makes it clear that the People's Republic of China—an emerging world power that poses a direct threat to the United States—penetrated the FBI. For more than two decades Communist China ran a spy, Katrina Leung, who stole valuable secrets from the U.S. government and intelligence community. More than that, this penetration agent, who had more than 2,100 contacts with Chinese officials over the course of twenty years, helped the Beijing regime exert enormous influence in the United States.
As revealed by the inspector general's report, by many declassified intelligence reports, by FBI documents, and by other documents submitted in court, Leung compromised all the FBI's foreign counterintelligence investigations on China. The FBI already struggled at aggressive counterintelligence, the vital technique that represents the best way to discover our adversaries' true intentions and, if necessary, to thwart dangerous plans before they are executed. The Chinese agent did incalculable harm by ruining the few successful counterintelligence operations that the United States had in place.
Adding to the damage, Leung's frequent reports on China apparently contained strategic disinformation about Beijing's plans and intentions. For many years these reports, intelligence officials told me, reached the highest levels of the U.S. government—including the Oval Office. The Chinese government could tailor its deceptive information to conform with U.S. beliefs and expectations because it had access to the deepest secrets from within the U.S. government and intelligence community. One legal document in the court case quotes U.S. government officials as stating that given the magnitude of the compromises, the FBI "must now re-assess all of its actions and intelligence analyses based on [Leung's] reporting."
Parlor Maid is a textbook case of how Communist China uses its intelligence services and agents not simply to gather intelligence but also to run aggressive counterintelligence operations, to manage its adversaries' perceptions of the emerging Chinese superpower, and to conduct disinformation operations against the United States. The Katrina Leung case provides a harrowing reminder that Communist China has made the United States its number-one target. But largely because of the effectiveness of China's penetration and disinformation campaigns, we have reached the point where top U.S. government officials dismiss a nuclear-armed Communist dictatorship in Beijing as "not a threat" to the United States.
And at the end of the day, Parlor Maid is a story of criminal negligence and cover-up on the part of the FBI. The truth must be revealed.
Copyright © 2006 by Bill Gertz
http://www.ereader.com/product/book/excerpt/22991?book=Enemies:_How_Americas_Foes_Steal_Our_Vital_Secrets--and_How_We_Let_It_Happen
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James J. Smith Case
Katrina Leung Case
CODENAME: Parlor Maid
JAMES J. SMITH, 59 years old:
-aka "JJ"
-Retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent
-Worked for the FBI from October 1970-November 2000; specialized in Chinese counterintelligence matters
-Supervisor of FBI's LA Field Office's FCI China squad
-Was involved in the investigation into whether China tried to funnel money into the 1996 US elections in a bid to gain influence
-Resides in Westlake Village, CA; married, one son
-Arrested Wednesday, 9 April 2003
-Charged with gross negligence in allowing Leung access to classified material
KATRINA LEUNG, 49 years old:
-aka Man Ying Chan, Wen Ying Chen, LUO Zhongshan
-Southern California Republican political activist
-One of the Directors of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council
-Resides in San Marino, CA; married, one son
-FBI asset recruited by Smith in the early 1980s
-Paid $1.7M as asset for services and expenses
-Allegedly covertly working for Chinese intelligence service MSS, alias "Luo"
-Arrested Wednesday, 9 April 2003
-Charged with illegally obtaining secret documents to the advantage of a foreign power
Quotes
"James Smith was once a special agent, sworn to uphold the rule of law and the high ethical standards of the FBI. According to today's charges, former Agent Smith not only betrayed the trust the FBI placed in him, he betrayed the American people he was sworn to protect."--FBI Director Robert Mueller
"This is as shocking as if someone you know had been shot and killed."--an FBI agent at the Los Angeles field office
"They are just the nicest people. I find it really hard to believe. They must have something wrong. This is a 'Leave it to Beaver' neighborhood. They were like the Cleavers."--Lisa Otis-Kisor, a Westlake Village, California neighbor of James Smith, his wife and son
"It would be inappropriate for the FBI to suggest that they were not aware of the potential risks and problems of using Ms. Leung as an asset, particularly since 1991. For them to lay it at my client's doorstep and say he was the only one who knew she was a potential problem is flat-out wrong."--Smith's Attorney Brian Sun
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Accused double agent Katrina Leung granted bail
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http://cicentre.com/Documents/DOC_Smith_James_J_Case.htm
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September 19, 2006, 5:51 a.m.
Enemies Within
Bill Gertz on our grave intel gaps.
An NRO Q&A
Bill Gertz is long-time defense and national-security reporter for the Washington Times. Today he is out with a new book,
Enemies: How America’s Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets—and How We Let It Happen, about which he took some questions from NRO editor Kathryn Lopez.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Most of us think Jack Bauer nowadays when we think of counterintelligence. Is there anything real about him?
Bill Gertz: Counterintelligence is the function of identifying and stopping foreign spies and terrorists. The fictional character Jack Bauer in TV’s “24” is a good example of the kind of counterterrorism specialist who often applies counterintelligence techniques to the problem of terrorism, something I advocate in Enemies, that needs to be done. Every terrorist attack is preceded by an intelligence operation and our counterterrorism agents need to get into that intelligence stream in order to stop the attacks before they take place.
Lopez: Briefly, who is Leandro Aragoncillo and why is he important?
Gertz: Leandro Aragoncillo was a spy for the Philippines who infiltrated the White House offices of Vice President Al Gore and Vice President Dick Cheney. He went on to get a job as an analyst at an FBI analytical unit in New Jersey and was caught by immigration agents after he tried to use his official status as an FBI employee to help one of his confederates in a spy ring that supplied U.S. secrets to Philippines opposition politicians.
The case showed that despite the extremely damaging spy case of FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, who spied for Russia, the FBI has not done enough to screen employees and limit their computer access to secrets.
Lopez: “Today, nearly 140 nations and some 35 known and suspected terrorist groups target the United States through espionage, according to intelligence officials,” you write. Is that exceptionally high for the world’s superpower?
Gertz: We are the main target because enemies of the United States want to obtain our most important secrets, which range from our military’s unique warfighting techniques, to advanced weaponry, to our economic and high-technology secrets. They also seek to influence our government and force it to adopt policies that are contrary to U.S. national interests, such as the unprecedented Chinese-influence operations that have resulted in naive and counterproductive policies toward China that seek to portray a nuclear armed Communist dictatorship as a non-threatening power. Terrorists also have targeted our military and intelligence services, seeking to learn valuable information that could be used to conduct terrorist attacks against us.
Unfortunately, we know very little about these enemies’ intelligence-gathering capabilities and unless we rapidly build-up our counterintelligence agencies, we are vulnerable to devastating losses.
Lopez: How significant a threat is China to our national security? Are we taking it seriously enough?
Gertz: China today represents the most serious long-term threat to our national security. Beijing is rapidly building up its military forces with one aim: To prepare to win a future military conflict against the United States. China’s intelligence services, both its Ministry of State Security (civilian) and Second Department of the People’s Liberation Army, known as 2 PLA, are the leading edge of a secret war by China against the United States. They are following the dictum of ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who said he acme of skill is defeating your enemy without firing a shot. Unfortunately, China, through intelligence operations and related influence operations have fooled major portions of the U.S. government, from the White House National Security Council to the higher levels of the military services into believing that China poses not threat to the United States.
The civilian part of the Pentagon alone among U.S. government agencies is taking the threat from China seriously and has begun quietly implementing a so-called “hedge strategy” that involves a build up of military forces in the Pacific and Asia that will better position the United States to deal with a China that in the future drops the facade of friendliness and openly declares its hostility. Our intelligence and security agencies remain woefully unprepared to deal with China’s intelligence assault, as I reveal in Enemies in the case of Katrina Leung, China’s mole in the FBI in Los Angeles, and in the case of Tai and Chi Mak, two brothers who passed valuable defense technology that has helped China’s military.
The chapter on the spies who got away reveals that either gross negligence or a Chinese spy in the highest levels of government, or both, can explain why so many recent Chinese spy cases were mishandled.
Lopez: You say that the best way to deal with North Korea is counterintelligence. Does that mean we’re doomed?
Gertz: No. The current U.S. policy toward North Korea has been announced as “diplomacy,” albeit a feckless effort to try and convince a radical Communist regime in Pyongyang to give up its nuclear-arms program. The diplomatic policy is doomed to failure but that does not mean that the only other option is to begin flying Tomahawks and dropping JDAMs on North Korea. The most effective middle ground between feckless diplomacy and heavy-handed military attacks is an effective, targeted program of regime change. The key to reaching this goal is to organize a major counterintelligence program that will target North Korean intelligence and government officials for recruitment. A targeted campaign would have the effect of creating opponents of the current regime within the power structure and to use those recruited agents to bring down the peaceful fall of the Pyongyang government and its replacement with a democratic regime. It will not be easy but it is the best option available.
Lopez: You have an entire chapter on Cuba — can Cuba really be a big threat (to more than the Cuban people), all things considered?
Gertz: My chapter on Cuba’s mole in the Pentagon is a detailed look at the little-known spy case of Ana Montes, one of the most senior intelligence analysts in the U.S. government who provided vast amounts of classified information to Cuba, whose government in turn then sold or traded those secrets to Russia and China. Montes was an ideological spy for Cuba who worked within the Defense Intelligence Agency and ultimately became the most important U.S. intelligence analyst in the entire government. She spied at first to oppose U.S. policy that supported the anti-Communist contra rebels in Nicaragua because Montes supported the Communist Sandinistas. She later switched her allegiance to Cuba after the Sandinistas were ousted in elections.
Cuba remains a threat because it is spreading its anti-Americanism throughout the region and is now deeply involved in backing the leftist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which could cause tremendous harm to U.S. national security by virtue of its oil exports to the United States. Chavez has invited Cuban intelligence and security police into the country in large numbers.
Lopez: How much of a problem for intelligence has media disclosures on that NSA surveillance program and other top-secret operations been?
Gertz: Electronic intelligence by its nature has a limited shelf life as targets are constantly identifying NSA electronic surveillance and shutting it down. It is a constant challenge for NSA to find new links for eavesdropping and certainly media disclosures have limited NSA’s ability to gather intelligence. That said, foreign governments and terrorists organizations know very well that all electronic signals they use to communicate are subject to monitoring so that it would be overstating the case to say we have been crippled by media disclosures. The problem for U.S. intelligence today is an over reliance on electronic eavesdropping and photographic intelligence, and a dramatic lack of human intelligence-gathering. As one intelligence official put it: “The problem with the CIA can be summed up in two words: “No spies.” Our intelligence agencies currently lack any inside sources in the places where we need them most: North Korea, China, Iran, Syria and other places. Thus the government has been forced to rely too much on its formidable electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
Lopez: What makes you so sure you have the full counterintelligence picture?
Gertz: I have interviewed scores of U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence officials and I have been writing and reporting on these issues for over 20 years. I feel very confident that the portrait I paint of a broken counterintelligence system is accurate and full. But the nature of intelligence is that it is secret and there is probably much more that we don’t know about. Just since the publication of Enemies I was able to learn about another spy for China inside the U.S. military who managed to get away without prosecution.
Lopez: What practical things can Congress do? Would they?
Gertz: Unfortunately, the problem of foreign spies and weaknesses in U.S. counterintelligence have been studied by numerous commissions, both administration and congressional, over the years, usually as a result of some of the recent extremely damaging spy cases. Nothing seems to change and bureaucrats in the intelligence community resist needed reforms.
The latest effort was the so-called WMD commission, which called for fixing the broken counterintelligence system.
I recommend creating new joint White House-Congressional panel that would focus exclusively on the counterintelligence failures of recent years and make practical recommendations for fixing the problems.
The problem has been that the CIA is averse to tough counterintelligence, viewing it as an impediment to their offensive spying efforts. The FBI continues to view counterintelligence from a law enforcement perspective, which means that instead of exploiting spy cases for counterintelligence operations against the enemies, they tend to first focus on “putting the cuffs” on spies, when that should only be one option. The better course of action is to find the spies and then turn them to our strategic advantage.
Lopez: Your book is, ultimately, about how bad our intelligence is. Has it gotten any better in the wake of 9/11? What can be done?
Gertz: Enemies in some ways is a follow-up to my 2003 book Breakdown, on the intelligence failures related to the September 11 attacks, but with a special emphasis on counterintelligence, that is, the failures of counterintelligence agencies and the need to fix the problem so that we can defend our nation from spies, saboteurs and terrorists.
U.S. intelligence agencies remain mired in what I call crushing bureaucratization — the loss of focus on national, strategic goals and the overemphasis on protecting bureaucratic turf, budgets and personnel. The problem is seriously undermining our national security.
The intelligence community is bloated, with too many agencies doing to many of the same things. Restructuring is needed to upgrade our intelligence services to the 21st Century. While some reform has been carried out, there is so much more that needs to be done. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in my view, has become another layer of bureaucracy on the overly bureaucratic system. It turns out that what the intelligence community didn’t need was a czar who could make all well.
We need smaller agencies with better people and radically different operating methods and procedures.
All Credit Given To: Kathryn Jean Lopez and The National Review Online
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzJlZWMyNWVmMWViMTFlZDgwMTZhZGE3N2E0YmMxNDQ=
__________________________________________________________________________
| Leandro Aragoncillo |
Michael Ray Aquino |
| Occupation: |
 FBI Intelligence Analyst at Fort Monmouth, NJ in the FBI's Information Technology Center. Hired July 2004, suspended 12 Sept 2005
Retired US Marine Gunnery Sergeant with 21 years service, 1983-2004.
Stationed in Japan, Guantanamo Bay, Quantico, VA and White House.
 Assignment to the White House between 1999 and 2002 as "administration chief" of the security detail assigned to the Vice President (Gore and then Cheney). Held Top Secret clearance.
Six Good Conduct Medals and a Humanitarian Service Medal |
 Former Deputy Directory of the Philippines National Police Intelligence Group under the government of former president Joseph Estrada
Former senior superintendent of the now-disbanded Philippines Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force |
| Age: |
47 years old |
39 years old |
| Home: |
Woodbury, NJ |
Queens, NY
March 2005: arrested by immigration authorities for overstaying his visa |
| Birthplace: |
Philippines, came to US in 1984 |
Philippines |
| Citizenship: |
United States in 1991 |
Philippines |
| Family: |
Wife, two children |
Wife, one son |
| |
|
|
| Arrested: |
Saturday, 10 September 2005 |
Saturday, 10 September 2005 |
| Charges: |
--Knowingly communicating classified information by a government employee to an agent or representative of a foreign country (i.e. receiving classified information).
--Acting as an agent of a foreign official without notification of the Attorney General in violation of Title 18 of the US Code, Section 951
--Unauthorized use of a government computer to obtain and transmit classified information
--Conspiracy to commit all of the above offenses in violation of Title 18 of the US Code Section 371.
Affidavit: printed and/or downloaded 101 classified documents related to the Philippines, 37 which were marked SECRET.
Cooperating with authorities; in plea negotiations |
--Knowingly communicating classified information by a government employee to an agent or representative of a foreign country (i.e. receiving classified information).
--Acting as an agent of a foreign official without notification of the Attorney General in violation of Title 18 of the US Code, Section 951
--Conspiracy to commit all of the above offenses in violation of Title 18 of the US Code Section 371.
Not cooperating with authorities |
| Dates of Spying: |
August 2000 to August 2005
Admitted to taking files while working under VP Cheney from 2001-2002.
Allegedly also gave information to another country (as yet unnamed) ABC News |
? to August 2005 |
| Possible Recruitment/ Motivations: |
 While working at the White House for Vice President Gore, on 27 July 2000 President Clinton introduced 21 Filipino-American White House staff to Philippine President Joseph Estrada during Estrada's official state visit to the US.
Allegedly Estrada and aides later appealed to Aragoncillo's Philippine loyalties.
Aragoncillo also had $500,000 in debts at the time, mostly mortgages on rental properties. $200,000 in personal debt, $300,000 mortgage.
Aragoncillo traveled to the Philippines 15 times from 2000 to 2005. Met with Estrada at presidential palace in Manila after first meeting in 2000. Kept in contact with Estrada. |
? Conduit between Aragoncillo and Philippine contacts |
| Identified: |
An alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency employee contacted the FBI after Aragoncillo tried to use his FBI employment to intervene on behalf of Aquino, who was facing deportation for overstaying his visa. FBI then launched an audit that showed Aragoncillo gained authorized access to documents pertaining to the Philippines. |
From association with Aragoncillo |
| Methodology: |
Searched FBI computers for information on Philippines, which was outside his work duties
Downloaded documents from FBI computers onto disk, put disk in bag and took home.
Emailed classified documents to contacts in Philippines.
15 foreign travel trips to the Philippines since 2000; unknown if reported trips as required. |