http://public.cq.com/public/20060602_homeland.html By Jeff Stein CQ Staff June 2, 2006 No self-respecting federal agency goes without its own intelligence service these days, and the U.S. Capitol Police is no exception. The Capitol Police have a little-known intelligence unit that takes up a whole floor of its seven-story, century-old headquarters at First and D Streets Northeast, according to its just-retired police chief. Terrance W. Gainer, who turned in his badge, gun and police-issued Blackberry two months ago after four years of occasionally rough times with protesters and headstrong lawmakers, says his unit collaborated closely with the CIA and the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force, and had liaison officers at most of the the 16 spy agencies that make of the U.S. intelligence community. Gainer also says his intelligence unit - fewer than 50 in a 600-strong corps, he indicated - often swept congressional hearing rooms and offices for secret electronic listening devices and fielded plainclothes officers to see who might be scouting the facilities for a terrorist attack. "We are a very, very full-service police department, and know for certain that the goal we have as counterterrorism police is stopping an attack before it starts," Gainer says. The intelligence unit's head, Deputy Chief Mike Jarboe, could not be reached for comment on the Capitol Police's counterintelligence and security activities. "I'm going to guess they're not going to be very talkative," Gainer said in the first of two interviews over the past few weeks." As a rule, I have a different philosophy on the press, as some might suspect, and it got me in trouble with some of the House members. "I think there ought to be a little open dialog," said Gainer, who was chief of the Illinois state police before coming to Washington in 1998, "and I don't like to deny that which is obvious. "I think in some respects you want our enemy to know that we are capable, but you don't want them to know the specifics of our capabilities. . . . And that's always a fine line." "Holy Cow" Every morning at 8:45, Gainer says he, his top officers and delegates from the House and Senate sergeant at arms offices gathered for an intelligence briefing in "a secure location" that he would not identify. That facility, as well as an area in Capitol Police headquarters, had a so-called Secure Compartmented Intelligence Facility, or SCIF, that prevented hostile intelligence agencies from listening in on conversations, Gainer said. "Our intel people would talk about threats picked up by other intel agencies, We'd also talk about major hearings, dignitary visits to the Hill, and so on." At least twice a month, and sometimes weekly, the Capitol Police intelligence unit and senior commanders got briefings from the CIA and FBI in the Hill's SCIF. "We had some 'holy cow' moments," Gainer said, declining to provide details. But overall, "It would be rare, in that kind of meeting, that I would learn something I hadn't already been briefed on." Moles As for finding "bugs" in Capitol facilities, Gainer would only say, "I wouldn't comment on that, but I will tell you this, that we feel comfortable with the meetings that are conducted in there and our sweeps." Gainer also revealed this little-known detail: Capitol Police carry out what he calls "counterintelligence" activities. "It's not putting people under cover to develop informants. We don't do that," he said. "We have plainclothes officers who go out and do counterintelligence work. We're always trying to figure out what the bad guys are trying to figure out in watching us or observing what we do." In the spy trade, counterintelligence usually means penetrating the opposition's spy service and looking for moles within its own. But that's not what Capitol Police "special agents" - a designation Gainer said he bestowed on his intelligence specialists for its "cachet" - do, the retired chief says. "Counterintelligence, from our perspective," Gainer explains, "is very limited in scope. It might be something as simple as, during the State of the Union address or the inauguration, having people out watching the crowd. "So we're looking at people who are watching us. If we got a phony call on a suspicious package, the terrorists might be watching to see how we respond - how many units, how many people, how we lay ourselves out. So we have people in plainclothes looking at the lookers. And we might decide to talk to someone who's doing some taping, we might tape people who are taping us, and cross-reference that with what's going on in other jurisdictions." In the investigation of last summer's London subway and bus bombings, authorities "captured tapes that showed different places in D.C. and on the Hill," said Gainer, 58. "Maybe it was pre-operational stuff." But the Capitol Police's intelligence unit's purview isn't necessarily confined to Capitol Hill, he said. Sharing All 535 members of Congress "and their families" are under the Capitol Police's protective wing. "We don't go out to their home towns, but our responsibility extends to where those men and women are, and their families. So either we or those local police departments stay on top of what's going on." "If there's something that is of greater scope than our area then we work with the the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces," he says. And the intel unit has "connections in each of the the states, with the local FBI field office, or places like L.A., New York, Chicago - they all have intelligence squads." It works the other way, too, Gainer said, with threats against members of Congress relayed quickly to Capitol Police intelligence. It wasn't always that way. Now the department's problem is information overload. "I think the biggest concern we have now is everybody is sharing so much because no one wants to be accused of not sharing. We would have a daily intel briefing telling us what was going on in the world, and sometimes you would say, 'Why in the world are we being told this, because it's laughable.'" "They might lay out a lot of information and then say the person giving this to us is unreliable, has given us bad information in the past and is crazy. And we'd go, 'then why share it with us?'" Today, he says, relations with the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies are tight. During the CIA and FBI briefings, there's a lot of unprecedented give and take with Capitol Police analysts, many of whom are drawn from the military intelligence services. Those who aren't are sent to the military intelligence schools and the FBI for training, Gainer said. "At the end of those briefs, the FBI and CIA would give more details and answer your questions. In other words, they would let those 'intellectual' discussions go on. They might say, 'This is our read of this bit of intelligence, give us yours,' " Gainer says. "Sometimes our analytical people would write reports that ran counter to [theirs], which was the accumulated intel from 18 agencies. Our guys would write theirs from our perspective and say, 'Why couldn't it mean this?'" Despite the new collaboration between the Capitol Police and federal spy agencies, along with bag checks, floating security units, New Jersey barriers and anthrax mail sniffers, a determined terrorist can probably get through, Gainer volunteered. "Because it's an open campus, someone can ride a bus up there - but not a truck - a bike with saddlebags on us. That presents a challenge. But our concern was the smaller events. Working with our federal intelligence agency partners, we think we have a pretty good handle on the potential for our adversaries to do big stuff." Big stuff? "A 9/11, a nuclear attack, a dirty bomb - all those are possible," he says. But the Capitol is much better protected than when he arrived, he maintained, despite such panicky moments as the "shooting" in the Longworth House Office Building garage last week that shook the whole city but most likely was a construction crew dropping pipes. "Between us and some of the other federal brethren, I feel we have a pretty good handle on what's in the air," Gainer said, "and which way the wind is blowing. . . ." [...] _________________________________ Attend the Black Hat Briefings and Training, Las Vegas July 29 - August 3 2,500+ international security experts from 40 nations, 10 tracks, no vendor pitches. www.blackhat.com
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