The Biggest Little CIA Shop You've Never Heard Of
By Jeff Stein
A few years ago, an American company placed a want ad for an aerospace engineering consultant in an Asian newspaper. It quickly drew a flurry of applicants - one of whom was just the kind of person the company was looking for: someone who worked in that country's missile program, someone who was a little sleazy, someone looking to make a little cash on the side.
This was a CIA front operation, and soon that eager applicant was supplying the spy agency with details on his country's ballistic missile program.
That kind of covert activity is a specialty of the CIA's National Resources Division, a little-known, U.S.-based component of the agency's National Clandestine Service.
The CIA's main business is sending operatives abroad to recruit spies and, especially since 9/11, chasing down terrorists for its target-hungry drone pilots. But NR, as it's known, is the agency's stay-at-home division. It's nothing like Homeland, however, with operatives running about with guns in the D.C. suburbs (though its 1960s-era predecessors once spied on antiwar and civil rights activists and recruited Cuban exiles to harass Fidel Castro). It also works with the FBI and NSA in bugging foreign diplomatic missions there.
Think of it as a more cuddly CIA. Its main business is to openly gather information from Americans who've traveled to places the CIA is interested in, particularly hard targets like North Korea, and to inveigle foreigners in the U.S. - officials, scientists and students - into spying when they return home.
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http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/11/15/cia.html
