On SpyCast: 'The largest agency you don't know about'

When I sat down with David Cattler, the Director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, he described “the largest agency in the country that no one knows anything about.”

DCSA was formed in the aftermath of China’s massive cyberattack on the Office of Personnel Management, which gave Beijing access to records from millions of federal government employees in 2015. Five years into existence, DCSA has evolved to be a critical component of national security.

Though not technically an intelligence agency, Cattler says his staff are “in the trust business,” overseeing nearly four million active security clearance records and opening nearly 11,000 investigations every day. They’re also responsible for insider threat mitigation and industrial security across the government, as well as cleared companies and academia. So it’s no small job.

We spoke about the Defense Insider Threat Management and Analysis Center, the agency’s new insider threat portal — a useful tool after the Trump administration’s widespread government terminations and intermittent hire-backs. DCSA also found that just 35% of people unambiguously approached by a foreign government on LinkedIn reported the incident, meaning that counterintelligence threats remain stark.

Even Cattler himself, NATO’s former Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security, has been targeted by foreign schemes through text messages and emails, he said in this episode of SpyCast.

He also discussed how the agency is piloting AI in continuous vetting of the federal workforce. He hopes that AI can find anomalies that allow his agency to assess where the greatest risks are cropping up, streamlining an overwhelming volume of data.

“I don’t want to sit here as the director of this very large security agency and say, ‘Well… we’re going to have some people that are going to go bad’ but we’re going to have some people that are going to go bad,” he told me.

In other news: Later this month, I will be at Covert Cocktails, the International Spy Museum’s mixer, complete with real spies. It’s in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, July 31, from 7pm-9pm. Tickets cost $225-250 and proceeds support the museum. So come get a drink with me.

Episode length: 29 minutes

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