Can A Computer Catch A Spy?
Thirty years ago finding a traitor required intuition, a kind of sixth-sensy feeling that something wasn't quite right. Before the Internet, widespread GPS and Google, it required paper trails, human intelligence and gumshoe investigations. Sandy Grimes experienced that firsthand, though almost by accident: She lost a source.
"Working in this kind of business you have a personal relationship with those people who when they agreed to work for the United States government put their lives in our hands," she said, which is why she may have taken it so personally when one of the spies she was running, a KGB official in Lagos, Nigeria, disappeared.
"He didn't appear for the first re-contact, didn't appear for the second re-contact," she said. It turned out he had been arrested, the first in a roster of Soviet double agents who were discovered to be working for the West. "One after another we were losing them," Grimes said, "And you couldn't cut it any other way: We failed them."
The big mystery was whether the agency was dealing with a spy in the ranks or a code breaker in Moscow. Had today's analytics existed back then, it might have sped up the process of discovery. Modern algorithms would have racked and stacked employee locations, found suspicious patterns in their work habits and tracked their movements.
But back then, in the late 1980s as the Cold War was drawing to a close, all the CIA could really count on were seasoned intelligence professionals like Grimes. So, in 1991, the agency launched an investigation called Operation Playactor. It largely comprised a small task force with Grimes, a young Office of Security employee named Dan Payne, a longtime CIA analyst named Jeanne Vertefeuille, and two FBI agents, Special Agent Jim Holt and a Soviet analyst named Jim Milburn. ("We called them Jim Squared,"
