According to information compiled by the Congressional Research Service, between 1990 and 1993, nine Americans were arrested for espionage against the United States. Since 1998, we have also discovered Russia's wiretapping of a sensitive conference room in the State Department, the mysterious theft of a laptop computer from the State Department containing highly classified information, and the 1999 arrest of Navy Petty Officer Daniel King, a code expert assigned to the super-secret National Security Agency. In addition, the number of Russian spies operating in the United States has increased markedly since the end of the Cold War, targeting everything from nuclear and other military secrets to industrial and commercial secrets important to our continued economic prosperity. In short, espionage remains very much a fact of life and there is no reason to believe that will change. Countries spy on each other as a matter of routine, allies and adversaries alike, the difference being the intentions behind those activities and the scale of effort involved.
Intelligence is the key to our anti-terrorism efforts.
The United States continues to maintain a sizable intelligence collection and analysis capability because the very countries about which we remain concerned are not coincidentally the most closed and dictatorial. Governments like those in China, Iraq, North Korea, and a number of others continue to be difficult to watch through open means like newspapers because of the degree to which they control information within their borders. Determining what goes on in those countries is a matter of vital interest to the United States, and the efforts we put into attaining information, assessing its importance, and placing it in the hands of key decision makers must be commensurate. The effort placed in preventing the intelligence agencies of these countries from obtaining U.S. military and diplomatic secrets must be similarly robust. We should never, like the French inspector declaring his shock to discover gambling in Casablanca, pretend that countries no longer spy on each other.