MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The job of catching foreign spies trying to steal U.S. secrets primarily falls to the FBI. NPR's Ryan Lucas has exclusive reporting that under the Trump administration, the FBI teams that do this work have been hit with major staffing cuts. And Ryan is with us now in our studios in Washington, D.C. Good to see you.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So what'd you find out?
LUCAS: Well, my story looks at the FBI's counterintelligence squads because it's their job to track and hunt down foreign spies here in the U.S. trying to steal government secrets but also economic secrets, so things like cutting-edge research and technology. And what my reporting found is that those FBI counterintelligence squads have been hit by pretty steep staffing shortages across the country. That's according to five people familiar with the matter. They all spoke to me on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. I was told that in some field offices, these squads have only half of their counterintelligence positions filled. So this is a significant drop in manpower doing this critical work.
MARTIN: Did the people you spoke with have any insight into why the FBI is cutting staffing on these squads?
LUCAS: So it's interesting. Sources told me this isn't the result of a specific directive from FBI Director Kash Patel to cut back on counterintelligence work. Instead, it's a result of Patel making violent crime and immigration enforcement priorities for the FBI. Those, of course, are also top issues for President Trump. So FBI field offices have been pulling agents and analysts from counterintelligence and putting them on violent crime and immigration enforcement instead.
But there's also another factor at play here, and that's the turmoil at the bureau under Patel's leadership. The FBI has lost more than 1,500 special agents under this administration. Those agents are leaving. They're taking their experience, their institutional knowledge with them. In some instances, this administration has also fired veteran FBI folks. And those sorts of firings, these departures, are particularly problematic in counterintelligence work because I'm told there's a huge learning curve doing this sort of work.
MARTIN: And what has the FBI said in response to your reporting?
LUCAS: Well, a spokesperson said the bureau has a robust counterintelligence operation and said anonymous critics are, quote, "disconnected from reality."
MARTIN: You know, you can imagine that a lot of countries would be interested in U.S. secrets. So what are the main concerns here? Who are the main concerns here?
LUCAS: Yeah. I spoke with Emily Harding about this. She's a former CIA analyst and deputy staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee under Republican leadership. She said there are a lot of adversaries that are very interested in operating in the U.S.
EMILY HARDING: China is very aggressive in what they do. The Iranians pose a real threat. The Russians have always been aggressive. They always will be aggressive. There is a host of counterintelligence threats.
LUCAS: There is, of course, the U.S. war right now with Iran, but broadly speaking, China looms largest here. For years, U.S. officials have been saying that China is relentlessly stealing American information and technology. And a few years ago, in fact, the FBI said it had more than 2,000 open economic espionage cases tied to China alone. So that gives you a bit of a sense of the scale of the issue here.
MARTIN: And so how would we be able to tell if the FBI is falling short in this critical role?
LUCAS: Yeah. It's a good question. And it's important to say that the FBI is still doing counterintelligence work, but it is hard to know when something slips through the cracks. This isn't like counterterrorism where if a terrorist plot isn't stopped, something horrible happens, we all know about it. In counterintelligence, the threats are silent. And that means that it's very hard to know when someone is making off with U.S. secrets, and if that's not stopped, that theft just goes on and on and on.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Ryan Lucas. You can read more of his reporting at npr.org. Ryan, thank you.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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