Counterintelligence Field Activity

Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) was a United States Department of Defense (DoD) agency whose size and budget were classified. The CIFA was created by a directive from the Secretary of Defense (Number 5105.67) on February 19, 2002. On August 8, 2008, it was announced that CIFA would be shut down. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) absorbed most of the components and authorities of the CIFA into the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center which was later consolidated into the Defense Clandestine Service.

CIFA goals were:

The Director of DoD CIFA reported directly to DoD's Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

The offices of Chief of Staff, Office of General Counsel, and Office of the Inspector General reported directly to the Director of CIFA.

CIFA was then broken into four directorates: Program Management, Information Technology, Operational Support and Training and Development.

Program Management was responsible for budgeting, management and accountability.

Information Technology was responsible for planning and managing special technology needs of the counterintelligence enterprise.

Operational Support planned, directed and managed counterintelligence activities and coordinated offensive counterintelligence campaigns.

Training and Development set performance assessment standards and assured that defense counterintelligence training and education programs, as well as instructors, maintained accreditation and certification.

CIFA managed the database of "suspicious incidents" in the United States or the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN). It was an intelligence and law enforcement system that was a near real-time sharing of raw non-validated information among DoD organizations and installations. Feeding into JPEN were intelligence, law enforcement, counterintelligence, and security reports, information from DoD's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (TALON) reporting system of unfiltered information, and other reports.

There were seven criteria taken into account in the creation of a TALON report:

Army regulation 190-45, Law Enforcement Reporting, stated that JPEN may be used to share police intelligence with DOD law enforcement agencies, military police, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command and local, state, federal, and international law enforcement agencies.

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