The Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, is allowed to conduct domestic spying, for the 70-year old ban preventing the Agency from conducting domestic surveillance inside America has ended with the establishment of Fusion Centers.

Let me explain. In 2005, retired CIA spymaster Charles “Charlie” Allen was called back in from the cold by the Department of Homeland Security, and he helped them deploy CIA intelligence officers to newly created Fusion Centers (FCs) throughout the U.S.

Allen, who spent 47 years collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence at the CIA, is using FCs to strengthen America’s homeland security by meticulously shaping our gravely inadequate homeland intelligence-gathering and sharing capacity into a well thought out operation. FCs enable our local authorities at the state, county, and city level to detect and respond to overseas terrorist threats by leveraging national intelligence with teams of CIA officers embedded locally in FCs throughout America.

In 2007, as a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), I attended a seminar in Tysons Corner, VA where Allen announced that by the end of 2008, FC’s will be operational in all 50 states. The CIA and NSA began domestic spying within the U.S. and two-way, robust sharing of information between overseas CIA counterintelligence operatives and local law enforcement began inside America.

In sum, Chief Intelligence Officer Allen began positioning CIA case officers in each FC, enabling the CIA to share overseas terrorist information with over 600 U.S. state and local law enforcement agencies.

Here is an imaginary example of how the process works: Suppose the NSA receives intelligence from a spy satellite that intercepted a cell phone call made from someone living outside Cleveland, Ohio, to a suspected al Qaeda cell in Yemen that they have been monitoring. It mentions Progressive Field in Cleveland.

On the ground in Yemen, a CIA Case Officer had previously recruited one of the suspected cell member’s cousins to spy for the U.S., and this recruited spy (“asset”) reported to his CIA handler that he saw in his cousin’s home a diagram of the Progressive Field arena and surrounding streets marked off with words in Farsi.

In this highly plausible scenario, the locally embedded CIA officers working at the Cleveland Fusion Center would be alerted and instantly tap into their underground workstation supercomputers and pull together the staggering intelligence-gathering capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community, then share it with Cleveland law enforcement in real time, with the CIA’s methods and sources kept secret.

The cloak-and-dagger, top secret particulars would be concealed- no one would know about the Yemen source or the NSA spy satellite method used to acquire the intelligence, but local police officials would be tipped off on the essence of the looming threat.

We need these locally embedded FCs because the lines between foreign and domestic intelligence have become blurred. Overseas threats that target our local communities are real and terrorist cells are transnational and religiously driven. Yes, domestic spying happens, but the CIA is spying FOR America, not ON America.