New in SpyWeek
A nuclear satellite alarm, early warning on a Cuban mole, a CIA whistleblower fired, a Moscow intelligence hack busted, Tucker's pratfall, espionage ethics, foreign gifts to CIA officers—and more
Welcome to SpyWeek, our new weekly newsletter, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.
Red Alert: What was Rep. Michael Turner doing? That question has puzzled Washington after the Ohio Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee went public Wednesday with a cryptic reference to “a serious national security threat” that set off a media frenzy. In the next day’s briefing, White House spokesman John Kirby said that the threat involves a space-based anti-satellite capability that Russia is developing. Multiple news reports claimed that Russia was seeking to build a nuclear weapon that could knock out satellites. (“The capability is a nuclear-armed—not a nuclear-powered—weapon,” two U.S. officials told The Washington Post).
While not commenting directly on those reports, Kirby said the capability would violate a 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbids nuclear weapons in space. The U.S. intelligence community has been tracking Russia’s developing anti-satellite capability for “many, many months if not a few years,” Kirby said. What changed in recent weeks was that the intelligence community has a “higher sense of confidence exactly how Russia continues to pursue it.”
Troubling, yes. A threat to anyone’s safety? No, not anytime in the near future.. “No need to buy gold,” said Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.
So why did Turner sound such an alarm?
The Kremlin called it a “malicious fabrication” and a trick designed to get the House to approve $60 billion in aid to Ukraine that passed the Senate on Tuesday. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. a staunch opponent of aid to Ukraine, pretty much agreed, saying, “The game you’re watching is not the game that is actually being played.” Gaetz and other GOP members of Congress also saw it as an attempt to mobilize votes for reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes U.S. counterterrorism agencies to gather communications from U.S.-based tech companies where a foreigner based overseas is on one end of the conservation. Such a 702 intercept may have led to the report Turner referenced, some sources said. U.S. intelligence officials say 702 “saves lives” and contributed to the 2022 drone strike that took out al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. Outgoing NSA director Paul Nakasone wrote that ending 702 would be “a self-inflicted wound of the highest order.”
Conservatives in the House are pushing to end what they call “warrantless government surveillance.” Turner’s red alert prompted House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to delay voting on HR 7320, which would restrict the powers authorized under Section 702. “Unbelievable,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. “Just as we were winning the debate on requiring warrants for domestic spying in the FISA 702 reauthorization, the Speaker yanked the bill. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was also miffed by Turner’s alert, which came the day before a scheduled White House briefing with lawmakers and may have exposed an important intelligence breakthrough.
Silent No More: The CIA has fired a woman whose decision to press charges of sexual assault against one of her colleagues triggered a flood of related complaints from women inside the agency. The woman’s dismissal comes less than six months after she filed a federal lawsuit accusing two CIA officers of trying to intimidate her to prevent her from talking to criminal investigators about her assault. An attorney for the woman accused the agency of retaliation; the CIA said that was “factually inaccurate.” The woman’s saga prompted at least two dozen women to come forward with their complaints of abusive treatment within the CIA. The House Intelligence Committee is now investigating how the CIA handles sexual assault and harassment cases, and the Senate Intelligence Committee called on the CIA’s inspector general to open an inquiry. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the CIA to better protect and support survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment within the agency and ensure that perpetrators of crimes are appropriately held accountable. SpyTalk Editor-in-chief Jeff Stein addressed the treatment of women in the agency in two podcasts last year, first with former CIA officer Laura Thomas, and again with Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.
Betrayal: Manuel Rocha, the Ivy-League educated, career U.S. diplomat who allegedly spent four decades working as a secret agent for Cuba, would have been a familiar figure to John Le Carré: a master of deception who seemingly embodied the American dream. In a deep dive into Rocha’s career, The Associated Press found that, as early as 1987, the CIA suspected that Fidel Castro had a “super mole” deep inside the U.S. government. Rocha’s conservative cover and tradecraft were so good, however, he avoided exposure. Then, in 2006, legendary former CIA operative Felix Rodriguez says he so admired Rocha that he dismissed a tip from a Cuban army officer defector that Rocha was spying for Havana.
This week, from jail, Rocha pleaded not guilty to 15 federal counts as FBI and State Department investigators try to understand what the veteran diplomat gave up to Cuba. “He had access to everything,” Rodriguez says. The AP found that the seeds of Rocha’s alleged betrayal may have been planted early on. Raised on food stamps by a widowed mother who worked in a sweatshop, Rocha won a scholarship in 1965 to attend the elite Taft boarding school in Connecticut. The discrimination Rocha suffered there, including a classmate who refused to room with him, led him to contemplate suicide and, friends suspect, to admire Castro’s socialist revolution. "The past always catches up with us,” Le Carré observed, “no matter how well we try to bury it."
The Gifts of Espionage: A $7,651 bottle of booze. A $5,000 saddle. Expensive watches. Nearly 200 cookies from an upscale bakery. According to the State Department's Office of the Chief of Protocol, those were some of the gifts that CIA officers (all anonymous except for Director Bill Burns) reported receiving from foreigners in 2022. The latest filing covers gifts worth more than $415 received by federal employees from foreign governments, international organizations, or their representatives. To protect sources and methods, the CIA doesn’t reveal the identities of gift-givers or the country involved. The agency is required, however, to say what it did with those gifts. The $7,651 bottle of booze was “destroyed.” The cookies from an upscale bakery and a chocolate gift set worth more than two grand were put to “official use.” (Is eating expensive cookies and chocolate an official use?) The $5,000 saddle, meanwhile, is displayed in a CIA mission at an undisclosed location. The most common gifts in 2022 for CIA employees were tickets worth as much as $1,200 to unspecified sporting events. Who says the life of a spy isn’t glamorous?
CIA Reject: Something about Tucker Carlson really drives people up the wall. Comedian Jon Stewart famously insulted him to his face on CNN. A man who encountered the former Fox News host in a Montana fishing store called him “the worst human being.” Even Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn’t resist needling Carlson about his onetime quest to join the CIA during their two-hour interview—Putin’s first with a Westerner since the invasion of Ukraine. The dictator described the CIA as “the organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand. Maybe we should thank God they didn’t let you in. Although it is a serious organization, I understand.” Carlson has said he was turned down for a job at the CIA after graduating from Trinity College in 1991. The New Yorker reported that Carlson was rejected because “the real-life agency, unlike its fictional counterparts, prefers not to hire young men who are gabby and insubordinate.” Ouch. A college friend told Business Insider that Carlson, a devoted Deadhead, told him he was “too honest” about his drug use. Former CIA officer Gail Helt, who teaches intelligence studies in Tennessee, reported that one of her students asked her why she thought Carlson was rejected. “Well, first, they only hire the best and brightest,” Helt replied. “Second, they’re fairly good at sensing disloyalty to the nation…” Double ouch.
Ethics of Spying: There’s no shortage of nonfiction books on spying. The bookshelves groan with tales of daring missions behind enemy lines, traitors, and shocking scandals. Few books, however, ask a more fundamental question: How do you morally justify spying? The conclusion French philosopher Cécile Fabre reaches in Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence might surprise some of her colleagues at the University of Oxford. “Fabre maintains that, in some circumstances, espionage is not just morally permissible but morally mandatory,” NYU professor Tamsin Shaw wrote in a recent essay in New York Review. Fabre believes the morally justified espionage tactics are “deception, treason, manipulation, exploitation, blackmail, eavesdropping, and computer hacking.” The intelligence officer is trained to use these unethical and often illegal tools to serve the greater good.
In Fabre’s formulation, the spy “must do wrong in order to do right or in order that right should prevail.” One of the book’s most essential points, Shaw observes, is that accountability can never be fully reconciled with the need for secrecy. The public can’t know what is and isn’t being legitimately concealed but must trust that its intelligence officers do the right thing. The key to ethical decision-making in espionage, according to Fabre, lies in the proper vetting and ethical training of intelligence officers. “This sounds appealing, but as a realistic possibility in either Britain or the U.S. today, it seems excessively optimistic,” Shaw writes. A review in the CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, called Spying Through a Glass Darkly, “an immensely important contribution to the intelligence literature.”
Legendary former CIA officer Jim Lawler, celebrated for taking down the infamous A.Q. Khan nuclear-smuggling network, is fond of telling audiences he had to be “a sociopath” to succeed in his line of work. After all, he told Jeff Stein in a Jan. 2023 SpyTalk podcast, sociopaths have “a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience,” according to one definition. “Symptoms may include disregard for others, a lack of empathy, and dishonest behavior.”
We’ll revisit the topic of ethics in spying soon. Stay tuned.
Whack-a-Mole: The U.S. and its worldwide partners kicked Russian intelligence hackers out of a network of over 1,000 compromised home and small business routers, the Justice Department announced Thursday. The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, had been using the compromised routers to launch cyberattacks against “U.S. and foreign governments and military, security, and corporate organizations,” it said. The FBI said the group responsible was Unit 26165 of the GRU—aka Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, and APT 28—the same unit behind the 2016 hack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails. The latest exploit had a new twist: The GRU relied on criminal groups to help infiltrate home and office routers in the United States. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said Wednesday that it shut down accounts being used by Unit 26165. The group was using AI primarily for open-source research into satellite communication protocols and radar imaging technology, according to OpenAI, which also shut down accounts being used by hackers from China, Iran, and North Korea.
Pocket Litter:
Peripatetic CIA Director Bill Burns flew to Israel on an unannounced visit after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu halted talks in Cairo aimed at brokering a ceasefire in Gaza despite signs of progress. (Ynet)
Thousands of Starlink internet terminals are being used by Russian forces inside Ukraine, according to Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s top military intelligence officer. The Starlink devices, made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, have been active for “quite a long time.” (WSJ)
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity—the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—launched a program that, for the first time, aims at the psychology of cyber attackers. The program seeks to waste attackers’ time and effort. (IARPA)
Six FBI officials working on assignment overseas solicited or had sex with prostitutes and then were not forthcoming when questioned by investigators. (NPR)
Federal prosecutors are asking for a 15-year sentence for the Iraqi immigrant accused of trying to orchestrate the murder of former President George W. Bush. Sentencing is set for Monday for the man who tried to smuggle former Iraqi intelligence officers into the U.S. to carry out the hit. (Washington Times)
The House Intelligence Committee opened an investigation into “allegations of improper suppression” of information related to “Havana Syndrome.” The CIA and other intelligence agencies concluded that a foreign power was not responsible for the mysterious ailment first seen in diplomats and spies working at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba in 2016 and 2017. (NYTimes)
Alexander Smirnov, the key FBI informant in the investigations of President Biden and his son Hunter related to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, has been unmasked as a serial fabricator, according to the Justice Department’s criminal indictment of him unsealed Thursday. Smirnov’s lies were driven by his “expressed bias” against Biden, prosecutors said. The indictment claims Smirnov also promoted fresh lies after meeting with unnamed Russian officials.
Two British former spy chiefs said at the annual Munich security conference that the UK intelligence structure needed a shakeup that eliminated divisions between domestic, foreign, and signals intelligence. (The Record)
Is there something we missed? Or something you would like to see more of? Send your tips, corrections, and thoughts to SpyTalk@protonmail.com.
Re the ethics of spying: An excellent source is "Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying" by James Olson who served as the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. Olson provides 50 scenarios on which individuals give their take on whether the activity is ethical or not.
Larry Brown
One of the first things I learned in Intelligence was that after an asset was recruited, that a secure communications link was necessary. How else could they tell the secrets to us? And that made it very interesting to learn that Trump agents wanted a secure way to communicate with Russia. And I suspect it was outside the established links. Why did they want this?
So now if I find that Members of Congress do not want us to follow up on intercepted links between the USA and "foreign agents" I have to ask: "Why not?" Are they recruited assets reporting to their case officers? Or just useful contacts for Russia? Or what?