New in SpyWeek
A rash of US military turncoats, the CIA's new ops chief, Iran assassins & troubling intel briefs for Trump lead this week's edition
Military Moles: Does the U.S. military have an espionage problem?
A spate of cases in the news in recent weeks highlighted the vastly different methods and means that foreign spies are enlisting members of the U.S. military to steal secrets.
Money appeared to have motivated Army Sgt. Korbein Schultz, who was charged with selling secrets in an indictment unsealed Thursday. An intelligence analyst who told his unidentified handler that he "wished he could be Jason Bourne,” according to the indictment, Schultz is accused of using his Top-Secret clearance to download sensitive information related to a variety of U.S. military weapons systems and the U.S. defense of Taiwan. Schultz was allegedly paid $42,000 for the documents. "I need to get my other BMW back,” the 24-year-old told his handler, who claimed to be a Hong Kong-based geopolitical consultant, according to the indictment. .
Love appears to have been the motive for David Slater, a civilian Air Force employee arrested last weekend for sharing classified information on a foreign online dating platform to a woman who called him her “secret informant love.”
Slater, a 63-year-old retired Army lieutenant colonel, provided information from top-secret briefings he attended on Russia’s war with Ukraine with someone claiming to be a woman living in Ukraine, prosecutors said. Slater worked at U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, which primarily oversees nuclear weapons.
Prosecutors say Slater’s correspondent “regularly asked” him for closely held information, which he provided from February 2022 to April 2022.
"Dear, what is shown on the screens in the special room?? It is very interesting,” Slater was asked in March 2022, according to an indictment. The following month, Slater’s correspondent thanked him for spilling secrets. "Sweet Dave, the supply of weapons is completely classified, which is great!"
Former CIA officer Doug London pointed out that prosecutors did not identify the foreign power behind this “virtual honeytrap.” “Does the omission suggest a US ally rather than Russia (or China), which both often use this methodology to target Americans?” London asked on X.
Ego and Internet clout appear to have motivated Jack Teixeira, the 22-year-old active duty airman who leaked top-secret documents on a social media site. Teixeira agreed Monday to plead guilty to all six counts he faced under the Espionage Act. He faces 16 years in prison when he is sentenced in September.
Beginning in January 2022, Teixeira allegedly accessed classified documents from a classified workstation at an Air National Guard base in Massachusetts and posted them in an online chat room called “Thug Shaker Central.” The Air Force punished 15 individuals who “intentionally failed” to report documented concerns about Teixeira’s behavior. The commander of Teixeira’s unit was relieved of command.
The Air Force isn’t the only service branch with espionage problems. We previously told you about U.S. Navy Chief Fire Controlman Bryce Pedicini, charged last month with espionage and other criminal charges for allegedly delivering classified information to an unidentified foreign contact in 2022 and 2023.
Two U.S. Navy sailors were arrested last year for sharing military information with China. Petty Officer Wengheng Zhao, 26, was sentenced in January to more than two years in prison for providing information to a Chinese intelligence officer in exchange for bribery payments. The other sailor, Jichao Wei, 22, pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors say Wei’s mother encouraged him to cooperate with a Chinese intelligence officer, telling her son it might help him get a job with the Chinese government someday.
Schultz, the Army intelligence officer arrested Thursday, discussed Zhao and Wei's arrests with his handler, who told him to be more careful.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, sought to assuage concerns about spying in the ranks. No, the Defense Department doesn’t have an espionage problem, Ryder said Tuesday. “But we also recognize the fact that insider threats are something that needs to be taken seriously, which is why every single member of the Department of Defense, whether you're a basic trainee or a two-star general or above, is going to take training on the proper handling and safeguarding of sensitive information,” Ryder said. “And if you violate those rules, you will be held accountable.”
CIA’s top spook: A new episode of the CIA’s podcast, The Langley Files, introduced listeners to the agency’s “top spymaster,” the new deputy director of operations, or DDO.
It’s the first-ever public remarks for the DDO. He’s identified on the podcast only as “Tom.” but his full name soon surfaced in the The New York Times: Tom Sylvester. As DDO, Sylvester manages the agency’s clandestine operations and oversees CIA station chiefs and the case officers who recruit and run spies. Sylvester took over as DDO last summer, replacing David Marlowe.
Sylvester is best known at Langley for coordinating, planning, and overseeing the CIA’s response to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. “I was always so incredibly proud of what we were able to accomplish,” he said. “If you look at that from the perspective of what we were able to accomplish—the information sharing, the training we provided, the insights, the organizational skills to ensure that Ukraine did not completely fall under Russian domination. I think it really is an incredible story.”
As we wrote last week, The New York Times detailed the years-long partnership between the CIA and Ukrainian intelligence. The CIA has financed and partially equipped a dozen spy bases in Ukraine, where Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites. Ground Branch, a CIA paramilitary unit, has for years trained a Ukrainian commando force—known as Unit 2245—which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. And the CIA oversaw a program known as Operation Goldfish that helped train the Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba. “Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians or to beat them,” Ivan Bakanov, then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the SBU, told the Times.
An Arabic speaker, Sylvester’s spying career was focused on the Middle East. He joined the CIA after serving in the Navy SEALs. The son of a State Department diplomat, Sylvester grew up overseas, attending junior high school in a northern Norway town, moving to Beijing in 1976, and ending up in Bordeaux, France, where his father was consul general.
Some time ago, an undated story on a Turkish web site identified a Thomas Sylvester as “working in Ankara since 2008” and accused him of having “a hand in the conspiracy against the Turkish Armed Forces.” It also alleged “Sylvester's place of duty before Ankara was Damascus,” and it said ”he knows the region very well and has a close friendship with Hakan Fidan,” Turkey’s foreign minister.
Sylvester says that despite all the technological advances in intelligence, there will always be a place for human intelligence—spies—the CIA’s specialty. “We can have the greatest technical overwatch capabilities, we can see our adversaries from our satellites, but ultimately, without understanding what it is that's making them tick,” Sylvester said. “Our core responsibility is preventing strategic surprise. And strategic surprise often comes from a few individuals. So even with all the technological advances of the 21st century there were still some secrets that exist only in people's minds.”
Briefing Trump: How do you provide a classified briefing to a man facing criminal charges of mishandling classified information? That’s the dilemma facing U.S. intelligence agencies preparing to brief the soon-to-be GOP nominee for president, Donald Trump.
A senior intelligence official and a second person with knowledge of internal conversations tell Politico that the Biden administration intends to share intelligence with the former president no matter the outcome of his trial in Florida, where he is accused of illegally hoarding extremely sensitive information at his resort in Mar-a-Lago. The briefings, which are managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and approved by the White House, don’t usually include the nation’s most sensitive secrets, particularly information that could unmask America’s spies. The candidate briefings normally take place after the national conventions in late summer.
Banned from the US: The United States continued its crackdown on makers of high-tech spyware, sanctioning a former Israeli intelligence commander whose company developed the Predator phone spyware that was used to target two members of Congress.
The White House says it’s the first time the U.S. government has sanctioned a commercial spyware vendor for enabling misuse of its tools.
Tal Jonathan Dilian, a retired colonel in the Israeli military, was banned Tuesday from doing business with the United States. Dilian once ran Unit 81, which is responsible for developing intelligence tools for the Israeli Defense Force.
Israel’s defense ministry supervises spyware vendors based in Israel, including NSO Group, maker of the powerful Pegasus spyware. Intellexa, based in Greece, operates outside the supervision of the Israeli Defense Ministry, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Dalian’s company, the Intellexa commercial spyware consortium, was blacklisted last year by the U.S. Commerce Department. NSO Group was placed on the blacklist in 2021.
Amnesty International found that Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, were targets of an attempt to implant Predator on their phones It’s unclear if the effort, which Amnesty linked to attackers in Vietnam, was successful. Predator was at the heart of the “Greek Watergate” scandal that involved mass monitoring of prominent figures in Greek politics. The revelations prompted the resignation of the head of the Greek National Intelligence Service.
Two other firms were placed on the Commerce Department’s blacklist Tuesday. The newly listed companies are Sandvine, a Canadian firm that sold network-monitoring technology to Egypt, where it was used to block news and target political and human rights advocates, and China's Chengdu Beizhan Electronics, which attempted to acquire U.S. goods on behalf of China's University of Electronic Science and Technology, which was previously blacklisted.
Best Russian Stunt of the Week: The envelope, please.
The award for Best Russian Stunt of the Week goes to the Russian disinformation sites that posted stories based on a crude, faked video of a leaked phone call between two U.S. officials that never happened.
A Russian disinformation site presented a since-deleted YouTube video of two people speaking English—with Russian accents—as “a clear indication of the U.S. government’s involvement in foreign opposition movements.”
The two individuals who were (not) captured on the leaked audio were said to be outgoing Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, a favorite target of Russian propagandists, and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Jim O’Brien (neither of whom has a Russian accent.)
The story appeared on the website of the Miami Chronicle, which, like its cousins D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, and the Chicago Chronicle, is not the local news outlet it purports to be. “They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture,” The New York Times reported.
The Miami Chronicle’s website first appeared on Feb. 26. It falsely claims to have delivered “the Florida News since 1937.” Its “about” page was Latin filler text.
According to the Times, the news sites are the work of what remains of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin who founded the Internet Research Agency, the “troll factory” in St. Petersburg, Russia, that meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash last year after leading a brief revolt against Russia’s military.
Pocket Litter:
The U.S. government is intensifying a manhunt for an Iranian intelligence operative who is suspected of plotting to assassinate current and former American officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The FBI said Majid Dastjani Farahani, who is believed to be a member of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, was recruiting individuals to avenge the 2020 death of IRGC Major General Qasem Soleimani, U.S. officials say. Trump’s special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, is also on Tehran’s hit list. (Semafor)
Speaking of threats to Americans, the U.S. has warned U.S. citizens in Moscow to stay clear of large gatherings, due to intelligence about an “imminent” attack by “extremists.” The perps were not identified, but “Russia's FSB security service said Thursday that it had foiled a planned attack by an Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State terrorist group on a synagogue in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow,” according to NBC News.
Former CIA officials should stay out of politics, retired former senior CIA executive Mark Kelton says. Claims by present and former intelligence officers that evidence existed to support Russia allegations about Donald Trump have done serious damage to the CIA’s credibility, Kelton wrote in The Cipher Brief.
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and his wife with extortion and obstruction of justice, adding a dozen counts to a case alleging that the lawmaker had acted as an illegal foreign agent on behalf of Egypt. (CNN)
Citing national security concerns, the Biden administration says it will investigate Chinese-made “smart cars” that can gather sensitive information about Americans driving them. (AP)
A former CIA contractor testified that agency interrogators slammed accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, naked, into a wall to try to get him to talk about al-Qaida’s future plans. The CIA wanted Mohammed to stop filibustering his interrogator with talk about how he put together the 9/11 attacks, former CIA contract psychologist James E. Mitchell testified at Guantánamo. (NYTimes)
The U.S. military has stationed members of the Army’s 1st Special Forces Group in Taiwan to conduct continuous training missions in the country. Training was required by the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. (Taiwan News)
A Pentagon study issued Friday found no evidence that any sighting of a UFO involved “extraterrestrial technology” and no “empirical evidence” that the U.S. government and private companies have been reverse-engineering alien tech. As SpyTalk readers know, the truth is out there.
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A great and rich post.