New in SpyWeek: Assassination Escalation
Plots by Russia, India, Iran, Israel, China and the Saudis. We also eyeball a strange frame-up, the FBI's 702 kerfuffle, a FISA Fest and more
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Assassination Contagion: The word “assassination” first appeared in print in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The Bard understood that assassination had the power to change history and fate. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly: If the assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with his surcease success,” Macbeth says, wishing that his plan to murder King Duncan could be over and done and the consequences controlled.
If only. Some 500 years later, assassination as a morbid tool of statecraft is getting a new life, so to speak. And just as Shakespeare warned, the consequences are threatening to spiral out of control.
Recent news that we’ve covered in SpyWeek suggests that we’ve entered a new era where multiple countries have become comfortable using assassinations as a tool of foreign policy. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India and Ukraine have been accused of plotting lethal attacks overseas against adversaries, including their own citizens. An act we once expected from only from Russia, Israel, and, let’s face it, the United States, has now become commonplace.
Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department counterterrorism official, told The Washington Post last year that the fraying of the international order has contributed to a “rise of states that are prepared to use violence, take chances, and violate norms.”
Just this week, Ukraine said that it thwarted another Russian plot to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The plot was allegedly organized by Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, a successor agency of the KGB. Ukraine has fought back with its own wartime hits inside Russia.
By Russian standards, the alleged plot against Zelensky seems almost mundane. Russia has long been using assassinations as a tool of foreign policy, often staging them as theatrical acts of vengeance. Poisoning former spies in England (and domestically, against enemies like Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza) with a Russian nerve agent (and in one case, polonium-laced tea) has allowed Vladimir Putin to project power and thumb his nose at Western democracy and its quaint laws, all while feigning outrage and demanding proof of his complicity. The plane crash that killed Wagner Group commander and onetime mutineer Yevgeny Prighozhin last August was widely considered an assassination. There seems to be a rash of people tumbling out of windows as well.
Israel’s intelligence service viewed assassination as more moral and safe than waging all-out warfare, as best detailed in Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. But the suspected Israeli airstrike last month in Syria that killed Iranian Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi triggered an Iranian missile and drone barrage on the Jewish state that nearly tipped into a larger-scale conflict.
Meanwhile, Canada has accused India’s intelligence service of directing the three men arrested on May 3 in connection with the shooting death of a Sikh separatist leader in British Columbia. The U.S. Justice Department says it prevented the assassination of another Sikh activist in New York, also said to be targeted by Indian intelligence.
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The Justice Department says it thwarted Iran’s effort to hire three members of an Eastern European criminal organization to kill Masih Alinejad, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen and activist living in Brooklyn who has written critically about the Iranian regime’s repression of women.
Then there’s the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia personally approved the assassination.
Beijing, too, has encouraged agents in the U.S. to take out dissidents living here. “In the end, violence would be fine, too,” a Chinese intelligence agent told a contact assigned to neutralize a former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen protests running for a congressional seat in New York in 2022.
Washington steps around the official prohibition on assassinations by calling them targeted killings or unilateral counterterrorism strikes. A U.S. military drone strike in Iraq in February killed a senior leader of an Iran-backed militia group responsible for dozens of recent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. A 2020 drone strike took out Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the legendary leader of the IRGC’s Quds force, during his visit to Baghdad. Another controversial drone strike in Yemen in 2010 killed Anwar Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and Islamic preacher linked to Al Qaeda.
During the Cold War, the CIA ran amok with murder plots against foreign officials, an investigation by the Senate’s Church committee found. It unearthed assassination plots against the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, and, of course, Cuba’s Fidel Castro (multiple times). The CIA also supplied weapons for the 1970 kidnapping of the Chilean army’s commander-in-chief Gen. Rene Schneider, which the plotters used to assassinate him. Three years later, the U.S.-backed military regime of Augusto Pinochet used an American-born agent and Cuban exiles to carry out the car-bombing assassination of a former opposition official living in exile in Washington, D.C., Orlando Letelier, in which a work colleague, Ronni Moffitt, also died. In concert with Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia, the regime ran a global assassination program against opponents abroad called Operation Condor
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At the present time, there’s a difference between killing political dissidents and defectors abroad and wiping out an Iranian officer or a militia leader bent on attacking U.S. troops, but it’s naive to think that India or Iran wouldn’t look at the use of assassination by Russia, Israel, and the United States and think—what’s stopping us from doing the same?
Frame Up Exposed: A former government employee was charged with falsely reporting that seven ex-colleagues, some of whom worked in the intelligence community, took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Federal prosecutors didn’t name the government agency where Miguel Eugenio Zapata worked, but the information he sent to an FBI tipline detailed the security clearance levels and intelligence community ties of his former colleagues. One of them was Zapata’s boss. .
“These tips variously alleged that the government employees and contractors were physically present at or involved in the attack at the Capitol or had shared classified information with individuals and groups present at the riot with the intent to assist these groups in overthrowing the United States government,” according to an FBI affidavit filed in court.
The FBI found that all seven of Zapata’s former colleagues were in Virginia when a mob incited by former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol. Zapata, 37, was arrested May 2 in Chantilly, Virginia.
The document didn’t cite a motive for Zapata to make the false reports about his former co-workers, but one possible explanation is that he was clumsily trying to make a case that U.S. intelligence agencies are riddled with pro-Trump insurrectionists. Or maybe that U.S. intelligence agents were behind the Jan. 6 uprising—a spurious claim by some far-right conspiracists. Or maybe he was just settling old workplace beefs. We’ll have to wait for an explanation.
In one false tip quoted in the FBI affidavit, Zapata wrote that one of his former colleagues “attended the riot insurrection at the Capitol that lead [sic] to the death of multiple people and the wounding of multiple police officers. [He/she] also provided support to domestic terrorist groups like the OathKeepers, Proud Boys and Boogaloos. [He/she] used [his/her] position of trust in the intelligence community to share classified information with these groups in an effort to assist them succeed in overthrowing the government. [He/she] currently works for [an intelligence agency][...] and is actively engaged in leadership meetings that grant [him/her] higher than normally expected access to classified information. [His/her] actions on January 6 directly lead [sic] to and actively contributed to the successful breach of Capitol police barricades through his encrypted communication techniques used on that day.”
Zapata allegedly used “burner” emails and a web anonymizer to submit tips. Investigators also found that Zapata did a Google search for the term “fbi mole” and accessed the website of an Office of Inspector General for an unidentified intelligence agency.
Listen Up: A top FBI official appeared to encourage employees to investigate Americans using a database of information gathered through warrantless wiretapping.
In an April 20 email obtained by Wired, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate encouraged employees "to continue to look for ways to appropriately use U.S. person queries to advance the mission." The FBI says Wired misrepresented the email.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows U.S. counterterrorism agencies to gather communications from U.S.-based tech companies in which a foreigner based overseas is on one end of the conservation.
Congress recently reauthorized the law after a contentious debate, although members of both parties remained concerned that the powerful law was abused to target George Floyd protesters, journalists, and a sitting member of Congress. Under the FISA reauthorization law, FBI employees must obtain prior approval from a supervisor or attorney before they search the database for information on Americans.
“I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to appropriately use U.S. person queries to advance the mission, with the added confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that those queries are fully compliant with the law,” Abbate wrote.
The FBI insists Abbate did not instruct employees to violate the law, a claim that, in any event, Wired did not make.
The FBI reported in March that U.S. person queries fell from 2.9 million in 2021 to just over 57,000 in 2023, a 98 percent drop. Wired noted that the FBI “updated its counting methodology” to count only unique searches.
A U.S. court found last year that the FBI improperly conducted 278,000 improper searches of Section 702 intelligence information over several years. The FBI says reforms have eliminated the vast majority of “unintentional” queries made under Section 702.
Wiretaps Shindig: Speaking of 702, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee threw a party Wednesday night to celebrate the recent extension of the warrantless wiretapping program.
Wired reported that Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and ranking member Jim Hines, D-Conn., hosted a party in the Capitol's reception room to celebrate the FISA reauthorization bill's passage in the House in April.
The bill passed on Speaker Mike Johnson's fourth try after months of wrangling with opponents in the GOP’s Freedom Caucus. Johnson cast the deciding vote that shot down an amendment to the bill by Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. The amendment would have required the FBI to obtain a warrant to query U.S. persons in the 702 database. After a fierce White House lobbying campaign, the amendment failed on a rare tie vote of 212-212.
The event—and we are not making this up—was called “FISA Fest.”
Pocket Litter:
Britain said it would expel Maxim Elovik, Russia’s defense attaché, whom it said was an undeclared military intelligence officer, in response to “reckless and dangerous activities of the Russian government across Europe.” The British government also said it would rescind the diplomatic status of Russia’s Trade and Defence Section in Highgate in north London, which it said had been used for intelligence purposes. (The Record)
Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden is urging Ukraine to keep up missile strikes on Russian oil facilities, no matter concerns that the hits will raise the global cost of petroleum. “Do it. do it, do it,” he tweeted (or X’d).
The final installment of the BBC’s Secrets and Spies: A Nuclear Game, tells the story of double agent Oleg Gordievsky’s escape from Moscow with the help of British intelligence. Operation Pimlico involved, among other things, a diaper change that distracted sniffer dogs from the scent of Gordievsky hiding in a car trunk. (The Telegraph) You can’t see the series in the U.S. yet, due to BBC geo-blocks, but you can get around it with a high-quality VPN.
Two political strategists close to Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, have agreed to plead guilty to conspiring with the congressman to launder more than $200,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijan-controlled oil company to “positively influence U.S. foreign policies for Azerbaijan.” Federal prosecutors struck plea deals with Colin Strother and Florencio "Lencho" Rendon to ensure their cooperation in the investigation of Cuellar. A classified information security officer has been assigned, which means that the case will drag on for some time. (Houston Chronicle)
The Polish Embassy in London posted videos of nine rare interviews with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack the German ENIGMA cryptographic machine during World War II. Without Rejewski’s mathematical breakthrough, the Allies may never have been able to read the German code. (Flying Penguin)
The America First Policy Institute released a new policy book laying out the national security agenda in a possible Trump second term. Suggested policies include making future military aid to Ukraine contingent on the country participating in peace talks with Russia and banning Chinese nationals from buying property within a 50-mile radius of U.S. government buildings. (AP)
Former Cyber Command chief Gen. Paul Nakasone says the U.S. is not doing enough to thwart foreign hackers who are undermining national security. He’s calling for a “full-time surge” that would harness diplomacy, business partnerships and technical know-how to thwart the threat. The goal would be to extend “the same type of work we do for our election security” to all cybercrime. (Bloomberg)
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President Trump did not incite anybody; his words were to "peacefully protest" which is what most of us did. And do note he offered National Guard support which was declined by Muriel Bowser. Overall an excellent article, marred by this significant inaccuracy.