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A CIA Code of Ethics, Israel’s AI-targeting system, Team Biden's use of secrets and vindication for CIA formers on Russia election influence lead this week's roundup.
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Pound for Pound: Ever wonder how much the Kremlin pays for friendly commentary in major US media outlets? According to leaked documents from a European intelligence agency, it can run as much as $39,000. That works out to 26 cents per lie.
The Washington Post was shown some 100 documents to expose the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. These “information psychological operations,” as Moscow calls them, provide a fascinating window into the surprisingly high-tech world of Russian disinformation.
The documents contain price lists for planting pro-Russian commentary in prominent Western media and for paying social media “influencers” in the United States and Europe “willing to work with Russian clients.” A note attached to the price list states, “Practically everywhere this will be columnists, leaders of public opinion, former diplomats, officials, professors and so on.” The documents did not say whether or how much the effort had been successful.
The trove of leaked documents included a "disinformation dashboard" that gets reviewed in nearly weekly meetings at the Kremlin to measure the success of its “information psychological operations” targeting Ukraine.
NewsGuard, a website founded by former U.S. media executives that aims to provide tools to counter disinformation, translated the dashboard and found it measures "goals" such as discrediting the Ukraine government, dividing the elite in that country, demoralizing the Ukrainian armed forces, and creating divisions among the Ukrainian population.
“In the West, sophisticated dashboards like these are associated with data scientists helping researchers to cure diseases or marketing professionals buying and gauging responses to advertisements,” NewsGuard wrote. “For the Kremlin, resources are instead devoted to building a world-class, interactive disinformation productivity chart.”
The leaked documents show that employees at troll farms earned 60,000 rubles a month, or $660, for writing 100 comments a day. If you assume 25 workdays per month, NewsGuard says, that works out to 26 cents per lie.
Best Russian Stunt of the Week: Intel Drop, a notorious pro-Kremlin disinformation website with a long history of fabricating stories aimed at disparaging Ukraine, amplified a purported “confession” video on an obscure YouTube channel alleging that Russian authorities foiled a plot by Ukraine to assassinate Tucker Carlson. The claims, viewed millions of times on X, were debunked by Olga Robinson of BBC Verify.
Israel’s Gospel: “Your mobile phone is the spy. And it’s not just any spy. It’s a lethal spy.” That warning comes from an unexpected ally of the cause of cell phone privacy, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. As SpyTalk’s Jonathan Broder reported in his not-to-be-missed report on the high-tech intelligence tools that Israel uses to target its foes, Nasrallah’s speech marked the first public acknowledgment of Israel’s technological prowess by a regional adversary.
The Hezbollah chief warned his audience that Israeli intelligence had hacked into the databases of Arab telecommunications firms and vacuumed up millions of telephone numbers, as well as the names and IP addresses of their subscribers, Broder reported. Armed with that information, Nasrallah advised that the Israelis could take remote control of their targets’ cell phones and gain access to emails, texts, photos, and passwords. They could also turn the phone into an eavesdropping device by switching on its microphone.
There’s more. A “sophisticated AI targeting platform” developed by the Israelis can use a cellphone to provide precise coordinates on a targeting package. The AI-assisted target creation platform is called Gospel (Habsora in Hebrew). It’s capable of generating targets at astonishing speed. And it’s made Gaza a much deadlier place.
Department of Strategic Declassification: The best propaganda, journalist Edward Murrow once said, is the truth. For some time now, as America’s adversaries flooded the world with distortions and lies, the Biden White House has been wielding a new tool to push back against disinformation and rebuild public trust: Making secrets public.
Time magazine’s intelligence ace Massimo Calabresi reported that the White House has built a “broad program” to declassify secrets when it serves U.S. strategic interests. About once a week, White House officials see intelligence they want to make public and get approval from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Once approved, officials fill out a template that includes details such as the date of the request, the deadline, what the cleared language would be, and the justification for declassification. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence handles the requests and sometimes receives one or two downgrade requests daily.
The motivation behind the program is that it works, Calabresi reports. “Strategic declassification” denied Russian President Vladimir Putin the false narratives he was concocting to justify the Ukraine invasion, for example. Since then, the effort has expanded to blunt Chinese saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait ahead of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. It was also used to pressure Iran to stop supplying weapons to the Houthis attacking shipping vessels in the Red Sea. The administration twice downgraded intelligence about Hamas’ use of a Gaza hospital as a military command center.
The program has gotten some pushback from the intelligence officers who classified the secrets in the first place. Don’t ask for declassification of full reports, they said Request individual facts, maps, or graphics. The White House has learned to tailor its requests to ease those concerns.
Vindication: The 51 former intelligence officers who signed a much-criticized letter warning of Russia’s information operations during the 2020 election feel vindicated, thanks to the arrest of Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant charged with pushing a lie in 2020 saying Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, took $10 million in bribes from Ukraine. The case “validates exactly what we were warning about,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a 26-year CIA veteran and one of the letter signers, told NBC. After Smirnov’s arrest on Feb. 14, he “admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about” Hunter Biden, prosecutors said.
Polymeropoulos and other intelligence veterans signed and published the letter in 2020 in the wake of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The “arrival” of emails via the laptop related to Hunter Biden’s time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” they declared, while not challenging the authenticity of the emails. Still, a report by the GOP-led House Judiciary and Intelligence committees called the spooks’ letter “a political operation to help elect Vice President Biden in the 2020 presidential election.”
A federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Smirnov jailed indefinitely on Monday. A local magistrate judge had initially ordered Smirnov released on bail in Las Vegas.
On Friday, House GOP committee leaders Jim Jordan and James Comer asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide information showing which criminal cases made use of information provided by Smirnov. Jordan and Comer also want to know how much the FBI paid Smirnov over his 14 years as an informant. The FBI had assured Congress in June that Smirnov was “highly credible.”
Gitmo’s Secret CIA ‘Mailman’: “A criminal investigator with the U.S. Army this week revealed previously unknown details about how the government handles defense requests to interview covert CIA officers who have knowledge of detainee abuse at foreign black sites,” the legal news site LAWDRGON reports. “Special Agent James Hodgson testified that he served as a ‘glorified mailman’ by delivering letters from one of the 9/11 defense teams to select CIA officers after the government prohibited the teams from independently contacting CIA witnesses. The CIA officers' identities have not been disclosed; they are known in court by ‘unique functional identifiers,’ or UFIs.”
Ethics of Spying: We promised you we would have more to say on the subject of ethics in spying. How does an intelligence service that employs deception, manipulation, exploitation, eavesdropping, and computer hacking remain ethical? We asked CIA public affairs if the case officers in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations responsible for recruiting spies had a code of ethics to follow and, if so, could we see it.
The CIA Public Affairs office provided us with a summary of the Code of Ethics for the D.O., which we’ve posted below. It’s the first time as far as we know that it’s ever been made public. Here it is.
Summary of the Professional Code of Ethics of the Directorate of Operations
DO Mission: The Directorate of Operations must operate anywhere to conduct espionage and enable U.S. strategic advantage. We honor our commitment to the American people to conduct our clandestine activities effectively and in conformity with the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
We adhere to the DO Professional Code of Ethics in the conduct of our work in the field, in our dealings with our customers and those charged with directing or overseeing our activities, and in our dealings with one another.
INTEGRITY: We are only as good as our word and actions. We conduct ourselves with the highest standards of personal honesty and integrity, even when doing so places us at personal or professional risk. We do not employ the methods of our craft for personal gain.
LOYALTY: We honor our oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and to protect our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We are likewise loyal to all those engaged with us in achieving our mission – our assets, our partners, and our colleagues. Considerations of personal integrity may come into conflict with these obligations, and dissent must be expressed openly and honestly.
PROFESSIONALISM: We uphold the following distinct attributes of professionalism as they apply to the Directorate of Operations:
Discretion: We protect sources and methods of intelligence collection while meeting the needs of our customers for intelligence and policy support. We keep secrets but never let secrecy become a cult or a mindless reflex.
Discipline: We are committed to our strategic goals. We are deliberate, intentional, and exercise patience.
Risk-Taking: We accept the dangers inherent in our business while carefully distinguishing between failures that result from sloppiness or error and those that are the occasional, but inevitable, consequence of judicious, calculated risk.
Creativity: We solve problems and seize opportunities. We are agile, curious, and innovative.
Accountability: We take responsibility for our actions and our conduct.
Anonymity: We do not call attention to ourselves. The need for secrecy makes external recognition impossible. We understand that our mission comes first and is greater than we are.
Excellence: We are an elite organization. We expect excellence in our people, our craft, and our product, always striving to better ourselves and our performance.
Commitment to Service: We serve our nation, our people, and our mission; this is key to our motivation and our professional concept of ourselves.
What jumps out at you? What’s missing? (We know something is missing, as this is described as a summary.) Send us your thoughts.
Pocket Litter:
Manuel Rocha, a career U.S. diplomat and former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, said he plans to plead guilty to charges that he worked as a spy for Cuba, in a deal that requires him to divulge all he knows about its espionage operations. The 73-year-old Rocha will be sentenced on April 12. (AP)
End around: The Biden administration plans to ask a court to extend the life of a controversial wireless surveillance program into April 2025, bypassing a heated debate in Congress over the future of a powerful eavesdropping law. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 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. Conservatives and Democrats in Congress say the program is in serious need of reform to curtail abuses. (NYTimes)
Reporters are lucky if they learn the existence of a foreign spy base financed and partially equipped by the CIA. The New York Times got to tour one. And that was just one of the revelations in a front-page investigation into the years-long partnership between the CIA and Ukrainian intelligence. There’s more that SpyTalk Editor-in-Chief Jeff Stein covers in his piece on the article, which you can read here.
Netflix this week released American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, a four-part documentary that digs into the unfinished work of the journalist who was found dead under curious circumstances. The series picks up the trail left by reporter Danny Casolaro, whom police said committed suicide while investigating ties between the Department of Justice and a technology company called INSLAW. (Netflix)
An Iranian political scientist charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Tehran in the U.S. filed a $50 million lawsuit against the Iranian government. Lotfolah Kaveh Afrasiabi claims that former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif lied to him about the legality of the $36,000-a-year job Afrasiabi held as a “consultant” job to Iran’s UN Mission from 2007 to 2021. (The Daily Beast)
The “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia issued a public warning about tactics Russian government hackers are using to gain access to cloud computing accounts. (NCSC)
Is there something we missed? Or something you would like to see more of? Send your tips, corrections, and thoughts to SpyTalk@protonmail.com.
What's missing: While it may be necessary to misrepresent facts to foreign entities in order to fulfill operational requirements, statements released publicly must only and always be truthful and unambiguous.