New in SpyWeek: Subverting House Intel
Plus the Ritter riddle, the Grayzone kerfuffle, Israeli psywar vs US, natsec fretting about a Trump return, and more
Hens and Foxes: Mike Johnson’s appointments of Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA) and Ronny Jackson (R-TX) to serve on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is “like putting Bonnie and Clyde in charge of bank security,” former panel member Eric Swalwell (D-CA) said on CNN this week. The House Speaker reportedly didn’t give HPSCI chair Mike Turner (R-OH) a heads up, much less seek his approval for the nods, which were said to have come at the behest of Donald Trump, whom readers may remember was indicted in Florida last year for essentially stealing classified documents.
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The A.P. summed up the problems with the two nominees, who will have access to highly sensitive information about U.S. and allied intelligence operations in their oversight roles, including details about U.S. and foreign operatives putting their lives on the line for U.S. intelligence.
Perry, a cog in the Stop the Steal caper, “was ordered by a federal judge last year to turn over more than 1,600 texts and emails to FBI agents investigating efforts to keep Trump in office after his 2020 election loss and illegally block the transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden,” the A.P. reported.
Former White House physician Jackson, meanwhile, elected to the House in 2020, long ago won notoriety for “his over-the-top pronouncements about Trump's health,” the A.P. noted. He was subsequently nominated by Trump to be V.A. secretary, but had to withdraw “amid allegations of professional misconduct,” the A.P. recounted.
“An internal investigation at the Department of Defense later concluded that Jackson made ‘sexual and denigrating’ comments about a female subordinate, violated the policy on drinking alcohol on a presidential trip and took prescription-strength sleeping medication that prompted worries from his colleagues about his ability to provide proper medical care.” Other than that, he’s a great fit for “the island of misfit toys,” as former CIA chief of staff Larry Pfeiffer has long called the committee.
More Jitters: For years now, a chorus of past top national security officials, Republicans and Democratic appointees alike, have been wringing their hands at the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House. The latest iteration of such jitters came this week from NBC News national security reporter Dan De Luce, who reported that former intelligence officers, Western officials and lawmakers are worried that Trump could turn America’s spy services into weapons of retribution against his detractors, just as President Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal. The Republican candidate has not been shy about unleashing the Justice Department against his foes.
They ‘re also concerned, De Luce said, that Trump might ignore or skew intelligence findings to curry favor with authoritarian leaders, as he did in 2018 at his Helsinki Summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, where he publicly sided with Putin’s denials of Russian interference in U.S. elections over the findings of his own intelligence community. De Luce also noted that Western officials are concerned that, if elected, the isolationist Trump could undermine intelligence sharing with longstanding U.S. allies, some of whom he’s publicly berated for not ponying up enough to NATO.
These officials point to Trump’s record during and after his first term. It includes his public castigation of the intelligence services, as well as his leaking highly classified information about Middle East terrorists to senior Russian officials during a White House meeting. Then there’s that little matter of top secret documents he squirreled away in Mar-a-Lago. Former intelligence officials told De Luce they fear such behavior portends “irreparable damage” to U.S. spy agencies if Trump wins a second term.
“I’m very concerned. And I think almost every one of my former colleagues and current colleagues in the intelligence community are very concerned,” a former national security official who served during Trump’s first term told De Luce.
This official added: “I haven’t talked to a single senior person who said, ‘Oh, it’s overblown. Don’t worry, he’ll be fine.”
The Ritter Riddle:
Remember Scott Ritter? During the long run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ritter, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector, emerged as a self-righteous but credible critic of the George W. Bush administration’s inexorable march toward war. It was Ritter who loudly—and, as it turned out, accurately—insisted that the administration’s claim of a hidden Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was actually a phony pretense to invade the country and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.
But as Washington’s pliant foreign policy establishment dutifully lined up behind the administration, Ritter’s relentless skepticism earned him only widespread mockery in both the corridors of power and in much of the media.
Yet once the war ended in 2011 with Bush ’s WMD claims thoroughly discredited, Ritter never received the public vindication his defenders say he deserved. That’s largely because that same year, he was publicly disgraced as a convicted sex offender and went to prison for two and half years.
After his release in 2014, Ritter kept himself out of the public eye. But soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he resurfaced on social media, this time as an outspoken Kremlin apologist.
Parroting the official Russian line, he blamed the April massacre of scores of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha on Ukrainian forces, a claim that got him briefly suspended from Twitter. His support for the Russian “special operation” narrative earned him slots as a regular paid commentator for Russia’s government-controlled media outlets Russia Today TV (RT) and Sputnik, where he compared Ukraine’s treatment of Russians to the Nazis ‘ treatment of Jews and described Ukraine as a “rabid dog” that needed to be put down. Since then , Ritter also has contributed commentary to Iran’s government-controlled PressTV, defending the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and castigating U.S. support for the Jewish state.
Now Ritter is back in the news again, this time as a self-declared First Amendment martyr.
Earlier this week, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol police at Kennedy International Airport in New York plucked Ritter from a line of passengers boarding a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul and seized his passport.
“I was boarding the flight. Three officers pulled me aside. They took my passport,” Ritter told Russia Today. “When asked why, they said, ‘Orders of the State Department.’ They had no further information for me. They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.”
Such actions by police raise a host of legal issues. Asked why Ritter was removed from his flight, a State Department spokesperson referred such questions to the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS press office did not respond to SpyTalk’s repeated requests for comment.
The State Department spokesperson also declined to say why Ritter’s passport was seized, citing privacy concerns for its official silence.
“Due to privacy considerations, we cannot share information about the passport status of private U.S. citizens without their consent,” the spokesperson said in an email. “There are situations where a U.S. passport may be revoked. These include, but are not limited to, laws and regulations affecting passport usage by individuals with active warrants or criminal records, fraud concerns, tax debt, and child support arrears.”
Ritter, who was on his way to Russia to speak at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, said he has no doubt as to why officials removed him from the flight and confiscated his passport. Speaking on Russia Today, he said he was “100 percent certain” that the State Department was punishing him for his support for Russia and “afraid” of what he would say at the St. Petersburg forum, which is now underway and titled, “The Foundations of a Multipolar World”—a favorite theme of Russian President Vladimir Putin as he challenges the U.S.-dominated rules-based global order.
Ritter said he also had planned to speak at a security conference in Moscow and then visit several Russian regions to provide in-depth commentary on Russian life. He added that he had notified U.S. authorities of his travel plans, as he was legally required to do as a result of his conviction.
“I am thinking they’ve freaked out,” he said of U.S. officials. “They saw ‘St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.’ They saw ‘Moscow International Security Conference.’ And they said: ‘Shut this thing down.’ And that’s what they did.”
Speaking a day after the incident on former Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom'' YouTube podcast, Ritter said he also suspected that U.S. officials prevented him from traveling to Russia on the advice of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, a U.S.-funded agency within the office of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He claimed the center had placed him at the top of a list of so-called “information terrorists” to be “hunted down and brought to justice.” SpyTalk confirmed the Ukrainian agency has placed Ritter on a list of what it calls “Russian propagandists.”
It is important to note that whatever one might think of Ritter’s views on Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or U.S. foreign policy, he enjoys as a U.S. citizen the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, as well as protection from “unreasonable searches and seizures” promised by the Fourth Amendment. Ritter’s freedom of travel is also protected under the Privileges and Immunities clause in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Ritter said he plans to file suit for the return of his passport.
Grayzone’s Gray Zone: In another instance of American commentators spreading misinformation, this time for both Russia and Iran as part of those countries’ respective — and sometimes overlapping —foreign influence operations, The Washington Post on June 2 broke a jolting story that focused on top editors at The Grayzone, an online news site.
Citing hacked emails and other documents from Iran’s PressTV, the Post reported that the Tehran-funded media outlet had paid thousands of dollars to Wyatt Reed, The Grayzone’s current managing editor, while he was also working for Russia’s state-owned Sputnik online news site.
The paper added that The Grayzone’s founder Max Blumenthal is a regular commentator on the state-owned Russia Today TV network, which paid his way to Moscow in 2015 to attend a gala dinner celebrating the network that included appearances by Putin; Michael Flynn, who served briefly as former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser; and perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Blumenthal has become a divisive figure in Washington for his virulent anti-Israel screeds which pre-date the current Gaza war. He also has given credence to Russia’s false claim that it was Ukrainian forces, not Russians, who bombed a Mariupol theater full of refugees in 2022, and that Kiev harbors neo-Nazis
Payments to ostensibly independent American pundits from both Russian and Iranian state-controlled media have heightened concerns among disinformation experts that foreign influence operations targeting the upcoming U.S. elections are becoming harder to pinpoint and track. These experts say that a country’s successful planting of disinformation in a U.S. publication is one way to provide cover for its influence operations, allowing it to avoid the identification of its material as coming from a state-controlled media outlet.
“What you are reporting is, I think, the most practical example of that convergence we’ve seen, where you have someone who has deep ties to Iranian state media working for an organization that we also know is a destination for narrative laundering from Russia,” Emerson Brooking, co-director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, told the Post’s Joseph Menn.
Neither Reed nor Blumenthal responded to the Post’s requests for comment. But after the Post’s article was published, Reed acknowledged some of his work for Iran’s PressTV on X. Blumenthal also tweeted that Reed worked for Press TV in 2020, three years before he joined The Grayzone.
“Since joining The Grayzone in June 2023, Wyatt has not accepted a penny from any government-backed outlet,” Blumenthal wrote on his site. Calling the Post story “malicious,” he charged that “The @washingtonpost is trying to get Wyatt Reed jailed for doing journalism. And it’s smearing The Grayzone for journalism he did before ever joining our team…The Grayzone is funded by our readers, not by Iran or Russia.”
The Post noted that in addition to Reed, two other Graystone journalists also have worked for Russian media outlets. They include London-based writer Mohamed Elmaazi, whose LinkedIn profile says he worked for Sputnik from 2019 to 2021, and Jeremy Loffredo, who worked full-time at Russia Today during the same time period, according to his LinkedIn profile. Neither responded to the Post’s requests for comment.
While the Post said there is no evidence that Russia and Iran coordinated their payments to Reed, the paper noted that Russia and China probably collaborated in spreading false claims on social media of a U.S. plot to overthrow the government of the Solomon Islands ahead of its election in March. Chinese media outlets also now echo Russia’s view of the Ukraine war, including false claims about U.S. bioweapons research in Ukraine, which Beijing has cited to further allege U.S. responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Many foreign governments collectively view the West, and the U.S. in particular, as a shared adversary,” Darren Linvill, a misinformation scholar at Clemson University, told the Post. “They share not only goals, but also tactics with one another. Parallel agendas shared by some non-Western governments makes attribution of responsibility for some disinformation more difficult than it would otherwise be.”
Israeli PsyWar Targets US: We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the discovery of yet another influence operation underway in the United States—this one a secret Israel effort targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public to encourage support for its war in Gaza.
The New York Times’ Sheera Frenkel, citing both Israeli officials involved in the operation and related documents, reported that the Israeli government paid $2 million to a Tel Aviv marketing firm last year to execute the operation, which involved the creation of hundreds of fake accounts on X, Facebook and Instagram and used ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot, to post pro-Israel comments. In addition, the paper said the operation also created three fake English-language news sites that posted pro-Israel articles.
The fake social media accounts posing as fictional American students, concerned citizens and local constituents, targeted more than a dozen members of Congress, focusing mainly on Black Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia. The fake posts urged the lawmakers to support continued funding for Israel’s military, the paper reported.
The operation, which began last October and remains active on X, underscored the Israeli government’s concerns about a possible erosion of U.S. support as it launched its invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas in retaliation to the Islamist Palestinian terror group’s Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1, 200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostage.
Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, resulting in widespread destruction and tens of thousands of civilian deaths, has outraged many Americans, particularly progressive Democrats, who are pressuring President Biden to halt arms shipments to Israel. Last month, Biden paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs and artillery shells to Israel, but all other U.S. deliveries of weapons, ordnance and ammunition have continued to flow to the Jewish state. It was a U.S.-made bomb that obliterated a U.N. school in central Gaza on June 6, killing “dozens of people inside,” according to The Washington Post.
Social media experts say the clandestine Israeli influence operation is the first documented case of such an intelligence effort in the United States, although many observers believe that there likely have been others when U.S. and Israeli interests have clashed in the past. As with all allegations of any kind of secret intelligence operations, the Israeli government’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which commissioned and funded the influence operation, denied any involvement, the Times said.
Liar’s Poker: Meanwhile, it’s hard to see how the Israeli operation is going to win any supporters at the White House or among many Democrats in the wake of a new CIA assessment that concludes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likely believes he can resist Biden’s pressure to end the Gaza war and produce a post-conflict plan for the decimated Palestinian enclave.
The Israeli leader “probably believes he can maintain support from his security chiefs and prevent defections” from his far-right wing coalition government by discussing the future of Gaza in “vague terms,” the June 3 analysis reads, according to CNN, which reviewed the document.
The CIA assessment essentially takes Netanyahu at his word — that he will only begin to seriously address post-war issues after meeting “what he sees as key security benchmarks, which may take months.” Those benchmarks, the assessment says, include completing “major military operations” in Gaza and killing top Hamas’ military commander Mohammed Deif, who is believed to be still directing the group’s resistance from its warren of tunnels deep beneath the Gaza Strip.
Kushner’s “Betrayal”: SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff produced a nice scoop with his June 4 story about a disturbing aspect to that $500 million deal between Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners investment fund and Serbia’s pro-Russian government to develop a high-end real estate project in downtown Belgrade on the site of a Serbian military building that was destroyed by NATO bombs during the 1999 Kosovo war.
The deal includes Kushner’s commitment to build a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression”—a thinly veiled allusion to the U.S.-backed bombing campaign that forced the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to halt its murderous military campaign against Kosovo’s breakaway ethnic Albanians. Milosevic was later Indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and extradited to the Hague, where he died of a heart attack in 2006 before his trial concluded.
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the Kosovo war, told Isikoff that Kushner’s pledge to build a memorial officially portraying Serbians as the victims of NATO aggression represents nothing less than “a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.” Clark added that the deal between Kushner’s firm and the Serbian government of pro-Russian hardliner Aleksander Vučić , also serves the Kremlin’s campaign to undermine NATO at a time when the Western alliance is helping Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion.
“This is part of a broader Russian intelligence movement to split, discredit and weaken NATO,” Clark told SpyTalk. “It’s Russian pushback. . . . Should Kushner participate in this? Of course he should not.”
Neither Kushner nor his Miami-based Affinity Partners responded to Isikoff’s inquiries about the deal, which could present potential conflicts of interest if Kushner’s father-in-law Trump is elected president in November. The New York Times recently reported that Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to Germany, acting director of national intelligence and special envoy to the Balkans, is a partner in Kushner’s Belgrade real estate project. A fan of the Serbs, he also hopes to become secretary of state in a second Trump administration.
Pocket Litter:
Israeli security officials disclosed they foiled a Hamas suicide bombing plot that was directed from Turkey. Unlike other NATO members which view Hamas as a terrorist organization, Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan, leader of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Justice and Development Party, has permitted the group to operate a headquarters in Istanbul since 2011 and provides passports to top Hamas operatives, including its political chief Ismail Haniyeh. (Times of Israel)
Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban interior minister and one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, paid an official visit to the United Arab Emirates on June 4, meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Emirates leader and a close U.S. ally. Their meeting underscored international divisions on how to deal with Taliban, who seized control of Afghanistan in 2021 and reimposed draconian Islamic restrictions of Afghan women and girls. The west has refused to recognize their government, and Haqqani still has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head for his role as leader of the Haqqani network, a powerful Afghan militia responsible for some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. forces during the 20-year Afghan war. Charles Lister, an expert on the region at the Middle East Institute, said Haqqani’s visit would “ruffle big feathers” in Washington, but the State Department reaction was muted. “We understand the complex relationship countries have with the Taliban, particularly those in the region,” a spokesperson told the Associated Press. “We remain in active communication with all of our partners on how to constructively engage the Taliban.” (Associated Press)
In the biggest sting operation in its history, the FBI ran its own encrypted phone company by agreeing to a lighter sentence for its creator, a tech-savvy criminal who enjoyed unassailable street cred with other criminals. The phones, which the FBI monitored, became the communications device of choice for one drug kingpin, leading to his arrest. (Joseph Cox in Wired)
National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid will step down in July, DNI Avril Haines confirmed on June 5. Haines said Abizaid will be replaced by Brett Holmgren, whose two decades in the intelligence community include senior positions at the CIA, Pentagon and the White House. He is currently the assistant secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. (Sasha Ingber on X)
A bill that would bolster weak state laws regulating the actions of private armed militias such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys is languishing in the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee. Introduced in January by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to prevent a repeat of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the measure would make it a federal crime for members of an armed militia to inerrupt government operations; pose as law enforcement officers or publicly display harmful or lethal techniques. Penalties would range from one year in prison for victimless violations to life imprisonment for lethal offenses. (H.R. 6981)
Japanese fighter jets scrambled last week to intercept a new Chinese spy drone flying for the first time over the East China Sea north of Okinawa, Japan’s Defense Ministry said. In response, the Wing Loong-10 (no pun apparently intended), which also has offensive capabilities, turned back toward the Chinese mainland without violating Japanese airspace. The attempted probe comes as U.S. forces on Okinawa are building up their fleet of surveillance drones to monitor Chinese threats to Taiwan. (Stars and Stipes)
Regular SpyWeek columnist Seth Hattena is off this week. SpyTalk Editor-in-chief Jeff Stein contributed to this edition.
If only there were a TV outlet (Fox180) which ran verifiable stories 24/7 on the scurrilous characters, operations and lifestyles in the Trump-World and Putin-World networks, it could engage and turn a large swath of the public, here and abroad, into educated viewers/voters who would be repulsed by what they see and hear. This audience would then understand the big cons, and no one likes being conned.
A first for me: I found this weekly unsatisfactory. First, "Hens and Foxes" failed to mention what I think is the most damaging aspect of Perry's and Jackson's appointment to HPSCI -- foreign governments sharing of sensitive information, particularly HUMINT with us. I don't think it is a stretch to believe that after these appointments our international partners will reconsider what they will and will not provide to us. Second, maybe it should, but removing a passport from a convicted sex-offender spouting Russian propaganda does not ring 1st Amendment alarm bells for me.