New in SpyWeek: Trump's Not So Civil War with Obama's CIA, FBI and DoJ
Key targets of Tulsi Gabbard's attack on the CIA-led 2017 report on Russian election interference fired back this week as purges of suspect CIA, ODNI, FBI, and DoJ officials and agents continued
Welcome to SpyWeek, our weekly intel news roundup, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations. Seth Hettena is off this week
Sylvester Ghosted: A celebrated head of CIA clandestine operations, Tom Sylvester, who has been described as one of the most gifted intelligence officers of his generation, was slated to head up London Station as a kind of parting gift after decades of outstanding service—until somebody in Trumpworld got wind of his staunch support for Ukraine and NATO. “Mr. Sylvester’s appointment was pulled after Foreign Policy magazine published excepts from a new book, “The Mission,” that included quotes from him,” the New York Times reported last Monday. “He was quoted talking about the importance of intelligence sharing with Ukraine beginning in 2014 and the agency’s efforts to cement partnerships with European allies.“ CIA Director John Ratcliffe pulled Sylvester’s ticket to London, perhaps the agency's most important station and one typically headed by a highly regarded veteran officer, in favor of “a younger CIA officer who is aligned with the agency’s new, more aggressive approach on recruiting sources and running clandestine operations,” said one official, probably from the agency’s public relations office. Sylvester, highly skilled as an agent recruiter, will instead retire, the Times said.
“The C.I.A. is not shooting itself in the foot; it’s shooting itself in the head,” Tim Weiner, author of The Mission, was quoted as saying. “Ratcliffe is a political ideologue, and ideology is the enemy of intelligence. He has just keelhauled one of the best C.I.A. officers of his generation. Tom Sylvester helped Ukraine survive after Russia invaded, among other achievements. That seems to be one reason why he’s been sacrificed.” Over at CODEWORD, his own new web site, Weiner wrote that “John Ratcliffe has just drafted the first paragraph of his obituary. It will read something like this: ‘…regarded as the worst director of the Central Intelligence Agency in history….’”
FBI Purge: The Trump administration's drive to purge U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies of anyone deemed insufficiently loyal continues. One senior FBI counteintellgence specialist, Michael Feinberg, ousted recently from his job as Assistant Agent in Charge of the Norfolk, Va, office, compared the house cleaning to Soviet-style purges furom Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin. “What the FBI reminds me of now, as somebody who's worked counterintelligence for his whole career, is honestly what the KGB or its forerunner, the NKVD, would have looked like after one of the politburo's ideological purges…or what China's MSS would have looked like after one of the pretextual corruption hunts that have gone on in that country over the past decade or so,” Feinberg said on the July 24 SpyTalk podcast. “I don't know how you could look at 20th century history and compare it to anything else. Individuals are being forced out or placed in positions…far from the action, simply because maybe they were appointed by Chris Ray.” A number of agents have been assigned to “stand around” while ICE agents carry out deportation raids, he said.
Loomer Again: The NSA’s top lawyer, April Falcon Doss, was abruptly removed from her post last Friday after far right conspiracy theorist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer put her in her sights. Apparently Doss’s sin was that she’d previously worked on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff. Previously, NSA Director Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, and his deputy, Wendy Noble, were removed after Loomer complained about them as disloyal. In February, DNI Gabbard ordered the dismissal of more than 100 NSA employees who she said had “participated in an explicit chat group on classified computers.” (New York Times)
Political Intelligence: An aide to DNI Tulsi Gabbard who helped skewer intelligence in line with White House dissembling about Venezuela and the Tren de Aragua criminal gang has been rewarded with an appointment to run the National Counterterrorism Center. Joe Kent’s nomination, approved Wednesday in a 52-48 party line vote, was lamented by Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va), who said “the Senate missed an opportunity to hold the Trump administration accountable for openly politicizing intelligence—a precedent that, if left unchecked, threatens to erode trust in our intelligence agencies, compromise the integrity of national security assessments, and ultimately make Americans less safe.” As with the FBI, the Trump administration wants the NCTC to focus more on drug cartels and deportation ops.
Shots Fired: Obama-era intelligence officials involved in the IC’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election began firing back this week at accusations by Gabbard and Ratcliffe that they “manufactured” “intelligence to make it appear that Russia intervened on Trump’s side “when they knew it was untrue.” DNI James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan called the accusation “patently false” and accused them of seeking to “rewrite history.” Former CIA counterintelligence chief Susan Miller, a principal author of the 2017 report, repeated her defense of the process, made originally in a July 16 SpyTalk interview, to the Guardian and other news outlets and said she had hired Mark Zaid, a prominent Washington, D.C. attorney with decades of experience defending CIA officers, to represent her. Amid the ruckus on Friday night, meanwhile, HBO Real Time host Bill Maher played a brief 2018 clip of Putin admitting his predilection for Trump. Asked at the notorious Helsinki press conference with Trump whether he favored him in the 2016 election, Putin said “Yes, I did.” Did he want Trump to win? “Yes, I did.”
Beat Down: Former CIA Director Bill Burns lamented at a formal dinner last weekend that his former colleagues “face badly misguided attacks, attacks that take gain by the imaginary deep state and leave behind the wreckage of a weak state that is less able to stand up for American interests, less able to stand against our adversaries and less able to stand with our allies.” (Sasha Inger/HUMINT) In May The Washington Post reported on Trump administration plans to radically downsize U.S. intelligence by cutting ”1200 positions at the CIA, along with thousands more from other parts of the U.S. intelligence community.”
Moscow Mules: What’s old is new again when it comes to reports on Russia’s century long espionage campaigns against the West. Reuters reports that one of the Kremlin’s “premier cyber espionage units is deploying malware against embassies and diplomatic organizations in Moscow by leveraging local internet service providers,” according to an investigation by Microsoft. “The analysis confirms for the first time that Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, is conducting cyber espionage at the ISP level, according to findings from Microsoft Threat Intelligence.” In the depths of the Cold War, Soviet intelligence beamed microwaves at American embassy windows in an effort to eavesdrop on conversations, and famously recruited a U.S. Marine embassy guard to spy on U.S. diplomats. And just this past week, a USSR-born Wisconsin man pled guilty to four counts of smuggling “scientific and diagnostic research equipment components to Russia.” So it goes.
Tehran Threats: In an unusual joint statement on Thursday, Britain and 13 allies including the U.S. and France condemned “what they called a surge in assassination, kidnapping and harassment plots by Iranian intelligence services targeting individuals in Europe and North America.” (Reuters)
CIA’s Spooky Afghans: How do you infiltrate terrorist groups if none of its members will talk to an American? That's long been a challenge for the CIA in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. In Kabul, the agency created a “unit that didn’t exist” composed of off-the-books Afghans, according to a fascinating report by Jack Murphy and Sean Naylor in their Substack newsletter The High Side. But they faced a particularly sticky wicket in 2016 when they had a chance to recruit Pakistani militant Mati-ur Rehman, “a wanted man, in more ways than one.” Rehman had blood on his hands, most prominently that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whom Rehman helped Al Qaeda’s Khalid Sheik Mohammed decapitate in Karachi in 2001. “The FBI wanted to convict him. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani allegedly wanted to kill him. And the CIA’s Kabul station wanted to recruit him,” Murphy and Naylor write. You’ll want to read to the end.
Summer Bookshelf: Our friend Mark M. Lowenthal, an esteemed former deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence, assistant CIA director, and staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, is out with his monumental Vigilance Is Not Enough: A History of United States Intelligence. We wish we’d gotten to it in May, when Yale University Press issued it, but suffice it to say it’s the ultimate word on 250 years of American spycraft. “Mark Lowenthal’s magisterial history of US intelligence drives home what James Bond movies distort: intelligence is a service function, and all the spying and eavesdropping are means to the end of helping political leaders frame wiser policies,” blurbed Gregory Treverton, a former chair of the National Intelligence Council (and SpyTalk podcast guest). “And as a sometime insider, he knows that whether intelligence matters depends very much on the proclivities of senior officials, especially the president, from George Washington, who ‘outspied’ the British in winning the Revolutionary war, to Donald Trump, who mostly ignore(s) intelligence.”
“ideology is the enemy of intelligence” Yeah, remember R.I.C.E.? Spot on… they’ve politicized the IC! With such dumb stories too. “We’re gonna lock up Obama!” 🤣