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SpyTalk Behind the Lines: Vault-7 and More
CIA losses, Russian suicides, counterterror blowbacks, Kabul debacle, etc.
Did CIA Fail to Grasp Security Threat in Joshua Schulte?
Pro tip for CIA supervisors: Next time you transfer an already troublesome employee out of a job they love, you had better keep a very close watch on what theyโre up to next. Thatโs just one of the upshots from the case of former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte, who was convicted Wednesday on nine charges, including illegally gathering and transmitting national defense information toย WikiLeaks in 2016.ย Youโd think somebody at CIA wouldโve seen it coming: Coworkers had nicknamed Schulte โThe Nuclear Optionโ for his explosive temperament.ย It was only a matter of time, it would seem, before the smoldering hacking genius, then 25, became a security liability.
Schulteโsย leak of materials, known as Vault-7, delivered the hacking arsenal of the CIAโs Center for CyberIntelligenceโthe folks who break into foreign computersโto Wikileaks. The heist included custom-made techniques that agency hackers had used to compromise Wi-Fi networks, Skype, antivirus software, and Apple Devices.ย
The leak was not just a devastating blow to the agencyโs cyber capacities, but a dangerous development for CIA cyber operations, because adversaries would be able to forensically identify when and where their systems were breached, experts said.
Unlike Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who maintain they leaked classified information for ideological reasons, Schulte seems to have acted only out of spite for his employer. As a recent deep-dive profile by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker makes clear, Schulte stole the Vault-7 files because he was enraged that his superiors transferred him to another office after constant squabbling with a co-worker and a superior. His acting out will now cost him up to 80 years in prison,ย not counting pending charges he faces for possession of child pornography.ย What the security breach cost the CIA remains to be seenโor unseen.
Another Russian Oligarch Swallows a Pistolย
Itโs getting hard to keep track of the number of Russian oligarchs committing suicide, especially among the Gazprom elites. The latest is Yuri Voronov, head of a transport and logistics company that had โlucrative contracts with the gas behemoth in the Arctic,โ according to the U.K. tabloid The Sun.ย The 61-year oldโs corpse was found July 4 floating in the pool behind his St. Petersburg mansion. He hadย a bullet in his head, police said.ย Probably a suicide. A semi-automatic Grand Power pistol was found nearby, The Sun said, while โseveral spent cartridges,โ according to police, were located at the bottom of the pool.
Seems to be an epidemic of suicides among Gazprom big shots. Newsweek helpfully added them up last week. โSeveral other Russians have been found dead since late January, all but one since Vladimir Putin launched his attack on Ukraine on February 24,โ the magazine said. โVoronov's death comes amid speculation about whether murders of top businessmen are being staged to look like suicides.โ
Bill Browder, the prominent former American investor in Russia whoโs long been a very big thorn in Vladimir Putinโs side, said last month that the sanctions against Moscow, imposed because of the Ukraine war, meant "the pie has shrunk," according to Newsweek.
"Whenever there's limited resources and very powerful people, people start getting killed," he told Secrets of the Oligarch Wives, a recently released documentary.
Russian White Supremacists Want U.S. Beachhead
In March SpyTalk reported that terrorists in the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) had leaned heavily into an international holy warโfighting for white Christian power around the world, in an effortย they call The Last Crusade. The State Department designated RIM asย a terrorist group in 2020.
Nonetheless, one of the groupโs leaders, Stansilav Vorobyev, toldย Verified, the investigative podcast of the Scripps news organization, that he was still in touch with unnamed like-minded Americans.ย Verifiedโs Mark Greenblatt, the Scripps Washington Bureauโs senior national investigative correspondent, pressed the Bureau of Counterterrorism at the State Department about why they were not doing more to counter this rising global movement. He noted that two neo-Nazis who returned from a RIM training camp had launched a series of bombings of immigrant and leftist targets in Sweden

Accountability journalism paid off. Last month State added three RIM members to a list of โspecially designated global terrorists.โ One has raised millions to support pro-Russian fighters in Ukraine. Another visited the United States in 2017 seeking to build a RIM network here. A third was one of the Swedish bombers.ย The designations are far more than just words. They authorize law enforcement intelligence agencies to monitor these terrorist facilitators more closely.ย
Abe and the Moonies
Some long-in-the-tooth SpyTalk readers may dimly recall โKoreagate,โ the 1970โs scandal in which agents of South Koreaโs KCIA spy service, reacting to President Jimmy Carterโs plan to withdraw U.S. troops from the peninsula,ย covertly shoveled money and favors to U.S. politicians to block the move.ย Congressional hearings laid bare how not just the KCIA, but agents of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's right-wing Unification Church,ย used a prominent Georgetown socialite and nightclub impresario, Tongsun Park, to spread the largesse to some 30 members of Congress
Weโre moved to take this stroll down memory lane because the churchโs history played a background role in the July 8 assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Turns out Abe had some ties to the church via an affiliate, the Universal Peace Federation, which jointly sponsored a Sept. 2021 โRally of Hopeโ and launch ceremony for โThink Tank 2022: Toward Peaceful Reunification of the Korean Peninsula,โ where the former P.M.ย delivered a speech. It further turns out that Abeโs assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami told police he was motivated to shoot Abe because his mother gave โlargeโ sums to the church and went bankrupt 20 years ago.ย The Unification Church denied it figured in the assassinโs motive. But there was no denying Abeโs connection to the self-proclaimed Korean messiah ran deep.ย Abeโs late grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, the Japanese prime minister from 1957 to 1960, had been friendly with Moon, whose church opened its branch in Japan in 1959.
A Terrorist Disposal Problem Haunting British Intelligenceย
โDonโt forget that we have a disposal problem,โ CIA director Allen Dulles told President John F.ย Kennedy in early 1961, a warning about the possible consequences of cutting loose what the CIA knew to be a volatile and potentially vengeful asset, the exile force it had trained to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. As Joan Didion reported in her classic book Miami,ย the disposal problem haunted south Floridaย for decades, as the defeated Cuban fighters turned to drug trafficking and violent vendettas in the 1970s and 1980s.
Now Britain faces a reckoning with its own disposal problem, involving Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who killed 23 people including himself at pop music concert in Manchester, England in May 2017.ย A recent investigation by the independent investigative news site Declassified UK, concluded that, โThe Manchester bomber and his closest family were part of Islamist militia forces covertly supported by the British military and Nato in the Libyan war of 2011.โ

With an official inquiry into the Manchester bombing due to report later this year, Declassified UK asks. โDid innocent citizens pay a blood price for British foreign policy?โ
The web site found that Abedi, his father Ramadan and brothers, Ismail and Hashem, were allowed to freely operate in the war zone of Libya for years before the 2017 atrocity.ย Salman Abedi was never subject to controls on his movements to Libya despite a stream of intelligence showing his contacts with extremists.ย
Abediโs father and brother were stopped by UK security officers in 2011 and 2015 respectively.ย The officers downloaded jihadist material from their mobile devices. Nonetheless, they were allow to travel back and forth to Libya where Ramadan Abedi actively supported of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda linked organization at war with the government of Muammar Gaddafi
An investigation by Middle East Eye found the U.K. government operated an โopen door, no questions askedโ policy toward Libyan exiles who wanted to fight Gaddafi. Yet the Manchester inquiry did not call anyone from MI6, the British foreign intelligence service,ย a decision UK Declassified called โbewildering.โ
MI5, Britainโs counterintelligence and counterterrorism service, told the inquiryย that โthere was a range of reasons for such travelโ to Libya, โmany of which were entirely legitimate,โ adding it did not have intelligence to indicate that Salman Abedi was engaged in fighting or was attending training camps or affiliating with Islamic State.
The inquiryโs expert on Islamic extremism, Matthew Wilkinson, countered thatย โThereโs a lot of evidence from 2011 onwardsโ2012, 2014, 2017 in particular โฆ [that] Salman was surrounded by people that had heavy weaponry, heavy machine gunsโ.ย Pete Weatherby, a lawyer for the bombing victims, told the inquiry, โIt is highly likely that [Salman Abedi] had a baptism of violence by exposure to the 2011 uprising.โ
Shabaab Counterspies Outwitting the US?ย
Are Somaliaโs al-Shabaab spooks beating the West at their own game? According to a new paperย in the prestige journal Intelligence and National Security, the Somali-based offshoot of Al-Qaeda โhas not only survived, but has also challenged more powerful multinational forces for more than a decade.โย The key to their success, according to author Zakarie Ahmed nor Kheyre, is Shabaabโs creation of a powerful intelligence division, known as Amniyat, which focuses on โ tactical efficiency, targeting, counterintelligence (CI), and communication,โ and has proven capable of fending off diverse threats.ย
While three heads of the Amniyat were killed by U.S. airstrikes in the past decade,ย Ahmed writes, none have been killed in the last four years.ย When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syriaย (ISIS) launched an affiliate inย Mogadishu, the Somali capital, al-Shabaab identified their supporters and dismantled their organization within two weeks. Based on interviews with jailed operatives and officials ofย Somaliaโs National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), Ahmed concludes the Amniyat is โfar more effectiveโ than NISA and other state intelligence services.
Biden Braces for Spotlight on Kabul Debacle
NBC reports that the Biden administration is shuddering at the prospect of multiple critical reviews of its handling of the collapse in Afghanistan last August. The administration's own โcomprehensive review of the withdrawal, which the White House vowed to undertake nearly a year ago, is still not complete,โ officials told NBCโs Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube.ย
โWhile the intelligence communityโs review is close to finished, much of that report is expected to be classified,โย they said, adding that the presidentโs aides โplan to emphasizeโ that the exit โwas a successful operation to evacuate tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan after the administration was caught flat-footed by the swift fall of Kabul.โย
Translation: Expect the White House to scapegoat the CIA and DoD for not better predicting the regimeโs swift collapse. Expect the agenciesย to argue that policymakers didnโt listen to them.
The ghost of the Afghan exit, lost in the shadows of Russiaโs invasion of Ukraine, mass shootings in the U.S. and the twin specters of global inflation and starvation, will increasingly haunt Biden as the elections approach, fueled by Republican campaign ads and media commemorations of the tragedy. On Aug. 1, PRX and Project Brazen kick off the coverage with โKabul Falling,โ an eight-part podcast โchronicling first hand accounts in Afghanistan as the Taliban gained control. One of the interviewees is an Afghan CIA asset.
U.S. Spies Backed Out of Bid for Pegasus Spyware, Firm Says
Not long afterย The New York Times reported that unnamed U.S. intelligence officials were backingย a bid by defense contractor L3Harris to buy NSO, the Israeli firm whose Pegasus spyware has been used to harass hundreds of journalists and political activists worldwide,ย the Israeliย newspaper Haaretz reported the possible deal was dead. Asked about the reports, a spokesman for L3Harris told SpyTalk he had โnothing to share.โย
Last month, the White House released a statement outlining the administration's concerns about L3Harris' acquisition of NSO's spyware, saying it would "pose a serious counterintelligence and security risk to U.S. personnel and systems."
MICRODOTS
Forensic Architecture, a British multidisciplinary research group, maps Russiaโs March 1 attack on Kyivโs TV tower over the site of infamous1941 Nazi Babyn Yar massacre which took place nearby.
ODNI has partially released the classified version of its groundbreaking June 2021 UFO report, โPreliminary Assessment: Unidentifiedย Aerial Phenomena.โ
Pigskin Espionage: In a new book out this September, former Defense Department Special Agent Thomas Bryant details the black ops practiced by the New England Patriots and virtually everyone else in the NFL.
Summer Break: At USA Today, national security reporter Josh Meyer offers 17 tips on how to think like a spy and stay safe on summer vacation, based on a CIA advisory.
SpyTalk Behind the Lines: Vault-7 and More
Secrets of the Oligarch Wives!