How are we to know what to believe in this age of cyber-spying? Obviously, the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies know more than we do, as they have access to all sorts of secret information. But they also have mixed motives with regard to the truth. It is part of their job to deceive other countries and potential enemies within our own country. And being practiced at deception, it is frequently the case that deception is deployed to favor domestic friends or hurt domestic enemies. Public figures may be reluctant to question or criticize intelligence figures, as they 'have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you', as Chuck Schumer says. And, of course, spies deal with other spies and may be deceived and/or confused themselves.
The United States has by far the biggest intelligence budget of any country in the world. The
annual budget is about $70 billion dollars, with 70% of this going to defense industry contractors. The overall defense budget is about $700 billion dollars per year. By comparison,
Russia spends about $60 billion per year on defense as a whole, less than one tenth what the United States spends. The United States spends more on intelligence alone than Russia spends on its entire military.
This money buys many tools for spying, though it also creates a sprawling intelligence bureaucracy which is difficult to control and use effectively. Thus:
- From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.
The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy — from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs — forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies.
- Chinese intelligence agents acquired National Security Agency hacking tools and repurposed them in 2016 to attack American allies and private companies in Europe and Asia, a leading cybersecurity firm has discovered. The episode is the latest evidence that the United States has lost control of key parts of its cybersecurity arsenal.
- Fifteen months into a wide-ranging investigation by the agency’s counterintelligence arm, known as Q Group, and the F.B.I., officials still do not know whether the N.S.A. is the victim of a brilliantly executed hack, with Russia as the most likely perpetrator, an insider’s leak, or both. Three employees have been arrested since 2015 for taking classified files, but there is fear that one or more leakers may still be in place. And there is broad agreement that the damage from the Shadow Brokers already far exceeds the harm to American intelligence done by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who fled with four laptops of classified material in 2013.
Mr. Snowden’s cascade of disclosures to journalists and his defiant public stance drew far more media coverage than this new breach. But Mr. Snowden released code words, while the Shadow Brokers have released the actual code; if he shared what might be described as battle plans, they have loosed the weapons themselves. Created at huge expense to American taxpayers, those cyberweapons have now been picked up by hackers from North Korea to Russia and shot back at the United States and its allies...
- Wikileaks published the CIA's Vault 7 files of "Marble Framework" and "Grasshopper". These CIA tools systematically changed its sniffing tools to make them look "Russian" or "Iranian" by inserting foreign language strings into their source code.
- CIA director George Tenet is noted as responding to skepticism that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction by leaping out of his chair and exclaiming "It's a slam dunk case!" Later, Tenet is forced to admit that his intelligence was flawed when months of post-war searches turned up nothing. On February 11, 2003, one month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Mueller gave testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mueller informed the American public that ... Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material."
- “everybody in the West, every major intelligence agency in the world, thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” ... The Guardian reported on October 12, 2002 that, “Vladimir Putin yesterday rejected Anglo-American claims that Saddam Hussein already possesses weapons of mass destruction
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... Yet on December 19, a
New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama’s 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.
- The Gulf of Tonkin incident, also known as the USS Maddox incident, was an international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. It involved either one or two separate confrontations involving North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. The original American report blamed North Vietnam for both incidents, but eventually became very controversial with widespread belief that at least one, and possibly both incidents were false, and possibly deliberately so.
- THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
BY CARL BERNSTEIN, October 20, 1077
more than 400 American journalists in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.
- Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Nicolás Maduro Burned Aid Convoy
- The bipartisan war to oust Gaddafi in Libya contributed to the Syrian civil war, which in turn brought Russia back into the Middle Eastern power equation, and let to hundreds of thousand refugees headed to Europe, which in turn resulted in right wing backlash. European terror incidents were in many cases directly planned from Libya in the wake of the power vacuum following the fall of Gaddafi. See How the West’s War in Libya Spurred Terrorism in 14 Countries.
Related to this, the case of Marc Turi sheds some light on how the intelligence agencies deal with criminals and get involved in international arms dealing. This is not exactly surprising, but lends more weight to the argument that they are unlikely to provide unbiased reports of the truth in international matters such as Trump-Russia collusion. Their sources, methods, and objectives are hidden and often the public stories surrounding these are false.
Furthermore, there is strong evidence that private spy agencies tied to Hillary Clinton were involved in the Arab Spring revolt in Libya which, however noble its intentions, led to indirectly to chaos in the Middle East, right wing popularity in Europe, and a renewed Cold War (Russia was against the armed overthrow of Gaddafi, which Hillary termed "despicable".)
So here we are in 2019 with the intelligence community commanding enormous authority in domestic and international politics. The hottest issue for the past 2+ years has been allegations of Trump collusion with the Russians. These charges came from the intelligence community have been almost completely discredited. No Democrat that I know of now supports the Russian collusion narrative, but rather the claim is that Trump obstructed the investigation. In other words, there has been an extensive investigation of Trump by a special prosecutor (Mueller, former head of FBI) for over two years based upon reports from the intelligence community. These intelligence community reports have been found to be baseless, and the most well publicized were actually funded by the Clinton campaign as opposition research.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration uses the intelligence community for their own purposes. Intelligence regarding Venezuela and Iran is used to threaten war. Even when the intelligence is proven to be false, there is no acknowledgement and little media attention given to misdirection -- see
Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Nicolás Maduro Burned Aid Convoy
Trump has tried to fight the intelligence / military community
in North Korea, but was overwhelmed as described below:
An investigation into the sources of the imagery and accompanying analysis creates serious doubts about the incentives with which they are being presented to the public and the groups involved in the Korean peace negotiations. NBC News based their report on the Sohae activity on analysis from Beyond Parallel, a project run by CSIS. An examination of Beyond Parallel's About page shows ties to the Heritage Foundation, the Atlantic Council-connected Korea Foundation and the Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy. All of these groups have advocated for hawkish US policies towards North Korea that will not be conducive to productive negotiations.
CSIS itself is currently run by John Hamre, former Deputy Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton and former Rockefeller fellow. CSIS' corporate officers include members of the Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy, a Henry A. Kissinger Chair and other individuals with work histories related to foreign policy and the American defense industry. It would be remiss to say that such connections do not indicate a strong bias against President Trump's attempts to seek denuclearization and peaceful dialogue with North Korea.
The NBC report, written by Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee and Andrea Mitchell, concerns satellite imagery released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) purported to have been taken on March 2, 2019. The imagery suffers from two defects - the fact that the images show two different facilities being attributed as one by the media, and that the purported construction activity indicates dismantling of the Sohae site rather than fresh additions or repairs.
The images themselves were represented by NBC News as being "commercial" in nature. An examination of the companies from which they are sourced shows that they are in fact deeply tied to groups that do consistent business with the CIA and defense industry.
Obviously the world is a dangerous place, and the U.S. has to be careful to protect its interests from unscrupulous agencies abroad. But we also have to be clear eyed as to how our best interests are served. We should not be guided by intelligence agencies and the spin they put on various issues. The intelligence agencies have a poor track record and conflicting incentives. Rather, we should act based upon independent thinking as to what is in our best interests. Are our interests aligned with those of the intelligence agencies and those political groups that both fund them and use them for political purposes? Or would we be better served by taking their findings with a grain of salt, and thinking through the issues independently?
In the case of Russiagate, it seems to me that some of the intelligence professionals had a well intentioned and reasonable aversion to a Trump presidency. Unfortunately, they were taken in by false reports on Trump-Russia collusion. Rather than double down on the veracity of the conspiratorial intelligence reports, we will all be better off in acknowledging the truth. Trump did not conspire with Russia. We should investigate how such false intelligence reports were able to drive U.S. politics for 2+ years.
