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Yup, it IS Russia, Russia, Russia. Why because Putin’s playbook is working and so many in America are useful dupes and unwitting accomplices. Does that include you?
Well it does include U.S. diplomats attending a party hosted by Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak for the sake of photos and social media. Were you there Monday night? It was a propaganda operation that included Russian intelligence officials as well.
Embattled Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak played host to Washington insiders and diplomats at the Russian Embassy Monday night, greeting guests one-by-one in a long receiving line at the embassy in honor of Russia Day. Attendees were encouraged to pose for photos with signs that said “I love Russia” and post them on Facebook, Instagram and other social networks.
The frayed U.S.-Russia relationship was clearly on the embassy’s mind as they handed out a pamphlet highlighting the two countries’ close relationship. On the cover: “As an American, I love Russia – friend of Washington and Lincoln.” At the top of the second page, there was this: “As an American, I love Russia because if not for Russia, there may not have been a United States of America.”
Meanwhile, many Senators came together in a bipartisan fashion for a major piece of legislation on sanctions against Russia.
The Senate has clinched a wide-ranging bipartisan agreement to slap new financial penalties on Russia and limit President Trump’s ability to lift sanctions without giving Congress a chance to weigh in.
“It’s as comprehensive as we could make it, and it’s going to be a very good piece of legislation,”
The agreement imposes new sanctions including “malicious cyber activity” on behalf of Moscow, individuals supplying weapons to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government or individuals tied to Russia’s intelligence and defense sectors. More here.
So, how bad was this hacking/phishing scheme launched by Russia? Much wider than previously know. Some explain all this to Tucker Carlson.
Russian Cyber Hacks on U.S. Electoral System Far Wider Than Previously Known
Bloomberg: Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.
In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database. Details of the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the matter. In all, the Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states, one of them said.
The scope and sophistication so concerned Obama administration officials that they took an unprecedented step — complaining directly to Moscow over a modern-day “red phone.” In October, two of the people said, the White House contacted the Kremlin on the back channel to offer detailed documents of what it said was Russia’s role in election meddling and to warn that the attacks risked setting off a broader conflict.
The new details, buttressed by a classified National Security Agency document recently disclosed by the Intercept, show the scope of alleged hacking that federal investigators are scrutinizing as they look into whether Trump campaign officials may have colluded in the efforts. But they also paint a worrisome picture for future elections: The newest portrayal of potentially deep vulnerabilities in the U.S.’s patchwork of voting technologies comes less than a week after former FBI Director James Comey warned Congress that Moscow isn’t done meddling.
“They’re coming after America,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the election. “They will be back.”
A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington declined to comment on the agency’s probe.
Kremlin Denials
Russian officials have publicly denied any role in cyber attacks connected to the U.S. elections, including a massive “spear phishing” effort that compromised Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, among hundreds of other groups. President Vladimir Putin said in recent comments to reporters that criminals inside the country could have been involved without having been sanctioned by the Russian government.
One of the mysteries about the 2016 presidential election is why Russian intelligence, after gaining access to state and local systems, didn’t try to disrupt the vote. One possibility is that the American warning was effective. Another former senior U.S. official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the classified U.S. probe into pre-election hacking, said a more likely explanation is that several months of hacking failed to give the attackers the access they needed to master America’s disparate voting systems spread across more than 7,000 local jurisdictions.
***
Such operations need not change votes to be effective. In fact, the Obama administration believed that the Russians were possibly preparing to delete voter registration information or slow vote tallying in order to undermine confidence in the election. That effort went far beyond the carefully timed release of private communications by individuals and parties.
One former senior U.S. official expressed concern that the Russians now have three years to build on their knowledge of U.S. voting systems before the next presidential election, and there is every reason to believe they will use what they have learned in future attacks.
Secure Channel
As the first test of a communication system designed to de-escalate cyber conflict between the two countries, the cyber “red phone” — not a phone, in fact, but a secure messaging channel for sending urgent messages and documents — didn’t quite work as the White House had hoped. NBC News first reported that use of the red phone by the White House last December.
The White House provided evidence gathered on Russia’s hacking efforts and reasons why the U.S. considered it dangerously aggressive. Russia responded by asking for more information and providing assurances that it would look into the matter even as the hacking continued, according to the two people familiar with the response.
“Last year, as we detected intrusions into websites managed by election officials around the country, the administration worked relentlessly to protect our election infrastructure,” said Eric Schultz, a spokesman for former President Barack Obama. “Given that our election systems are so decentralized, that effort meant working with Democratic and Republican election administrators from all across the country to bolster their cyber defenses.”
Illinois Database
Illinois, which was among the states that gave the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security almost full access to investigate its systems, provides a window into the hackers’ successes and failures.
In early July 2016, a contractor who works two or three days a week at the state board of elections detected unauthorized data leaving the network, according to Ken Menzel, general counsel for the Illinois board of elections. The hackers had gained access to the state’s voter database, which contained information such as names, dates of birth, genders, driver’s licenses and partial Social Security numbers on 15 million people, half of whom were active voters. As many as 90,000 records were ultimately compromised.
But even if the entire database had been deleted, it might not have affected the election, according to Menzel. Counties upload records to the state, not the other way around, and no data moves from the database back to the counties, which run the elections. The hackers had no way of knowing that when they attacked the state database, Menzel said.
The state does, however, process online voter registration applications that are sent to the counties for approval, Menzel said. When voters are added to the county rolls, that information is then sent back to the state and added to the central database. This process, which is common across states, does present an opportunity for attackers to manipulate records at their inception.
Patient Zero
Illinois became Patient Zero in the government’s probe, eventually leading investigators to a hacking pandemic that touched four out of every five U.S. states.
Using evidence from the Illinois computer banks, federal agents were able to develop digital “signatures” — among them, Internet Protocol addresses used by the attackers — to spot the hackers at work.
The signatures were then sent through Homeland Security alerts and other means to every state. Thirty-seven states reported finding traces of the hackers in various systems, according to one of the people familiar with the probe. In two others — Florida and California — those traces were found in systems run by a private contractor managing critical election systems.
(An NSA document reportedly leaked by Reality Winner, the 25-year-old government contract worker arrested last week, identifies the Florida contractor as VR Systems, which makes an electronic voter identification system used by poll workers.)
In Illinois, investigators also found evidence that the hackers tried but failed to alter or delete some information in the database, an attempt that wasn’t previously reported. That suggested more than a mere spying mission and potentially a test run for a disruptive attack, according to the people familiar with the continuing U.S. counterintelligence inquiry.
States’ Response
That idea would obsess the Obama White House throughout the summer and fall of 2016, outweighing worries over the DNC hack and private Democratic campaign emails given to
Wikileaks and other outlets, according to one of the people familiar with those conversations. The Homeland Security Department dispatched special teams to help states strengthen their cyber defenses, and some states hired private security companies to augment those efforts.
In many states, the extent of the Russian infiltration remains unclear. The federal government had no direct authority over state election systems, and some states offered limited cooperation. When then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said last August that the department wanted to declare the systems as national critical infrastructure — a designation that gives the federal government broader powers to intervene — Republicans balked. Only after the election did the two sides eventually reach a deal to make the designation.
Relations with Russia remain strained. The cyber red phone was announced in 2011 as a provision in the countries’ Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers to allow urgent communication to defuse a possible cyber conflict. In 2008, what started during the Cold War as a teletype messaging system became a secure system for transferring messages and documents over fiber-optic lines.
After the Obama administration transmitted its documents and Russia asked for more information, the hackers’ work continued. According to the leaked NSA document, hackers working for Russian military intelligence were trying to take over the computers of 122 local election officials just days before the Nov. 8 election.
While some inside the Obama administration pressed at the time to make the full scope of the Russian activity public, the White House was ultimately unwilling to risk public confidence in the election’s integrity, people familiar with those discussions said.
Timelines and context are important and must be adhered to when it comes to controversy and chaos. America and the world is full of it for sure and personally I lay blame at the feet of Barack Obama.
Let’s begin in September of 2015 shall we? ODNI James Clapper warned in not only Congressional testimony but it presidential dialing briefings to the Obama White House that the Russians had launched a cyber military command. In addition to Russia, Clapper singled out China, Iran, and North Korea as the primary nation states capable of conducting sophisticated cyber attacks and espionage.
“Politically motivated cyber attacks are now a growing reality, and foreign actors are reconnoitering and developing access to U.S. critical infrastructure systems, which might be quickly exploited for disruption if an adversary’s intent became hostile,” Clapper said in prepared remarks for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The testimony on Sept. 10 represents a break from past public testimony on cyber threats. Previous intelligence statements and testimony limited public mention of explicit links between nations and their cyber strikes.
Clapper revealed that Russian cyber warfare specialists are developing the capability to remotely access industrial control systems used in managing critical infrastructure. More here.
Barack Obama did nothing. Obama never established a cyber policy due to rogue countries and cyber attack. Why? Establishing committees and having hearings is theater….this is the kind of stuff that is an act of war…but read on….context, timelines, facts and perspective is noted below.
In May of 2016, Clapper tried again and then attended a breakfast and made it all know more publically. Did anyone listen then? Nope. Further, while on the campaign trail, did any candidate make this an issue? Nope.
“The transcendent issue here is the Russian interference in our election process, and what that means to the erosion of the fundamental fabric of our democracy,” former DNI Clapper told the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 8. “And that to me is a huge deal. And they’re going to continue to do it. And why not? It proved successful.”
Russia’s success in sowing discord perhaps makes it harder for the US to focus on and fight the cyber intrusion that officials say stole Democratic Party emails and planted false news stories about the election. The purpose of this operation was to amplify division and turmoil in US politics. Well, mission accomplished.”
Barack Obama was convinced as was Hillary she was going to win, so Russian intrusion(s) were minimized. That is until she lost. Leading however into October, Obama kinda sorta decided to get serious. This was not until it was determined by the NSA that Russia did intrude into the voting software company based in Florida known as VR Systems where attempts to phish email accounts of 100+ company officials. So Obama’s best response was to trot out DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson ordering him to visit a handful of states to be vigilant.
That was the best Obama could do? No, he should have embarrassed Russia globally as the same thing was happening in other allied countries least of which was Ukraine and later so many more in Europe. Obama should have ordered the entire United States after embarrassing Putin’s operation to go to paper ballots and state the reason(s) why.
Former ODNI Clapper recently said the matter of Russia is not the only concern, China is just as aggressive. Anyone paying attention to that? Nope. China and Russia have a cyber pact.
Now the media stepped in to point to Trump as having to collude with the Russians on the election system. Former FBI Director said to Trump on at least 3 occasions along with the other intelligence community leaders, such was not the case. The media stayed with it, why? Because of the secondary track of investigation and that is the collection of Trump people have undisclosed and in some cases unreported meetings with Russian officials beyond that of Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. That track continues by the FBI.
Here is where at least Jeff Sessions is caught up in the snare. Sessions is in fact an honorable man as proven in his long political history. However, during his confirmation hearing for the top job at the Department of Justice, he omitted all his meetings in oral and written form. The meeting at the Mayflower Hotel is still under dispute. Why? Likely he was told too. Later, Sessions had a ‘duty to correct’ and he did. So, the recusal chatter started and later it was official. It has been reported by ‘sources’ that President Trump is furious at Sessions for his recusal. That too is suspect since those ahem…sources are unnamed. It is also reported that Sessions offered to tender his resignation over this mess, that too is suspect due to unnamed sources.
Now we have a recused AG, then later one Rod Rosenstein is confirmed at Deputy AG and the whole Russian probe fell into his lap. It never should have gotten this far if Trump himself had taken heed of his White House and outside personnel and quit tweeting and perpetuating the whole topic. Instead, his anger fired Comey. While I agree there is reason to be challenging Comey and his work as Director at the FBI least of which is the Hillary thing…one too must remember the FBI does NOT bring formal charges, but rather the DoJ does. Lynch was not going there. Comey covered for her and that was a mistake, until later Lynch abused that chain of command and met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac and told Comey to assume political speak with regard to investigation, commanding him to use matters rather than investigation. He capitulated again.
Further, President Trump’s long time attorney, Marc Kasowitz comes out in support for his client as he should. But, has Kasowitz been forthcoming about his own Russian clients like Oleg Deripaska? One has to go look for that, it is in open source and Deripaska has deep connections with the Kremlin and Putin. Head tilt on this one.
Meanwhile the issue of Flynn was still brewing and then came memos and well, Comey’s testimony. So, Putin wins again. We don’t trust anyone, much less each other and certainly we don’t trust the political bunch on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC. This is just how Putin planned it.
Where is Trump on all this now? Sadly he is not launching any punishment at Russia either on the hacking/phishing front or that of the chaos in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen or Crimea or Ukraine….and on and on. Why is the big question.
How about this question? Democracies worldwide should be demanding Russia become a better global actor, right? Read on for undeniable facts.
Russia dispatched a Sukhoi Su-27 fighter to intercept a U.S. B-52 strategic bomber on mission in the Baltic Sea. Russia keeps a Baltic flight operation for its Baltic Fleet air defense based out of Kaliningrad. Further, on the same day, Tuesday, Russian scrambled at MiG-31 jet fighter to intercept a Norwegian patrol plane of the Barents Sea. Russia has a large inventory of missiles stored in Kaliningrad.
As Secretary of State Tillerson is traveling to once again assure allies of America’s commitment to NATO, respective partnerships and cooperation, he has also been told to eliminate the turmoil between the United States and Russia. Tillerson is presently in New Zealand where he was barraged with questions regarding countless Russian investigations and tweets from President Trump.
Meanwhile, Putin continues to deny any evidence presented with regard to not only hacking into United States agencies including the election software, but has also denied all evidence of the Assad regime using chemical weapons on civilians in Syria.
Many will think that President Trump has a plan to normalized relations with the Kremlin and continuing to overlook past aggressive events against the West by Russia is a good plan. Decades of history proves otherwise.
Russia has not only annexed Crimea and continues at the military conflict with Ukraine, Putin is also deepening the threat against the United States when it comes to Cuba, Venezuela, Latin America but most especially the Arctic. All of this without so much as any kind of rebuke from the White House.
BusinessInsider
Russian spies and diplomats have been involved in a nearly decade-long effort to spread propaganda and provoke discord in Macedonia as part of a region-wide endeavor to stop Balkan countries from joining NATO. This conclusion comes from a tranche of intelligence documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and partners NOVA TV and the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK).
Russia has been giving financial aide to Cuba and other Caribbean Islands and has forgiven $32 billion in Cuban debt. In Nicaragua, Russia has expanded military ties and uses Nicaraguan ports for Russian warships.
As today, the Department of Defense announced to start of the offensive in Raqqa, Syria to rid the city finally of Islamic State, Russia will continue to prop up the Assad regime via the Syrian Express.
Since Moscow’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war began in September 2015, a key element of Russian logistical support for its forces has been a maritime supply route deployed from southern Russian Black Sea ports via the Turkish Straits to Syria. This supply train, nicknamed the “Syrian Express” by the media, has now apparently attracted the attention of Syrian extremist groups.
On May 16, Turkey’s Gazete Habertürk stated that Turkish intelligence had collected information about the Islamic State preparing a possible attack on Russian warships transiting the Bosporus. This, in turn, reportedly pushed Istanbul’s security services to step up protective measures and begin monitoring 146 possible points along the shoreline from where the attacks could be carried out (Gazete Habertürk, May 16). But later the same day, Istanbul authorities denied the reports. Nonetheless, the denials failed to take into account the Islamic State’s current de facto presence in Istanbul; as the aforementioned media account was being dismissed, the paper Milliyet reported that police had arrested Khasan Gulomov (a.k.a. Abu Khaliq) in Istanbul’s Başakşehir district. Gulomov is allegedly connected to the Reina nightclub attack in Istanbul on January 1, in which 39 people were killed. Police confiscated 12 Kalashnikovs, $4,378 and 3,000 Swedish krona ($345) during the raid (Milliyet, May 17). Every Russian ship currently navigating the Bosporus is escorted by a police helicopter and two Turkish Coast Guard boats. Russian Navy vessels, primarily from the Black Sea Fleet, regularly transit the Turkish Straits in order to deliver military equipment to Russian forces in Syria or carry out combat operations in the Eastern Mediterranean (Akşam, May 16). At the same time, Russia’s use of the Turkish Straits to resupply its military operations in Syria is but one aspect of its utilization of these waterways as a transit route. Notably, Russian-flagged tankers use them on a regular basis to ship oil to European markets. Turkey is constrained in what it can do to control commercial or maritime traffic through the Straits, as ship passage via this route is regulated by the 1936 Montreux Convention.
According to Article 2, merchant vessels can pass through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles without hindrance “day and night, regardless of flag and cargo,” while the warships of Black Sea littoral powers enjoy similar passage rights except in times of war (Sam.baskent.edu.tr, accessed May 31). Turkey has repeatedly voiced its concerns to Russia to no avail about the rising volume of the latter’s oil tanker traffic in the Bosporus, the narrowest strait in the world used for international navigation and one that bisects Istanbul—a city of 12 million inhabitants. The waterway is congested with civilian merchantmen: about 45,000 ships from around the world annually pass through the strait (RIA Novosti, May 16). More here from Jamestown.
Russia only teams up with adversarial countries against the West. Having any kind of trusting alliance with the Kremlin is misguided and a fool’s errand. Reagan told us so years ago.
LONDON — Vladimir Putin again denied that Russia interfered in last year’s U.S. election, joking to NBC News’ Megyn Kelly on Friday that even her “underage daughter” could have been behind the hacking.
The journalist asked the Russian president about what American intelligence agencies say is evidence that he became personally involved in a covert campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and benefit Donald Trump.
“IP addresses can be invented — a child can do that! Your underage daughter could do that. That is not proof,” Putin replied.
He also said that U.S. accusations about Russia were reminiscent of “anti-Semitism and blaming the Jews,” describing them as “disinformation.”
*** Hummm, okay, but he also said this:
Moscow (CNN)Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed to suggest Thursday that “patriotic hackers” may have meddled in the US election, but insisted that none of their potential activities were state-backed.
It’s the first time the Russian leader has conceded that any election-related hacking attacks may have emanated from his country.
In comments to reporters at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Putin likened hackers to “artists,” who could act on behalf of Russia if they felt its interests were being threatened.
“(Artists) may act on behalf of their country, they wake up in good mood and paint things. Same with hackers, they woke up today, read something about the state-to-state relations.
“If they are patriotic, they contribute in a way they think is right, to fight against those who say bad things about Russia,” Putin said.
*** Typical Kremlin, squishy on truth and commitment. Now…how about this mess that the Trump White House is working a deal with the Kremlin to return the two dachas in Maryland and New York that Obama ordered shuttered in December? It is said that the Kremlin did not respond to this action by Obama, but actually they did by terminating the construction of our diplomatic post in St. Petersburg. C’mon Tillerson really? Why should we be so hard on Putin and the Kremlin? Let’s go deeper shall we? We may also have to wait for the full Putin/Kelly interview to be aired.
There are many more Russia vs. United States issues like Russian bombers buzzing U.S. military aircraft or that Russian spy ship that hovered off the Atlantic coast….moving on….
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How many Russian spies are inside the United States? Answer unknown, but the estimates are in the tens of thousands. One such former FBI sleuth explains the condition here:
A national-security expert who has worked as a double agent for the FBI against Russian intelligence operations says the bureau’s current model for identifying Russian assets relies too much on a Cold War-era style of human-asset recruitment.
Naveed Jamali, who secretly reported to the FBI for four years while pretending to work for a Russian spy, was invited by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell to brief the House Intelligence Committee last week on Russia’s techniques for recruiting foreign spies. More here.
***
Politico: Russian diplomats, whose travel was supposed to be tracked by the State Department, were going missing.The diplomats, widely assumed to be intelligence operatives, would eventually turn up in odd places, often in middle-of-nowhere USA. One was found on a beach, nowhere near where he was supposed to be. In one particularly bizarre case, relayed by a U.S. intelligence official, another turned up wandering around in the middle of the desert. Interestingly, both seemed to be lingering where underground fiber-optic cables tend to run.
According to another U.S. intelligence official, “They find these guys driving around in circles in Kansas. It’s a pretty aggressive effort.”
It’s a trend that has led intelligence officials to conclude that the Kremlin is waging a quiet effort to map the United States’ telecommunications infrastructure, perhaps preparing for an opportunity to disrupt it.
“Half the time, they’re never confronted,” the official, who declined to be identified discussing intelligence matters, said of the incidents. “We assume they’re mapping our infrastructure.”
As the country — and Washington in particular — borders on near-obsession over whether affiliates of Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin to swing the 2016 presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials say Moscow’s espionage ground game is growing stronger and more brazen than ever.
It’s a problem that’s sparking increasing concern from the intelligence community, including the FBI. After neglecting the Russian threat for a decade, the U.S. was caught flat-footed by Moscow’s election operation. Now, officials are scrambling to figure out how to contain a sophisticated intelligence network that’s festered and strengthened at home after years’ worth of inattention.
“We’ve definitely been ignoring Russia for the last 15 years,” another intelligence official said, calling the Kremlin “resurgent.”
POLITICO spoke with half a dozen current and former U.S. intelligence officials about Russian spy strategies. All requested anonymity to openly discuss espionage.
“They’ve just got so many bodies,” the first intelligence official said of the Russians. “It’s not about what we know [is happening]. It’s about what we don’t know.”
It’s one of the most poorly kept secrets in the intelligence community: The Russian effort is a startlingly open and aggressive one, and often falls in a complex legal gray zone.
For example, the second official said, diplomats wandering around the desert might be in violation of certain travel requirements, but it’s not necessarily illegal.
Most U.S. intelligence officials can relay stories of run-ins with Russian intelligence operatives — often moonlighting as lobbyists, diplomats and businessmen — hanging around popular Washington happy hours. It’s an open assumption that they use Capitol Hill and its public office buildings as a farming ground for potential recruits. And the presumed agents aren’t hard to spot, according to officials: An oft-traded joke is to go to one of Washington’s handful of Russian restaurants and look for the guy in a tracksuit.
As the Russians continue aggressively pushing legal boundaries in both the United States and Moscow, there’s a tangible frustration among U.S. intelligence officials and on Capitol Hill that the U.S. has consistently missed its chance to crack down on Moscow’s spy games.
For years, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle pressed a hesitant Obama White House to crack down on some of the Kremlin’s more brazen stateside maneuvers.
“There was a general feeling that this was not getting the attention it deserved,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has supported the panel’s efforts in pressing the White House to tow a harder line with the Kremlin.
Around last summer, that tension reached a fever pitch.
Lawmakers, frustrated by Russian diplomats’ repeated violation of travel rules, inserted a provision in last year’s intelligence authorization bill that would have required Russian diplomats to provide ample notice to the State Department if they planned to travel more than 50 miles from where they were based, and further, would have required the FBI to validate that travel. According to several sources involved in the discussions at that time, the administration fought desperately — and failed — to get those provisions taken out of the bill.
Around that same time, two key Democratic lawmakers informed the White House of plans to publicly finger Russia as the foreign power behind a widespread effort to manipulate the ongoing U.S. election — something no official U.S. government entity had yet done. Fearful of escalation, the administration tried to get Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, then the two leading Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, respectively, to back off. The California lawmakers didn’t, and they released the statement. Backed into a corner by Congress, the administration released a statement saying the same a week later.
The Obama administration’s tentativeness in the weeks leading up to Nov. 8 — especially in the high-stakes context of a presidential election — is something that still bewilders corners of the intelligence world. Some speculate that Secretary of State John Kerry, desperate for a peace deal in Syria, urged the White House to lie low. Some blame it on fear of igniting a cyberwar, and still others say it stemmed from a generalized underestimation of the Russian threat.
Blaming one factor, one of the officials said, is “oversimplified.” But the frustration — and regret — is tangible.
Underscoring all this is that the Kremlin shows none of the same reluctance at home, nor does it show any propensity to abide by the gentlemen’s espionage rules that the U.S. tends to uphold, sometimes to the chagrin of its own spy corps.
“We can’t even leave the compound over there without being followed,” the first U.S. intelligence official said.
One well-publicized incident continues to agitate officials in Washington. In June of last year, a U.S. diplomat was returning to the embassy in Moscow when a guard with the FSB, the domestic Russian security service, exploded from his booth on the compound’s perimeter and assaulted him. A surveillance video shows the guard tackling the man and throwing him to the ground before the U.S. diplomat was able to drag himself inside the doors of the embassy to safety.
The U.S. diplomat, whom POLITICO confirmed was actually a CIA officer, had done the impossible — he had lost his tails as he maneuvered in Moscow. Infuriated, the Russians sent an FSB guard the man wouldn’t recognize to wait outside the embassy for his inevitable return. The officer was beaten so badly he was immediately flown out of the country for urgent medical attention.
The account was confirmed by another person familiar with the incident.
“They are far more aggressive on counterintelligence issues in Russia than we are here,” one of the officials said.
It’s these incidents that worry and frustrate the Americans. The unspoken rules of spying mean nothing to the Kremlin.
“They agree to rules, and then break them,” another U.S. official said.
Former CIA Director John Brennan made reference to this frustration in recent congressional testimony. Though he stopped short of explicitly discussing the June 2016 incident in Moscow, he told lawmakers that he had brought up the broader harassment issue to his Russian counterpart at Russian state security services last August.
“I first told him, as I had several times previously, that the continued mistreatment and harassment of U.S. diplomats in Moscow was intolerable and needed to stop,” Brennan said.
The CIA declined to comment. The FBI did not respond to an official request for comment by deadline.
This electronic briefing book focuses on the experience of the Pike Committee in 1975. Formally known as the House Select Committee, and the forerunner of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—the current oversight mechanism—the Pike Committee encountered the same CIA reluctance to endure investigation as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) did during the more recent torture inquiry from 2009-2012. Indeed, at the time, Donald Gregg, a senior CIA officer who served as the agency’s top liaison person with Pike’s committee, recalled the experience as more difficult than some of his most hair-raising covert operations.[i] The Pike Committee’s investigation brought the Ford administration to the brink of a constitutional crisis over the principle that Congress had a right to investigate any aspect of Executive Branch activity. Pike also established a procedure—which congressional overseers typically neglect to make use of—for Congress to declassify information. Such procedures may prove crucial in the future.
The administration of Gerald R. Ford was far different from that of Donald J. Trump. So was the Congress in the two eras. Today’s Congress, although controlled by one party, is hampered by bitter political infighting. In 1975, Capitol Hill, though it was in the hands of the Democratic Party and coming off the Watergate affair, had a tradition of bipartisanship. President Ford faced congressional efforts to build mechanisms for dismantling what had come to be regarded as the “imperial presidency.”[ii] But Ford could enlist allies in Congress and reasonably hope to build consensus toward measures he considered desirable. Aspects of the intelligence crises of 1975, 2012-2014, and 2017-on, evolved with eerie similarity.
The Central Intelligence Agency’s problem at that time was, if anything, worse than in the Obama-Trump era, because there were parallel investigations of the agency by a presidential commission, the Senate, and Pike’s House of Representatives panel. Also, Otis Pike, the New York congressman chairing the HSC, moved fast to make up for lost time, because his HSC had ben reconstituted after a previous inquiry had failed to get off the ground. The CIA had tried to impose controls on all the investigations in the form of exacting agreements on the handling of classified information. To a large extent it had succeeded with the presidential commission (the Rockefeller Commission) and the Senate inquiry (the Church Committee), but the previous HSC had been derailed precisely because of the impression of collusion between the CIA and the committee. Pike was not about to fall into that trap.
Henry Kissinger and Otis Pike (undated photo).
Equally troubling, there were suspicions on both sides from the start. Director William E. Colby of the CIA thought Pike’s investigators a pick-up team who knew nothing, and the HSC principals a troop of publicity hounds. CIA officials were already on the defensive based on a number of damaging stories about them in the press in the course of 1975. Chairman Pike compounded CIA hostility by refusing to obligate his staff to sign CIA-like secrecy agreements, while opening a second front by declining to implement CIA-style compartmentation for storage of agency documents. Chairman Pike also rejected the formula later adopted under Ronald Reagan and used by subsequent administrations—including during George W. Bush’s presidency to shield CIA torture—of briefing only the committee chairman and vice-chair (which at higher levels translated into the “Gang of Four” or “Gang of Eight” groups). Robustly, Pike ruled that if the House of Representatives had wanted to create a two-person investigative committee it would have done so. Gaming the system was not permitted on his watch.
Responding to the House committee, Director Colby made CIA lawyer Mitchell Rogovin the point of contact for HSC requests to interview CIA officers, laid down access conditions to Pike, and informed CIA employees of both actions. When Pike rejected a letter from Rogovin, Colby and the lawyer then met with Pike, but that encounter turned into a confrontation. Rogovin believed Pike sought to avoid charges of having been coopted by the agency. Pike all but said as much when he responded to Colby’s follow up letter: “It’s a delight to receive two letters from you not stamped ‘Secret’ on every page …. You are concerned with the concept of ‘need to know’ and I am concerned with the concept of ‘right to know.’”[iii]
Pike held his first public hearing on August 4, 1975. He used the occasion to contrast the Ford administration’s public posture that it was cooperating fully with the CIA and White House’s actual practice of obfuscation and delay. The impasse escalated tensions, leading to destructive clashes between the sides. One prime example was the “briefcase episode.” Ford’s Office of Management and Budget had been refusing to hand over data regarding CIA’s budget, which Pike had requested from Colby on July 28. When White House lawyers Philip Buchen and Roderick Hills visited HSC offices to discuss the matter, Hills inadvertently left his briefcase behind with a secret document in it. Weeks later, Pike cited the incident as an example of how the Committee safeguarded classified information more carefully than the Ford administration. On September 3, White House staff secretary James E. Connor drew the battle lines within the administration over the Pike committee’s access to information by arguing that if President Ford failed to act a series of terrible consequences would follow (Document 3).
On September 10, with the administration pulling back on access, the Pike Committee subpoenaed documents for its next case study – of U.S. officials being caught by surprise by the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The CIA was reluctant to comply. This is where our documentary exhibits pick up. It was at this point that the Ford White House escalated the dispute over access to information. On September 12, Assistant Attorney General Rex E. Lee, alleging Pike Committee leaks, terminated the Ford administration’s supply of information to the House committee (Document 4). The HSC threatened to go to court. Agency lawyer Rogovin failed to get Pike to modify his committee’s requests. Rogovin was then told the CIA had no authority to alter the deadline for it to respond to the subpoena.
Pike responded by returning just one item, using the opportunity to point out – in elaborate detail in a cover letter – that the “secret” classification had been unjustifiably imposed on inconsequential information (Document 10).
Seymour Hersh’s explosive revelations in The New York Times on December 22, 1974, led to White House and congressional investigations into the intelligence community, including establishment of the Pike Committee.
The demands for information, on the one side, and foot-dragging on the other, built to a crescendo that September. The HSC moved to hold a hearing to examine intelligence performance during the October War of 1973, and wanted to quote a paragraph from a CIA postmortem of this action. CIA tried once again to keep the material secret leading Pike to demand the material be released. Colby tried to shield a particular passage concerning intercepts of Egyptian radio communications, but Pike refused. When the HSC voted to release the material over CIA objections, that furnished Assistant Attorney General Rex Lee with his rationale for terminating cooperation (Document 4). The White House’s turn to the Department of Justice to enunciate its official position signaled the Pike Committee that President Ford’s patience had worn thin.
The CIA’s “Family Jewels” document collection triggered fresh hostility between the agency and the committee throughout this period. Colby showed Pike the full collection, but when HSC investigators wanted to see it, Langley supplied only a sanitized version. Upon renewed demand, Donald Gregg informed the HSC that top staff could review a different—also sanitized—version, but only at CIA headquarters. In November, fifteen minutes ahead of a press conference Pike had called to lambast CIA on this and other matters, the agency suddenly furnished a full copy.
Meanwhile, HSC investigators had discovered that, in a 1974 internal political crisis in Cyprus, U.S. diplomats had complained in State Department dissent channels that the Department’s favoritism toward Greece had worsened the situation. Pike’s staff wanted to look into this, too. Henry Kissinger, who simultaneously held the positions of national security adviser and secretary of state, not only demanded that nothing be given to Pike but insisted upon the return of all classified materials from the HSC. It is a measure of the falsity of many claims of national security damage caused by the release of classified information that Kissinger himself had already leaked the October war communications intelligence data that the Pike Committee was now to be punished for releasing. The leak had been to the writers Marvin and Bernard Kalb, who had written a biography of Kissinger.[iv] The “revelation” had already been public for a year. Scholar Frank J. Smist argues that the Pike declassification was a “phony issue” because the HSC’s wording was ambiguous and would have required the CIA to identify the offending text and explain how it was so damaging.[v]
By September 16, the CIA’s effort to control congressional access to records had had to be modified. Director Colby’s attempt to completely deny access to decision-making material collapsed amid the white heat of public controversy. Now the CIA and White House tried to apply different restrictions to HSC review of 40 Committee records (Document 8). The 40 Committee was the administration’s interagency unit that approved covert operations. Ford officials wanted to allow only cursory information to be reviewed, and to require that all examination of documentation take place at the White House, in NSC offices, with any notes retained at the NSC. (The Intelligence Community demanded similar restrictions during the 1987 Iran-Contra congressional hearings and the 2009 SSCI investigation of CIA torture programs.)
The White House scheme for a revised system to provide materials did not pass muster with the House Select Committee. Ford administration officials inexplicably resisted taking Pike Committee objections seriously until a White House liaison, meeting with ally Robert McCrory, senior Republican member of the HSC, noted that the committee fully intended to proceed in its own way – in other words, that GOP members would support the Democratic majority (Document 11). A letter from another Republican member to President Ford, affirming that committee members from both parties were united (Document13), made it plain the White House had little alternative.
In fact, neither Colby nor Ford had any running room. On September 20 it became clear the Pike Committee was preparing to sue the president (Document 14). Officials sought expert opinion. In a legal brief on September 22, the CIA’s own lawyers concluded that the HSC subpoena had been legally issued by an authorized body. The courts would accept that, the lawyers believed, and an “excellent chance” existed the judiciary would uphold the subpoena. Conversely, there was little probability a court would order a congressman or committee not to report on what he/they had investigated, or to avoid discussion of matters under their jurisdiction. Consequently, “there does not appear to be any realistic way in which the Agency can come out the winner” (Document 16). Colby and his lawyer, Rogovin, had sat through many meetings in the White House Situation Room at which officials had railed at congressional demands for information, only to have to yield the documents days or weeks later. Congress had a constitutional right to investigate, so the Ford administration was obliged to reply.
White House lawyers, reviewing these issues themselves, were only a little more optimistic, but they feared the courts would rely on the doctrine of “political issues” to avoid ruling on the very narrow grounds the lawyers saw open (Document 22). They, too, advised accommodation. Political adviser Max Friedersdorf predicted that “a serious confrontation is coming” (Document 20). Republican members of the Pike Committee warned the White House that both parties would unite to demand access, and that Pike was inclined to litigate, and to go as far as the Supreme Court to seek a judgment. The Ford White House and the CIA were on track for a white-hot constitutional crisis with the House Select Committee.
For his part, Henry Kissinger continued to advise President Ford to stand fast. The secretary of state held out for defying the congressional requests for documentation, and denying Congress had any role to play in releasing information (Document 21). Kissinger, in effect, was inviting the president to ignite a constitutional crisis, bringing the behind-the-scenes dispute over access into the open. The main impact of Kissinger’s stand, had he succeeded, would have been to widen the constitutional breach by suppressing the release of information on the Cyprus crisis and October War. This was information Congress had a right to ask for, and it amounted to substituting the secretary’s personal objectives for the U.S. government’s overall interests.
On September 24, a decision document went to President Ford, who approved a compromise that effectively overrode Kissinger’s objections. The compromise provided that, if the Pike Committee agreed to White House conditions, it would immediately receive the information it sought, excepting categories such as intelligence sources and methods. The documents would be considered to be on loan to the HSC. If Congress wished to release (declassify) information and an agency objected, the administration would have a chance to make its case for secrecy and, if that were rejected, the president would make the final decision. White House and CIA officials deliberated over new rules for documents to be provided to the Pike Committee. If Pike rejected the compromise offer, Ford agreed to adopt a “maximum control” standfast position (Document 25).
The HSC, facing an approaching deadline to complete its inquiry, could hardly afford a lengthy controversy. Pike agreed to Ford’s formula. On September 29, the two met in the Oval Office along with the senior House leadership to consecrate the new arrangement. Secretary Kissinger opted out (the documents do not explain why Ford permitted him to do so) , and sought to keep State Department materials from HSC hands. The committee later issued a separate subpoena against him, resulting in an eventual agreement to allow State Department officials to create a substitute document containing the gist of the documents the HSC had requested.
Meanwhile, following the September compromise, the CIA had gained confidence in its ability to preserve secrecy. Director Colby’s agency adopted the device of “lending” its documents to the House Select Committee as a means of asserting that only the agency could “declassify,” or release the information. By October 3, the CIA had provided 80 documents requested. One remained pending. Some 188 lines had been blanked out. Another 100 items had come from the Defense Intelligence Agency. In the end, CIA secret documents, alone some 90,000 pages, filled 32 file cabinets in the HSC offices (Document 34).
The last act revolved around the Pike Committee’s actual report. It remains unclear when, exactly, President Ford got the idea of quashing the document by inducing the full House of Representatives to refuse to release it, but it was very possibly linked with the September compromise. Or it could have happened in connection with a very embarrassing development for Ford on November 20, when the HSC’s Senate counterpart, the Church Committee, refused to suppress its investigation of CIA assassination plotting, and released its conclusions to the public. That provided a discomfiting precedent for the Pike report, which the White House certainly wished to avoid. On the other hand, the HSC was continuing its foraging among secret records with fresh subpoenas issued in November, looking toward a January 31, 1976, deadline.
On January 15, Ford wrote Pike that he had determined that publication of the HSC Report would be detrimental to national security. When Pike persisted, Ford insisted on January 29 that outstanding disputes over classified information had to be submitted to the Executive for its determination. That forced Pike to seek an extension for printing the report, which the House Rules Committee granted only on the condition that the White House approve release of the report. Ford relied upon Pike’s September compromise to claim the committee’s report itself was a classified document and thus subject to White House approval. Pike failed to convince the House to overrule that condition and the president duly rejected release of the report.[vi] Suddenly, on February 16, 1976, large excerpts of the Pike Report appeared in the newspaper The Village Voice, to which it had leaked. Journalist Daniel Schorr was the acknowledged recipient of the leak. The text that appeared, in discussing the Ford administration’s practices in furnishing classified material, included the passage, “when legal proceedings were not in the offing, the access experience was frequently one of foot-dragging, stone-walling, and careful deception.”[vii]
When the House of Representatives created its Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) on July 14, 1977, the struggle over the congressional power to declassify information was reflected in House Rule XLVIII, Section 7, which acknowledges the HPSCI’s power to “disclose publicly any information in [its] possession.” Specifically, the rule provided that the Select Committee may vote to release classified information. It would notify the president in cases where secrets had been furnished by the Executive. If there were no objections, after five days the information could be declassified. If there were, the president would be required to submit them “personally, in writing.” In that case the HPSCI could either take no action, leaving the information classified; or it could vote to send the dispute to the House floor with a recommendation for consideration. The full House of Representatives would then determine the outcome. The procedure specified an ability to consider such matters in secret session, set a maximum time for debate, and made an explicit promise that HPSCI would not reveal properly classified information except under this procedure.
The legacy of Otis Pike and his committee was thus not only to promote intelligence oversight in general, but also to establish an explicit mechanism for the House of Representatives to declassify secret documents. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has available to it a similar provision under Section 8 of Senate Resolution 400, which brought the committee itself into existence.[viii] These congressional rules were careful to delineate that the Executive’s ability to prevent congressional declassification of information was limited to documents which Executive agencies, such as the CIA, had provided to Congress. The White House has no power to limit the release of classified information originated in Congress itself. Except for the courtesy which Congress has chosen from time to time to extend the Executive in these matters, several presidents would have sustained deeper political wounds from congressional investigations.[ix]
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There are many more Russia vs. United States issues like Russian bombers buzzing U.S. military aircraft or that Russian spy ship that hovered off the Atlantic coast….moving on….
Seymour Hersh’s explosive revelations in The New York Times on December 22, 1974, led to White House and congressional investigations into the intelligence community, including establishment of the Pike Committee.