National Security Reporter. Words in Foreign Policy, Politico, Axios, Yahoo News, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone and more.
Email: thebrushpass1
@protonmail
.com
I don’t know whether the alleged Zelensky assassination plot was, in fact, foiled by FSB snitches, as the Ukrainians say. But saying the tip came from with the FSB itself is maximally designed to send the FSB into a counterintelligence ouroboros.
Look at the size of this protest in Prague—a city that knows a thing or two about a Russian invasion. Ukrainian and EU flags. Like watching a tectonic shift in the politics of the continent in real time.
Just want to pause for a second to acknowledge that, if Russia does indeed launch a new war against Ukraine, the Ukrainian people will suffer terribly, and many civilians will likely die. The human costs are going to be terrible.
Imagine being a spy service, investing years on an asset in a big tech company, it pivots radically from its original remit, confuses senior intel officials by advertising that “legs are coming soon” or something equally impenetrable, then fires your source amid mass layoffs
An ex-CIA official once said to me that the agency was the “secret foreign policy wing of the U.S. government.”
It’s very difficult to judge, say, the Obama admin’s record on Ukraine without factoring in its covert support & training for Ukrainian intel/special operations.
“Your security services are flipping to our side for ideological/policy reasons” is terrifying to any spy agency. Look, spying for money is bad enough. But when people start doing it for a cause…
The bomb that killed the ultranationalist war blogger was hidden within a small statue … of his own likeness, given to him during a speech at the cafe.
Killing a war propagandist with a statue of his own image: that’s a biblical-literary level of vengeance, folks. Le Carre would have rejected it as too on-the-nose.
NEW: How a now-shuttered CIA paramilitary training program on Ukraine's eastern frontlines helped prepare Kyiv for the current Russian onslaught.
The effect of the agency training programs “cannot be overestimated,” said a former senior CIA official.
In the 1980s, the FBI recruited a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to secretly ship millions in sabotaged hi-tech to the Soviet Bloc. My exclusive story—on the never-before-revealed OPERATION INTERING—in
@politico
/
@POLITICOMag
:
"Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping."
A former intelligence official said to me recently that what was scariest was the dawning realization among many within the USG that Putin actually likely believes this drivel; that he’d entered “Kim Jung Un territory” and was “self-brainwashed.”
Johnson went from being a backbencher to a member of the Gang of 4. He’s gone from 0 real intel awareness to mainlining the strongest stuff—covert actions, ultrasensitive collection programs, exquisite source reporting. Some of that has shaken him, and he’s said as much publicly.
Important but overlooked: Mike Johnson explicitly says he's acting on Ukraine because believes what our intel agencies say about the awful consequences of abandoning it.
That's a striking rebuke to MAGA's lies about the "deep state" and the war. 1/
Link:
Covert action campaigns using cyberespionage and selective disclosure via deniable third parties to influence US elections is going to feature prominently in American electoral politics for the rest of our lives. The question is how resilient we’re going to be to them.
Buckle up. Confirmed hack & leak of Trump Campaign sensitive documents. Initial response by Campaign suggests foreign sources, coinciding with Microsoft’s alert from this past week and the
@ODNIgov
alert of the week before. Someone is running the 2016 playbook, expect continued
It’s hard to overstate the importance, or weight of the mission, of the
@AssociatedPress
team—the only international journalists in the city—on the ground in Mariupol today.
In the 80s a CIA officer, FBI agent & KGB officer went out for dinner in VA. They got incredibly drunk. The FBI agent turned to the next table & said loudly, “Guess what? I’m FBI, he’s CIA, & this is a KGB guy we’re recruiting.”
That table happened to be a group of CIA analysts.
And here it is,
CIA ANALYST, MICHAEL SCHEUER. PHD,
The Central Intelligence Agency toppled the United States government on CONSPIRACY DAY November 3, 2020 live on national tv.
DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.
.
@BuzzFeed
calling it straight:
“Vladimir Putin has lied about his army not targeting civilians in what he calls a ‘special military operation,’ and has also lied about establishing safe corridors for people to flee his deadly violence.”
Irpin Mayor Oleksandr Markushin said about 8 people died from Russian shelling today. “Two children died in front of my eyes,” he said in a video posted to his Telegram channel.
This understated and candid account by
@douglaslondon5
--describing a degraded, politicized environment at CIA during the Pompeo era--is shocking and deserves wide readership.
I asked a senior Trump admin official why they didn’t try & provide Ukraine with more in-country mil training.
Trump was “completely focused” on the conspiracy theory that UKR had a server with hacked DNC materials, to the detriment of other UKR matters, said the official.
Trump says Putin's military move on Ukraine is "genius."
"Putin is now saying, 'It’s independent,' a large section of Ukraine. I said, 'How smart is that?' And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper... We could use that on our southern border."
"Here’s a guy who’s very savvy."
Widespread state hacking of airport biometric data. A compromise of CIA officers in Moscow. The end of fake IDs.
Based on conversations w over 40 officials,
@JennaMC_Laugh
& I did a deep dive on how the digital age has transformed human spying forever:
Trump is about to speak to reporters in Rose Garden for unscheduled event. Pooler
@hunterw
says rumors among press corps are an appearance from Conan the hero dog from Baghdadi raid
When a head of state believes a peaceful democratically elected government led by a Jew is actually a drug addled Nazi cabal committing genocide, it might be time to re-examine our priors about his worldview and capacity for empirical analysis
This is a story about a CIA officer who, after 9/11, spent years deep undercover posing as an Islamist radical, infiltrating terrorist groups. He was celebrated in secret; he even met the president. But when he came home, he just wasn’t the same.
By the time former President Donald Trump was sworn in, CIA officials were “really concerned” about the growing relationship between Russian extremists and their Western counterparts, according to a former senior agency official.
Re-upping this
@POLITICOMag
story of mine about how Kissinger secretly conspired with the Chilean military dictatorship to undermine the Carter admin.
He counseled Chile to subvert a US terrorism investigation into a lethal bombing in Washington.
@georgiaisaverb
@kenklippenstein
“Your joy—which is harmful to no one, and encapsulates the fundamental human desire to understand and be understood— is ipso facto an affront to me”
This is a pretty incredible disclosure from GCHQ--and a window into both Russian prowess and a future where assigning attribution is going to become more fraught.
This is a superb
@RollingStone
profile by
@arawnsley
of the lead CIA analyst for the landmark intel community report on Russian election interference in 2016.
Russia’s invasion plan was to decapitate Ukraine’s civilian government. So far, what we’re seeing instead is a decapitation of Russia’s military leadership in Ukraine. A stunning inversion.
Audio from Snake Island, Black Sea:
Russians: This is a Russian warship. I propose you lay down arms and surrender to avoid bloodshed & unnecessary victims. Otherwise, you’ll be bombed.
Ukrainians: Russian warship, go fuck yourself.
They were all killed
BREAKING INTEL:
@CBSNews
has confirmed that Robert Hanssen, a former
@FBI
agent and one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history, has died. He was found unresponsive this morning, per the Bureau of Prisons. Hanssen was 79 and had spent the last 22+ years in federal custody.
I was told there were NSC folks worried about precisely this issue—that Starlink use would become a very prominent signal for Russian targeting. (NSC declined to comment.)
Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution.
This falsehood—which I keep seeing repeated and shared online, and has continued to gain currency—is, at best, misinformation; at worst, it is willful disinformation. There is no evidence whatsoever that substantiates the claim.
Some ex-agency officials with whom I’ve spoke also say that, in their experience, Democratic administrations are bigger proponents of covert action than Republican ones (though this is hard to quantify from the outside).
Honored to find out that
@SeanDNaylor
,
@Isikoff
and my story on WikiLeaks is a finalist for an SPJDC Dateline Award for investigative reporting.
Here’s the piece:
“Investigators determined that Flynn received nearly $450,000 from Turkish and Russian interests in 2015, including for an appearance in Moscow alongside President Vladimir Putin, but found no records that he had sought government approval beforehand.”
A former FBI agent recently told me that, in the 1990s, CIA turncoat Edward Lee Howard—who successfully escaped to Moscow in 1985–would occasionally drunkenly call the US embassy in Moscow. One can only imagine the reaction of US personnel there, particularly at the CIA station.
Duty to warn—extending even to America’s geopolitical adversaries—is a real bright spot in U.S. policy and an example of the salutary use of intelligence.
For my fellow nerds out there: this is, to my knowledge, the most detailed reporting out there on a Cold War-era U.S.-authored, tech-focused sabotage offensive counterintelligence campaign. No need to rely on the what-ifs of Gus Weiss anymore!
Whats’s amazing about Proghozin’s public statements lately is that, were he to have uttered them privately, they would have represented explosive and closely-held intelligence. But the man is just putting it all out there for the world to hear.
Spurred by the recent
@Reuters
report, I wrote about the catastrophic compromise of CIA's covert communications system in China and Iran roughly a decade ago.
On the one side, dissidents and journalists. On the other, assassins and deep-cover spies. This wasn’t a “trade,” or a “swap.” This was hostage-taking by an authoritarian power, versus an array of liberal democracies putting their values first.
To risk stating the obvious, Zelenskyy apparently mulling sacking his intel chief in the middle of an existential fight for his country is not exactly a vote of confidence in the SBU at the moment.
Again: We need something like a 9/11 Commission on the COVID-19 response. It's that catastrophic of a failure. Many people will die because of the bungled response.
I get that it’s a busy news day, but NATO doubling its border with Russia overnight, and adding a new member with serious artillery capabilities: big deal.
Ah, ok. "Grenell used to do consulting work on behalf of an Eastern European oligarch who is now a fugitive and was recently barred from entering the U.S. under anti-corruption sanctions imposed last month by the State Department."
Gates told the FBI that the RNC had advance knowledge of the Wikileaks dumps, and Flynn told the Trump team that Russian intelligence couldn't have been involved in the hacks(?) and that he'd use his intel contacts to get the emails for Trump.
Every time I read about the Russian military obliterating some apartment building or otherwise obviously civilian-populated building in Ukraine I think of the former senior CIA official who told me the Russians had “very precise fires” when it came to artillery.
A former senior CIA official said to me recently that one of their top concerns was that a cash-poor Russia, cut off from global financial markets, would start directing its intel agencies to behave like the North Koreans services & start widespread hacking for profit.
This story courtesy of Bearden and Risen’s incredible “Main Enemy.”
The FBI agent was taken off the case after the CIA analysts reported what happened. The KGB guy wasn’t recruited.
NEW: Via the declassified Polish cold war intel archive, I obtained a KGB-era Russia-language document cataloging a massive U.S. bugging operation of Soviet diplomatic facilities in DC, NYC, & SF, as well as of the apartments and cars of Soviet personnel.
Senior officials pressed the CIA about how it could help effect a coup in Venezuela, according to a former senior Trump administration official involved in the discussions.
Former Sec of State Mike Pompeo has announced he will not run for president in 2024.
As CIA Director, Pompeo repeatedly advocated for kidnapping WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK, & rendering him back to the US.
Loud and noisy behavior by Russian or Chinese intelligence operatives in the U.S.--like, say, rolling up to a U.S. military base with JSOC facilities contained therein, with FBI CI almost certainly tailing you--is sometimes a cover for action for *other* operational acts
"US intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen."
@QW5kcmV3
@kenklippenstein
@tytinvestigates
I think that's fair when you're talking about cartels or other violent extremist groups. The interfaith coalitions? No. That's just first amendment activity. Hard to see how this bubbie or her crews' activities "may result in harm" to the US military.
As someone who has reported in this space, I think this type of speculation is irresponsible at best. The causality behind asset losses is often complex, opaque even to CI experts, & overdetermined.
Also, basic social science teaches that correlation is not equal to causation.
POTENTIALLY MASSIVE in light of what we know now:
In Oct 2021, CIA Counterintelligence sent a top secret cable warning an unusually number of confidential informants were being killed, captured, or compromised.
In Jan 2021, Trump stole documents on these kind of informants.
Every presidential administration produces reams of classified documents. The bare fact of their transportation to Mar-a-Lago is potentially far less substantial than what precisely they reveal. Why were these documents, above all others, taken by former president Trump?
The president's personal lawyer's close associate in the Ukraine coercion scheme allegedly hid a $1 million "loan" from a Putin-aligned Ukrainian oligarch currently under U.S. federal indictment for racketeering charges.
Am I getting this right?
@chrislhayes
@PeterBeinart
Imagine, as CIA Director and Sec of State, receiving the mostly highly classified intelligence in the U.S. government for 4 years straight, truly the Crown Jewels —after sitting on House Intel, by the way—and believing the head of a teacher’s union is a bigger threat than Xi.
If you're interested in understanding the global reach of Iran's proxies, I highly recommend this
@JoshMeyerDC
story--one of my favorite pieces of investigative journalism of the last few years.
Iraqi intelligence recruited a courier working with al-Baghdadi's family, and passed the info on to CIA.
Strong liaison relationships--with the Iraqis and Kurds--were critical to decapitating ISIS. And how they got him underscores the value of HUMINT.
Must be amazing to sit at the apex of coordination for a vast and powerful military, intelligence, diplomatic, and economic complex and talk about . . . purchasing Greenland.
“Two of the U.S. officials said there was additional intelligence indicating a false flag by Russia would involve the use of a chemical agent that would immobilize civilians, then use cadavers to make it appear as though the Ukrainians had gassed and killed civilians.”
This is an incredible story, but the underlying takeaway is dispiriting. A sitting U.S. Senator shouldn’t need a Deep Throat-figure to point him toward intelligence to which he should have already had access.
THREAD: In
@SenatorLeahy
's new memoir, there's a wild story in it that I haven't ever seen before—a rare glimpse into the shadowy way that the intel agencies interact with Members of Congress. It feels ripped from a political thriller movie...:
I'm thrilled to announce that I've started a new role as a writer/producer at
@ProjectBrazen
, where I'll be developing an investigative intelligence podcast and writing a weekly newsletter, The Brush Pass--
@brushpass1
--on all things national security, intel & cybersecurity.
The massive Iranian intelligence leaks on Iraq and Chinese government leaks on Xinjiang feel epochal—like authoritarian states will increasingly grapple with the type of highly disruptive documentary disclosures that Western governments have struggled with for half a decade.
🚨 Sue Mi Terry, a US security expert who had worked on the White House National Security Council, has been indicted on U.S. charges she worked as an unregistered agent for South Korea's government in exchange for luxuries and other gifts, according to a newly unsealed indictment
My
@rollingstone
feature, based on conversations with over two dozen former CIA officials, is about a deep-cover CIA officer who spent years abroad after 9/11 living as an Islamist extremist—and the tragic personal fallout that resulted.
Some news: I’m writing a book on the US history of deep cover, from the Cold War to the present.
If you’d like to connect, please reach out. There are so many important stories waiting to be told. DM me for secure email, and we can take it from there!
“We tried to really focus on operational planning, then really hard military skills like long-range marksmanship—not just the capacity to do it, but to know how to do it on a battlefield, to really deplete the leadership on the other side,” said a former senior intel official.
NEW: After 9/11, the CIA launched an ultra-secret initiative to have deep-cover spies pose as Islamist radicals in order to infiltrate Al Qaeda.
This is the story of the CIA officer who went deepest down the rabbit hole—and never really came home.
I know there’s a lot going on right now. But if you can spare a few minutes, please consider making this story—based on 6+ months of reporting, and interviews with over 40 officials—from
@JennaMC_Laugh
and me, your weekend read:
This is absurd. The Nuremberg Trials were completed by 1946. The Tokyo Trials by 1948. Mass murderers can receive relatively speedy trials. And if the evidence has been irrevocably tainted by torture, that’s on the torturers, not the military officials trying to close the book.
BREAKING: The U.S. defense secretary revoked a plea deal with three men accused of plotting Sept. 11, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case. My developing story start here.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be the gentlemen who lie for the good of their county?’
‘That’s diplomats. We’re not gentlemen.’
‘So you lie to save your hides.’
‘That’s politicians. Different game entirely.’
—John Le Carre, “Our Kind of Traitor”