Also: Putin ramps up sabotage, a CIA sex assault case ends, DoD stands by its covert disinfo op against China, more HPSCI havoc and Trump on JFK files
Blinking Red: In the four years before 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet testified publicly 10 times about the threat al Qaeda posed to the United States. In eight appearances before Congress in recent months, FBI Director Christopher Wray has been sounding similar warnings.
In addition to threats from al Qaeda and ISIS, the United States is also facing threats from state-sponsored terrorists and home-grown domestic terrorists. All three threats are “simultaneously elevated,” Wray told the Senate Appropriations Committee this month.
Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell and influential national security analyst Graham Allison said Wray’s testimony should be taken seriously. “Put simply, the United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist attack in the months ahead,” they wrote in Foreign Affairs.
For months, Wray has been saying that the top threat to the homeland comes from “lone actors or individuals operating in small cells who typically radicalize to violence online, and who primarily use easily accessible weapons to attack soft targets.” These are the hardest threats to detect.
The FBI identified two principal categories of lone actors and small cells radicalized online. The first is “domestic violent extremists,” Americans who use violence to further social or political goals. The second is “homegrown violent extremists,” individuals of any citizenship in the United States who are inspired by global jihad but are not receiving direction from a foreign terrorist group like ISIS or al Qaeda.
Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm in New York City, told the Los Angeles Times that the range of domestic threat actors includes those on the far-right, the far-left, and “salad bar people” like Incels and Q-Anon believers who borrow from different ideologies.
Data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security show that from 2010 through 2021 white supremacy motivated more native terrorists than any other ideology.
Wray said the FBI is increasingly concerned about a foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil carried out by global jihad-inspired homegrown violent extremists. Foiling these attacks presents a challenge to investigators who must decide whether would-be terrorists are planning an attack or simply consuming terrorist propaganda.
The FBI director has repeatedly pointed out the security gaps along the U.S.-Mexico border. Wray warned the Senate intelligence committee in March about a smuggling network with “ISIS ties that we are very concerned about.” Those concerns were underscored by the recent arrests of eight Central Asian men with potential ties to ISIS-K who entered the United States via the southern border.
Then there’s the state-sponsored threat. In April 2022, federal prosecutors charged an Iranian government official in Tehran with trying to hire a hit name to assassinate former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton.
According to a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., the FBI also recently foiled a “sadistic” assassination attempt by an Iranian agent against Amir Fakharavar, a student who fled Iran in 2006 and now advocates for regime change in Tehran. Fakharavar sued the government of Iran and disclosed in his lawsuit that the FBI informed him in April that he was the target of an assassination plot by an agent of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) whom the FBI arrested. The IRGC agent “planned to surveil Mr. Fakhravar and his family, locate them, execute Mr. Fakhravar’s wife and child— while forcing Mr. Fakhravar to watch their executions—and then murder Mr. Fakhravar.” (Asked for comment, the FBI told SpyTalk it doesn’t comment on litigation.)
As Morell and Allison wrote, “Foiled plots inside the United States should be the ultimate wake-up call.”
Putin Turns Up the Heat: A fire destroys a Ukrainian-owned warehouse in East London. A warehouse owned by the same company in Spain goes up in flames. In Berlin, a metals plant owned by a company that makes a Ukrainian air defense system burns. Another fire destroys Warsaw’s largest shopping center.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched a shadow war against NATO, and U.S. intelligence is providing their European counterparts information they can use to disrupt the Kremlin’s sabotage campaign.
David Ignatius of The Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines briefed NATO’s decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council, about a surge in shadowy, Russian-linked attacks that began this spring.
“Haines told the NATO council that Putin’s goals were to interrupt weapons deliveries, divide the alliance and deter further NATO support for Kyiv,” Ignatius reported. Putin, however, wants to vex his opponents while avoiding an overt act that could trigger an Article 5 response from allied forces. Putin knows that’s a war he would lose. So far, no one has been hurt in this sabotage campaign. As we’ve reported, Russia’s intelligence services have deteriorated since the invasion of Ukraine, despite Putin’s efforts to bolster them since he rose to power two decades ago. (Imagine how bad things have to be if the CIA can recruit Russian assets via videos posted on social media.) So, it’s only a matter of time before an operation goes wrong and someone is killed. That could lead NATO to discuss a collective response.
Case Dismissed: A notice of dismissal was filed Thursday in a federal lawsuit brought against the CIA by an agency trainee whose decision to press charges of sexual assault against one of her colleagues prompted at least two dozen women with related complaints to come forward.
The parties in Doe v. Burns mutually agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, which means that the dismissal is the final outcome of the matter and that the case cannot be refiled.
In her lawsuit, the woman accused two CIA officers of trying to intimidate her in order to prevent her from talking to criminal investigators about her 2002 assault in a stairwell at agency headquarters. The CIA fired the woman in February.
The woman’s saga prompted at least two dozen women to come forward with their complaints of abusive treatment within the CIA. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence interviewed 26 whistleblowers and reviewed more than 4,000 pages of records.
As we reported in April, HPSCI found the CIA failed to deal with sexual abuse in its ranks, and there was “little to no accountability or punishment for confirmed perpetrators.”
The intelligence oversight panel found that victims at the CIA were deterred from coming forward because the agency did not grant them anonymity. By contrast, a federal judge allowed the CIA whistleblower to sue the agency anonymously.
The CIA established an office in 2021 that advocates for employees dealing with sexual assault and harassment and hired an experienced outside expert to lead that office.
Pentagon Disinformation: The U.S. military stands by its decision to run a secret campaign in the Philippines aimed at undermining faith in China’s COVID-19 vaccine, an operation that was payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic.
A bombshell report by Reuters last week found that the military propaganda effort, which employed phony social media accounts that impersonated Filipinos, “morphed into an anti-vax campaign.”
“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog.
The operation was the brainchild of Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, then-commander of Special Operations Command, Pacific, which coordinates, plans and directs all special operations in China, India, and Southeast Asia. (Braga took over as head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command in 2021.) It was run out of SOCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.
The campaign started in 2020 under former President Trump and continued into Biden’s presidency, “even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation,” Reuters reported. The National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vax messaging in the spring of 2021.
The Washington Post reported in 2022 that the Pentagon ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after social media companies took down fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military.
Reuters found that the audit concluded that the military’s primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics Information Technology, “had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts.”
In February, General Dynamics IT was awarded a $493 million task order to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military, Reuters reported.
HPSCI Havoc: Congress can rarely agree on much these days, but both sides of the aisles seemed united in their outrage over Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to appoint a pair of Trump loyalists to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
As we reported earlier this month, Johnson appointed Reps. Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Ronny Jackson, R-Tex., to the oversight panel, reportedly at Donald Trump’s behest.
Most of the anger seemed directed at Perry, a retired brigadier general who schemed to reverse or obstruct certification of the 2020 presidential election and pushed Trump to appoint an acting attorney general to support bogus claims of voter fraud. “Part of the problem is it is rewarding bad behavior,” one GOP member told Axios.
The FBI seized Perry’s phone in 2022 as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s effort to reverse the election results. A judge in December ordered Perry to disclose to the FBI more than 1,600 messages he claimed were protected by the Speech and Debate clause.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a member of the House intelligence committee, called Perry “a threat to intelligence oversight.” In a letter to the speaker, Houlahan wrote that Perry “will be on the very committee that oversees the FBI while he is directly under investigation by this very agency,” which amounted to a “disqualifying conflict of interests.”
HPSCI Chairman Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, said he contacted the intelligence community about the issues raised by Houlahan. “They indicated that there was not an ongoing or continuing issue, or even a current issue that we needed to address,” Turner said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation.
“The FBI told you that?” host Margaret Brennan asked.
“The IC told us that,” Turner replied.
Turner also said Perry apologized to him for saying he would conduct actual oversight on the committee, “not blind obedience to some facets of our Intel Community”—an apparent dig at the chairman himself. Perry’s statement remains on his House website, however.
The intelligence committee “is not a place to play games,” a “high-ranking” Republican told The Washington Post, “This is not a place to appease somebody. This is where you got to do the real work.” This high-ranking Republican apparently forgot that a previous member of the committee was Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., who, while serving on the panel, perpetuated nutty claims about longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Former Speaker John Boehner, who described Bachmann as a “lunatic” and “folk hero of the freak show set,” put her on the panel in 2010 not because she was qualified but because she had leverage. In his 2021 memoir On the House, Boehner revealed that Bachmann had threatened to go on Fox News and conservative talk radio and complain if she didn’t get the committee assignments she wanted.
Perry’s post-election antics make Bachmann look like a responsible choice. The Pennsylvania Republican’s texts revealed that he urged White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to use the intelligence community as a tool to keep Trump in power.
CNN reported that Perry texted Meadows five days after the election was called for Biden: “From an Intel friend: DNI needs to task NSA to immediately seize and begin looking for international comms related to Dominion—was china malware involved?”
A short time later, Perry texted Meadows and told him that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, run by Perry’s former House colleague John Ratcliffe, “needs to be tasked to audit their overseas accounts at the CIA and their National Endowment for Democracy,” a congressionally funded non-governmental organization that supports democratic movements overseas.
He also texted that then-CIA Director Gina Haspel “is still running around on the Hill covering for the Brits who helped quarterback this entire operation.”
A court filing that was mistakenly made public in December refers to a mysterious file that Meadows sent to DNI Ratcliffe at Perry’s direction relating to claims of election fraud or efforts to keep Donald Trump in power after he lost to Biden.
One former Trump Justice Department official described Perry’s post-election antics, some of which involved bogus claims about U.S. intelligence, as “pure insanity.”
The Saudis and 9/11—Again: It’s amazing that more than two decades after 9/11, we are still learning new information about Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi intelligence asset who helped the first two hijackers to arrive in the United States settle in San Diego.
60 Minutes obtained a video Bayoumi filmed over the course of several days in 1999 outside the U.S. Capitol. The video shows the Capitol’s entrances and exits along with security posts and a model of the building. At one point, he points out the Washington Monument and says he’ll go there and “report to you in detail what is there.” He also notes the airport is nearby.
“I think he’s talking to the al Qaeda planners who tasked him to take the pre-operational surveillance video of the intended target,” said Richard Lambert, a retired FBI agent who led the initial 9/11 investigation in San Diego and now consults for 9/11 families suing Saudi Arabia. “It is another very large brick in a massive wall of evidence that at this point indicates the Saudi government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”
Bayoumi was the subject of a 2023 SpyTalk investigation into allegations by former FBI agents that the CIA and Saudi intelligence launched a failed effort to recruit two 9/11 hijackers.
Clearance Reinstated: The FBI has reinstated the security clearance of an agent who was allegedly retaliated against for questioning the bureau’s narrative regarding investigations into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Marcus Allen, an ex-Marine, was accused of disloyalty to the United States and suspended without pay in February 2022 from his role as staff operation specialist in the Charlotte, N.C. bureau.
The FBI accused Allen of “questionable judgment” after he told supervisors that Director Christopher Wray lied during his 2021 Senate testimony when asked about whether informants infiltrated groups responsible for the Jan. 6 riot.
Asked whether he wished the FBI had infiltrated the Proud Boys, Wray responded:
“I will tell you, Senator, and this is something I feel passionately about, that any time there is an attack, our standard at the FBI is we aim to bat a thousand, right? And we aim to thwart every attack that is out there. So any time there is an attack, especially one that's this horrific, that strikes right at the heart of our system the government, right at the time of transfer of power is being discussed, you can be darn tooting that we are focused very, very hard on how could we get better sources, better information, better analysis so that we can make sure that something that what happened on January 6th never happens again.”The FBI did have numerous informants inside the Proud Boys, including the group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio. Another FBI whistleblower subsequently told Congress that the bureau had more than 20 confidential human sources in the crowd on Jan. 6. (By the way, “the Proud Boys are back,” Reuters’ Aram Roston reported June 3.)
Long Arm of New Delhi: An Indian national was extradited to the United States on June 17 from the Czech Republic to face charges that he was hired to direct an assassination plot on U.S. soil against a Sikh attorney and political activist.
As we reported in May, Nikhil Gupta, an alleged Indian drug and weapons trafficker, was tasked with carrying out the plot to kill one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most vocal critics in the United States. The killer Gupta hired was an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“This murder-for-hire plot — allegedly orchestrated by an Indian government employee to kill a U.S. citizen in New York City — was a brazen attempt to silence a political activist for exercising a quintessential American right: his freedom of speech,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.
Gupta was arraigned Monday in federal court in Manhattan.
An investigation by The Washington Post found that Gupta was tasked by Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). According to the Post, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that the operation was approved by RAW’s chief at the time, Samant Goel. Evidence linking RAW to the attempted assassination was found on Gupta’s laptop and phone.
Yadav was also linked to the June 18 shooting death of a Sikh activist in Surrey, B.C., near Vancouver, that ruptured India-Canada relations.
Pocket Litter:
OpenAI appointed retired US Army General Paul Nakasone, the former head of the National Security Agency, to its board of directors. (Bloomberg)
House lawmakers are proposing to create a commission to investigate Havana Syndrome, brain-related injuries caused during incidents against U.S. government personnel posted abroad, known formally as Anomalous Health Incidents. A section of the current House intelligence authorization bill now being debated would set up a National Security Commission on Anomalous Health Incidents. (The Washington Times)
A Russian court on Monday announced it will hold the espionage trial of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich behind closed doors late in June. The 32-year-old American journalist has been detained in Russia for more than a year on allegations of spying for the CIA, a charge that the newspaper describes as “false and baseless.” (Politico)
The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to bar the sale of antivirus software made by Russia's Kaspersky Lab in the United States. The Commerce Department says the company’s links to Russia’s government pose a national security risk. (Reuters)
The Week in Trump: The Republican candidate for president said Thursday the CIA “was probably behind” the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. He also said in a podcast interview that he might declassify more files if he makes it back to the White House.