Time to Get Spies Out of Politics
The Michael Morell story demonstrates that the intelligence community needs sweeping reform, beginning with getting spies all the way out of domestic political life
On September 08, 2002, New York Times writers Michael Gordon and Judith Miller wrote a blockbuster, titled, “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” It began:
Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney went on “Meet The Press” and told Tim Russert Iraq had “reconstituted” its nuke program, citing “a story in the New York Times this morning.”
The Cheney-MTP episode set a standard for laundering disinformation through media. The Times got its “A-Bomb Parts” story by citing “Bush administration officials,” and Cheney sold the same story to the world by citing the New York Times. This merry-go-round is a perfect way for politicians and spooks to introduce bogus news into the world without leaving fingerprints.
The new story about former acting CIA director Michael Morell looks like a similar game of disinformation telephone. Again, the House Weaponization of Government Committee led by Jim Jordan recently questioned Morell. His answers suggest he may have been “triggered” by a call from then-Biden campaign official Anthony Blinken to organize a group letter signed by 50 former intel officials, opining the Hunter Biden laptop story looked like a “Russian information operation.”
A little-noticed detail about the letter is in its next-to-last paragraph, where officials worked the word “disinformation” into the text:
In addition, media reports say that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement in the case. According to USA Today, “…federal authorities are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.”
The USA Today piece was published two days before the group letter. Citing a “person familiar with the matter,” it said the FBI was investigating the “smoke bomb of disinformation,” a USA Today characterization of the “person’s” assessment.
This is the same circular firing squad trick Cheney employed. Nameless official is source for news outlet, news outlet becomes source for different official, and in the end, no one has to take credit for making the wrong claim. This is the template for information delivery in a world run by spooks, where we won’t get news but what the Russians call versii, or versions — takes on takes on reality, with the origin source too far away to see. We’ll know what we’re supposed to think, but less and less effort is being put into the problem of giving us reasons to believe what we’re told.
We saw the same circle-trick in 2016 when a “well-placed Western intelligence source” told Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! that former Trump aide Carter Page met with Rosneft chief Igor Sechin. The article claimed Page was a “possible back channel” to the Russians.
The Isikoff piece came out on September 23rd, 2016. That same day, the Hillary For America campaign issued a statement about how it was “chilling to learn that U.S. intelligence officials are conducting a probe” into Trump’s onetime adviser:
Of course, the Clinton camp didn’t “learn” anything from the Yahoo! piece. They were the origin of it, as the “well-placed Western intelligence source” was the campaign’s own opposition researcher, British ex-spy Christopher Steele (Isikoff, who’s been forthright in answering questions on this, insists he was unaware of the connection). The Clinton campaign pulled the same stunt with the Alfa Server story, with Clinton policy aide and current Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan penning a “We’re shocked, shocked” tweet “in response” to a Slate report they planted.
Given this latest news about Morell, one wonders if the Weaponization Committee is taking a look back at 2016. Recall in late July of that year, then-CIA chief John Brennan warned Barack Obama about “Russian intelligence analysis” the Agency reportedly obtained about the Clinton campaign. According to Brennan’s handwritten notes, the warning included “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
It subsequently came out — among other things in a March 2017 Washington Post column by former Clinton spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri — that Palmieri and Sullivan decided to “make the rounds of the television networks’ tents” at the Democratic convention in 2016, pitching them all stories about how Russia had not only hacked the election, but “had done so to help Donald Trump.” As Palmieri wrote, “We did not succeed.”
Though some channels were willing to let Clinton spokespeople make such charges on air, these theories weren’t swimming with a roaring media tide yet. Just before, the Clinton campaign had been rocked by a Wikileaks dump that showed how completely the Democratic Party was tilted in Clinton’s favor and against rival Bernie Sanders, among other things showing then-DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz saying Sanders “skated” on his “Jewish heritage.”
When Robby Mook told Jake Tapper on CNN that “the Russians are releasing these e-mails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Tapper appropriately asked for evidence twice, chiding Mook that this was a “very, very strong charge you’re leveling.” Mook replied by saying it wasn’t his charge, but “what experts are telling us.” The comments were construed as a desperate attempt to change the subject. How long ago was this? Even the Atlantic pooh-poohed the charges as “brazenly hypocritical.”
With media not rising fast enough to bait, what happened? A miracle. On August 5th, 2016, two weeks after Sullivan and Palmieri’s golf-cart ride, Michael Morell came out with an editorial in the New York Times, “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.” A key passage:
Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
Morell concluded by essentially saying his source for Trump being an “unwitting agent” was “my training as an intelligence officer,” language very like the 2020 letter about the laptop. That said signatories may lack proof, but “our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
The 2016 article gave new weight to Trump-Russia claims. The term “unwitting agent” appeared in headlines all over, from Reuters to Politico to NBC to the Washington Post to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. As my colleague Walter Kirn eloquently put it, “In that statement, we have the seed of seven years of bullshit.”
There may not be a specific law enjoining intelligence officials from spreading lies in mass media to further electoral aims, or against politicians using intelligence personnel to mesmerize the flaccid brains of corporate reporters, but I’d argue such behavior goes against the spirit of the CIA’s 1947 charter prohibiting domestic spycraft.
These people — all of them — need to get out of domestic politics, leave cable, and go back to living off overpaid no-show jobs at the Rand Corporation or Raytheon as God ordained. They are exactly the direct threat to democracy they keep claiming other groups are, and it’s increasingly clear our survival as a nation will depend on finding a way to expunge them from the domestic political arena. It’s their remorseless fascistic rhetoric I think I hear when I see people like Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan say about the Tucker Carlson story, “Now they just need to take out the rest of the trash.”
Who’s they? To what higher cabal is a member of congress referring when he talks about sweeping away the rest of America’s human trash? That sounds like Travis Bickle waiting for a “real rain to come and wash all the scum off the streets,” except in modern America that’s not a lone outcast’s fantasy but mainstream cult demand. They want the rabble washed away, and can’t for an excuse to start raining.