New in SpyWeek: Assange and More
The Wikileaker's guilty plea, Evan Gershkovich’s secret trial, internal CIA grumbling over the Hunter Biden letter, more Air Force leaks & a Russian bomb plot in Paris lead this week's roundup
Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The swift resolution of the case against Julian Assange was a legal surrender by the U.S. government, but it was much more: an outcome shaped by the competing and overlapping pressures of diplomacy, national security, and military strategy.
Assange’s return to his native Australia as a free man Wednesday followed years of quiet but strategic diplomacy by Australian leaders who seized upon a new strategic partnership with Washington and London to make the case for Assange’s release.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he personally raised the issue with President Biden at a 2022 NATO summit in Madrid as the two leaders strengthened their ties through the AUKUS partnership forged the previous year. Under AUKUS, the United States and the United Kingdom committed to helping Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to counter China’s rise as a global superpower.
AUKUS was the sort of deal full of secrets—such as highly classified efforts to develop unspecified “advanced capabilities”—that the 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder would have loved to spill. But as Assange lingered for five years in a high-security British prison battling the U.S. government’s efforts to extradite him, he became one of AUKUS’ beneficiaries.
The result was a fitting end to a case that probably should never have been brought. Assange pleaded guilty to a single count of the Espionage Act in a remote U.S. courthouse about 6,000 miles from the American mainland and was sentenced to time served.
The U.S. government had maintained that Assange was “no journalist,” but the conduct underlying the 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder’s plea bore a closer resemblance to journalism (albeit bad journalism) than espionage.
Assange admitted that in 2009, WikiLeaks had a list of “Most Wanted Leaks,” and Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, sent him much of what he sought and more. That included roughly half a million U.S. military activity reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, 250,000 State Department cables, and secret files relating to the U.S. military’s rules of engagement. Assange published that information without concealing the identities of confidential U.S. government informants in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The government noted that no responsible journalist would publish the names of informants in war zones. We agree. But who was harmed? In a detail many reporters overlooked, a senior Justice Department official told the judge hearing Assange’s case in the Northern Marianas Islands on Tuesday that there were no “individual victims.”
What was really striking about Assange’s courtroom appearance on the outer fringes of the U.S. legal system was how much was left unsaid. Gone were the criminal allegations that might have distinguished Assange’s conduct from journalism. An indictment unsealed in 2019 in Virginia accused Assange of agreeing to help Manning crack a password on a computer on a secure U.S. Defense Department network. (NB: Journalists don’t hack passwords and stealing information isn’t journalism.) Absent those charges, however, the “crime” to which Assange pleaded guilty amounted to publishing information.
There was no mention of the notorious and un-journalistic role WikiLeaks played in advancing Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by serving as a conduit for hacked Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails. The Senate intelligence committee's years-long investigation found that WikiLeaks “actively sought and played a key role in the Russian influence effort and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence effort.”
Also absent was former CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s 2017 description of WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence agency,” a designation that reportedly authorized the spy agency to draft a series of war plans against the group. As SpyTalk’s Jeff Stein noted, the CIA’s sordid secret plans to neutralize Assange may have led the Biden Justice Department to reduce the charges against the WikiLeaks founder.
“It’s over. Both sides lost,” wrote national security blogger Marcy Wheeler. The biggest loser was Chelsea Manning, who went to jail to resist a subpoena for testimony against Assange that will never be used against him. Convicted at a court-martial in 2013, Manning served seven years in prison. (President Obama commuted her 35-year sentence in 2017.) She served an additional year in jail fighting the subpoena.
For years, Assange waged an information war against the United States, but the Obama administration declined to prosecute him because it posed a threat to press freedom, as The Washington Post noted:
Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a "New York Times problem." If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute The New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material.
Under President Trump, who crowed about his love of WikiLeaks on the campaign trail, the Justice Department tried to put Assange in prison and had him hauled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where the WikiLeaks founder spent seven years fighting the law.
“Regardless of what you think of his activities, Mr. Assange's case had dragged on for far too long,” said Australian PM Albanese. “There was nothing to be gained by the further incarceration of Mr. Assange and we wanted him brought home. Tonight that has happened. We have got this done.”
Russian Justice: The same day Julian Assange entered his guilty plea in a public courtroom, the secret trial of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich began in Russia. Gershkovich, a 32-year-old American journalist, was detained in March 2023 on an espionage accusation that he, the U.S. government, and the Journal vehemently deny. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said the Kremlin appears to be using the reporter for its own political ends. The Kremlin said it has “repeatedly emphasized that the U.S.” should “seriously consider the signals” Moscow has sent about possible prisoner exchanges.
The Laptop from Hell: A much-criticized letter signed in 2020 by 51 former intelligence officers in warning of Russia’s influence efforts in the U.S. presidential election generated some controversy inside the spy agency.
“I don’t think it’s helpful to the Agency in the long run. Sigh,” an unnamed CIA officer wrote to a colleague in an internal email obtained by two House committees investigating the letter, according to a 30-page congressional report released Tuesday.
The letter claimed that the arrival of emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop weeks before the 2020 election “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” although it held out the possibility that emails might be genuine. The laptop, however, and many of the emails turned out to be real. Some of the contents became evidence in Hunter Biden’s recent trial and conviction on charges that he lied on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use.
The letter came up in Thursday’s presidential debate. “Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation,” Donald Trump said. “It wasn’t. That came from his son, Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation.”
The report by the GOP-led House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and the House intelligence committee called the Hunter Biden letter “an intelligence community influence operation” that was directed at the American people and the democratic process.
A Democratic response said the GOP report ignores the broader context that this “supposed plot” took place while Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer who obtained the laptop and leaked its contents, was “actively pushing Russian disinformation to the Department of Justice.”
The Republican report noted that letter sailed through the often cumbersome CIA approval process in six hours.Democrats said there’s no evidence the CIA treated the letter any differently than any other manuscript.
“CIA officers, as a condition of their employment, are required to sign a secrecy agreement that includes a lifelong obligation to submit any and all intelligence-related materials to CIA’s Pre-Publication Review Board (PCRB) before they are published. That process was followed in this case,” a CIA spokesperson told SpyTalk. “The PCRB reviews material to determine if they contain any classified information. The PCRB’s confirmation that information is unclassified is never an endorsement of the reviewed content or its veracity. These former officers were not speaking for CIA.”
The GOP report found at least two signatories to the letter were on active contract the day it was published. The CIA told Congress that former acting Director Michael Morell, who co-wrote the letter, was on the agency’s books as an independent contractor on the date the letter was written. (Morell told the New York Post that the CIA’s information about him was “wrong.”) Former Inspector General David Buckleywas on contract through KPMG.
A set of media talking points related to the letter, which was submitted for CIA approval by former senior intelligence officer Marc Polymeropoulos, also raised some eyebrows inside Langley.
One CIA officer said Polymeropoulos was “actively involved in a pro-Biden campaign and may be disclosing classified information in his efforts.” According to the House report, the PCRB found the talking points contained classified information that had to be removed prior to publication.
A CIA branch chief also commented on Polymeropoulos’ talking points. “Interesting to see what was submitted and approved by the PCRB. Please do not forward,” the chief of the Nontraditional Intelligence Threat Branch of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center wrote. (Note: "Non-traditional” intelligence collection involves academics and businessmen tasked by foreign governments to steal intellectual property and other secrets.)
Former CIA Chief Operating Officer Andrew Makridis told Congress he would not have signed the letter. “I think the agency’s work is best done when it … doesn’t sort of splash across the press in any way, but that’s a general statement, and I think most CIA officers would sort of say the same,” Makridis said.
Some of the signatories to the letter said they have received death threats since the letter came out, adding that the GOP investigation into the “Intelligence Community 51” would chill others from speaking out in the future. “It’s chilled me,” Morell said. “You know, I’m not likely to participate in the political process again.”
Air Force Inside Threats: In the latest in a string of classified leaks involving current or former Air Force personnel, a 68-year-old Air Force veteran was indicted on Espionage Act charges, prosecutors announced Thursday.
Paul J. Freeman of Niceville, Florida, allegedly transmitted classified national defense information about U.S. Air Force aircraft and weapons to unnamed people not authorized to access the information on multiple occasions between November 2020 and March 2021.
If convicted, Freeman faces up to a maximum of 10 years imprisonment on each of the nine counts in the indictment.
This isn’t the first time Freeman has gotten in trouble over a classified leak. According to court records, he was removed from his position in 2016 as a senior general engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory for unauthorized disclosure of classified information and being AWOL. Freeman was found to have sent personal emails with classified information to several news outlets, government agencies, public officials, and others.
He joins two other high-profile accused Air Force leakers:
David Slater, a 63-year-old civilian Air Force employee, was arrested in March for sharing classified information on a foreign online dating platform to a woman who called him her “secret informant love.” Also in March, Jack Teixeira, a 22-year-old active duty airman who leaked top-secret documents on a social media site, pleaded guilty to all six counts he faced under the Espionage Act. He faces 16 years in prison when he is sentenced in September.
Putin Turns Up the Heat: The surge in shadowy, Russian-linked attacks across Europe that we told you about last week continued with revelations of a plot to blow up a French home improvement store.
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that a 26-year-old Russian-Ukrainian man had intended to place his hand-made bomb in a Bricorama store in a Paris suburb before it opened in the early hours of the morning to avoid any loss of human life. The explosive device was made using the highly unstable chemical TATP, connected to a mobile phone.
The plot was foiled not by the authorities but by incompetence. The suspect was injured on June 3 while making his bomb in a hotel room near Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. A search of his hotel room found forged identity papers, products and materials intended for constructing explosive devices, and traces of ammonium nitrate.
The man was indicted and imprisoned on June 7 for "criminal terrorist conspiracy," as well as "possession of a substance or explosive with a view to preparing destruction or harm to persons, in connection with a terrorist enterprise,” Le Monde reported.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines briefed NATO’s decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council, earlier this month about Russia’s sabotage campaign.
France is on high alert as it prepares to host the Summer Olympics next month.
Death in Dagestan: No one has yet claimed responsibility for near-simultaneous assaults Sunday on synagogues and Orthodox Christian churches in Russia’s southern region of Dagestan that killed 20 people, most of them police.
In one church, attackers slit the throat of a 66-year-old Orthodox priest, an execution that bore the gruesome hallmarks of the Islamic State. The attacks took place on the Orthodox Christian holy day of Pentecost.
The attack in the majority Muslim region is the second in the last three months. More than 140 people were killed at a concert hall near Moscow in a terrorist attack claimed by ISIS-K in March.
Russian politicians blamed the Dagestan attack on Ukraine and the West, an attempt to shift blame away from the Kremlin.
Two major terrorist attacks happening so close together “will raise questions about whether the war in Ukraine has distracted the Kremlin from what is happening inside Russia,” Neil Melvin, the director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, told NBC News.
Israeli Intel Knew: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the infamous Presidential Daily Brief presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, became the key example used to illustrate how the administration disregarded warnings of al Qaeda’s looming attack
Israel now has its own unheeded warning, an intelligence report distributed on September 19, 2023, that eerily predicted the events that unfolded on Oct. 7.
Israel's public broadcaster Kan News revealed the existence of the document, entitled “Detailed End-to-End Raid Training," which described a series of military training exercises conducted by Hamas's Nukhba units (“elite,” in Arabic). Israel accused the Nukhba of leading the attack on Oct. 7.
The Hamas commandos practiced infiltrating a mock IDF outpost and targeting command and control headquarters, base synagogues, squadron headquarters, communications headquarters, and soldiers' quarters, closely mirroring the locations hit by Hamas forces during the early morning hours of Oct. 7.
“The Israeli intelligence officers who followed the exercise formulated in a document the next steps after breaking into Israeli territory and taking over the outposts, and stated that the instruction was to hand over the captured soldiers to the company commanders,” Kan News reported. “The expected number of hostages,” it was written, is between 200 and 250 people.” That’s pretty much what happened on Oct. 7 when more than 200 Israelis were taken hostage.
Kan also reported that Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, compiled the document and forwarded it to the IDF Southern Command’s Gaza Division.
IDF sources told Kan News that Unit 8200 did not distribute the document to “relevant senior officials.” An intelligence officer in the Gaza Division found the document on October 1 and informed commanders, but it again failed to reach senior leaders.
The IDF has been investigating its failures to prevent the attack and said it would present its findings next month.
Speaking of Ignored Intel: Doris Allen, an Army Intelligence specialst whose pinpoint warning that Communist forces in South Vietnam were organizing a massive, countrywide attack on the Tết holiday in 1968 was ignored, died on June 11 in Oakland, Calif. She was 97. “She pushed for someone up the chain of command to take her report seriously, but no one did,” the New York Times reported Friday. “On Jan. 30, 1968 — in line with what she had predicted — the enemy surprised American and South Vietnamese military leaders with the size and scope of their attacks.” Allen, a Tuskegeee graduate who had enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps in 1950, attributed the catastrophic lapse to the fact that she was a Black enlisted woman. “I just recently came up with the reason they didn’t believe me — they weren’t prepared for me,” she told an Army publication in 2012. “They didn’t know how to look beyond the WAC, Black woman in military intelligence. I can’t blame them. I don’t feel bitter.”
Pocket Litter:
Prosecutors working for Special Counsel Jack Smith released a new batch of photos of the raid at Mar-a-Lago that show Trump kept some of the nation's most highly guarded secrets in cardboard boxes along with a jumble of personally chosen keepsakes. The boxes "had no apparent organization whatsoever," prosecutors wrote. (CBS)
The Biden administration on Thursday banned Russian software vendor Kaspersky from selling its cybersecurity programs in the United States. The U.S. government has warned for years that Kaspersky poses a national security threat. (Wired)
Vienna has emerged as Russia’s new espionage hub in Europe after capitals there expelled 600 spies posing as diplomats in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. (Wall Street Journal). Might be a good time to re-watch The Third Man.
A Chinese Embassy official recently wrote to Congress to criticize legislation requiring DNI Avril Haines to produce a report on corruption and hidden wealth held by Chinese leaders through their relatives, including President Xi Jinping. The DNI report is due in December. (The Washington Times)
House intelligence committee chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, pushed the Biden administration to declassify intelligence on a nuclear-capable anti-satellite weapon Russia is developing. (MSNBC)
A new podcast debuting next month explores a 1971 burglary at an FBI office in Media, Pa., carried out by eight antiwar activists. Documents stolen from the office revealed the extent of the FBI’s surveillance of Americans and exposed COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). The story is told in the second season of SNAFU, hosted by actor and comedian Ed Helms. It debuts on July 10. (The Washington Post). The break-in was previously the subject of a 2014 film documentary, 1971.
Silicon Valley companies like Google and OpenAI are escalating their security vetting of staff and potential recruits as U.S. officials voice greater concern about the threat of Chinese espionage. (The Financial Times)
Haviland Smith, a CIA officer who pioneered simple but effective techniques that CIA officers could use to evade detection in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, has died. He was 94. “Essentially what Smith had done was to prove that there were no such things as denied areas; it was simply a question of methods,” CIA disguise experts Tony and Joanna Mendez wrote in The Moscow Rules, their 2019 book about the field tactics that CIA operatives adopted for the Cold War. “If the right techniques were used, anything was possible.” (The Washington Post)
An expected engagement between Trump and Biden on controversial FBI, CIA and NSA issues at Thursday’s presidential debate never really materialzed. (See Jeff Stein’s “Pffft.”
Is there something we missed? Or something you would like to see more of? Send your tips, corrections, and thoughts to SpyTalk@protonmail.com.
I read this some-what balanced article by Mr. Hettena and I quote "Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The swift resolution of the case against Julian Assange was a legal surrender by the U.S. government, but it was much more: an outcome dictated by the competing and overlapping pressures of diplomacy, national security, and military strategy" What Mr. Stein explains in his article is the "Break-Down" of the National Securtiy of the US. I know there is alot of Intelligence and Military people that read Mr. Stein's Spy-Talk. That is why I joined. How is it that long ago those of us entrusted with highly classified documents and information now see it spread all over the world? I am litterally mortified when I read of one Intelligence Leak and prosecution after another ... after another. If you missed it, Director Wray has ominous warnings one after another of the "Insider Threats" and the lastest is as follows:
"FBI Director Christopher Wray issued an ominous warning during a hearing last week before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) about a “wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from” the Southwest border. Don’t feel bad if you missed it, because it didn’t get much coverage, but the interesting thing is Wray likely knew about — and may have been specifically referencing — the self-proclaimed Hezbollah member caught crossing that border two days earlier in El Paso, Texas." It is not if .... it is just when. They, the FBI just cannot keep up with the tusnami of threats coming at them. Howard Walther, member of a Military family