New in SpyWeek: Seoul Sister? The Sue Mi Terry Fallout and More
Also: The Secret Service under fire, the DCIA's Gaza peace missions, more Russia disinfo ops, Cannon fire at DoJ, Windows' epic crash and empty chairs in Aspen
SpyWeek columnist Seth Hettena is away this week.
Koreagate Redux: Back in 1976, official Washington roiled with revelations that South Korea’s CIA had conducted a clandestine influence campaign on Capitol Hill to persuade members of Congress to reverse a decision by the Jimmy Carter administration to withdraw U.S. troops from the embattled nation. This week, the Acela Corridor was roiled by the criminal indictment of Sue Mi Terry, a top former CIA analyst and prominent think tank expert on the two Koreas, on charges that she acted as an unregistered secret agent for Seoul, whose agents lavished thousands of dollars worth of luxury goods and cash on her to help promote South Korean security interests. Terry admitted to the FBI during its investigation that she had resigned from the CIA in 2009 to avoid being fired over what she described as the agency's "problems" concerning her contacts with South Korean intelligence.
Terry facilitated their access to U.S. officials, testified in congressional hearings and wrote think tank and newspaper pieces pushing South Korea’s interests, all the while concealing her arrangements with the agents, who posed as diplomats, according to the indictment. One of those pieces, in The Washington Post on Mar. 3, 2023, “South Korea takes a brave step toward reconciliation with Japan,” was co-written with her husband Max Boot, a prominent national security columnist at the Post and author of an influential book on U.S. intelligence during the Cold War, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. On Thursday, the Post affixed an Editor’s note to the Boot-Terry piece noting the indictment and saying, “If true, this is information that would have been pertinent for The Post’s publication decision. Ms. Terry has denied these charges and has asserted through counsel that the allegations in the indictment are unfounded.” No word yet on the standing at the paper of Boot, who was not charged in the case. Neither he nor the paper’s communications director responded to emails requesting comment. We’ll have more on this case in the coming days.
Rocky Mountain Low: For years now, the Aspen Security Forum has attracted the nation’s top intelligence and military officials to the toney ski resort town in the Colorado Rockies for unclassified but frank, on-the-record discussions with journalists and top experts about the most urgent security challenges around the world. CIA Director William Burns was a regular, but this week he, along with several other top Biden officials, bowed out because of what Forum organizers delicately referred to as “recent events.”
Burns canceled his appearance because of the possibility of a trip to Qatar for further negotiations for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the release of hostages held by Hamas, a source told SpyTalk. Others called away in the wake of the Trump assassination incident and rising terror threats included: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; Secret Service chief Kimberly Cheatle, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco; and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden’s Homeland Security Advisor on the White House National Security Council.
Cheatle, of course, is rightly facing fire over her agency’s security lapses in Butler, Pa. and initial attempts to shift blame to local police. On Capitol Hill, several committees are now gearing up for hearings and investigations into the assassination attempt featuring Cheatle and other top Biden officials.
Over at the SpyTalk podcast on Friday, former DHS intelligence chief John Cohen told substitute host and Contributing Editor Michael Isikoff, “I think they've got a lot to explain and they need to get it explained pretty quickly or the situation is going to spiral out of control even more so than it is today.” See Isikoff’s take on their convo here.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Cheatle to appear at a July 22 hearing to answer questions about the assassination attempt. Secret Service officials also briefed committee members in a closed meeting on July 16. Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has asked Cheatle to hand over records to the committee before she testifies, including a list of local police who were providing security at the Trump rally.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee announced it will conduct its own bipartisan investigation into the attempted assassination. Committee Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich., and ranking member Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, sent a letter to Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wrey, requesting a briefing from their department as well as the Secret Service no later than July 25. They also requested that Mayorkas and Wrey, or their designees, appear before the committee for a public hearing no later than Aug. 1.
Earlier this week, a senior FBI official briefed Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., on the shooting. Durbin has asked that Secret Service, Homeland Security and FBI officials provide a closed-door briefing for committee members this coming week, Politico reported.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has called on Cheatle to resign. But Cheatle says she has no plans to step down. In a July 15 statement, Cheatle said she will cooperate with an independent investigation announced by President Biden and work “with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.”
Ironically, all this comes as the Secret Service finally releases nearly 160 pages of documents showing abject security lapses at Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago home and resort. “Taken together,” wrote Jason Leopold, Bloomberg’s maestro of Freedom of Information Act requests, “they reveal dozens of incidents where people gained access to Mar-a-Lago while Trump was at the resort, despite not having the authorization to be there. In a couple instances, those individuals were mistakenly waived through checkpoints by Secret Service or Mar-a-Lago security.”
Leopold added that, according to the records, which the Secret Service handed over to him in response to a FOIA request that he had filed two years ago, it appears that none of the unauthorized individuals who gained access to Mar-a-Lago posed an immediate threat to Trump. “ Still,” he added, “many of the offenders were charged with trespassing and resisting arrest, and several were sent to mental health facilities.
Maybe some wayward visitors stumbled upon a box of Trump’s purloined Top Secret documents in the john and mistook them for party favors—who knows? More on the stalled docs case below.
Lies & Damned Lies Boosted by AI: A lie, it has been said, can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” But today, a lie metastasizes so quickly across both social and traditional media that for many users, it can drown out the truth entirely, with potentially destabilizing results.
The latest case in point: the conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies ordered the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
This baseless assertion first surfaced on an anonymous X account only minutes after the initial reports of a shooting at the July 13 Trump rally in Butler, Pa. Soon, Trump supporters of all stripes, ranging from QAnon followers to Republican lawmakers — notably including Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate — piled on, amplifying the unverified claim. By the next day, the narrative that Biden was behind Trump’s attempted assassination had been posted on numerous platforms and shared millions of times, prompting some Trump acolytes to issue murderous threats of violence against Democratic lawmakers.
For hostile foreign intelligence services, such rightwing anger, stoked by news broadcasts that repeatedly show Trump grabbing his ear, dropping to the ground and coming up, his face streaked with blood and defiantly pumping his fist as Secret Service agents hustle him away, has created a fertile climate for their anti-American influence operations. Russia, and to a lesser extent China and Iran, have wasted no time in exploiting Republican outrage.
“Biden calls Trump ‘threat to the nation,’” Sputnik International, a Russian state-controlled news site, said in a report accompanied by a video showing Biden using that phrase in a recent speech. “Trump gets shot the very next day. . . . Coincidence?”
The information warfare campaigns, both domestic and foreign, threaten to exacerbate social tensions, stoke more domestic violence and foment greater chaos across America’s deeply divided population, experts say.
“From a counter-terrorism and personal security protection standpoint for elected officials, we are now at an extremely elevated threat level,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told War on the Rocks, a website that posts expert national security commentary. “To borrow a cliché commonly deployed by terrorism scholars, the alarms are flashing red, with multiple political factions actively promising retribution or threatening violence against a variety of targets.”
Hoffman added: “This assassination attempt was not the beginning of political violence during this election cycle, but it will likely also not be the end.”
Of the foreign influence operations targeting the United States, Russia is the most active, experts say. And its disinformation campaign extends beyond pointing a finger at Biden for the attempted Trump assassination to efforts to undermine U.S. support for the war in Ukraine. The disinformation also portrays the United States as a bullying superpower meddling in Russia’s so-called “near-abroad.”
In a statement earlier this month, Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, anticipating a victory for pro-Russian candidates in October elections in former Soviet-controlled yGeorgia, accused the United States of plotting to overthrow the new government. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller denied the accusation, calling it “absurd.”
In addition to using official statements and state-run media like Sputnik and RT, Russian intelligence is also generating disinformation on X and the messaging service Telegram, using bots with fictitious identities.
Moscow’s disinformation campaigns go back to the earliest days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union sought to undermine the Marshall Plan for rebuilding postwar Europe, and continued thereafter with other fictitious charges to discredit the West, such as a media campaign accusing the CIA of creating AIDS. But with the advent of the internet, social media and most-recently, artificial intelligence (AI), Russia’s influence operations have become far more sophisticated.
In the run-up to the 2016 election that brought Trump to office, Russian intelligence created battalions of bots posing as made-up Americans and deployed them on social media platforms. Some bots targeted Republicans, stoking their fears about immigrants and crime, while others posed as Black Americans, voicing anger over police brutality.
On July 15, the Justice Department announced that, together with its counterparts in Canada and the Netherlands, it had taken down a covert Russian influence operation that used two U.S.-based internet domains and nearly a thousand AI-powered bots to spread pro-Russian propaganda and foment internal divisions in the United States, Europe and Israel over the past two years.
“Today’s actions represent a first in disrupting a Russian-sponsored Generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray in the Justice Department’s press release. “The FBI is committed to working with our partners and deploying joint, sequenced operations to strategically disrupt our most dangerous adversaries and their use of cutting-edge technology for nefarious purposes.”
But Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says that despite the bust, U.S. efforts to defend itself against this new AI-powered threat “remain anemic at best.”
“The Global Engagement Center at the State Department and the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are small and understaffed,” Harding wrote in a CSIS commentary. “The rules about what U.S. government (USG) agencies are and are not allowed to do in the information space are unclear and sometimes contradictory. In truth, the USG is largely dependent on industry to keep the bot farms away, and even the USG’s ability to talk to social media companies about these issues was recently the subject of intense legal debate.
Like the old adage about the unequal competition between lies and the truth, “the sum total of these efforts,” Harding concluded, “is that the United States is crawling, and its adversaries just strapped on a jet pack.”
Secret Agent Burns:
Last Saturday, the CIA chief told an exclusive closed-door gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho that Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas leader in Gaza, has come under increasing pressure from his own military commanders to accept a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal and suspend the war with Israel.
For months, Burns has been serving as the Biden administration’s lead negotiator in indirect ceasefire talks between Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea and Hamas political leaders, with Qatari intelligence officials delivering messages between the two combatants, who refuse to recognize each other. Intelligence chiefs from Egypt and Jordan also are playing a role in the talks, which have shifted between Cairo and Doha.
The Sun Valley attendee quoted Burns as saying it was incumbent on both Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire, which would open the door for the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinians being held in Israeli jails and Gaza’s eventual reconstruction under a new non-Hamas Palestinian leadership. “I believe we’re inside the ten-yard line on getting an agreement that would produce a ceasefire (in Gaza) and bring the hostages home," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the Aspen Security Forum. "But the last ten yards are often the hardest."
Death Tolls: The carnage in Gaza, meanwhile, prompted Yossi Melman, the veteran intelligence reporter for the left-leaning Haaretz daily, to take note of the coarsening of Israeli attitudes toward the recent killing of civilians in the country’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Until those wars, Melman wrote, Israel conducted strictly targeted assassinations of the country’s enemies, striving to eliminate only their target. Melman noted that numerous operations were canceled if it was determined that civilian deaths couldn’t be avoided.
“Since the start of the Gaza war, Israel has loosened the reins,” Melman said. “What started with targeted killings evolved into non-targeted killings and is now developing into a policy of tolerating the deaths of innocents, including children and women, in order to eliminate a terrorist.”
“The problem is that once upon a time, assassinations like this were a means to achieve wider military, political and strategic goals,” Melman said. “Today, the IDF's operations in Lebanon and Gaza seem to show that the assassinations themselves have become an end in themselves. The politicians, most of the defense establishment, the IDF, the media and much of the public laud them. They hold that targeted killings will solve Israel's war problems.”
But Melman argues Israel’s current policy of nontargeted killings serves no political purpose. “They are of no use and in the long run even increase violence and acts of terrorism,” he said. “People deceive themselves when they place hope in such tactics.”
Boxed Out: In the wake of Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision this past week to dismiss the classified documents case against Donald Trump, it’s worth remembering the long list of less privileged federal officials and members of the military who were quickly arrested, stripped of their security clearances, fired from their jobs, and given stiff fines and jail sentences for essentially the same crime that the former president stands accused of — illegally holding classified documents.
Consider, for example, the cases of Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe, three senior officials at the National Security Agency who were merely suspected of mishandling classified documents, as recounted in a piece late last year by SpyTalk Editor-in-Chief Jeff Stein.
Following the 9/11 terror attacks, the three men had lobbied internally against an electronic data-collection program, arguing that the program, the brainchild of NSA contractors and which secretly searched the private communications of millions of Americans, was both unconstitutional and overpriced to the tune of billions of dollars. When elements of the program appeared in The New York Times and Baltimore Sun, the trio landed in the crosshairs of investigators determined to find the source of the leak.
According to the Government Accountability Project, a private group that supports whistleblowers, the way law enforcement officials treated the three men stands in sharp contrast to the government’s deferential treatment of Trump, who was indicted for not only illegally holding classified documents, but also also for lying about his retention of those documents and willfully obstructing the efforts of federal officials to retrieve them.
“FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower,” the group’s account says. “He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures. Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.
“Meanwhile, Wiebe’s family was subjected to a day-long armed raid, during which FBI agents rummaged through all the family’s belongings, taking phone directories and computer hard drives containing business records and other personal information, some of which have still not been returned. Binney, Wiebe, and the other complainants were forced to suethe NSA in November 2011, in order to attempt to recover their property.
“The day after the raids, both Binney and Wiebe were summoned to NSA headquarters, where they were informed that the Agency was suspending their security clearances, a decision that cannot be adequately challenged. Binney had held a security clearance since 1965, and Wiebe since 1964.” As Stein recounts, FBI agents also raided Drake’s home, seizing his computer, documents and books. But as the details of NSA’s illegal conduct and the FBI’s draconian tactics became known, the government’s case against the three men largely collapsed. The Justice Department gave Binney and Wiebe immunity from prosecution, and Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of misusing a government computer. “Still, his life was made hell,” Stein wrote, “forcing him and the others out of the patriotic work they had devoted their lives to.”
Here’s another link to Stein’s 2023 piece, which provides details of another 13 l cases of people who were charged and convicted of mishandling classified documents since 2000 and who received sentences ranging from two years probation to 60 years in prison and fines ranging from $5,500 to $1.5 million.
It’s important to note that Judge Cannon based her dismissal of Trump’s case not on any dissection of the allegations against Trump but on a questionable legal technicality: she agreed with the assertion of Trump’s lawyers that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of special counsel Jack Smith to prosecute the classified documents case had violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, arguing that Garland’s choice of Smith had never been brought before the Senate for approval and confirmation and therefore had undermined the authority of Congress.
The Justice Department has authorized Smith to appeal Judge Cannon’s ruling. But even if the 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals overturns her dismissal, it’s virtually certain that Trump’s legal team will ask the Supreme Court for a final ruling. And it’s a good bet that the six Republican-appointed “originalists” on the bench will side with Trump’s lawyers, forcing Garland to decide whether he wants to bring Smith’s special counsel nomination before the Senate for its approval and confirmation.
Moscow Rules: In recent weeks there’s been speculation in Washington that an expected Russian conviction of imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich for espionage could potentially clear the way for a prisoner swap between Moscow and Washington. On July 19, after 478 days of pre-trial detention in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, Gershkovich, his head shaved and looking thin in a dark T-shirt, stood before a court in Yekaterinburg, a city about 1,000 miles east of Moscow, and listened as a judge found him guilty of spying for the CIA and sentenced him to 16 years in a maximum security prison. Both the Journal and the U.S.government have vehemently denied the charges. “We are pushing hard for Evan’s release and will continue to do so,” President Biden said in a statement. “As I have long said and as the U.N. has also concluded, there is no question that Russia is wrongfully detaining Evan. Journalism is not a crime.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he is open to prisoner swap for Gershkovich and that Russian and American officials have quietly discussed the matter. But he also said any deal could only be negotiated “in silence.” In a February interview with former Fox News commentator and conspiracies enthusiast Tucker Carlson, Putin hinted he would trade Gerkovich for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian national serving a life sentence in a German prison for the 2019 murder of an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park. A German judge said Putin must have ordered the killing, a charge that the Russian leader denies. He told Carlson that Krasikov was a person who "due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.”
Circuit Breaking: Details are still trickling in about that massive Microsoft Windows software fail that crippled health-care, business and transportation systems worldwide starting Thursday evening and continuing Friday. “Emergency 911 call service was disrupted in several U.S. states, although service improved throughout the morning,” The Washington Post reported. Our first thought was that it was China—again—but the tech firm Crowdstrike accepted responsibility for the “glitch.”
“One way to view this is like a large-scale ransomware attack,” a publicist for the firm said in a statement. That’s exactly what worries us, of course. It’s yet another “wake up call” on our cyber vulnerability.
Pocket Litter
A jury in Manhattan federal court convicted Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, on 16 felony counts, including bribery, extortion, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt. The prosecution showed how Egyptian intelligence officials and three businessmen enriched Mendendez and his wife with cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz in return for unclassified insider information and the senator’s help in getting Egypt $300 million in U.S. military aid that had been blocked in Congress over concerns about Egypt’s human rights record. Menendez, once the powerful chairman of the senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said he will resign from the Senate but also appeal his conviction. If his guilty verdict is upheld, the 70-year-old faces a long prison sentence and a ban on holding public office. The Washington Post
The Senate Armed Services Committee last Monday released the full text and report for its version of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act with a number of cybersecurity provisions included in it related to zero trust, a concept that assumes adversaries have access to your network and thus requires constant authentications. Key among them is a requirement that would require the Pentagon’s chief information officer to make the Defense Department's zero-trust framework available on “human-wearable devices, sensors, and other smart technology” included in the so-called military internet of things within 180 days of the law’s passage. 2025 NDAA Executive Summary
The Navy has begun to deploy information warfare specialists on submarines as part of two pilot projects off the East Coast, according to Vice Admiral Kelly Aeschbach, the Navy’s information warfare chief. Aeschbach says the additional crew members — both officers and sailors — have enabled submarines to conduct information warfare, bringing aboard their expertise in cybersecurity, communications, and intelligence. The additional crew also includes cryptologic technicians for electronic intelligence and warfare. Later this year, Aeschbach says she plans to embed information warfare specialists aboard submarines plying the Pacific. Defense One
Outraged Republican lawmakers are demanding the Army provide them with an explanation after its gate security awareness briefing atFort Liberty, N.C., included anti-terrorism slide show that lumped mainstream anti-abortion groups in with extremist groups. Though the briefing also labeled non-violent left-wing groups as terrorists, the Republicans are focusing on the terrorist portrayal of the anti-abortion groups to accuse the Army of targeting conservative political policies. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., personnel subcommittee Chairman Jim Banks, R-Ind., and other committee Republicans sent a letter to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth last weekend, calling for answers by July 25 on how the slideshow was created. Military.com
Twenty-three years after the 9/11 terrorist attack, 30 prisoners captured during the so-called global war on terror are still languishing in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba — even though most have never been charged with any crime. Legal experts say it’s doubtful any will ever be charged or go to trial because they were all tortured in secret CIA prisons after their capture, involving information that remains classified. This inconvenient fact has created major legal problems for military prosecutors, as well as fights over the defense’s access to classified material. So while in theory, there will eventually be a 9/11 trial for the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in reality, few legal experts believe that will ever happen. NPR
MITRE, a Massachusetts and Virginia-based think tank that conducts federally funded research to support the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has released a new white paper that endorses a new approach to national security planning based on “criticality”, a system that assesses and ranks assets based on their potential risks and likelihood of failure. This approach, the paper says, “promotes the essential information, human factors, organization and technology to improve U,S. readiness and minimize intelligence failures, catastrophic losses and diminished national power.” MITRE
Concerning President Carter's reversal of his decision to draw down US troop strength in South Korea in the mid 1970's: My Army Reserve MI Detachment, which supported ITAC (the Army's Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center) was in DC at the time. Our focus was counterintelligence in an entirely different part of the world. We had no Korea analysts, nor did we have any "squints" (photo interpreters. )
But the story making the rounds in ITAC was that an ITAC squint had put together a briefing showing that the conventional threat from North Korea was far greater than Carter had been led to believe. The briefing caused the Pentagon to recommend that Carter leave all our troops in place. He agreed and reversed his decision.
Although I never saw the briefing in question (nor was there any reason I should have seen it), I'm pretty sure most everyone in ITAC heard about it. Just a particularly well supported intelligence rumor? Perhaps. But it is another possible explanation for the tangled web surrounding why the troop withdrawal was cancelled.