The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump: A Study In Political Psychology, Political Criminology, and Psychohistory, and as the aid for the General, Criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations of Donald Trump - by Michael Novakhov, M.D. (Mike Nova): Web Research, Analysis, Hypotheses, and Opinions | Current News | Reviews of media reports | Selected reading lists | Site: http://trumpinvestigations.org/
12:58 PM 2/2/2019 - "The funding of Mr. Trump’s golf empire has been something of a mystery... the company’s golf properties were funded by Russians." - New York Times | Comment and Hypothesis: M.N.: Scratch the Russians, and you might find (as the example of the "reasonable doubt"), New Abwehr: Aberdeen golf fields on the North-East coast of Scotland, just like Salisbury as the setting for the Novichok "Mysteries" are of the special sentimental historical interest to Germany as the objects of the Abwehr's close attention during WW2. | MORE ABOUT FBI SPYING - ACLU | Trump Sought a Loan During the 2016 Campaign. Deutsche Bank Said No. - The New York Times
"The funding of Mr. Trump’s golf empire has been something of a mystery.
In the decade before he was elected president, Mr. Trump’s company spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying or renovating about a dozen clubs and resorts around the world. Despite Mr. Trump’s self-proclaimed fondness for relying on debt, the Trump Organization has reported that it used its own money for most of the acquisitions and upgrades.
A prominent golf journalist, James Dodson, said Mr. Trump’s son Eric had told him in 2013 that the company’s golf properties were funded by Russians. Eric Trump has denied making the comment."
The Tatars are a Turkic-speaking people living mainly in Russia and other Post-Soviet ... by the famous saying "scratch any Russian just a little and you will discover a .... Most of the population survived, and there may have been a certain degree ..... Timofeeva, S. V.; Devald, I. V.; Vavilov, M. N.; Darke, C. (1 October 2012).
At least 20 spies were sent to England by boat or parachute to gather information on the British coastal defences under the codename "Operation Lena"; many of the agents spoke limited English. All agents were quickly captured and many were convinced to defect by MI5's Double-Cross System, providing disinformation to their German superiors. It has been suggested that the "amateurish" espionage efforts were a result of deliberate sabotage by the head of the army intelligence bureau in Hamburg, Herbert Wichmann, in an effort to prevent a disastrous and costly amphibious invasion; Wichmann was critical of the Nazi regime and had close ties to Wilhelm Canaris, the former head of the Abwehr who was later executed by the Nazis for treason.[119]
While some errors might not have caused problems, others, such as the inclusion of bridges that no longer existed[120]and misunderstanding the usefulness of minor British roads,[120] would have been detrimental to German operations, and would have added to the confusion caused by the layout of Britain's cities (with their maze of narrow roads and alleys)[clarification needed] and the removal of road signs.[121
Eventual cancellation and diversion of German, Italian, and other Axis forces for Operation Barbarossa
Operation Sea Lion, also written as Operation Sealion[2][3] (German: Unternehmen Seelöwe), was Nazi Germany's code name for the plan for an invasion of the United Kingdom during the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. Following the Fall of France, Adolf Hitler, the German Führer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, hoped the British government would seek a peace agreement and he reluctantly considered invasion only as a last resort if all other options failed. As a precondition, he specified the achievement of both air and naval superiority over the English Channel and the proposed landing sites, but the German forces did not achieve either at any point during the war, and both the German High Command and Hitler himself had serious doubts about the prospects for success. A large number of barges were gathered together on the Channel coast, but, with air losses increasing, Hitler postponed Sea Lion indefinitely on 17 September 1940 and it was never put into action.
In 2014 and 2015, a Trump legal entity lent at least $96 million to the subsidiary that operated Turnberry, according to British regulatory filings. The next year, the Trump Organization would go back to Deutsche Bank for more.
The relationship between Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank had survived some rocky moments. In 2008, amid the financial crisis, Mr. Trump stopped repaying a loan to finance the construction of a skyscraper in Chicago — and then sued the bank, accusing it of helping cause the crisis. After that lawsuit, Deutsche Bank’s investment-banking arm severed ties with Mr. Trump.
But by 2010, he was back doing business with Deutsche Bank through its private-banking unit, which catered to some of the world’s wealthiest people. That unit arranged the Doral loans, and another in 2012 tied to the Chicago skyscraper.
Mr. Trump’s go-to in the private bank was Rosemary Vrablic, a senior banker in its New York office. In 2013, she was the subject of a flattering profile in The Mortgage Observer, a real estate magazine owned by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was also among her clients. In 2015, she arranged the loan that financed Mr. Trump’s transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into the Trump International Hotel, a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.
In early 2016, as Mr. Trump was lending tens of millions of dollars to his campaign, his company contacted Ms. Vrablic about getting money for Turnberry, said two of the three people familiar with the request, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The proposal was to expand Deutsche Bank’s outstanding loans backed by the Doral by well over $10 million and to use the proceeds for work on Turnberry, the people said.
Around the time that Mr. Trump was winning New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, officials in the private-banking unit informed their superiors that they were inclined to provide him with the loan, according to one of the people familiar with the internal discussions.
Senior executives in New York balked, arguing that Mr. Trump’s candidacy made such a loan unacceptably risky, the three people said. In part, they feared the bank’s reputation could be harmed if the transaction were to become public because of the polarizing statements Mr. Trump was making on the campaign trail.
The federal judge overseeing litigation stemming from Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal spent nearly two hours of a marathon hearing Friday drilling down on the issue of consent.
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The FBI has a long history of abusing its national security surveillance powers. The potential for abuse is once again great, particularly given that the lines between criminal investigations and foreign intelligence operations have been blurred or erased since 9/11. As a result, intrusive surveillance tools originally developed to target Soviet spies are increasingly being used against Americans.
COINTELPRO. During the Cold War, the FBI ran a domestic intelligence/counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO that quickly evolved from a legitimate effort to protect the national security from hostile foreign threats into an effort to suppress domestic political dissent through an array of illegal activities. COINTELPRO targeted numerous non-violent protest groups and political dissidents with illegal wiretaps, warrantless physical searches and an array of other dirty tricks. The FBI used the information it gleaned from these improper investigations not for law enforcement purposes, but to "break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths." The Church Committee, a Senate Select Committee that investigated COINTELPRO in the 1970s, found that a combination of factors led law enforcers to become law breakers. One factor was their perception that traditional law enforcement methods were ineffective in addressing the security threats they faced. Another was their easy access to damaging personal information as a result of "the unrestrained collection of domestic intelligence." Unfortunately, these factors are all present again today as the FBI seeks to transform itself into an internal intelligence agency dedicated to preventing future acts of terrorism.
Reforms Undone. The Church Committee's exposure of the FBI's COINTELPRO abuses led to a series of reforms, including laws designed to regulate government surveillance and internal guidelines (Attorney General's Guidelines) which limited the FBI's investigative authority and spelled out the rules that govern law enforcement operations. These reasonable limits have been either abandoned or ignored since 9/11, however, through legislation like the USA Patriot Act, through amendments to the AG Guidelines, and through an expansion of powerful Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) that operate with virtually no public accountability.
Patriot Act. With the enactment of the USA Patriot Act Congress expanded the FBI's authority to make secret demands for personal information and records about not just suspected terrorists or spies but about anyone the FBI deemed merely "relevant" to an FBI investigation. Not surprisingly, a series of five audits by the Department of Justice Inspector General confirmedwidespread FBI mismanagement, misuse and abuse of this unchecked authority, which is now used, more often than not, to target Americans. For more on the Patriot Act, see the ACLU's extensive page on that issue.
Attorney General Guidelines. The AG Guidelines underwent four separate changes under the Bush administration, all of which gave the FBI increased surveillance authorities with reduced oversight. Attorney General John Ashcroft first amended the guidelines in 2002 to expand the investigative techniques the FBI could use during preliminary inquiries (which require less evidence of wrongdoing to initiate than a full investigation), and to increase the time limits to 180 days with the possibility of two or more 90-day extensions. The Ashcroft guidelines also allowed FBI agents to "visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public, on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally." The FBI later claimed this authority did not require the FBI agents attending public meetings to identify themselves as government officials.
Attempting to assuage concerns that the FBI would misuse this expanded authority by targeting First Amendment-protected activity, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress in 2002 that the FBI did not have plans to infiltrate mosques. Nonetheless, in the ensuing years there was a sharp increase in the FBI's controversial use of informants as agents provocateur in religious settings, including in Miami, New York, and northern and southernCalifornia. In 2009 Director Mueller defended these tactics, saying the FBI would not "take [its] foot off the pedal of addressing counterterrorism."
In 2005 the Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) audited the FBI's compliance with AG Guidelines and found significant deficiencies: 53 % of the audited preliminary inquiries that extended beyond the initial 180-day authorization period did not contain necessary documentation authorizing the extension, and 77% of those that extended past the first 90-day extension period lacked the required authorizations. The IG was unable to determine whether or how frequently agents attended public events, however, because the FBI failed to keep records of such activity.
The final and most dramatic changes to the AG Guidelines were made in December 2008, in the Bush Administration's final month in office. Then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey instituted new guidelines that authorize the FBI to conduct investigations called "assessments" without requiring any factual predicate suggesting the target of the investigation is involved in illegal activity or threats to national security. The Mukasey guidelines allow the FBI to utilize a number of intrusive investigative techniques during these assessments, including physical surveillance, retrieving data from commercial databases, recruiting and tasking informants to attend meetings under false pretenses, and engaging in "pretext" interviews in which FBI agents misrepresent their identities in order to elicit information. "Assessments" can even be conducted against an individual simply to determine if he or she would be a suitable FBI informant. Nothing in the new AG Guidelines protects entirely innocent Americans from being thoroughly investigated by the FBI for no good reason. The new Guidelines explicitly authorize the surveillance and infiltration of peaceful advocacy groups in advance of demonstrations, and they do not clearly prohibit using race, religion, or national origin as factors in initiating assessments.
Use of Race and Ethnicity. An internal FBI guide to implementing the new AG Guidelines, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), contains startling revelations about how the FBI is using race and ethnicity in conducting assessments and investigations. First, the DIOG says that investigative and intelligence collection activities must not be based "solely on race." But the Department of Justice's 2003 Guidance on the Use of Race in Federal Law Enforcement, which is binding on the FBI, says race can't be used "to any degree" absent a specific subject description. There is a huge difference between using race as a factor and using race as the solefactor.
Moreover, the DIOG then goes on to describe the authorized uses of race and ethnicity for FBI agents, which include:
"Collecting and analyzing" racial and ethnic community demographics.The FBI, according to the document, is authorized to "identify locations of concentrated ethnic communities in the Field Office's domain, if these locations will reasonably aid in the analysis of potential threats and vulnerabilities, and, overall, assist domain awareness for the purpose of performing intelligence analysis… Similarly, the locations of ethnically-oriented businesses and other facilities may be collected…" (DIOG page 32)
"Geo-mapping" of racial and ethnic demographics. "As a general rule, if information about community demographics may be collected it may be 'mapped.'" (DIOG page 33)
Collecting "specific and relevant" racial and ethnic behavior. Though the DIOG prohibits "the collection of cultural and behavioral information about an ethnic community that bears no relationship to a valid investigative or analytical need," it allows FBI agents to consider "focused behavioral characteristics reasonably believed to be associated with a particular criminal or terrorist element of an ethnic community," as well as "behavioral and cultural information about ethnic or racial communities" that may be exploited by criminals or terrorists "who hide within those communities." (DIOG page 33-34).
It is hard to imagine how any U.S. law enforcement agency would consider collecting and mapping racial and ethnic community demographics an appropriate use of its resources (or, for that matter, consistent with its obligation to not only follow but enforce U.S. civil rights laws). In fact, in 2007 the Los Angeles Police Department abandoned a similar plan to map LA's Muslim community in the face of public outrage. The FBI hotly contested a 2007 report from Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein that the FBI had tracked San Francisco falafel sales to try and find Iranian terrorists, but the DIOG certainly confirms that the FBI considers ethnic behavior and ethnic-oriented businesses fair targets for surveillance (and Stein stood by his story).
Data Mining. The FBI is sweeping up incredible amounts of information about innocent Americans through unchecked data collection and data mining programs. According to documents obtained by Wired magazine in 2009, an arm of the FBI called the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has collected 1.5 billion records from public and private sources in a massive data mining operation. The records collected by the FBI include financial records from corporate databases, such as hotel and rental car company transactions; millions of "suspicious activity reports" from financial institutions; millions of records from commercial data aggregators; a multitude of law enforcement and non-law enforcement government databases; and public information gleaned from telephone books and news articles. The NSAC records include data from the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse, which was identified in a Department of Justice Inspector General reports as the depository for information collected by the FBI through National Security Letters (NSLs) and illegal exigent letters.
In 2014 and 2015, a Trump legal entity lent at least $96 million to the subsidiary that operated Turnberry, according to British regulatory filings. The next year, the Trump Organization would go back to Deutsche Bank for more.
The relationship between Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank had survived some rocky moments. In 2008, amid the financial crisis, Mr. Trump stopped repaying a loan to finance the construction of a skyscraper in Chicago — and then sued the bank, accusing it of helping cause the crisis. After that lawsuit, Deutsche Bank’s investment-banking arm severed ties with Mr. Trump.
But by 2010, he was back doing business with Deutsche Bank through its private-banking unit, which catered to some of the world’s wealthiest people. That unit arranged the Doral loans, and another in 2012 tied to the Chicago skyscraper.
Mr. Trump’s go-to in the private bank was Rosemary Vrablic, a senior banker in its New York office. In 2013, she was the subject of a flattering profile in The Mortgage Observer, a real estate magazine owned by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was also among her clients. In 2015, she arranged the loan that financed Mr. Trump’s transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into the Trump International Hotel, a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.
In early 2016, as Mr. Trump was lending tens of millions of dollars to his campaign, his company contacted Ms. Vrablic about getting money for Turnberry, said two of the three people familiar with the request, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The proposal was to expand Deutsche Bank’s outstanding loans backed by the Doral by well over $10 million and to use the proceeds for work on Turnberry, the people said.
Around the time that Mr. Trump was winning New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, officials in the private-banking unit informed their superiors that they were inclined to provide him with the loan, according to one of the people familiar with the internal discussions.
Senior executives in New York balked, arguing that Mr. Trump’s candidacy made such a loan unacceptably risky, the three people said. In part, they feared the bank’s reputation could be harmed if the transaction were to become public because of the polarizing statements Mr. Trump was making on the campaign trail.
The federal judge overseeing litigation stemming from Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal spent nearly two hours of a marathon hearing Friday drilling down on the issue of consent.
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The federal judge overseeing litigation stemming from Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal spent nearly two hours of a marathon hearing Friday drilling down on the issue of consent.
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Like everyone else on Lawfare, I was struck by the recent New York Times story about the FBI opening a counterintelligence investigation into President Trump after he fired former FBI Director Jim Comey. It adds to my unease, not about President Trump but about the FBI.
In the end, the story probably doesn’t tell us anything new about President Trump. If the investigation had turned up evidence in the last 18 months that the president was working for Russia and covering his tracks from investigators, we’d have the evidence by now, not just a story about investigators’ suspicions in mid-2017.
What’s most troubling about the story is what it seems to say about the FBI and its leadership. I agree with Jack Goldsmith that the story is deeply discomforting. There is only one American agency with a history of destroying American politicians to serve its own bureaucratic interests. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used illegal wiretaps and other files on political leaders to ensure his power. When he was gone, Mark Felt’s effort to succeed him included leaks that destroyed Richard Nixon. Now we hear that the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump on the politically explosive premise that he was doing Putin’s bidding. I don’t think that’s an accident. We like to say that no president is above the law. The unspoken corollary is that no president is above the FBI. If so, we need to be damn careful about how the FBI uses that power.
Like Goldsmith, I’m a long-time admirer of the bureau. It rarely has any doubt about who the bad guys are or what they deserve—relentless, overwhelming, and street-smart pursuit within the law. But the bureau’s self-certainty has risks, summed up by the old saw that for the FBI there are only two kinds of people: agents and suspects.
And, like Goldsmith, I think the Trump campaign and Russian interest in it posed an impossible problem for the bureau and other intelligence agencies. There was too much smoke to ignore. Russia’s effort to influence the campaign had to be probed. But the decision to add President Trump as an individual counterintelligence subject of the investigation is a lot harder to justify,
There are two possible motives for adding the president to the counterintelligence probe. One—call it the “standard narrative”—is that the president’s firing of Jim Comey was evidence that the president intended not just to obstruct the criminal probe of his campaign but also to cover up a compromising relationship with Putin. The alternative narrative is that expanding the probe to the president himself was simple bureaucratic revanchism: “You take out our guy and we’ll take you out.” I’m guessing there was a mix of motives here, but for discussion purposes, let’s treat them as competing narratives.
Let’s start with the standard narrative: According to the New York Times, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker summed up the case for investigating the president in congressional testimony: “Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.” That seems like a fair statement of the justification—and a pretty thin basis for something as momentous as launching a counterintelligence probe of the president. Was Jim Comey himself personally running the investigation, so his removal would leave it crippled? Wouldn’t any attack on the counterintelligence investigation have required cooperation from the men who replaced Comey—first Andrew McCabe, and later Chris Wray? Was the bureau going to investigate them, too? Of course not.
Why not let the criminal investigation play out and expand it to national security if and when the evidence justified it? It’s hard to see what extra authorities agents would gain from the expansion—unless they planned on seeking a FISA warrant to wiretap the president. I’m guessing we’d have heard about that if they did. So what was the point? No one seems to have taken seriously the question, “Why do we need to take this norm-busting step?”
What about the alternative narrative, in which the bureau comes off as more tribal than magisterial? Let’s start with Andrew McCabe, who made this call as acting FBI director but whose name is mysteriously missing from the Times account. He was seen inside the bureau as Comey’s guy, accelerated into the deputy slot because of the director’s favor. And he had reason to resent the conservatives who had embarrassed him over his wife’s campaign for the Virginia legislature and its ties to Hillary Clinton fundraisers. Equally important, during the week between Jim Comey’s firing and the naming of Robert Mueller as special counsel, it seems as though the entire Justice hierarchy was losing all sense of proportion in the face of President Trump’s own norm-breaking. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was talking openly to his aides about wearing a wire to his meetings with the president. It’s fair to say that Justice and the bureau thought for a time that they were at war with the president, and when those agencies go to war, the weapons they use are investigations.
In the real world, of course, those two competing narratives braid around each other; they are less competing than complementary. The decision was probably a bit of “just doing our job” and a bit of “don’t screw with us.” If I had to guess at the decision’s origins, I’d look to Jim Comey’s statement that he had a friend leak the details of Comey’s meetings with the president in the hope that Rod Rosenstein would appoint a special counsel. I doubt he hid this notion from the team he left behind at the bureau. And that team could reasonably assume that the special counsel would inherit the existing FBI investigation as it stood; so the decision to quickly expand the probe could have been a way of ensuring the widest possible latitude for the special counsel’s office.
But who knows? And that’s what makes me uneasy. The political and bureaucratic motives mixed into this incident are reminiscent of the motives mixed into the decision to launch an investigation of Russia and the Trump campaign, the decision to rely on Christopher Steele’s research despite his partisan funding, and the decision to interrogate national security adviser Michael Flynn in the slipperiest of fashions. There are reasons why all of these things might have seemed necessary to honest, committed cops just doing their job. But they also offer a roadmap for how to abuse counterintelligence authority to serve partisan ends—a roadmap that more or less begins where the civil liberties protections of the 1970s end.
My concern is that we’re not taking that risk seriously because so many former officials and commentators believe that President Trump deserves all this and more. Some of them still hope that the election of 2016 can be undone, or at least discredited. This leads to a perseverating focus on leaks and scraps from the investigation and a determined lack of concern about the investigation’s sometimes tawdry origins. (Yes, I’m talking to you, #BabyCannon!)
If we’re going to prevent future scandals, we need to look at both. We need to know the answers to a lot of questions that are not being seriously addressed today: To what extent was politics involved in the decision to open the Trump-Russia investigation; to what extent did politics drive its direction; to what extent was politics involved in the Obama administration’s transition intelligence leaks; and, finally, to what extent was politics involved in adding the president to the counterintelligence probe?
The only independent review of any of these questions seems to be the investigation launched by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. He’s examining the FISA application for Carter Page. That’s a good start, but it’s only a start. It’s a commonplace insight that President Trump’s norm-defying conduct has triggered norm-defying payback by others. I’m sure we’re going to learn about the first, but we can’t ignore the second.
It’s time to expand the Horowitz inquiry, or something like it, into all of these events.
The President of the United States is under investigation as a possible agent ... variety of ways, Trump is also a target of the FBI's counterintelligenceinvestigation. ... Longest federal government shutdown in American history.
... perhaps the biggest political scandal in American history remain untouched. ... Just days after McCabe opened the investigation into President ... whether or not…a counterintelligence investigation was opened up at the FBI ...
What can be the result of such an investigation? ... Hitler and the Nazis as “just bird poo in over 1,000 years of successful German history. ... The FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump was triggered by signs of ...
If you want to learn about the FBI's investigation of the Las Vegas Massacre ... the worst mass shooting in American history that left 58 people dead and ... in the Counterintelligence Division at FBIHQ, the senior liaison to the ...
But, it is my gut feel that they want to be on the right side of history.” ... This is a counter intelligence matter.” ... took the opportunity to note the discord between previous House and Senate investigations viz. the Russia probe.
... the longest in U.S. history—and it could remain shuttered for “months or ... the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into potential ...
Who gave the FBI the power to investigate the president? The president did.Let’s begin with a series of difficult questions. What should the FBI do when it possesses information that causes trained counterintelligence officials to fear that the president of the United States is — either knowingly or unknowingly — falling under the influence of a hostile foreign power? Should the FBI investigate the man who ultimately runs the agency? Can it investigate a man who has considerable power even to define American national interests?
I’d suggest that these questions, for now, have been asked and answered by the president. Or, more specifically, by the presidency. Executive Order 12333 — drafted in 1981, amended in 2003, 2004, and 2009, and still in effect today — defines the executive branch’s counterintelligence mission and allocates responsibility for carrying out that mission. And under that executive order, the president has defined counterintelligence and has precisely delegated specific tasks to different executive branch agencies.
First, the definition of counterintelligence is as follows:
Counterintelligence means information gathered and activities conducted to identify, deceive, exploit, disrupt, or protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers, organizations, or persons, or their agents, or international terrorist organizations or activities. [Emphasis added.]
The highlighted words are particularly important. The focus is on the effort of the foreign power. The executive order allocates responsibility for the counterintelligence mission based on the relevant statutory framework and mission of each agency. Here’s what it has to say about the responsibilities of the FBI:
(g) INTELLIGENCE ELEMENTS OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. Under the supervision of the Attorney General and pursuant to such regulations as the Attorney General may establish, the intelligence elements of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall:
(1) Collect (including through clandestine means), analyze, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence and counterintelligence to support national and departmental missions, in accordance with procedural guidelines approved by the Attorney General, after consultation with the Director;
(2) Conduct counterintelligence activities; and
(3) Conduct foreign intelligence and counterintelligence liaison relationships with intelligence, security, and law enforcement services of foreign governments or international organizations in accordance with sections 1.3(b)(4) and 1.7(a)(6) of this order. [Emphasis added.]
There is no exemption in this order applicable to the actions or conduct of a president or of any other member of the executive branch. If Trump wanted to amend this order to exempt himself and key officials from the FBI’s counterintelligence mission, he could — so long as his order didn’t conflict with any constitutionally valid federal statutes.
But for now, this executive edict exists, and it specifically orders the FBI to carry out its part of the American counterintelligence mission.
Why emphasize this order? Because it helps us understand why the FBI would believe it had the authority andresponsibility to allegedly open a counterintelligence investigation of the president. The New York Times bombshell report has triggered a round of important debate and thoughtful criticism of the FBI, including from two men I greatly respect — Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith and my boss at National Review, Rich Lowry. Professor Goldsmith and Lowry both raise interesting and important questions about the FBI’s role.
Let’s look at one of Professor Goldsmith’s concerns first. After discussing how the FBI defines its counterintelligence mission in part as protecting against threats to American national security, the professor raises this key point:
Because the president determines the U.S. national security interest and threats against it, at least for the executive branch, there is an argument that it makes no sense for the FBI to open a counterintelligence case against the president premised on his being a threat to the national security. The president defines what a national security threat is, and thus any action by him cannot be such a threat, at least not for purposes of opening a counterintelligence investigation.
I’d argue that this concern is answered by the very definition of counterintelligence quoted above. The Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations define a “threat to national security” in part as “espionage and other intelligence activities, sabotage, and assassination, conducted by, for, or on behalf of foreign powers.” The definition isn’t dependent on the policy but rather the prime mover. Is it the president or the foreign power?
If Russia has engaged in “espionage” or “other intelligence activities” to induce the president (knowingly or unknowingly) to act on its behalf, then those actions (and their effects) are within the scope of the FBI’s mission. It’s black-letter law under a currently operative presidential order.
In addition, the existence of this order helps respond to Rich’s concern here: “The Times story is another sign that we have forgotten the role of our respective branches of government. It is Congress that exists to check and investigate the president, not the FBI.” But through Executive Order 12333, the president gave the FBI its current role — and explicitly subjected it to attorney-general oversight.
And that attorney-general oversight (or, in this case, deputy-attorney-general oversight, since the attorney general had recused himself from the Russia investigation) is critical. It’s the role of the man appointed by the president to prevent the parade of horribles that could easily flow from FBI abuses. We don’t want presidents placed under FBI investigation simply because the bureau might believe the president’s actions are dangerously wrong.
Rich rightly notes:
The president gets to fire subordinate executive-branch officials. He gets to meet with and talk to foreign leaders. He gets to make policy toward foreign nations. Especially important to the current investigation, he gets to say foolish, ill-informed, and destructive things.
Yes, he gets to do all those things, but according to the applicable law, when confronted with sufficient evidence of foreign intelligence activities, the FBI has the authority and obligation to investigate whether the president is doing those things on behalf of a foreign power.
It’s important to pause and note that despite an intense amount of coverage and reporting on Russian and Trump-team activities during and after the campaign, we do not yet know everything the FBI knew (or, critically, thought it knew) when it allegedly opened its counterintelligence investigation. Firing James Comey and bragging to the Russians that he did it because of the Russia investigation is but one odd event. Sharing classified information with Russians was another. We now know about many other odd occurrences that had happened by 2017 (and this is a very partial list):
• Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign chair met with a purported Russian representative for the purpose of obtaining negative information about Hillary Clinton, as part of an explicitly-described Russian effort to help Trump.
• Trump was pursuing an extraordinarily lucrative business deal in Moscow well into the 2016 campaign, and his lawyer and “fixer” was in contact with a representative of the Putin regime.
• Trump hired Paul Manafort as campaign chair, a man with longstanding ties to a Russian-supported Ukrainian strongman who was also deeply in debt to a Kremlin-tied Russian oligarch.
• Manafort shared polling data during the presidential campaign with Konstantin Kilimnik, a person “tied to Russian intelligence.”
• Russian operatives reached out to Trump-campaign official George Papadopoulos with an offer of sharing “dirt” on Hillary in the form of “thousands of emails.”
• Trump’s key national-security aide, Michael Flynn, had been paid tens of thousands of dollars by Kremlin-backed interests.
• Longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone — a man who the special counsel’s office alleges was in “regular contact with senior members of the Trump campaign” — also reportedly made substantial efforts to communicate with Wikileaks.
The list could easily continue without even touching the dubious Carter Page FISA application and the suspect Steele dossier. Intelligence agencies concluded that Russia developed a clear preference for Trump over Hillary, so I’d be stunned if a competent counterintelligence professional wasn’t concerned about the extent of Russian influence over the campaign and, indeed, over Trump himself.
At the very least, if we’re concerned about negative precedents, shouldn’t we be also concerned — perhaps even more concerned — by a presidential campaign that featured such extensive clandestine ties (including financial ties) with a hostile foreign power than we are by a federal agency fulfilling its president-defined legal mandate, under president-designated Department of Justice oversight?
It is quite fair to say (and obvious as you read the relevant guidelines) that counterintelligence responsibilities were not allocated with a potential investigation of the president in mind. It seems not to have crossed previous presidents’ minds that there could exist credible concerns that a president would knowingly or unknowingly act on behalf of a hostile foreign power.
Sadly, now we know those credible concerns can exist. It would be rational and wise for a future president and Congress to work together to more precisely define and establish worst-case counterintelligence investigation procedures applicable even to presidents. In the meantime, the FBI can apply only the guidelines and orders that exist, and the available evidence suggest that by opening an investigation of the president it was, ironically enough, following presidential orders. The FBI wasn’t abusing its power. It was fulfilling the mission the president gave it.
For nearly a century, counterintelligence has played a crucial role in providing force protection to the Army while keeping the Nation’s most guarded secrets. Today, it continues to play an integral part in America’s first line of defense in the war against global terrorism. In the Shadow of the Sphinx, an absorbing new history of Army counterintelligence, now reveals the real stories of the soldiers and civilians of Army counterintelligence on the front lines of three major wars and the shadowy Cold War conflict of spy versus counterspy.
Explosions in American cities and spies crossing international borders are not unique to the post 9-11 world. In the Shadow of the Sphinx traces the origins of Army counterintelligence to the need to counter such threats as far back as World War I. This authoritative, profusely illustrated official history follows the Army’s shadowy war of spies versus spies through two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War.
In the Shadow of the Sphinx includes fascinating tales of:
True spy stories from World War I through the end of the Cold War
Securing the Manhattan Project
Handling denazification in post-war Germany
Grappling with the emerging threat of communism
And much more!
Product Details
USA Price:
$7.99
Publisher:
U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Army, Army Intelligence & Security Command
BY: Bill Gertz
The CIA was fooled by scores of double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly loyal to communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.
The large-scale deception included nearly 100 fake CIA recruits in East Germany, Cuba, as well as the Soviet Union (and later Russia) who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. policymakers for decades.
"During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times," writes Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA’s former chief historian.
"The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure," he stated in a journal article published last week.
The failure to recognize the double agents and their disinformation designed to influence U.S. policies "wreaked havoc" on the agency, Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.
Fischer stated that the failure to prevent the double agent deception was dismissed by the CIA as insignificant, and that congressional oversight committees also did not press the agency to reform its vetting processes.
Fischer was a career CIA officer who joined the agency in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He later sued the agency in 1996, charging he was mistreated for criticizing the agency for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant.
Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence—the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as "sickthink."
The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.
Double agents are foreign nationals recruited by a spy service that are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to feed false disinformation for intelligence and policy purposes and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents.
Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.
The CIA’s first major double agent failure occurred in Cuba and was revealed by Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga, who defected to the CIA in 1987.
Aspillaga revealed that some four-dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period secretly had been working for the communist government in Havana and supplying disinformation to the CIA.
Later that year, Cuban state television confirmed the compromise in a documentary revealing the existence of 27 phony CIA agents, along with their secret CIA communications and photographic gear.
The intelligence failure was covered up by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, according to Fischer, who quoted former CIA officer Brian Latell.
In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double-agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi.
According to two East German Stasi officers, Klaus Eichner and Andreas Dobbert, operating against CIA without inside sources was difficult.
"Naturally we tried but did not succeed in placing agents in the CIA," they stated in their 2009 book. "Nevertheless, there was not a single CIA operation on [East German] territory that we were not able to detect using [double agents] and counterespionage operations."
Fischer said the controlled East German assets "rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb, and blind."
The late East German spymaster Markus Wolf also wrote in his memoir that by the late 1980s "we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start."
"On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans," Wolf said.
Wolf had been able to identify a CIA officer working in West Germany who was recruiting East Germans and then dispatched double agents to the officer.
Fischer says former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the failure, including Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy CIA director, who said the double agent fiasco spanned over 20 years.
Former CIA Director Robert Gates also said the agency was "duped by double agents in Cuba and East Germany.
Fischer states that the East German failure was "wall-to-wall," from the lack of advance warning in 1961 of plans to build the Berlin Wall, to 1989, when cable television provided CIA with the first word that the wall was coming down.
From 1961 to 1989, all CIA intelligence on East Germany was "no more and no less than what Wolf wanted it to know," he said.
The last major double agent failure took place in the Soviet Union and after its 1991 collapse in Russia.
It was revealed after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames for spying for Moscow since the 1980s.
Ames helped the KGB expose all Soviet and East European intelligence operations, allowing Moscow to pass "feed material"—a combination of accurate information and false data—through controlled double-agents.
The KGB operation involving Ames began in 1986 and continued through 1993, when he was handled by the post-Soviet SVR intelligence service.
During that period, the KGB sent a false defector to the CIA, Aleksandr Zhomov, who fooled the agency into believing he could supply information on how the KGB had unmasked and arrested almost all CIA recruited agents during the mid-1980s.
Zhomov, who was paid an estimated $1 million by the CIA, made the fake offer in 1987 and according to Fischer, was dispatched by Moscow in a bid to protect Ames from being discovered as the source of the earlier leak.
In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from "bogus" and "tainted" sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow.
The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey.
The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.
Fischer said the CIA defended its recruitment of bogus agents by asserting that even while controlled the doubles provided some good intelligence.
A major problem for Soviet operations was the failure of agency officers to successfully conduct direct recruitments of agents to work for the agency. Instead, the CIA was reliant on "walk-ins," or volunteers, a practice that increased the vulnerability to foreign double agent operations.
Fischer blamed the bureaucratic culture and careerism at CIA for the failure to prevent the double agent disaster.
"The case of the KGB-SVR double agents from 1986 to 1994 is egregious," he said, "not the least because it revealed that deceptive practices transcended the Cold War."
The CIA continued to handle agents the CIA knew were fraudulent and allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to "cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents," Fischer concluded.
"Yet none of these revelations resulted in a serious inquiry into the troubles that doubles cause," he said. "To paraphrase Lord Acton, secret power corrupts secretly."
A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff member, said he was familiar with some of the details on CIA double agents during his intelligence career but said some information in the article was new.
"Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption—moral, intellectual, and political—of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it," said Codevilla, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University.
Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, said Fischer and other former intelligence officials have revealed that large-scale communist intelligence service operations to undermine the CIA show "the story of Soviet-era espionage operations that we’ve understood to this point is probably deeply flawed."
"What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong," said deGraffenreid. "And therefore because we’ve not corrected that problem we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China and others."
David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst and retired Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member, said Fischer correctly notes that "intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole."
Special to <a href="http://WorldTribune.com" rel="nofollow">WorldTribune.com</a>
Bill Gertz, Washington Free Beacon
The CIA was fooled by scores of double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly loyal to communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.
James Jesus Angleton.
The large-scale deception included nearly 100 fake CIA recruits in East Germany, Cuba, as well as the Soviet Union (and later Russia) who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. policymakers for decades.
“During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times,” writes Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA’s former chief historian. “The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure,” he stated in a journal article published last week. …
Fischer was a career CIA officer who joined the agency in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He later sued the agency in 1996, charging he was mistreated for criticizing the agency for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant.
Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence — the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink” [a term popularized as it concerned the legendary James Jesus Angleton who was chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 to 1975 before being forced to resign when the CIA moved to downsize the counterintelligence operation.]
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Photo: Ernst Urhlau, former chief of BND and later the "consultant on geopolitical risks" for the Deutsche Bank, and the political ally of Gerhard Schroeder. Uhrlau was the chief of the Hamburg police when the core group of 9/11 hijackers, the so called Hamburg Cell, lived and received training there. He was uncooperative and hostile towards 9/11 Investigationinquiries.
»German Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Franz Canaris 24/01/19 06:17 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Warfare History Network. Adolf Hitler’s spymaster, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was actually a dedicated anti-Nazi who did everything he could to frustrate the Führer’s plans. by David…
»Canaris and Heydrich – Axis History Forum 24/01/19 06:16 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Canaris and Heydrich #1 Post by Ezboard » 29 Sep 2002, 21:37 GFM2001 Member Posts: 55 (8/20/01 12:32:55 pm) Reply Canaris and Heydrich ————————————————————…
»Service record of Reinhard Heydrich 24/01/19 05:43 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks Michael_Novakhov shared this story . SS- service record cover of Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich The service record of Reinhard Heydrich was a collection of official SS documents maintained at the SS Pers…
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M. N.: The New Abwehr enjoys and employs the deep and intimate connections with the criminal Underworld which go back to the early 1920-s, the conditions after the Germany's defeat in the WW1 and the resulting "Restrictions" (I almost typed "Sanctions") which made the symbiotic and sometimes parasitic relations with Police and Criminals the matter of survival for the Abwehr which based itself at that time at the Military Police Stations. Money Laundering is another, related sub-specialty which was a matter of survival and necessity at that time, and the Abwehr under Canaris (which really is the Abwehr we are talking about) made both areas the traditional historical "fields of excellence". Money Laundering , from Deutsche Bank to Chabad dealers to Oligarchs, e.g. Lev Leviev and others, and most notably by our pretty laundry girls and boys from the Trump-Kushner Crime Family , was and is one of the truly heart felt activities for the Abwehr, and...
How did these 650,000 emails get into the Abedin -Weiner laptop? This question remains open for almost three years now, and no answer in sight. - 6:35 AM 2/17/2019 Lawyers: Teen girl Weiner sexted wanted to affect election – Bowling Green Daily News Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks℠ hoax - Google Search Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Anthony Weiner: It was a hoax - Google Search Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Anthony Weiner: It was a hoax - Google Search Michael_Novakhov shared this story from "Anthony Weiner: It was a hoax" - Google News. A nude-photo hoax was supposed to silence Alexandria Ocasio ... Washington Post - Jan 10, 2019 Circulating nudes — real or fake — is one of the oldest and ... The Daily Caller changed the headline of its story to “ Anthony Weiner Mistress ... The Latest Smear Against Ocasio-Cortez: A Fake ...
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9:37 AM 7/19/2019 - Melania Knauss Trump is a lesbian Melania Trump poses naked for Max magazine | Daily Mail Online Friday July 19 th , 2019 at 9:31 AM News | Mail Online 1 Share Naked pictures from lesbian-themed photoshoot emerge of Donald Trump's wife Melania posing for a French men's magazine at the age of 25 Photos appeared in the January 1996 issue of now-defunct Max magazine One shows Mrs Trump just in heels with her hand over her private parts French photographer Alé de Basseville took the photos in Manhattan Slovenian-born Mrs Trump was then taking her modeling career to the US Appears under her stage name Melania K, short for maiden name Knauss By Daniel Bates In New York For The Daily Mail and Clemence Michallon For Dailymail.com Published: 00:27 BST, 1 August 2016 | Updated: 14:05 BST, 1 August 2016 e-mail 3.8k shares 3.9k ...
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The Latest Posts - The Trump Investigations - Review Of News ____________________________________________________ Pages - The Trump Investigations - Review Of News Home Shared Links Links - On The Road... America On The Road To Dictatorship: Trump, Trumpism, FBI, and the New Abwehr - By Michael Novakhov - Last Update: 3:10 PM 5/1/2019 On The Road To Dictatorship: FBI + Facebook. "Like? No Like!" - By Michael Novakhov - Page The New Abwehr Hypothesis of The Operation Trump - Outline and Links The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr | Recent Tweets | Shared Links - Twitter - Facebook The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr The Manifesto Of The American Socialism: SOCIALISM IS HEALTH, SOCIALIST SOCIETY IS THE HEALTHY SOCIETY, in all respects; as the SOCIAL ORGANISM. Political Criminology - The Outline Trump Investigations News In 25 Posts Trump Investigations News In Brief All Saved Stories News Review - 25 Trump Investigations News Review - Saved Stories - 250 All Blogs ...
Admiral Canaris during WW2
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"The funding of Mr. Trump’s golf empire has been something of a mystery... the company’s golf properties were funded by Russians." - New York Times |
Comment and Hypothesis:
M.N.: Scratch the Russians, and you might find (as the example of the "reasonable doubt"), New Abwehr: Aberdeen golf fields on the North-East coast of Scotland, just like Salisbury as the setting for the Novichok "Mysteries" are of the special sentimental historical interest to Germany as the objects of the Abwehr's close attention during WW2.
The Recorder.
Lawfare.
"counterintelligence investigations in history" - Google News.
National Review.
Washington Free Beacon.
World Tribune Life.
Trump Investigations.
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