Seth Rich

Exploration of Conspiracy Theories from Perspective of Esoteric Traditions

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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Jul 20, 2018 7:52 pm

Seth Rich Conspiracy Theorist’s Event Fizzles Spectacularly

http://www.thedailybeast.com
12 mins read
It's no secret: A call with a mystery witness flops.

witness flops.

Lobbyist Jack Burkman invited reporters to huddle around a phone in a Holiday Inn conference room on Tuesday, promising damning revelations about the 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
On the other end of the call, Burkman insisted, was a former intelligence operative with an explosive revelation: government agents from the DEA and ATF were behind Rich’s murder. Burkman’s source — codename “Luke” — was about to blow this still-unsolved case open.

But Burkman couldn’t get the call to work. The call from his tipster, ostensibly whistleblowing from deep inside the deep state on the second anniversary of Rich’s death, kept getting bounced back to the phone at the reception desk at the Northern Virginia hotel. Burkman scrambled out of the room, leaving reporters and Burkman’s online audience — watching live from a variety of livestreams operated by fringe internet personalities — wondering what exactly was going on.
Police believe Rich’s murder, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was the result of a botched robbery, and Rich’s parents have repeatedly urged anyone with information about their son’s death to contact police instead of speculating about it in the media or online. Still, Burkman and other Rich conspiracy theorists used the anniversary of Rich’s death to attempt to relaunch their baseless claims that Rich’s death was orchestrated by a government or Democratic Party conspiracy.
The claim that Rich was murdered for leaking Democratic emails to WikiLeaks became a popular conspiracy theory on the right around the 2016 election. Speculation about the motivations behind Rich’s murder are now the subject of a number of lawsuits, with Rich’s parents suing Fox News and Rich’s brother suing America First Media Group, a conspiracy theory outlet that Burkman teamed up with for his press conference.
The event was the latest production from Burkman, an attention-hungry Washington character whose previous causes have included banning gay athletes from the NFL. After initially considering having his mystery source appear in-person with a “mask or bag” over his head, Burkman eventually opted for the call, claiming it was too dangerous for his source to appear in public.


Burkman, dressed in a silvery suit and crocodile-skin loafers, quipped before the press conference that he was successfully recovering from an attempt on his own life in March — the apparent result of a feud with an underling over the direction of their freelance Rich investigation.

“I have two bullets in me,” Burkman told The Daily Beast.
After the technical issues were resolved, the much-hyped call with Burkman’s gravelly voiced anonymous tipster didn’t go well.
With the press and YouTube livestreamers crowded around the phone, Luke spun a confusing tale involving two assassins — or maybe three assassins — from the DEA and ATF tracking Rich to murder him and take a thumb drive containing confidential documents. The supposed whistleblower’s story grew as the call went on, with Luke claiming he had passed a lie detector test administered by the Secret Service and that he had also received vague help from the House Intelligence Committee.
Luke wouldn’t explain why anyone should believe him, and he grew flustered when asked to explain his claim that the House Intelligence Committee was involved in his investigation.
“Uh, they helped with… computer things,” Luke said.

Luke and Burkman also had shifting descriptions of the amount of danger the ostensible witness was in. On the one hand, they said he couldn’t reveal his name because he was still in the same region as Rich’s assassins. But at the same time, he felt comfortable enough to use his own voice on the call and reveal details about his supposed conversations with the assassins.
“Did you think about using a voice scrambler?” asked one reporter.
“Uh, does it matter?” Luke replied.
Luke even got some pushback from Burkman’s own stepson and sometimes-bodyguard, David Harden, who sharply questioned Luke about his claims. Harden then delivered confusing remarks about his mother’s safety and living in Burkman’s basement before Burkman cut him off.
After the press conference, Burkman claimed that he was satisfied with how it went. But not everyone in the often-fractious world of Rich conspiracy theorists was so thrilled.
America First Media Group founder Matt Couch quickly took to a Periscope livestream to distance himself from the event. Couch denounced Burkman on a livestream as “bush league” and “unprofessional,” claiming that Luke was disappointed in how the event had played out.
“That press conference out in D.C. was an absolute shitshow,” Couch said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/seth-rich ... ctacularly
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Jul 20, 2018 7:55 pm

Seth Rich Murder: Witness Prepared to Identify 2 Killers (Gov’t Agents)

stonecoldtruth.com
1 min read

This week is the two year anniversary of Seth Rich’s murder.
Jack Burkman, a Washington D.C. lawyer, and lobbyist has been exploring the Seth Rich murder case for the majority of the past 2 years.
Burkman now claims to have found a credible witness that is willing to identify the two killers of Seth Rich. The “DNC Hack” was most likely an inside job because the file transfer rate was to be done via the Internet. All evidence points to Seth Rich as holding the key to who was the real “DNC hackers.”

According to The Gateway Pundit:
Jack Burkman, a Washington-based attorney and lobbyist who has worked with a private investigative team to solve the Seth Rich murder mystery, told The Gateway Pundit that the witness has conclusive evidence that will bring Rich’s killers to justice within a month.
“We believe that we have reached the beginning of the end of the Seth Rich murder investigation,” Burkman toldThe Gateway Pundit in an exclusive interview Sunday. “After two long hard years of work, we have a witness who is prepared to identify the two killers of Seth Rich. One is reportedly a current DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent, the other is reportedly a current ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) agent”
The witness, who “fears for his life,” will be accompanied by armed guards and disguise his identity as he details how two employees of the United States government killed Seth in a press conference slated for Tuesday.
WND refreshes us on the importance and possible implications of Rich’s murder:
Rich, 27, the DNC’s voter expansion data director, had accepted a position with Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign just before his death.
On July 10, 2016, he was fatally shot in the back in Washington, D.C., near his apartment in an affluent neighborhood. Rich had been working for the DNC at a time when emails from the organization were provided to WikiLeaks for publication.
They considered that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks’ origin for the Podesta Email leaks. As Jack Burns previously reported, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is one of the many, who do not believe this was a random shooting:
Burns also verified Gingrich’s claims that Rich’s notebook was found to possess DNC correspondence and emails with Wikileaks,
He was almost surely the origin of the DNC emails flow.
And if he was, then that is more than enough reason for him to be silenced.

https://stonecoldtruth.com/seth-rich-mu ... vt-agents/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Jul 20, 2018 9:34 pm

ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE HACK

US Lab Says Electronic Voting Machines Easy to Hack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Oty69mQ80

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ClrHPShljM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hCyVsUir8k

Fraction Magic
http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-video/





Voting-machine makers are already worried about Defcon

Engadget

Last year, Defcon's Voting Village made headlines for uncovering massive security issues in America's electronic voting machines. Unsurprisingly, voting-machine makers are working to prevent a repeat performance at this year's show.

According to Voting Village organizers, they're having a tough time getting their hands on machines for white-hat hackers to test at the next Defcon event in Las Vegas (held in August). That's because voting-machine makers are scrambling to get the machines off eBay and keep them out of the hands of the "good guy" hackers.



Village co-organizer Harri Hursti told attendees at the Shmoocon hacking conference this month they were having a hard time preparing for this year's show, in part because voting machine manufacturers sent threatening letters to eBay resellers. The intimidating missives told auctioneers that selling the machines is illegal -- which is false.

Electronic voting-machine manufacturers -- and anyone with a stake in keeping their flaws secret -- have oodles of reasons to prevent Defcon's Voting Village from having a repeat performance of last year's (perfectly legal) mass hacking of e-vote boxes.

Voting-machine hacking at Defcon isn't new; the conference has been joyfully cracking voting machines since 2004. The problems with voting-machine security, and the industry's unwillingness to acknowledge the problems discovered at Defcon, have ensured the voting machine hacking challenge has been coming back year after year.

In fact, the machines are so badly maintained, notoriously backdoored and easily hacked that even Defcon hackers massively stress out in forums and chat spaces about their own local and federal voting process.

As you'd expect, e-vote machine hacking was more popular than ever last year at Defcon.



Voting machines displayed at Defcon's Voting Village in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 29, 2017.

But 2017's e-vote hackfest was markedly different because it was officially the first time a large-scale hack of voting machines had occurred (openly, anyway) because the act of hacking them is considered illegal. Not at Defcon's 2017's mass e-vote hack-a-palooza: That was thanks to the hard work of law professor Andrea Matwyshyn. She cleared the way for scores of hackers to legally throw everything they had at voting machines for all to see.

Voting-machine makers with anything to hide couldn't have been happy about that. If you remember the headlines after last year's Defcon, the results that came out of the Voting Village were beyond problematic. Shocking, even.

Defcon's hackers breached every single voting machine in the Village. Some in minutes; many in under an hour-and-a-half. E-vote machines were popped by hackers without insider knowledge and by hackers who didn't even specialize in voting machines.

One attendee remarked on Twitter, "Horrifyingly, some were hacked wirelessly (ie no physical access). Many hadn't had OS or basic software patches in over a decade." They added, "Others had been sold off after use, but hadn't been wiped; still had voter data on them. Didn't hear of any with any credible audit trail."


A hacker tries to access and alter data from an electronic poll book at Defcon's Voting Village in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 29, 2017.

A journalist at the event tweeted: "One of the Express epollbooks at the Defcon voting machine hacking village had 600,000 voter reg records on it from Shelby County, TN." Voting Village hackers also discovered that all Sequoia brand voting machines shared a common, hard-coded password.

Before the 2016 presidential election in the US, a study released by the Brennan Center called "America's Voting Machines at Risk" stated 43 states were using machines that were over a decade old in 2016. The report's author, Larry Norden, said before the election, "In 14 states, machines will be 15 or more years old."

What's worse, he added that "nearly every state is using some machines that are no longer manufactured, and many election officials struggle to find replacement parts." Before millions of electronic votes were cast for the next US president, Norden told press that "everything from software support, replacement parts and screen calibration were at risk."

So it's no wonder voting machine makers are keen to get their gear off eBay and keep it out of the hands of white-hat hackers equally keen to expose their collective security failings.

The Defcon Voting Village crew seems to be taking it as you'd expect -- like a challenge. Harri Hursti is definitely having trouble, but said it scored at least one machine from "an e-cycling company [that] had bought 1,300 voting machines, which it acquired when the ceiling of the warehouse in which they were being stored collapsed."

Hursti told press, "We found the company had already sold 400 of the machines, in some cases back to counties for voting duties."

© 2018 Oath Tech Network Aol Tech. All rights reserved.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/26/vot ... ut-defcon/
33


Black Box Voting, founded in 2003, is a nonpartisan investigative reporting and public education organization for elections.
http://blackboxvoting.org/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Jul 21, 2018 9:52 pm

Mueller Reveals Russia Investigation Just Elaborate Sting To Nail Clinton Child Sex-Slavery Ring

The Onion

Politics

‘President Trump Played His Role To Perfection,’ Special Counsel Discloses
WASHINGTON—Lauding President Trump for his invaluable role in the operation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller informed the public Wednesday that his so-called Russia investigation was in fact merely a cover for an elaborate sting to bring down the Clinton family’s child sex-slavery ring. “The Justice Department has finally been able to track down and arrest everyone associated with the Clinton Foundation’s unconscionable crimes, and it’s all thanks to President Trump agreeing to work undercover and play along with our fabricated accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election,” said Mueller, explaining that after its agent Seth Rich was killed by the Clintons, the department recruited Trump to distract high-ranking Democrats with social media stunts, continuous denials of Russian involvement in U.S. politics, and glowing praise for Vladimir Putin. “Without the president’s help, we never would have been able to keep the guise of the ‘Russia investigation’ going long enough to launch our successful raids of Comet Ping Pong and secret locations in Haiti—efforts that ultimately brought the Clintons’ human-trafficking crimes to light. Thanks to the heroic actions of Donald Trump, we can all sleep a little more soundly tonight, knowing the world’s children are safe.” Mueller went on to thank the numerous media personalities and Republican lawmakers who first pointed out to federal investigators that the real problem lay in Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

Love The Onion.. :'(
https://politics.theonion.com/mueller-r ... 1827696431
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Jul 21, 2018 9:59 pm

"I knew Seth Rich. I know he was the @Wikileaks source. I was involved."

--- Kim.Com

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/86 ... 3D11860521

30



California GOP Rep. Rohrabacher doubts Russia hacking indictment, plans to consult outside ‘experts’

By Washington Post |

The Mercury News | PUBLISHED: July 20, 2018 at 6:59 am | UPDATED: July 20, 2018 at 7:10 am

By David Weigel | The Washington Post

On July 3, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., talked with a local news station in his district about a topic on which he has often strayed from the pack: the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee. Rohrabacher, who has urged friendlier relations with Russia, said that there were plenty of questions about the hack, and that it might have been an “inside job,” followed by a years-long coverup.

“I went to Julian Assange of course to talk to him personally, the guy who of course disclosed all of these emails, and he adamantly said the Russians weren’t in it,” he told Fox LA reporter Elex Michaelson. “And, by the way, if we could in some way guarantee that he can get out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, he said he told me he has absolute proof, just actual, not just words, but he’s got proof that the Russians did not hack.”

Start your day with the news you need from the Bay Area and beyond.



Ten days later, the Justice Department indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers, fingering them for the email hacks that roiled and wounded Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. For many people, the indictment put to rest several alternative theories of how the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were hacked.

In a short interview, Rohrabacher said that he wanted to know more.

“The explanation of the indictment is so complicated and technical that it is hard for anyone to judge whether it’s accurate,” he said. “There are experts that will be able to judge whether it’s accurate. I know that there are a number of intelligence agents, people experienced with this area of technically, the VIPS. They’re experts in cyberwarfare. I plan to talk to them to see if the information provided in the indictments is something that they are willing to accept as possible as compared to what they said in the past.”

Rohrabacher was referring to the work of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of “Russiagate” skeptics who argued in 2017 that “an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.” They cited “independent cyber investigators” and got a serious airing for their theory, from the pages of the Nation to prime time on Fox News. But not every member of VIPS had signed on to that finding, and Rohrabacher admitted that the indictments raised serious questions about alternate theories.

“Because of the amount of time necessary for a hack from the inside to get all of those emails would have taken out a huge amount of time and instead it was done very quickly. So we know it was an inside job and we know there are several people in, working in the DNC at that time who were disgruntled because they knew that the DNC was breaking its own rules by undermining Bernie Sanders’s campaign,” Rohrabacher said on July 3.

This week, the congressman said that he needed to know more.

“The government said it’s got to be a hack,” said Rohrabacher. “I’ll see if [VIPs] now have changed their minds, because they had a technical explanation of how supposedly people were able to get these emails. This is the first time I’ve been given these details about hacking from the special prosecutor. I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”

Rohrbacher, first elected in 1988, has often stood apart from his Republican colleagues. In 2016, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., joked that Rohrabacher and then-candidate Donald Trump were so soft on Russia, they were probably paid by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Earlier this week, the congressman weighed in on the indictment of Maria Butina, a Russian woman charged with acting as a foreign agent in the United States and having ties to Russian intelligence operatives.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s stupid,” Rohrabacher told Politico. “She’s the assistant of some guy who is the head of the bank and is a member of their Parliament. That’s what we call a spy? That shows you how bogus this whole thing is.”

The 2018 election presents his first serious electoral test in years. Trump lost Rohrabacher’s coastal Orange County district in 2016, and Democrats have poured resources behind Harley Rouda, a wealthy businessman and attorney who has made the Russia issue central to his campaign.

“Dana Rohrabacher is unfit to lead,” Rouda said in a statement after seeing Rohrabacher’s comments. “American intelligence agencies all agree that Russia interfered in our elections. Every American, especially 30-year members of Congress, need to be focused on protecting our Democracy from foreign attacks. Yet, Dana is sadly incapable of doing that.”

In the Michaelson interview, Rohrabacher had not said who in particular could have leaked from inside the DNC. This week, he said that he was not referring to Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was killed outside his District of Columbia home in 2016, and who, ever since, has been the focus of conspiracy theories about the hacked emails.
“I’ve never suggested that Seth Rich was the leaker,” Rohrabacher said. “I’ve never told anybody that Seth Rich was the leaker. But that is something that needs to be thoroughly looked into, and it hasn’t been. It’s disturbing that the DNC’s server was not given to the FBI. It’s disturbing that Seth Rich’s laptop has not been examined. That’s important, the fact they haven’t looked at yet. We need to pull through and see all evidence is looked at.”
Rouda hit back, saying that even broaching the “inside job” question was a step too far.

“His comments on the murder of Seth Rich also show that when not being duped by Borat, Dana would rather peddle the sickest conspiracies of the alt-right than fight for families in the 48th District,” he said. (Sacha Baron Cohen, star of the movie “Borat,” has filmed a show in which he tricked Rohrabacher and others and got them to talk on camera about training young children to use firearms.)

© 2018 Digital First Media

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/20/ ... experts-2/
Last edited by kinderdigi on Sat Jul 21, 2018 10:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Jul 21, 2018 9:59 pm

kinderdigi wrote:"I knew Seth Rich. I know he was the @Wikileaks source. I was involved."

--- Kim Dotom

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/86 ... 3D11860521

30



California GOP Rep. Rohrabacher doubts Russia hacking indictment, plans to consult outside ‘experts’

By Washington Post |

The Mercury News | PUBLISHED: July 20, 2018 at 6:59 am | UPDATED: July 20, 2018 at 7:10 am

By David Weigel | The Washington Post

On July 3, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., talked with a local news station in his district about a topic on which he has often strayed from the pack: the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee. Rohrabacher, who has urged friendlier relations with Russia, said that there were plenty of questions about the hack, and that it might have been an “inside job,” followed by a years-long coverup.

“I went to Julian Assange of course to talk to him personally, the guy who of course disclosed all of these emails, and he adamantly said the Russians weren’t in it,” he told Fox LA reporter Elex Michaelson. “And, by the way, if we could in some way guarantee that he can get out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, he said he told me he has absolute proof, just actual, not just words, but he’s got proof that the Russians did not hack.”

Ten days later, the Justice Department indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers, fingering them for the email hacks that roiled and wounded Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. For many people, the indictment put to rest several alternative theories of how the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were hacked.

In a short interview, Rohrabacher said that he wanted to know more.

“The explanation of the indictment is so complicated and technical that it is hard for anyone to judge whether it’s accurate,” he said. “There are experts that will be able to judge whether it’s accurate. I know that there are a number of intelligence agents, people experienced with this area of technically, the VIPS. They’re experts in cyberwarfare. I plan to talk to them to see if the information provided in the indictments is something that they are willing to accept as possible as compared to what they said in the past.”

Rohrabacher was referring to the work of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of “Russiagate” skeptics who argued in 2017 that “an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.” They cited “independent cyber investigators” and got a serious airing for their theory, from the pages of the Nation to prime time on Fox News. But not every member of VIPS had signed on to that finding, and Rohrabacher admitted that the indictments raised serious questions about alternate theories.

“Because of the amount of time necessary for a hack from the inside to get all of those emails would have taken out a huge amount of time and instead it was done very quickly. So we know it was an inside job and we know there are several people in, working in the DNC at that time who were disgruntled because they knew that the DNC was breaking its own rules by undermining Bernie Sanders’s campaign,” Rohrabacher said on July 3.

This week, the congressman said that he needed to know more.

“The government said it’s got to be a hack,” said Rohrabacher. “I’ll see if [VIPs] now have changed their minds, because they had a technical explanation of how supposedly people were able to get these emails. This is the first time I’ve been given these details about hacking from the special prosecutor. I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”

Rohrbacher, first elected in 1988, has often stood apart from his Republican colleagues. In 2016, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., joked that Rohrabacher and then-candidate Donald Trump were so soft on Russia, they were probably paid by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Earlier this week, the congressman weighed in on the indictment of Maria Butina, a Russian woman charged with acting as a foreign agent in the United States and having ties to Russian intelligence operatives.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s stupid,” Rohrabacher told Politico. “She’s the assistant of some guy who is the head of the bank and is a member of their Parliament. That’s what we call a spy? That shows you how bogus this whole thing is.”

The 2018 election presents his first serious electoral test in years. Trump lost Rohrabacher’s coastal Orange County district in 2016, and Democrats have poured resources behind Harley Rouda, a wealthy businessman and attorney who has made the Russia issue central to his campaign.

“Dana Rohrabacher is unfit to lead,” Rouda said in a statement after seeing Rohrabacher’s comments. “American intelligence agencies all agree that Russia interfered in our elections. Every American, especially 30-year members of Congress, need to be focused on protecting our Democracy from foreign attacks. Yet, Dana is sadly incapable of doing that.”

In the Michaelson interview, Rohrabacher had not said who in particular could have leaked from inside the DNC. This week, he said that he was not referring to Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was killed outside his District of Columbia home in 2016, and who, ever since, has been the focus of conspiracy theories about the hacked emails.
“I’ve never suggested that Seth Rich was the leaker,” Rohrabacher said. “I’ve never told anybody that Seth Rich was the leaker. But that is something that needs to be thoroughly looked into, and it hasn’t been. It’s disturbing that the DNC’s server was not given to the FBI. It’s disturbing that Seth Rich’s laptop has not been examined. That’s important, the fact they haven’t looked at yet. We need to pull through and see all evidence is looked at.”
Rouda hit back, saying that even broaching the “inside job” question was a step too far.

“His comments on the murder of Seth Rich also show that when not being duped by Borat, Dana would rather peddle the sickest conspiracies of the alt-right than fight for families in the 48th District,” he said. (Sacha Baron Cohen, star of the movie “Borat,” has filmed a show in which he tricked Rohrabacher and others and got them to talk on camera about training young children to use firearms.)

© 2018 Digital First Media

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/20/ ... experts-2/


30




Rep. Dana Rohrabacher meets with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, plans to tell Trump what he heard

By Christine Mai-Duc

latimes.com | 2017-08-17T05:04:00Z

Orange County GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher confirmed that he met Wednesday with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is still living in asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

In a statement, Rohrabacher's office said the Australian fugitive "emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved" in the theft of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. The emails, which were published by WikiLeaks, put Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton on the defensive.

The conversation between Rohrabacher and Assange, which was first reported by the Daily Caller, "ranged over many topics," according to the statement. The statement didn't reveal much more, but said "the congressman plans to divulge more of what he found directly to President Trump."

http://www.latimes.com/politics/essenti ... story.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Jul 23, 2018 4:39 am

I've seen several of these kind of things lately, don't know why now ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/greatawakening ... _in_texas/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Tue Jul 24, 2018 1:00 am

D.C. surgeon who operated on Seth Rich: ‘The DNC staffer was alive and well after surgery, before a group of LEOs showed up to the ICU’

DNC staffer's plug pulled in ICU?


Shepard Ambellas

Intellihub | 2017-05-22T09:17:07+00:00




WASHINGTON (INTELLIHUB) — A 4-year resident surgeon at Washington Hospital Center claims that Seth Rich was alive and recovering well in facility’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) after being treated for a total of 3 routine gunshot wounds — that is until a number of law enforcement officers arrived eight hours later kicking most everyone out of the ICU and physically barring doctors and others from attending to Rich.

The surgeon who witnessed this bizarre behavior decided to come forth with the information despite the fact that he or she may be easy to identify.

Posted on May 17, to 4chan under the anonymous ID: “rhotYJAg,” the surgeon wrote:


4th year surgery resident here who rotated at WHC (Washington Hospital Center) last year, it won’t be hard to identify me but I feel that I shouldn’t stay silent.

Seth Rich was shot twice, with 3 total gunshot wounds (entry and exit, and entry). He was taken to the OR emergently where we performed an exlap and found a small injury to segment 3 of the liver which was packed and several small bowel injuries (pretty common for gunshots to the back exiting the abdomen) which we resected ~12cm of bowel and left him in discontinuity (didn’t hook everything back up) with the intent of performing a washout in the morning. He did not have any major vascular injuries otherwise. I’ve seen dozens of worse cases than this which survived and nothing about his injuries suggested to me that he’d sustained a fatal wound.


In the meantime he was transferred to the ICU and transfused 2 units of blood when his post-surgery crit came back ~20. He was stable and not on any pressors, and it seemed pretty routine. About 8 hours after he arrived we were swarmed by LEOs and pretty much everyone except the attending and a few nurses was kicked out of the ICU (disallowing visiting hours -normally every odd hour, eg 1am, 3am, etc- is not something we do routinely). It was weird as hell. At turnover that morning we were instructed not to round on the VIP that came in last night (that’s exactly what the attending said, and no one except for me and another resident had any idea who he was talking about).


No one here was allowed to see Seth except for my attending when he died. No code was called. I rounded on patients literally next door but was physically blocked from checking in on him. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and while I can’t say 100% that he was allowed to die, I don’t understand why he was treated like that. Take it how you may, /pol/, I’m just one low level doc. Something’s fishy though, that’s for sure.

https://www.intellihub.com/d-c-surgeon- ... o-the-icu/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby Kurt » Tue Jul 24, 2018 3:02 pm

So you just cited a "news" organization that cited a post in 4chan.

No name of the doctor was given (of course...someone on 4chan might have than fact checked).
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Tue Jul 24, 2018 4:27 pm

Kurt wrote:So you just cited a "news" organization that cited a post in 4chan.

No name of the doctor was given (of course...someone on 4chan might have than fact checked).


Yeah, from the top of #28

"I find the report (anonymous as could be) by the emergency room surgeon that said, he was alive in the hospital, and that his wounds were survivable. Then, law enforcement came in and all the medical staff were required to leave the room.. interesting. It might be big BS, but the hospital is known now, and no questions have been asked or answered, that I've seen "
End

I just found that story again.

I think a good portion of the stuff archived is unfounded BS. But, just like the Onion story, I collect all I find.

Also, I thought both 4 and 8 chan were dead? I don't read them, but have looked. When I last looked, the posts were stale, months old? Maybe I'm mistaken ?

Edit
Just had a look and both 4&8 are quite active. I don't have time to track trace codes, etc, so, I don't follow anything on those boards. If a "news" source publishes something originating from a board, I might see it. The "news" is wacky enough without bringing in known BS, but it's done all the time now.

In my photo work world.. Agencies knew about this guy and his BS for a time, but continued to use his work until he was completely exposed. There are many others. These stories rarely make the big media.
https://mashable.com/2017/09/05/fake-ph ... Vrw_oKQZqr
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Thu Jul 26, 2018 8:17 pm

Zoo accused of painting donkeys to look like zebras

An Egyptian zoo is insisting it did not paint a pair of donkeys to look like zebras.

Cairo's International Garden municipal park became a target of ridicule after an Egyptian student, Mahmoud Sarhan, posted images on Facebook of the suspicious beast. Sarhan said that the zoo's two zebras were obviously painted donkeys, a view that has since been embraced by online animal experts.

However, zoo director Mohamed Sultan told a local radio station that his zebras are real, dismissing claims that they are just painted donkeys, according to the BBC.

This is not the first time that a zoo has painted donkeys to look like zebras. In 2009, a zoo in Gaza did the same thing, saying that it could not procure real zebras due to an Israeli blockade.

"The first time we used paint but it didn't look good," the zoo's proprietor told Reuters at the time. "The children don't know, so they call them zebras and they are happy to see something new."

In 2013, a Chinese zoo was criticized for trying to pass off a large dog as a lion. "The zoo is absolutely trying to cheat us," one visitor told Chinese media. "They are trying to disguise dogs as lions."

Zebras and donkeys, despite both bearing a resemblance to horses, are different species. Donkeys are popular beasts of burden in developing countries and were domesticated millennia ago. Zebras, meanwhile, are primarily known for their black-and-white stripes.

Zebras also have black snouts, according to one expert. They are also larger and less donkey-like than the animal in the viral photo, and do not have smudged stripes.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zoo-accuse ... ke-zebras/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Jul 29, 2018 5:26 am

This is just some of the information that federal air marshals collect on thousands of regular US citizens under a secret, domestic surveillance program.

By Jana Winter

BostonGlobe.com

Federal air marshals have begun following ordinary US citizens not suspected of a crime or on any terrorist watch list and collecting extensive information about their movements and behavior under a new domestic surveillance program that is drawing criticism from within the agency.

The previously undisclosed program, called “Quiet Skies,” specifically targets travelers who “are not under investigation by any agency and are not in the Terrorist Screening Data Base,” according to a Transportation Security Administration bulletin in March.

The internal bulletin describes the program’s goal as thwarting threats to commercial aircraft “posed by unknown or partially known terrorists,” and gives the agency broad discretion over which air travelers to focus on and how closely they are tracked.

But some air marshals, in interviews and internal communications shared with the Globe, say the program has them tasked with shadowing travelers who appear to pose no real threat — a businesswoman who happened to have traveled through a Mideast hot spot, in one case; a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, in another; a fellow federal law enforcement officer, in a third.

It is a time-consuming and costly assignment, they say, which saps their ability to do more vital law enforcement work.

TSA officials, in a written statement to the Globe, broadly defended the agency’s efforts to deter potential acts of terror. But the agency declined to discuss whether Quiet Skies has intercepted any threats, or even to confirm that the program exists.

Release of such information “would make passengers less safe,” spokesman James Gregory said in the statement.

Already under Quiet Skies, thousands of unsuspecting Americans have been subjected to targeted airport and inflight surveillance, carried out by small teams of armed, undercover air marshals, government documents show. The teams document whether passengers fidget, use a computer, have a “jump” in their Adam’s apple or a “cold penetrating stare,” among other behaviors, according to the records.

Air marshals note these observations — minute-by-minute — in two separate reports and send this information back to the TSA.

All US citizens who enter the country are automatically screened for inclusion in Quiet Skies — their travel patterns and affiliations are checked and their names run against a terrorist watch list and other databases, according to agency documents.

The program relies on 15 rules to screen passengers, according to a May agency bulletin, and the criteria appear broad: “rules may target” people whose travel patterns or behaviors match those of known or suspected terrorists, or people “possibly affiliated” with someone on a watch list.

The full list of criteria for Quiet Skies screening was unavailable to the Globe, and is a mystery even to the air marshals who field the surveillance requests the program generates. TSA declined to comment.

When someone on the Quiet Skies list is selected for surveillance, a team of air marshals is placed on the person’s next flight. The team receives a file containing a photo and basic information — such as date and place of birth — about the target, according to agency documents.

The teams track citizens on domestic flights, to or from dozens of cities big and small — such as Boston and Harrisburg, Pa., Washington, D.C., and Myrtle Beach, S.C. — taking notes on whether travelers use a phone, go to the bathroom, chat with others, or change clothes, according to documents and people within the department.

Quiet Skies represents a major departure for TSA. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency has traditionally placed armed air marshals on routes it considered potentially higher risk, or on flights with a passenger on a terrorist watch list. Deploying air marshals to gather intelligence on civilians not on a terrorist watch list is a new assignment, one that some air marshals say goes beyond the mandate of the US Federal Air Marshal Service. Some also worry that such domestic surveillance might be illegal. Between 2,000 and 3,000 men and women, so-called flying FAMs, work the skies.

Since this initiative launched in March, dozens of air marshals have raised concerns about the Quiet Skies program with senior officials and colleagues, sought legal counsel, and expressed misgivings about the surveillance program, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the Globe.

“What we are doing [in Quiet Skies] is troubling and raising some serious questions as to the validity and legality of what we are doing and how we are doing it,” one air marshal wrote in a text message to colleagues.

The TSA, while declining to discuss details of the Quiet Skies program, did address generally how the agency pursues its work.

“FAMs [federal air marshals] may deploy on flights in furtherance of the TSA mission to ensure the safety and security of passengers, crewmembers, and aircraft throughout the aviation sector,” spokesman James Gregory said in an e-mailed statement. “As its assessment capabilities continue to enhance, FAMS leverages multiple internal and external intelligence sources in its deployment strategy.”

Agency documents show there are about 40 to 50 Quiet Skies passengers on domestic flights each day. On average, air marshals follow and surveil about 35 of them.

In late May, an air marshal complained to colleagues about having just surveilled a working Southwest Airlines flight attendant as part of a Quiet Skies mission. “Cannot make this up,” the air marshal wrote in a message.

One colleague replied: “jeez we need to have an easy way to document this nonsense. Congress needs to know that it’s gone from bad to worse.”

Experts on civil liberties called the Quiet Skies program worrisome and potentially illegal.

“These revelations raise profound concerns about whether TSA is conducting pervasive surveillance of travelers without any suspicion of actual wrongdoing,” said Hugh Handeyside, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.

“If TSA is using proxies for race or religion to single out travelers for surveillance, that could violate the travelers’ constitutional rights. These concerns are all the more acute because of TSA’s track record of using unreliable and unscientific techniques to screen and monitor travelers who have done nothing wrong.”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Quiet Skies touches on several sensitive legal issues and appears to fall into a gray area of privacy law.

“If this was about foreign citizens, the government would have considerable power. But if it’s US citizens — US citizens don’t lose their rights simply because they are in an airplane at 30,000 feet,” Turley said. “There may be indeed constitutional issues here depending on how restrictive or intrusive these measures are.”

Turley, who has testified before Congress on privacy protection, said the issue could trigger a “transformative legal fight.”

Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor chosen by President Obama in 2013 to help review foreign intelligence surveillance programs, said the program could pass legal muster if the selection criteria are sufficiently broad. But if the program targets by nationality or race, it could violate equal protection rights, Stone said.

Asked about the legal basis for the Quiet Skies program, Gregory, the agency’s spokesman, said TSA “maintains a robust engagement with congressional committees to ensure maximum support and awareness” of its effort to keep the aviation sector safe. He declined to comment further.

Beyond the legalities, some air marshals believe Quiet Skies is not a sound use of limited agency resources.

Several air marshals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly, told the Globe the program wastes taxpayer dollars and makes the country less safe because attention and resources are diverted away from legitimate, potential threats. The US Federal Air Marshal Service, which is part of TSA and falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has a mandate to protect airline passengers and crew against the risk of criminal and terrorist violence.

John Casaretti, president of the Air Marshal Association, said in a statement: “The Air Marshal Association believes that missions based on recognized intelligence, or in support of ongoing federal investigations, is the proper criteria for flight scheduling. Currently the Quiet Skies program does not meet the criteria we find acceptable.

“The American public would be better served if these [air marshals] were instead assigned to airport screening and check in areas so that active shooter events can be swiftly ended, and violations of federal crimes can be properly and consistently addressed.”

TSA has come under increased scrutiny from Congress since a 2017 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about its management of the Federal Air Marshal Service. Requested by Congress, the report noted that the agency, which spent $800 million in 2015, has “no information” on its effectiveness in deterring attacks.

Late last year, Representative Jody Hice, a Georgia Republican, introduced a bill that would require the Federal Air Marshal Service to better incorporate risk assessment in its deployment strategy, provide detailed metrics on flight assignments, and report data back to Congress.

Without this information, Congress, TSA, and the Department of Homeland Security “are not able to effectively conduct oversight” of the air marshals, Hice wrote in a letter to colleagues.

“With threats coming at us left and right, our focus should be on implementing effective, evidence-based means of deterring, detecting, and disrupting plots hatched by our enemies.”

Hice’s bill, the “Strengthening Aviation Security Act of 2017,” passed the House and is awaiting consideration by the full Senate.

The Globe, in its review of Quiet Skies, examined numerous TSA internal bulletins, directives, and internal communications, and interviewed more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the program.

The purpose of Quiet Skies is to decrease threats by “unknown or partially known terrorists; and to identify and provide enhanced screening to higher risk travelers before they board aircraft based on analysis of terrorist travel trends, tradecraft and associations,” according to a TSA internal bulletin.

The criteria for surveillance appear fluid. Internal agency e-mails show some confusion about the program’s parameters and implementation.

A bulletin in May notes that travelers entering the United States may be added to the Quiet Skies watch list if their “international travel patters [sic] or behaviors match the travel routing and tradecraft of known or suspected terrorists” or “are possibly affiliated with Watch Listed suspects.”

Travelers remain on the Quiet Skies watch list “for up to 90 days or three encounters, whichever comes first, after entering the United States,” agency documents show.

Travelers are not notified when they are placed on the watch list or have their activity and behavior monitored.

Quiet Skies surveillance is an expansion of a long-running practice in which federal air marshals are assigned to surveil the subject of an open FBI terrorism investigation.

In such assignments, air marshal reports are relayed back to the FBI or another outside law enforcement agency. In Quiet Skies, these same reports are completed in the same manner but stay within TSA, agency documents show, and details are shared with outside agencies only if air marshals observe “significant derogatory information.”

According to a TSA bulletin, the program may target people who have spent a certain amount of time in one or more specific countries or whose reservation information includes e-mail addresses or phone numbers associated to suspects on a terrorism watch list.

The bulletin does not list the specific countries, but air marshals have been advised in several instances to follow passengers because of past travel to Turkey, according to people with direct knowledge of the program.

One air marshal described an assignment to conduct a Quiet Skies mission on a young executive from a major company.

“Her crime apparently was she flew to Turkey in the past,” the air marshal said, noting that many international companies have executives travel through Turkey.

“According to the government’s own [Department of Justice] standards there is no cause to be conducting these secret missions.”

Jana Winter can be reached at jana.winter@globe.com and on Twitter @JanaWinter. This investigation was made possible through the Spotlight Investigative Journalism Fellowship, a social impact initiative of Participant Media. For more, go to http://www.spotlightfellowship.com.


https://apps.bostonglobe.com/news/natio ... iet-skies/
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Jul 30, 2018 8:53 pm

FIRST NET

A New Broadband Network Is Pitching Surveillance Enhancements to Cops Across the Country

The latest technologies promise cops the ability to whip out a smartphone, take a snapshot of a passerby, and instantly learn if that person is in an immigration or gang database.

A federal broadband program, designed after 9/11 to improve first responder communication during emergencies, will enhance this sort of capability and integrate it into an internet “super highway” built specifically for police and public safety. The program, called FirstNet, is already expanding the surveillance options available to law enforcement agencies across the country.

According to publicly available documents, as well as interviews with program participants, stakeholders, and government researchers, FirstNet will help agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection communicate with local police, deliver more information to officers’ hands, accelerate the nascent law enforcement app industry, and provide public safety agencies with new privileges and powers over AT&T’s commercial broadband network.

The program will also hasten these agencies’ migration from public radio frequencies to encrypted broadband networks, potentially eliminating one resource that local newsrooms and citizens have historically relied upon to monitor police and first responders.

FirstNet is a public-private partnership that creates a dedicated lane for public safety agencies within AT&T’s existing broadband network. As of January, all U.S. states had opted in to FirstNet, meaning that they agreed not to build their own competing broadband lanes for law enforcement and public safety. Then, in March, AT&T announced that FirstNet’s core — the infrastructure that isolates police traffic from the commercial network — had become operational at last.

“It’s like having a super highway that only public safety can use,” the company wrote in a press release.

Why FirstNet?

Part of FirstNet’s mission is to create a virtual space that allows any federal, state or local law enforcement or public safety agency to communicate seamlessly with any other. Therefore, convincing as many agencies as possible to sign up for the program is key to its success.

FirstNet recently pitched U.S. Customs and Border Protection to convince the agency to subscribe to the network. In a white paper, FirstNet claims its services will provide CBP access to “photographs, real-time audio/video feeds, and databases from other state, local, or Federal agencies … to aid in the identification and apprehension of terrorists, undocumented aliens, and smugglers.” These capabilities would be offered “in times of crisis or simply day-to-day operations.”

In the pitch, FirstNet also promises to help agents “connect to critical databases to identify whether detained persons have been previously apprehended for violating immigration law by quickly and efficiently collecting biographic (e.g., name, date of birth, place of birth) and biometric information (e.g., 10-print fingerprints, photo image), which are submitted remotely to said databases.” The document also promotes FirstNet’s support of other data-heavy technologies, such as live video streaming from drones.

AT&T and FirstNet did not respond to questions about whether CBP or any other federal agency has subscribed to the program. (A recent press release indicates that some federal agencies are currently using the system, but it does not name them.) CBP did not respond to requests for comment.

Local law enforcement officials are well-aware of the new capabilities that FirstNet is offering their departments. Domingo Herraiz, programs director at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, is excited about the heightened access to federal data FirstNet promises. Herraiz told The Intercept that FirstNet will place information from fusion centers, which enable criminal intelligence-sharing between government agencies, at the fingertips of local officers. “You could have gang databases,” he said. “It’s not there [on officers’ phones] today, but it will be.”

A “Private Tunnel” for Law Enforcement and First Responders

The concept behind FirstNet — a broadband network dedicated to public safety — was inspired by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the so-called 9/11 Commission). Its 2004 report determined that streamlined communication between different agencies and jurisdictions could have saved lives in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The report blamed the use of separate radio frequencies by police and firefighters for the deaths of firefighters who didn’t get the message to evacuate before the north tower collapsed.


timeline-3-1532443237Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
The government’s subsequent quest for improved public safety communication has led to the expansion of Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which integrate local, state, and federal anti-terrorism operations, as well as a network of 79 fusion centers. The idea to dedicate a nationwide, high-speed broadband network to law enforcement and public safety was another outgrowth of this effort. Congress acted on the proposal in 2012, when it created FirstNet as part of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act. Rather than create a network that would be totally independent from commercial broadband, the legislation reallocated some broadband spectrum for “public safety” use and allowed service providers to bid on the contract for it.

In March 2017, the U.S. Department of Commerce signed a contract with AT&T, creating a dedicated lane for FirstNet within AT&T’s existing broadband network. In the deal, the federal government gave AT&T free rights to 20 MHz of lucrative broadband spectrum, as well as $6.5 billion for FirstNet’s initial rollout. In return, the government got AT&T’s commitment to spending $40 billion over the next 25 years on network buildout and maintenance. Since 2013, the Department of Commerce has also awarded $116.5 million in funding to state Homeland Security agencies, offices of information technology, public safety agencies, and statewide communication boards to help implement and promote the network.

Scott Edson is the executive director of the Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System, a fully independent public safety network built with some of the early funding for FirstNet. According to Edson, when local agencies subscribe to FirstNet, they will get “a special connection that looks just like a commercial carrier but [connects to] what’s called a dedicated core.” FirstNet is “a private tunnel within their AT&T network,” he explained.

FirstNet provides “priority” and “pre-emption” privileges that have long been desired by public safety agencies. “Priority” means faster access to broadband-based services. “You may have license plate readers that are scanning cars that are nearby and querying databases automatically,” explained Edson, who is also former chief of special operations at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “That’s all data that’s going to be prioritized to help us do our job.”

But priority is not always enough to guarantee a fast connection during an emergency or a large gathering like a parade, sporting event, or protest, when networks can get jammed. That’s where “pre-emption” comes in. Pre-emption allows public safety agencies or police to boot the general public off the network.

“At a time of crisis, yeah, you’re trying to call your mom and say you’re safe,” Herraiz from IACP told The Intercept. “But it’s more important that that network shut down every citizen, so it can be used solely for public safety purposes, so lives can be saved.”

Service Providers Compete for Public Safety Customers

Before FirstNet, the commercial broadband industry would not offer these public safety privileges on its networks. “They told us we would never have priority and pre-emption,” Edson told The Intercept. But if providers like Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile want to compete with FirstNet, they, too, will have to begin offering priority and pre-emption. (In January, Verizon announced that it would begin to phase in these features.)

Though all U.S. states have agreements with FirstNet, this doesn’t commit state or local agencies to subscribing to the service. Most agencies currently subscribe to Verizon, which announced its own dedicated “core” for public safety users in March. (In February, the company aired a Super Bowl ad suggesting that it intends to retain its market share with first responders.)

But subscriptions for FirstNet are picking up quickly. In June, AT&T announced that more than 1,000 agencies had signed up. The company also announced that over 5,300 of its retail stores would offer personal FirstNet subscriptions to “verified” police and first responders whose agencies don’t provide wireless plans. (Volunteer first responders are eligible for this offer as well.)

With Verizon mimicking FirstNet’s priority and pre-emption offerings, FirstNet is aggressively pursuing new frontiers in public safety technology and smartphone apps, which could make its service more competitive.

Indeed, FirstNet has its own “app store.” In a slide presentation it prepared for the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials conference in August 2017, FirstNet touted its intention to “enable development of a growing portfolio of public safety apps.” These applications will incorporate facial recognition, real-time video, and other existing technologies, according to the presentation.

Millions of dollars of government research funding are underwriting this development. For example, the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology is funding research into real-time video analytics (including the automated recognition of faces, objects, and text), a “hyper-reality helmet for mapping and visualizing public safety data” in the field, and livestreaming and analytics for body-worn cameras, among other technologies.

According to Dereck Orr, chief of the Public Safety Communications Research Division at NIST, most of the research into these technologies will eventually be made public. However, he added, “we certainly bring [FirstNet] in to discuss creation and priorities of new processes, because we want to make sure that anything we do is going to be something that is impactful and useful to FirstNet.”
A Loss of Public Oversight?

With this frenzy of technological development, a longtime transparency tool is suddenly under threat. For decades, local newsrooms and citizen watchdogs have relied on police scanners to monitor first responders and track natural disasters, protests, and emergencies. The migration to data-based communications cuts down on what is communicated over these public frequencies. As FirstNet and its competitors transition voice communications to their encrypted broadband networks in the coming years, even more will be kept from public oversight.

That concerns Andrew Seaman, ethics committee chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. Seaman told The Intercept that he hopes measures will be taken to guarantee journalists and newsrooms access to the encrypted FirstNet network.

“There are very practical reasons why there should be a relationship between first responder emergency systems and the press,” he said. “If you want people to know what’s going on — that they should avoid a certain area or if they need to get out of an area quickly — you’re going to need to equip journalists with the ability to monitor these channels.”

FirstNet did not comment on whether it was open to offering local newsrooms some access. Edson of LA-RICS said decisions about transparency and access for newsrooms will likely have to take place at the local government level.

FirstNet is already the subject of a transparency lawsuit by two Vermont men who claim that the U.S. government is legally required to perform a Privacy Impact Assessment on the program, since the FirstNet network will presumably be used to transmit personal information about American citizens. The government has argued that this requirement does not apply since the network itself is owned by AT&T, rather than the government.

The program’s status as a public-private partnership has created other transparency roadblocks as well: The federal government’s contract with AT&T has not been made public.

Worth the Cost?

Some have criticized FirstNet as a waste of public funds because after years of talk, it has produced few deliverables. However, its ultimate impact on U.S. broadband is likely to be extensive, if incremental. For example, FirstNet’s prioritized section of the broadband spectrum is now being extended to some private entities, like electric utilities, that help first responders or provide essential services during emergencies.

FirstNet’s most lasting achievement may be the infrastructure it provides for state-of-the-art surveillance technologies to be deployed by law enforcement at every level. One of FirstNet’s early adopters, the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, has celebrated how FirstNet allows it to livestream surveillance footage to its central command. Only time will tell if the program can enable emerging technologies like real-time facial recognition to become part of the day-to-day operations of U.S. police.

Despite the surveillance enhancements that FirstNet offers local police departments, some are skeptical that local governments (and voters) can be convinced that subscribing to the program is a worthy investment.

“The public believes law enforcement already has all this at their fingertips,” Herraiz told The Intercept. “They think when you run a license tag or your driver’s license, the cops know everything about you. That’s not true.”

Well, not yet.

Top photo: A Chicago police officer speaks on his radio at the scene of a shooting on July 28, 2017, in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago.

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/29/fir ... veillance/
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Aug 01, 2018 2:04 am

UNSUB Dick



When the FBI Spent Decades Hunting for a Soviet Spy on Its Staff

A tip provided by a double-agent for the KGB set off one of the most self-destructive mole hunts in FBI history

David Wise

Smithsonian

One spring night in 1962 a short, stocky Russian walked into the FBI office in Midtown Manhattan and offered his services as a spy for the United States. Aleksei Kulak, then 39, was working undercover as a science official at the United Nations. He said he was unhappy with his progress at his true employer, the KGB.

Kulak was taking a huge risk simply by entering the FBI office. The building was on East 69th Street at the corner of Third Avenue—just three blocks from the Soviet U.N. mission on Park Avenue at 68th Street, which provided cover for dozens of KGB agents. “Aren’t you worried they may be watching the FBI building?” an FBI agent asked.

“No,” Kulak replied. “All of our people are out covering a meeting with your guy, Dick.”

Your guy, Dick.

The Russian was clearly saying that the KGB had a mole inside the FBI. With those three words, he set off an earthquake inside the bureau that reverberated for decades—and remains unsettled even now.

Kulak became the FBI’s Bureau Source 10, with the code name FEDORA. (Behind his back, agents called him Fatso.) The FBI assigned the code name UNSUB Dick, “UNSUB” being the term for “unknown subject,” to the mole that Kulak said was hidden inside the bureau.

Kulak had scarcely left the FBI building that evening before the bureau launched a mole hunt that “shook the foundations of the bureau,” says David Major, who spent 24 years as an FBI counterintelligence agent and was the first bureau official assigned to the National Security Council in the White House. Over the course of three decades, hundreds of agents’ careers fell under the shadow of the investigation. In terms of corrosive effect, Major cites only one comparable event in U.S. intelligence history: the notorious mole hunt James Jesus Angleton conducted within the CIA, which paralyzed the agency’s Soviet operations and destroyed or damaged the careers of as many as 50 loyal CIA officers between 1961 and 1974, when Angleton was fired. “You know how Angleton ripped apart the agency,” Major, who retired from the FBI in 1994, told me. “Well, the same thing happened to the bureau. Dick ripped the bureau apart. But it never became public.”

I first learned of UNSUB Dick while researching my 2002 book, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. When I approached Major back then about the hunt for Dick, he replied, “You make my hair stand on end when you say that name. How do you know about UNSUB Dick?” and declined to discuss the matter any further. But with the passage of time, Major—and several others—recently agreed to talk about it. This article, based on interviews with 30 current or former FBI agents, traces the course and effects of one of the most sensitive investigations in the bureau’s history—and what is, as far as can be determined, the first mole hunt in the history of the FBI. “This was the first,” says R. Patrick Watson, a counterintelligence agent in New York at the time and later a deputy assistant director of the FBI for intelligence operations. “I’m not aware of any prior to Dick.”

The bureau’s first task was to ensure that it didn’t assign the mission of finding Dick to Dick himself. To reduce that risk, the hunt was given to two trusted senior counterintelligence agents, Joseph J. Hengemuhle and Joseph J. Palguta, who were good friends as well as colleagues. Hengemuhle was “a big, burly guy, over six feet, brash—cuss words were every other word,” recalls Michael J. Waguespack, another seasoned FBI counterspy. “He was the Soviet program in New York.” Hengemuhle would later move to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., as Soviet section chief; he retired in 1987 and died in 1989. Palguta, too, loomed large—he was “a big, balding, stocky guy, very intense,” says Watson. “I always thought he was Slavic. You didn’t want to tell him he looked like a Russian—he didn’t like that.” But Palguta had taught himself Russian from Berlitz recordings and was fluent in the language. According to John J. O’Flaherty, another former counterintelligence agent, his accent was convincing enough that he would sometimes pose as a Russian. Palguta worked as a counterspy in New York for 27 years. He retired in 1976 and died in 1988.

Armed with little more than a name—and uncertain whether it was the target’s real name or a KGB code name—Hengemuhle and Palguta set out to catch a mole.

***

With a thousand agents, New York was the FBI’s largest field office. “There were about six or seven Soviet squads with maybe 20 or 25 people on each,” says an FBI counterintelligence agent assigned to New York at the time. “Some were looking at the U.N., some were looking at Americans the Soviets contacted. Plus lookout squads and a squad that did surveillance. There were maybe 50 people combined on each squad, so with six or seven squads there were over 300 agents looking at the Soviets—which means everyone on those squads was a potential suspect.” Including FBI agents working against Eastern European targets, the number of logical suspects totaled about 500.

Of course, everyone named Dick had to be investigated. “Dick McCarthy became the first suspect, because of his name,” says Walter C. “Goose” Gutheil, a New York FBI counterintelligence agent for 26 years until he retired in 1978. Richard F. McCarthy, who worked on a squad that targeted the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, assumed the mole hunters investigated him but says they never interviewed him. “I hope I was a suspect—they had to look at people with the first name,” he says. “I had an attitude, if I knew who it was I would have belted him.” Any FBI man who spied for the Russians, he added, would have to be “a psycho.”

About the only other thing the mole hunters knew was that on the night Kulak walked into the FBI office, he said Dick was out meeting with the KGB. That reassured Kulak that he wasn’t talking to the mole, whose identity and appearance he didn’t know, and gave Hengemuhle and Palguta a clue, however slight. They could try to narrow the field of suspects by determining who was on the street at that hour. “You’d want to see who worked that day based on timecards, when did they sign in, what was on their timecard,” says former FBI agent Edwin L. Worthington, who reviewed the files on UNSUB Dick in the mid-1980s as a headquarters official responsible for investigating penetrations of U.S. intelligence.

Although Hengemuhle and Palguta held their mission closely, word got around as they delved into counterintelligence agents’ backgrounds, the cases they handled and their possible vulnerabilities to recruitment by the KGB. For security reasons, the mole hunters worked from a windowless back room in the New York FBI office, in an area set apart from the rest of the floor. “It was supposed to be secret, but everyone knew about the search,” Major says. James A. Holt, a counterintelligence agent in New York at the time, says the mole hunt shattered morale: “There was consternation in the New York office because everybody knew they were under the gun, that they were being looked at.”

One reason for the apprehension is that many agents worried that the investigation might uncover other sins that would get them in trouble—a drinking problem, an extramarital affair. An agent who lived through the mole hunt recalled hearing about “one guy who used to go to a bar every morning before he reported to work.”

It also became apparent that the bureau was wiretapping its own men. After James E. Nolan Jr. arrived in New York as a counterintelligence agent in 1964, he needed a place to live and wanted to make a call about an apartment. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI prohibited agents from using bureau phones for personal calls. So Nolan went downstairs to the building’s garage to use the pay phone. He happened to be with another agent who had worked longer in the New York office.

As Nolan started to pick up the phone, his colleague whispered: “Don’t use that one.” And then he told Nolan about the hunt for UNSUB Dick. Nolan, who years later became a deputy assistant director of the FBI, concluded that if the bureau was tapping the pay phone in the garage, it probably would not stop there—or overlook the agents’ office phones.

David Major learned about UNSUB Dick while he was assigned to the FBI’s Newark office in 1972. “I was doing a stakeout on a kidnapping,” he says. “We were doing the stakeout on the Bayonne Bridge. I was with an agent who had previously worked in the New York office. It was 2 or 3 in the morning, and the agent started telling me about the case. He got very emotional, because as a result of the case he was transferred to Newark. I was told by this agent that a significant number were transferred out of New York because of the search for UNSUB Dick. Later I was told of another agent on the West Coast who had been transferred for the same reason.” Those transfers—away from access to the bureau’s Soviet counterintelligence operations—were made “to be on the safe side,” he says.

Meanwhile, the investigation seemed to be getting no closer to its target. Then in 1964 or ’65 a second KGB agent, Valentin Lysov, alleged that the FBI had been penetrated, but again offered no details. The mole hunters decided to try something new—a “dangle” operation, in which they would send an FBI agent posing as a turncoat to offer his services to the KGB, in the hope that any conversations that resulted would elicit some clues to the identity of UNSUB Dick.

A former FBI counterintelligence agent explained how the dangle worked: “A watcher for us, a street agent, walked into the apartment of Boris Ivanov, the KGB rezident in New York. Ivanov slammed the door, but not before our agent said he would meet them at such-and-such time and place.”

In fact, a KGB counterintelligence agent showed up at the appointed time and place. “We ran the operation for six months; there were three or four meetings,” the ex-counterintelligence agent says. “We hoped their questions might lead us to Dick, the questions they asked and the questions they did not ask—because that would imply they had a source already in those areas. That might give us a clue to the identity of Dick. If the KGB asked for more information about something that perhaps Dick was involved in, that might also point to Dick.” But the KGB “never asked the right questions,” and the operation proved fruitless.

With so many agents to investigate, there seemed to be no end to the mole hunt. “It went on for years,” a former head of the Soviet section at FBI headquarters says. “It drove us crazy.”

***

As the investigation persisted, it magnified a question that had arisen the moment Aleksei Kulak presented himself to the FBI: Was he a true “agent in place” for the FBI, or a double agent planted by the KGB? If he was a double agent, could his warning about UNSUB Dick be trusted? Some FBI agents argued that Kulak was simply playing mind games with the bureau, that Dick was a phantom. Like the hunt for UNSUB Dick, the argument about Kulak went on for decades, compounding the mistrust in the New York office and tensions within headquarters. One former counterintelligence agent, an assistant chief of the Soviet section at headquarters, says he periodically changed his mind. “I certainly had access and read through the FEDORA file. When I retired in 1988, it was 92 volumes,” he says. “I believe that the information from FEDORA was probably good. There were those, myself included, who sometimes questioned Bureau Source 10’s bona fides. Depends on which side of the bed I got up.”

Kulak, the source of all this turmoil, had arrived in New York on November 28, 1961, only a few months before he turned up at the FBI office with his alarming news about Dick. Kulak’s cover was his job as a consultant to a U.N. committee on the effects of nuclear radiation (he had a doctorate in chemistry), but his real mission was to collect scientific and technical secrets for the KGB. In February 1963, he changed his cover job, working as a science attaché at the Soviet mission to the U.N., and went back to Moscow in 1967. He returned to the Soviet mission in New York in 1971 and stayed six more years before going home for good. All told, he fed information to the FBI for ten years.

He would periodically meet secretly with FBI agents, and the videotaped record of these sessions shows a bottle of Scotch on the table. Kulak drank heavily, and apparently the bottle was considered a necessary lubricant for the debriefings.

“The information he gave over the years was for the most part good—very good on the identity of other KGB officers,” says a former senior FBI official, a counterintelligence agent in New York at the time. Kulak, he says, identified every KGB man in New York, plus many of their sources. “There were those who said he drank so much nobody would ever have picked him to be a plant,” this agent says. “There’s much to be said for that. My belief is he was probably genuine. That does not mean he was always truthful.”

In David Major’s view, Kulak was “one of the most important sources the FBI had” and “the very first KGB officer that had ever been worked by the FBI.” He adds: “The KGB would never send a staff officer as a false defector. What happens if he really defects?” Other FBI veterans say Kulak was a true volunteer to the bureau. “It’s so hard to dangle someone; you have to give up something,” Edwin Worthington notes. “And to give up the identities of all the KGB people in New York was huge. He gave up way too much information. They [the KGB] wouldn’t have allowed it.”

“We put people in jail on the basis of information provided by FEDORA,” another former FBI counterintelligence agent says. Kulak, according to this agent, “said Dick had given the KGB our surveillance codes”—secret codes FBI lookouts used to communicate when Soviet agents were on the move, and in what direction. “The code sheets were changed on a daily basis,” this agent says, but “the Russians had the capability to monitor our broadcasts.” Kulak “was specific enough about the codes so it was clear the KGB had them.” Given the nature and volume of information he produced over ten years, Hoover believed that FEDORA was an authentic FBI source.

Against the information Kulak provided, however, the mole hunters had to consider the possibility that he was really acting for the KGB. “The KGB was aware you can cause the FBI to chase its tail,” says Paul D. Moore, a retired longtime analyst for the bureau.

The CIA, too, was unsettled on the question of Kulak’s bona fides. James Angleton, the counterintelligence chief, never believed he was genuine, but then Angleton placed his faith in only one Russian defector, who persuaded him that the Sino-Soviet split that emerged in the 1960s was all a plot to deceive the West. That idea was widely regarded as nutty then and has been soundly discredited since. After Angleton was fired, his successors concluded that Kulak was a legitimate source, and two CIA counterintelligence specialists assigned to review his FBI files agreed.

But others who have doubted that Kulak was working for the United States point out that when he returned to Moscow in 1976 he was not executed—unlike the GRU officer Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, who provided valuable information to the CIA and the FBI for 18 years until the CIA mole Aldrich Ames betrayed him in the 1980s. Kulak survived his homecoming, they note, even though American media reports had hinted that the FBI had a KGB source in New York. In a 1978 book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, author Edward Jay Epstein went so far as to publish the code name FEDORA and describe him as a KGB officer working undercover at the U.N. and specializing in “science and technology.” Before leaving New York for the last time, Kulak had agreed to provide information to the CIA in Moscow, and did so, leaving material in a dead drop there. But with his cover all but blown by the book, the agency, fearing for his safety, offered to exfiltrate him—to spirit him out of Moscow. He declined and said he would be fine. He was never arrested, and the agency eventually received word that he died of natural causes in the early 1980s.

Oleg Kalugin, a major general in the KGB who became an outspoken critic of the agency and moved to the United States in 1995, said in an interview that the Soviets “suspected [Kulak], but they did not have enough evidence” to justify going after him, especially given his meritorious record during World War II. “He was a Hero of the USSR,” Kalugin says, referring to a Soviet award roughly equivalent to the Congressional Medal of Honor. The medal, Kalugin and others said, gave Kulak a kind of cloak of immunity.

On the question of whether the KGB had a mole in the FBI, Kalugin says yes, it did. Kalugin worked in New York undercover for the KGB for five years starting in 1958. At first, in a series of interviews, he told me he was “vaguely familiar with the case. I did not have access to that case. I simply knew of the existence of a guy in the bureau. But he did provide genuine information. There was such a person as Dick.” Later, however, Kalugin said he had actually paid the FBI agent for his services to the KGB, more than once and in person. “I paid Dick, but I didn’t know his true name,” Kalugin says. He did not say how much he paid.

The FBI paid Kulak $100,000 over 15 years, but he may have had more than money on his mind. One agent says Kulak worried constantly that UNSUB Dick would find out that he was spying for the FBI and tell the KGB about him. “That’s why he dimed him out,” the FBI man said. Kulak, he said, “kept telling the bureau to find him.”

But over time, the mole hunt faded. Palguta’s retirement in 1976, while Kulak was still in New York, left Hengemuhle as the sole active member of the original team. By the time Hengemuhle retired, in 1987, other priorities took precedence. In 1985, the FBI was busy making arrests in what became known as the Year of the Spy, rounding up John A. Walker, the head of a Navy spy ring, Jonathan J. Pollard, the Navy analyst who spied for Israel, and Ronald W. Pelton, a former employee of the National Security Agency who passed secret information to the Soviets.

By then the first FBI mole had been discovered—Richard Miller of the Los Angeles office had been arrested in 1984, convicted of spying for the Soviets and sentenced to life in prison. In 1996, Earl Edwin Pitts became the second; he was sent away for 27 years. (Hanssen, the most notorious Soviet mole in the FBI, was not caught until 2001; he was sentenced to life.) But even though the trail to UNSUB Dick had grown cold, the FBI wasn’t about to forget about the case.

In the mid-1980s, an analyst named Robert H. King concluded that he had identified UNSUB Dick. King had worked at the CIA before he joined the FBI in 1980. He and his FBI colleague James P. Milburn specialized in detecting penetrations of the bureau.

King had the benefit of two pieces of information learned through Kulak on his second tour. First, that the KGB had a source who had retired from the FBI and lived in Queens, a bedroom borough of New York favored by a multitude of FBI agents who could not afford the rents in Manhattan. And second, the initial of that source’s last name was the Cyrillic letter G, which was also his KGB code name. King wondered whether the KGB source in Queens was UNSUB Dick.

Painstakingly, he checked the name of every FBI agent who lived in Queens in the 1960s—and found that one of them had been flagged in a routine inspection of the New York office. The agent worked not in counterintelligence, but on internal security and investigations of the Communist Party. He was a poor performer, and he had a host of other problems, including alcohol abuse, which could have made him a target for recruitment by the KGB. He had retired on a medical disability around 1964, when he was in his mid-30s.

King, who speaks Russian, transliterated the Cyrillic letter into a Roman one—and got no match with the ex-agent’s last initial. Then he realized that a Roman letter transliterated into Cyrillic may re-transliterate into a different Roman letter. King tried it, and he got a match. After almost a quarter of a century, the FBI had its first viable suspect.

An FBI agent was sent to Queens to interview the suspect. He denied he was a spy. King and Milburn interviewed him again, and he denied it again. Two seasoned FBI counterintelligence agents interviewed him a third time; one was inclined to believe the man’s denials and the other was not.

King remained certain that he had found UNSUB Dick at last—and his belief is seemingly supported by the files of the KGB. In 1973, Oleg Kalugin was in Moscow, serving as chief of KGB worldwide foreign counterintelligence. Out of curiosity, he reviewed several files about his years as a young spy in New York. “There was one file on our man in the FBI,” Kalugin told me. “He was retired and living in Queens.” That man, he says, was the mole Kulak had warned about, the one the FBI had dubbed UNSUB Dick. In his 1994 memoir, The First Directorate, Kalugin wrote of sending KGB agents in New York to visit him and ask for more information, which he declined to provide.

“I already gave you guys all I know,” the man said, Kalugin told me. But he said he couldn’t remember the man’s real name or his KGB code name.

Without a confession by the suspect, the FBI did not officially accept King’s view and took no legal action against the ex-agent. “Espionage is a very difficult crime to prove,” Patrick Watson notes. “Unless a suspect confesses or is caught in the act of passing information to a foreign power, an arrest and prosecution are unlikely.” To prosecute this case, the bureau would have had to disclose Kulak’s identity—which was not publicly known at the time—and the information he provided. “The problem is many times you are relying on sources that can’t be presented in a courtroom,” Watson says.

To this day, the FBI is maintaining its silence on UNSUB Dick. In response to several requests for comment, a bureau spokesman said none would be forthcoming, and that “the assistant director for counterintelligence will not confirm or deny such a case.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... aff-15561/
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Wed Aug 01, 2018 2:11 am

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

cia.gov

Ben Macintyre. (Crown Publishers, 2014), 384 pp., illustrated.

Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy

Tim Milne. (Biteback Publishing, 2014), 304 pp., illustrated.

Reviewed by Thomas G. Coffey

Of all Soviet spies during the Cold War, Harold (Kim) Philby is the one authors seem to most like writing about. (Well over a dozen books about him, including his autobiography and his widow’s memoir, have appeared in print in multiple versions and languages.) He was not creepy like the FBI’s Robert Hansen. Nor had he topped out like CIA’s Aldrich Ames. He was no screw up like British Foreign Service officer Guy Burgess or defense contractor TRW’s Christopher Boyce and his partner Daulton Lee. He was not dastardly to those around him like the US Navy’s John Walker. Rather, Philby was charming, smart, quite likeable, and a professional success. While many of his MI6 colleagues felt deeply betrayed by his spying, a few expressed no hard feelings.

Philby’s life had all the elements of a gripping novel. Two of his British intelligence colleagues based their fiction on him. Graham Greene was a pen pal and visitor after Philby defected to Moscow, and his book The Human Factor (not The Third Man) was written with Philby in mind. The same goes for John Le Carré’s classic about high-level betrayal at MI6, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And so it is only fitting that a terrific storyteller and documentarian, Ben Macintyre, would provide a novel’s touch to a factual account of Philby’s espionage. And if Macintyre’s narrative comes across at times as too interesting to be true, a fellow MI6 officer and close friend of Philby, Tim Milne, provides a sanity check while putting Philby’s spying in context.

Macintyre rehashes much of Philby’s history (see the textbox on the right) but gives it a fresh look by telling the story through the prism of Philby’s friendship with his MI6 friend and colleague Nicholas Elliot, who ultimately confronted Philby with the truth in Beirut in 1962. True to form, Macintyre’s book is well told and juicy. For starters, there are so many references to tours abroad, drinking, wild parties, passing out on the sofa, trashed apartments, ripped panties, and womanizing that you’d think this was a biography of the Rolling Stones and not a spy. Macintyre peppers the narrative with marvelous turns of phrase and characterizations of Elliot, OSS officer and later CIA counterintelligence officer James Angleton, and Philby. He describes Elliot as “a distinctly English combination of the staid and unconventional, conservatism and oddity.” Angleton, who interacted frequently with Philby, is depicted as haunted by the spy case, known to ascribe new signs of treachery well after Philby defected as being “all Kim’s work.”

Macintyre quotes MI6 officer and later historian Hugh Trevor-Roper as looking around the office spotting “part-time stockbrokers, retired Indian policemen, epicureans from the bars…robust adventurers from the bucket shop (shady trades)…and I looked at Philby. He alone was real. I was convinced he was destined to head the service.” Philby’s destiny took a markedly different turn in 1951 and later when Elliot urged him to own up to his spying, sign a confession, and tell British authorities all he knew in return for immunity. The transcript from this encounter is Macintyre’s contribution to the Philby literature and it makes A Spy Among Friends a riveting read.

Milne throws some cold water on Macintyre’s portrayal of Philby. He was not a big drinker, in the sense of being an alcoholic, at least in front of Milne, until he came under suspicion. He did not have a complex about his father, as Macintyre suggests. The prep school he attended was not typical of public school life—a key theme of Macintyre’s is that Philby was “one of them,” from the ruling class, with the same upbringing, schools, and acquaintances and this protected him from suspicion. Milne sees little psychological explanation to Philby’s spying, no attraction discernible in the double life spying forced on him. Like Macintyre, he notes Philby took the path of many others who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, when capitalism was collapsing and fascism was on the rise. However, he never lost faith in the cause upon discovering the extent of Stalin’s monstrous rule.

For this reviewer, Macintyre’s discussion of Angleton is a bit exaggerated—as he believes are many accounts of Angleton—and does not add up in some cases. He asserts Philby’s betrayal motivated Angleton to be increasingly suspicious—which it no doubt did—and illegally spy on US antiwar protesters and dissidents. The real culprit here is President Lyndon Johnson, who ordered the CIA to undertake these operations against domestic opponents.[1]

Macintyre contends little is known about what exactly Angleton told Philby during their martini-filled lunches because Angleton destroyed memos he supposedly dictated right after the sessions. It is hard to believe Angleton would give away the store to Philby because he was drunk and then return sober enough to dictate a comprehensive memo detailing his possible violation of the need-to-know principle—in itself an act of astounding stupidity.

The relationship between the Brits and their American cousins was not nearly as chummy as Macintyre suggests. Philby himself in his memoir My Silent War cites many instances of CIA officers’ and their British counterparts’ sparring over who should lead insurgent groups behind the East Bloc. Milne does not discuss Angleton in much detail.

The Angleton memos begin to provide insight into the damage caused by Philby’s spying and to put it in context. Milne carries this further quite well. From 1941 to 1944, Philby’s informing the Soviets of what the British—and to a lesser extent—the Allies were doing counterintelligence wise in the Iberian Peninsula during WWII did little damage. Some of Philby’s reporting during this period should have actually benefited the Allied cause. Information that the British were not actively spying on the Soviet Union during the war should have eased Soviet suspicions and built trust. It did not. The Kremlin simply could not believe its luck. His information seemed so good that they came to wonder if Philby was a double agent. His reporting did apparently help convince the Kremlin that London and Washington had no intention of selling out the Soviets to coup plotters against Hitler or allying with a successor German government against them.

The real damage began in 1944, when the British and Americans set their counterintelligence sights against the Soviet Union. Philby gave up one Soviet defector just before the defector could name Philby as a spy. The Soviet consular official in Istanbul had promised to turn over the names of hundreds of Soviet agents in Turkey and Britain. Philby shared with the Soviets the names of leading Catholics in Germany who could play a role in government after the war. The Kremlin had many of them killed or imprisoned. This was a particularly cruel act.

Philby appears to have acted slavishly without any reflection, given the Soviets almost certainly would have gained hegemony over parts of Germany without this kill list. He gave away plans of the United States and Britain to infiltrate insurgents into Albania, thus ensuring these raiding parties were all rolled up. Philby mentioned in his memoir a similar failed foray into Ukraine, of which he most likely warned the Kremlin. However, it is very possible these operations would have ended badly anyway, given their difficult nature. Similar operations during the Cold War behind other parts of the Iron Curtain, China, and North Vietnam failed miserably. Indeed, Philby’s spying backfired in one case, depriving the Soviets of his services for many years. The end of his time as an MI6 officer started with Philby’s telling his handler that MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, was planning to arrest Maclean based on intelligence indicating he was a spy.

The takeaways for an intelligence officer from these books are few and simple. As the above rundown suggests, the impact of spying is hard to discern and there are often unintended consequences. Another lesson, unfortunately, is that crime sometimes does pay. Philby escaped to Moscow—some believe MI6 looked the other way to avoid the embarrassment of a public trial—and lived a relatively content 25 years there. It undoubtedly stung that the Soviet authorities received him as an agent and not a KGB officer, in part because his easy escape from Beirut invited suspicion he was still working for the British government. For his first five years in Moscow, Philby had little to do and attempted suicide. Eventually the KGB came to trust him and had him lecture and train new intelligence officers. He had an affair with Maclean’s wife, remarried, wrote a memoir, lived comfortably by Soviet standards, and traveled within the Communist bloc. He seemed himself again.

The Philby case drives home the need to be wary of liaison relationships, even with the closest of allies. Macintyre notes the deal MI6 offered had Philby confess to spying until 1949, even though they undoubtedly knew Philby spied afterwards, when stationed in Washington. Macintyre makes plain that the early end date for Philby’s spying allowed MI6 to cut Washington out of the deal and offer Philby immunity. (257–58) MI6 was also slow to acknowledge Philby was a spy despite growing evidence against him. (173) Director Bedell Smith let his British counterpart know what his Agency had concluded about Philby:

. . .a letter had arrived from CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith, drafted by Bill Harvey with his indictment attached. Aggressive in tone and addressed to C in person, it stated under no circumstances would Philby be permitted to return to Washington. The underlying message was blunt: Fire Philby or we break off the intelligence relationship. (163–64)

Finally, one can be too close to an issue to think objectively. Elliot and Milne believed Philby was innocent until his defection. Elliot fought to clear Philby’s name and even used him as an agent when Elliot served as chief of station in Beirut. Milne continued to receive Philby warmly after he was forced out of MI6. Macintyre sees this disbelief as part of the British elite’s refusing to believe the worst about one of their own. Angleton also kept faith, writing a memo in Philby’s defense to Director Smith. It was outsiders in MI5, officers who traveled in different circles with different upbringings, as well as former FBI officer and then colleague of Angleton’s Bill Harvey, who were convinced of Philby’s guilt.

Whether one is hunting for intelligence lessons, life lessons, or no lessons at all, the two books are worthy reads as historical literature: informative, thought-provoking, and even entertaining.

Footnote

[1] John Ranelagh, CIA, a History (BBC Books, 1992), 534.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this journal are those of the authors. Nothing in any of the articles should be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of their factual statements and interpretations. Articles by non-US government employees are copyrighted.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for- ... Books.html
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