What US leaders have never understood about Iran | Iran supreme leader: Nuclear deal won't change policy to US
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“American rulers have always dreamed of forcing us to change our behavior, and failed,” Iran’s “Supreme Guide,” Ali Khamenei, said Saturday. “Five US administrations took that dream to their graves. The present one shall have the same fate.”
Khamenei’s analysis is not far off the mark. Successive American presidents have worked hard to persuade the Khomeinist regime in Tehran to modify aspects of its foreign policy, so far with no success.
The reason may be the inability or unwillingness of successive US presidents, and a good part of the American political and cultural elite, to properly understand the nature of the Khomeinist regime.
Jimmy Carter believed the Khomeinist seizure of power represented the return of religion to the center of public life.
His administration described Khomeini as “a holy man” and “the Gandhi of Islam.” Carter wrote letters to Khomeini “as a man of faith to a man of faith.” He even ordered the resumption of arms supplies to Tehran.
We all know what that did to Carter.
President Ronald Reagan, who had visited Iran just a year before the revolution, thought he knew Iranians better. He described them as “carpet merchants and dealmakers.” Accordingly, he smuggled arms that the mullahs needed to stop the Iraqi army from advancing farther into Iran. He also sent a huge heart-shaped cake and a personally autographed copy of the Bible to the ayatollah.
One result was the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked Reagan’s presidency.
Dealing with the aftershocks of that crisis, President George H.W. Bush developed no policy on Iran beyond a number of secret talks that led nowhere but reassured Tehran that the American “Great Satan” had been neutralized.
President Bill Clinton saw the Khomeinist regime as “progressist,” a view shared by many American liberals who think anti-Americanism is the surest sign of progressive beliefs.
Here is what Clinton said at a meeting on the margins of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2005: “Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.”
And here is what Clinton had to say in an interview a bit later with Charlie Rose:
“Iran is the only country in the world, the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.”
Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, apologized to the mullahs for unspecified “crimes” committed “by my civilization” and removed a raft of sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic after the seizure of the US hostages in Tehran.
But what crimes?
Clinton summed them thus: “It’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadegh, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the Shah back and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. We got rid of the parliamentary democracy [there] back in the ’50s; at least, that is my belief.”
Clinton did not know that in the Islamic Republic that he so admired, Mossadegh, far from being regarded as a national hero, is an object of intense vilification. One of the first acts of the mullahs after seizing power was to take the name of Mossadegh off a street in Tehran.
Apologizing to the mullahs for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadegh is like begging Josef Stalin’s pardon for a discourtesy toward Alexander Kerensky.
Too busy with Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush paid little attention to Iran. Nevertheless, in his second term he, too, tried to persuade the mullahs to modify their behavior. His secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, sent an invitation, not to say a begging note, to the mullahs for “constructive dialogue.” They responded by stepping up the killing of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq by local surrogates.
Needless to say, he did no better.
President Obama has gone further than any of his predecessors in trying to curry favor with the mullahs. Even in 2009, when the regime’s paramilitary units were massacring people in the streets of Iranian cities during a nationwide pro-democracy uprising, Obama decided to side with the mullahs.
Earlier this month, Obama officially recognized the Islamic Republic as a threshold nuclear state in exchange for dubious concessions by Tehran that have not yet even been endorsed by Khamenei, who has every intention of ignoring them at the first opportunity.
One key reason for misunderstanding the nature of the present regime in Tehran is the failure to acknowledge that, for the past four decades, Iran has suffered from a Jekyll-and-Hyde split personality.
‘The only realistic strategy for the United States would be to help it stop being the Islamic Republic and become Iran again’
- Amir Taheri
As a people and a culture, Iran is immensely attractive.
Valerie Jarett, reputed to be Obama’s closest adviser, remembers Shiraz, the Iranian cultural capital and the Florence of the East, where she was born and grew up. Before the revolution, Shiraz, with its breathtakingly beautiful architecture, was a city of gardens, wine and music with an annual international art festival. How could one not love Iran through it?
Today, however, Shiraz, where John Kerry’s sister worked for years, is a scene of public hangings and floggings, with its prisons filled with political and religious dissidents.
The film star Sean Penn, acting as a part-time reporter, visited Iran and wrote laudatory pieces. He saw Isfahan, the great former capital of Iran, as something of a paradise on earth. Like Clinton he was impressed by “incredibly progressive” people he met. What he ignored was that the Islamic Republic has been top of the list in the world for the number of executions and political prisoners.
Another movie star, George Clooney, praises Iranian cinema as “the only original one” in the world. But he ignores the fact that the films he admires, seen in festivals in the West, are never shown inside Iran itself and that many Iranian cineastes are in jail or in exile.
The pop star Madonna sings the ghazals of Persian Sufi poet Rumi and admires Iran. She ignores the fact that under the Khomeinist regime, Sufis are assassinated or in jail or forced into silence.
Secretary of State John Kerry admires Iran because he knows it through his Iranian son-in-law, who hails from a pre-revolution middle-class family. He doesn’t know it is precisely such families that suffer most from Khomeinist terror and repression; this is why many fled into exile.
As a nation-state, Iran has no problems with anybody. As a vehicle for the Khomeinist ideology it has problems with everybody, starting with the Iranian people. The Khomeinist regime makes no secret of its intense hatred for Iranian culture, which it claims has roots in “the age of ignorance” (jahiliyyah).
To admire this regime because of Iranian culture is like admiring Hitler for Goethe and Beethoven and praising Stalin for Pushkin and Tchaikovsky.
This regime has executed tens of thousands of Iranians, driven almost 6 million into exile, and deprived the nation of its basic freedoms. It has also killed more Americans, often through surrogates, than al Qaeda did on 9/11. Not a single day has passed without this regime holding some American hostages.
Iran as a nation is a solid friend of America. Iran as a vehicle for the Khomeinist revolution is an eternal enemy of “The Great Satan.”
The only realistic strategy for the United States would be to help it stop being the Islamic Republic and become Iran again.
President Obama’s policy, however, points in the opposite direction. He has made it harder for the Iranian people to regain their human rights.
Tehran getting missiles
If Iran does violate its nuclear agreement, it will be harder for the US to stop it militarily.
Iran is buying five Russian S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile systems, which can shoot down aircraft and intercept ballistic missiles.
The UN Security Council still needs to vote Monday on a resolution that would endorse Iran’s nuclear deal but Russia — one of the council’s permanent members — has already agreed to sell it the missile systems.
The deal was first inked in 2007 but then delayed by Russia after pressure by the West and Israel when UN sanctions were imposed in 2010.
It’s unknown exactly which model of S-300 Iran will get (the original 2007 deal was for missile systems developed two decades ago), but the S-300 is one of the most complex defense systems available.
Russia tried to claim in April that other countries should not fear Iran arming itself.
“The S-300 is exclusively a defensive weapon, which can’t serve offensive purposes and will not jeopardize the security of any country, including, of course, Israel,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
But a S-300 can down aircraft flying at 90,000 feet, can track aerial targets 150 miles away, and has a range of 93 miles, putting neighboring countries at possible risk.
“It is proof that the economic momentum in Iran that will come after the lifting of the sanctions will be exploited for arming and not for the welfare of the Iranian people,” Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said.
— Amber Jamieson, Post Wires
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Secretary of State John Kerry talks to ABC New's Martha Raddatz.
At training camp, children told to behead dolls as Islamic State militants mold new generation
Iran supreme leader: Nuclear deal won't change policy to USby By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Saturday a landmark nuclear deal won't change his country's policy toward the "arrogant" U.S., making his first public speech since the Islamic Republic's historic pact with world powers....
CAIRO (Reuters) - Five members of Egypt's security forces were killed in an attack by suspected Islamist militants on military checkpoints in North Sinai on Saturday, security sources said.
1 dead, 1 injured in shooting at alcohol detoxification center in Riverton, Wyoming
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For the last several months our celebrity-obsessed popular culture has given vast coverage to the transformation of Bruce Jenner, onetime Olympian, into Caitlyn Jenner, tabloid icon. I have been profoundly uninterested in this saga from the get-go. I remember Bruce when he adorned cereal boxes in my childhood. I lost all track of him until he reappeared, decades later, as part of the horrible Kardashian family, which was a warning to the sentient that Jenner should be safely ignored.
Jenner has now cleverly reinvented himself/herself/whatever as a woman. Sort of. Jenner shows no interest in gender reassignment surgery, and he still professes sexual interest in women, while espousing Republican conservatism, so this appears to be the best-publicized cross-dressing exercise in human history.
Let me be clear. I fully support the right of all adults to live their lives how they see fit. If Bruce wants to be Caitlyn, to be called her not him, that’s cool with me. Moreover, let’s be honest: this poor guy (now girl) had to spend twenty-four years of wedded bliss to Kris Kardashian, one of the world’s worst people who isn’t a member of the Islamic State. I would lose my mind after twenty-four minutes with Kris, so Jenner has lots of sympathy here.
With her transformation, Caitlyn gets tons of payback. Massive coverage in the media, fawning interviews galore, plus an impending TV reality show that will, no doubt, give the Kardashians the overdue comeuppance that a few hundred million Americans crave. The stars are shining on Caitlyn.
To add to the accolades, Jenner has received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, named after the tennis great who died of AIDS in 1993. This award didn’t sit well with everybody in the sports world, with skeptics feeling that the courage shown by Jenner in her gender transformation fell a bit short of that august award’s high standards.
Not being a sports maven — my interest seldom goes beyond The Ocho — I won’t comment on that but let me add that I know LGBT people more deserving of courage awards than Jenner. Make that alot of LGBT people.
While I don’t doubt it’s difficult to tell the world you’re undertaking gender transformation when you’re sorta famous and at an age most people are looking into retirement communities, this doesn’t meet my threshold of award-level courage.
In the military and the Intelligence Community, I’ve had the privilege of serving with many LGBT Americans who routinely showed more courage than Jenner — and who will never be on the cover of any magazines nor get their own reality show.
By the time I joined NSA in the mid-1990’s the IC’s longtime ban on gays and lesbians in the workforce was rescinded, but there were plenty of staffers who still had PTSD from hiding in the shadows for decades, fearful of a call, at any time, from Agency security inquiring into their private life.
In the aftermath of the defection of two NSA employees to Moscow in 1960, whom the Agency believed were gay, a hunt for secret homosexuals took place that had reverberations for decades. When my father, a career NSA officer, had the misfortune of showing up at Fort Meade only months after the defection, like countless others he was given harsh questioning, including while strapped to the polygraph, to determine if he was a secret “homo.”
In an amazing fail, Martin and Mitchell, the defectors who caused all the panic, were not actually homosexual, but that mattered little to NSA, which for decades associated gays with treason. I had LGBT coworkers in the 1990s who still couldn’t quite believe that the Agency was copacetic with their sexual preference. One co-worker had gotten so accustomed to living in the shadows that he had to be all but begged to invite his partner of two decades to an NSA social event. The fear lingered.
The military was similar. Even after President Clinton implemented Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 1994, many military members had difficulty accepting that LGBT personnel were no longer subject to invasive scrutiny. Like anybody who’s served in the U.S. military and is being honest, I knew lots of gays and lesbians in uniform.
I was in the Navy, which — let’s be honest — has more than a little association with the LGBT community. In the late 1970’s, the Navy really did plan to use the Village People’s “In the Navy” videoas a recruitment tool until some hipper junior officers explained to admirals in the Pentagon what that famous group was singing about.
A decade later, the Navy supported Cher’s famous “If I Could Turn Back Time” video — the one with the gay icon, nearly naked, straddling a battleship’s sixteen-inch cannon in front of a thousand cheering sailors — because it estimated that it saved the Naval service $10 million in recruiting costs.
That’s right, the Navy determined that a lot of guys joined the service on the basis of a Cher video. For years I dined out on the punchline: I guess that tells us who’s joining the Navy. Add “it’s not gay if it’s underway” jokes as needed.
There was always a darker side, however. Many LGBT personnel in all the services endured decades of harassment and abuse. Even the more tolerant Navy had its share of terrible incidents. In late 1992, Allen Schindler (no relation), a sailor on USS Belleau Wood, was beaten to death for being gay, a crime that spurred Clinton’s DADT policy.
In my time in the Navy I never saw any harassment of LGBT personnel, but that’s perhaps because my community, the spooky intelligence sailors, had so many gays and lesbians. Officers estimated that twenty-five percent of intel sailors were LGBT, and even before DADT died in 2011, many of them served rather openly. Certainly Monterey’s Defense Language Institute, where intelligence linguists were educated, long enjoyed a hook-up culture that was open to straights and gays alike, sometimes to the consternation of senior officers.
The Navy was always more open-minded than the Army or Air Force (the latter service in particular, with its strong evangelical Christian culture, before 2011 was prone to periodic “fag hunts” as they were termed to root out closeted gays and lesbians) and I never witnessed any anti-homosexual antics myself. Of course, that may be self-selection, since I was an officer who was known to be “gay friendly” and, for instance, would sign leave chits without questions. This could be an issue under DADT when you were taking time off to visit, say, a partner’s sick parent.
I also knew gay and lesbian officers who had great careers yet who were always a bit afraid under DADT that they might get exposed. Even the Army now has an openly serving gay general officer. The key word is “openly”: there have been many LGBT generals and admirals, up to the four-star level — this is no secret in certain circles — now they just don’t have to hide it.
The military is better off now that LGBT Americans can serve openly, without fear. But we must never forget that many gay and lesbian Americans have served honorably, even heroically, when they had to hide in the shadows. That is true courage. Let me add the same about the many LGBT Americans who serve in our police and emergency services who, per Kipling’s great line, guard you while you sleep.
I hope Caitlyn Jenner is happy with her new life. I would prefer that the media get out of its celebrity obsession and honor some of the ordinary, un-famous LGBT Americans — soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, cops, EMTs — who serve us all with a degree of heroism that will never be required of any reality TV stars.
Filed under: USG
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The Painful Truth About Snowden by 20committee
Since the saga of Edward Snowden went public just over two years ago, I’ve had a lot to say in the media about this sensational case. That’s gotten me loads of push-back, not to mention trolling, but my take on the case — particularly that it’s a planned foreign intelligence operation that operates behind the cover of “freedom” and “civil liberties” — has increasingly become accepted by normals.
In the first place, that Snowden shows no sign of leaving Putin’s Russia, not exactly a bastion of liberty, has made all but his most uncritical defenders wonder what’s going on here. The clear damage that Snowden’s vast revelations have done to Western counterterrorism and security likewise has raised doubts about motives. And that’s not been helped by the fact that very few of Snowden’s purloined secrets have to do with NSA domestic operations. The overwhelming majority expose foreign intelligence activities that are considered legitimate and normal by most citizens. It’s hard to see how exposing details of Israel’s killing of senior WMD proliferators in Syria, perthe latest Snowden revelation, exactly protects the civil liberties of Americans.
At last, some important questions about the Snowden Operation, which I’ve posed for two years, are being picked up by the mainstream media. Even in Germany, where Snowdenmania has taken root perhaps more than anywhere else, voices are now asking who exactly stands behind The Ed Show.
I’ve previously explained how nobody acquainted with counterintelligence, and particularly with Russian espionage practices, accepts the official story, that Snowden “just happened” to wind up in Moscow in June 2013. While we still don’t know when Snowden’s first contact with Russian intelligence was, that remains the preeminent question. Moreover, if you don’t understand that Snowden’s in bed with Russia’s secret services now, after more than two years in the country — “of course” he is, explained a top KGB general — I can’t fix that kind of stupid.
There remains also the important question of what exactly Putin is getting out of Snowden. At a fundamental level the answer is obvious. The Snowden Operation was designed to inflict maximum pain on the mighty Western intelligence alliance, led by NSA, that has stood as a bulwark of freedom since the Second World War. This it has achieved, one headline at a time, making it the greatestActive Measure in Chekist history.
Yet there’s nothing new about any of this. As I’ve explained since the moment Snowden first went public, this is really no more than the Agee operation sexed up for the Internet age. Phil Agee was a former CIA officer who, disillusioned with the Agency (in part because it washed him out over his alcoholism), volunteered his services to the Cubans and Soviets. In the mid-1970’s, Agee (known to the KGB as PONT) became a worldwide sensation, exposing numerous CIA activities and officers through books and articles authored by the KGB under Agee’s byline. To his death in 2008, an unrepentant Agee lied about his KGB connections and insisted he was a pure-hearted whistleblower, a claim which was accepted uncritically by his hardcore fans. Sound familiar?
But there is one key difference between the cases. While Agee had been a CIA operations officer and gave the KGB lots of information about his secret activities, Snowden is really no more than an IT guy. While he excelled at stealing top secret files, it’s evident to the initiated that his actual understanding of the SIGINT system is weak.
Moreover, it’s exceptionally unlikely that Snowden has told the Russians much about NSA and its partners that they didn’t know already, in some form. At the beginning of 2012, Canadian authorities, acting on a tip from the FBI, arrested a naval officer named Jeffrey Delisle, one of the most damaging (but least interesting) traitors in recent history. Motivated by self-loathing and greed, for five years until his arrest Delisle passed volumes of classified information from his office, an intelligence shop in Halifax, to GRU, Russian military intelligence. For the Western SIGINT system especially, this was a devastating compromise. As I explained long before the Snowden case broke:
In the SIGINT realm, what Delisle wrought appears to have terrible consequences, beyond the spook world. Thanks to his access to STONEGHOST and related databases where Anglosphere countries share intelligence seamlessly, the damage from this case is probably felt more severely in Washington and London than in Ottawa. Under the so-called Five Eyes system, which dates to the Second World War, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and (mostly) New Zealand, cover the globe with SIGINT, and share most of the take with each other. Hence, as Delisle explained about what he betrayed, “It was never really Canadian stuff,” he told police, later adding, “There was American stuff, there was some British stuff, Australian stuff – it was everybody’s stuff.” Last week, after Delisle accepted a plea agreement admitting his guilt, the U.S. ambassador in Ottawa, David Jacobson, characterized the case as the loss of “a lot of highly classified material,” adding with consummate diplomatic tact, “That is obviously not good.”
It can be safely assumed that Delisle gave GRU the store on what Anglosphere SIGINT agencies knew abut Russia, which is always a lot – politics, military, economics. He appears to have betrayed a great deal of Canadian insider information too. True to form, GRU was most interested in – Delisle said they were “fixated on” – counterespionage data, i.e. finding Western spies in Russia, but thankfully that, at least, was something the junior officer could not access from his desk in Halifax.
GRU had it all before Snowden gave it to them. Ed’s vast haul of well over a million classified documents undoubtedly added details — as well as the ability to attack NSA and its partners through “helpful” Western media outlets with lots of purloined PowerPoints about SIGINT activities — but nobody acquainted with GRU and SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, will fail to grasp how damaging the Delisle case was to Western intelligence long before Snowden got on that Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong to Moscow.
While the unprecedented propaganda value of Snowden to Russian intelligence cannot be doubted, any seasoned counterintelligencer will have follow-on questions. As a former NSA counterintelligence officer myself, I can share with you the depressing reality that, during the Cold War, the NSA-led Western SIGINT alliance was never not penetrated, somewhere, by Soviet spies. And that’s counting only the moles we know of.
The importance of NSA to Soviet espionage would be difficult to overstate. They called it OMEGA, and it was the KGB’s highest priority foreign intelligence target on earth. Why isn’t difficult to grasp, as since its founding in 1952, NSA has been the source of the lion’s share of foreign intelligence inside the U.S. Government, while also protecting sensitive American communications. When you penetrate NSA, you get the whole thing. An all-access pass to Top Secret America. Moreover, thanks to lots of intelligence sharing among Anglosphere SIGINT agencies, a penetration anywhere across the system could offer a great deal of access to the closest-held secrets of five states, two of which are nuclear powers.
Hence it’s no surprise that throughout the Cold War the KGB and GRU tried hard to recruit spies inside NSA and its partners, worldwide. SIGINT analysts, linguists, mathematicians, code-makers and code clerks — military, civilian, contractor — were all top-priority targets for Soviet spies. Around the globe, KGB and GRU case officers hung out at bars and clubs where NSA personnel collected, hoping for a lonely, drunk, and perhaps horny young man they could “befriend.” They had more success than most Americans perhaps want to know. The worst penetration of the SIGINT systemthat we know of, William Weisband, came at the beginning of the Cold War, but that damaging traitor had many successors.
Protecting moles has always been an important task for Kremlin spies. Unlike Western espionage, Moscow’s spymasters take a long view, particularly regarding high-priority penetrations, and will do things that no Western spy service would countenance to protect them from exposure. In particular, the Russians have a long (and often successful) history of compromising and exposing less important assets to protect “golden sources.” I’m personally aware of at least three cases in recent memory where Russian spies intentionally let us find their agents, with the aim of leading the path away from more valued sources.
This was a venerable Cold War practice. In the 1960’s the U.S. Intelligence Community became engaged in a vast mole-hunt thanks to the defection of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer, shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The debate over Nosenko’s bona fides grew extended and nasty, tearing a fissure through CIA and IC counterintelligence that lingered for years. To his defenders, Nosenko was that rarest of creatures, an actual KGB officer with important knowledge (including, with impeccable timing, information about Lee Harvey Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union), who crossed to our side. To his detractors, Nosenko’s saga was too convenient by half.
This debate continues more than a half-century after it commenced. Down to his death in 2008, Nosenko was heralded as a hero by the CIA, which in 1969 officially assessed that Nosenko was a legitimate defector, although doubters still remain. Not long before his own death, Pete Bagley, Nosenko’s first CIA case officer, published a definitive account of the doubters’ case against Nosenko. This was the case Bagley made against Nosenko in the 1960s, which harmed his career for being bureaucratically “off-message” in an Agency that very much wanted its star Soviet defector to be real, seasoned with decades of pondering and additional research.
What Nosenko was really up to will not be determined beyond doubt until outsiders get access to the full KGB archives, which is impossible as long as Putin rules in the Kremlin. That said, Bagley made a thoroughly persuasive case that, at a minimum, Nosenko was not who he claimed to be. The holes in Nosenko’s account of his KGB career and defection are big enough to drive trucks through. While Nosenko was a KGB officer, Bagley showed convincingly that he was not the elite foreign intelligence official that he posed as to the Americans.
Bagley and others for decades insisted that Nosenko was a plant, dispatched westward as a fake defector to throw American counterintelligence off the trail of genuine Soviet moles inside the Intelligence Community. This notion, a complex form of long-term offensive counterintelligence married to strategic deception, sounds fanciful to most Western spies but is in fact quite normal in Moscow. Moreover, Bagley offered evidence pointing to deeply damaging Soviet penetrations of the IC. particularly of the cryptologic system, going back to the 1950’s, that Nosenko’s defection sought to protect.
These moles were never uncovered but NSA counterintelligence long agreed that they probably existed. This deception extends beyond Nosenko, right into the mysterious case of Aleksei Kulak, known as FEDORA to the FBI, who was the Bureau’s “golden source” inside the KGB. Kulak served in New York with the Soviet mission to the United Nations from 1961 to 1967, then again from 1971 to 1977. Ostensibly a science attaché, Kulak was really a KGB case officer. An odd duck for a Chekist, Kulak was an actual scientist, holding a Ph.D. in chemistry, and was a hero of the Second World War, having received the highest Soviet valor decoration, the Hero of the USSR, for frontline service.
In the spring of 1962, a few months after his arrival in New York, Kulak volunteered his services to the FBI. Thus began an espionage saga that would continue, on and off, for the next fifteen years and, like Nosenko, would divide the American counterintelligence club. The FBI immediately understood the value of FEDORA. Behind his back they called him “Fatso” but the Bureau saw that Kulak was who he said he was and that he knew a great deal about KGB operations inside the United States.
There were doubters from the start, and to make a complex story brief, the FBI more or less accepted FEDORA’s bona fides while CIA mostly didn’t (though there were dissenters from orthodoxy in both agencies). Kulak spilled the beans about lots of high-value cases, but he seldom gave away enough information — exact names, for instance — to easily uncover Soviet moles. Despite the KGB’s normally rigid compartmentization, which meant that no case officer usually knew much beyond his own purview, Kulak knew some details of many operations he was not involved with. This was due to the fact that he was drinking buddies with the longtime KGB rezident (i.e. station chief) in New York: they had served together during the war and liked to get sloshed, reminisce, and talk spy cases.
One of Kulak’s most sensational revelations was of a KGB mole inside the FBI. The thought, heresy to Hoover’s Bureau, set off a massive hunt for the traitor known as “UNSUB Dick” that lingered through the 1960’s and never officially caught the mole. This was a traumatic experience for the FBI that it kept out of public view for decades. Years later, UNSUB Dick was identified, with a high degree of confidence, but he had left the Bureau years before and the FBI had no stomach for arresting him with all the awkward questions that would follow.
Had Kulak helped — or hurt — the FBI with his tantalizing but incomplete revelations? There’s no doubt that his telling the Bureau a little bit about UNSUB Dick, but not too much, set the Bureau chasing his own tail for years without resolution. Was Kulak our friend? enemy? perhaps frenemy? This sort of enduring counterintelligence mystery is normal if you want to play against the Russians, where initiation into the vaunted Wilderness of Mirrors is a hard school.
Kulak played this game more than once, including against NSA. Just as with UNSUB Dick, he offered a bit of information — fuzzy details of career and life — about a well-placed KGB mole inside NSA. This explosive revelation set NSA counterintelligence on a years-long hunt for the traitor which never definitely uncovered him. Just as with UNSUB Dick, the mole was eventually uncovered, with a high degree of confidence, years after he left Fort Meade, when nobody wanted to deal with what was then old news.
Was Kulak a bona fide source who helped the Americans where he could? Or was he a plant whose job was sending U.S. counterintelligence down false (or just as bad, not very helpful) avenues of mole-hunting inquiry? Or was he bona fide in part while fake also in part, i.e. a classic Chekist disinformation operation? Russians, unlike Western spy agencies, are perfectly happy to compromise a great deal of legitimate intelligence information in the service of dezinformatsiya, and none could deny that the lion’s share of what Kulak told the FBI did in fact check out.
Having examined a lot of Kulak’s information with a fine-toothed comb when I was working CI, my own view is that Kulak was a controlled KGB source, designed to disseminate disinformation that would confuse the Americans while protecting real moles, but he was also an alcoholic who overshared frequently. Debriefs with FEDORA usually involved a bottle of good stuff that the Chekist chugged down solo while Bureau handlers watched in amazement, taking notes furiously.
What does this entertaining Cold War mystery — how Kulak’s never gotten his own movie bewilders me — have to do with Edward Snowden? Kulak died in 1983, the year Snowden was born. Yet they may be connected all the same, albeit only in spirit.
Chekist espionage operations have remained remarkably constant over the decades. Why change what already works? Under Putin, a onetime KGB counterintelligencer, Russian espionage activities against the West, especially the United States, have grown highly aggressive while adhering to proven Chekist tactics and techniques.
To anyone versed in counterespionage, the 2010 roll-up of the Russian Illegals Network offered tantalizing clues. This major event was treated as a comic-opera affair by most Western media, thanks to the star role of the redheaded Illegal Anna Chapman — just as Moscow wanted. In reality, that network was engaged in a wide range of nefarious activities, including the handling of deep-cover Russian agents, that set off big-time counterintelligence alarm bells.
The bad news was delivered by Bill Gertz, veteran intelligence reporter, who nearly five years ago told of a major mole-hunt inside NSA spurred by the Illegals’ roll-up:
NSA counterintelligence officials suspect that members of the illegals network were used by Russia’s SVR spy agency to communicate with one or more agents inside the agency, which conducts electronic intelligence gathering and code-breaking.
“They are looking for one or more Russian spies that NSA is convinced reside at Fort Meade and possibly other DoD intel offices, like DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency],” the former official said. “NSA is convinced that at least one is at NSA.”
They were not looking for Edward Snowden, who in 2010 had only recently begun work on an NSA contract — but in Japan, thousands of miles from Agency headquarters at Fort Meade. Since there have been no follow-up reports on the Russian mole, or moles, at Fort Meade, we are left to assume that they remain unidentified by NSA counterintelligence.
Here Snowden has doubtless been a big help. Since he went public two years ago, NSA has been engaged in the biggest damage assessment in all intelligence history. Trying to determine exactly what Snowden stole, as well as who may have helped him in his betrayal, has consumed the full resources of Agency counterintelligence, and will for years to come. Perhaps this is why the real Russian moles have yet to be uncovered.
If this notion — that Moscow would sacrifice Snowden to protect their actual moles — strikes you as fanciful you’re not well acquainted with Chekists and how they roll, and have rolled for nearly a century now. Welcome to the Wilderness of Mirrors.
Filed under: Counterintelligence, Espionage, Strategy, USG
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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.”
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Since the saga of Edward Snowden went public just over two years ago, I’ve had a lot to say in the media about this sensational case. That’s gotten me loads of push-back, not to mention trolling, but my take on the case — particularly that it’s a planned foreign intelligence operation that operates behind the cover of “freedom” and “civil liberties” — has increasingly become accepted by normals.
In the first place, that Snowden shows no sign of leaving Putin’s Russia, not exactly a bastion of liberty, has made all but his most uncritical defenders wonder what’s going on here. The clear damage that Snowden’s vast revelations have done to Western counterterrorism and security likewise has raised doubts about motives. And that’s not been helped by the fact that very few of Snowden’s purloined secrets have to do with NSA domestic operations. The overwhelming majority expose foreign intelligence activities that are considered legitimate and normal by most citizens. It’s hard to see how exposing details of Israel’s killing of senior WMD proliferators in Syria, per the latest Snowden revelation, exactly protects the civil liberties of Americans.
At last, some important questions about the Snowden Operation, which I’ve posed for two years, are being picked up by the mainstream media. Even in Germany, where Snowdenmania has taken root perhaps more than anywhere else, voices are now asking who exactly stands behind The Ed Show.
I’ve previously explained how nobody acquainted with counterintelligence, and particularly with Russian espionage practices, accepts the official story, that Snowden “just happened” to wind up in Moscow in June 2013. While we still don’t know when Snowden’s first contact with Russian intelligence was, that remains the preeminent question. Moreover, if you don’t understand that Snowden’s in bed with Russia’s secret services now, after more than two years in the country — “of course” he is, explained a top KGB general — I can’t fix that kind of stupid.
There remains also the important question of what exactly Putin is getting out of Snowden. At a fundamental level the answer is obvious. The Snowden Operation was designed to inflict maximum pain on the mighty Western intelligence alliance, led by NSA, that has stood as a bulwark of freedom since the Second World War. This it has achieved, one headline at a time, making it the greatestActive Measure in Chekist history.
Yet there’s nothing new about any of this. As I’ve explained since the moment Snowden first went public, this is really no more than the Agee operation sexed up for the Internet age. Phil Agee was a former CIA officer who, disillusioned with the Agency (in part because it washed him out over his alcoholism), volunteered his services to the Cubans and Soviets. In the mid-1970’s, Agee (known to the KGB as PONT) became a worldwide sensation, exposing numerous CIA activities and officers through books and articles authored by the KGB under Agee’s byline. To his death in 2008, an unrepentant Agee lied about his KGB connections and insisted he was a pure-hearted whistleblower, a claim which was accepted uncritically by his hardcore fans. Sound familiar?
But there is one key difference between the cases. While Agee had been a CIA operations officer and gave the KGB lots of information about his secret activities, Snowden is really no more than an IT guy. While he excelled at stealing top secret files, it’s evident to the initiated that his actual understanding of the SIGINT system is weak.
Moreover, it’s exceptionally unlikely that Snowden has told the Russians much about NSA and its partners that they didn’t know already, in some form. At the beginning of 2012, Canadian authorities, acting on a tip from the FBI, arrested a naval officer named Jeffrey Delisle, one of the most damaging (but least interesting) traitors in recent history. Motivated by self-loathing and greed, for five years until his arrest Delisle passed volumes of classified information from his office, an intelligence shop in Halifax, to GRU, Russian military intelligence. For the Western SIGINT system especially, this was a devastating compromise. As I explained long before the Snowden case broke:
In the SIGINT realm, what Delisle wrought appears to have terrible consequences, beyond the spook world. Thanks to his access to STONEGHOST and related databases where Anglosphere countries share intelligence seamlessly, the damage from this case is probably felt more severely in Washington and London than in Ottawa. Under the so-called Five Eyes system, which dates to the Second World War, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and (mostly) New Zealand, cover the globe with SIGINT, and share most of the take with each other. Hence, as Delisle explained about what he betrayed, “It was never really Canadian stuff,” he told police, later adding, “There was American stuff, there was some British stuff, Australian stuff – it was everybody’s stuff.” Last week, after Delisle accepted a plea agreement admitting his guilt, the U.S. ambassador in Ottawa, David Jacobson, characterized the case as the loss of “a lot of highly classified material,” adding with consummate diplomatic tact, “That is obviously not good.”
It can be safely assumed that Delisle gave GRU the store on what Anglosphere SIGINT agencies knew abut Russia, which is always a lot – politics, military, economics. He appears to have betrayed a great deal of Canadian insider information too. True to form, GRU was most interested in – Delisle said they were “fixated on” – counterespionage data, i.e. finding Western spies in Russia, but thankfully that, at least, was something the junior officer could not access from his desk in Halifax.
GRU had it all before Snowden gave it to them. Ed’s vast haul of well over a million classified documents undoubtedly added details — as well as the ability to attack NSA and its partners through “helpful” Western media outlets with lots of purloined PowerPoints about SIGINT activities — but nobody acquainted with GRU and SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, will fail to grasp how damaging the Delisle case was to Western intelligence long before Snowden got on that Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong to Moscow.
While the unprecedented propaganda value of Snowden to Russian intelligence cannot be doubted, any seasoned counterintelligencer will have follow-on questions. As a former NSA counterintelligence officer myself, I can share with you the depressing reality that, during the Cold War, the NSA-led Western SIGINT alliance was never not penetrated, somewhere, by Soviet spies. And that’s counting only the moles we know of.
The importance of NSA to Soviet espionage would be difficult to overstate. They called it OMEGA, and it was the KGB’s highest priority foreign intelligence target on earth. Why isn’t difficult to grasp, as since its founding in 1952, NSA has been the source of the lion’s share of foreign intelligence inside the U.S. Government, while also protecting sensitive American communications. When you penetrate NSA, you get the whole thing. An all-access pass to Top Secret America. Moreover, thanks to lots of intelligence sharing among Anglosphere SIGINT agencies, a penetration anywhere across the system could offer a great deal of access to the closest-held secrets of five states, two of which are nuclear powers.
Hence it’s no surprise that throughout the Cold War the KGB and GRU tried hard to recruit spies inside NSA and its partners, worldwide. SIGINT analysts, linguists, mathematicians, code-makers and code clerks — military, civilian, contractor — were all top-priority targets for Soviet spies. Around the globe, KGB and GRU case officers hung out at bars and clubs where NSA personnel collected, hoping for a lonely, drunk, and perhaps horny young man they could “befriend.” They had more success than most Americans perhaps want to know. The worst penetration of the SIGINT systemthat we know of, William Weisband, came at the beginning of the Cold War, but that damaging traitor had many successors.
Protecting moles has always been an important task for Kremlin spies. Unlike Western espionage, Moscow’s spymasters take a long view, particularly regarding high-priority penetrations, and will do things that no Western spy service would countenance to protect them from exposure. In particular, the Russians have a long (and often successful) history of compromising and exposing less important assets to protect “golden sources.” I’m personally aware of at least three cases in recent memory where Russian spies intentionally let us find their agents, with the aim of leading the path away from more valued sources.
This was a venerable Cold War practice. In the 1960’s the U.S. Intelligence Community became engaged in a vast mole-hunt thanks to the defection of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer, shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The debate over Nosenko’s bona fides grew extended and nasty, tearing a fissure through CIA and IC counterintelligence that lingered for years. To his defenders, Nosenko was that rarest of creatures, an actual KGB officer with important knowledge (including, with impeccable timing, information about Lee Harvey Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union), who crossed to our side. To his detractors, Nosenko’s saga was too convenient by half.
This debate continues more than a half-century after it commenced. Down to his death in 2008, Nosenko was heralded as a hero by the CIA, which in 1969 officially assessed that Nosenko was a legitimate defector, although doubters still remain. Not long before his own death, Pete Bagley, Nosenko’s first CIA case officer, published a definitive account of the doubters’ case against Nosenko. This was the case Bagley made against Nosenko in the 1960s, which harmed his career for being bureaucratically “off-message” in an Agency that very much wanted its star Soviet defector to be real, seasoned with decades of pondering and additional research.
What Nosenko was really up to will not be determined beyond doubt until outsiders get access to the full KGB archives, which is impossible as long as Putin rules in the Kremlin. That said, Bagley made a thoroughly persuasive case that, at a minimum, Nosenko was not who he claimed to be. The holes in Nosenko’s account of his KGB career and defection are big enough to drive trucks through. While Nosenko was a KGB officer, Bagley showed convincingly that he was not the elite foreign intelligence official that he posed as to the Americans.
Bagley and others for decades insisted that Nosenko was a plant, dispatched westward as a fake defector to throw American counterintelligence off the trail of genuine Soviet moles inside the Intelligence Community. This notion, a complex form of long-term offensive counterintelligence married to strategic deception, sounds fanciful to most Western spies but is in fact quite normal in Moscow. Moreover, Bagley offered evidence pointing to deeply damaging Soviet penetrations of the IC. particularly of the cryptologic system, going back to the 1950’s, that Nosenko’s defection sought to protect.
These moles were never uncovered but NSA counterintelligence long agreed that they probably existed. This deception extends beyond Nosenko, right into the mysterious case of Aleksei Kulak, known as FEDORA to the FBI, who was the Bureau’s “golden source” inside the KGB. Kulak served in New York with the Soviet mission to the United Nations from 1961 to 1967, then again from 1971 to 1977. Ostensibly a science attaché, Kulak was really a KGB case officer. An odd duck for a Chekist, Kulak was an actual scientist, holding a Ph.D. in chemistry, and was a hero of the Second World War, having received the highest Soviet valor decoration, the Hero of the USSR, for frontline service.
In the spring of 1962, a few months after his arrival in New York, Kulak volunteered his services to the FBI. Thus began an espionage saga that would continue, on and off, for the next fifteen years and, like Nosenko, would divide the American counterintelligence club. The FBI immediately understood the value of FEDORA. Behind his back they called him “Fatso” but the Bureau saw that Kulak was who he said he was and that he knew a great deal about KGB operations inside the United States.
There were doubters from the start, and to make a complex story brief, the FBI more or less accepted FEDORA’s bona fides while CIA mostly didn’t (though there were dissenters from orthodoxy in both agencies). Kulak spilled the beans about lots of high-value cases, but he seldom gave away enough information — exact names, for instance — to easily uncover Soviet moles. Despite the KGB’s normally rigid compartmentization, which meant that no case officer usually knew much beyond his own purview, Kulak knew some details of many operations he was not involved with. This was due to the fact that he was drinking buddies with the longtime KGB rezident (i.e. station chief) in New York: they had served together during the war and liked to get sloshed, reminisce, and talk spy cases.
One of Kulak’s most sensational revelations was of a KGB mole inside the FBI. The thought, heresy to Hoover’s Bureau, set off a massive hunt for the traitor known as “UNSUB Dick” that lingered through the 1960’s and never officially caught the mole. This was a traumatic experience for the FBI that it kept out of public view for decades. Years later, UNSUB Dick was identified, with a high degree of confidence, but he had left the Bureau years before and the FBI had no stomach for arresting him with all the awkward questions that would follow.
Had Kulak helped — or hurt — the FBI with his tantalizing but incomplete revelations? There’s no doubt that his telling the Bureau a little bit about UNSUB Dick, but not too much, set the Bureau chasing his own tail for years without resolution. Was Kulak our friend? enemy? perhaps frenemy? This sort of enduring counterintelligence mystery is normal if you want to play against the Russians, where initiation into the vaunted Wilderness of Mirrors is a hard school.
Kulak played this game more than once, including against NSA. Just as with UNSUB Dick, he offered a bit of information — fuzzy details of career and life — about a well-placed KGB mole inside NSA. This explosive revelation set NSA counterintelligence on a years-long hunt for the traitor which never definitely uncovered him. Just as with UNSUB Dick, the mole was eventually uncovered, with a high degree of confidence, years after he left Fort Meade, when nobody wanted to deal with what was then old news.
Was Kulak a bona fide source who helped the Americans where he could? Or was he a plant whose job was sending U.S. counterintelligence down false (or just as bad, not very helpful) avenues of mole-hunting inquiry? Or was he bona fide in part while fake also in part, i.e. a classic Chekist disinformation operation? Russians, unlike Western spy agencies, are perfectly happy to compromise a great deal of legitimate intelligence information in the service of dezinformatsiya, and none could deny that the lion’s share of what Kulak told the FBI did in fact check out.
Having examined a lot of Kulak’s information with a fine-toothed comb when I was working CI, my own view is that Kulak was a controlled KGB source, designed to disseminate disinformation that would confuse the Americans while protecting real moles, but he was also an alcoholic who overshared frequently. Debriefs with FEDORA usually involved a bottle of good stuff that the Chekist chugged down solo while Bureau handlers watched in amazement, taking notes furiously.
What does this entertaining Cold War mystery — how Kulak’s never gotten his own movie bewilders me — have to do with Edward Snowden? Kulak died in 1983, the year Snowden was born. Yet they may be connected all the same, albeit only in spirit.
Chekist espionage operations have remained remarkably constant over the decades. Why change what already works? Under Putin, a onetime KGB counterintelligencer, Russian espionage activities against the West, especially the United States, have grown highly aggressive while adhering to proven Chekist tactics and techniques.
To anyone versed in counterespionage, the 2010 roll-up of the Russian Illegals Network offered tantalizing clues. This major event was treated as a comic-opera affair by most Western media, thanks to the star role of the redheaded Illegal Anna Chapman — just as Moscow wanted. In reality, that network was engaged in a wide range of nefarious activities, including the handling of deep-cover Russian agents, that set off big-time counterintelligence alarm bells.
The bad news was delivered by Bill Gertz, veteran intelligence reporter, who nearly five years ago told of a major mole-hunt inside NSA spurred by the Illegals’ roll-up:
NSA counterintelligence officials suspect that members of the illegals network were used by Russia’s SVR spy agency to communicate with one or more agents inside the agency, which conducts electronic intelligence gathering and code-breaking.
“They are looking for one or more Russian spies that NSA is convinced reside at Fort Meade and possibly other DoD intel offices, like DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency],” the former official said. “NSA is convinced that at least one is at NSA.”
They were not looking for Edward Snowden, who in 2010 had only recently begun work on an NSA contract — but in Japan, thousands of miles from Agency headquarters at Fort Meade. Since there have been no follow-up reports on the Russian mole, or moles, at Fort Meade, we are left to assume that they remain unidentified by NSA counterintelligence.
Here Snowden has doubtless been a big help. Since he went public two years ago, NSA has been engaged in the biggest damage assessment in all intelligence history. Trying to determine exactly what Snowden stole, as well as who may have helped him in his betrayal, has consumed the full resources of Agency counterintelligence, and will for years to come. Perhaps this is why the real Russian moles have yet to be uncovered.
If this notion — that Moscow would sacrifice Snowden to protect their actual moles — strikes you as fanciful you’re not well acquainted with Chekists and how they roll, and have rolled for nearly a century now. Welcome to the Wilderness of Mirrors.
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Is there behind the NSA revelations one instance, a handlebar and copyright? This is and will evermore CLEARLY A legitimate question. For the many revelations about CIA and NSA - Whether by Snowden or Wikileaks - burden the European-American relationship now steadily and strategically relevant. This is an effect, a security policy effect, and with seeking effects it is Necessary strategically to speculate who in what way it benefits - and Whether a secret arm of the question. If you choose this point of view, the Snowden saga CAN tell very different.
Possible agents behind the agents come for the United States, Russia and China Especially in question. Both countries want to deprive America of its moral leadership in the cyber diplomacy. In addition, not only the moral, but so the technical and tactical leadership of the United States in parts lost. The tactical and technical insights based on the data would therefore be important to bargaining chip in allies of China and Russia as Syria and North Korea.
Cracks in the Transatlantic Alliance - and who benefits?
The Russian Cyber Gang "Carbanak" what the beginning of a harbinger. You have NSA tactics abgeguckt -. and promptly cleared one billion dollars . Third, Russia and China will therefore benefit from the many general Cracks in the Transatlantic alliance Both benefit from A rift in the West itself, but even just the perception abroad. Both countries have a motive THEREFORE. manyother Certainly, but Russia and China would be particularly true in a position to construct a search situation.
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Countries are in the intelligence community famous and notorious for its large weighting and excellent mastery of the field of "Information Operations" or "Psychological Operations" in which one narrative and perceptions based in order to achieve long-term strategic effects.
Apart with this paranoid ground overlooking the Snowden history, a number of issues is possible, Which Allows at least some plausibility of a hidden link. How could on average staff of Contractors as to individual perpetrator ever channeling so incredibly many secret and top-secret documents and exfiltrieren unnoticed? Maybe that's a terrible mishap - even That is plausible.
The Snowden-Files - a real treasure
Perhaps there were so professional helpers. Why is Edward Snowden fled to the east and not south? Clear - Russia May Be A Better, safer harbor than any other country, if one before the CIA . flees But several South American countries would havebeen more accessible and therefore had granted him asylum.
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Edward Snowden
© dpa 
Edward Snowden
Why did Snowden as a supposed civil rights of all in the two countries are indeed undoubtedly, on the world list of the supervisor, manipulator and censors the Internet at the top? Can you believe Snowden did He has China and Russia were no copies of the 1.7 million secret and top secret documents? Hey what with various laptops, and removable media on the go and has been contradictory as regards to Whether He Was carrying the document or not. When He should have been doing anyway, China and Russia would have never Treated him kindly without a decrypted copy. Because tactically, strategically and politically the Snowden files are a real treasure. THEREFORE, even a copy of the documents will have been on important bargaining chip for Snowden.
More on the subject
Why are Actually in theory measure of leaks so far only documents surfaced That CLEARLY impact on the European-American relations and nothing contained on China and Russia or on its allies in the Middle East?
It is hard to imagine in fact 1.7 million NSA-CIA documents no material can be found on the main patient of the American intelligence services. And yet we read about this Exactly as anything. In western intelligence circles this circulating the wild rumor did the Snowden Files Could be encrypted differentially. They Could be divided thematically and encrypts thesis thematic blocks with individual keys. The mysterious link then sends the activists and the press at Certain Times Certain key - and so dictates the course of the narrative, and THUS very precise structure and sequence of the political action. That would fit in well with the usual tactical procedures there.
Leaks in high synchronicity
Sequencing of the leaks has been so Analyzed the way in the service. The results are confidential and unknown to me, but it what Noted thatmany leaks were in high synchronicity with diplomatic encounters and incidents. Before specific negotiations about or concomitantly in Certain moments of important crises. This would be another indicator of a warrior in the background info.
None of this can be proven. If it is a targeted operation, it is built masterfully. Not least, Because it serves up not Constructed read, but The Truth About NSA uncovers and Co .. Unpleasant truths are always the best weapons in the information was . It remains a factthat the United States has done a lot of what is Judged to be disproportionate and difficult to justify. Some Of These complaints may be naive. The transformation of perception, HOWEVER, thatwill not stop.
The author Sandro Gaycken is Senior Researcher for Cyber Security and Cyber Strategy at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. He advises NATO and German companies in espionage cases.
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Federal Inquiry Scrutinizes Chattanooga Gunman’s Travel and Texts
The F.B.I. was reviewing a text that the gunman, Mohammod Abdulazeez, sent hours before his rampage, and was expanding an inquiry into his 2014 trip to Jordan.
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 Military Times |
Tennessee shootings crystallize FBI terrorism concerns - Military Times
Military Times WASHINGTON — The deadly shootings at military sites in Tennessee illustrate the threat thatFBI officials have warned about: violence directed against a vulnerable government target by a lone gunman with apparent terrorist aspirations. The FBI has not ... Military site shootings spotlight FBI terrorism concerns - The Herald: NewsSharonherald FBI and DHS says Chattanooga shooter's motive still remains unknown | Fox 59Fox 59 Authorities say Chattanooga shooter's motive still remains unknownCNN all 6,980 news articles » |
July 19, 2015, 7:42 PM (IDT)
The Shin Bet, the IDF and police in a combined operations caught up with members of the Hamas gang which murdered Malachi Rosenfeld in a terrorist attack three weeks ago at the entrance to Shevut Rachel on the West Bank. The gang leader, who was released in the Shalit prisoner exchange,,escaped to Jordan.
Who is the Chattanooga gunman?(1:09)
Here's what you need to know about Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the gunman who opened fire at two military facilities in Tenn., killing four Marines. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A few months before he killed five U.S. service members in a shooting rampage here, the 24-year-old gunman, who often joked that he was just an “Arabian redneck,” was smoking marijuana with friends.
It was getting late and Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez had work the next morning at his new job some two hours away in Franklin, said a close friend who was with him that night and spent several hours with him in the days leading up to the shooting.
Abdulazeez dropped off a couple of his friends at their homes on the night in April, snorted some crushed caffeine pills and started to drive.
A little after 2 a.m., Abdulazeez was arrested for driving under the influence, according to court papers, an incident sharply at odds with blog posts in which he portrayed himself as a devout Muslim and his existence in this world a “prison of monotony and routine.”
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Mourning and questioning after Chattanooga rampage
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Investigators probe for a motive behind Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez’s shooting spree that left four Marines and a Navy officer dead in Tennessee.
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Investigators probe for a motive behind Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez’s shooting spree that left four Marines and a Navy sailor dead in Tennessee.
July 18, 2015 Retired Marine Brandon Hetrick, center, prays with his family at a memorial set up at the entrance to the Navy Operational Support Center and Marine Corps Reserve Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., where four Marines and a Navy sailor were killed. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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The portrait emerging of Abdulazeez isn’t one of a committed Muslim or vengeful jihadist, but rather an aimless young man who came from a troubled home and struggled to hold down a job after college, said friends and law enforcement officials.
He never dated, the friend said.
In a statement, his family said Abdulazeez’s mental illness had contributed to the crime. “For many years, our son suffered from depression. It grieves us beyond belief to know that his pain found its expression in this heinous act of violence,” the statement said.
Abdulazeez had been in and out of treatment for his depression and frequently stopped taking his medication, despite his parents’ pleas for him to continue, said a person close to the family.
Abdulazeez smoked pot occasionally and then would feel guilty for violating his faith and beat himself up for it, said the close friend who has known Abdulazeez for 15 years and was recently questioned by the FBI. The friend, also a Muslim, spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because he is concerned for his family’s privacy.
The friend said Abdulazeez was especially ashamed of his DUI arrest, which led to his mugshot being posted online and in Just Busted, a newspaper sold at local gas stations.
“He was pretty upset about it,” said the friend, who spoke with Abdulazeez almost daily in the weeks and days leading up to the shooting. “It was kind of degrading to him.”
Chattanooga mosque cancels Eid celebrations(1:28)
The Chattanooga mosque, where the suspect in the fatal shootings of four Marines reportedly worshipped, cancelled all activities for the Muslim Eid holiday. (Reuters)
Abdulazeez’s friends said he liked to shoot guns, drive four-wheelers through the mud and hike in the mountains. Within the past year, he bought two assault rifles — an AK-74 and an AR-15 — and a Saiga 12 pistol-grip shotgun from an online weapons site. Abdulazeez and his friends would drive out to the Prentice Cooper State Forest, where they would blast away at the state park’s gun range. None of his friends thought twice about his decision to purchase military-style assault weapons.
“Take any typical Chattanoogan — Christian or Muslim — and he’s going to like to shoot guns, ride trucks and climb mountains,” the friend said.
Abdulazeez’s father was angry when he spotted one of the assault rifles in their home, and Abdulazeez hid other guns from him. “His dad was always against him having guns and said they weren’t safe to have around the house,” the friend said. Abdulazeez insisted that he was old enough to handle them responsibly.
The friend and Abdulazeez — along with two other young Muslim men — spent hundreds of hours together over the past four years, including the weeks and months leading up to the violent attack. Sometimes they talked about the Middle East’s bloody wars, such as the battles between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and the chaos in Syria.
Abdulazeez blamed some of the bloodshed on U.S. foreign policy.
“All of us are upset right now about the fighting. It wasn’t anything that would throw up red flags,” said the friend. “We never would have seen this coming at all, but especially from him. Nobody suspected a thing. If we had, we would have done something to prevent this from happening.”
Indeed, the most striking thing about the last days that Abdulazeez spent with friends is how normal they appear to have been. Two days before the shooting, he texted his friend to ask if he wanted to go hot-rodding outside Chattanooga.
“You wanna go to lookout?” he asked, referring to the mountain on the city’s outskirts.
“IDK,” the friend replied. “I might have to run a few more errands.”
“I hear ya,” Abdulazeez texted back. “Let me know.”
The two men met up later that night around 11 p.m. and took off in a Ford Mustang Abdulazeez had rented — the same car that he used in the attacks. They drove for hours around the curving mountain roads surrounding Chattanooga. “We talked and had a lot of ‘oh [expletive]’ moments,” said the friend who recalls returning home around 3 a.m. Wednesday.
On Wednesday night, the friends exchanged texts for the last time. The friend was struggling with how to balance his Muslim faith with the more secular demands of his work, which included serving bacon to customers.
Abdulazeez responded a quote from the prophet Muhammad — that speaks to the tensions in the world between believers and non-believers. “Whosoever shows enmity to a wali [friend] of Mine, then I have declared war against him,” it begins. It ends by encouraging devout Muslims to keep the faith and draw closer to God.
Although the exchange suggests Abdulazeez was devout, he often seemed to struggle with his faith. Abdulazeez was fasting for the Ramadan holiday, which requires Muslims not to eat or drink during daylight hours. But he doesn’t appear to have regularly attended his parents’ mosque in the months leading up to the shooting, according to members of the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga.
“The father came regularly. The mother did occasionally,” said Bassam Issa, the president of the society, which includes the mosque. “We really didn’t know much about the boy. He wasn’t around.”
Abdulazeez also struggled to find work after he graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with an engineering degree. He briefly landed a job at a nuclear power plant in Ohio but was dismissed when he failed a background check. He told friends he had failed the company’s drug test after smoking marijuana.
He remained in Ohio, where he lived with relatives and worked for a moving company.
Back home, his family also appeared to be struggling. His mother had filed for divorce in 2009, alleging physical and sexual abuse, but later pulled the petition. In recent years, their house, in a middle-class suburb of neatly tended lawns and towering oaks, began to fall into disrepair. The home’s wooden clapboards are warped, and the gray paint is peeling. The lawn is badly overgrown.
Issa said that immediately after the shooting, Abdulazeez’s father apologized for the damage his son had done. “He was distraught,” Issa said. “His voice was broken, and he said he was very sorry for what his son caused to the community of Chattanooga and the Islamic community here.”
Issa wondered if Abdulazeez had been radicalized during his several trips to Jordan, the last in 2014 when he was in the region for seven months.
“It has to be the overseas trip that caused this,” he said. “That’s the only thing I can figure out.”
Others who knew Abdulazeez when he was a mixed-martial-arts fighter reflected on his time in the ring, searching their memory for signs of potential violence.
Chet Blalock, owner of Blalock’s International Mixed Martial Arts Gym in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., described Abdulazeez as “very respectful” but stubbornly determined.
“My students would get him in a chokehold, and he wouldn’t tap out,” Blalock said, describing an incident in 2012. “He would just go to sleep.”
“It was a little crazy,” he added.
Less than two hours after the violent rampage, Abdulazeez’s friend texted him to check when they’d be able to meet up for the Muslim holiday of Eid. He’d seen the news alerts about the shooting in Chattanooga and wanted to talk about it with Abdulazeez, who he assumed was still at his new job outside Nashville.
By that point, Abdulazeez was already dead.
Greg Jaffe covers the White House for The Washington Post, where he has been since March 2009.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Washington Post contributor and a former U.S. infantry Marine.
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Story highlights
- Four U.S. Marines were killed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when a gunman shot at two separate military sites
- Peter Bergen: While gunman's motive is unknown, the incident is being treated as a potential domestic terrorist attack
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad." David Sterman is a program associate at New America, a Washington-based think tank.
(CNN)On Thursday morning, four U.S. Marines were killed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when a gunman shot at two separate military facilities: a military recruiting center and a Navy training reserve center.
The suspected shooter is 24-year-old Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, who also is dead, according to the FBI.
The shooter's motivations are as yet unclear. U.S. Attorney Bill Killian told reporters that the investigation is being treated as "act of domestic terrorism."
One likely reason why investigators are treating the shooting as a potential domestic terrorist attack is that there are multiple cases of jihadist extremists plotting to attack military facilities and recruiting centers in the United States.
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A car believed to be driven by Abdulazeez is seen on the grounds of the Navy facility.
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WTVC's Drew Bollea heard gunshots on Amnicola Highway near the Navy facility.
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The gunman first opened fire at this military recruitment office located in a strip mall off Lee Highway in Chattanooga.
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The entrance to the military recruiting office is seen riddled with bullet holes on July 16.
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Blue evidence markers, believed to be the location of spent shell casings, can be seen here. Gina Mule, a server at a restaurant who took this photo, said she saw a man in a car firing a "high-powered rifle" at the recruiting offices at about 10:50 a.m. ET Thursday.
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An officer patrols the parking lot of the recruitment center.
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An FBI investigator works outside a military recruiting center where a gunman opened fire Thursday, July 16, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Authorities say Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, opened fire first on the recruiting station and then moved to a U.S. Navy facility seven miles away. At the Navy facility, he fatally shot four U.S. Marines and wounded three other people before he died in police gunfire.
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Abdulazeez was born in Kuwait and had Jordanian citizenship, law enforcement officials said. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen.
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A woman places a balloon and flowers at a makeshift memorial outside the military recruiting center on Friday, July 17.
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The Rev. Drew McCallie prays during a church service in Chattanooga on July 16.
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Members of the FBI gather evidence at the scene of the recruiting center shooting on July 16.
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A police car blocks the entrances to the U.S. Navy Reserve Center on July 16.
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A car believed to be driven by Abdulazeez is seen on the grounds of the Navy facility.
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WTVC's Drew Bollea heard gunshots on Amnicola Highway near the Navy facility.
12 photos
The gunman first opened fire at this military recruitment office located in a strip mall off Lee Highway in Chattanooga.
12 photos
The entrance to the military recruiting office is seen riddled with bullet holes on July 16.
12 photos
Blue evidence markers, believed to be the location of spent shell casings, can be seen here. Gina Mule, a server at a restaurant who took this photo, said she saw a man in a car firing a "high-powered rifle" at the recruiting offices at about 10:50 a.m. ET Thursday.
12 photos
An officer patrols the parking lot of the recruitment center.
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An FBI investigator works outside a military recruiting center where a gunman opened fire Thursday, July 16, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Authorities say Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, opened fire first on the recruiting station and then moved to a U.S. Navy facility seven miles away. At the Navy facility, he fatally shot four U.S. Marines and wounded three other people before he died in police gunfire.
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Abdulazeez was born in Kuwait and had Jordanian citizenship, law enforcement officials said. He was a naturalized U.S. citizen.
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A woman places a balloon and flowers at a makeshift memorial outside the military recruiting center on Friday, July 17.
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The Rev. Drew McCallie prays during a church service in Chattanooga on July 16.
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Members of the FBI gather evidence at the scene of the recruiting center shooting on July 16.
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A police car blocks the entrances to the U.S. Navy Reserve Center on July 16.
While cautioning against jumping to conclusions, FBI spokesman Ed Reinhold stated that the bureau "will treat this as a terrorism investigation until we can confirm it is not."
A common target in jihadist plots
Military facilities and personnel are a common target in jihadist plots to conduct violence within the United States. Nearly a third of the 119 Americans accused of plotting an attack inside the United States since 9/11 were alleged to have plotted to attack U.S. military targets, according to data collected by New America.
Thursday's shooting would not be the first jihadist attack on a U.S. military recruitment office, nor even the first one with a connection to Tennessee.
On June 1, 2009, Carlos Bledsoe shot and killed 23-year-old Pvt. William Long and wounded 18-year-old Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula in an attack on an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. Bledsoe shot them both from close range with a SKS semiautomatic rifle from the window of a black Ford Explorer.
Bledsoe was from Memphis, Tennessee, where he had converted to Islam.
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Dylann Storm Roof is accused of opening fire at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine.
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Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. He also killed his mother.
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James Holmes opened fire inside a packed movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, also in 2012. He killed 12 people and injured 70.
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Jared Loughner killed six people and wounded former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.
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Seung-Hui Cho was responsible for the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, which left 32 people dead.
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Aaron Alexis killed 12 people inside the Navy Yard in Washington in 2013.
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Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were responsible for killing 13 people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999.
EXPAND GALLERY
After converting and becoming an observant Muslim in college, Bledsoe traveled to Yemen to study Arabic.
On November 18, 2008, Bledsoe was arrested in Yemen for possessing a fake Somali identification card. The fake identity card was part of Bledsoe's ill-conceived plan to travel to Somalia to wage jihad. When he was arrested, Bledsoe was found to possess manuals about how to make bombs and gun silencers. On his cell phone were contacts for militants who were wanted in Saudi Arabia.
The FBI interviewed Bledsoe after his arrest in Yemen, and he eventually returned to the United States. In a letter to the judge in his case, Bledsoe claimed to have been sent by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and portrayed the Little Rock shooting as a jihadist attack -- though there is no evidence that he was actually sent or directed by AQAP.
The Fort Hood shooting
The best-known case is, of course, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
The Fort Hood attack helps illustrate the particular role of military targets for jihadists who see themselves as engaged in a war with the United States and soldiers as legitimate targets.
Hasan's only real confidant in Texas was Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old covert from Catholicism who attended his mosque. Hasan told Reasoner he didn't want to be deployed to Afghanistan. At their final dinner together, on November 4, Hasan told Reasoner that what he really wanted was to quit the military because anyone fighting against fellow Muslims was likely to go to hell.
The next day, the 467th Combat Stress Control Detachment to which Hasan was assigned was due to report at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood -- the last stop before the unit shipped out to Afghanistan. This was the day that Hasan selected to conduct his deadly attack.
Attack foiled in Illinois
Earlier this year, an alleged plot inspired by ISIS to attack a military base was foiled in Illinois. On March 25, Hasan Edmonds, a 22-year-old U.S. citizen, and his cousin Jonas Edmonds, a 29-year-old U.S. citizen, were arrested. The two allegedly plotted for Hasan, a member of the Illinois National Guard, to travel to Syria to fight with ISIS while Jonas would carry out an attack on a military facility. The two were monitored by an undercover officer.
Another potential reason to consider jihadist terrorism as a motivation in the Chattanooga shooting is that the incident comes amid a spike in terrorism cases this year, driven in large part by the threat posed by individuals inspired by ISIS and a law enforcement crackdown on potential plotters.
Already less than seven months into 2015, more Americans have been charged in jihadist terrorism related cases than in any other year since 9/11, according to data collected by New America.
Moreover, the timing of the Chattanooga shooting on the final night of Ramadan raises another flag. ISIS called for its supporters to unleash "a month of disaster" during the holy celebration of Ramadan, which ends Friday.
Regardless of the shooter's motivation, it is essential to investigate all possibilities and not jump to conclusions.
On September 16, 2013, Aaron Alexis killed 12 people in a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard. Though the attack came on the heels of the anniversary of 9/11, occurred in the nation's capital, targeted a military facility and had other characteristics that superficially suggested it might be jihadist terrorism, Alexis turned out to not be a terrorist, but a mass shooter with a history of mental health problems.
Even though Alexis was not a jihadist terrorist, his shooting at the Navy Yard demonstrated in the words of a Department of the Navy report on the shooting that there were "critical performance gaps" in the Navy Yard's capabilities "against a wide range of threats" and that "the Naval Support Activity Washington's Antiterrorism Program" was "deficient in several areas."
An issue laid bare by Thursday's shootings is the challenge of securing military recruiting offices from attacks.
While U.S. military bases tend to have high levels of security, military recruiting offices do not. Since these offices have been the scenes of two attacks in the past six years, the Pentagon should consider how to make them harder targets.
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By Reuters
Published: 13:40 EST, 19 July 2015 | Updated: 13:40 EST, 19 July 2015
By Andrea Shalal and Richard Valdmanis
WASHINGTON/CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., July 19 (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers will examine possible shortcomings in law enforcement or intelligence in the case of a Tennessee shooting that killed five servicemen, a top Republican said on Sunday, adding that the case may be linked to Islamic State.
Representative Mike McCaul, who heads the U.S. House of Representatives homeland security committee, told ABC's "This Week" program the case highlighted growing concern about Internet-based directives from Islamic State leaders in Syria.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the gunman appeared to be a "classic lone wolf," but said it was difficult to know for sure given new encryption applications available to terrorists.
Feinstein said legal counsels at big Internet companies were unwilling to bar those apps and remove other explicit postings about bomb-making techniques unless mandated by law.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating Thursday's attack as an act of terrorism, but said it was premature to speculate on the motive of the gunman, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, a Kuwaiti-born naturalized U.S. citizen.
U.S. authorities said Abdulazeez sprayed gunfire at a military recruiting center in a strip mall in Chattanooga, then drove to a Naval Reserve Center about 6 miles (10 km) away, where he killed four Marines before he himself was shot dead.
Three people were wounded, including a sailor who died on Saturday.
McCaul said the Chattanooga case was troubling for several reasons, including the fact that Abdulazeez's father had been on a U.S. watch list, but that case was later closed.
FBI officials were now examining the suspect's computer, his cell phone and his travel to Jordan, McCaul said. "We'll be looking at all those details. This is one (where) we'll be conducting oversight and examining what happened."
McCaul said the U.S. government had counted 200,000 tweets a day from Islamic State and had active investigations under way in all 50 states. But he said Internet calls aimed at activating people in the United States were "very hard to stop."
"This is a very difficult counterterrorism challenge in the United States," McCaul said, urging increased efforts to hit the Islamic State officials who were issuing the cyber commands.
He said the FBI had arrested individuals in 60 separate cases linked to Islamic State over the past year, including an alleged plot scheduled for the U.S. national holiday on July 4.
Representative Ed Royce, who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said lawmakers were also looking at changing federal law to allow Marines and other troops to fire at attackers at U.S. facilities, much as they now can overseas.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Friday approved immediate steps to beef up protection of military sites.
The Marine Corps closed all recruiting stations within 40 miles (65 km) of the incident in Chattanooga, and told recruiters not to wear military uniforms, Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright said.
A couple of dozen residents of Chattanooga on Sunday stopped by a makeshift shrine of American flags, flowers, balloons and handwritten notes set up at the Navy Operational Support Center and Marine Corps Reserve Center, one of the targets of Thursday's attack.
"The men who died here knew that losing their lives in service was a possibility, but they probably didn't think it would happen on home soil," said Dan Woughter, 67, a former Air Force serviceman who now works at a local manufacturing company.
He said he blamed the attack on the Islamic State, and wanted to see the United States step up its attacks on the militant group in Syria and Iraq.
"The enemies of United States are doing what they said they would: encouraging lone wolf attacks in the U.S.," Woughter said. "It is time for us to do more to dissuade them." (Additional reporting by Michael Flaherty; Editing by Scott Malone and Eric Walsh)
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