Government Pioneers Hairdresser Venue-Shopping in Jeffrey Sterling Case

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CIA

Here’s my latest on the Jeffrey Sterling trial from ExposeFacts.org:

Coming back into the courtroom after a break in the Jeffrey Sterling trial this afternoon, I heard an odd conversation. Apparently the government had unsuccessfully tried to get the defense to stipulate that the hairdresser for the FBI officer who had investigated this case had read James Risen’s book, State of War, in the Eastern judicial district of Virginia, where the court is located.

“There is no hairdresser privilege,” the judge presiding over the case, Leonie Brinkema, ruled.

So after a surprisingly weak presentation of computer forensic evidence, the government then called the investigating FBI officer’s hairdresser, who I will refer to as Julia P (because why shouldn’t she get the same privacy protections all the CIA’s witnesses got?). She seemed unprepared for court testimony, dressed casually. But she was a welcome breath of fresh air from all the stern witnesses preaching national security we’ve seen in the trial so far.

“Hi!” she said in a high voice as she took the stand. She explained she’d been a hairdresser for 35 years (she looked far too young for that to be the case). Julia P then confirmed that she had read State of War.

“Yessir, every chapter.”

She went on to confirm that she had read the book in Alexandria, VA shortly after it came out and that she does not have a security clearance.

The government, you see, is trying to establish they have charged Jeffrey Sterling in the proper venue. If anything has so far been presented that ties the alleged crimes to the Eastern District of Virginia, it’s not apparently clear what that is. It may be that the government had intended to use Risen’s testimony to establish venue in CIA’s home judicial district, but even there, he lives in Maryland and his office in is District of Columbia, as the government had just stipulated.

So they called the investigative Special Agent’s hairdresser.

And citing no precedent for this means to establish venue for an espionage case, the prosecution got Julia P to testify she had read a nationally released book that disclosed classified information in the same city where the trial is taking place.

Judge Brinkema then interjected, “how did you obtain the book?” It might have been either Borders or Barnes & Noble, Julia P explained. When pressed, she said it was probably in Alexandria or Arlington.

But it might have been in Bowie, Maryland, because her boyfriend lives there.

As Julia P pointed out, there are Barnes & Nobles all over.

On cross-examination, the defense asked her to clarify this, whether she knew where she bought the book. “It was probably Virginia, but it might have been Bowie,” she repeated. “You don’t remember whether you bought the book in Virginia or Maryland?” the defense asked again to be sure.

When she was dismissed, Julia P responded with the same refreshing voice, “Thank you!”

Note, of a fairly large jury pool, not a single potential juror had read Risen’s book. But to Julia P’s great credit, she has.

I’m anticipating that the venue jury instructions are going to be mighty interesting.

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The Jeffrey Sterling Trial: Merlin Meets Curveball

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Here’s my latest post  from the Jeffrey Sterling trial at ExposeFacts.org, I describe how a top CIA officer — one who works in counterproliferation — used “curveball unironically,” even while presenting information that raised new concerns for me about Operation Merlin.

English nuclear blueprints“Very often you get a curveball thrown at you.”

When Bob S, a longtime CIA operations manager working on Weapons of Mass Destruction described the ambiguity common on CIA operations as getting a “curveball” thrown at you in Wednesday’s testimony at the Jeffrey Sterling trial, he surely didn’t mean to reference the Iraqi fabricator who, under the pseudonym “Curveball,” lied about Saddam Hussein having mobile bioweapons labs, thereby playing a key role in CIA’s dodgy case to support the Iraq War.

Nevertheless, several people in the courtroom laughed that a senior CIA official working on WMD could ever use the term, Curveball, and not realize he was, at the same time, invoking one of CIA’s most embarrassing failures, one directly tied to Bob S’ work.

And while Bob S’ testimony made no mention of Iraq — at least not explicitly — his testimony did, at times, seem to confirm defense lawyer Edward MacMahon’s opening argument quip that the CIA was using this criminal case “to get its reputation back.” The better part of Wednesday’s testimony involved Bob S walking the court through one set of cables relating to the Merlin operation (though surely not all the ones pertaining to Zach W, the witness who lost his confidence when asked about Risen’s book on Tuesday), showing how slow and, the implication is, careful the operation was. At one point, as part of a very extended review of James Risen’s chapter on Operation Merlin stating which paragraphs Bob S claimed were true, which incorrect (though in some areas his claims about accuracy might be rebutted by the CIA cables), and which Bob S found to be “overstated,” the witness judged, “We have demonstrated that we did this very carefully.”

But even the timing of the operation raises questions about its efficacy. The CIA started this operation in summer 1996, at a time when (according to national lab scientist Walter C, who testified Wednesday) they believed Iran was a “nascent proliferator.” It took 9 months to reverse engineer a functional design from the intelligence a second Russian asset had provided, until April 1997. The national lab spent 8 months developing flaws and testing them, until late 1997. After that, a set of US experts “Red Teamed” the blueprints, looking for flaws; they only found 25% of the flaws but nevertheless were able to build something workable from the plans in 5 months, in May 1998. It then took over a year to get approval to use these things and get export control approval. There’s no reason to believe the Iranians could work as quickly as the US Red Team. Nevertheless, the US spent 3.5 years setting up the first offer for something that a Red Team was nevertheless able to use within 5 months.

Then there are really curious problems with the story, as told.

For example, according to Walter C and Bob S’ testimony, the CIA and national lab were very intent to build something that looked like a Russian schematic, complete with gaps in information that might arise from Russia’s compartmented nuclear development system (for some reason they had no concern that this would identify the other Russian asset involved in the operation, whose knowledge tracked that gap). In addition, purportedly, they were trying to hide that the Russian called Merlin at the trial — who had a post office box set up to correspond with potential targets, presumably in the US, and who emailed potential targets from the US — was in the US. In spite of both these details, however, they insisted on keeping the parts list — on what was supposed to be a Russian schematic reconstituted from a Russian lab — in English.

Under cross-examination Walter S admitted he had never seen a Russian schematic with English parts list. This led to a question from the defense about why the national lab had a Red Team whose sole job it was to find flaws in nuclear diagrams. “Why do you [meaning, presumably, the lab] have expertise in detecting flaws, all for deception?” The prosecution objected to this, the defense responded, “You opened the door,” but nevertheless Judge Brinkema sustained the objection after a lawyer’s conference. The CIA — or the nation’s weapons labs — have a system of Red Teams that test nuclear dodgy blueprints, but even though the government presented that information, the defense can’t force witnesses to explain why they have one.

The defense was more successful asking why the labs believed Iran had a fire-set program when, by 2007, the CIA judged (in a National Intelligence Estimate released to the public, though that was not explained to the jury) Iran had no nuclear weapons program. Expert Walter C said he was “only vaguely” aware of this assessment, which is rather incredible given the heated debate that ensued when the NIE judgement was released.

Within the context of the trial, perhaps this information didn’t raise real questions about what exactly the government believed it was doing (perhaps one of the plans was to give Iran a list of parts that intelligence agencies could then track the purchase of, which might be far easier to do if the parts are in the US). Perhaps all this (especially the unrebuttable claims about the accuracy of Risen’s reporting) is helping the CIA get its reputation back. But against the context of what else the public record shows CIA was doing at the time, it’s not clear how this restores CIA’s credibility on WMD.

For example, in late 2004, an officer also working in the counterproliferation division of CIA sued for wrongful termination, claiming that — starting in 2000 — his supervisors had ordered him to suppress intelligence because it conflicted with the Agency’s existing assessment of the country’s WMD program. While the earliest reporting on the suit — from none other than James Risen — made clear that some of this suppressed intelligence pertained to Iraq’s WMD program from the period leading up to the Iraq War, court documents filed after that 2007 NIE claim that the first report this former CIA officer’s supervisors asked him to suppress in 2000 pertained to Iran’s nuclear program, the same year as the Merlin operation.

Then there’s what has come to be known as the “laptop of death,” a laptop dealt to US intelligence in 2004 rather remarkably containing everything you’d need to claim Iran had a nuclear weapons program, including plans for a “detonation system.” Colin Powell rolled it out in 2004 as one of his last acts in the Bush Administration. Since then, the Iranians have been trying to prove it’s a fake, with increasing success of late. Nevertheless, that material has formed a significant part of the case supporting Iranian sanctions.

Finally, there’s another operation the CIA rolled out, in 2003, to “get its reputation back.” On June 25, 2003, on the evening before George Tenet had to testify to Congress about why the US had found no WMD in Iraq, CIA hailed the claims of an Iraqi nuclear scientist, Mahdi Obeidi, who claimed to have stashed a blueprint and working parts from an Iraqi centrifuge in a hole in his backyard since 1991. The story was riddled with internal contradictions, which didn’t stop Obeidi from having the almost unparalleled luck among Iraqi WMD scientists of settling in the vicinity of CIA headquarters. One of the oddest parts of Obeidi’s story is that the blueprints, purportedly developed in Iraq by Iraqis from German plans — which CIA briefly posted on its website, then took down — were in English.

On April 30, 2003, less than two months before CIA would roll out those nuclear blueprints in English (and at a time when US government officials were already working with Obeidi), Condoleezza Rice called New York Times‘ editors to the White House and persuaded them not to publish Risen’s story about Operation Merlin, in which (we now know) a Russian parts list rather curiously written in English were dealt to Iran back in 2000. Rice actually went further; she asked Times editor Jill Abramson to make Risen stop all reporting on this topic.

Which brings us to one more detail presented on Wednesday that may not actually help CIA get its reputation back. In 2011, the government hinted that the real problem with Risen’s story was that other US adversaries would learn that CIA was fronting a Russian scientist to deal them dodgy blueprints; Risen’s book does suggest the plan may have been used again. In testimony on Wednesday, Bob S confirmed that. This top counterproliferation official revealed that between 2001 and 2003, CIA had used the Russian dubbed Merlin to approach “other countries believed to be interested in WMD.” More troubling still, a March 11, 2003 cable introduced into evidence revealed that — after Iran had not taken the bait at all back in 2000 — CIA had started to try again with Merlin to reach out to Iran. In 2003, at a time when many worried an invasion of Iran would quickly follow the dodgy imminent invasion of Iraq, the CIA attempted to dump flawed nuclear blueprints into Iran’s hands via their asset, Merlin.

None of these other details will be presented to the jury, and even key details like the NIE judgment won’t come in as evidence with enough context for it to affect the jury’s deliberations in this case. But the way in which newly-revealed details about how Operation Merlin resonates with other dubious CIA claims made around the same time does present another likely motive, aside from the motive of revenge the government claims animated Sterling, to explain why leakers might go to James Risen in 2003 with concerns about the CIA operation.

In Risen’s affidavit to this court fighting his subpoena, he said he “made the decision to publish the information about Operation Merlin” because the case against Iraq “was based on flawed intelligence about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, including its supposed nuclear program.” He cited a 2005 report that “described American intelligence on Iran as inadequate to allow firm judgments about Iran’s weapons programs.” And he noted the “increasing speculation that the United States might be planning for a possible conflict with Iran, once again based on supposed intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction.” Clearly, in Risen’s mind, this Iranian operation might tie into what he was learning and reporting about the Iraq debacle.

Again, none of this is likely to help Jeffrey Sterling. As Judge Leonie Brinkema noted yesterday, all the government has to do is prove Sterling is one of Risen’s sources, regardless of however many other sources he might have, motivated for whatever reason.

But the CIA seems to believe this tediously presented information helps it get its reputation back, helps explain the operation that appears so dubious in Risen’s book.

For listeners who know the full extent of CIA’s dodgy record on WMD, it does not.

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Coverage from the Jeffrey Sterling Trial

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I’m covering the beginning of the Jeffrey Sterling trial this week with ExposeFacts.org. This post lays out the opening arguments from yesterday, showing how circumstantial the government’s case is. More interesting, if I do say so myself, is this post on how one of the CIA officers who testified yesterday started losing his cool as matters got to James Risen’s book.

Zach W — the third CIA officer, who played a key role in setting up Operation Merlin before he handed the Russian off to Sterling — came off less impressively. Because the public had no visual cues because he (like the other two officers) testified behind a screen, his voice and overly-helpful answers recalled Vizzini, the Princess Bride character who dies in a battle of wits. The government used Zach W to explain how Operation Merlin came about, to get him to deny having spoken with James Risen, and to disclaim any concerns about the operation, But on cross-examination, he hurt the government’s case in three ways:

  • He presented contradictory evidence about the Russian’s knowledge of the blueprints dealt to Iran
  • His demeanor started crumbling when the defense pointed out where he’d fit in Risen’s book
  • The defense demonstrated that in both functional position and language, Zach W was a closer fit to the focalization and language used in Risen’s book than Sterling is

[snip]

Zach W’s demeanor started as very confident and overly helpful. He always answered “yes” or “correct” to questions, and at one point got ahead of the prosecution’s questions, leading the defense to object. As someone who had been in the CIA since the 1980s, he had the air of telling how hard things used to be before Google.

But his confident demeanor started crumbling soon after the cross examination started. The government had ended its questioning by asking if he knew Risen. “I know who he is, I never talked to him,” Zach W answered. When asked again if he had ever talked to him, he answered, no, twice.

Then under cross-examination, the defense got him to repeat his description of how he worked with the Russian to make himself available to Iranians by sending letters. When Zach W was asked if he sent the Russian to conferences, he said he was reluctant to say without material in hand to check. The defense then asked when he read the book. Zach W sighed audibly. They walked through the passage describing a case officer working with the Russian to reach out to the Iranians. In response to a question about that, Zach W answered, for the first time, “mmm hmmm.” “I’m sorry, you have to say yes or no,” Judge Brinkema responded. You are that case officer being referenced, the defense asked. “To some degree it does,” Zach W responded, “it seems more precise in targeting, just saying.”

Then the defense led Zach W through how the blueprints were discussed, either as “blueprints,” “firing set,” or “fire set”  in the CIA cables and the book. “Firing set is something you’d use,” the defense asked after getting Zach W to say he didn’t know how the Russian described the part. “That’s what we were talking about,” Zach W responded. The defense pointed to another instance, “fire ring set.” For the second time, Zach W answered, “mmm hmmm.” “You have to say yes or no,” Judge Brinkema reminded again.

After laying out all the cables Zach W had written that use the same language that appears in the book, the defense then turned to the cable Zach W wrote about the meeting in San Francisco. He pointed to the description of Sterling, the Russian, and his wife, going to wine country. This was something the prosecution had said only Sterling knew about. When asked if the cable talked about wine country, Zach W once again answered “mmm hmmm.”

Today’s main witness, Bob S, tried to explain that Zach W would have had no way of knowing that the wine country trip went to Sonoma, though (as I’ll write later) he was not at all credible on that front.

Thus far, the government’s main witnesses aren’t coming off all that impressively.

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DC’s Elite: Let Our General Go!

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At almost precisely the moment the FBI started investigating who was pestering Tampa Bay socialite Jill Kelley, an investigation that would lead to the resignation and investigation of David Petraeus, John McCain called for an investigation into top Obama officials leaking details of covert ops to make themselves look good.

Outraged by two recent articles published by the New York Times, which exposed the extent of U.S. involvement in cyberattacks made against Iran and the White House’s secret ‘Kill List,’ John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) took to the Senate floor to admonish the administration, and accuse it of widespread disregard for national security.

“The fact that this administration would aggressively pursue leaks by a 22-year-old Army private in the Wikileaks matter and former CIA employees in other leaks cases, but apparently sanction leaks made by senior administration officials for political purposes is simply unacceptable,” McCain said.

Now, McCain is outraged! that former top Obama official David Petraeus is getting the callous treatment given to those being investigated for leaks.

U.S. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) today released the following statement on the handling of the investigation into former CIA Director David Petraeus:

“While the facts of the case involving General David Petraeus remain unknown and are not suitable for comment, it is clear that this investigation has been grievously mishandled.

“It is outrageous that the highly confidential and law enforcement-sensitive recommendation of prosecutors to bring charges against General Petraeus was leaked to the New York Times. It is a shameful continuation of a pattern in which leaks by unnamed sources have marred this investigation in contravention to fundamental fairness.

“No American deserves such callous treatment, let alone one of America’s finest military leaders whose selfless service and sacrifice have inspired young Americans in uniform and likely saved many of their lives.”

And of course, McCain had no problem when the first story about poor Petraeus’ treatment appeared in December, quoting lots of McCain’s buddies calling for justice! for Petraeus.

McCain (and his sidekick Lindsey) are not the only ones rending their garments over the injustice of a top Obama official being investigated for leaking classified details to make himself look good. Jason Chaffetz keeps complaining about it. And Dianne Feinstein took to the Sunday shows to declare that Petraeus has suffered enough. Richard Burr apparently made false claims about how the Espionage Act has been wielded, of late, even against those whose leaks caused no harm.

Golly, you’d think all these legislators might figure out they have the authority, as legislators, to fix the overly broad application of the Espionage Act.

Meanwhile, Eli Lake — who launched the campaign to Let Our General Go last month — has an odd story complaining about Petraeus’ treatment. To Lake’s credit, he mentions — though does not quote — how Petraeus celebrated John Kiriakou’s guilty plea. Here’s what Petraeus said then about the importance of respecting your vows to secrecy:

It marks an important victory for our agency, for our intelligence community, and for our country. Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.

Lake also suggests Paula Broadwell’s job — writing fawning biographies of the man she was fucking — was the same as Bob Woodward’s.

What’s more, Broadwell herself was writing a second book on Petraeus. When Broadwell — a graduate of West Point — was writing her first biography of him, she was given access to top secret information covering the period in which Petraeus commanded allied forces in Afghanistan. This arrangement is common in Washington for established authors. Sources for Bob Woodward, whose books often disclose classified information that is provided to him through semi-official leaks, are not investigated for betraying state secrets.

Maybe it is, maybe Woodward is nothing more than a power-fucker. But it obscures the key difference (which should not be true but is) that when the White House sanctions a book, they get to sanction self-serving leaks for it.

Finally, Lake misstates something about selective treatment.

Senior officials such as Petraeus, who serve at the highest levels of the national security state, are almost never punished as harshly as low- and mid- level analysts who are charged with leaking. When former CIA director John Deutch was found to have classified documents on his unsecure home computer, he was stripped of his security clearance and charged with a misdemeanor. 

An even better example — one not mentioned at all — is when Alberto Gonzales was found to have kept a CYA file, full of draft OLC memos and notes from a briefing on the illegal wiretap program, in a briefcase in his house. He resigned at the beginning of that investigation (and it has never been clear how much that played a role in his resignation; there are many interesting questions about Gonzales’ resignation that remain unanswered). But he suffered no consequences from keeping unbelievably sensitive documents at his house, aside from being denied the sinecure all other Bush officials got.

That said, that’s true of a lot of people in sensitive positions. Of the 40 witnesses who might be called against Jeffrey Sterling, for example, 6 have been found to have mistreated classified information (as has Sterling himself); that includes his direct supervisor while at CIA as well as 3 others cleared into the Merlin op (and I’m certain that doesn’t include Condi Rice, whose testimony the AIPAC defendants would have used to show how common leaking to the press was, nor does it include one other witness I strongly suspect has been involved in another big leak case). CIA withheld that detail from DOJ until right before the trial was due to start in 2011. But it does offer at least one metric of how common mistreating classified information is.

The prosecution of it, of course, is very selective. And that’s the problem, and David Petraeus’ problem, and Congress’ problem.

Yet that won’t ensure that Congress does anything to fix that problem with the means at their disposal, legislating a fix to stop the misuse of the Espionage Act. That’s because they like the overly broad use of it to cudgel leakers they don’t like. Just not the ones they’re particularly fond of.

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Rules on Leaking for Generals and CIA Directors

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1) If you leak who-knows-what to your mistress, you might actually get prosecuted (or at the very least, prosecutors and/or FBI Agents will leak to the press that they recommended you be prosecuted but the Attorney General has been stalling on that decision).

The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of theC.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

[snip]

Mr. Holder was expected to decide by the end of last year whether to bring charges against Mr. Petraeus, but he has not indicated how he plans to proceed. The delay has frustrated some Justice Department and F.B.I officials and investigators who have questioned whether Mr. Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Mr. Holder has led an unprecedented crackdown on government officials who reveal secrets to journalists.

The protracted process has also frustrated Mr. Petraeus’s friends and political allies, who say it is unfair to keep the matter hanging over his head. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote to Mr. Holder last month that the investigation had deprived the nation of wisdom from one of its most experienced experts.

2) If you leak highly classified information that makes the Administration look good to friendly Hollywood producers, not only won’t you be prosecuted, but if an Inspector General employee in turn leaks that you leaked that information they’ll get investigated.

More than two years after sensitive information about the Osama bin Laden raid was disclosed to Hollywood filmmakers, Pentagon and CIA investigations haven’t publicly held anyone accountable despite internal findings that the leakers were former CIA Director Leon Panetta and the Defense Department’s top intelligence official.

Instead, the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office is working to root out who might have disclosed the findings on Panetta and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers to a nonprofit watchdog group and to McClatchy.

3) If you’re Obama’s favorite General and you leak unbelievably sensitive information about America and Israel ushering a new world of cyberwarfare, you’ll lose your security clearance but then everyone will forget about it.

Legal sources tell NBC News that the former second ranking officer in the U.S. military is now the target of a Justice Department investigation into a politically sensitive leak of classified information about a covert U.S. cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

According to legal sources, Retired Marine Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has received a target letter informing him that he’s under investigation for allegedly leaking information about a massive attack using a computer virus named Stuxnet on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Gen. Cartwright, 63, becomes the latest individual targeted over alleged leaks by the Obama administration, which has already prosecuted or charged eight individuals under the Espionage Act.

This is all very confusing.

Apparently there are rules about leaking classified information and President Obama’s Administration is more aggressive about enforcing those rules than any administration ever.

Except if you’re a top National Security official.

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Chuck Grassley Questions Why DOD Inspector General Cannot Report on Senior Official Leaks

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Chuck Grassley just released a scathing criticism of the DOD Inspector General Report one the Pentagon’s cooperation with the makers of Zero Dark Thirty.

A draft of the report, which got leaked to Project on Government Oversight in June 2013, reported that Leon Panetta had disclosed Top Secret information. But when the report got released shortly thereafter, the damning information on Panetta had been suppressed. The IG later went after the employee who provided a copy of the draft report to Congress.

All these issues led Grassley to ask his staffers to investigate the IG Report. In the final assessment of it, Grassley called the report a “second-class report that is not worth the paper on which it was written.”

But that’s not the most stunning part of his report.

Grassley reveals that DOD has a “long-standing Department policy mandating the removal of sensitive information” from IG Reports prior to publication. That policy requires that “all derogatory information pertaining to unauthorized disclosures by senior officials be removed from the report.” Grassley explains how this served to protect former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director  Leon Panetta and current Under Secretary for Defense Michael Vickers.

Senior officials, including former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director and DOD Secretary Leon Panetta and Under Secretary for Intelligence (USDI) Michael Vickers, were accused of allegedly making unauthorized disclosures of highly classified information on the Osama bin Laden raid.

[snip]

When top government officials, like the Secretary and Under Secretary of Defense, stand accused of misconduct, there should be some accountability to the public. Thus far, in this matter, there has been none. By comparison, former Deputy Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Deutch mishandled highly classified information and got hammered for doing it. He lost his clearance for six years and came close to prosecution. Unlike the Zero Dark Thirty leaks, the matter was dealt with effectively and aired in public. Those lessons seem to have been forgotten.

Grassley doesn’t say it, but the revisions in the report may also have protected one other senior DOD official: Admiral William McRaven. The initial draft of the report had referred to McRaven “purging” photographs members of the raid had taken of Osama bin Laden (he did so after several outlets FOIAed the pictures). The word “purge” and reference that he had sent the pictures to another agency (CIA) was eliminated in the final draft.

Grassley called for “independent review and possible modification” of the policy of suppressing details that reflect badly on senior officials. If he’s serious about the need to hold senior officials accountable, Grassley should probably adopt stronger language than “possible modification.”

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Shorter the Neocons: Let Our General Go!

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Neocon scribes Eli Lake and Josh Rogin published a piece asserting that the man whose COIN theories failed in 3 different war theaters is making a comeback undermined only by his extramarital affair.

By all outward appearances, David Petraeus appears to be mounting a comeback. The former general landed a job at powerhouse private-equity firm KKR, has academic perches at Harvard and the University of Southern California and, according to White House sources, was even asked by the President Barack Obama’s administration for advice on the fight against Islamic State. Yet it turns out that the extramarital affair that forced him to resign as director of the Central Intelligence Agency is still hanging over him.

Yet that’s not actually what their article describes. Instead, it explores why it is that the FBI investigation into David Petraeus for leaking information to his mistress, not fucking her, is ongoing.

Curiously, these two journalists exhibit no shred of curiosity about why the GOP Congress continues to investigate the Benghazi attack, an investigation that started exactly contemporaneously with the Petraeus leak investigation — or, for that matter, why all the investigations have avoided questions about Petraeus’ training failures in Libya.

Instead, they see in this particular 2 year counterintelligence investigation a conspiracy to silence the fine General.

[Retired General Jack] Keane questions whether the Petraeus FBI probe lasting this long may be driven by something other than a desire to investigate a potential crime. “It makes you wonder if there is another motivation to drag an investigation out this long,” he said.

[snip]

Petraeus allies both inside and outside the U.S. intelligence community and the military express a concern that goes beyond a criminal probe: that the investigation has caused Petraeus to trim his sails — that one of the most informed and experienced voices on combating terrorism and Islamic extremism is afraid to say what he really thinks, a sharp juxtaposition to Bob Gates and Leon Panetta, two former defense secretaries who have not been shy about criticizing Obama’s national security team.

[snip]

But what does seem surprising, to many who know and have worked with him, is that the views he has been expressing are so at odds with what he has said and implied in the past.

For example, when Petraeus was inside Obama’s administration in his first term, he advocated for more troops inside Afghanistan and made the case for arming Syrian moderate forces. But when asked this summer about that effort, Petraeus demurred and focused on Obama’s new $500 million initiative in 2014 to train Syrian rebels. “I strongly support what’s being done now,” he said. “Half a billion dollars is a substantial amount of resourcing to train and equip.”

Petraeus’s rhetoric on Iraq and Syria differs sharply not only from his past positions, but from that of many retired generals of his generation and of his biggest supporters.

To support their conspiracy theory, they not only cite noted leaker Pete Hoekstra, but Lake and Rogin ignore a whole load of other details, such as how long leak investigations normally take. Even the investigation into and punishment of Sandy Berger — which they cite — took 18 months from leak to guilty plea, plus another two years until he relinquished his license. The investigation into Donald Sachtleben — or rather, the UndieBomb 2.0 leak that Sachtleben was singularly held responsible for — took 15 months, even with his computer  in custody and Sachtleben on bond most of that time. John Kiriakou was charged almost 4 years after his leaks, and two after Pat Fitzgerald was appointed to find a head for the CIA. Thomas Drake was indicted over 4 years after the investigation into Stellar Wind leaks started and almost 3 years after the FBI raided the homes of those associated with Drake’s whistleblowing. Jeffrey Sterling was indicted 7 years after FBI first started looking into leaks to James Risen.

Leak investigations can take a long time. That’s not a good thing, as they leave the targets of those investigations in limbo through that entire time. Petraeus is, comparatively, doing better off than most of the others I named above. Indeed, in paragraph 7, Lake and Rogin reveal that Petraeus, in fact, has gotten preferential treatment, in that his security clearance hasn’t been stripped.

To wit: Petraeus is ostensibly being investigated for mishandling classified material and yet he retains his security clearance.

Even Hoss Cartwright had his security clearance stripped for allegedly leaking details of StuxNet to the press. Heck, based on this detail, one has just as much evidence to support a counter-conspiracy theory that Petraeus is getting lax treatment because he’s got damning information on Obama (not one I’m adopting, mind you, but it does illustrate what one can do with an absence of evidence).

If warmongers like Jack Keane want to make drawn out leak investigations a cause, they would do well to make it a principle, not a singular conspiracy theory used to explain why David Petraeus isn’t being more critical of Obama’s efforts not to escalate into another failed counterinsurgency.

Is it possible, after all, that Petraeus is silent because he realizes what a hash he has made of the Middle East?

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New Email Release Shows: Peter King Demanded an Investigation To Find Journalist’s Sources Like Peter King

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On May 7, 2012, then Associated Press reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo broke the story of a thwarted al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) underwear bomb plot. Within a day, several news outlets — including ABC News, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times — reported that the culprit was actually a Saudi agent.

On May 9, 2012, Representative Peter King called for an FBI investigation to determine who leaked details of the plot to the AP.

I’m calling on the FBI to do a full of investigation of how this was leaked, who’s leaking it. And also the CIA to do an internal investigation.

[snip]

This came from such a small circle.  Nobody in Congress knew about it. My understanding is very few of anyone in the FBI even knew about it. And yet so much of it was leaked to the Associated Press a week ago, and now someone’s leaking like a sieve. This is really dangerous to the national security.

DOJ did launch the investigation King demanded. In fact, in early 2013, DOJ obtained the phone records of 20 AP phone lines — affecting 100 AP journalists — without giving the outlet an opportunity to challenge the subpoena. The investigation and excessive subpoena has marked one of the low points of the Obama Administration’s crackdown on journalism.

The investigation ended last September when former FBI bomb expert Donald Sachtleben pled guilty to serving as a source to one of the AP journalists. Prosecution documents revealed that, because the government had already been investigating Sachtleben for child porn charges, they already had the means to find his communications with the AP reporters, without compromising the sources of 98 other journalists.

The investigation King demanded ended up needlessly compromising the reporting of a slew of journalists.

That’s remarkable, because — as emails newly released by The Intercept‘s Ken Silverstein show — Peter King himself was talking to journalists about the story.

120507 Shane King email

Within hours of the first AP report, Scott Shane, of the New York Times, emailed CIA’s press office asking them to clarify something King told the NYT, based on the briefings King had gotten about the plot. “‘They said that we don’t have to worry about him anymore, that we don’t have to worry about this guy. That was the exact language they used,’” Shane recounted King explaining, on the record. “Can you help me interpret what Rep. King is saying…?”

As King explained to Wolf Blitzer two days after this conversation with NYT journalists — even as he was calling for an investigation into the the people leaking classified information — he had been in a number of Top Secret briefings on the plot. King complained that “so many people are talking about something which is still classified.”

Representative King’s office did not return a request for comment.

Shane explained to ExposeFacts over the weekend that King’s comment led him to wonder whether — and then confirm — the bombing culprit was really an infiltrator. “I do remember being genuinely puzzled on May 7 by King’s remark that he had been told we ‘don’t have to worry about’ the guy and trying hard that night to get officials to clarify,” Shane described. “The next morning it suddenly occurred to me that the guy might have been an agent,” he continued. “I finally got someone to confirm in the afternoon and we posted a story.”

On May 8 — even before King started calling for an investigation into those leaking classified information — Shane and Eric Schmitt reported, “The suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.”

Shane emphasized that he doesn’t know whether King meant to imply that the culprit was an infiltrator. “I actually have no idea whether King himself at that point knew the guy was a double agent — that was so sensitive that they may have omitted it from his briefing.” But by sharing details from the briefings he had gotten, King provided a clue that led the NYT to learn and report an important new detail about the plot.

That’s not to say Peter King should be investigated for leaking to journalists — as he himself insisted should happen — or lose his access to classified information on the House Intelligence Committee. On the contrary, it’s a good example of how journalists work — and should work.

On the contrary, it shows why the first response to solid national security reporting should not be to demand an investigation. Even an innocuous comment may lead journalists to ask the right questions to flesh out the story. Those kinds of conversations should not be criminalized … even in spite of what King demanded.

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Government Continues to Freak Out about the Intercept, Raise Its Profile

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The Intercept had a story on the content of the government’s terrorist watchlist yesterday — I’ll have more to say about the content later. But the government — largely National Counterterrorism Center — response to it shows the government getting increasingly unhinged about the Intercept and other journalistic models based on leaked documents.

First, in an apparent effort to shift the focus away from the 200,000 people on the terrorist watchlist with no tie to a known terrorist organization and to the fact that the watchlist has ballooned in response to the UndieBomb attempt in December 2009, NCTC gave the scoop to AP’s Eileen Sullivan.

The Associated Press dropped a significant scoop on Tuesday afternoon, reporting that in the last several years the U.S. government’s terrorism watch list has doubled.

A few minutes after the AP story, then consisting of three paragraphs, was posted at 12:32 p.m., The Intercept published a much more comprehensive article.

NCTC even admitted they spoiled the scoop after the Intercept’s John Cook called them on it.

After the AP story ran, The Intercept requested a conference call with the National Counterterrorism Center. A source with knowledge of the call said that the government agency admitted having fed the story to the AP, but didn’t think the reporter would publish before The Intercept did. “That was our bad,” the official said.

Asked by The Intercept editor John Cook if it was the government’s policy to feed one outlet’s scoop to a friendlier outlet, a silence ensued, followed by the explanation: “We had invested some quality time with Eileen,” referring to AP reporter Eileen Sullivan, who the official added had been out to visit the NCTC.

“After seeing you had the docs, and the fact we had been working with Eileen, we did feel compelled to give her a heads up,” the official said, according to the source. “We thought she would publish after you.”

This is bone-headed on several levels. In the future, all government agencies will get less time to comment on the Intercept’s upcoming stories, which — given how much classified information they’re sitting on — could really hurt their interests.

And NCTC burned Sullivan badly; she’s a decent reporter, but NCTC has made it clear they consider her their reporter. (NSA has done this similarly but less obviously with some superb beat reporters, leaking them partial stories then exploiting those partial stories to undercut real attention on the documents.)

Then, the government gave CNN’s Evan Perez an “Exclusive” to trumpet their determination that there’s probably someone else leaking documents to the Intercept.

The federal government has concluded there’s a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN.

Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden’s leaks.

The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.

The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.

Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter “it seems clear at this point” that there was another.

Government officials have been investigating to find out that identity.

Note, there’s almost certainly an error here, presumably on the part of the government. There appears to be a second NSA leaker, leaking to Jacob Appelbaum. But there’s also the person who gave the Intercept the NCTC documents, which is almost certainly an entirely different person.

Of course, there’s not just one new leaker. In DC there are new leakers everyday, even people who share classified documents. What Perez’ sources mean is OMIGOD there’s another person giving That Outlet documents.

The government has chosen to make it a Big Story that at least one more person has decided to leak the Intercept documents.

Ultimately, I think the Known and Suspected Terrorist documents the Intercept got are badly overclassified and also should be released in whole to permit debate and oversight. The documents show some good things (and some areas where NCTC has implemented questionable demands from Congress such as that they biometric everything). They also show the system lacks controls. Absent real discussion, it appears NCTC and the rest of this bureaucracy hasn’t gotten the right balance on watchlisting.

But rather than engaging in that debate, the government first tried to pre-empt it, burning Sullivan in the process, and then screaming so loud as to raise the value of such leaks.

Dumb.

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Under Clapper’s Continuous Monitoring CIA Could Continuously Monitor SSCI on CIA Network

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As I pointed out the other day, the CIA IG Report on spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee appears to say the egregious spying happened after John Brennan told Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss on January 15 CIA had been spying on SSCI.

Agency Access to Files on the SSCI RDINet:

Five Agency employees, two attorneys and three information technology (IT) staff members, improperly accessed or caused access to the SSCI Majority staff shared drives on the RDINet.

Agency Crimes Report on Alleged Misconduct by SSCI Staff:

The Agency filed a crimes report with the DOJ, as required by Executive Order 12333 and the 1995 Crimes Reporting Memorandum between the DOJ and the Intelligence Community, reporting that SSCI staff members may have improperly accessed Agency information on the RDINet. However, the factual basis for the referral was not supported, as the author of the referral had been provided inaccurate information on which the letter was based. After review, the DOJ declined to open a criminal investigation of the matter alleged in the crimes report.

Office of Security Review of SSCI Staff Activity:

Subsequent to directive by the D/CIA to halt the Agency review of SSCI staff access to the RDINet, and unaware of the D/CIA’s direction, the Office of Security conducted a limited investigation of SSCI activities on the RDINet. That effort included a keyword search of all and a review of some of the emails of SSCI Majority staff members on the RDINet system.

With that in mind, consider this passage of James Clapper’s July 25, 2014 response to Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden’s concerns about Clapper’s new ongoing spying on clearance holders.

With respect to your second question about monitoring of Members of Congress and Legislative Branch employees, in general those individuals will not be subject to [User Activity Monitoring] because their classified networks are not included in the definition of national security systems (NSS) for which monitoring is required.

[snip]

Because no internally owned or operated Legislative branch network qualifies as a national security system, UAM by the Executive Branch is accordingly neither required nor conducted. To be clear, however, when Legislative Branch personnel access a national security system used or operated by the Executive Branch, they are of course subject to UAM on that particular system.

CIA’s spying on SSCI took place on CIA’s RDI network, not on the SSCI one. SSCI had originally demanded they be given the documents pertaining to the torture program, but ultimately Leon Panetta required them to work on a CIA network, as Dianne Feinstein explained earlier this year.

The committee’s preference was for the CIA to turn over all responsive documents to the committee’s office, as had been done in previous committee investigations.

Director Panetta proposed an alternative arrangement: to provide literally millions of pages of operational cables, internal emails, memos, and other documents pursuant to the committee’s document requests at a secure location in Northern Virginia. We agreed, but insisted on several conditions and protections to ensure the integrity of this congressional investigation.

Per an exchange of letters in 2009, then-Vice Chairman Bond, then-Director Panetta, and I agreed in an exchange of letters that the CIA was to provide a “stand-alone computer system” with a “network drive” “segregated from CIA networks” for the committee that would only be accessed by information technology personnel at the CIA—who would “not be permitted to” “share information from the system with other [CIA] personnel, except as otherwise authorized by the committee.”

It was this computer network that, notwithstanding our agreement with Director Panetta, was searched by the CIA this past January,

Presumably, those limits on access should have prevented CIA’s IT guys from sharing information about what SSCI was doing on the network. But it’s not clear they would override Clapper’s UAM.

Remember, too, when Brennan first explained how this spying didn’t qualify as a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, he said CIA could conduct “lawfully authorized … protective … activity” in the US. Presumably like UAM.

I have no idea whether this explains why CIA’s IG retracted what Feinstein said had been his own criminal referral or not. But I do wonder whether the CIA has self-excused some of its spying on SSCI in the interest of continuous user monitoring?

If so, it would be the height of irony, as UAM did not discover either Chelsea Manning’s or Edward Snowden’s leaks. Imagine if the only leakers the Intelligence Community ever found were their own overseers?

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