When former intelligence officer Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer wrote about the “dark arts” of intelligence being used for “personal reasons” in his 2010 book Operation Dark Heart, few people imagined that this was presaging what is nothing less than the deconstruction of our representative republic by its own national security bureaucracy. Make no mistake that the shenanigans of the informal networks within the West’s intelligence, counter-terrorism, and law enforcement communities can be discounted as “politics as usual”.
Although the scriptural history of the modern left holds as its article of faith that J.Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigations was merely a tool of political oppression, the overwhelming majority opinion of America’s elected representatives and the citizenry thought otherwise. The specter of the Hoover-run FBI’s involvement in domestic political spying occurred within the same timeframe when Soviet communist subversion was widely believed to be a genuine, existential national security threat. In the 1930s through the 1960s, the “pink” communist sympathizing bureaucrats, college professors, labor agitators, Hollywood actors and screenwriters, and the like, that the FBI investigated and kept meticulous files on, were truly a part of a communist network established by Russia in the United States (as proven in the now-declassified Project Venona papers) and were rightly considered genuine threats to national security.
This is not the case with the Obama administration’s use of not only America’s own intelligence agencies but also allied Western intelligence agencies to further the left’s domestic political agenda. No one in the Obama administration, or in the intelligence agencies they deployed, truly believed that respected journalists like CBS’ Sharyl Atkinson or Fox News’ James Rosen represented threats to national security. Nor does the current leftist clamor to suddenly make the well-known former businessman, television celebrity, and now President Donald Trump into a patsy and an asset for, alternatively, Russian intelligence or its sworn enemy Ukraine hold sway with any but the weak-minded. Rather, this circus of the absurd reveals a panoply of horribles committed by individuals and administrators in the West’s now far-flung intelligence, counter-terrorism, and law enforcement apparatus to use their resources, capabilities, sources, and methods upon the very societies that they were created to defend, from foreign use of those types of resources, capabilities, sources, and methods.
It is not the purpose of this piece to rehash or recount the various shadowy figures and techniques of the spies and intelligence assets Josef Mifsud, Anya Turk, Stefan Halper, and the like. directed at members of the Trump campaign and the new administration as part of the officially codenamed “Operation Crossfire Hurricane”. But the fact that the current faux inquiry into the Trump administration is STILL using the instruments of spycraft for domestic political hatchet jobs should be horrifying. Indeed, even the more recent presidential impeachment efforts were launched in the House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee, rather than in the House Judicial Committee where impeachments usually originate, was done specifically so that all the tools of spycraft could be used to hide their wielders from scrutiny by the American voting public. This included the House reviewing evidence in special rooms that are hardened against electronic surveillance, known as Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities (“SCIF”), and using national security secrecy rules designed for shielding spies to keep significant portions of the impeachment process from public scrutiny.
The purpose of this piece is to point out the danger posed by the fact that the West’s national security apparatus was successfully corrupted by the Obama administration and was re-tasked inward against both journalists and opposition political figures. The gravity of this threat to the Republic is vastly underestimated and continues to this very moment.
The tools of intelligence are no less weapons of war than are missiles, tanks, aircraft carriers, and mechanized infantry divisions. Americans have placed at the disposal of these spy organizations vast technologies of surveillance that make even the concept of individual privacy laughable. Successive administrations have empowered them with sophisticated technologies and techniques to falsify information and fabricate “evidence” to deceive foreign enemies with disinformation. They have trained operatives skilled at manipulating unsuspecting individuals into engaging in actions that the latter would otherwise have no personal inclination to do and would not do, unless so prompted and tempted with these sophisticated techniques by highly-trained operatives. We know the extent of these techniques from historical public records.
In the 1950s, in “Operation Mockingbird”, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists, writers, artists, and intellectuals to oppose communism using propaganda and “dirty tricks”. Personal secrets were secured by J. Edgar Hoover about politicians, celebrities, journalists, and community leaders, which were then used to “control” their actions. When a secret could not be uncovered, one could be either engineered or even simply fabricated. Those who cannot be bought off can be extorted. These “dirty tricks” or, as Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer dubbed them “dark arts”, are a necessary component of warfare against a foreign state power, when they are directed in the interests of the American society they seek to defend. They are weapons of war. They may be weapons of psychological warfare, but warfare is warfare nonetheless, and it is every bit as dangerous as battle tanks or missiles.
However, these weapons of war were not intended and should not be used domestically in a free society. Only in tyrannies are tanks, infantry divisions, missiles, and aircraft directed against a country’s own citizenry or political opponents to protect corrupt regimes with no legitimacy other than raw force. Nor should the weapons of intelligence and espionage be used by a democracy against its own citizens in this fashion, while still pretending to be considered a free society or a representative government with legitimacy.
The former head of Indian Intelligence Research & Analysis Wing, Vikram Sood, wrote that, “An intelligence organization is also a danger when it begins to feel indispensable to its government and becomes arrogant. It becomes particularly dangerous when it sets its own agendas or priorities”. Professional intelligence agencies pose a danger to their own governments, and Mr. Sood cites the difficulties the Soviet Union faced with its intelligence services playing a hand in deposing Soviet leaders. Mr. Sood could have been prophetically writing about the scheming factions within American intelligence agencies to sabotage the election and the administration of Donald Trump on behalf of the departing Obama administration and in furtherance of the agencies’ own arrogant, institutional agendas.
The breadth and depth of the American intelligence agencies’ betrayal of our free society are breathtaking. It involved the counter-terrorism department of the FBI under director James Comey. It involved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) courts. It involved former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. It ensnared personnel and resources of the allied countries of Great Britain and Australia. It utilized assets from near peer competitors such as Russians and Ukrainians, as well as electronic surveillance and government personnel on loan from their home departments to the National Security Council. It was a web of social, personal, and political connections within the security apparatus that was assembled and deployed for domestic political influence.
When the modern United States intelligence organizations were established following World War II, certain safeguards were put in place to prevent the domestic misuse and abuse of these weapons of war. Their founders had just survived a total war with one police state, Nazi Germany and were facing an existential threat from the police state of a former ally of convenience, the Soviet Union. They were all too aware of the dangerous power of spycraft, which is equivalent to all other weapons of war, and sought to protect the freedoms and representative government of the America they had just fought so hard to protect. In furtherance of this aim, they erected a strict legal wall between foreign “spy work” and domestic “law enforcement” to keep the spycraft bag of dirty tricks for use only overseas.
After September 11, 2001, when it became known that the hostile foreign assassins and saboteurs of Al Qaeda were able to slip through the cracks between our foreign intelligence apparatus (spy network) and domestic law enforcement (law enforcement agencies), politicians of that era chose to tear down those legal barriers between the domestic and foreign intelligence bureaucracies. The spies came back home and brought their spycraft toolkit with them. In doing so, they disregarded the wisdom of their World War II era founders, and, in doing so, placed our representative form of government in greater danger than any threat posed by Al Qaeda “terrorists”. They put a sharpened back edge on our intelligence and law enforcement tool, making it into a weapon that was dangerous to their user as their target. They turned that tradecraft into the foundation of a police state.
Wasting no time at all, the very next administration took advantage of this dangerous tool and deployed it domestically for its own partisan political agenda. There is a Libertarian saying that “you should not endorse a government power that you would not want wielded by your worst political enemy”. This aphorism is on full display here.
If America values its liberties at all, this must be curbed, and it must be done by law. Strict new limiting statutes–complete with harsh penalties–must be enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Trump to deter this type of abuse from ever happening again. Our national security apparatus must never again be used to spy on another political campaign, to destroy another president’s administration or to surveil another innocent American citizen. Further, the politicians need to write these new laws not only to protect themselves from being the target of a dangerous tool in the wrong hands, but to protect the basic elemental building block of our self-governing Republic, the American voter. It is a certainty that disavowing the corrosive tools of the police state will eventually make America less safe and secure from some terrorist attack. However, we must hearken back to the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin that those who exchange their precious liberty for some security will, in the end, have neither. Americans do not wish to have total safety and security at the cost of imprisoning our entire society.
A good start would be to abolish the FISA courts, which have proven to be a failed experiment ever since their creation in the 1970s. Next, we must restore the legal walls forbidding the exchanges and partnerships formed between the agencies designated to handle the dirty issues of foreign spycraft and those tasked with domestic law enforcement. The protections of Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of illegal searches and seizures, must be restored specifically for legal American citizens. Neither intelligence agencies nor apparatus nor law enforcement should be allowed to read an American citizen’s mail or email, record and track their movements, documents, personal papers and effects, including banking and financial records, without a particularized warrant signed by an American judge that cites why a particular individual person is under suspicion. Laws should also be written to close the backdoor loophole, by which our spy agencies cooperated with friendly intelligence agencies of foreign countries, such as Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia, to subcontract out to these foreign agencies the task of surveilling American citizens in ways that the American apparatus could not.
We must return to both the spirit and the letter of the United States Constitution, the very one that all the intelligence agents and soldiers swore an oath to uphold and protect against all enemies foreign and domestic. Americans must be able to trust that their spy services and their law enforcement services serve American citizens, not the institutional interests of the agencies themselves and not the current occupants of the seats of power. Otherwise, the United States of America will only be the world’s largest banana republic.
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A half dozen independent forensics exams later, with uninvited government IP addresses definitively identified as pathways into my computers, with forensic testimony from a former NSA specialist, with a sworn statement of confirmation from a former FBI Unit chief, and with a former federal agent confessing to being part of the government’s illegal spy operation against me and many other U.S. citizens, it is reasonable to ask: Is the Department of Justice (DOJ) alarmed by the shocking injustices and crimes? Is DOJ interested in holding accountable the federal agents who are responsible? Is DOJ concerned with making sure the activity has stopped and does not happen to others?
Apparently not.
Going on seven years now, the DOJ remains precisely where it started: in huddle down and cover up mode. Rather than acknowledge the forensic evidence and dig deeper to identify all of the agents who touched the illegal operation and all of the victimized Americans, and rather than being incensed by the confession of a former federal agent who admitting spying on me, DOJ has used unlimited taxpayer dollars to block pursuit of the facts.
In a just or fair system, the DOJ would not have searched for legal excuses to dismiss the lawsuit I filed to bring the abuses to light… in fact, there would be no need for me to pursue a civil court case because the DOJ would have already prosecuted the guilty parties.
Yet here we are.
The fact is, DOJ is the entity that is supposed to administer law and order in our country. DOJ should be prosecuting the guilty federal agents. Yet DOJ officials were the ones who employed and tasked the guilty federal agents.
As Senator Ron Johnson pointed out in a recent letter to the DOJ and FBI, both agencies have stonewalled for six years refusing to answer basic questions about the intrusions into my computers. Instead, when they have responded at all, it has been to avoid the questions and replace them with answers to questions never asked.
It is no surprise to me that the Inspector General recently flagged FBI and DOJ officials for egregious misconduct involving government surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page, that an FBI lawyer allegedly doctored documents to wiretap Page, that DOJ has had to admit at least two wiretaps against Page should never have been granted, and that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court belatedly ruled the wiretaps were invalid. All of that is a little late. Page cannot recover his privacy or his reputation.
We could have seen this coming had we paid attention to the red flags and demanded real accountability. We already knew DOJ secretly subpoenaed phone records of Associated Press reporters and surveilled then-Fox News reporter James Rosen. We had discovered that our own Director of National Intelligence James Clapper gave false testimony to Congress denying the government was conducting mass surveillance of tens of millions of Americans. We knew, thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that our intel community had granted itself wide latitude to spy on U.S. citizens suspected of nothing at all through tactics such as “incidental” surveillance. We knew that communications of U.S. political figures were captured by intelligence officials and improperly leaked to the press. Incredibly, we even knew the CIA had gotten into computers of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, though CIA head John Brennen initially denied it. Brennan and Clapper eventually apologized for the lapses. A little late for that, too.
It is becoming more obvious than ever how all of this fits together. Also obvious is the likelihood that the abuses we know about today are only a small slice of what may have really occurred — and what may continue to occur. It would explain the otherwise inexplicable double standards we are growing accustomed to. DOJ leaves no stone unturned pursuing the likes of Carter Page as a Russian spy only to have their suspicions revealed to be a figment of their imaginations. Yet provable crimes happening right under their own noses, sometimes committed by their own agents, are conveniently deposited down a memory hole like they never even happened.
It is in the hands of an independent news media to hold the powerful accountable. They could press until the abuses are addressed, the perpetrators held accountable, and the guilty brought to justice. But there is no such interest.
I have a feeling that if Trump administration intel officials ever got accused of illegally spying on journalists and hundreds of citizens through an illegal operation via computers, even without the forensics we have, even without the confession we have, it would still make international news and the media would not let go of it until heads really did roll. As for me? I was unlucky on two counts: I got targeted by the government in the first place, and I was spied on by an administration whom the press did not wish to admit would do such an unthinkable thing.
I once read about an ancient form of government whose premise was that an orderly society was only possible if its citizens had confidence that the law would be applied equally to the poorest and richest among them. Things would devolve into chaos if the citizenry came to believe people were held to different standards or escaped accountability depending on their power or status. Considering the course of my case, it is hard to look at our system today and not wonder if we are reaching that point.
A few years ago, several members of Congress who were concerned about intelligence community abuses told me they had been convinced not to call for wholesale reforms and heads-on-a-platter by the argument that it would “undermine the public’s faith in our institutions.” I think there is a strong argument to be made that the public is losing faith in our institutions because it sees double standards and absence of accountability.
As incredible as it seems, all of our forensic proof, expert testimony and even the confession may not matter. The way the game is played, a jury may never have the chance to see any of that simply because the other side has more lawyers, deeper pockets and all the power. However, we are exhausting all avenues and remedies, looking for glimmers of hope, and continuing to expose the facts— because the fight is too important.
But we know one thing for certain: the abuses surrounding my case are deeply symbolic. It they are dismissed and forgotten, we can certainly expect more of the same.