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Back to the Bad Old Days of Mutually Assured Destruction

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Posted: July 16th, 2017

By Steven L. Hall

Steven L. Hall retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2015 after 30 years of running and managing intelligence operations in Eurasia and Latin America.  Mr. Hall served as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, the small cadre of officers who are the senior-most leaders of the CIA's Clandestine Service.  Most of Mr. Hall's career was spent abroad, overseeing intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact.

Reports late last week revealed that the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya also included a Russian-American lobbyist named Rinat Akhmetshin, a former member of the Soviet military who may have ties to Russian counterintelligence. The Cipher Brief asked Steve Hall, a former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, to help put the methods used to arrange this meeting in the larger context of Russian intelligence tradecraft and influence operations against the United States. In his view, Russian intentions and goals remain the same as they ever were – “the question now is simply: how are [they] going to do it?”

The Cipher Brief: Is this meeting, in your opinion, an example of intelligence collection tradecraft?

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