Dead Drop: August 10

THE DUST-BINNEY OF HISTORY:  In July of last year a group of contrarian former government officials who call themselves “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” (VIPS) came out with a theory that the Democratic National Committee emails were not hacked by Russians, but instead were leaked by an insider. The theory was picked up by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and soon given credence by President Donald Trump.  Not long thereafter, as The Dead Drop told you last November,  one of the “VIPS” leaders, former NSA official Willian Binney, was granted an audience with then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to explain why he thought the entire U.S. intelligence community was wrong and VIPS were right about how the Russians were not to blame. Now comes a report in ComputerWeekly.com from veteran British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell which says a “British IT manager and former hacker” ran a disinformation campaign that duped VIPS into thinking there were no Russian fingerprints on the theft of DNC emails. Campbell says that Binney has changed his mind on the evidence he previously thought proved that the pilfering of the DNC emails was an inside job.  But if VIPS or Fox News have issued any corrections, we have missed them.

PROTECTING THE CROWN JEWELS: CNN.COM posted a lengthy story late last week about the increased challenges of protecting foreign defectors who once spied for the United States and who have been resettled on domestic soil.  Former CIA Director, General Michael Hayden, was quoted as saying that when he would speak to graduating classes of Agency case officers he would remind them “of the moral responsibility they had to anyone they would recruit.” Joe Augustyn, a retired CIA officer who once ran the Agency’s defector program, said high-level defectors “have been the crown jewels of human intelligence collection.”  Augustyn noted that modern technology makes it harder than ever to assure defectors of safety and anonymity. We suspect Russia’s recent poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom has increased the pucker factor for former KGB and GRU officials in the United States.