THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: You can’t make this stuff up. If you had predicted this a year ago, we might have checked to see if you were off your meds, but this past week Russian President Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump to thank the CIA. Meanwhile, Trump supporters on Fox News compared the FBI with the KGB. And Trump told the media (again) that the Bureau was “in tatters” – minutes before getting on Marine One to fly to Quantico to praise the FBI, saying its agents are “heroes for all of us.” Earlier in the week, Putin praised Trump’s handling of the economy, spurring Trump to call Putin to thank him for noticing how he was making America great again.
THIS WEEK IN CRAZY: Infowars-lord Alex Jones’s gut is talking to him. And it is nuttier than ever. Media Matters reports that Jones told his viewers that he thinks the FBI is going to try to kill Donald Trump in the next month. “I think they're going to go ahead and make their move to kill the president. I think in the next 30 days, I think they're going to make an assassination attempt. I just – my gut – I see all of them together, they're that desperate," he said. OK, but such nonsense was limited to Infowars, right? Not exactly. Kevin Jackson, a guest on Fox News’ “Outnumbered” on Tuesday, raised the speculation that the FBI might have plotted previously to have Trump whacked.
THIS WEEK IN CRAZY (PART TWO): Infowars listeners also were treated to a conspiracy theory that asserts that the CIA hacked into a Hawaii database to create a fake birth certificate for Barack Obama. Why would the CIA do that? Infowars didn’t say. Practice, maybe.
TWIC (PART THREE): CNN Politics’ “KFILE” reports that a White House senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, Frank Wuco, is a former talk radio host who promoted conspiracy theories such as the claim that former CIA Director John Brennan is a secret Muslim.
TLDNR: There is a remarkable three-part, 12,000-plus word story in Politico this week called “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” We’d summarize it for you, but there is so much detail, intrigue and minutiae in it that we’d never finish our Christmas shopping if we tried. Near as we could follow it, the story alleges there was an Obama administration decision to spike “Project Cassandra,” a federal probe into international drug smuggling, money laundering and terrorism by Hezbollah. The accusations seem significant, but few other media outlets followed up. We chalk that up to the article being “TLDNR” — “too long, did not read.”
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST: Two years ago, in one of the earliest editions of The Dead Drop on Dec. 10, 2015, we told you about an event held in Moscow celebrating the 10th anniversary of “RT,” the propaganda artists formerly known as “Russia Today.” We noted at the time: “Speakers and panelists at the event were said to include an odd assortment of folks like “Red Ken” Livingstone, the former mayor of London; elderly CIA alum and gadfly Ray McGovern; and, oddly, former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. (ret.) Mike Flynn, who may have missed the intelligence about who is pulling the editorial strings at RT.” Back in 2015 we didn’t know just HOW ODD Flynn’s participation would turn out to be.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting/weird stuff we discovered:
- Happy (Redacted): Just in time for the holidays, the folks at Muckrock.com have published declassified redacted CIA holiday greetings to their officers in the field in 1985.
- Bad Cover: The Daily Caller tells us that Abid Awan, the Pakistani-American who handled IT matters for Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and other House Democrats (until Awan was arrested by the FBI this summer) was involved in some other questionable activity. According to the report, Awan was involved in a Falls Church, Va., used car dealership that their sources say had the markings of a money laundering operation. The story quotes a private investigator as saying that Awan “was probably operating a foreign intelligence gathering operation on U.S. soil.” The oddest part: Awan’s used car dealership was known as “CIA” - aka “Cars International A.”
NETWORK NEWS: Not a day goes by when members of The Cipher Brief Network aren’t making news. Here are just a few examples from this week:
- Handler’s Messiah: Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN that Putin treats Trump like an “asset.” Apparently, Clapper thinks Putin plays to Trump’s ego. "I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that's what he's doing with the president," Clapper told CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
- Flattery gets you somewhere: John McLaughlin, a former acting CIA director, tells U.S. News that it is not unusual that Putin would thank the U.S. for a terrorist tipoff. But it is unusual to announce it publicly.
- Make America, America Again?: Former CIA and National Security Agency Director General Michael Hayden told CNN that Donald Trump Jr.’s comments that some people don’t want to “Let America be American,” were “scary” and “an appeal to the heart of autocracy.”
- Crossing the malign: Retired 4-star Army General Jack Keane told Fox Business on Tuesday that the president must hold Iran accountable for its misdeeds. “We have got to see Iran…as the No. 1 malign actor in the Middle East,” Keane told Fox Business’ Dagen McDowell. “We have got to organize with the Sunni Arabs to push back comprehensively against Iran’s aggressive behavior.”
- “Shockingly normal”: Writing for Bloomberg Views, Admiral James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander for NATO, says that the president’s newly released National Security Strategy is a “pleasantly centrist document.”
- NY-CT-3 FOR 3: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo just named a three-person advisory panel to make recommendations on protecting the state’s airports, bridges, tunnels and other assets against terrorism. All three members of the panel are in The Cipher Brief’s network of experts. According to the New York Daily News, the panel will be chaired by Kenneth Wainstein, who was a Homeland Security adviser to President George W. Bush. The other members are former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Lisa Monaco, a Homeland Security adviser to President Obama.
- Confusion over CFIUS: John Carlin, former assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of the National Security Division, was interviewed in the National Law Journal explaining proposed changes to rules for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, including new emphasis on cybersecurity and information security.
- Where the truth lies: Newsweek’s coverage of last week’s press conference by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley regarding allegations of Iranians supplying missiles to Yemeni rebels included statements supplied by The Cipher Brief from former senior CIA officials Rob Richer and Emile Nakhleh. Richer explained that the evidence presented by Haley “is not conclusive.” Nakhleh added that "It is possible that the Houthis could have gotten those weapons from some elements within or outside Iran without the knowledge and complicity of the Iranian government.”
WHAT’S ON THEIR NIGHTSTAND?
“I’m one of those people who often reads several books in parallel, so I’ve got a couple going simultaneously. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve started Luke Harding’s new book, Collusion, detailing what is known (at least from open source material) about how Russia attacked the American presidential elections last year. For me, this is obligatory professional reading, and the book provides good context and a sort of 30,000-foot view of the entire matter – a nice breather from the bits and pieces of the story we get almost daily from the news media.
I’m also about halfway through The Future is History by Masha Gessen, which provides a fascinating window into post-communist Russia by recounting the viewpoints of several Russian citizens from very different walks of life. We usually talk about Russia from a geopolitical perspective, or we focus on Putin, but a better understanding of what Russians have been through in the years since Gorbachev is important backdrop.
Lastly, balancing out what would otherwise be a Russia-heavy diet, I read an essay or two each night from Jonathan Carroll’s most recent collection, The Crow’s Dinner. I have a love/hate relationship with Carroll’s magical realism writings. At his best, I enjoy him as much as I do Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But sometimes I feel like his novels short circuit, and I find myself angry and disappointed after the last page. I’ve never read any of Carroll’s essays before, so the jury’s still out. – Steve Hall, who retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2015 after 30 years of running and managing intelligence operations in Eurasia and Latin America.
SECURITY QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
“In theory, regulation could transform Bitcoin into something usable, but only by imposing conditions such as moving away from a completely “unpermissioned” model towards some centralization, with clearer real-world ownership and access control. That would build greater trust, although purists will argue that it comes at the price of weakened resilience.
“I suspect Bitcoin owners will find any change unacceptable for a range of ideological reasons and will consider the process of agreeing to anything at all very difficult. If so, regulators will probably freeze Bitcoin out from contact with the real-life finance sector. But that could enable other, more pragmatic cryptocurrencies to thrive; the first adopter of technology is often not the most successful.
“Whatever happens to Bitcoin, distributed ledgers and blockchain are an exceptionally important part of the future and a huge net gain for cyber security and data integrity. We should not let Bitcoin’s ups and downs distract us from that.” – Robert Hannigan, former Director of GCHQ, the UK's largest intelligence agency and NSA equivalent from 2014-17, writing in The Cipher Brief this week.
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING: Got any tips for your friendly neighborhood Dead Drop? Shoot us a note at TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com or TheCipherBrief@protonmail.com.
