Spying & Spies in the USA (merged thread)

[davidbfpo]

Zenpundit adds, in a comment on the other plot:

By some miraculous deus ex machina, the cultish, 1970’s era Iranian Marxoid terrorist group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MeK) have spent a wealth of funds to buy the lobbying services of a glittering array of former top US national security officials and general officers - despite being on the State Department’s official terrorist list.

….Among the new faces: (edited) General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009...

In what should be a national scandal, those names are not even a comprehensive list of the very influential former politicians, K Street lobbyists and Beltway law firms accepting payments to whisper in the ears of current officials in the national security community, regarding Iran, on behalf of the MeK. Not sure how it is legal to do so either, since aiding a group on the State Department’s list by providing services normally can get you hauled into Federal court pronto, if you are an ordinary American citizen. A most curious situation….

I have no brief for Iran, the regime is a dedicated enemy of the United States, but a group of exiled Iranian Marxist-terrorists who used to work for Saddam Hussein hardly have our best interests at heart.

Link:http://zenpundit.com/?p=4390

T'is a topsy-turvy world and we can trust the law to look equally on all.

[Fuchs]

I did some questioning and it appears that we have no law that forbids foreign agents to spy on private persons in Germany, but there's an interpretation of the law by lawyers that suggests this could nevertheless be criminal under § 99 StGB if said private persons are aligned with our country (~ if we oppose the Syrian government and support the Syrian opposition publicly).

The forging stuff is illegal here, too - but that wasn't mentioned in the article.

[jmm99]

German media may be different on legal cases; but US media often gives an incomplete - and therefore misleading - reading of the charges.

So, it's better to get the name from the Wash Post or the NYT; and then start Googling for the indictment or complaint, and other charging documents.

The "foreign agent registration" provisions (Counts 1 and 2) belong less to espionage law than to lobbyist law.

For the more general act - see Foreign Lobbying in the United States; and more particularly, Foreign Agents Registration Act .

According to the US Attorneys' Manual, 2062 Foreign Agents Registration Act Enforcement:

Since 1966 there have been no successful criminal prosecutions under FARA and only 3 indictments returned or informations filed charging FARA violations. ...

But, the Manual goes on:

FARA does not exhaust the federal government's response to perceived problems in this area. There are numerous other federal statutes aimed at persons loosely called foreign agents (See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 951; Public Law 893, 50 U.S.C. §§ 851-857; and 18 U.S.C. § 2386 (the Voorhis Act)).

18 USC 951(b) states:

b) The Attorney General shall promulgate rules and regulations establishing requirements for notification.

and, indeed, the Code of Federal Regulations, 28 CFR 73, so provides:

73.1—Definition of terms.
73.2—Exceptions.
73.3—Form of notification.
73.4—Partial compliance not deemed compliance.
73.5—Termination of notification.
73.6—Relation to other statutes.

Authority: 18 U.S.C. 951, 28 U.S.C. 509, 510.
Source: Order No. 1373-89, 54 FR 46608, Nov. 6, 1989, unless otherwise noted.

The last reg (73.6) provides that:

The filing of a notification under this section shall not be deemed compliance with the requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended, 22 U.S.C. 611, et seq., nor compliance with any other statute.

The net result is at least two possible "foreign agent" enforcement paths.

Regards

Mike

[davidbfpo]

Prompted by a new report, posted separately for visibility, I have merged four threads on spying and spies within the USA.

[davidbfpo]

An official DoD report 'The Expanding Spectrum of Espionage by Americans, 1947–2015', which is the report is the fourth in the series on espionage by Americans that the Defense Personnel and Security Research Center (PERSEREC) began publishing in 1992 and published in August 2017, but appeared on my Twitter feed today.
Link:https://publicintelligence.net/perse...-by-americans/

The publishers explain, so not the DoD:

The report describes characteristics of 209 Americans who committed espionage-related offenses against the U.S. since 1947. Three cohorts are compared based on when the individual began espionage: 1947-1979, 1980-1989, and 1990-2015. Using data coded from open published sources, analyses are reported on personal attributes of persons across the three cohorts, the employment and levels of clearance, how they committed espionage, the consequences they suffered, and their motivations. The second part of the report explores each of the five types of espionage committed by the 209 persons under study. These include: classic espionage, leaks, acting as an agent of a foreign government, violations of export control laws, and economic espionage.

The introduction has some gems:

Three-quarters succeeded in passing information, while one-quarter were intercepted before they could pass anything. Sixty percent were volunteers and 40% were recruited. Among recruits, 60%were recruited by a foreign intelligence service and 40% by family or friends.Contacting a foreign embassy was the most common way to begin as a volunteer.

[davidbfpo]

Classic story and hat tip to WoTR. It is within a wider article on immigrants and national security.

The FBI, too, has benefitted from the service of immigrants. A particularly striking example in the national security realm is that of Dimitry Droujinsky, the son of Russian immigrants to Palestine who later came to the United States. Droujinsky had a multi-decade career in the FBI; his specialty was impersonating KGB officers to ensnare Americans who had spied for Moscow. His career reached all the way into the late 1990s when he came back from retirement to help bring to justice David Sheldon Boone, a former National Security Agency official who had sold sensitive documents to Moscow in the last days of the Cold War. Boone had Russian-language training and might not have been fooled by an FBI agent who had learned his Russian in a classroom.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2018/02/th...us-hard-power/

[davidbfpo]

A report by Bill Gertz, ex-WaPo, which uses Congressional testimony as the foundation. Two small quotes:

Gone was any dedicated strategic [counterintelligence] program, while elite pockets of proactive capabilities died of neglect....We know surprisingly little about adversary intelligence services relative to the harm they can do.

Link:http://freebeacon.com/national-secur...-s-technology/

[davidbfpo]

A book review by Bruce Reidel that is titled 'Order from Chaos' which starts with:

The former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the author of 'Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence' at a critical time in our nation’s history, and he offers a crucial insight into the threat we face from a foreign adversary. His great sense of humor also makes the book a pleasure to read.

Link:https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order...ce-challenges/

[davidbfpo]

A devastating IMHO review of Steve Coll's book (see Post 37 on the Pakistani ISI thread) by Edward Luttwak, although it's real focus is the CIA (the other half of the relationship). There several illustrations why:

abysmal “tradecraft”...Raymond Davis had a bank statement listing the CIA as his employer in his car when he was arrested by local police in Lahore on January 27, 2011....the linguistic incompetence of almost all CIA analysts that really matters – an incompetence that goes right to the top....secretaries of state and generals seem to have believed that the cultures of Afghanistan are flexible, fluid and malleable..

He ends with:

ntelligence is an ancillary function, so it may be that the CIA’s systemic shortcomings are irrelevant to the preordained outcome in Afghanistan. This does not diminish the virtues of Steve Coll’s excellent book – a rem#arkable feat of extended reportage soundly constructed out of telling details and a great number of effective character portraits.

Link:https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/p...-coll-luttwak/

[davidbfpo]

Via Newsweek and based on a new audio-only book:

Now we know, according to an posthumously published book by the late David Wise, the authoritative espionage writer who died from pancreatic cancer last month. The informant, Wise writes, was Alexandr Shcherbakov, a down-on-his-luck former KGB officer who delivered the Kremlin’s dossier on Hanssen to an FBI counterspy who had pursued the case for years.

Link:https://www.newsweek.com/who-dimed-o...anssen-1196080

[davidbfpo]

I thought we'd had a post on the ex-USAF lady, a linguist, who appears to have defected to Iran, the search function fails to help. So as a stop gap here is a February 2019 BBC report:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-47230150

So here is an article that appears to have considerable help from "informed persons" in the USA. The title suggests Iran is preparing it's options to say the least.
Link:https://news.yahoo.com/as-trump-escalates-rhetoric-iran-is-making-its-own-plans-for-a-potential-war-084500212.html?