By John R. Schindler
Monday, July 25, 2016
The recent Wikileaks dump of 20,000 emails belonging to
the Democratic National Committee has caused political sensation and scandal on
a grand scale. These internal communications reveal nothing flattering about
the DNC or Hillary Clinton, who is set to be anointed as the Democrats’
presidential nominee at their party convention in Philadelphia that gets
underway with fanfare today.
Wikileaks has thrown an ugly wrench into Hillary’s
coronation. DNC emails reveal a Clinton campaign that’s shady and dishonest, not
to mention corrupt. Its secret dealings with Hillary’s opponents—whether Bernie
Sanders or Donald Trump—have been distasteful and possibly illegal. To say this
is an unflattering portrayal of Team Clinton is like saying the Titanic had issues with ice.
The ramifications of this massive leak are already
serious. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the embattled DNC chair, has been forced to
tender her resignation in advance of the party conclave in Philadelphia, while
Senator Sanders, who’s been revealed as the target of much aggressive DNC
attention during the Democratic primary campaign, stated he was “not shocked
but I’m disappointed” by the Wikileaks revelations. The Democrats are anything
but united now as they prepare to take on Donald Trump and the Republicans.
On the eve of the four-day Democratic convention
extravaganza, this data-dump could not have been timed better to damage Hillary
and her efforts to move back into the White House this November. Although it’s
doubtful that leaked RNC internal emails would make any more pleasant a read
for the public, Clinton will emerge from this tarred with the indelible brush
of corruption and collusion with her party’s leadership to fix the Democratic
presidential nomination.
Wikileaks has delivered as promised on its public threats
of damaging Team Clinton with hacked emails. Although the DNC can’t deny that
many of the leaked messages appear authentic—they wouldn’t have forced the
chair’s resignation if they were fake, obviously—there remains the important
question of how the vaunted “privacy organization” got its hands on them.
It turns out there’s hardly any mystery there. It’s no
secret that the DNC was recently subject to a major hack, one which independent
cybersecurity experts easily assessed as being the work of Russian intelligence
through previously known cut-outs. One of them, called COZY BEAR or APT 29, has
used spear-phishing to gain illegal access to many private networks in the
West, as well as the White House, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff last year. Another hacking group involved in the attack on the DNC,
called FANCY BEAR or APT 28, is a well-known Russian front, as I’ve
previously profiled.
These bears didn’t make much efforts to hide their DNC
hack—in one case leaving behind a Russian name in Cyrillic as a signature—and Kremlin attribution has been
confirmed by independent analysis by a second cybersecurity firm.
The answer then is simple: Russian hackers working for
the Kremlin cyber-pilfered the DNC then passed the purloined data, including
thousands of unflattering emails, to Wikileaks, which has shown them to the
world.
This, of course, means that Wikileaks is doing Moscow’s
bidding and has placed itself in bed with Vladimir Putin. In response to the
data-dump, the DNC has said as much and the Clinton campaign has endorsed the
view that Moscow prefers Donald Trump in this election, and it’s using
Wikileaks to harm Hillary. This view, considered bizarre by most people as late
as last week, is being taken
seriously by the White House—as it should be.
In truth, to anyone versed in counterintelligence and
Russian espionage tradecraft, Wikileaks has been an obvious Kremlin front for
years, and it’s nice to see the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream
media suddenly come around to this view—which I’ve stated publicly since 2013,
based on my long experience working against Russian security agencies in the
SpyWar.
Wikileaks came to international prominence in 2010 when
it released online a quarter-million classified State Department cables that
had been stolen by disgruntled Army Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. This
was a huge black mark for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and unleashed
a global scandal.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006, ostensibly as a “privacy
organization” and in reality as a vanity project by the Australian hacktivist
Julian Assange, who has been hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since
mid-2012, on the run from rape charges in Sweden. It’s unclear when the group’s
ties to the Kremlin were forged, but it’s obvious they existed by the time Wikileaks
took center stage in the Edward Snowden case in mid-2013.
The role of Wikileaks in the Snowden saga would be
difficult to overstate, not least since Assange was the one who counseled the
American IT contractor to seek sanctuary in Russia. Snowden left Hong Kong for
Moscow in June 2013—where he remains—based on Assange’s advice and accompanied
by Sarah Harrison, a top Wikileaks official and Assange intimate.
Why Assange recommended that the NSA contractor on the
lam seek Putin’s protection is an important question. As I explained last year:
Only in Russia would Ed be safe,
Julian counseled, because there he would be protected by Vladimir Putin and his
secret services, notably the FSB. One might think that seeking the shelter of
the FSB—one of the world’s nastiest secret police forces that spies on millions
without warrant and murders opponents freely—might be an odd choice for a
“privacy organization.” But Wikileaks is no ordinary NGO.
Why Assange knew Russia would take
in Snowden—it could be a big political hassle for Moscow—is a key question that
any counterintelligence officer would want answered. Was Julian speaking on
behalf of the FSB or did he just “know” Ed could obtain the sanctuary plus
protection he sought?
Then there’s the revealing fact that Assange has wanted
FSB protection for himself too:
While holed up in London, Assange
“requested that he be able to choose his own Security Service inside the
embassy, suggesting the use of Russian operatives.” It is, to say the least,
surpassingly strange that a Western “privacy advocate” wants Russian secret
police protection while hiding out in a Western country.
There’s no doubt that Assange considers Putin’s highly
unsavory secret services to be his friends. Why is a very good question that
anybody who’s looking into Wikileaks ought to ask.
All the same, Assange’s affection for the Kremlin and its
intelligence agencies is nothing new and was something I wrote about fully
three years ago, as the Snowden story was breaking. This revolved around Israel
Shamir, an anti-Semitic nutcase who’s been in the Wikileaks orbit for many
years, serving as a close confidant to Assange and his go-to guy on Russian
matters. As I elaborated back in July 2013:
So who is Israel Shamir? That’s not
an easy question to answer with much certainty. His official biography states
that he was born in the Soviet Union in 1947 and emigrated to Israel in 1969,
but little of his curriculum vitae stands up to detailed scrutiny. He admits to
having something like a half-dozen different identities, complete with aliases.
Of greatest interest here is that, before he became famous for his Wikileaks
links, he was best known as a neo-Nazi holocaust denier in European circles.
Which is a pretty rare thing for a Jew and Israeli citizen to get mixed up in.
Shamir, operating under several
names, is noted for his anti-Semitic vitriol and is fond of extolling the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and hanging out with Nordic neo-Nazis. His
views are so strange and vehement that many have wondered if Shamir’s is actually
an agent provocateur on behalf of some intelligence service. Jewish scholar
Norman Finkelstein, known for his own pro-Palestinian views, who crossed paths
with Shamir more than once, called him a “maniac,” adding, “He has invented his
entire personal history. Nothing he says about himself is true.” In all,
Shamir’s a pretty odd choice as Wikileaks’ go-to guy for Russia.
Although Wikileaks has semi-denied that Shamir is on
their payroll, Shamir himself has been abundantly clear who he works for. The secret
services had this oddball pegged as a KGB agent way back in the 1980s, and
given Shamir’s pro-Moscow rants to the present day there seems no reason to
doubt he’s still friendly with Russian special services.
Since Assange hasn’t exactly been shy about his
pro-Moscow views—including having his own show on RT, the Kremlin agitprop
network—why Western reporters haven’t been digging into this mess until about
four days ago is an important question. Especially since Assange years ago
dropped any pretense of objectivity, slavishly following the Moscow line on a
wide array of issues such as Syria which have nothing to do with “privacy.”
That Assange and Wikileaks are surrogates for Putin is
now obvious, and in truth has been for some time, as the media has been
gradually noticing. Their operation to take down Hillary Clinton—about whom
Assange, in an exclusive interview with the Observer in 2014, said: “it is
pretty clear that we are witnessing the birth of a Google-military-surveillance
complex”—is merely the final straw.
I counseled this a year ago: “Wikileaks should be treated
as the front and cut-out for Russian intelligence that it has become, while
those who get in bed with Wikileaks—many Western ‘privacy advocates’ are in
that group—should be asked their feelings about their own at least indirect
ties with Putin’s spy services.” It’s better to see the Western media get there
late rather than never.
There’s nothing new about Wikileaks or its key role in
the Kremlin’s international propaganda apparatus. Back in 1978 the magazine
Covert Action Information Bulletin appeared to expose the secrets of Western
intelligence. Its editor was Phil Agee, a disgruntled former CIA officer who
had gotten into bed with Cuban and Soviet intelligence (his KGB covername was
PONT). CAIB was in fact founded on the direction of the KGB and for years
served as a conduit for Kremlin lies and disinformation that seriously harmed
Western intelligence.
While CAIB presented itself to the public as a
truth-telling group of “whistleblowers,” in actuality it was a KGB front,
though few magazine staffers beyond Agee knew who was really calling the shots
and paying the bills. It’s best to think of Wkilieaks as no more than CAIB
updated for the Internet age. Since senior Kremlin security officials have
recently admitted that Snowden is their agent, and has shared American secrets
with them, Ed is merely today’s Phil Agee—though Phil at least had the sense to
defect to sunny Havana rather than snowy Moscow.
The important part of this story is that Russian
intelligence, using its Wikileaks cut-out, has intervened directly in an
American presidential election. This was something even the KGB was sheepish
about doing at the height of the Cold War, but Putin fears nothing in Obama’s
Washington, as his increasingly brazen actions against Americans plainly
illustrate.
The most damaging aspect to the DNC leak is the certainty
that Moscow has placed disinformation—that is, false information hidden among
facts—to harm the Democrats and the Clinton campaign. Disinformation is a
venerable Russian spy trick that can be politically devastating to its target.
Disinformation is most effective when it plays upon
essential truths. Since Hillary really is corrupt and less than honest, and the
DNC actually has done her bidding in shady ways, lies that amplify those themes
will be readily believed by many Americans. It’s obvious that Moscow prefers
Trump over Clinton in this election, which ought not surprise given the
important role of Putin-friendly advisors in the Trump campaign, and what
better way to help is there than to discredit Team Clinton?
It’s apparent already that some of the most salacious
emails in the DNC mega-dump are fake—as is to be expected. It’s normal Russian
spycraft to place juicy fake messages among a lot of genuine ones. Here we need
rigorous independent analysis of this latest Wikileaks operation to assess
what’s real and what’s made up by somebody in Moscow.
I’m anything but a Hillary fan, as my extensive reporting
on her crimes and lies in EmailGate can attest. However, I am far more troubled
by the naked interference of the Kremlin and its spy agencies in American
democracy, which is a threat to our freedoms beyond anything the Clintons might
do. Every American should demand thorough investigation of the DNC leak and
it’s well past time for the mainstream media to examine closely what Wikileaks
really is—as I’ve been doing for years. It’s satisfying to see my reality-based
counterintelligence analysis of Wikileaks finally being endorsed by the media,
but I would have preferred if they had paid attention earlier and the current
election-year disaster with DNC emails had been avoided.
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