By Jim Geragthy
Monday, April 10, 2023
There are often harmful consequences when government
agencies that deal with national security “stovepipe” intelligence — that is, keep it to
themselves and don’t share it with other agencies. For the U.S. government to
operate effectively when dealing with little-known or little-noticed threats or
attempting to persuade or influence other governments, multiple government
agencies need to know who’s doing what, where, and when, and coordinate their
actions.
But when agencies don’t stovepipe sensitive or classified
information, and, say, the Central Intelligence Agency shares a lot of what it
knows with the Pentagon, they can end up with problems like the one currently
wracking the highest levels of the U.S. government, as the Wall Street Journal lays out:
The intelligence leak is shaping up
to be one of the most damaging in decades, officials said. The disclosure
complicates Ukraine’s spring offensive. It will likely inhibit the readiness of
foreign allies to share sensitive information with the U.S. government. And it
potentially exposes America’s intelligence sources within Russia and other
hostile nations.
This is really bad news. I don’t begrudge anyone for
choosing to pay attention to other news stories, but this is a far-reaching and
consequential development that will probably get less attention than it
deserves, because it doesn’t involve Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or
Ron DeSantis, or fit neatly into any partisan narrative.
The documents — really, photographs of classified
documents — took an odd and circuitous route to the public’s eyes. Bellingcat,
a Netherlands-based investigative-journalism group, lays out the sequence:
The existence of the documents was
first reported by the New York Times after a number of Russian Telegram
channels shared five photographed files relating to the invasion of Ukraine on
April 5 — at least one of which has since been found by Bellingcat to be
crudely edited.
These documents appeared to be
dated to early March, around the time they were first posted online on Discord,
a messaging platform popular with gamers. . . .
Bizarrely, the Discord channels in
which the documents dated from March were posted focused on the Minecraft
computer game and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity. They then spread to
other sites such as the imageboard 4Chan before appearing on Telegram, Twitter
and then major media publishers around the world in recent days.
At some point, someone altered the images to make it
appear that Russia was inflicting way more casualties upon Ukraine than the
other way around. It is unclear whether this was the work of the original
leaker, or someone later:
There was only one image in common
between the Telegram and 4chan posts: a map that showed a number of statistics,
including the cumulative number of KIA (killed in action) soldiers on the
Russian and Ukrainian sides through the course of the war.
However, the numbers on these two
sources differed, with the first source (4chan) showing more Russian losses
than Ukrainian, and the second source (Donbass Devushka) the reverse.
A closer examination of the second
image, with the much higher Ukrainian KIA numbers, that was posted on Telegram
shows crude image manipulation.
As well as the later posting time
and far blurrier resolution, the numbers are out of alignment. Spacing between
some numbers and letters is also too large to be consistent with the font.
It therefore seems that either the
Donbass Devushka Telegram account, or a previous source posted by this account,
altered the original image to paint the Ukrainian losses as heavier than in the
original assessment.
Who’s got Gorilla Glue on their desk? Apparently, that’s
a weird clue about who took the pictures: “Creases can be seen on the documents
with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the
background of those dated from early March. This appears to indicate that at
least some of the documents were photographed in the same location.”
Every major news organization has found the documents and
is picking through them for scoops. In the middle of last month, a grim account from Washington Post reporters Isabelle
Khurshudyan, Paul Sonne, and Karen DeYoung described “a palpable, if mostly
unspoken, pessimism from the front lines to the corridors of power in Kyiv, the
capital.”
This morning, the Post reports that the intelligence further
confirms this grim outlook, that the Ukrainians are facing “alarming shortfalls
in Western-supplied weaponry — especially ammunition and air defense”:
According to one of the documents,
a late February assessment from the Defense Department’s Joint Staff, Ukraine’s
“ability to provide medium range air defense to protect the [front lines] will
be completely reduced by May 23. UKR assessed to withstand 2-3 more wave
strikes” from attacking Russian missiles and drones.
“As 1st Layer Defense munitions run
out, 2nd and 3rd Layer expenditure rates will increase, reducing the ability to
defend against Russian aerial attacks from all altitudes,” the classified
document says.
Up across our northern border, the Globe and Mail reports that one of the
documents indicates Russian hackers conducted a successful cyberattack on a
Canadian natural-gas-pipeline company — but at least some Canadians are saying
the attack never happened:
Hackers working with Russia’s spy
agency claimed earlier this year to have disrupted operations at a Canadian
natural-gas pipeline company, inflicting costly damage on its infrastructure,
leaked Pentagon documents say.
The Globe and Mail has been unable
to independently verify the allegations in the U.S. intelligence documents, the contents of which have
also been reported by U.S. media.
There is no evidence to date that a
natural-gas pipeline company in Canada suffered such an attack, which the
Pentagon documents suggest occurred earlier this year.
Timothy Egan, president and chief
executive of the Canadian Gas Association, which represents the natural-gas
delivery industry, said he’s following the matter closely – after being
contacted by an American journalist on the same documents. However, he said he
is not aware of any compromised gas distribution infrastructure in this country
or of an attack on it by hackers.
These documents may be entirely true, or they may be a
mix of disinformation, misinformation, errors, rumors, and just plain mistakes.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the documents
reveal that the South Korea government was wary about shipping ammunition to
the U.S., for fear that we would turn around and give the ammunition to
Ukraine:
[President Yoon Suk Yeol’s]
secretary for foreign affairs, Yi Mun-hui, told his boss, National Security
Adviser Kim Sung-han, that the government “was mired in concerns that the U.S.
would not be the end user if South Korea were to comply with a U.S. request for
ammunition,” according to a batch of secret Pentagon documents leaked through
social media.
The secret report was based on
signals intelligence, which meant that the United States has been spying on one
of its major allies in Asia.
I don’t think any U.S. ally should be that shocked that
the NSA intercepts their internal communications, but this revelation is an
embarrassment, nonetheless. After Edward Snowden revealed so many secrets about
the NSA’s spying programs, a report indicated that the U.S. had tapped the cell phone of German chancellor Angela
Merkel.* The U.S. government wants to know what allied leaders are really
thinking and saying behind closed doors; it is reasonable to assume that our
allies are attempting to do the same to our leaders.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that the documents indicate that the Mossad,
Israel’s intelligence agency, has been attempting to influence Israel’s own
domestic politics:
An intelligence report about
Israel, meanwhile, has sparked outrage in Jerusalem. The report, produced by
the CIA and sourced to signals intelligence, says that Israel’s main
intelligence agency, the Mossad, had been encouraging protests against the
country’s new government – “including several explicit calls to action,” the
report alleges.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office
responded on the Mossad’s behalf Sunday morning, calling the report “mendacious
and without any foundation whatsoever.”
“The Mossad and its senior
officials did not — and do not — encourage agency personnel to join the
demonstrations against the government, political demonstrations or any
political activity,” the statement said. “The Mossad and its serving senior
personnel have not engaged in the issue of the demonstrations at all and are
dedicated to the value of service to the state that has guided the Mossad since
its founding.”
Hey, now! Intelligence agencies are only supposed to
meddle with and destabilize other countries’ governments, not their own!
A Feb. 28 document assesses
“pathways” for Israel to provide “lethal aid” to Ukraine, providing
hypothetical situations that might drive Israel from its balancing act between
Kyiv and Moscow. Marked “secret,” the document also suggests what Israeli
weapons could be transferred to Ukraine, such as Israel’s Javelin equivalent and
other missile systems. The analysis says the “most plausible” scenario is that
Jerusalem adopts a Turkish model under U.S. pressure. Like Ankara, it would
mean that Israel “sells lethal defense systems or provides them through
third-party entities” while openly advocating for peace and “offering to host
mediation efforts.” Alternative scenarios consider how Moscow’s support of
Iran’s military programs or proxy efforts in Syria could drive Israel to
provide Ukraine with “lethal aid.”
The world knew that helping Ukraine repel the invading
Russians was a high priority of the Biden administration. What we didn’t know
was all the different ways that the U.S. was exerting pressure on allies to get
them to send arms to Ukraine.
*Hey, when has a German chancellor ever created trouble
for the United States, right?
A Serious Setback for Fox News in the Defamation
Lawsuit
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Paul
Clement, the former solicitor general under George W. Bush and the lawyer
representing Fox News in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion
Voting Systems Corporation and a similar $2.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed
by Smartmatic.
Shortly before I left on vacation, Fox News received a
setback in the case, as Delaware Superior Court judge Eric Davis rejected Fox
News’ argument that statements at issue were opinion and thus protected by the
First Amendment and not a basis for a defamation lawsuit. In an 81-page ruling, Davis laid out 19 examples where
figures such as Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Lou Dobbs, and
others made statements on-air that asserted “facts and [were] therefore not
protected under the opinion privilege.”
“The evidence does not support that [Fox News network]
‘conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting,” Judge Davis wrote. “Like in
Cianci v. New Times Pub. Co., where the Second Circuit held that defendant’s
failure to reveal facts and plaintiffs side of the story was not disinterested
reporting, FNN’s failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the
public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not
disinterested.”
This is not the final ruling in the case, although this
may increase pressure on Fox News to settle. The jury will be asked to consider
whether the Fox News journalists, or the network as a whole, acted with actual
malice — knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth — in broadcasting
the claims, and whether damages are due.
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