By Peter
Theroux
Tuesday,
May 30, 2023
Americans have
every reason to be angry about the successive revelations concerning the
notorious 51 former intelligence officials behind 2020’s “Russian
disinformation” letter, a statement shepherded by three former CIA directors
and drafted by former acting CIA director Michael Morell. The letter assessed
that the damning emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop were not actual evidence of
Biden family corruption, but a Russian information operation to influence the
2020 U.S. presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor. That assessment has
long since been thoroughly debunked, not least by Biden fils himself.
Congress
revealed in mid-May that, far from being the work of astute intelligence
professionals acting as concerned citizens, the letter was suborned by Antony
Blinken, at the time working for the Biden campaign. Blinken nudged Morell to
draft the letter, and Morell was quick to enlist former CIA director John
Brennan and others. This was itself a covert action to influence the 2020 U.S.
presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor.
Next we
learned that a serving CIA officer, whose job was to review the letter for
publication, used his or her position to promote the letter to gain the
signature of former officers. Kimberley
Strassel noted in the Wall Street Journal:
That a CIA official was using government time and resources to scheme
with outside partisans to assist in Mr. Biden’s victory is worthy of
termination. Consider, too, that this CIA official was better placed to know
that there was no truth to the letter’s assertion. That very day, then-DNI John
Ratcliffe—privy to all—had publicly said the intel community had nothing to
support the claim that the laptop was “disinformation.”
The
shady behavior of the 51 former officers did not end there. While Twitter and
Facebook censored the New York Post’s laptop scoop, media outlets
such as CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post breathlessly
reported the preposterous letter as factual. None of the signatories tried to
correct them. In March 2022, after the laptop had been confirmed to be genuine
and the emails the work of Hunter Biden and not the Russians, the New York
Post reached out to
the 51 to ask
for comment. Did they “feel any regret for their actions”?
Along
with Morell, nearly all of them, including the three former directors — Michael
Hayden, Leon Panetta, and Brennan — failed to respond. (You have to give Hayden
a pass, because he has not been the same since his stroke in 2019.) Testy
former director of national intelligence James Clapper responded, “Yes, I stand
by the statement made AT THE TIME, and would call attention to the fifth
paragraph.” (We’ll come to his prized fifth paragraph in a moment.) Andrew
Liepman, former deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),
offered a feckless “As far as I know I do [feel regret or stand by the
statement? It’s unclear] but I’m kind of busy right now.” David Priess, an
intelligence officer under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, had “no
further comment.” Emile Nakhleh, former senior intelligence officer, was at
least firm that “I still stand by that letter,” though his comment that “I have
not seen any information since then that would alter the decision behind
signing the letter” means he was either strenuously avoiding the news or
telling a hilarious lie.
Hiding
under their beds or lying — those were the two types of response.
Now,
let’s have a look at the letter’s fifth
paragraph:
We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the
New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine
or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our
experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a
significant role in this case.
It
doesn’t take an especially inquiring or analytic mind to wonder: Why wasn’t
this the first paragraph? Or even the only paragraph?
The rest of the letter is vague, irrelevant, and contrary to every rule of
analytic tradecraft.
“Tell me
what you know, tell me what you don’t know, and only then tell me what you
think,” was Colin Powell’s famous rule for his intelligence briefers. The first
four paragraphs of the letter are a bloviating prologue attesting to what they
know: that they are a community of deeply concerned experts who love America
more than Russia. The fourth paragraph closes with the statement that the
emergence of the emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian
disinformation operation.”
So much
for the intelligence community (IC) rule known as “BLUF” — that you put the
“bottom line up front.” In other words, why was the topic sentence not the
first sentence in the first paragraph? Because then they would have had to
identify what in fact those “classic earmarks” — note the wording, which
Congress discovered was Clapper’s own: not some but “all the
classic earmarks” — were, as applied to the laptop and its contents.
The
dithering fifth paragraph is the classic earmark of the amateur. Neither
profiles in courage nor Einsteins were our 51 formers: Their letter had to be
vague and contradictory so they could have it both ways — preposterous as
analysis, but a nice feat of propaganda.
Since
nearly half of the signatories grew up in the analytic line of the business,
and several boast of having been high-level briefers (Morell, Priess, Timothy
Kilbourn, Pam Purcilly, David Terry, and Kristin Wood), let’s look at the basic
elements of what’s expected of agency analysts.
What
is the intelligence question you are answering? This would have been: Is the Hunter Biden
laptop, and/or its contents, genuine, or is it an embellished or wholly
fabricated Russian product? Answering that would have entailed tracing the
physical origin and chain of custody of the laptop, and citing examples of
emails that appear to be hacked, manipulated, or made up.
BLUF. State your analytic conclusion
clearly and follow it directly with your strongest supporting data. If
you judge that Moscow hacked the laptop, cite examples of material on the
laptop that you assess to be phony and compare them to genuine emails. State
why they are implausible or inconsistent with the facts of Hunter Biden’s
business dealings or communications. Instead, the letter cites historical
instances of Russian misbehavior that have no immediate bearing. A GS-11
analyst’s branch chief would throw this back in his face with a terse “Try
harder” or “Not threshold!”
Sourcing. This is a basic rule that you
do not base an assessment on a single source, unless it is threat reporting.
Careful analysis will cite multiple corroborating sources — one term of art is
“a body of reporting.” The letter cites zero sources. It makes references to
Russian intentions to meddle but does not cite a single detail from any of the
emails.
Collection
gaps. This is
the humbling “tell me what you don’t know” part of the Powell rule. “Diplomatic
and media reporting suggest a coup might be imminent in Country X, but we lack
insight into the plans and intentions of senior military officers. Similarly,
overhead [satellite] collection and HUMINT reporting, as of X date, have turned
up no indications that the army’s order of battle has changed.”
Collection
posture. This
is how you assure your boss that you have a plan to fill those collection gaps.
“We’re tracking vernacular open-source media and social-network platforms in
Country X . . .”
Avoid
weasel words. The
51 formers trample this rule by resorting to “perhaps” and “suspicious” (not in
any analyst’s vocabulary) and combining illogic with a lack of evidence.
When
analysts are dealing with troubling levels of uncertainty, they have many tools
to keep them honest, among them devil’s advocacy, analysis of competing
hypotheses, and the time-honored “key assumptions check”: What assumptions are
we making and what are they based on? Which ones must we keep or throw out? For
example, what challenges the assumption that the emails are genuine? And if it
is established that Hunter’s emails were not his but were hacked or created to
make the Bidens look bad, do we have a basis for identifying the Russians as
the culprits? Could there be any other explanation?
Of
course, intelligence officers who aren’t trying to be honest
wouldn’t make use of those tools.
Most
basic is that the 51 formers, had they been following logic and impulses toward
honesty, would have asked, What does Hunter Biden himself say? The 51 formers
were not a staff of paleontologists examining a prehistoric fossil or dinosaur
footprint but Washington creatures faced with a living, breathing, Washington
princeling. But of course Hunter was hiding under the bed with the rest of
them, never denying that the emails were his, but only after the election
owning up to them.
And then
there is the sacred — read, pretentious and overused — IC principle of “telling
truth to power.” This is the most abysmal aspect of the letter, because the 51
formers were telling lies to the powerless — the American public — to protect
the powerful. Here is where they crossed the line. This was collusion among the
ruling party, the intelligence community, and the media to influence domestic
politics — a common thing in third-world dictatorships, but something of an
innovation in the United States.
Remember
that a putative CIA attempt to influence a foreign country’s
internal politics or succession — including an enemy country’s
domestic politics — would be a grave ethical and legal matter requiring the
attorney general’s approval and a presidential finding. Morell, Brennan,
Clapper, and their sordid crew had no qualms about using their spook
credentials to distort U.S. politics.
That
leaves us asking why they did it, and whether they thought they could get away
with it. Answer the first question by considering the MICE rule for why people
spy — money, ideology, compromise, or ego. I think three of these apply —
money, ideology, and ego. After clandestine careers on the federal pay scale,
the sketchier former spooks crave publicity, commentator gigs on CNN, and book
contracts, for the visibility and (finally!) big money. Ideologically, most of
the 51 are Democrats who openly loathed Trump. The vast majority of ex-spooks,
of course, stay out of politics and hang up the phone on journalists.
Ego also
answers the question as to whether they thought they could get away with it —
yes. The Arab proverb tells us that the blind man goes up and sh**s on his roof
and he thinks no one sees him.
Related:
Did the 51 formers turn into manipulative, partisan hacks for a brief moment in
the fall of 2020, or were they career-long hacks protected by secrecy? Only
Clapper and Morell have left reputational paper trails. And Brennan, in
his awful memoir, Undaunted, was unintentionally
self-revealing. The work is a self-portrait of anger, partisanship, bad
judgment, spite, recurring financial vulnerabilities, and, notably or not, a
deep attachment to Saudi Arabian patronage. That the author is unaware of embarrassing
himself appears to derive from ego.
In the
end, taxpayers might hope that this is merely a Bud Light moment, where one
silly publicity stunt damaged a brand but in survivable fashion. The canniness
and dishonesty of the letter, however, give one pause.
Here’s
the thing. Managers at the CIA, with careers behind them as analysts,
targeters, ops officers, or support officers, must be keenly aware of the
morale issue. The media don’t get them, don’t like them, and love to
sensationalize them. A counternarcotics ops officer penetrates a drug cartel to
spy on it and disrupt it, but when this leaks to the press it gets spun as the
CIA in bed with drug lords. They use safe and legal enhanced-interrogation
techniques against senior al-Qaeda detainees, and the media accuse them of
torture. They advise their people to ignore the lies, develop thick skins, and
stay focused on the mission.
What
probably makes that an uphill mission right now is that, while the drugs and
torture stories were media lies, the Blinken-Morell-Brennan scandal is factual.
Can the director of the CIA assert moral clarity and reassure the workforce
that the agency is what we want it to be without denouncing the letter? This
matters not just for morale but for retention and recruitment.
After
all, on May 12, 2023, CIA director William Burns found the time to write a
discursive open email to former agency employees titled “Continuing Efforts to
Address Sexual Harassment and Assault.” (“Colleagues—I know that our alumni
remain interested in and concerned about developments at the Agency . . .”).
Will he send a letter acknowledging, and distancing the agency from, the
present scandal? So far, he has not done so.
I’m
interested in and concerned about sexual harassment at the CIA, which I hope affects
only the tiniest fraction of the workforce, and I’m glad it’s being addressed.
Disinformation and election-meddling, meanwhile, affect all Americans, whether
conducted by Vladimir Putin and Alexander Bortnikov, or by Tony Blinken and
Mike Morell.
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