New in SpyWeek: 9/11 Report Cards, New Threats, Agency Shakeups

Counterterrorism Cuts: “Reassigning seasoned counterterrorism investigators to immigration enforcement degrades post-9/11 threat coverage in ways that will only become visible after a missed plot,” concludes IC Brief, a public-facing independent intelligence analysis site. “Reallocating resources toward China, Russia and border/narco-trafficking priorities leaves counterterrorism capacity thinner than at any point since 2001, a vulnerability that becomes visible only after an attack.” IC Brief cites “a Democratic staff report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released July 30, which “found the Trump administration has removed more than 1,300 DHS personnel from roles preventing, countering, and responding to terrorism, and cut 15,000 positions across the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI.” Misguided DHS: “Today, 25 years after 9/11, DHS’s core original mission of combating and responding to terrorism seems all-but forgotten in the public eye — and it seems particularly ill-poised to respond to the modern terrorism or national security threats as they currently exist,” 9/11 historian Garret M. Graff wrote at Politico on the eve of the anniversary. “It’s a threat that has grown even more serious in the years since — and yet still remains largely off the radar of DHS.” he added. “Most acts of terrorism now — by any objective measure — in this country are from within,” Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told him. “There are not a whole lot of DHS cops running around the interior looking for terrorists. That task has always been with the FBI.” Over at Lawfare, Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy at DHS, said the department had gone from hunting al-Qaeda to hunting immigrants. “The result of this organizational mismatch has become an all-too-obvious mission creep—as a department ill-poised to do the thing it was created to do instead became a politically useful and opportunistic cudgel for a president with authoritarian impulses.” Deep State: “By most all accounts, the U.S. is safer at home. The country has not been hit on U.S. soil with anything remotely comparable to the 9/11 attack, which killed nearly 3,000 people. Yet 25 years later, the U.S. national security industry is undergoing another dramatic change,” NPR’s Greg Myrer reported. “President Trump is waging an ongoing campaign against the so-called ‘deep state,’ which he describes largely as national security officials trying to undermine him.” Former CIA senior executive John Sipher opined that “We have allowed our partisan anger, and specifically the Trump administration, to create this narrative that there’s a deep state and that the intelligence services work for one party or another. I think it’s a real danger.” Trump Turns JTTFs Inward: “Trump has directed that Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which spread nationwide after 2001 to harness federal and local resources, investigate groups that challenge White House views on immigration, gender and religion,” Warren P. Strobel wrote Thursday at The Washington Post. “Another post-9/11 creation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has aggressively surveilled and rounded up immigrants on Trump’s watch, sometimes catching or killing U.S. citizens in its dragnet.” NSA’s Musical Chairs: Yet another chart scramble is coming at the code-breaking, eavesdropping, cyber-snaking National Security Agency. Gen. Joshua M. Rudd’s “initiative calls for the creation…of five new organizations inside the agency, in artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence,” reports The Washington Post. “Each will be led by a newly elevated ‘mission director,’ according to former officials.” A prior re-org initiated in 2016 under then-Director Mike Rogers, estimated to take two years, “still remains unfinished.” Opportunity Missed: 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could’ve and should’ve been tried in New York, former DOJ prosecutor David Raskin wrote at The Washington Post. “Unlike the military commissions underway at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — which had planned to use so-called clean team FBI interrogations that were conducted after years of abusive detention until a military judge recently suppressed them in Mohammed’s case — a civilian prosecution would have had no need to flirt with legal gray zones. The admissible evidence was overwhelming. It included financial records, communications, co-conspirator testimony, physical evidence, Mohammed’s own uncoerced admissions and some surprises that have never been made public.” Raskin, who specialized in terrorism and national security cases for more than 20 years, maintained “that trial would have ended in conviction long ago, as the evidence demanded.” A conservative backlash barring the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the mainland for civilian trials aborted the chance of real justice for the perpetrators—and victims. President Obama should’ve rejected the pressure and backed civilian trials, Raskin says. Snap Back: Pegged to the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, “the CIA released dozens of intelligence documents it had sent to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, outlining what was known about Al Qaeda.” Tucked at the end of a Sept. 10, 1998 report, a CIA analyst wrote that AQ “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city,” but “Intelligence provides no conclusive information on Bin Laden’s future attacks.” Another report said CIA suspected that “several recent walk-ins to our embassies may be part of an effort by Bin Laden to case US facilities,” and, for sure, in August 1998, AQ attacked U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But “bin Laden late last month said his preferred option is to attack the U.S. on its own soil in Washington.” (NYT) In case you missed it: See “CIA Officers Recall the Shock of 9/11.” Only at SpyTalk. Saudi Bedfellows: Despite new evidence of official Saudi ties to two of the 9/11 hijackers and the reported order of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s to assassinate exile journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Trump administration is forging closer intelligence ties with Riyadh, reports CNN. “More than 100 US military advisers are on the ground in Saudi Arabia providing intelligence and targeting support to the Kingdom in its military campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, multiple sources familiar with the effort say. The assistance comes as fighting on the peninsula intensifies and risks spilling into open war with the Houthis, threatening a second major shipping corridor out of the Middle East,” CNN said. Video released on Friday showed the Houthis’ capture of “U.S.-made Oshkosh M-ATV vehicles, technicals, armored vehicles, and artillery left intact” by retreating government forces. (Open Source Intel) Don’t miss master CIA spy recruiter James Lawler with our Michael Isikoff on lessons of the game, on the SpyTalk podcast. The Witkoff Deception: Trump envoy-at-large Steve Witkoff “hauled in more than $250 Million” while in government service last year, including millions from his stake in World Liberty, the Trump cryptocurrency firm with ties to the UAE, specifically Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the emirate’s spy chief, whose firm “bought nearly half of the company last year, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise and enriched Mr. Witkoff’s family and Mr. Trump’s,” as the New York Times’ Ben Protess and Andrea Fuller put it. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly claimed Witkoff has “fully divested from World Liberty Financial” and that his business dealings are “completely unrelated” to his diplomacy. China Spying: Senior U.S. officials accused China of providing Iran with satellite images that helped the regime in July target a U.S base in Jordan, but Beijing “pushed back and demanded proof,” U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. London’s iPaper, meanwhile, revealed that former Housing Minister Angela Rayner had “secretly” raised the espionage risk posed by China’s new London “mega embassy.” For its part, Beijing “urged the United States to “immediately stop all espionage activities targeting Chinese companies, warning that it had ‘firm resolve and abundant means’ to retaliate after a senior CIA official defended spying on China’s artificial intelligence (AI) and chip sectors.” (South China Morning Post) Clumsy Russian Spy Ploy: A German journalist posed as a Putin fangirl online and Russian intelligence soon came calling. “Angelique Geray ran a fake channel for several months under the name ‘Katya’ — a Russia supporter,” the Eastern European news site Nexta reported. “She posted videos featuring the Russian flag and soon received assignments from people” who asked her “to photograph sites in Germany, monitor people from the CDU, arms companies and NGOs, as well as collect the personal data of their employees.” One of her dupes: German politician Jovica Jovitch, from the pro-Russian Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. “He gave advice on developing the channel. For example, the politician suggested making a video of ‘Katya’ dancing on a NATO flag.” Achtung, baby! Postscript: “After Geray revealed her fake identity,” Nexta said, “unknown individuals threatened to kill her.” Taking It to Russia: “Europe’s spies are finally taking off the gloves to face Putin,” claims a headline in the U.K. iPaper. Goldfinger Deal: DOJ is quietly negotiating a plea deal with former senior CIA executive David Rush, who is accused of stashing $40 million worth of gold bars, cash and other valuables in his home (for purposes that remain unclear), according to a court filing Friday reported by CBS News. No doubt that’s one big can of worms the agency does not want opened in public. Beirut Station: “The CIA station in Beirut was considered a plum assignment in the early Cold War, when the bar of the city’s St George’s Hotel was a centre of intrigue with ramifications across the Middle East,” writes Tom Griffin in a colorful brief history. Not so much anymore. Strange Bedfellows: Espionage writer extraordinaire Ben McIntyre has yet another great-looking yarn out this week, Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy. An excerpt in The Washington Post this week, set in Tehran in 1981, two years after the Islamic revolution, tells the story of how a desperate KGB agent in Iran offered to swap Moscow’s secret plan for a communist coup there in exchange for help with his erectile dysfunction. What’s in Your Garage? Fascinating story on how a Waterloo, N.Y. man rooting around in his garage discovered a box of classified World War Two files on the 1945 debriefings of U.S. prisoners of war in Germany. (Meryl Kornfield, The Washington Post) People Get Ready: A Bob Woodward memoir is coming in November. “In Secrets, Woodward tells his story—from his Illinois youth to his Navy service during the Vietnam War to his tenure at The Washington Post, where his reporting with Carl Bernstein on Watergate captivated the world and became the book All the President’s Men,” plumps Simon & Schuster. “Like never before, Woodward takes readers inside his reporting on the White House, Supreme Court, CIA operations, and the Pentagon.” Djt and co have made our country less safe from day one, even before his first administration not even counting the Mueller report or Jack Smith or the 1/6 sedation coup attempt imo anyone that thinks differently shouldn’t be taken seriously. Now ask yourself why would he and co be trying to and making our country less safe along with the for who, where and why’s of such. You come up with anything even remotely conclusive re making our country safe or as they continue to propagandize about that so called great word give yourself the clown conned award. No congratulations from me either A whole lot of terrifying information in this new spy week.