Father Coughlin was before my time, but - good grief! - how could I not
know who he was?
On 2/18/2018 10:16 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
James Risen claims that we have forgotten who Father Coughlin and
General Edwin Walker are. Maybe so, but not all of us. These loud
mouthed promoters of the ugliest side of Capitalism, sneered at, and
trashed everything that was decent. Donald Trump fits well in such
sour-mouthed company.
Beyond that, I would suggest to James Risen that he look past the
Russian influence on the last presidential election, and look instead
to the Mega International Corporations. As these giant International
Corporations increase their world-wide influence, and with no
particular loyalty to national boundaries or governments, and by
making it easier to dump billions of dollars into buying people
favorable to the Corporate interests, these Corporate cancers are the
real threat to democracy and to all nations on Planet Earth.
By allowing ourselves to be manipulated, we are being dragged pell
mell down a road toward a world dominated by huge conglomerates. It
will not end in Peace. Instead of warring nations, we will pledge our
loyalties to one corporation or another, and continue the slaughter of
innocent people.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/17/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is Donald Trump a Traitor?
By James Risen, The Intercept
17 February 18
Americans must live with the uncertainty of not knowing whether Trump has
the best interests of the United States or those of Russia at heart.
I find it hard to write about Donald Trump.
It is not that he is a complicated subject. Quite the opposite. It is that
everything about him is so painfully obvious. He is a low-rent racist, a
shameless misogynist, and an unbalanced narcissist. He is an unrelenting
liar and a two-bit white identity demagogue. Lest anyone forget these
things, he goes out of his way each day to remind us of them.
At the end of the day, he is certain to be left in the dustbin of history,
alongside Father Coughlin and Gen. Edwin Walker. (Exactly – you don’t
remember them, either.)
What more can I add?
Unfortunately, another word also describes him: president. The fact that
such an unstable egomaniac occupies the White House is the greatest threat
to the national security of the United States in modern history.
Which brings me to the only question about Donald Trump that I find really
interesting: Is he a traitor?
Did he gain the presidency through collusion with Russian President
Vladimir
Putin?
One year after Trump took office, it is still unclear whether the president
of the United States is an agent of a foreign power. Just step back and
think about that for a moment.
His 2016 campaign is the subject of an ongoing federal inquiry that could
determine whether Trump or people around him worked with Moscow to take
control of the U.S. government. Americans must now live with the
uncertainty
of not knowing whether the president has the best interests of the United
States or those of the Russian Federation at heart.
Most pundits in Washington now recoil at any suggestion that the
Trump-Russia story is really about treason. They all want to say it’s about
something else – what, they aren’t quite sure. They are afraid to use
serious words. They are in the business of breaking down the Trump-Russia
narrative into a long series of bite-sized, incremental stories in which
the
gravity of the overall case often gets lost. They seem to think that
treason
is too much of a conversation-stopper, that it interrupts the flow of cable
television and Twitter. God forbid you might upset the right wing! (And the
left wing, for that matter.)
But if a presidential candidate or his lieutenants secretly work with a
foreign government that is a longtime adversary of the United States to
manipulate and then win a presidential election, that is almost a textbook
definition of treason.
In Article 3, Section 3, the U.S. Constitution states that “treason against
the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in
adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
Based on that provision in the Constitution, U.S. law – 18 U.S. Code § 2381
– states that “[w]hoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war
against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort
within
the United States or elsewhere” is guilty of treason. Those found guilty of
this high crime “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than
five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall
be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”
Now look at the mandate given to former FBI Director Robert Mueller when he
was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,
who
was acting in place of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused
himself because of his role in the Trump campaign and the controversy
surrounding his own meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United
States.
On May 17, 2017, Rosenstein issued a letter stating that he was appointing
a
special counsel to “ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian
government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.” He
added that Mueller’s mandate was to investigate “any links and/or
coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with
the campaign of President Donald Trump; and any matters that arose or may
arise directly from the investigation.” Rosenstein noted that “[i]f the
Special Counsel believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special
Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the
investigation of these matters.”
How closely aligned is Mueller’s mandate with the legal definition of
treason? That boils down to the rhetorical differences between giving “aid
and comfort, in the United States or elsewhere” to “enemies” of the United
States and “any links and/or coordination” between the Russian government
and Trump campaign aides related to “the Russian government’s efforts to
interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”
Sounds similar to me.
As a practical matter, the special counsel is highly unlikely to pursue
treason charges against Trump or his associates. Treason is vaguely defined
in the law and very difficult to prove. To the extent that it is defined –
as providing aid and comfort to an “enemy” of the United States – the
question might come down to whether Russia is legally considered America’s
“enemy.”
Russia may not meet the legal definition of an “enemy,” but it is certainly
an adversary of the United States. It would make perfect sense for Russian
President and de facto dictator Vladimir Putin to use his security services
to conduct a covert operation to influence American politics to Moscow’s
advantage. Such a program would fall well within the acceptable norms of
great power behavior. After all, it is the kind of covert intelligence
program the United States has conducted regularly against other nations –
including Russia.
Throughout the Cold War, the CIA and the KGB were constantly engaged in
such
secret intelligence battles. The KGB had a nickname for the CIA: glavnyy
vrag or “the main enemy.” In 2003, I co-authored a book called “The Main
Enemy” with Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who had been chief of the
CIA’s Soviet/Eastern European division when the Berlin Wall fell and the
Soviet Union collapsed. The book was about the intelligence wars between
the
CIA and the KGB.
Today’s cyber-spy wars are just the latest version of “The Great Game,” the
wonderfully romantic name for the secret intelligence battles between the
Russian and British empires for control of Central Asia in the 19th
century.
Russia, the United States, and other nations engage in such covert
intelligence games all the time – whether they are “enemies” or simply
rivals.
In fact, evidence of the connections between Trump’s bid for the White
House
and Russian ambitions to manipulate the 2016 U.S. election keeps piling up.
Throughout late 2016 and early 2017, a series of reports from the U.S.
intelligence community and other government agencies underlined and
reinforced nearly every element of the Russian hacking narrative, including
the Russian preference for Trump. The reports were notable in part because
their findings exposed the agencies to criticism from Trump and his
supporters and put them at odds with Trump’s public dismissals of reported
Russian attempts to help him get elected, which he has called “fake news.”
In addition, a series of details has emerged through unofficial channels
that seems to corroborate these authorized assessments. A classified NSA
document obtained by The Intercept last year states that Russia’s military
intelligence agency, the GRU, played a role in the Russian hack of the 2016
American election. In August, a Russian hacker confessed to hacking the
Democratic National Committee under the supervision of an officer in
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, who has separately been accused
of spying for the U.S. And Dutch intelligence service AIVD has reportedly
given the FBI significant inside information about the Russian hack of the
Democratic Party.
On February 16, just hours after this column was published, the special
counsel announced indictments of 13 Russians and three Russian entities for
meddling in the U.S. election. The special counsel accused them of
intervening to help Trump and damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. The
indictments mark the first time Mueller has brought charges against any
Russians in his ongoing probe.
Given all this, it seems increasingly likely that the Russians have pulled
off the most consequential covert action operation since Germany put Lenin
on a train back to Petrograd in 1917.
There are four important tracks to follow in the Trump-Russia story. First,
we must determine whether there is credible evidence for the underlying
premise that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win.
Second, we must figure out whether Trump or people around him worked with
the Russians to try to win the election. Next, we must scrutinize the
evidence to understand whether Trump and his associates have sought to
obstruct justice by impeding a federal investigation into whether Trump and
Russia colluded. A fourth track concerns whether Republican leaders are now
engaged in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice through their intense
and ongoing efforts to discredit Mueller’s probe.
This, my first column for The Intercept, will focus on the first track of
the Trump-Russia narrative. I will devote separate columns to each of the
other tracks in turn.
The evidence that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win is
already compelling, and it grows stronger by the day.
There can be little doubt now that Russian intelligence officials were
behind an effort to hack the DNC’s computers and steal emails and other
information from aides to Hillary Clinton as a means of damaging her
presidential campaign. Once they stole the correspondence, Russian
intelligence officials used cutouts and fronts to launder the emails and
get
them into the bloodstream of the U.S. press. Russian intelligence also used
fake social media accounts and other tools to create a global echo chamber
both for stories about the emails and for anti-Clinton lies dressed up to
look like news.
To their disgrace, editors and reporters at American news organizations
greatly enhanced the Russian echo chamber, eagerly writing stories about
Clinton and the Democratic Party based on the emails, while showing almost
no interest during the presidential campaign in exactly how those emails
came to be disclosed and distributed. The Intercept itself has faced such
accusations. The hack was a much more important story than the content of
the emails themselves, but that story was largely ignored because it was so
easy for journalists to write about Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
To anyone who has studied the history of the KGB, particularly during the
Cold War, the attack on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party
during
the 2016 U.S. election looks like the contemporary cyber-descendant of
countless analog KGB propaganda efforts. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the
KGB frequently engaged in ambitious disinformation campaigns that were
designed to sow suspicion of the United States in the developing world. The
KGB’s so-called “active measures” programs would use international front
organizations, cutouts, and sometimes unwitting enablers in the press to
disseminate their anti-American propaganda.
The most infamous and dangerously effective KGB disinformation campaign of
the Cold War was known as Operation Infektion. It was a secret effort to
convince people in developing countries that the United States had created
the HIV/AIDS virus.
In 1983, a newspaper in India printed what purported to be a letter from an
American scientist saying the virus had been developed by the Pentagon. The
letter went on to suggest that the U.S. was moving its experiments to
Pakistan, India’s archenemy. Meanwhile, the KGB got an East German
scientist
to spread misinformation supporting the Moscow-backed conspiracy theory
that
the U.S. was behind the virus.
While these lies never penetrated the U.S. mainstream, they nonetheless
spread insidiously through much of the world.
Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer during the 1980s when the KGB was
conducting this disinformation campaign. He was stationed in East Germany
in
the late 1980s, and there is a good chance he knew about the East German
component of Operation Infektion.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the KGB was broken up and its
successor agencies renamed. But the KGB never really went away. Instead, it
underwent an extensive rebranding that did little to change its culture and
traditions.
The KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its foreign intelligence service, was
renamed the SVR. Like its predecessor agency, it was still housed in the
First Chief Directorate’s headquarters in the Yasenevo District of Moscow,
which was known as the “Russian Langley” for its similarities to CIA
headquarters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I met many former KGB
officials in Moscow, including Leonid Shebarshin, the last leader of the
First Chief Directorate, who was running the agency in 1991 when communist
hardliners launched a coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. By
the time I met Shebarshin, he was retired and running an “economic
intelligence” firm out of an office in Moscow’s old Dynamo Stadium, the
home
of the KGB’s soccer team. A mural on his office wall depicted scenes from
the Battle of Stalingrad and the Bolshevik Revolution, signaling his
immersion in the Soviet era.
After the Soviet collapse, the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, which
handled
spy-hunting and counterintelligence, along with other directorates that
handled the KGB’s internal police state functions, were bundled into a new
organization known as the FSB, the Federal Security Service. I conducted
extensive interviews with one of the most legendary spy-hunters of the
Second Chief Directorate, Rem Krassilnikov, a man whose personal history
showed how entwined Russian intelligence still was with its Soviet past.
His
first name, Rem, was an acronym for Revolutsky Mir – the “World Revolution”
Soviet leaders had longed to bring about. His father had been a general in
the NKVD, the Stalinist predecessor to the KGB, and whenever I talked to
him, Krassilnikov made it clear that he still considered the United States
his adversary. He proudly took me on a tour of sites around Moscow where he
had arrested American spies.
No one even bothered to rename the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence
agency. During the Cold War, the KGB considered the GRU a lower-class
cousin, much as the CIA has always looked down upon the Pentagon’s Defense
Intelligence Agency. Today, the GRU has added cyber and hacking
capabilities
like those of the National Security Agency. The GRU was involved in the
Russian hack of the 2016 American election, according to a classified NSA
document obtained by The Intercept, yet it still operates in the shadows of
the more influential FSB and SVR.
Russian intelligence was briefly weakened following the collapse of the
Soviet Union, but under Putin – the first KGB man to run the country since
Yuri Andropov died in 1984 – it has come roaring back. During his KGB
career, Putin served in both the First and Second Chief Directorates. One
of
his key formative experiences occurred in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.
Putin was stationed in East Germany at the time, and his biographers have
written that the personal humiliation he felt watching the Soviet empire
collapse helps explain his drive to return Russia to great power status.
In 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Putin director of the FSB.
Since coming to power himself, Putin has deployed his country’s spies in
Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Syria in a bid to
reassert Moscow’s global influence.
Why wouldn’t he be willing to deploy his spies inside the computer system
of
the DNC as well?
The chronology of the attack on the Democratic Party is a sad testament to
the overconfidence of the Clinton campaign. It also highlights the
inattention of American intelligence and law enforcement and their failure
to adequately warn the major political parties of looming cyberthreats to
the U.S. electoral system.
In September 2015, the FBI made a halfhearted effort to tell the DNC that
its computer system had been invaded. In November 2015, the FBI told the
DNC
that its computers were sending data to Russia, but even that didn’t seem
to
prompt much concern on the Democrats’ part. In March 2016, Podesta’s email
account was hacked in a phishing attack, giving thieves access to thousands
of his emails.
In May 2016, CrowdStrike, a cybercompany hired by the DNC after the party
finally recognized it had a problem, told DNC officials that its computers
had been compromised in two separate attacks with two sets of malware
associated with Russian intelligence.
While the DNC used CrowdStrike, a private contractor, to conduct an
investigation, it did not give the FBI access to its computer systems. That
fact has since been seized upon by skeptics who say that CrowdStrike’s
analysis can’t be considered credible. But according to a November BuzzFeed
story, CrowdStrike’s lead investigator, Robert Johnston, was a former
Marine
captain who had previously worked at the U.S. Cyber Command, where he had
investigated an attempted hack of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he
identified as likely associated with the FSB. He had recent experience in
identifying the signatures of hacking linked to Russian intelligence.
In June 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said WikiLeaks had obtained
emails associated with Clinton. Just days later, the Washington Post
reported that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC’s computers.
In July 2016, just before the Democratic National Convention, Wikileaks
released thousands of DNC emails, and the party’s chairwoman, Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign.
In September 2016, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the
Senate
Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the
House Intelligence panel, issued a statement that they had received
classified briefings that made it clear that Russian intelligence was
trying
to intervene in the election.
“We believe that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct
such actions could come only from very senior levels of the Russian
government,” their statement noted.
The key moment in the 2016 campaign came on October 7, when three events
unfolded one after another. That afternoon, the Department of Homeland
Security and the Director of the Office of National Intelligence issued a
statement that U.S. intelligence believed Russia was behind the Democratic
Party hacks and email releases.
“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian
Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and
institutions, including from US political organizations,” the statement
read. “The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like
DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are
consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.
These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S.
election process.”
That statement was immediately overshadowed later that afternoon when the
Washington Post published the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which
Trump is heard talking about how easy it is for him to get away with sexual
assault, including groping and forcibly kissing women.
Later that afternoon, WikiLeaks started tweeting links to emails hacked
from
Podesta’s account. WikiLeaks then began releasing Podesta emails on a
regular basis throughout the last month of the campaign. Meanwhile, a group
called DC Leaks, which is now believed to be a front for the Russian
hackers
who sought to intervene in the election, released more Democratic
Party-related documents.
Within days, Trump was telling his supporters at rallies: “I love
WikiLeaks.”
The scope of the impact of Russian hacking and subsequent disclosures of
Democratic Party emails and data on the outcome of the 2016 election
remains
unclear. But the disclosures certainly helped take at least some of the
media’s attention off Trump, and probably should be credited with giving
him
time to recover from the disastrous “Access Hollywood” tape. The pattern
and
timing of the disclosures also strongly suggests that the objective was to
damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Donald Trump.
In December 2016, a month after the election, the FBI and the National
Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center issued a joint report
detailing the cybertools used by Russian intelligence to attack the
Democratic Party.
The report is still illuminating today because it suggests that the
original
DNC hack in 2015 was part of a much broader Russian cyberassault on a wide
array of American institutions, including government agencies. Originally,
it seems, the Russians were not specifically targeting the Democrats, but
were simply casting a wide net in Washington to see who might take the
bait.
The agencies’ report determined that in the summer of 2015, “an APT29
[Advanced Persistent Threat 29, one of two Russian intelligence “actors”
identified in the report, also known as Cozy Bear] spearphishing campaign
directed emails containing a malicious link to over 1,000 recipients,
including multiple U.S. Government victims. APT29 used legitimate domains,
to include domains associated with U.S. organizations and educational
institutions, to host malware and send spearphishing emails. In the course
of that campaign, APT29 successfully compromised a U.S. political party.”
The report adds that the Russians quickly followed up when they gained
access to the Democrats. “APT29 delivered malware to the political party’s
systems, established persistence, escalated privileges, enumerated active
directory accounts, and exfiltrated email from several accounts through
encrypted connections back through operational infrastructure.”
While intervening in the 2016 election may not have been the initial
purpose
of the cyberattack, once the Russians opportunistically struck gold by
breaking into the DNC, they went after the Democrats relentlessly.
“In spring 2016, APT28 [another Russian intelligence “actor”] compromised
the same political party, again via targeted spearphishing,” the report
states. “This time, the spearphishing email tricked recipients into
changing
their passwords through a fake webmail domain hosted on APT28 operational
infrastructure. Using the harvested credentials, APT28 was able to gain
access and steal content, likely leading to the exfiltration of information
from multiple senior party members.”
By luck or design, Russian intelligence had obtained a vast trove of inside
information from the Democratic Party in the middle of a presidential
campaign.
In January 2017, just days before Trump took office, a remarkable report
from the CIA, FBI, and NSA was made public, plunging the U.S. intelligence
community into American politics in an unprecedented way. Its aftershocks
continue to reverberate a year later.
The report states that “we assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered
an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.” It
continues: “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US
democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability
and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian
Government
developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high
confidence in these judgments. We also assess Putin and the Russian
Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when
possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her
unfavorably to him.”
The report also notes that “further information has come to light since
Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since early November
2016, increases our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations
and
goals.”
Trump has sought to discredit the report, and by extension, the entire
intelligence community, ever since. His cronies have chimed in, dismissing
it as the work of the so-called deep state.
Yet interestingly, CIA Director Mike Pompeo – a Trump loyalist who has been
criticized for transparently currying favor with Trump in hopes of being
named secretary of state – still stands by the January intelligence
assessment. In November, after Trump once again publicly trashed the
intelligence community’s conclusions, the CIA issued a statement that
“[t]he
Director stands by and has always stood by the January 2017 Intelligence
Community Assessment.” According to the CIA, “the intelligence assessment
with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed.” Pompeo’s
willingness to stand by the assessment is clearly not in his own political
interest and thus, lends credibility to the assessment.
Earlier this week, meanwhile, top intelligence officials, including Pompeo
and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, underlined their ongoing
concerns about Russian election meddling, warning that Moscow once again
seems to be seeking to intervene, this time in the 2018 midterm elections.
In a congressional hearing, Coats suggested that the Russians believe they
were successful in 2016 and want to build on their success in 2018. Coats
said that “the 2018 midterm elections are a potential target for Russian
influence operations,” and that “at a minimum, we expect Russia to continue
using propaganda, social media, false flag personas, sympathetic
spokespeople, and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and
political fissures in the United States.”
Text. (photo: The Intercept)
Further documentary evidence of Russian intervention in the 2016 election
came from an important story published by The Intercept last June.
The story was notable because it was based on a classified U.S.
intelligence
document about Russian election hacking obtained through an unauthorized
leak. All the other U.S. intelligence assessments and reports that have so
far been made public about the issue have come through officially
authorized
channels. Thus, the NSA report leaked to The Intercept has the enhanced
credibility that comes from being disclosed against the will of the U.S.
intelligence community.
The classified report is significant because it reveals that Russian
interference in the election extended beyond the direct attack on the
Democratic Party and included attempts to gain access to the basic
infrastructure involved in actually counting American votes. It details how
the GRU conducted a cyberattack on a U.S. voting software supplier and
engaged in spear-phishing to try to hack local election officials before
the
2016 vote
The classified May 2017 NSA report, provided anonymously to The Intercept,
shows that Russian hackers sought to pose as an e-voting vendor and trick
local government officials into opening Microsoft Word documents loaded
with
malware that would let the hackers remotely control the government
computers. To fool the local officials, the Russians first sought to gain
access to the vendor’s internal systems, which they hoped would provide a
convincing disguise.
“Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors [redacted]
executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August,
2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and
hardware solutions, according to information that became available in
April,
2017,” the report states. “The actors likely used data obtained from that
operation to create a new email account and launch a voter
registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government
organizations.”
The compromise of the vendor would provide cover for the direct attack on
the local officials. “It was likely that the threat actor was targeting
officials involved in the management of voter registration systems,” the
report adds. “It is unknown whether the aforementioned spear-phishing
deployment successfully compromised the intended victims, and what
potential
data could have been accesses by the cyber actor.”
The growing evidence that Russia was behind the attack on the Democratic
Party now includes the confession of a Russian hacker in a Moscow court.
The
story of Konstantin Kozlovsky appears to be one of the most significant of
the entire Trump-Russia saga. It is one of several intriguing tales now
emerging that suggests that the secrecy surrounding the Russian hacking is
beginning to unravel.
In December 2017, The Bell, an independent Russian news site, reported on
Kozlovsky’s stunning testimony in Moscow City Court. Kozlovsky — a young
Russian hacker who had been arrested, along with other members of the Lurk
hacking group, in connection with the cybertheft of more than $50 million
from Russian bank accounts — testified that he had conducted the Democratic
Party hack on behalf of Russian intelligence. In an August 15 court hearing
in Moscow, Kozlovsky said he “performed various tasks under the supervision
of FSB officers,” including hacking “of the National Committee of the
Democratic Party of the USA and electronic correspondence of Hillary
Clinton,” and hacking “very serious military enterprises of the United
States and other organizations,” according to the Bell.
The news site reported that Kozlovsky said he had conducted the hack at the
direction of Dmitry Dokuchaev, a major in the FSB’s Information Security
Center, the intelligence agency’s cyber arm.
When Kozlovsky made this statement in court, he was already facing serious
criminal charges for hacking. He may have thought that claiming involvement
in the DNC hack would help him with his ongoing criminal case, or he may
have thought that he had nothing left to lose and so should tell all. He
remains in pretrial detention in Moscow.
Dokuchaev, meanwhile, is a fascinating character, and his involvement in
Kozlovsky’s story plunges it into the wilderness of mirrors of present-day
espionage battles between the U.S. and Russia.
In December 2016, Dokuchaev was arrested in Moscow and charged with spying
for the United States. He and three others have reportedly been accused of
providing information to U.S. intelligence on the Russian hack of the
Democratic Party. Along with Dokuchaev, FSB Col. Sergey Mikhailov, Ruslan
Stoyanov of Kaspersky Labs, and Georgy Fomchenkov, a Russian businessman,
have been charged with treason in the case.
Dokuchaev is now being detained in Russia, but since Kozlovsky’s confession
was made public, Dokuchaev, through his lawyer, has told the Russian press
that he doesn’t know the hacker and was not involved with the theft of
documents from the Democratic Party.
In March 2017, just months after Dokuchaev was arrested in Moscow for
spying
for the United States, the U.S. Justice Department announced that he had
been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of hacking Yahoo’s network
and webmail accounts. Dokuchaev, identified by the Justice Department as a
33-year-old FSB officer, was one of four men indicted in the case. “The
defendants used unauthorized access to Yahoo’s systems to steal information
from about at least 500 million Yahoo accounts and then used some of that
stolen information to obtain unauthorized access to the contents of
accounts
at Yahoo, Google and other webmail providers, including accounts of Russian
journalists, U.S. and Russian government officials, and private-sector
employees of financial, transportation and other companies,” according to
the Justice Department.
At the press conference announcing the indictments, officials displayed a
large FBI wanted poster for Dokuchaev.
This chain of events leaves plenty of questions unanswered, but I wouldn’t
be surprised if Dokuchaev’s December 2016 arrest for treason in Moscow and
his March 2017 indictment in the United States were somehow related.
While the Washington press corps has been obsessing over Donald Trump’s
tweets and a ginned-up memo from House Republicans seeking to discredit the
Trump-Russia investigation, another major break in the story has just begun
to unfold in the Netherlands. In late January, a Dutch newspaper, de
Volkskrant, along with Nieuwsuur, a Dutch current affairs television
program, reported that Dutch intelligence service AIVD has turned over to
the FBI conclusive inside information about the Russian hack of the
Democratic Party.
The two news organizations reported that in 2014, Dutch hackers working for
the AIVD gained secret access to the Russian hacker group known as Cozy
Bear
– also known as Advanced Persistent Threat 29 – a Russian intelligence unit
behind the hack of the DNC.
Dutch intelligence first told their American counterparts about their
successful penetration of Cozy Bear in 2014, tipping off Washington that
the
Russian hackers were trying to break into the State Department’s computer
system. That warning led the NSA to scramble to counter the Russian threat.
In 2015, the Dutch were also able to watch, undetected by the Russians, as
the Cozy Bear hackers launched their first attack on the Democratic Party,
according to the two news organizations. In addition to gaining access to
the Cozy Bear computers, the Dutch were able to hack into a security camera
that recorded who was working in Cozy Bear’s office in a university
building
in Moscow near Red Square. The Dutch discovered that there were about 10
people working there, and they were eventually able to match the faces to
those of Russian intelligence officers who work for the SVR.
The information flowing from the Dutch was considered so vital by the
Americans that the NSA opened a direct line with Dutch intelligence to get
the data as fast as possible, according to the Dutch news organizations. To
show their appreciation, the Americans sent cake and flowers to AIVD
headquarters in the Dutch city of Zoetermeer.
If the Dutch story is accurate, it would help explain why the U.S.
intelligence community is so confident in its assessment that Russian
intelligence was behind the attack on the Democratic Party.
The Dutch news organizations say that the AIVD is no longer inside the Cozy
Bear network, and that Dutch intelligence has become increasingly
suspicious
of working with the Americans.
Since Trump’s election, who can blame them?
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