Compromised CIA communications during the Obama years
This is a very disturbing story:
From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials….
…[It] started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility — part of Iran’s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.
The mole hunt wasn’t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a state actor like China or Iran. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. But it was an elementary system.”
By 2010, however, it appears that Iran had begun to identify CIA agents. And by 2011, Iranian authorities dismantled a CIA spy network in that country, said seven former U.S. intelligence officials. (Indeed, in May 2011, Iranian intelligence officials announced publicly that they had broken up a ring of 30 CIA spies; U.S. officials later confirmed the breach to ABC News, which also reported on a potential compromise to the communications system.)
Iran executed some of the CIA informants and imprisoned others in an intelligence setback that one of the former officials described as “incredibly damaging…” A lack of proper vetting of sources may have led to the CIA inadvertently running a double agent, said one former senior official — a consequence of the CIA’s pressing need at the time to develop highly placed agents inside the Islamic Republic.
Please read the whole thing.
Apparently the system was not changed, and the same thing occurred in China. The article also points out that during the entire time, John Brennan was Obama’s Homeland Security advisor, and then shortly after the beginning of Obama’s second term he became head of the CIA.
And China got the entire cache of federal personnel files. The partisan Democrats on my Facebook wall keep assuring me the administration was ‘scandal free’.
Some of the losses had been discussed publicly before. Look at the dates, 2009, 2010….. you imply carelessness (or worse) by Brennan, it appears; but I have assumed some secrets had been given up by Hillary’s carelessness with information while she was Secy of State. Somewhere I had earlier read that she referred to one nuclear physicist (Amri) as a “friend,” IIRC, and he was not long after forced to return to his homeland of Iran by government threats against family members; he was promptly executed. I could be wrong; but I’ve always figured 1+1=2 on that one.
Obama was a case of however suspicious his associations seemed, the reality turned out much worse. His administration was an abomination. He reached across the political aisle to tap the most anti-Israel Republican ever, Chuck Hagel, to head DOD. As for John Brennan, the handwriting was also on the wall well in advance. Referring to Jerusalem as “al-Quds” was the tip of the Brennan iceberg.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/controversial-comments-by-cia-director-nominee-john-brennan
Obama rapture turned out to be a nearly lethal national mental illness.
I can’t tell from this report whether errors were committed within the CIA career ranks, came from hacking US political sources, or had anything to do with who was in the White House when this occurred. It does seem strange that Brennan stayed in his post in the White House, then moving to CIA, when there was turmoil and grave distress in the intelligence community.
It gets harder and harder to credit them with the degree of incompetence necessary for this all to have been unplanned.
In terms of lives lost this is the greatest intelligence failure in the Agency’s history; in Chinese assets alone the death toll is triple that caused by the Soviet mole Aldrich Ames. But the bungle isn’t surprising – in 2004 Bush created the Directorate of National Intelligence and the CIA Director, instead of reporting directly to the President, now reported to the DNI. This led to several years of turf war with more than one DNI micromanaging CIA operations. During the relevant period the CIA Directors were Hayden, Panetta, Petraeus, and Brennan. The DNIs were McConnell (under Bush), replaced for a few months by Blair and Gompert, and from August of 2010 onward by James Clapper.
When an incident like this happens, the ripple effect is huge. After Cambridge Five, for decades there was international reluctance to share intel with the Brits for fear of it winding up in the Kremlin, and anything coming from MI-6 was considered questionable for the same reason. “Trust” is a meaningless term in the intelligence profession.
Losing a cluster of assets as we did to the Iranians, the first place you look is communication security. The fact that it happened more than once would mean multiple checks of the network and it probably was raised with a number of Directors. Thank goodness we finally found the problem, but Jeez Louise – couldn’t those guys do ANYTHING right? Scandal-free administration, my butt.
The “most transparent administration in American history” was always a head scratcher. (And always good for more than a few belly laughs….)
Seems that blowing CIA agents is what Obama meant by “transparency”.
(That and HRC’s “transparent” home-brewed, bathtub-still server.)
Laugh no more.
Unfortunately, no heads will roll. President not a smidgen of scandal is ultimately to blame.
Hillary’s email.
Feinstein’s driver.
How many dead in Ohio? er, old Shanghai?
And Brennan is now a paid talking head for NBC. Why doesn’t Chuck Todd grill him?
I said from the first time I heard about Hillary’s private server that China, Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and North Korea all have her emails.
“Turn’s out I’m really good at killing people.” — Barack Obama
Who knew he was referring to our own assets? (joke)
I was going to bitch about the failure of the Inspector General described in the Yahoo article, but then I saw this piece by Attkisson in The Hill. Maybe the CIA’s IG was being coerced by some of the spooks.
Hmmm. The link didn’t take, nor did I get an edit option.
The link to The Hill again.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/414804-surveillance-state-is-alive-well-and-operating-against-us-all
This is indeed catastrophic, and the repercussions will be coming for years to come. That no one has gone to jail over this is truly a miscarriage of justice. The fact that the left, and most people in Washington D.C., are comfortable with this misprision is the strongest evidence ever that we are two nations, and the elite scorn us.
O/T, but the still-shot in the right sidebar of TommyJay’s Hill piece right now
shows a bunch of (presumably) college-age kids grinning wildly and holding a sign that says Abolish Student Debt.
If these people can still think logically at all, that’s only possible if we abolish student loans. I say, Good! Let’s do! (Taxpayer-funded student loans, anyway.)
If they say No, no, we don’t want to abolish student loans, We just don’t want to have to pay back ours,
then I respond, Oh, you mean take the money and run.
Their mamas need to spank ’em and send ’em to bed without supper.
F,
Same as it ever was. It has been a slow plunge into totalitarianism since the 1830s. Progressive Teddy, Wilson, briefly interrupted by Calvin, FDR, LBJ, Carter, Slick Willy, and the messiah carried the ball towards the goal line. The bad orange man interrupted the procession, that is why he and the basket of deplorables are so hated by our betters.
Clinging with joy not bitterness.
CIA counterespionage and counterintelligence has been worse than weak ever since Angleton was purged. The Agency should be abolished and a new strategic intelligence service created using the intel people who did so well in Iraq. HUMINT has always been a weakness of US intelligence.
Kai Akker on November 5, 2018 at 4:33 pm at 4:33 pm said:
It gets harder and harder to credit them with the degree of incompetence necessary for this all to have been unplanned.
* * *
Indeed.
If Obama had been an Iranian agent, what would he have done differently?
And Clinton was bought-and-paid for by most of our enemies.
She left her server “open” on purpose, says the VRWC.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/414804-surveillance-state-is-alive-well-and-operating-against-us-all
“But here’s where it gets slippery. It turns out the CIA claims it must engage in “routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computers” to make sure certain employees aren’t doing bad things. Poof! Now, all kinds of U.S. citizens and their communications can be swept into the dragnet — and it’s deemed perfectly legal. It’s just an accident or “incidental,” after all, if the CIA happens to pick up whistleblower communications with the legislative branch.”
But they couldn’t find the Awan Espionage Ring, or the Chinese Driver?
Also this:
“Some see the intel community’s alleged abuses during campaign 2016 as its own major scandal. But I see it as a crucial piece of a puzzle.
The evidence points to bad actors targeting candidate Donald Trump and his associates in part to keep them — and us — from learning about and digging into an even bigger scandal: our Intelligence Community increasingly spying on its own citizens, journalists, members of Congress and political enemies for the better part of two decades, if not longer.”
However, this may be like the standard murder mystery plot, where the killer is caught because he keeps bumping off people who might catch on to him, or know something about his evil deeds.
If they had stopped while they were still shrouded in secrecy, instead of poking the Russian bear, we still would not know about the scandalous subversion of our democratic values and even our laws.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/11/06/the-compromised-comms-of-cia-state-and-hillary-clinton/
J E Dyer on the sloppy tradecraft at Washington, Hillary’s connection, and the smoking guns that were being passed around for YEARS without any action being taken.