I call it “Mutiny Over the Bounty” with apologies to the real-life Captain Bligh and his unruly crew.
It is a tale of blown secrets and the President’s coddling of a mortal enemy.
It is set forth in the still-evolving blockbuster news story about the most loathsome offense of the Trump administration, the President’s acquiescence in a Russian kill plot against American GIs in Afghanistan — and the exquisitely orchestrated leak campaign that has exposed it.
Who are the leakers? You don’t have to know their names to recognize them as well-placed intelligence insiders.
They are modern-day “mutineers,” though nobly inspired.
The story they have slipped to the press is two-fold:
First: a Russian military intelligence unit, the same one that meddled in U.S. elections in 2016, has offered cash bounties to Taliban fighters for every GI they kill in Afghanistan.
Second: Trump, despite knowing about the scheme for more than a year and a half, has uttered not a peep of protest to Putin and has continued to fawn over him.
Joe Biden says that if the leaks are accurate Trump is guilty of “a dereliction of duty.” A veterans’ group has posted a political ad accusing Trump of treason.
After some ragged fits and starts the President and his team have attempted to alibi his non-response by tutting about the quality of the underlying intelligence.
They have also damned the leakers, who, though anonymous, are clearly spiritual descendants of George Smiley. Over the past three weeks these intrepid invisibles have proved so adept at psywar tactics they have kept the befuddled Trump reeling.
The first leak, published in the New York Times on June 26, parceled out just enough information to tempt Trump into denying he’d been briefed on the kill plot. Even before that lie could catch wind, a second spate of leaks revealed that he’d received a warning about the scheme in his own classified news bulletin, the President’s Daily Brief. Then came the White House complaints about the credibility of the supportive intelligence, followed immediately by a counter-leak showing that the intelligence had been credible enough to trigger responses by US spies and commandos, if not by Trump himself.
The ever-expanding timeline laid out by the leakers provides a blistering indictment of Trump’s fitness for office – and fresh evidence that he is an owned and operated subsidiary of Putin, Inc. It also raises the prospect that US intelligence agencies are now so mistrustful of the President that they are embarked on a campaign to discredit him.
Trump has long nattered about a “Deep State” conspiracy to bring him down. This latest leak fest is not that fever dream come true. It is not the handiwork of some power-hungry cabal out to subvert democracy. It is not a conjury of lies. It is just the opposite: an expression of the intelligence community’s sacred if often shortchanged obligation to let us know the truth so the truth can keep us free.
Personal Disclaimer:
Lest I be accused of pimping for the spooks, a brief preface is in order.
True, I worked for the CIA during the Vietnam era and even contributed to the President’s Daily Brief from time to time. But I blew the whistle on intelligence abuses when I saw them, and in my second career as an investigative journalist I have helped unravel numerous national security scandals.
But despite my well-earned skepticism of my old profession, I must confess to a certain awe at the way the intelligence community is letting Trump hoist himself on his own petard. I have often surmised to friends that it would be patriots in mufti who finally called Trump to account. That, I believe, is what we are witnessing.
Even so, you almost have to be an alumnus of the spy trade to be able to appreciate the ingenuity with which the leakers have contrived to turn Trump into a witness against himself.
Sorting through the key events chronologically is clarifying.
Conception:
In early 2019, amidst mounting evidence that Russia was playing a spoiler’s game in Afghanistan, Taliban militants let slip to the CIA that bagmen from Moscow were willing to pay for American scalps. According to recent revelations from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, the National Security Council reacted with alarm. The US Central Command began scavenging for details, and the President was soon alerted by way of an entry in the President’s Daily Brief (the first such warning on the public record). An unidentified source has told Business Insider that then-National Security Adviser John Bolton updated Trump on the bounty plot in March 2019.
A few weeks later, an attack on an American convoy outside Bagram airbase left three U.S. Marines dead, and three others wounded. The Taliban took credit. American analysts began noodling the theory that Russian bounties had incentivized the killings.
Trump, for his part, sat on his hands. Despite having been clued in, he made no complaint to Putin. Worse, he continued to play suck-up.
The White House now maintains that none of the tips flowing into US intelligence then or later were credible enough to be “actionable.” But that makes no sense since the very first tips were sufficient to galvanize the NSC, Bolton, the Central Command and the US intelligence community.
Leaning over backwards to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, it’s arguable that his own stasis, his failure to raise red flags with Putin right away, reflected a strategic canniness — a reluctance to alert the Russian leader that we were onto him before we had all the facts nailed down.
There was plenty to learn, of course, not the least: Why had Putin opted for such a provocative policy? It’s one thing to poison or radiate Russian defectors in Europe, as Putin had done on two occasions. It was quite another to bankroll hits on American servicemen in the process of vacating a war zone.
One possible explanation for his temerity traces back to a bloodletting in 2018 involving Russian mercenaries working for one of his cronies. In February of that year, US troops operating in Syria killed several of these guns-for-hire in a firefight. It was the deadliest shootout between US and Russian operatives since the end of the Cold War.
Was the bounty operation Putin’s idea of payback? That seems like a safe bet.
The Game Heats Up:
Last fall, the Trump administration joined Russia, China and Pakistan in calling for an Afghan peace. Trump and Putin seemed to be in sync politically and Trump clearly wanted to promote that impression. But US intelligence hauled him up short. In December, according to recent leaks, the President received yet another briefing on the bounty program (his second on the public record).
Giving him the benefit of the doubt once again, it is conceivable that his failure to call Putin out at this point was transactional – an effort to keep the peace initiative on track. The administration may also have been seeking to preserve breathing room for US operatives to root out the Russian bagmen and neutralize them.
On a more sinister level, it is also conceivable that US intelligence officials, fearing that Trump might say too much to Putin, deliberately downgraded the threat to reduce his incentive to run off at the mouth.
There were predicates for such caution. Five months after being inaugurated, Trump famously blurted out vital secrets to the Russian ambassador and Foreign Minister during an Oval Office meeting. According to Washington Post reporting at the time, the compromised information “jeopardized a critical source of intelligence” on ISIS.
To be on the safe side, U.S intelligence promptly pulled a key intelligence source out of Moscow lest another slip of the tongue in high places put him at risk.
Giving Trump the benefit yet again, his Oval Office gaffe may have been due to the sheer amateurism.
But there are no such benign explanations for a raft of other entries in Trump’s pro-Putin playbook: his open solicitation of Russian help in the 2016 election, his shady ties to Putin’s favorite money men, his championing of Putin over U.S. intelligence on the issue of Russian election tampering, his tag-team performance with Putin in Helsinki, his stiff-arming of the Mueller investigation, his constant disparagement of NATO and other allies to Moscow’s benefit, and his efforts to extort the Ukrainian government into backing a Russia-friendly interpretation of the hacking of the Clinton campaign’s computers.
As if all this weren’t enough, we have just learned from a media outlet called “Just Security” that in early 2018 “Trump directed the CIA to share intelligence information on counterterrorism with the Kremlin despite no discernible reward.” The same report indicates he declined to act on tips linking Putin to arms shipments to the very Taliban terrorists who figured in the shared intelligence.
No US serviceman or spy with an ounce of integrity could have turned a blind eye to these intimations of conflicted loyalties or their implications.
No wonder, then, that early warnings about the bounties found resonance among operational personnel at the CIA and the Pentagon. In early 2020, despite Trump’s own indifference, Seal Team Six raided a Taliban hideout and snagged $500,000 in cash. Analysts surmised the money was meant for bounty payments.
A simultaneous intelligence haul, including productive interrogations, bolstered that conclusion. The National Security Council took a second look at the evidence and according to recent leaks to The New York Times, Trump received another “written briefing” about it (his third on the public record). One source told the Times that the pertinent PDB entry was dated February 27, 2020.
Two days later, United States struck a tentative peace accord with the Taliban, looking towards the withdrawal of the last US forces in the next 14 months.
It’s arguable that Trump’s continued failure to beard Putin was keyed to the peace gambit and a desire to make it work.
But there are aspects to the February 27 brief that suggest something else was going on.
Most significantly, according to various sources, the PDB item was published without an accompanying oral brief. During my time in the CIA –admittedly long ago — it was standard procedure for important PDB briefs to come with oral elaboration.
Why didn’t it happen this time?
Possibly because Trump has little tolerance for any sort of intelligence brief, written or oral. All our spy agencies seem aware of this.
But they also know that he will grudgingly accede to an oral presentation if it comes with video. So, eliminating an oral brief in this instance, especially given the importance of the material, seems odd.
In a recent interview Beth Sanner, Trump’s assigned intelligence briefer, offered no explanation for this omission. But she did let on that a good briefer knows how to “pivot” away from material that seems boring to the briefee.
Having been a CIA briefer myself, with ambassadors and their staff as my audience, I can attest that it is also important to know how to “pivot” away from information that is not ripe, or right, for dissemination.
Given Trump’s closeness to Putin and his demonstrated propensity for sharing too much, it seems plausible that Sanner’s superiors chose to skip an oral brief on February 27 for security reasons.
By this date, the CIA case file on the bounty plot had expanded beyond the simple fact of the plot’s existence and included sensitive details about the Seal Team operation, other possible countermeasures and “sources and methods” needed to implement them.
In the free-wheeling format of an oral presentation, Trump would have had ample opportunity to delve into such minutiae and to load up on detail that would have been catnip for Putin. If there was concern that such material might be leaked to him by his friend in the Oval Office, it made imminent sense to cancel or truncate the oral brief. This would have assured the sanctity of operational secrets, the “how” and “when” of any prospective US pushback against Putin’s operatives.
There would have been similar concerns about any written brief. Secrets in black and white are as leaker-friendly as those delivered orally. So why did Sanner’s superiors decide to publish the PDB item at all, if security was the issue?
For starters, they probably felt duty-bound to do so. No intelligence professional would dare simply banish sensitive material from the President’s must-reads.
The PDB staff may also have felt confident that they could write the item in such a way as to get the main points across without exposing secrets too sensitive to put at risk.
Moreover, because of Trump’s well-established aversion to reading, they may have reasoned that a brief PDB item would go unnoticed altogether.
All this makes sense to me as a one-time CIA intelligence analyst and briefer.
But I am also tempted to believe that some combination of concerned citizens at Langley, the Pentagon and NSA headquarters had begun contemplating a longer game. By late February, the tea leaves had coalesced into a clear message: Trump had become such a Putin fanboy that the two were merging into a single security threat. Therefore, the only alternative was to neutralize Trump’s capacity for doing damage.
I am not talking “coup” here. But I can imagine a scenario in which my hypothetical “concerned citizens” decide at some point that the President’s pro-Putin sympathies and his careless handling of intelligence have made him an intolerable liability, that he must be shamed into impotence, and the best way to do it is through a carefully programmed leak campaign. In this scenario, the PDB item of February 27, and Trump’s indifference to it, become components of a political time bomb that will be triggered through leaks to demolish his already shredded credibility.
And what makes the PDB item so potent is that it deals with a murder plot against American servicemen. You couldn’t come up with a more visceral tweak to the American conscience if you searched a thousand years.
I have no idea whether any of this figured in the thinking behind the PDB item or the subsequent leak campaign. What I do know, however, is that this is exactly how the campaign has played out. The item planted in the PDB on February 27, which Trump claims not to have seen, has become Exhibit Number One in the most damning case ever made against his competency as President.
Follow-Through:
In late March, according to recent leaks, CIA attendees at a “large interagency meeting” gave a thumbs up to existing intelligence about the bounty plot, and Trump again received a written brief about it (his fourth on the public record) – and again brushed it off. At the same time, the National Security Council reportedly drew up “a menu of potential responses, ranging from a simple diplomatic protest to sanctions and “other punishments.”
A month later, the intelligence community began dribbling out select information about the plot to a wider audience. I am tempted to read this as a test run for the coming leak campaign.
On May 4, a massaged version of the latest PDB material popped up in a classified publication, called “The Wire,” which is distributed across the intelligence community and to select congressional overseers.
By my reckoning this was a last desperate warning flare from the leakers – a signal to other insiders and witting lawmakers that time was running out for a discreet behind-the-scenes intervention to rein Trump in.
Apparently all that came back was a deafening silence, for even to this day no one on the Congressional oversight committees has claimed to have protested Putin’s plot and Trump’s non-reaction before they surfaced in the press.
In late June US agencies alerted the British that their own troops in Afghanistan were on the Russian bounty list. Once the British were apprised, the die was cast. On June 26, the steady drip, drip, drip of press leaks began.
Trump’s defenders howled in protest, condemning the leaks as grave security breaches even while (incongruously) dissing the underlying intelligence as unconfirmed.
In a rage tweet, Trump called the emerging story a “hoax with “no corroborating evidence.” Appearing on Fox News, he blamed the “hoax” on “the newspapers and the Democrats” and insisted “the intelligence people didn’t even – many of them didn’t believe it happened at all.”
He added plaintively, “I was tougher on Russia than any other President… No one has done what I’ve done with sanctions and all.”
That, like everything else he spouted, was a lie. Over the previous six months, with bounty-related intelligence piling up, he had lavished extra bonbons on Putin, extolling their “good relationship,” offering to send ventilators to Russia to combat the pandemic, and championing a return to G-8 summitry, with Putin restored to a seat of honor.
The steady drip, drip, drip of the leaks turned all this sugar to mush – overnight.
From the Horse’s mouth:
Ironically, corroboration for the leakers’ story as described above comes from a recent administration handout.
On July 1, according to The New York Times, the NSC staff and John Ratcliffe, newly appointed Director of National Intelligence, issued a memo about the bounty plot. While zeroing in on the alleged softness of the background intelligence, they confirmed the essence of the leaked stories. They also left undisputed the impression that Trump had let Putin get away with murder.
Here’s how the Times summarized the memo’s conclusions:
“It declared that the intelligence community knows that Russian military intelligence officers met with leaders of a Taliban-linked criminal network and that money was transferred from a G.R.U. account to the network. After lower-level members of that network were captured, they told interrogators that the Russians were paying bounties to encourage the killings of coalition troops, including Americans.
“The [National Security] Agency did intercept data of financial transfers that provide circumstantial support for the detainees’ account…”
The memo, as the Times describes it, contained abundant qualifiers, many of which seemed to be skewed or weighted to give Trump deniability.
As the Times put it, the memo “stressed that the government lacks direct evidence of what the criminal network leaders and G.R.U. officials said at face-to-face meetings, so it cannot say with any greater certainty that Russia specifically offered bounties in return for killings of Western soldiers.”
More specifically, according to the Times, the memo revealed that the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center had reached their dire conclusions with “medium confidence.” It noted (in the Times’ reading) that the NSA “did not have surveillance that confirmed what the captured detainees told interrogators about bounties…. [or] explicit evidence that the [captured] money was bounty payments.” In addition the memo reportedly made clear that the DIA had no “information directly connecting the suspected operation to the Kremlin…”
What we are being told here is that because the NSA and DIA were source-shy, they could not vouch for the veracity of the information collected independently by the CIA and Seal Team 6. But we are also invited to believe that such deficits in NSA and DIA reporting warrant skepticism about the CIA’s findings and validate Trump’s indifferent treatment of them and his failure to confront Putin about the kill plot.
Based on my own experience as a one-time PDB contributor, the inability of other agencies to match the CIA’s intelligence does not automatically diminish it.
Moreover, it is likely that the blind spots in NSA and DIA reporting were noted in PDB entries. Normally any analyst, from the CIA or any other agency who contributes to the PDB spends more than half of his/her time “coordinating” with sister agencies to make sure their input and reservations are reflected in the final item. If the other agencies have nothing to add or no way of pronouncing confidently on the lead analysts’ conclusions, that is noted in the PDB.
Nor does the lack of unanimous support for an intelligence assessment mean that it is unworthy of the president’s attention.
Don’t forget: In late December 2016 then-FBI Director Jim Comey made a point of briefing the newly elected President about uncorroborated evidence that Putin had video of him cavorting with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel some years before.
If that kind of material merited Trump’s attention, it is inconceivable that he wasn’t briefed, one way or another, on the bounty plot, despite NSA’s lack of supportive radio intercepts and the DIA’s handicaps. Thus, his failure to nail Putin for it remains indefensible.
Those who who publicly exposed Putin’s kill scheme and Trump’s limp-wristed response accomplished what Robert Mueller and the whistleblower behind the Ukraine revelations only approximated. They maneuvered Trump into indicting himself.
And they did so without imperiling any legitimate security interest, simply by planting a devastating piece of intelligence under his nose and then leaving him enough room to lie about it and be exposed for what he is.