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A Demand for
Russian ‘Hacking’ Proof
More than 20 U.S.
intelligence, military and diplomatic veterans are
calling on President Obama to release the evidence
backing up allegations that Russia aided the Trump
campaign – or admit that the proof is lacking.
MEMORANDUM
FOR: President Barack Obama
FROM: Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: A Key
Issue That Still Needs to be Resolved
January 17,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take the
oath of office Friday, a pall hangs over his upcoming
presidency amid an unprecedentedly concerted campaign to
delegitimize it. Unconfirmed accusations continue to
swirl alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin
authorized “Russian hacking” that helped put Mr. Trump
in the White House.
As President
for a few more days, you have the power to demand
concrete evidence of a link between the Russians and
WikiLeaks, which published the bulk of the information
in question. Lacking that evidence, the American people
should be told that there is no fire under the smoke and
mirrors of recent weeks.
We urge you to
authorize public release of any tangible evidence that
takes us beyond the unsubstantiated, “we-assess”
judgments by the intelligence agencies. Otherwise, we –
as well as other skeptical Americans – will be left with
the corrosive suspicion that the intense campaign of
accusations is part of a wider attempt to discredit the
Russians and those – like Mr. Trump – who wish to deal
constructively with them.
Remember the Maine?
Alleged Russian
interference has been labeled “an act of war” and Mr.
Trump a “traitor.” But the “intelligence” served up to
support those charges does not pass the smell test. Your
press conference on Wednesday will give you a chance to
respond more persuasively to NBC’s Peter Alexander’s
challenge at the last one (on Dec. 16) “to show the
proof [and], as they say, put your money where your
mouth is and declassify some of the intelligence.”
You told
Alexander you were reluctant to “compromise sources and
methods.” We can understand that concern better than
most Americans. We would remind you, though, that at
critical junctures in the past, your predecessors made
judicious decisions to give higher priority to
buttressing the credibility of U.S. intelligence-based
policy than to protecting sources and methods. With the
Kremlin widely accused by politicians and pundits of “an
act of war,” this is the kind of textbook case in which
you might seriously consider taking special pains to
substantiate serious allegations with hard intelligence
– if there is any.
During the
Cuban missile crisis, for instance, President Kennedy
ordered us to show highly classified photos of Soviet
nuclear missiles in Cuba and on ships en route, even
though this blew sensitive detail regarding the imagery
intelligence capabilities of the cameras on our U-2
aircraft.
President
Ronald Reagan’s reaction to the Libyan terrorist bombing
of La Belle Disco in Berlin on April 5, 1986, that
killed two and injured 79 other U.S. servicemen is
another case in point. We had intercepted a Libyan
message that morning: “At 1:30 in the morning one of the
acts was carried out with success, without leaving a
trace behind.” (We should add here that NSA’s dragnet
SIGINT capability 30 years later renders it virtually
impossible to avoid “leaving a trace behind” once a
message is put on the network.)
President
Reagan ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb Col. Muammar
Qaddafi’s palace compound to smithereens, killing
several civilians. Amid widespread international
consternation and demands for proof that Libya was
responsible for the Berlin attack, President Reagan
ordered us to make public the encrypted Libyan message,
thereby sacrificing a collection/decryption capability
unknown to the Libyans – until then.
As senior CIA
veteran Milton Bearden has put it, there are occasions
when more damage is done by “protecting” sources and
methods than by revealing them.
Where’s
the Beef?
We find the New
York Times- and Washington Post-led media Blitz against
Trump and Putin truly extraordinary, despite our long
experience with intelligence/media related issues. On
Jan. 6, the day after your top intelligence officials
published what we found to be an embarrassingly shoddy
report purporting to prove Russian hacking in support of
Trump’s candidacy, the Times banner headline across all
six columns on page 1 read: “PUTIN LED SCHEME TO
AID TRUMP, REPORT SAYS.”
The lead
article began: “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary
Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in
the Oval Office, the nation’s top intelligence agencies
said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday
to Mr. Trump.” Eschewing all subtlety, the Times added
that the revelations in “this damning report …
undermined the legitimacy” of the President-elect, and
“made the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate
of Mr. Putin.”
On page A10,
however, Times investigative reporter Scott Shane
pointed out: “What is missing from the public report is
what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard
evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the
Russian government engineered the election attack. That
is a significant omission.”
Shane
continued, “Instead, the message from the agencies
essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’ There is no
discussion of the forensics used to recognize the
handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of
intercepted communications between the Kremlin and the
hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow’s
propaganda machinery.”
Shane added
that the intelligence report “offers an obvious reason
for leaving out the details, declaring that including
‘the precise bases for its assessments’ would ‘reveal
sensitive sources and methods and imperil the ability to
collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.’”
Shane added a
quote from former National Security Agency lawyer Susan
Hennessey: “The unclassified report is underwhelming at
best. There is essentially no new information for those
who have been paying attention.” Ms. Hennessey served as
an attorney in NSA’s Office of General Counsel and is
now a Brookings Fellow in National Security Law.
Everyone Hacks
There is a lot
of ambiguity – whether calculated or not – about
“Russian hacking.” “Everyone knows that everyone hacks,”
says everyone: Russia hacks; China hacks; every nation
that can hacks. So do individuals of various
nationalities. This is not the question.
You said at
your press conference on Dec. 16 “the intelligence that
I have seen gives me great confidence in their [U.S.
intelligence agencies’] assessment that the Russians
carried out this hack.” “Which hack?” you were
asked. “The hack of the DNC and the hack of John
Podesta,” you answered.
Earlier during
the press conference you alluded to the fact that “the
information was in the hands of WikiLeaks.” The key
question is how the material from “Russian hacking” got
to WikiLeaks, because it was WikiLeaks that published
the DNC and Podesta emails.
Our VIPS
colleague William Binney, who was Technical Director of
NSA and created many of the collection systems still in
use, assures us that NSA’s “cast-iron” coverage –
particularly surrounding Julian Assange and other people
associated with WikiLeaks – would almost certainly have
yielded a record of any electronic transfer from Russia
to WikiLeaks. Binney has used some of the highly
classified slides released by Edward Snowden to
demonstrate precisely how NSA accomplishes this using
trace mechanisms embedded throughout the network. [See:
“U.S.
Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims,” Dec. 12,
2016.]
NSA
Must Come Clean
We strongly
suggest that you ask NSA for any evidence it may have
indicating that the results of Russian hacking were
given to WikiLeaks. If NSA can produce such evidence,
you may wish to order whatever declassification may be
needed and then release the evidence. This would go a
long way toward allaying suspicions that no evidence
exists. If NSA cannot give you that information – and
quickly – this would probably mean it does not have any.
In all candor,
the checkered record of Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper for trustworthiness makes us
much less confident that anyone should take it on faith
that he is more “trustworthy than the Russians,” as you
suggested on Dec. 16. You will probably recall that
Clapper lied under oath to the Senate Intelligence
Committee on March 12, 2013, about NSA dragnet
activities; later apologizing for testimony he admitted
had been “clearly erroneous.” In
our Memorandum for you on Dec. 11, 2013, we cited
chapter and verse as to why Clapper should have been
fired for saying things he knew to be “clearly
erroneous.”
In that
Memorandum, we endorsed the demand by Rep. Jim
Sensenbrenner that Clapper be removed. “Lying to
Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be
fired and prosecuted for it,” said Sensenbrenner in an
interview with The Hill. “The only way laws are
effective is if they’re enforced.”
Actually, we
have had trouble understanding why, almost four years
after he deliberately misled the Senate, Clapper remains
Director of National Intelligence – overseeing the
entire intelligence community.
Hacks
or Leaks?
Not mentioned
until now is our conclusion that leaks are the source of
the WikiLeaks disclosures in question – not
hacking. Leaks normally leave no electronic
trace. William Binney has been emphasizing this for
several months and suggesting strongly that the
disclosures were from a leaker with physical access to
the information – not a hacker with only remote access.
This, of
course, makes it even harder to pin the blame on
President Putin, or anyone else. And we suspect that
this explains why NSA demurred when asked to join the
CIA and FBI in expressing “high confidence” in this key
judgment of the report put out under Clapper’s auspices
on Jan. 6, yielding this curious formulation:
“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.
All three agencies agree with this
judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this
judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.” (Emphasis, and
lack of emphasis, in original)
In addition,
former U.K. Ambassador Craig Murray has said publicly he
has first-hand information on the provenance of the
leaks, and has expressed surprise that no one from the
New York Times or the Washington Post has tried to get
in touch with him. We would be interested in knowing
whether anyone from your administration, including the
intelligence community, has made any effort to contact
Ambassador Murray.
What to
Do
President-elect
Trump said a few days ago that his team will have a
“full report on hacking within 90 days.” Whatever the
findings of the Trump team turn out to be, they will no
doubt be greeted with due skepticism, since Mr. Trump is
in no way a disinterested party.
You, on the
other hand, enjoy far more credibility – AND power – for
the next few days. And we assume you would not wish to
hobble your successor with charges that cannot withstand
close scrutiny. We suggest you order the chiefs of the
NSA, FBI and CIA to the White House and ask them to lay
all their cards on the table. They need to show you why
you should continue to place credence in what, a month
ago, you described as “uniform intelligence assessments”
about Russian hacking.
At that point,
if the intelligence heads have credible evidence, you
have the option of ordering it released – even at the
risk of damage to sources and methods. For what it may
be worth, we will not be shocked if it turns out that
they can do no better than the evidence-deprived
assessments they have served up in recent weeks. In that
case, we would urge you, in all fairness, to let the
American people in on the dearth of convincing evidence
before you leave office.
As you will
have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the
evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint
Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing
operation is no better than the “intelligence” evidence
in 2002-2003 – expressed then with comparable flat-fact
“certitude” – of the existence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.
Obama’s
Legacy
Mr. President,
there is much talk in your final days in office about
your legacy. Will part of that legacy be that you stood
by while flames of illegitimacy rose willy-nilly around
your successor? Or will you use your power to reveal the
information – or the fact that there are merely
unsupported allegations – that would enable us to deal
with them responsibly?
In the
immediate wake of the holiday on which we mark the
birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems
appropriate to make reference to his legacy, calling to
mind the graphic words in his “Letter From the
Birmingham City Jail,” with which he reminds us of our
common duty to expose lies and injustice:
“Like a
boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered
up, but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness
to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice
must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its
exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and
the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
For the
Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS)
William Binney,
former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military
Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research
Center (ret.)
Marshall
Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer (ret) and former
Office Director in the State Department Bureau of
Intelligence and Research
Thomas Drake,
former Senior Executive, NSA
Bogdan
Dzakovic, Former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and
Red Team, FAA Security, (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Giraldi,
CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Mike Gravel,
former Adjutant, top secret control officer,
Communications Intelligence Service; special agent of
the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States
Senator
Matthew Hoh,
former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer,
Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry Johnson,
former CIA Intelligence Officer & former State
Department Counter-Terrorism Official, ret.
Michael S.
Kearns, Captain, USAF (Ret.); ex-Master SERE Instructor
for Strategic Reconnaissance Operations (NSA/DIA) and
Special Mission Units (JSOC)
Brady Kiesling,
former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, ret. (Associate
VIPS),
John Kiriakou,
Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior
Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Karen
Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at
Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture
of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Linda Lewis,
WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)
David
MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern,
former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA
analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce,
MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Elizabeth
Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for
Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Scott Ritter,
former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Coleen
Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis
Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Peter Van
Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer
(ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe,
former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research
Center, NSA (ret.)
Robert
Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright,
U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat
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