MARKETWATCH
"The Kremlin says Mueller report offers no evidence of Russian interference in U.S. election"
By Associated Press
Published: Apr 19, 2019 10:47 a.m. ET
MOSCOW (AP) — The Kremlin argued on Friday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 400-page report has not offered any credible evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The redacted report presented on Thursday said that there was no collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian officials but it did document Russian efforts to meddle in the presidential vote.
The publication of the redacted report offered Russian officials another “I-told-you-so” moment to deny any efforts to help Trump win the U.S. presidency.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that there is “no evidence substantiated by any facts” that Russia interfered in the election, and said stressed that Moscow rejects the accusations.
Peskov pointed out that President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied the claims of interference “because there was none.”
In the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament, the chairman of the information committee, Alexei Pushkov, on Friday mocked the Mueller probe for spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money without ever proving there was any collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, instead charging Trump’s former campaign chief with illegal lobbying on behalf of Ukraine.
Most of the Russian media on Thursday and Friday made a point of rejecting the well-documented findings about Russian interference in the 2016 elections via hacking and a social media campaign.
State-owned Rossiya television channel said in its report on the Vesti. Economy program late on Thursday that the report is not credible because it has failed to release the content of hacked emails or “specific files.”
“The Mueller probe was an attempt to threaten the current government and influence U.S. foreign policy without offering any specific evidence,” Vesti. Economy said.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-k ... 2019-04-19
RUSSIA
Re: RUSSIA
THE NEW YORK TIMES
"What Spy? Kremlin Mocks Aide Recruited by C.I.A. as a Boozy Nobody"
By Andrew Higgins
Sept. 11, 2019
MOSCOW — He drank too much, abandoned his sick, aged mother and — in Russia’s own account of the man portrayed in the United States as a highly valued spy burrowed deep into the Kremlin — he had no contact whatsoever with President Vladimir V. Putin.
Just hours after The New York Times and other American news outlets this week detailed how an unnamed Russian informant helped the C.I.A. conclude that Mr. Putin ordered and orchestrated a campaign of interference in the 2016 United States election, Russia fired up its propaganda machine to provide an entirely different picture of the same man, who the state-controlled news media identified as Oleg B. Smolenkov.
Instead of a superspy who saw Mr. Putin regularly and became “one of the C.I.A.’s most valuable assets,” he is now being presented by Russian officials, state-controlled news outlets and pro-Kremlin newspapers as a boozy nobody with no access to Kremlin secrets.
No American official has ever claimed the C.I.A.’s source was part of Mr. Putin’s inner circle.
But nevertheless, if Mr. Smolenkov, now aged 50, was the informant, he had a position of interest to the C.I.A.: an aide to a senior official close to Mr. Putin.
Anyone in that position could have provided a vital flow of information to the United States government.
Dmitri Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, told journalists on Tuesday that Mr. Smolenkov had been fired several years ago from a modest position in the Kremlin “that did not belong to the category of senior posts.”
This job, he added, “did not provide for any contacts with the president at all.”
Mr. Peskov said he could not confirm whether Mr. Smolenkov is indeed the alleged C.I.A. informant extracted from Russia in 2017 and described American news media accounts of the informant’s escapades as “pulp fiction.”
The C.I.A. declined to comment and The New York Times was not able to independently confirm that Mr. Smolenkov was indeed the spy extracted by the United States.
Much of what the Russian government was putting out through state-controlled media amounts to disinformation, said current and former American officials.
The information about Mr. Smolenkov, they said, could not be trusted.
Playing down the importance of a rival’s recruits is as much part of spycraft as exaggerating the importance of those recruited by one’s own side.
“It’s pretty standard practice to magnify your own intelligence triumphs and minimize those of your rivals,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security system at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
This is partly just an effort to control embarrassing publicity.
But, he added, “the hope — probably vain — is to cast doubt in the minds of the other side’s intelligence managers and consumers of the real value of the source’s insights.”
Whether the former Kremlin official was as valuable as the Americans describe him or as derelict as the Russians now claim is a question of paramount importance.
On his bona fides rests an issue at the heart not only of Washington’s relations with Moscow but also American politics: just how accurate was the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion, made public in a declassified report in January, 2017, that Mr. Putin personally “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” and developed “a clear preference for President-elect Trump?”
The informant extracted from Russia in 2017, whoever it was, had proved vital to the intelligence assessment about Moscow’s interference campaign.
The informant’s reports in 2016 detailed Mr. Putin’s intentions and orders, and led to the C.I.A.’s declaration with “high confidence” that the hack of the Democratic National Committee was the work of the Russian government.
For the Obama administration, the inside source’s testimony was critical; it gave them what they were missing, an understanding of the role of the Russian leadership in this new, innovative attack on the American democratic process.
It was the spy’s testimony that described a coordinated campaign that Mr. Putin himself ordered, as a public intelligence report, released in January, 2019, detailed.
Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, on Wednesday lashed out at reports of Mr. Smolenkov providing inside information to the C.I.A. on Russian election meddling, saying this was impossible “because there was no meddling.”
He condemned what he described as “the piling up of one lie on top of another and the multiplication of slander about us.”
Mr. Ryabkov’s boss, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, also weighed in, mostly to distance himself from Mr. Smolenkov.
“I never saw him, never met him and didn’t follow either his career or his movements."
"And I don’t want to comment on rumors,” the foreign minister said.
Aleksei Pushkov, chairman of the information policy committee in the Russian Parliament’s upper house, accused the United States of leaking information about its Russian informant as part of an effort to revive “its old story about ‘Russian interference in the election.’”
He did not name Mr. Smolenkov but mocked him as someone who “supposedly knew everything about everyone.”
He concluded: “The story is muddy, the goal is clear.”
Frants Klintsevich, a member of the defense and security committee of the upper house, said on his Facebook page that American news media reports of the extracted spy were “a routine attempt to discredit American President Donald Trump,” and said there was “no question of any American informant having worked ‘inside the Russian leadership.’”
Born in Ivanovo, a depressed former textile manufacturing center northeast of Moscow, Mr. Smolenkov seems to have joined the Russian Foreign Ministry straight out of college in the early 1990s.
But his duties, according to Russian accounts, involved less high diplomacy than lowly administrative tasks like money transfers.
He worked for a time at the ministry’s Second European Department, which handles relations with Britain, Baltic states and parts of Scandinavia.
Sent to Washington around 15 years ago to work in the Russian embassy there, he appeared in diplomatic lists as a “second secretary” and was listed as being accompanied by his then wife, Regina.
(He subsequently remarried a woman 16 years his junior, Antonina, who also worked in the Russian bureaucracy.)
While in Washington, the family rented a house in Norfolk, Va., but it is not clear whether the diplomat lived at this address, which is several hours’ drive from the capital.
Mr. Smolenkov worked under the Russian ambassador at the time, Yuri Ushakov, a seasoned diplomat who later became Mr. Putin’s diplomatic adviser in the Kremlin.
It is not clear where or when the C.I.A. recruited its informant, though it was decades ago, according to people familiar with the matter.
If Mr. Smolenkov was the spy, his tour of duty in Washington would have given the agency ample opportunity to cultivate him further.
Mr. Ushakov is precisely the kind of official close to Mr. Putin the agency was interested in.
Since 2012, Mr. Ushakov, now 72, has served as Mr. Putin’s foreign policy aide in the Kremlin.
And Mr. Ushakov has been involved in every major confrontation between Russia and the West in recent years — from the incursions into Ukraine to the annexation of Crimea to the confrontations over arms control with the U.S.
RIA-Novosti, a state-controlled Russian news agency, quoted an unnamed former colleague as saying Mr. Smolenkov’s duties at the embassy revolved around menial tasks like buying automobiles for the embassy car pool and goods for its shop.
The colleague also said Mr. Smolenkov “often” drank and a “bit more than usual,” which is saying something in the context of Russia’s diplomatic corps.
Another former associate said Mr. Smolenkov complained about his foreign ministry salary being too low.
After returning to Russia, Mr. Smolenkov appeared in a 2010 civil service ranking as a “third class” official serving as an adviser to the government.
He left the government bureaucracy around 2012 and joined the presidential administration, a separate system, as an aide and then “chief adviser” to Mr. Ushakov, the former ambassador to Washington.
He had an office in Old Square, a tightly guarded complex of buildings used by many of Mr. Putin’s officials down the road from the Kremlin.
Mr. Galeotti, the Russian security expert, said that Mr. Smolenkov’s position, though fairly lowly, would probably have granted him “considerable access.”
That said, he added, the “Russians operate ‘compartmentalized intelligence’ based on need-to-know, and I’d be skeptical he’d have any sight of operational materials.”
As in many governments, Russia’s foreign policy professionals have wary relations with their country’s intelligence services, particularly the military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., which has been accused of spearheading Moscow’s election meddling.
This makes it highly unlikely, experts say, that Mr. Smolenkov or even Mr. Ushakov would have had detailed knowledge of a secret program to disrupt American democracy hatched by Russia’s spies.
Mr. Smolenkov’s known curriculum vitae is so thin that it has prompted speculation on Russian social media that rather than providing the C.I.A. with secret inside information he merely acted as a “courier” to the Americans for information obtained by a more highly placed agent who has yet to be exposed.
But such speculation could itself be disinformation, as there is no easier way to thwart the operations of a country’s intelligence apparatus than planting seeds of suspicion of hidden traitors.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the C.I.A. became paralyzed by an endless hunt for turncoats driven by James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s deeply paranoid counterintelligence chief.
The Russian and American accounts of Mr. Smolenkov’s activities diverge so sharply that even the manner of his escape from Russia is clouded by contradiction.
United States officials describe a secret operation in 2017 to “exfiltrate” — spy talk for extract — him to safety.
Russia, though, has detailed a far more mundane exit, saying Mr. Smolenkov took his second wife and their three children on holiday to Montenegro, a popular tourist destination for Russians on the Adriatic coast, and then traveled on to the United States, where he bought a house under his own name in Virginia for $925,000 in 2018.
The only certainty is that he and his family disappeared.
Russian opened a murder case after they vanished but closed it when no bodies could be found.
In the fall of 2017, friends of his son, Ivan, exchanged anxious messages on VKontakte, a Russian social networking site.
“Is he dead or what?” asked one of Ivan’s friends.
When this drew flippant responses, the friend tried again: “Seriously, what has happened to him?”
“God only knows,” replied another friend.
Reporting was contributed by Oleg Matsnev from Moscow, and Julian Barnes and David E. Sanger from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 12, 2019, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Moscow Mocks Russian Aide Recruited by the C.I.A. as a Boozy Nobody.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/worl ... emlin.html
"What Spy? Kremlin Mocks Aide Recruited by C.I.A. as a Boozy Nobody"
By Andrew Higgins
Sept. 11, 2019
MOSCOW — He drank too much, abandoned his sick, aged mother and — in Russia’s own account of the man portrayed in the United States as a highly valued spy burrowed deep into the Kremlin — he had no contact whatsoever with President Vladimir V. Putin.
Just hours after The New York Times and other American news outlets this week detailed how an unnamed Russian informant helped the C.I.A. conclude that Mr. Putin ordered and orchestrated a campaign of interference in the 2016 United States election, Russia fired up its propaganda machine to provide an entirely different picture of the same man, who the state-controlled news media identified as Oleg B. Smolenkov.
Instead of a superspy who saw Mr. Putin regularly and became “one of the C.I.A.’s most valuable assets,” he is now being presented by Russian officials, state-controlled news outlets and pro-Kremlin newspapers as a boozy nobody with no access to Kremlin secrets.
No American official has ever claimed the C.I.A.’s source was part of Mr. Putin’s inner circle.
But nevertheless, if Mr. Smolenkov, now aged 50, was the informant, he had a position of interest to the C.I.A.: an aide to a senior official close to Mr. Putin.
Anyone in that position could have provided a vital flow of information to the United States government.
Dmitri Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, told journalists on Tuesday that Mr. Smolenkov had been fired several years ago from a modest position in the Kremlin “that did not belong to the category of senior posts.”
This job, he added, “did not provide for any contacts with the president at all.”
Mr. Peskov said he could not confirm whether Mr. Smolenkov is indeed the alleged C.I.A. informant extracted from Russia in 2017 and described American news media accounts of the informant’s escapades as “pulp fiction.”
The C.I.A. declined to comment and The New York Times was not able to independently confirm that Mr. Smolenkov was indeed the spy extracted by the United States.
Much of what the Russian government was putting out through state-controlled media amounts to disinformation, said current and former American officials.
The information about Mr. Smolenkov, they said, could not be trusted.
Playing down the importance of a rival’s recruits is as much part of spycraft as exaggerating the importance of those recruited by one’s own side.
“It’s pretty standard practice to magnify your own intelligence triumphs and minimize those of your rivals,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security system at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
This is partly just an effort to control embarrassing publicity.
But, he added, “the hope — probably vain — is to cast doubt in the minds of the other side’s intelligence managers and consumers of the real value of the source’s insights.”
Whether the former Kremlin official was as valuable as the Americans describe him or as derelict as the Russians now claim is a question of paramount importance.
On his bona fides rests an issue at the heart not only of Washington’s relations with Moscow but also American politics: just how accurate was the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion, made public in a declassified report in January, 2017, that Mr. Putin personally “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” and developed “a clear preference for President-elect Trump?”
The informant extracted from Russia in 2017, whoever it was, had proved vital to the intelligence assessment about Moscow’s interference campaign.
The informant’s reports in 2016 detailed Mr. Putin’s intentions and orders, and led to the C.I.A.’s declaration with “high confidence” that the hack of the Democratic National Committee was the work of the Russian government.
For the Obama administration, the inside source’s testimony was critical; it gave them what they were missing, an understanding of the role of the Russian leadership in this new, innovative attack on the American democratic process.
It was the spy’s testimony that described a coordinated campaign that Mr. Putin himself ordered, as a public intelligence report, released in January, 2019, detailed.
Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, on Wednesday lashed out at reports of Mr. Smolenkov providing inside information to the C.I.A. on Russian election meddling, saying this was impossible “because there was no meddling.”
He condemned what he described as “the piling up of one lie on top of another and the multiplication of slander about us.”
Mr. Ryabkov’s boss, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, also weighed in, mostly to distance himself from Mr. Smolenkov.
“I never saw him, never met him and didn’t follow either his career or his movements."
"And I don’t want to comment on rumors,” the foreign minister said.
Aleksei Pushkov, chairman of the information policy committee in the Russian Parliament’s upper house, accused the United States of leaking information about its Russian informant as part of an effort to revive “its old story about ‘Russian interference in the election.’”
He did not name Mr. Smolenkov but mocked him as someone who “supposedly knew everything about everyone.”
He concluded: “The story is muddy, the goal is clear.”
Frants Klintsevich, a member of the defense and security committee of the upper house, said on his Facebook page that American news media reports of the extracted spy were “a routine attempt to discredit American President Donald Trump,” and said there was “no question of any American informant having worked ‘inside the Russian leadership.’”
Born in Ivanovo, a depressed former textile manufacturing center northeast of Moscow, Mr. Smolenkov seems to have joined the Russian Foreign Ministry straight out of college in the early 1990s.
But his duties, according to Russian accounts, involved less high diplomacy than lowly administrative tasks like money transfers.
He worked for a time at the ministry’s Second European Department, which handles relations with Britain, Baltic states and parts of Scandinavia.
Sent to Washington around 15 years ago to work in the Russian embassy there, he appeared in diplomatic lists as a “second secretary” and was listed as being accompanied by his then wife, Regina.
(He subsequently remarried a woman 16 years his junior, Antonina, who also worked in the Russian bureaucracy.)
While in Washington, the family rented a house in Norfolk, Va., but it is not clear whether the diplomat lived at this address, which is several hours’ drive from the capital.
Mr. Smolenkov worked under the Russian ambassador at the time, Yuri Ushakov, a seasoned diplomat who later became Mr. Putin’s diplomatic adviser in the Kremlin.
It is not clear where or when the C.I.A. recruited its informant, though it was decades ago, according to people familiar with the matter.
If Mr. Smolenkov was the spy, his tour of duty in Washington would have given the agency ample opportunity to cultivate him further.
Mr. Ushakov is precisely the kind of official close to Mr. Putin the agency was interested in.
Since 2012, Mr. Ushakov, now 72, has served as Mr. Putin’s foreign policy aide in the Kremlin.
And Mr. Ushakov has been involved in every major confrontation between Russia and the West in recent years — from the incursions into Ukraine to the annexation of Crimea to the confrontations over arms control with the U.S.
RIA-Novosti, a state-controlled Russian news agency, quoted an unnamed former colleague as saying Mr. Smolenkov’s duties at the embassy revolved around menial tasks like buying automobiles for the embassy car pool and goods for its shop.
The colleague also said Mr. Smolenkov “often” drank and a “bit more than usual,” which is saying something in the context of Russia’s diplomatic corps.
Another former associate said Mr. Smolenkov complained about his foreign ministry salary being too low.
After returning to Russia, Mr. Smolenkov appeared in a 2010 civil service ranking as a “third class” official serving as an adviser to the government.
He left the government bureaucracy around 2012 and joined the presidential administration, a separate system, as an aide and then “chief adviser” to Mr. Ushakov, the former ambassador to Washington.
He had an office in Old Square, a tightly guarded complex of buildings used by many of Mr. Putin’s officials down the road from the Kremlin.
Mr. Galeotti, the Russian security expert, said that Mr. Smolenkov’s position, though fairly lowly, would probably have granted him “considerable access.”
That said, he added, the “Russians operate ‘compartmentalized intelligence’ based on need-to-know, and I’d be skeptical he’d have any sight of operational materials.”
As in many governments, Russia’s foreign policy professionals have wary relations with their country’s intelligence services, particularly the military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., which has been accused of spearheading Moscow’s election meddling.
This makes it highly unlikely, experts say, that Mr. Smolenkov or even Mr. Ushakov would have had detailed knowledge of a secret program to disrupt American democracy hatched by Russia’s spies.
Mr. Smolenkov’s known curriculum vitae is so thin that it has prompted speculation on Russian social media that rather than providing the C.I.A. with secret inside information he merely acted as a “courier” to the Americans for information obtained by a more highly placed agent who has yet to be exposed.
But such speculation could itself be disinformation, as there is no easier way to thwart the operations of a country’s intelligence apparatus than planting seeds of suspicion of hidden traitors.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the C.I.A. became paralyzed by an endless hunt for turncoats driven by James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s deeply paranoid counterintelligence chief.
The Russian and American accounts of Mr. Smolenkov’s activities diverge so sharply that even the manner of his escape from Russia is clouded by contradiction.
United States officials describe a secret operation in 2017 to “exfiltrate” — spy talk for extract — him to safety.
Russia, though, has detailed a far more mundane exit, saying Mr. Smolenkov took his second wife and their three children on holiday to Montenegro, a popular tourist destination for Russians on the Adriatic coast, and then traveled on to the United States, where he bought a house under his own name in Virginia for $925,000 in 2018.
The only certainty is that he and his family disappeared.
Russian opened a murder case after they vanished but closed it when no bodies could be found.
In the fall of 2017, friends of his son, Ivan, exchanged anxious messages on VKontakte, a Russian social networking site.
“Is he dead or what?” asked one of Ivan’s friends.
When this drew flippant responses, the friend tried again: “Seriously, what has happened to him?”
“God only knows,” replied another friend.
Reporting was contributed by Oleg Matsnev from Moscow, and Julian Barnes and David E. Sanger from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 12, 2019, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Moscow Mocks Russian Aide Recruited by the C.I.A. as a Boozy Nobody.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/worl ... emlin.html
Re: RUSSIA
Yahoo! News
"Exclusive: Russia carried out a 'stunning' breach of FBI communications system, escalating the spy game on U.S. soil"
Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor
16 SEPTEMBER 2019
On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government.
As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.
The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.
Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials.
The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials.
It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.
“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.
American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams.
Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet.
Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.
These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials.
They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.
“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.
The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s 2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover – and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage.
Just a few months after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian intelligence officers.
These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The breaches also spoke to larger challenges faced by U.S. intelligence agencies in guarding the nation’s secrets, an issue highlighted by recent revelations, first published by CNN, that the CIA was forced to extract a key Russian asset and bring him to the U.S. in 2017.
The asset was reportedly critical to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally directed the interference in the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump.
Yahoo spoke about these previously unreported technical breaches and the larger government debates surrounding U.S. policies toward Russia with more than 50 current and former intelligence and national security officials, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive operations and internal discussions.
While the officials expressed a variety of views on what went wrong with U.S.-Russian relations, some said the United States at times neglected to appreciate the espionage challenge from Moscow, and paid a significant price for a failure to prioritize technical threats.
“When I was in office, the counterintelligence business was … focused entirely on its core concern, which is insider threats, and in particular mole hunting,” said Joel Brenner, the head of U.S. counterintelligence and strategy from 2006 to 2009.
“This is, in fact, the core risk and it’s right that it should be the focus."
"But we were neither organized nor resourced to deal with counterintelligence in networks, technical networks, electronic networks.”
The discovery of Russia’s newfound capacity to crack certain types of encryption was particularly unnerving, according to former U.S. officials.
“Anytime you find out that an adversary has these capabilities, it sets off a ripple effect,” said a former senior national security official.
“The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given technology."
"... They are singularly dangerous in this area.”
The FBI’s discovery of these compromises took place on the heels of what many hoped would be a breakthrough between Washington and Moscow — the Obama administration’s 2009 “reset” initiative, which sought to improve U.S.-Russia relations.
Despite what seemed to be some initial progress, the reset soon went awry.
In September 2011, Vladimir Putin announced the launch of his third presidential campaign, only to be confronted during the following months by tens of thousands of protesters accusing him of electoral fraud.
Putin, a former intelligence officer, publicly accused then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of fomenting the unrest.
It was around this time that Putin’s spies in the United States, operating under diplomatic cover, achieved what a former senior intelligence official called a “stunning” technical breakthrough, demonstrating their relentless focus on the country they’ve long considered their primary adversary.
That effort compromised the encrypted radio systems used by the FBI’s mobile surveillance teams, which track the movements of Russian spies on American soil, according to more than half a dozen former senior intelligence and national security officials.
Around the same time, Russian spies also compromised the FBI teams’ backup communications systems — cellphones outfitted with “push-to-talk” walkie-talkie capabilities.
“This was something we took extremely seriously,” said a former senior counterintelligence official.
The Russian operation went beyond tracking the communications devices used by FBI surveillance teams, according to four former senior officials.
Working out of secret “listening posts” housed in Russian diplomatic and other government-controlled facilities, the Russians were able to intercept, record and eventually crack the codes to FBI radio communications.
Some of the clandestine eavesdropping annexes were staffed by the wives of Russian intelligence officers, said a former senior intelligence official.
That operation was part of a larger sustained, deliberate Russian campaign targeting secret U.S. government communications throughout the United States, according to former officials.
The two Russian government compounds in Maryland and New York closed in 2016 played a role in the operation, according to three former officials.
They were “basically being used as signals intelligence facilities,” said one former senior national security official.
Russian spies also deployed “mobile listening posts.”
Some Russian intelligence officers, carrying signals intelligence gear, would walk near FBI surveillance teams.
Others drove vans full of listening equipment aimed at intercepting FBI teams’ communications.
For the Russians, the operation was “amazingly low risk in an angering way,” said a former senior intelligence official.
The FBI teams were using relatively lightweight radios with limited range, according to former officials.
These low-tech devices allowed the teams to move quickly and discreetly while tracking their targets, which would have been more difficult with clunkier but more secure technology, a former official said.
But the outdated radios left the teams’ communications vulnerable to the Russians.
“The amount of security you employ is the inverse of being able to do things with flexibility, agility and at scale,” said the former official.
A former senior counterintelligence official blamed the compromises on a “hodgepodge of systems” ineffective beyond the line of sight.
“The infrastructure that was supposed to be built, they never followed up, or gave us the money for it,” said the former official.
“The intelligence community has never gotten an integrated system.”
The limitations of the radio technology, said the former senior officials, led the FBI’s surveillance personnel to communicate on the backup systems.
“Eventually they switched to push-to-talk cellphones,” said a former counterintelligence executive.
“The tech guys would get upset by that, because if they could intercept radio, they might be able to intercept telephones.”
That is indeed what happened.
Those devices were then identified and compromised by Russian intelligence operatives.
(A number of other countries’ surveillance teams — including those from hostile services — also transitioned from using radios to cellphones during this time, noted another former official.)
U.S. intelligence officials were uncertain whether the Russians were able to unscramble the FBI conversations in real time.
But even the ability to decrypt them later would have given the Russians critical insights into FBI surveillance practices, including “call signs and locations, team composition and tactics,” said a former intelligence official.
U.S. officials were also unsure about how long the Russians had been able to decipher FBI communications before the bureau realized what was happening.
“There was a gap between when they were really onto us, and when we got onto them,” said a former senior intelligence official.
Even after they understood that the Russians had compromised the FBI teams’ radios, U.S. counterintelligence officials could not agree on how they had done it.
“The intel reporting was they did break our codes or got their hands on a radio and figured it out,” said a former senior intelligence official.
“Either way, they decrypted our comms.”
Officials also cautioned, however, that the Russians could only crack moderately encrypted communications, not the strongest types of encryption used by the U.S. government for its most sensitive transmissions.
It was nonetheless “an incredible intelligence success” for the Russians, said the former senior official.
While the Russians may have developed this capability by themselves, senior counterintelligence officials also feared that someone from within the U.S. government — a Russian mole — may have helped them, said former officials.
“You’re wondering, ‘If this is true, and they can do this, is this because someone on the inside has given them that information?’’ said another former senior intelligence official.
Russia has a clear interest in concealing how it gets its information, further muddying the waters.
According to a former senior CIA officer who served in Moscow, the Russians would often try to disguise a human source as a technical penetration.
Ultimately, officials were unable to pinpoint exactly how the Russians pulled off the compromise of the FBI’s systems.
Mark Kelton, who served as the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA until he retired in 2015, declined to discuss specific Russian operations, but he told Yahoo News that “the Russians are a professionally proficient adversary who have historically penetrated every American institution worth penetrating.”
This remains a core worry for U.S. spy hunters.
The number of ongoing espionage investigations into U.S. government personnel — at the CIA, the FBI and elsewhere — including those potentially recruited by Russia, “is not a little, it’s a lot,” said another former senior counterintelligence official.
Once the compromises of FBI communications devices were confirmed, U.S. officials scrambled to minimize the exposure of mobile surveillance team operations, quickly putting countermeasures in place, according to former senior officials.
There was a “huge concern” about protecting the identities of the individuals on the teams — an elite, secret group — said the former senior counterintelligence official.
U.S. officials also conducted a damage assessment and repeatedly briefed select White House officials and members of Congress about the compromise.
After the FBI discovered that its surveillance teams’ cellphones had been compromised, they were forced to switch back to encrypted radios, purchasing different models, according to two former officials.
“It was an expensive venture,” said one former counterintelligence official.
But the spying successes went both ways.
The U.S. intelligence community collected its own inside information to conclude that the damage from the compromises had been limited, partly due to the Russians’ efforts to keep their intelligence coup secret, according to a former senior intelligence official.
“The Russians were reticent to take steps [that might reveal] that they’d figured it out,” the former senior official said.
Even so, the costs to U.S. intelligence were significant.
Spooked by the discovery that its surveillance teams’ communications had been compromised, the FBI worried that some of its assets had been blown, said two former senior intelligence officials.
The bureau consequently cut off contact with some of its Russian sources, according to one of those officials.
At the time of the compromise, some of the FBI’s other Russian assets stopped cooperating with their American handlers.
“There were a couple instances where a recruited person had said, ‘I can’t meet you anymore,’” said a former senior intelligence official.
In a damage assessment conducted around 2012, U.S. intelligence officials concluded the events may have been linked.
The impact was not limited to the FBI.
Alerted by the bureau to concerns surrounding Russia’s enhanced interception capabilities, the CIA also ceased certain types of communications with sources abroad, according to a former senior CIA official.
The agency “had to resort to a whole series of steps” to ensure the Russians weren’t able to eavesdrop on CIA communications, the former senior official said.
There was a “strong hint” that these newly discovered code-breaking capabilities by Russia were also being used abroad, said another former senior intelligence official.
The CIA has long been wary of Russian spies’ eavesdropping efforts outside of the United States, especially near U.S. diplomatic facilities.
U.S. officials have observed Russian technical officers repeatedly walking close to those compounds with packages in their hands, or wearing backpacks, or pushing strollers, or driving by in vehicles — all attempts, U.S. officials believe, to collect information on the different signals emanating from the facilities.
While the tools used by the Russians for these activities were “a bit antiquated,” said a former senior CIA official, they were still a “constant concern.”
It’s not unusual for intelligence officers operating from diplomatic facilities, including the United States’s own operatives, to try and intercept the communications of the host nation.
“You had to find ways to attack their surveillance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former head of counterintelligence at the Department of Energy and a former CIA officer who first served in Moscow in the 1980s.
“The Russians do everything in the U.S. that we did in Moscow.”
Indeed, the focus on cracking radio communications was no different.
“We put extraordinary effort into intercepting and monitoring the FSB surveillance radio networks for the purpose of understanding whether our officers were under surveillance or not,” said another former senior CIA officer who also served in Moscow.
The discovery of the Russians’ new code-breaking capabilities came at a time when gathering intelligence on Russia and its leaders’ intentions was of particular importance to the U.S. government.
U.S. national security officials working on Russia at the time received rigorous security training on how to keep their digital devices secure, according to two former senior officials.
One former U.S. official recalled how during the negotiations surrounding the reset, NSC officials, partially tongue in cheek, “would sometimes say things on the phone hoping [they] were communicating things to the Russians.”
According to a former CIA official and a former national security official, the CIA’s analysts often disagreed about how committed Russia was to negotiations during the attempted reset and how far Putin would go to achieve his strategic aims, divergences that confused the White House and senior policy makers.
“It caused a really big rift within the [National Security Council] on how seriously they took analysis from the agency,” said the former CIA official.
Senior administration leaders “went along with” some of the more optimistic analysis on the future of U.S.-Russia relations “in the hopes that this would work out,” the official continued.
Those disagreements were part of a “reset hangover” that persisted, at least for some inside the administration, until the 2016 election meddling, according to a former senior national security official.
Those officials clung to the hope that Washington and Moscow could cooperate on key issues, despite aggressive Russian actions ranging from the invasion of Ukraine to its spying efforts.
“We didn’t understand that they were at political war with us already in the second term once Putin was reelected and Obama himself was reelected,” said Evelyn Farkas, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia during the Obama administration.
As high-level hopes for the U.S.-Russia “reset” withered, concerns about the threat of Russian spying made their way to Capitol Hill.
Top officials at the FBI and CIA briefed key members of Congress on counterintelligence issues related to Russia, according to current and former U.S. officials.
These included briefings on the radio compromises, said two former senior officials.
Mike Rogers, a former Republican lawmaker from Michigan who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2011 to 2015, alluded to counterintelligence concerns at a conference earlier this year in Washington, D.C.
One of those concerns was a massive intelligence failure related to the secret internet-based communications system the CIA used to communicate with agents.
The extent of that failure, first reported publicly by Yahoo News in 2018, got the attention of Congress earlier.
But the problems were broader than that issue, according to Rogers.
“Our counterintelligence operations needed some adjustments,” said Rogers, adding that he and his Democratic counterpart from Maryland, Dutch Ruppersberger, requested regular briefings on the subject from agency representatives.
“We started out monthly until we just wore them out, then we did it quarterly to try to make sure that we had the right resources and the right focus for the entire community on counter[intelligence].”
Rogers later told Yahoo News that his request for the briefings had been prompted by “suspected penetrations, both physical and technical, which is the role of those [Russian and Chinese] intelligence services,” but declined to be more specific.
The former committee chairman said he wanted the intelligence community to make counterintelligence a higher priority.
“Counterintelligence was always looked at as the crazy uncle at the party,” he said.
“I wanted to raise it up and give it a robust importance.”
The briefings, which primarily involved counterintelligence officials from the FBI and CIA and were limited to the committee leadership and staff directors, led to “some useful inquiries to help focus the intelligence community,” Rogers said.
The leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were also included in some of the inquiries, according to Rogers and a current U.S. government official.
Spokespeople for the current House and Senate intelligence committees did not respond to a request for comment.
The FBI and CIA declined to comment.
The Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to a request for comment.
The briefings were designed to “get the counterintelligence house in order,” said Jamil Jaffer, senior counsel at the House intelligence committee from 2011 to 2013, and to ensure that Congress and the intelligence agencies were “on the same page” when it came to such matters.
“There were some concerns about what the agencies were doing, there were some concerns about what Congress knew, and all of these issues, of course, had China-Russia implications.”
Rogers and Jaffer declined to provide further details about what specific counterintelligence issues the committee was addressing, but other former officials indicated that worries weren’t limited to the compromise of FBI radio systems.
Senior U.S. officials were contemplating an even more disturbing possibility: that the Russians had found a way to penetrate the communications of the U.S. intelligence community’s most sensitive buildings in and around Washington, D.C.
Suspected Russian intelligence officers were seen conspicuously loitering along the road that runs alongside the CIA’s headquarters, according to former senior intelligence officials.
“Russian diplomats would be sitting on Route 123, sometimes in cars with diplomatic plates, other times not,” a former senior intelligence executive said.
“We thought, they’re out doing something."
"It’s not just taking down license plates; those guys are interrogating the system.”
Though this behavior dated back at least to the mid-2000s, former officials said those activities persisted simultaneously with the compromise of the FBI’s communication system.
And these were not the only instances of Russian intelligence operatives staking out locations with a line of sight to CIA headquarters.
They were “fixated on being in neighborhoods” that gave them exposure to Langley, said a former senior official.
Over time, U.S. intelligence officials became increasingly concerned that Russian spies might be attempting to intercept communications from key U.S. intelligence facilities, including the CIA and FBI headquarters.
No one knew if the Russians had actually succeeded.
“The question was whether they had capabilities to penetrate our comms at Langley,” said a former senior CIA official.
In the absence of any proof that that was the case, the working theory was that the Russian activities were provocations designed to sow uncertainty within the CIA.
“We came to the conclusion that they were trying to get into our heads,” the former senior official said.
A major concern was that Russian spies with physical proximity to sensitive U.S. buildings might be exfiltrating pilfered data that had “jumped the air gap,” i.e., that the Russians were collecting information from a breach of computers not connected to the Internet, said former officials.
One factor behind U.S. intelligence officials’ fears was simple: The CIA had already figured out how to perform similar operations themselves, according to a former senior CIA officer directly familiar with the matter.
“We felt it was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time,” the former CIA officer said.
“It allowed us to do some extraordinary things.”
While no one definitively concluded that the Russians had actually succeeded in penetrating Langley’s communications, those fears, combined in part with the breach of the bureau’s encrypted radio system, drove an effort by U.S. intelligence officials around 2012 to fortify sensitive Washington-area government buildings against potential Russian snooping, according to four former officials.
At key government facilities in the Washington area, entire floors were converted to sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs.
These are specially protected areas designed to be impenetrable to hostile signals intelligence gathering.
The normal assumption was that work done in a SCIF would be secure, but doubts arose about the safety of even those rooms.
“The security guys would say, your windows are ‘tempested’”—that is, protected against the interception of emissions radiating from electronic equipment in the building —“you’re in a SCIF, it’s fine,” a former senior counterintelligence executive recalled.
“The question was, ‘Is it true?’”
Increasingly, U.S. officials began to fear it was not.
New security practices were instituted in sensitive government facilities like the FBI and CIA headquarters, according to former officials.
“It required many procedural changes on our part to make sure we were not susceptible to penetrations,” said a former senior CIA official.
These included basic steps such as moving communication away from windows and changing encryption codes more frequently, as well as more expensive adjustments, said four former officials.
Revelations about the Russian compromise of the radio systems, recalled a former senior intelligence official, “kick-started the money flowing” to upgrade security.
While the breaches of the FBI communications systems appeared to finally spur Congress and the intelligence agencies to adopt steps to counter increasingly sophisticated Russian eavesdropping, it took the Putin-directed interference in the 2016 election to get the White House to expel at least some of those officials deemed responsible for the breaches, and to shut down the facilities that enabled them.
Even then, the decision was controversial.
Some in Washington worried about retribution by the Russians and exposure of American intelligence operations, according to a former senior U.S. national security official directly involved in the discussions.
The FBI consistently supported expulsions, said another former national security official.
More than two years later, the Russian diplomatic compounds used in the FBI communications compromises remain shuttered.
The U.S. government has prevented many of the Russian spies expelled by the United States from returning, according to national security experts and senior foreign intelligence officials.
“They are slowly creeping back in, but [the] FBI makes it hard,” said a senior foreign intelligence official.
“The old guard is basically screwed."
"They need to bring in a whole new generation.”
In the meantime, those familiar with Russian operations warn that the threat from Moscow is far from over.
“Make no mistake, we’re in an intelligence war with the Russians, every bit as dangerous as the Cold War,” said a former senior intelligence officer.
“They’re trying all the time ... and we caught them from time to time,” he said.
Of course, he added, “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
That’s the same message that special counsel Robert Mueller tried to convey during the highly contentious hearings to discuss his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“They are doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” Mueller told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee about covert Russian involvement in U.S. politics.
But a number of observers believe Mueller’s message about the threat from Russia was largely lost amid a partisan battle on Capitol Hill over President Trump.
During his Washington conference appearance earlier this year, Rogers, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, also lamented that the current politicized state of the intelligence committees would make spy agencies more hesitant to admit their failures.
“They're not going to call you to say, 'I screwed up.'"
"They're going to say, 'God, I hope they don't find that,’” he said.
“That's what's going to happen."
"I'll guarantee it's happening today.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/exclus ... P17#page=2
"Exclusive: Russia carried out a 'stunning' breach of FBI communications system, escalating the spy game on U.S. soil"
Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor
16 SEPTEMBER 2019
On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government.
As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.
The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.
Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials.
The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials.
It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.
“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.
American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams.
Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet.
Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.
These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials.
They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.
“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.
The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s 2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover – and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage.
Just a few months after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian intelligence officers.
These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The breaches also spoke to larger challenges faced by U.S. intelligence agencies in guarding the nation’s secrets, an issue highlighted by recent revelations, first published by CNN, that the CIA was forced to extract a key Russian asset and bring him to the U.S. in 2017.
The asset was reportedly critical to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally directed the interference in the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump.
Yahoo spoke about these previously unreported technical breaches and the larger government debates surrounding U.S. policies toward Russia with more than 50 current and former intelligence and national security officials, most of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive operations and internal discussions.
While the officials expressed a variety of views on what went wrong with U.S.-Russian relations, some said the United States at times neglected to appreciate the espionage challenge from Moscow, and paid a significant price for a failure to prioritize technical threats.
“When I was in office, the counterintelligence business was … focused entirely on its core concern, which is insider threats, and in particular mole hunting,” said Joel Brenner, the head of U.S. counterintelligence and strategy from 2006 to 2009.
“This is, in fact, the core risk and it’s right that it should be the focus."
"But we were neither organized nor resourced to deal with counterintelligence in networks, technical networks, electronic networks.”
The discovery of Russia’s newfound capacity to crack certain types of encryption was particularly unnerving, according to former U.S. officials.
“Anytime you find out that an adversary has these capabilities, it sets off a ripple effect,” said a former senior national security official.
“The Russians are able to extract every capability from any given technology."
"... They are singularly dangerous in this area.”
The FBI’s discovery of these compromises took place on the heels of what many hoped would be a breakthrough between Washington and Moscow — the Obama administration’s 2009 “reset” initiative, which sought to improve U.S.-Russia relations.
Despite what seemed to be some initial progress, the reset soon went awry.
In September 2011, Vladimir Putin announced the launch of his third presidential campaign, only to be confronted during the following months by tens of thousands of protesters accusing him of electoral fraud.
Putin, a former intelligence officer, publicly accused then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of fomenting the unrest.
It was around this time that Putin’s spies in the United States, operating under diplomatic cover, achieved what a former senior intelligence official called a “stunning” technical breakthrough, demonstrating their relentless focus on the country they’ve long considered their primary adversary.
That effort compromised the encrypted radio systems used by the FBI’s mobile surveillance teams, which track the movements of Russian spies on American soil, according to more than half a dozen former senior intelligence and national security officials.
Around the same time, Russian spies also compromised the FBI teams’ backup communications systems — cellphones outfitted with “push-to-talk” walkie-talkie capabilities.
“This was something we took extremely seriously,” said a former senior counterintelligence official.
The Russian operation went beyond tracking the communications devices used by FBI surveillance teams, according to four former senior officials.
Working out of secret “listening posts” housed in Russian diplomatic and other government-controlled facilities, the Russians were able to intercept, record and eventually crack the codes to FBI radio communications.
Some of the clandestine eavesdropping annexes were staffed by the wives of Russian intelligence officers, said a former senior intelligence official.
That operation was part of a larger sustained, deliberate Russian campaign targeting secret U.S. government communications throughout the United States, according to former officials.
The two Russian government compounds in Maryland and New York closed in 2016 played a role in the operation, according to three former officials.
They were “basically being used as signals intelligence facilities,” said one former senior national security official.
Russian spies also deployed “mobile listening posts.”
Some Russian intelligence officers, carrying signals intelligence gear, would walk near FBI surveillance teams.
Others drove vans full of listening equipment aimed at intercepting FBI teams’ communications.
For the Russians, the operation was “amazingly low risk in an angering way,” said a former senior intelligence official.
The FBI teams were using relatively lightweight radios with limited range, according to former officials.
These low-tech devices allowed the teams to move quickly and discreetly while tracking their targets, which would have been more difficult with clunkier but more secure technology, a former official said.
But the outdated radios left the teams’ communications vulnerable to the Russians.
“The amount of security you employ is the inverse of being able to do things with flexibility, agility and at scale,” said the former official.
A former senior counterintelligence official blamed the compromises on a “hodgepodge of systems” ineffective beyond the line of sight.
“The infrastructure that was supposed to be built, they never followed up, or gave us the money for it,” said the former official.
“The intelligence community has never gotten an integrated system.”
The limitations of the radio technology, said the former senior officials, led the FBI’s surveillance personnel to communicate on the backup systems.
“Eventually they switched to push-to-talk cellphones,” said a former counterintelligence executive.
“The tech guys would get upset by that, because if they could intercept radio, they might be able to intercept telephones.”
That is indeed what happened.
Those devices were then identified and compromised by Russian intelligence operatives.
(A number of other countries’ surveillance teams — including those from hostile services — also transitioned from using radios to cellphones during this time, noted another former official.)
U.S. intelligence officials were uncertain whether the Russians were able to unscramble the FBI conversations in real time.
But even the ability to decrypt them later would have given the Russians critical insights into FBI surveillance practices, including “call signs and locations, team composition and tactics,” said a former intelligence official.
U.S. officials were also unsure about how long the Russians had been able to decipher FBI communications before the bureau realized what was happening.
“There was a gap between when they were really onto us, and when we got onto them,” said a former senior intelligence official.
Even after they understood that the Russians had compromised the FBI teams’ radios, U.S. counterintelligence officials could not agree on how they had done it.
“The intel reporting was they did break our codes or got their hands on a radio and figured it out,” said a former senior intelligence official.
“Either way, they decrypted our comms.”
Officials also cautioned, however, that the Russians could only crack moderately encrypted communications, not the strongest types of encryption used by the U.S. government for its most sensitive transmissions.
It was nonetheless “an incredible intelligence success” for the Russians, said the former senior official.
While the Russians may have developed this capability by themselves, senior counterintelligence officials also feared that someone from within the U.S. government — a Russian mole — may have helped them, said former officials.
“You’re wondering, ‘If this is true, and they can do this, is this because someone on the inside has given them that information?’’ said another former senior intelligence official.
Russia has a clear interest in concealing how it gets its information, further muddying the waters.
According to a former senior CIA officer who served in Moscow, the Russians would often try to disguise a human source as a technical penetration.
Ultimately, officials were unable to pinpoint exactly how the Russians pulled off the compromise of the FBI’s systems.
Mark Kelton, who served as the chief of counterintelligence at the CIA until he retired in 2015, declined to discuss specific Russian operations, but he told Yahoo News that “the Russians are a professionally proficient adversary who have historically penetrated every American institution worth penetrating.”
This remains a core worry for U.S. spy hunters.
The number of ongoing espionage investigations into U.S. government personnel — at the CIA, the FBI and elsewhere — including those potentially recruited by Russia, “is not a little, it’s a lot,” said another former senior counterintelligence official.
Once the compromises of FBI communications devices were confirmed, U.S. officials scrambled to minimize the exposure of mobile surveillance team operations, quickly putting countermeasures in place, according to former senior officials.
There was a “huge concern” about protecting the identities of the individuals on the teams — an elite, secret group — said the former senior counterintelligence official.
U.S. officials also conducted a damage assessment and repeatedly briefed select White House officials and members of Congress about the compromise.
After the FBI discovered that its surveillance teams’ cellphones had been compromised, they were forced to switch back to encrypted radios, purchasing different models, according to two former officials.
“It was an expensive venture,” said one former counterintelligence official.
But the spying successes went both ways.
The U.S. intelligence community collected its own inside information to conclude that the damage from the compromises had been limited, partly due to the Russians’ efforts to keep their intelligence coup secret, according to a former senior intelligence official.
“The Russians were reticent to take steps [that might reveal] that they’d figured it out,” the former senior official said.
Even so, the costs to U.S. intelligence were significant.
Spooked by the discovery that its surveillance teams’ communications had been compromised, the FBI worried that some of its assets had been blown, said two former senior intelligence officials.
The bureau consequently cut off contact with some of its Russian sources, according to one of those officials.
At the time of the compromise, some of the FBI’s other Russian assets stopped cooperating with their American handlers.
“There were a couple instances where a recruited person had said, ‘I can’t meet you anymore,’” said a former senior intelligence official.
In a damage assessment conducted around 2012, U.S. intelligence officials concluded the events may have been linked.
The impact was not limited to the FBI.
Alerted by the bureau to concerns surrounding Russia’s enhanced interception capabilities, the CIA also ceased certain types of communications with sources abroad, according to a former senior CIA official.
The agency “had to resort to a whole series of steps” to ensure the Russians weren’t able to eavesdrop on CIA communications, the former senior official said.
There was a “strong hint” that these newly discovered code-breaking capabilities by Russia were also being used abroad, said another former senior intelligence official.
The CIA has long been wary of Russian spies’ eavesdropping efforts outside of the United States, especially near U.S. diplomatic facilities.
U.S. officials have observed Russian technical officers repeatedly walking close to those compounds with packages in their hands, or wearing backpacks, or pushing strollers, or driving by in vehicles — all attempts, U.S. officials believe, to collect information on the different signals emanating from the facilities.
While the tools used by the Russians for these activities were “a bit antiquated,” said a former senior CIA official, they were still a “constant concern.”
It’s not unusual for intelligence officers operating from diplomatic facilities, including the United States’s own operatives, to try and intercept the communications of the host nation.
“You had to find ways to attack their surveillance,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former head of counterintelligence at the Department of Energy and a former CIA officer who first served in Moscow in the 1980s.
“The Russians do everything in the U.S. that we did in Moscow.”
Indeed, the focus on cracking radio communications was no different.
“We put extraordinary effort into intercepting and monitoring the FSB surveillance radio networks for the purpose of understanding whether our officers were under surveillance or not,” said another former senior CIA officer who also served in Moscow.
The discovery of the Russians’ new code-breaking capabilities came at a time when gathering intelligence on Russia and its leaders’ intentions was of particular importance to the U.S. government.
U.S. national security officials working on Russia at the time received rigorous security training on how to keep their digital devices secure, according to two former senior officials.
One former U.S. official recalled how during the negotiations surrounding the reset, NSC officials, partially tongue in cheek, “would sometimes say things on the phone hoping [they] were communicating things to the Russians.”
According to a former CIA official and a former national security official, the CIA’s analysts often disagreed about how committed Russia was to negotiations during the attempted reset and how far Putin would go to achieve his strategic aims, divergences that confused the White House and senior policy makers.
“It caused a really big rift within the [National Security Council] on how seriously they took analysis from the agency,” said the former CIA official.
Senior administration leaders “went along with” some of the more optimistic analysis on the future of U.S.-Russia relations “in the hopes that this would work out,” the official continued.
Those disagreements were part of a “reset hangover” that persisted, at least for some inside the administration, until the 2016 election meddling, according to a former senior national security official.
Those officials clung to the hope that Washington and Moscow could cooperate on key issues, despite aggressive Russian actions ranging from the invasion of Ukraine to its spying efforts.
“We didn’t understand that they were at political war with us already in the second term once Putin was reelected and Obama himself was reelected,” said Evelyn Farkas, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia during the Obama administration.
As high-level hopes for the U.S.-Russia “reset” withered, concerns about the threat of Russian spying made their way to Capitol Hill.
Top officials at the FBI and CIA briefed key members of Congress on counterintelligence issues related to Russia, according to current and former U.S. officials.
These included briefings on the radio compromises, said two former senior officials.
Mike Rogers, a former Republican lawmaker from Michigan who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2011 to 2015, alluded to counterintelligence concerns at a conference earlier this year in Washington, D.C.
One of those concerns was a massive intelligence failure related to the secret internet-based communications system the CIA used to communicate with agents.
The extent of that failure, first reported publicly by Yahoo News in 2018, got the attention of Congress earlier.
But the problems were broader than that issue, according to Rogers.
“Our counterintelligence operations needed some adjustments,” said Rogers, adding that he and his Democratic counterpart from Maryland, Dutch Ruppersberger, requested regular briefings on the subject from agency representatives.
“We started out monthly until we just wore them out, then we did it quarterly to try to make sure that we had the right resources and the right focus for the entire community on counter[intelligence].”
Rogers later told Yahoo News that his request for the briefings had been prompted by “suspected penetrations, both physical and technical, which is the role of those [Russian and Chinese] intelligence services,” but declined to be more specific.
The former committee chairman said he wanted the intelligence community to make counterintelligence a higher priority.
“Counterintelligence was always looked at as the crazy uncle at the party,” he said.
“I wanted to raise it up and give it a robust importance.”
The briefings, which primarily involved counterintelligence officials from the FBI and CIA and were limited to the committee leadership and staff directors, led to “some useful inquiries to help focus the intelligence community,” Rogers said.
The leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were also included in some of the inquiries, according to Rogers and a current U.S. government official.
Spokespeople for the current House and Senate intelligence committees did not respond to a request for comment.
The FBI and CIA declined to comment.
The Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to a request for comment.
The briefings were designed to “get the counterintelligence house in order,” said Jamil Jaffer, senior counsel at the House intelligence committee from 2011 to 2013, and to ensure that Congress and the intelligence agencies were “on the same page” when it came to such matters.
“There were some concerns about what the agencies were doing, there were some concerns about what Congress knew, and all of these issues, of course, had China-Russia implications.”
Rogers and Jaffer declined to provide further details about what specific counterintelligence issues the committee was addressing, but other former officials indicated that worries weren’t limited to the compromise of FBI radio systems.
Senior U.S. officials were contemplating an even more disturbing possibility: that the Russians had found a way to penetrate the communications of the U.S. intelligence community’s most sensitive buildings in and around Washington, D.C.
Suspected Russian intelligence officers were seen conspicuously loitering along the road that runs alongside the CIA’s headquarters, according to former senior intelligence officials.
“Russian diplomats would be sitting on Route 123, sometimes in cars with diplomatic plates, other times not,” a former senior intelligence executive said.
“We thought, they’re out doing something."
"It’s not just taking down license plates; those guys are interrogating the system.”
Though this behavior dated back at least to the mid-2000s, former officials said those activities persisted simultaneously with the compromise of the FBI’s communication system.
And these were not the only instances of Russian intelligence operatives staking out locations with a line of sight to CIA headquarters.
They were “fixated on being in neighborhoods” that gave them exposure to Langley, said a former senior official.
Over time, U.S. intelligence officials became increasingly concerned that Russian spies might be attempting to intercept communications from key U.S. intelligence facilities, including the CIA and FBI headquarters.
No one knew if the Russians had actually succeeded.
“The question was whether they had capabilities to penetrate our comms at Langley,” said a former senior CIA official.
In the absence of any proof that that was the case, the working theory was that the Russian activities were provocations designed to sow uncertainty within the CIA.
“We came to the conclusion that they were trying to get into our heads,” the former senior official said.
A major concern was that Russian spies with physical proximity to sensitive U.S. buildings might be exfiltrating pilfered data that had “jumped the air gap,” i.e., that the Russians were collecting information from a breach of computers not connected to the Internet, said former officials.
One factor behind U.S. intelligence officials’ fears was simple: The CIA had already figured out how to perform similar operations themselves, according to a former senior CIA officer directly familiar with the matter.
“We felt it was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time,” the former CIA officer said.
“It allowed us to do some extraordinary things.”
While no one definitively concluded that the Russians had actually succeeded in penetrating Langley’s communications, those fears, combined in part with the breach of the bureau’s encrypted radio system, drove an effort by U.S. intelligence officials around 2012 to fortify sensitive Washington-area government buildings against potential Russian snooping, according to four former officials.
At key government facilities in the Washington area, entire floors were converted to sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs.
These are specially protected areas designed to be impenetrable to hostile signals intelligence gathering.
The normal assumption was that work done in a SCIF would be secure, but doubts arose about the safety of even those rooms.
“The security guys would say, your windows are ‘tempested’”—that is, protected against the interception of emissions radiating from electronic equipment in the building —“you’re in a SCIF, it’s fine,” a former senior counterintelligence executive recalled.
“The question was, ‘Is it true?’”
Increasingly, U.S. officials began to fear it was not.
New security practices were instituted in sensitive government facilities like the FBI and CIA headquarters, according to former officials.
“It required many procedural changes on our part to make sure we were not susceptible to penetrations,” said a former senior CIA official.
These included basic steps such as moving communication away from windows and changing encryption codes more frequently, as well as more expensive adjustments, said four former officials.
Revelations about the Russian compromise of the radio systems, recalled a former senior intelligence official, “kick-started the money flowing” to upgrade security.
While the breaches of the FBI communications systems appeared to finally spur Congress and the intelligence agencies to adopt steps to counter increasingly sophisticated Russian eavesdropping, it took the Putin-directed interference in the 2016 election to get the White House to expel at least some of those officials deemed responsible for the breaches, and to shut down the facilities that enabled them.
Even then, the decision was controversial.
Some in Washington worried about retribution by the Russians and exposure of American intelligence operations, according to a former senior U.S. national security official directly involved in the discussions.
The FBI consistently supported expulsions, said another former national security official.
More than two years later, the Russian diplomatic compounds used in the FBI communications compromises remain shuttered.
The U.S. government has prevented many of the Russian spies expelled by the United States from returning, according to national security experts and senior foreign intelligence officials.
“They are slowly creeping back in, but [the] FBI makes it hard,” said a senior foreign intelligence official.
“The old guard is basically screwed."
"They need to bring in a whole new generation.”
In the meantime, those familiar with Russian operations warn that the threat from Moscow is far from over.
“Make no mistake, we’re in an intelligence war with the Russians, every bit as dangerous as the Cold War,” said a former senior intelligence officer.
“They’re trying all the time ... and we caught them from time to time,” he said.
Of course, he added, “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
That’s the same message that special counsel Robert Mueller tried to convey during the highly contentious hearings to discuss his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“They are doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” Mueller told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee about covert Russian involvement in U.S. politics.
But a number of observers believe Mueller’s message about the threat from Russia was largely lost amid a partisan battle on Capitol Hill over President Trump.
During his Washington conference appearance earlier this year, Rogers, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, also lamented that the current politicized state of the intelligence committees would make spy agencies more hesitant to admit their failures.
“They're not going to call you to say, 'I screwed up.'"
"They're going to say, 'God, I hope they don't find that,’” he said.
“That's what's going to happen."
"I'll guarantee it's happening today.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/exclus ... P17#page=2
Re: RUSSIA
MARKETWATCH
"Syrian troops move north, setting up potential clash with Turkish forces"
By Associated Press
Published: Oct 14, 2019 4:49 p.m. ET
AKCAKALE, Turkey — Syrian government troops moved into towns and villages in northeastern Syria on Monday, including the flashpoint region of Manbij, setting up a potential clash with Turkish-led forces advancing in the area as long-standing alliances in the region began to shift or crumble following the pullback of U.S. forces.
The Syrian military’s deployment near the Turkish border came after Syrian Kurdish forces previously allied with the U.S. said they had reached a deal with President Bashar Assad’s government to help them fend off Turkey’s invasion, now in its sixth day.
Assad’s return to the region his troops abandoned in 2012 at the height of the Syrian civil war is a turning point in Syria’s eight-year civil war, giving yet another major boost to his government and its Russian backers and is like to endanger, if not altogether crush, the brief experiment in self-rule set up by Syria’s Kurds since the conflict began.
The rapidly changing situation was set in motion last week, when President Donald Trump ordered American troops in northern Syria to step aside, clearing the way for an attack by Turkey, which regards the Kurdish fighters as terrorists.
Since 2014, the Kurds have fought alongside the U.S. in defeating the Islamic State in Syria, and Trump’s move was decried at home and abroad as a betrayal of an ally.
Faced with unrelenting criticism, Trump said Monday he was putting new sanctions on Turkey, halting trade negotiations and raising steel tariffs in an effort to pressure Ankara to stop its offensive.
In the past five days, Turkish troops and their allies have pushed into northern towns and villages, clashing with the Kurdish fighters over a stretch of 125 miles.
The offensive has displaced at least 130,000 people.
“Where is the United Nations?"
"Let them come see the blood of our children on the floor!"
"Why don’t they show up?” cried a medic at the Tal Tamr hospital, which received dozens of injured people from nearby Turkish shelling in recent days.
Abandoned in the middle of the battlefield, the Kurds turned to Assad and Russia for protection and announced Sunday night that Syrian government troops would be deployed in Kurdish-controlled towns and villages along the border to help repel the Turkish advance.
Kurdish official Aldar Khalil said in a statement that the aim of the agreement is for Syrian troops to be deployed along the border, except for the area between the towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad, where Turkish troops are advancing.
He added that the autonomous authority will continue to run daily affairs in northeast Syria.
“There is an understanding between SDF and Damascus — a military agreement only,” said Badran Ciya Kurd, a senior Kurdish official, referring to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
He has been in talks with Russians since the start, and he made his comments in an interview with The Associated Press.
Syrian state media broadcast repeated footage of government forces entering northern towns and villages with residents chanting slogans in support of Assad, while others rushed to hug the soldiers.
In a northern village, residents welcomed the troops by showering them with rice, an Arab gesture of welcome.
In another village, dozens of young men rode motorcycles as some waved posters of Assad.
“We are going back to our normal positions that are at the border,” said a Syrian officer, as embattled Kurdish authorities invited the government to retake towns and villages in the north.
“May God protect the army!” residents responded.
The dramatic events are a crushing blow to the dreams of Syria’s Kurds who had built up a degree of autonomy that was unthinkable before the war, when they were an oppressed minority by the Assad family rule.
The ethnic group grew from an underdog in Syria to a prestigious group that controls about 30% of Syrian territory, working hand in hand with the Americans to defeat the Islamic State group.
A return by Assad’s forces to their region is a major shift in Syria’s long-running civil war, further cementing Assad’s hold over the ravaged country.
The Syrian troops arrived in the northern province of Raqqa aboard buses and pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.
Troops moved into the towns of Tal Tamr, about 12 miles from the Turkish border, Ein Issa and Tabqa, known for its dam on the Euphrates River and a nearby air base of the same name.
They later entered the Kurdish-held town of Manbij, in a race with Turkey-backed opposition fighters advancing in the same direction.
The Manbij region is home to U.S. outposts that were set up in 2017 to patrol the tense frontiers between Turkish-controlled areas and the Kurdish-held side of northern Syria.
A U.S. official said troops are still in the town, preparing to leave.
Earlier, Syrian fighters backed by Turkey said they began an offensive alongside Turkish troops to capture Manbij, which is on the western flank of the Euphrates River, broadening their campaign east of the river.
Mustafa Sejari, an official with the Turkey-backed fighters, tweeted: “The battle of Manbij has begun.”
Turkey’s private NTV television reported that Turkish special forces and commandos began advancing toward Manbij in the afternoon.
CNN-Turk also mentioned the attack, reporting that the sound of clashes could be heard.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signaled earlier in the day his military was ready to begin the assault Manbij, with a goal of returning the city to Arab populations that he said were its rightful owners.
Speaking later in Baku, Azerbaijan, Erdogan said Turkey’s military offensive into northeast Syria is as “vital” to Turkey as its 1974 military intervention in Cyprus, which split the island.
Erdogan also made clear Turkey would not halt its offensive despite the widespread condemnation.
The military action by Ankara sets up a potential clash between Turkey and Syria and raises the specter of a resurgent Islamic State group as the U.S. relinquishes any remaining influence in northern Syria to Assad and his chief backer, Russia.
Turkey warned its NATO allies in Europe and the United States not to stand in its way.
Trump said the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops he ordered out of Syria would remain in the Middle East to prevent a resurgence of the IS threat.
The European Union unanimously condemned Turkey’s military move and asked all 28 of its member states to stop selling arms to Ankara, Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell told the AP.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russian and Turkish officials have remained in close contact.
Russia appeared to be working on de-confliction between Turkish and Syrian troops.
Erdogan has already said Turkey will not negotiate with the Syrian Kurdish fighters, saying they have links to a long-running Kurdish insurgency within its own borders.
Syria’s state-run news agency SANA said government forces planned to “confront the Turkish aggression,” without giving further details.
Photos posted by SANA showed several vehicles and a small number of troops in Tal Tamr, a predominantly Assyrian Christian town that was once held by IS before it was retaken by Kurdish-led forces.
Many Syrian Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million, left for Europe in the past 20 years, with the flight gathering speed since the conflict began in March 2011.
Heavy fighting on Sunday reached a Kurdish-run camp for displaced persons in Ein Issa.
The camp is home to about 12,000 people, including around 950 wives and children of IS fighters, and hundreds are believed to have escaped amid the chaos.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/syria ... latestnews
"Syrian troops move north, setting up potential clash with Turkish forces"
By Associated Press
Published: Oct 14, 2019 4:49 p.m. ET
AKCAKALE, Turkey — Syrian government troops moved into towns and villages in northeastern Syria on Monday, including the flashpoint region of Manbij, setting up a potential clash with Turkish-led forces advancing in the area as long-standing alliances in the region began to shift or crumble following the pullback of U.S. forces.
The Syrian military’s deployment near the Turkish border came after Syrian Kurdish forces previously allied with the U.S. said they had reached a deal with President Bashar Assad’s government to help them fend off Turkey’s invasion, now in its sixth day.
Assad’s return to the region his troops abandoned in 2012 at the height of the Syrian civil war is a turning point in Syria’s eight-year civil war, giving yet another major boost to his government and its Russian backers and is like to endanger, if not altogether crush, the brief experiment in self-rule set up by Syria’s Kurds since the conflict began.
The rapidly changing situation was set in motion last week, when President Donald Trump ordered American troops in northern Syria to step aside, clearing the way for an attack by Turkey, which regards the Kurdish fighters as terrorists.
Since 2014, the Kurds have fought alongside the U.S. in defeating the Islamic State in Syria, and Trump’s move was decried at home and abroad as a betrayal of an ally.
Faced with unrelenting criticism, Trump said Monday he was putting new sanctions on Turkey, halting trade negotiations and raising steel tariffs in an effort to pressure Ankara to stop its offensive.
In the past five days, Turkish troops and their allies have pushed into northern towns and villages, clashing with the Kurdish fighters over a stretch of 125 miles.
The offensive has displaced at least 130,000 people.
“Where is the United Nations?"
"Let them come see the blood of our children on the floor!"
"Why don’t they show up?” cried a medic at the Tal Tamr hospital, which received dozens of injured people from nearby Turkish shelling in recent days.
Abandoned in the middle of the battlefield, the Kurds turned to Assad and Russia for protection and announced Sunday night that Syrian government troops would be deployed in Kurdish-controlled towns and villages along the border to help repel the Turkish advance.
Kurdish official Aldar Khalil said in a statement that the aim of the agreement is for Syrian troops to be deployed along the border, except for the area between the towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad, where Turkish troops are advancing.
He added that the autonomous authority will continue to run daily affairs in northeast Syria.
“There is an understanding between SDF and Damascus — a military agreement only,” said Badran Ciya Kurd, a senior Kurdish official, referring to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
He has been in talks with Russians since the start, and he made his comments in an interview with The Associated Press.
Syrian state media broadcast repeated footage of government forces entering northern towns and villages with residents chanting slogans in support of Assad, while others rushed to hug the soldiers.
In a northern village, residents welcomed the troops by showering them with rice, an Arab gesture of welcome.
In another village, dozens of young men rode motorcycles as some waved posters of Assad.
“We are going back to our normal positions that are at the border,” said a Syrian officer, as embattled Kurdish authorities invited the government to retake towns and villages in the north.
“May God protect the army!” residents responded.
The dramatic events are a crushing blow to the dreams of Syria’s Kurds who had built up a degree of autonomy that was unthinkable before the war, when they were an oppressed minority by the Assad family rule.
The ethnic group grew from an underdog in Syria to a prestigious group that controls about 30% of Syrian territory, working hand in hand with the Americans to defeat the Islamic State group.
A return by Assad’s forces to their region is a major shift in Syria’s long-running civil war, further cementing Assad’s hold over the ravaged country.
The Syrian troops arrived in the northern province of Raqqa aboard buses and pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.
Troops moved into the towns of Tal Tamr, about 12 miles from the Turkish border, Ein Issa and Tabqa, known for its dam on the Euphrates River and a nearby air base of the same name.
They later entered the Kurdish-held town of Manbij, in a race with Turkey-backed opposition fighters advancing in the same direction.
The Manbij region is home to U.S. outposts that were set up in 2017 to patrol the tense frontiers between Turkish-controlled areas and the Kurdish-held side of northern Syria.
A U.S. official said troops are still in the town, preparing to leave.
Earlier, Syrian fighters backed by Turkey said they began an offensive alongside Turkish troops to capture Manbij, which is on the western flank of the Euphrates River, broadening their campaign east of the river.
Mustafa Sejari, an official with the Turkey-backed fighters, tweeted: “The battle of Manbij has begun.”
Turkey’s private NTV television reported that Turkish special forces and commandos began advancing toward Manbij in the afternoon.
CNN-Turk also mentioned the attack, reporting that the sound of clashes could be heard.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signaled earlier in the day his military was ready to begin the assault Manbij, with a goal of returning the city to Arab populations that he said were its rightful owners.
Speaking later in Baku, Azerbaijan, Erdogan said Turkey’s military offensive into northeast Syria is as “vital” to Turkey as its 1974 military intervention in Cyprus, which split the island.
Erdogan also made clear Turkey would not halt its offensive despite the widespread condemnation.
The military action by Ankara sets up a potential clash between Turkey and Syria and raises the specter of a resurgent Islamic State group as the U.S. relinquishes any remaining influence in northern Syria to Assad and his chief backer, Russia.
Turkey warned its NATO allies in Europe and the United States not to stand in its way.
Trump said the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops he ordered out of Syria would remain in the Middle East to prevent a resurgence of the IS threat.
The European Union unanimously condemned Turkey’s military move and asked all 28 of its member states to stop selling arms to Ankara, Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell told the AP.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russian and Turkish officials have remained in close contact.
Russia appeared to be working on de-confliction between Turkish and Syrian troops.
Erdogan has already said Turkey will not negotiate with the Syrian Kurdish fighters, saying they have links to a long-running Kurdish insurgency within its own borders.
Syria’s state-run news agency SANA said government forces planned to “confront the Turkish aggression,” without giving further details.
Photos posted by SANA showed several vehicles and a small number of troops in Tal Tamr, a predominantly Assyrian Christian town that was once held by IS before it was retaken by Kurdish-led forces.
Many Syrian Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million, left for Europe in the past 20 years, with the flight gathering speed since the conflict began in March 2011.
Heavy fighting on Sunday reached a Kurdish-run camp for displaced persons in Ein Issa.
The camp is home to about 12,000 people, including around 950 wives and children of IS fighters, and hundreds are believed to have escaped amid the chaos.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/syria ... latestnews
Re: RUSSIA
MARKETWATCH
"Top Democrats walk out of White House meeting on Syria following ‘meltdown’ by Trump"
By Associated Press
Published: Oct 16, 2019 6:11 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Washing his hands of Syria, President Donald Trump declared Wednesday the U.S. has no stake in defending the Kurdish fighters who died by the thousands as America’s partners against IS extremists.
Hours later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats walked out of a meeting at the White House, accusing him of having a “meltdown,” calling her a “third-rate politician” and having no plan to deal with a potentially revived Islamic State group.
Condemnation of Trump’s stance on Turkey, Syria and the Kurds was quick and severe during the day, not only from Democrats but from Republicans who have been staunch supporters on virtually all issues.
The House, bitterly divided over the Trump impeachment inquiry, banded together for an overwhelming 354-60 denunciation of the U.S. troop withdrawal.
Many lawmakers expressed worry that it may lead to revival of IS as well as Russian presence and influence in the area — in addition to the slaughter of many Kurds.
At the White House, Trump said the U.S. has no business in the region — and not to worry about the Kurdish fighters.
“They know how to fight,” he said.
“And by the way, they’re no angels.”
After the House condemnation vote, the congressional leaders of both parties went to the White house for a briefing, which grew contentious, with Trump and Pelosi trading jabs.
The Democrats said they walked out when the meeting devolved into an insult-fest.
“What we witnessed on the part of the president was a meltdown,” Pelosi told reporters, saying Trump appeared visibly “shaken up” over the House vote.
“We couldn’t continue in the meeting because he was just not relating to the reality of it,” she said.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer criticized Trump for not having an adequate plan to deal with IS fighters who have been held by the Kurds.
He said the meeting “was not a dialogue, this was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts.”
Republicans pushed back, saying it was Pelosi who’d been the problem.
“She storms out of another meeting, trying to make it unproductive,” said House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.
White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham called Pelosi’s action “baffling but not surprising.”
She said the speaker “had no intention of listening or contributing to an important meeting on national security issues.”
Trump himself has stalked out of his White House meetings with congressional leaders — in May, saying he would no longer work with Democrats unless they dropped all Russia investigations, and last January during the partial government shutdown.
Separately on Wednesday, a letter was disclosed in which he both cajoled and threatened Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, urging him to act only in “the right and humane way” in Syria.
He started on a positive note, suggesting they “work out a good deal,” but then talked about crippling economic sanctions and concluded that the world “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen."
"Don’t be a tough guy."
"Don’t be a fool!”
In public appearances Wednesday, Trump said he was fulfilling a campaign promise to bring U.S. troops home from “endless wars” in the Middle East -- casting aside criticism that a sudden U.S. withdrawal from Syria betrays the Kurdish fighters, stains U.S. credibility around the world and opens an important region to Russia, which is moving in.
“We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria."
"Syria’s not happy about it."
"Let them work it out,” Trump said.
“They have a problem at a border."
"It’s not our border."
"We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”
Trump said he was sending Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Ankara to urge the Turks to halt their weeklong offensive into northeastern Syria.
But his remarks, first to reporters in the Oval Office and later at a news conference with his Italian counterpart, suggested he sees little at stake for America.
“Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine,” he said.
“They’ve got a lot of sand over there."
"So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”
“Let them fight their own wars.”
More than once, Trump suggested the United States has little concern in the Middle East because it is geographically distant -- a notion shared by some prior to Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida militants used Afghanistan as a base from which to attack the U.S.
That attack set off a series of armed conflicts, including in Iraq, that Trump considers a waste of American lives and treasure.
The current withdrawal is the worst decision of Trump’s presidency, said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who meets often with the president and is one of his strongest and most important supporters in Congress.
“To those who think the Mideast doesn’t matter to America, remember 9/11 -- we had that same attitude on 9/10 2001.”
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he strongly disagreed with Trump and had told the president so.
But he asked, “What tools do we have” to back up that disagreement?
Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the area.
Turkey’s Erdogan has said he wants to create a 30-kilometer (20-mile) -deep “safe zone” in Syria.
Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, designate as a terrorist organization.
Trump mischaracterized the progress made thus far by the U.S. military in carrying out his instructions to withdraw all 1,000 troops in northeastern Syria.
He referred to the approximately two dozen soldiers who evacuated from Turkey’s initial attack zone last week, but cast that as meaning the U.S. has “largely” completed its pullout.
A U.S. official familiar with planning for the withdrawal of the 1,000 said that they are consolidating onto two main bases but have not yet begun flying out of Syria in significant numbers.
Military equipment is being gathered and flown out, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the withdrawal, which poses big security risks.
Trump downplayed the crisis that followed his decision to pull out of Syria, which critics say amounted to giving Turkey a green light to invade against the Kurdish fighters.
“It’s not between Turkey and the United States, like a lot of stupid people would like you to believe,” Trump said.
“Our soldiers are not in harm’s way, as they shouldn’t be.”
Trump did impose new sanctions on Turkey this week in an attempt to force Erdogan to end his assault.
But he said Wednesday, “It’s time for us to come home.”
Even as Trump defended his removal of U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, he praised his decision to send more troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom defend against Iran.
Trump said the U.S. is sending missiles and “great power” to the Saudis, and “they’re paying for that.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/top-d ... latestnews
"Top Democrats walk out of White House meeting on Syria following ‘meltdown’ by Trump"
By Associated Press
Published: Oct 16, 2019 6:11 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Washing his hands of Syria, President Donald Trump declared Wednesday the U.S. has no stake in defending the Kurdish fighters who died by the thousands as America’s partners against IS extremists.
Hours later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats walked out of a meeting at the White House, accusing him of having a “meltdown,” calling her a “third-rate politician” and having no plan to deal with a potentially revived Islamic State group.
Condemnation of Trump’s stance on Turkey, Syria and the Kurds was quick and severe during the day, not only from Democrats but from Republicans who have been staunch supporters on virtually all issues.
The House, bitterly divided over the Trump impeachment inquiry, banded together for an overwhelming 354-60 denunciation of the U.S. troop withdrawal.
Many lawmakers expressed worry that it may lead to revival of IS as well as Russian presence and influence in the area — in addition to the slaughter of many Kurds.
At the White House, Trump said the U.S. has no business in the region — and not to worry about the Kurdish fighters.
“They know how to fight,” he said.
“And by the way, they’re no angels.”
After the House condemnation vote, the congressional leaders of both parties went to the White house for a briefing, which grew contentious, with Trump and Pelosi trading jabs.
The Democrats said they walked out when the meeting devolved into an insult-fest.
“What we witnessed on the part of the president was a meltdown,” Pelosi told reporters, saying Trump appeared visibly “shaken up” over the House vote.
“We couldn’t continue in the meeting because he was just not relating to the reality of it,” she said.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer criticized Trump for not having an adequate plan to deal with IS fighters who have been held by the Kurds.
He said the meeting “was not a dialogue, this was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts.”
Republicans pushed back, saying it was Pelosi who’d been the problem.
“She storms out of another meeting, trying to make it unproductive,” said House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.
White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham called Pelosi’s action “baffling but not surprising.”
She said the speaker “had no intention of listening or contributing to an important meeting on national security issues.”
Trump himself has stalked out of his White House meetings with congressional leaders — in May, saying he would no longer work with Democrats unless they dropped all Russia investigations, and last January during the partial government shutdown.
Separately on Wednesday, a letter was disclosed in which he both cajoled and threatened Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, urging him to act only in “the right and humane way” in Syria.
He started on a positive note, suggesting they “work out a good deal,” but then talked about crippling economic sanctions and concluded that the world “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen."
"Don’t be a tough guy."
"Don’t be a fool!”
In public appearances Wednesday, Trump said he was fulfilling a campaign promise to bring U.S. troops home from “endless wars” in the Middle East -- casting aside criticism that a sudden U.S. withdrawal from Syria betrays the Kurdish fighters, stains U.S. credibility around the world and opens an important region to Russia, which is moving in.
“We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria."
"Syria’s not happy about it."
"Let them work it out,” Trump said.
“They have a problem at a border."
"It’s not our border."
"We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”
Trump said he was sending Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Ankara to urge the Turks to halt their weeklong offensive into northeastern Syria.
But his remarks, first to reporters in the Oval Office and later at a news conference with his Italian counterpart, suggested he sees little at stake for America.
“Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine,” he said.
“They’ve got a lot of sand over there."
"So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”
“Let them fight their own wars.”
More than once, Trump suggested the United States has little concern in the Middle East because it is geographically distant -- a notion shared by some prior to Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida militants used Afghanistan as a base from which to attack the U.S.
That attack set off a series of armed conflicts, including in Iraq, that Trump considers a waste of American lives and treasure.
The current withdrawal is the worst decision of Trump’s presidency, said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who meets often with the president and is one of his strongest and most important supporters in Congress.
“To those who think the Mideast doesn’t matter to America, remember 9/11 -- we had that same attitude on 9/10 2001.”
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he strongly disagreed with Trump and had told the president so.
But he asked, “What tools do we have” to back up that disagreement?
Turkish troops and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched their offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria a week ago, two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the area.
Turkey’s Erdogan has said he wants to create a 30-kilometer (20-mile) -deep “safe zone” in Syria.
Ankara has long argued the Kurdish fighters are nothing more than an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has waged a guerrilla campaign inside Turkey since the 1980s and which Turkey, as well as the U.S. and European Union, designate as a terrorist organization.
Trump mischaracterized the progress made thus far by the U.S. military in carrying out his instructions to withdraw all 1,000 troops in northeastern Syria.
He referred to the approximately two dozen soldiers who evacuated from Turkey’s initial attack zone last week, but cast that as meaning the U.S. has “largely” completed its pullout.
A U.S. official familiar with planning for the withdrawal of the 1,000 said that they are consolidating onto two main bases but have not yet begun flying out of Syria in significant numbers.
Military equipment is being gathered and flown out, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the withdrawal, which poses big security risks.
Trump downplayed the crisis that followed his decision to pull out of Syria, which critics say amounted to giving Turkey a green light to invade against the Kurdish fighters.
“It’s not between Turkey and the United States, like a lot of stupid people would like you to believe,” Trump said.
“Our soldiers are not in harm’s way, as they shouldn’t be.”
Trump did impose new sanctions on Turkey this week in an attempt to force Erdogan to end his assault.
But he said Wednesday, “It’s time for us to come home.”
Even as Trump defended his removal of U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, he praised his decision to send more troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom defend against Iran.
Trump said the U.S. is sending missiles and “great power” to the Saudis, and “they’re paying for that.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/top-d ... latestnews
Re: RUSSIA
IF THERE IS ANYONE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WHO IS A TRUE RUSSIAN ASSET, IT IS HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON HERSELF ...THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR June 20, 2019 at 6:52 pm
And that talk of the famous “Obama/Clinton reset” takes us back to a NATIONAL REVIEW article entitled “Russian Collusion, Clinton $tyle” by Deroy Murdock on March 27, 2018, where we had this necessary background, to wit:
In contrast, Team Mueller studiously ignores something more conspicuous than the iridescent onion domes atop Red Square’s St. Basil’s Cathedral: Private interests that closed deals with Vladimir Putin and his agents — thanks to then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s public favors — gave the Clinton Foundation between $152 million and $173 million.
Donations to the Clinton Foundation were, in essence, gift-wrapped presents for the Clintons.
Hillary’s March 2009 button-pushing “Russian reset” ceremony with Moscow’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, triggered this particular bonanza.
Hillary captured its essence in March 2010 when she told former Soviet propagandist Vladimir Pozner on First Channel TV: “Our goal is to help strengthen Russia.”
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/h ... -on-trump/
CNN
"Hillary Clinton suggests Russians are 'grooming' Tulsi Gabbard for third-party run"
By Dan Merica, CNN
Updated 9:13 AM ET, Sat October 19, 2019
(CNN) — Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said Thursday the Russians are currently "grooming" a Democrat running in the presidential primary to run as a third-party candidate and champion their interests.
The comment appears to be directed at Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who has been accused of being cozy with Russia in the past.
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate," Clinton said, speaking on a podcast with former Obama adviser David Plouffe.
"She's the favorite of the Russians."
Clinton never names Gabbard, but there are only five women running for President -- Gabbard, California Sen. Kamala Harris, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and author Marianne Williamson -- and none of the other woman have been accused of being boosted by Russia.
Clinton did not provide proof about how Russia is "grooming" Gabbard.
She and her team pointed to allegations that Russian news and propaganda sites often report on Gabbard's campaign and that moments in Gabbard's campaign have been reportedly amplified by trolls and bots on Twitter with ties to Russia.
Gabbard has denied those allegations.
"They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far," Clinton said.
Clinton's team also noted that some of Gabbard's foreign policy views align closely with Russian interests.
Gabbard responded on Twitter Friday afternoon to Clinton's comments.
"Thank you @HillaryClinton."
"You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain," she tweeted.
"From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation," she added.
"We wondered who was behind it and why."
"Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose."
"It's now clear that this primary is between you and me."
"Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies."
"Join the race directly."
Responding to Gabbard's attacks, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said, "Divisive language filled with vitriol and conspiracy theories?"
"Can't imagine a better proof point than this."
Asked earlier if the former secretary of state was referring to Gabbard in her comment, Merrill told CNN, "If the nesting doll fits."
"This is not some outlandish claim."
"This is reality," Merrill said.
"If the Russian propaganda machine, both their state media and their bot and troll operations, is backing a candidate aligned with their interests, that is just a reality, it is not speculation."
On Friday evening, after Clinton's comments drew considerable criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, Merrill backed away from the former secretary of state's allegation, tweeting, "She doesn't say the Russians are grooming anyone."
"It was a question about Republicans."
Gabbard, in a late August interview with CNN, ruled out a third-party bid.
"I will not," the Hawaii Democrat told CNN.
"No, I have ruled that out."
Gabbard has tried to fight off the charge that she is being pushed by Russian interests.
"Just two days ago, the New York Times put out an article saying that I'm a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears," Gabbard said, referring to a recent story that said she is being backed by Russians on Twitter.
"This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I'm an asset of Russia."
"Completely despicable."
Clinton also accused Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in both the 2012 and 2016 elections, of being a "Russian asset."
"That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton said.
"Yes, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally."
"They know they can't win without a third-party candidate."
Stein's campaign, which earned nearly 1.5 million votes in the 2016 election, was part of Russia's meddling efforts, according to a host of congressional reports, including a Senate Intelligence Committee report that indicated Russian social media efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election included messaging in support of Stein.
A summation of the report's findings on "comprehensive anti-Hillary Clinton operations" said while the group's assumed Twitter personas had some pro-Clinton content, "the developed Left-wing Twitter personas were still largely anti-Clinton and expressed pro-Bernie Sanders and pro-Jill Stein sentiments."
Stein, who had dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2015, has also compared Russian interference in the 2016 election to American overseas efforts.
"I think it would be naive to think that Russia did not try to interfere."
But, she said, "Certainly that's what the United States does," though she added, "that's not to justify it."
"Interference is wrong and it's an assault against democracy, and it should be pursued, but (the United States) should pursue it knowing that we do it, too."
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect when Clinton made the comments, to provide more context about Clinton's allegations and with additional comment from a Clinton spokesman.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/18/politics ... index.html
Re: RUSSIA
THE GUARDIAN
"Gabbard: Clinton 'personifies rot that has sickened Democratic party'"
* 2016 candidate implies 2020 hopeful ‘favorite of the Russians’
* Congresswoman fires back in extraordinary intra-party spat"
Associated Press in Washington
Sat 19 Oct 2019 08.21 EDT Last modified on Sat 19 Oct 2019 13.55 EDT
The Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard fought back after Hillary Clinton appeared to call her “the favorite of the Russians”.
In an interview, Clinton said she believes the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate”.
The former senator, secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate did not name Gabbard directly.
But in tweets on Friday, Gabbard called Clinton the “personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long”.
Gabbard also alleged there has been a “concerted campaign” to destroy her reputation since she announced her presidential run in January.
“It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me,” Gabbard tweeted about Clinton.
“Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies."
"Join the race directly.”
There is lingering trepidation in the Democratic party of a repeat of the 2016 race, when Russia interfered in an effort to help Donald Trump defeat Clinton.
US intelligence agencies have warned that Russia intends to meddle in 2020.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has mocked that possibility, joking earlier this month that Moscow would “definitely intervene”.
During a Democratic debate on Tuesday, Gabbard criticized a commentator who she said called her “an asset of Russia”.
She called the comments “completely despicable”.
Clinton seemed to echo the commentator’s remark during a podcast appearance this week on Campaign HQ with David Plouffe.
Plouffe was campaign manager for Barack Obama in 2008 and a senior adviser to the president.
“She’s the favorite of the Russians,” Clinton said, referring to the person she had earlier identified as a woman “who’s currently in the Democratic primary”.
”They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton also called Trump “Vladimir Putin’s dream”.
She went on to say Trump’s inauguration speech was “like a declaration of war on half of America”.
Clinton also described the 2016 Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein as “a Russian asset”.
The Russians know they can’t win without a third-party candidate, Clinton added.
Gabbard said on CBSN she “will not be leaving the Democratic party."
"I will not be running as an independent or a third-party candidate.”
Stein, who ran against Trump and Clinton, received about 1% of the vote in the 2016 election.
But some Democrats said her candidacy syphoned votes from Clinton and helped Trump win, particularly in states like Wisconsin.
The Senate intelligence committee asked Stein for documents as part of its inquiry into Russian interference in the election because she attended a 2015 dinner in Moscow sponsored by the Russian television network RT, with Putin.
Stein has said she attended “with a message of Middle East peace, diplomacy and cooperation”.
In a tweet on Friday, Stein accused Clinton of “peddling conspiracy theories to justify her failure instead of reflecting on real reasons Dems lost in 2016”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... atic-party
"Gabbard: Clinton 'personifies rot that has sickened Democratic party'"
* 2016 candidate implies 2020 hopeful ‘favorite of the Russians’
* Congresswoman fires back in extraordinary intra-party spat"
Associated Press in Washington
Sat 19 Oct 2019 08.21 EDT Last modified on Sat 19 Oct 2019 13.55 EDT
The Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard fought back after Hillary Clinton appeared to call her “the favorite of the Russians”.
In an interview, Clinton said she believes the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate”.
The former senator, secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate did not name Gabbard directly.
But in tweets on Friday, Gabbard called Clinton the “personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long”.
Gabbard also alleged there has been a “concerted campaign” to destroy her reputation since she announced her presidential run in January.
“It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me,” Gabbard tweeted about Clinton.
“Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies."
"Join the race directly.”
There is lingering trepidation in the Democratic party of a repeat of the 2016 race, when Russia interfered in an effort to help Donald Trump defeat Clinton.
US intelligence agencies have warned that Russia intends to meddle in 2020.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has mocked that possibility, joking earlier this month that Moscow would “definitely intervene”.
During a Democratic debate on Tuesday, Gabbard criticized a commentator who she said called her “an asset of Russia”.
She called the comments “completely despicable”.
Clinton seemed to echo the commentator’s remark during a podcast appearance this week on Campaign HQ with David Plouffe.
Plouffe was campaign manager for Barack Obama in 2008 and a senior adviser to the president.
“She’s the favorite of the Russians,” Clinton said, referring to the person she had earlier identified as a woman “who’s currently in the Democratic primary”.
”They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton also called Trump “Vladimir Putin’s dream”.
She went on to say Trump’s inauguration speech was “like a declaration of war on half of America”.
Clinton also described the 2016 Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein as “a Russian asset”.
The Russians know they can’t win without a third-party candidate, Clinton added.
Gabbard said on CBSN she “will not be leaving the Democratic party."
"I will not be running as an independent or a third-party candidate.”
Stein, who ran against Trump and Clinton, received about 1% of the vote in the 2016 election.
But some Democrats said her candidacy syphoned votes from Clinton and helped Trump win, particularly in states like Wisconsin.
The Senate intelligence committee asked Stein for documents as part of its inquiry into Russian interference in the election because she attended a 2015 dinner in Moscow sponsored by the Russian television network RT, with Putin.
Stein has said she attended “with a message of Middle East peace, diplomacy and cooperation”.
In a tweet on Friday, Stein accused Clinton of “peddling conspiracy theories to justify her failure instead of reflecting on real reasons Dems lost in 2016”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... atic-party
Re: RUSSIA
WE LIVE IN A TIME OF INSANE NATIONAL LEADERS …
ERDOGAN HAS A WORM TWISTING IN HIS BRAIN FROM THE SOUND OF THINGS HERE ...
FOX News
"Erdogan vows to 'crush the heads' of Kurds if they don't withdraw; both sides trade blame for violating cease-fire"
Melissa Leon
19 OCTOBER 2019
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday promised to "crush the heads" of the Kurds in Syria if they don't fall back from the border's safe zone, according to reports.
The threat comes as both Turkey and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) claim the other is violating terms of a 120-hour cease-fire brokered by Turkey and the U.S. on Thursday.
Violence continued in northeast Syria despite the five-day peace agreement, a source told Fox News.
Dave Eubank with Free Burma Rangers, a private military company that provides emergency medical assistance, was on the ground near the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn trying to help trapped and wounded Kurds.
Eubank told Fox News the fighting hasn't stopped and movement in the area is severely limited, despite the cease-fire's intention to "pause" fighting to allow Syrian Kurds time and space to retreat from the area.
Thousands of Kurdish civilians live in the so-called buffer zone, a senior military source had told Fox News.
The Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) was "still shooting all through the night," Eubank said.
"So far since [the] cease-fire, no airstrikes here, but artillery and ground attacks."
Erdogan threatened the Kurds on Saturday during a televised speech, saying they will be slaughtered if they don't pull back from the 20-mile-wide safe zone along the Turkey-Syria border by Tuesday night.
"We will start where we left off and continue to crush the terrorists' heads," Erdogan said.
Turkey claims it is living up to the terms of the cease-fire agreement and accused the Kurds of violating it.
The Turkish Defense Ministry said Kurdish forces carried out 14 "provocative" attacks in Ras al-Ayn in 36 hours, according to the BBC.
In a statement, the SDF said there has been "no tangible progress" in solving the issues at the northeast border.
As of Friday, 86 civilians had been killed since Turkey launched its military offensive into Syria on Oct. 9, according to a war monitor, the BBC reported.
Erdogan claimed the move was to "neutralize terror threats" and establish a "safe zone."
After carrying out airstrikes, Turkish ground troops later invaded northeastern Syria.
Nearly all U.S. troops there have been removed and will be redeployed in the region in the coming weeks.
The U.S. had teamed up with the Kurds to fight ISIS in the region.
Some analysts and politicians criticized President Trump for removing America forces, saying it was a "green light" for Ankara to invade Syria and fight the Kurds.
Trump said the Turks have been "warring for many years," and that the U.S. does not need to protect war-torn Syria because it's "7,000 miles away."
The president on Friday claimed "thousands and thousands" of lives were being saved in Syria and Turkey due to the cease-fire.
Fox News' Griff Jenkins and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/erd ... P17#page=2
ERDOGAN HAS A WORM TWISTING IN HIS BRAIN FROM THE SOUND OF THINGS HERE ...
FOX News
"Erdogan vows to 'crush the heads' of Kurds if they don't withdraw; both sides trade blame for violating cease-fire"
Melissa Leon
19 OCTOBER 2019
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday promised to "crush the heads" of the Kurds in Syria if they don't fall back from the border's safe zone, according to reports.
The threat comes as both Turkey and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) claim the other is violating terms of a 120-hour cease-fire brokered by Turkey and the U.S. on Thursday.
Violence continued in northeast Syria despite the five-day peace agreement, a source told Fox News.
Dave Eubank with Free Burma Rangers, a private military company that provides emergency medical assistance, was on the ground near the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn trying to help trapped and wounded Kurds.
Eubank told Fox News the fighting hasn't stopped and movement in the area is severely limited, despite the cease-fire's intention to "pause" fighting to allow Syrian Kurds time and space to retreat from the area.
Thousands of Kurdish civilians live in the so-called buffer zone, a senior military source had told Fox News.
The Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) was "still shooting all through the night," Eubank said.
"So far since [the] cease-fire, no airstrikes here, but artillery and ground attacks."
Erdogan threatened the Kurds on Saturday during a televised speech, saying they will be slaughtered if they don't pull back from the 20-mile-wide safe zone along the Turkey-Syria border by Tuesday night.
"We will start where we left off and continue to crush the terrorists' heads," Erdogan said.
Turkey claims it is living up to the terms of the cease-fire agreement and accused the Kurds of violating it.
The Turkish Defense Ministry said Kurdish forces carried out 14 "provocative" attacks in Ras al-Ayn in 36 hours, according to the BBC.
In a statement, the SDF said there has been "no tangible progress" in solving the issues at the northeast border.
As of Friday, 86 civilians had been killed since Turkey launched its military offensive into Syria on Oct. 9, according to a war monitor, the BBC reported.
Erdogan claimed the move was to "neutralize terror threats" and establish a "safe zone."
After carrying out airstrikes, Turkish ground troops later invaded northeastern Syria.
Nearly all U.S. troops there have been removed and will be redeployed in the region in the coming weeks.
The U.S. had teamed up with the Kurds to fight ISIS in the region.
Some analysts and politicians criticized President Trump for removing America forces, saying it was a "green light" for Ankara to invade Syria and fight the Kurds.
Trump said the Turks have been "warring for many years," and that the U.S. does not need to protect war-torn Syria because it's "7,000 miles away."
The president on Friday claimed "thousands and thousands" of lives were being saved in Syria and Turkey due to the cease-fire.
Fox News' Griff Jenkins and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/erd ... P17#page=2
Re: RUSSIA
THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
"'Hillary's gone crazy': Trump knocks Clinton for 'Russian asset' jab at Gabbard"
Carlin Becker
20 OCTOBER 2019
President Trump slammed Hillary Clinton for insinuating that Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein are "Russian" assets.
"So now Crooked Hillary is at it again!"
"She is calling Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard 'a Russian favorite,' and Jill Stein 'a Russian asset,'" he tweeted Saturday night.
"As you may have heard, I was called a big Russia lover also (actually, I do like Russian people. I like all people!)."
"Hillary’s gone Crazy!"
During a Thursday podcast interview, Clinton said Russia had groomed Stein to be a spoiler third-party candidate in 2016 and implied that the Kremlin is doing the same with Gabbard in order to take votes away from the 2020 Democratic ticket and secure Trump's reelection.
"They are also going to do third party again," Clinton, 71, said.
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate."
"She is a favorite of the Russians," she continued, referring to Gabbard without mentioning the Hawaii representative by name.
"They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far."
"That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset."
Gabbard, who is currently a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, fired back at Clinton on Friday, calling her "the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long."
Some of her fellow 2020 Democratic contenders later came to her defense.
On Saturday, Stein also defended herself and said Clinton's accusation is a "completely unhinged conspiracy theory."
Trump previously weighed in on the controversy on Stein's behalf, blasting "Crooked Hillary" for attacking the "respected environmentalist."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
"'Hillary's gone crazy': Trump knocks Clinton for 'Russian asset' jab at Gabbard"
Carlin Becker
20 OCTOBER 2019
President Trump slammed Hillary Clinton for insinuating that Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein are "Russian" assets.
"So now Crooked Hillary is at it again!"
"She is calling Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard 'a Russian favorite,' and Jill Stein 'a Russian asset,'" he tweeted Saturday night.
"As you may have heard, I was called a big Russia lover also (actually, I do like Russian people. I like all people!)."
"Hillary’s gone Crazy!"
During a Thursday podcast interview, Clinton said Russia had groomed Stein to be a spoiler third-party candidate in 2016 and implied that the Kremlin is doing the same with Gabbard in order to take votes away from the 2020 Democratic ticket and secure Trump's reelection.
"They are also going to do third party again," Clinton, 71, said.
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate."
"She is a favorite of the Russians," she continued, referring to Gabbard without mentioning the Hawaii representative by name.
"They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far."
"That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset."
Gabbard, who is currently a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, fired back at Clinton on Friday, calling her "the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long."
Some of her fellow 2020 Democratic contenders later came to her defense.
On Saturday, Stein also defended herself and said Clinton's accusation is a "completely unhinged conspiracy theory."
Trump previously weighed in on the controversy on Stein's behalf, blasting "Crooked Hillary" for attacking the "respected environmentalist."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... P17#page=2
Re: RUSSIA
ERDOGAN IS A SACK OF WIND PUFFING OUT COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF SMOKE ...
CBS NEWS
"Turkey's Erdogan threatens to "crush" former U.S. allies in Syria"
CBSNews
22 OCTOBER 2019
Sanliurfa, Turkey — Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to "crush the heads" of America's former allies, the Kurdish-led forces in Syria, if they don't fully withdraw from the Turkey-Syria border by Tuesday evening.
The five-day ceasefire that the Trump administration got Erdogan to agree to expires at 7 p.m. local time, or noon Eastern.
Erdogan has said if the Kurds aren't completely out of what he's dubbed a "safe zone," stretching across most of Syria's northern border and about 20 miles south into Syrian territory, his offensive against them will resume.
Already it is said to have claimed dozens of civilian lives and has driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.
So as CBS News Holly Williams reports, the stakes were high on Tuesday as Erdogan met President Vladimir Putin in Russia.
The future of Syria could be decided at their meeting; Russia is poised to step into the power vacuum the U.S. left behind when President Trump ordered American troops to leave northeast Syria earlier this month, effectively opening the door to a deadly Turkish offensive.
Those U.S. forces only numbered around 1,000, but with their Kurdish partners they were able to beat back ISIS and bring relative stability to a large swathe of Syria after six years of war.
Thousands of the Kurdish-led fighters died battling ISIS, and now say they've been betrayed by America.
About 200,000 civilians have fled the clashes with Turkey, and a Kurdish lawmaker called on President Trump Monday to stop what she called "ethnic cleansing" of the Kurds in northern Syria.
Turkey, however, insists its offensive has not targeted civilians.
Erdogan's government views the Kurdish-led forces as terrorists linked to a separatist movement based in southern Turkey.
Syria's Russian-backed President Bashar Assad has lambasted Turkey for its offensive on his soil, and chided the Syrian Kurds for seeking help from the U.S.
On Tuesday the Syrian dictator paid a visit to his troops on the front lines of Idlib province, in territory recently reclaimed from Turkish-backed militias.
It was his first visit to the province in seven years.
Arriving in the southern countryside of Idlib, Assad strongly denounced Erdogan for the incursion into northern Syria, calling him "a thief."
"He has robbed the factories, wheat and oil, and today he is robbing the land," Assad asserted.
Since the U.S. began moving its forces out of the region, the long-time U.S. allies of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who for years helped the U.S. battle ISIS while also fending off attacks from Assad's forces, have formed limited partnerships with the Syrian leader's Russian-backed regime.
President Trump has warned Erdogan to restrain his forces and threatened to destroy Turkey's economy if the offensive goes too far.
But on Monday, Mr. Trump also said the U.S. had "never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tur ... P17#page=2
CBS NEWS
"Turkey's Erdogan threatens to "crush" former U.S. allies in Syria"
CBSNews
22 OCTOBER 2019
Sanliurfa, Turkey — Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to "crush the heads" of America's former allies, the Kurdish-led forces in Syria, if they don't fully withdraw from the Turkey-Syria border by Tuesday evening.
The five-day ceasefire that the Trump administration got Erdogan to agree to expires at 7 p.m. local time, or noon Eastern.
Erdogan has said if the Kurds aren't completely out of what he's dubbed a "safe zone," stretching across most of Syria's northern border and about 20 miles south into Syrian territory, his offensive against them will resume.
Already it is said to have claimed dozens of civilian lives and has driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.
So as CBS News Holly Williams reports, the stakes were high on Tuesday as Erdogan met President Vladimir Putin in Russia.
The future of Syria could be decided at their meeting; Russia is poised to step into the power vacuum the U.S. left behind when President Trump ordered American troops to leave northeast Syria earlier this month, effectively opening the door to a deadly Turkish offensive.
Those U.S. forces only numbered around 1,000, but with their Kurdish partners they were able to beat back ISIS and bring relative stability to a large swathe of Syria after six years of war.
Thousands of the Kurdish-led fighters died battling ISIS, and now say they've been betrayed by America.
About 200,000 civilians have fled the clashes with Turkey, and a Kurdish lawmaker called on President Trump Monday to stop what she called "ethnic cleansing" of the Kurds in northern Syria.
Turkey, however, insists its offensive has not targeted civilians.
Erdogan's government views the Kurdish-led forces as terrorists linked to a separatist movement based in southern Turkey.
Syria's Russian-backed President Bashar Assad has lambasted Turkey for its offensive on his soil, and chided the Syrian Kurds for seeking help from the U.S.
On Tuesday the Syrian dictator paid a visit to his troops on the front lines of Idlib province, in territory recently reclaimed from Turkish-backed militias.
It was his first visit to the province in seven years.
Arriving in the southern countryside of Idlib, Assad strongly denounced Erdogan for the incursion into northern Syria, calling him "a thief."
"He has robbed the factories, wheat and oil, and today he is robbing the land," Assad asserted.
Since the U.S. began moving its forces out of the region, the long-time U.S. allies of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who for years helped the U.S. battle ISIS while also fending off attacks from Assad's forces, have formed limited partnerships with the Syrian leader's Russian-backed regime.
President Trump has warned Erdogan to restrain his forces and threatened to destroy Turkey's economy if the offensive goes too far.
But on Monday, Mr. Trump also said the U.S. had "never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tur ... P17#page=2