by Bill Gertz
Comey took the sensational step of ordering the Clinton email investigation reopened eleven days before Election Day. The case was reenergized by new evidence indicating classified information may have been transmitted on some 650,000 personal email messages sent by Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime assistant and vice chair of the presidential campaign. Reopening the criminal probe was a clear sign the FBI had failed to fully investigate the case, or closed it before all the facts surrounding the scandal were uncovered. Two days before the election, Comey again wrote to Congress to say that the FBI had not altered its conclusion after reviewing the emails.
The Clinton security failure was the third major compromise of secrets during the Obama administration and bodes ill for American information warfare capabilities under a possible second Clinton presidential administration. Operational security—the ability to protect information—will be a critical feature in conducting future information warfare and counter-information warfare programs and activities.
The mass disclosure of secrets began in early 2010 when a mentally unstable twenty-three-year-old army sergeant, Bradley Manning, illegally downloaded 400,000 classified documents from an army computer while posted at an intelligence center in Iraq. Manning’s stolen secrets were published online by the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks. It was followed three years later by the compromise of even more sensitive information carried out by a delusional National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden, who, using his access to secrets as a computer systems maintenance administrator at the agency, stole an estimated 1.7 million documents, containing some of the agency’s most sensitive and secret operations used to gather electronic intelligence around the world. Snowden was driven by the false belief, repeated endlessly today by America’s enemies, that NSA is engaged in a massive government conspiracy to spy on Americans. Snowden, working at NSA’s Kunia facility in Hawaii at the time of the document theft, fled first to Hong Kong, which he mistakenly believed would welcome him and which he falsely believed would be a safe haven because it had a news media independent of Beijing. After surfacing in interviews with news reporters, Snowden eventually fled to Russia and ended up under the protection of the FSB security and intelligence service in Moscow, where he remained as of late 2016, out of reach of U.S. federal prosecutors who have charged him with espionage.
“Whether it was WikiLeaks or Snowden or now the Hillary emails, we have done more to hurt ourselves than the Russians, the Chinese, the terrorists, or anybody else that you want to name,” House Armed Services Committee chairman Representative Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican, told me. “This is serious business when you have top-secret emails on a private server, and then you think it all goes away by saying ‘I’m sorry.’ The damage to the country is just enormous when you put these compromises together.”
In August 2016, FBI agents arrested another insider at NSA who was charged with cyber theft of large amounts of highly classified electronic intelligence information. Harold Thomas Martin III had worked for the same contractor as Snowden and was charged with stealing secret computer code used by NSA to break into foreign computer networks.
The Obama administration’s loss of secrets was the culmination of information security failures that would never have occurred years ago, when American leaders understood the need to protect the country from foreign threats.
The United States of America at one time boasted impressive information warfare capabilities. These nonkinetic means of warfare were used effectively in World War II and during the Cold War to defeat America’s foes. Unfortunately, today the U.S. government has been rendered incapable of mounting an effective information warfare program, the result of decades of policies that sought to limit this strategic American power. At the same time, America’s adversaries worked full speed to apply the same information warfare techniques against the country.
“If the CIA were directed to conduct information warfare today, it would be unable to do so because it no longer has an effective and capable directorate of operations,” former CIA operations officer Brad Johnson told me.
How did this happen? The disarming of America ideologically can be traced to liberal politicians who opposed the use of American ideals and values on the world scene as less important than advancing their own political agendas. The politicization of American national security policies, first through Congress and later in Democratic presidential administrations, culminated with the most openly anti-American president in history: Barack Obama, who deliberately worked to transform traditional American institutions and policies through an aggressive liberal leftist political agenda.
A second factor in the failure of American government to develop capabilities and programs for waging information warfare has been the stultifying bureaucratization within the federal government, to the point that federal workers, once regarded as servants to the American people, have turned that concept on its head and created government agencies that have lost both direction and a sense of mission. Government bureaucracy—preserving authority, funding, and turf—has replaced the notion of what Abraham Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Instead, government under liberal notions has become a power unto itself. The problem of the out-of-control federal bureaucracy is in large measure responsible for the rise of political outsiders like Donald Trump, who in 2016 won the Republican nomination for president over a large field of establishment candidates.I
During World War II, the American government learned nearly from scratch how to conduct information warfare and propaganda operations. It did so through the Office of War Information, which operated from June 1942 until September 1945. During that period the office was tasked with the domestic role of explaining to the American people why the war against Japan and Germany had to be fought, and to counteract strong isolationist sentiment. Producing an array of programs, outlined in an executive order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Office of War Information served as a critical soft-power armament during the global war. Its mandate was to “formulate and carry out, through the use of press, radio, motion picture, and other facilities, information programs designed to facilitate the development of an informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort and of the war policies, activities, and aims of the government.” The order also coordinated all war information for federal agencies to ensure an accurate and consistent flow of war information to the public and the world at large. The office also worked with American radio broadcasters and motion picture studios. Lastly, the office was given the mandate to “perform such other functions and duties relating to war information as the president may from time to time determine.” This vaguely worded passage was president-speak for covert and clandestine activities that would be carried out in connection with the Office of Strategic Services, the secret intelligence and covert action agency and wartime predecessor of today’s CIA.
An example of a successful wartime information operation was code-named Operation Annie, carried out in secret by a small group of soldiers from the Psychological Warfare Branch of the U.S. Army’s Twelfth Army Group. The soldiers pulled off a very effective deception using radio broadcasts from a residence in Luxembourg, near the German border, which fooled its listeners into believing it was operated by anti-Nazi Germans inside Germany. It was known to German troops and officers who listened as “Zwölf hundert zwölf,” the German designation for its frequency of 1212. It provided real and accurate news on the war front and built its credibility. Radio hosts were eight Americans who spoke fluent German, or Germans who were working with the Americans. OSS intelligence reports were used to give an accurate description of Allied bombing and damage, something Nazi-controlled radios were not providing. The radio also broadcast reports about how the station was constantly moving around to avoid detection by German forces. By early 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander in Europe, ordered the radio to begin providing false rep
orts on rapid advances by Allied troops toward Germany. The reports triggered a panic and prompted German civilians to flee and clog major roads, thus slowing the retreat of the Germany army. Operation Annie would be difficult to pull off today because of liberal opposition to using news media for warfare purposes. But it was an essential effort in World War II.
OSS chief Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan led the way in the use of wartime psychological warfare operations that were a key element of the fledgling spy agency. Unlike today’s CIA, OSS was a wartime action organization rather than one devoted mainly to gathering intelligence. OSS created the Morale Operations Branch, which was devoted to countering Nazi propaganda and information warfare activities and designed to attack the enemy’s will to fight. The unit was based largely on Britain’s Political Warfare Executive, which produced open as well as secret propaganda. In a speech on December 12, 1942, Donovan outlined the importance of information warfare. “Since war began, psychological warfare has been used,” he said. “You direct your propaganda at the civilian population, at their national emotions, because by doing so you not only involve the leaders, you not only aim at destroying the force of the war machine, but the political or military group who runs that machine.” For Donovan, psychological warfare proved crucial to achieving victory in war, and he knew Adolf Hitler was using it effectively. As Donovan put it:
Between wars, the democracies had not prepared in psychological warfare because they had not prepared for war physically or morally. But Hitler did prepare and he changed the kind of political warfare. He said: “The place of the artillery barrage as a preparation for infantry attack will, in the future, be taken by revolutionary propaganda. Its task is to break down the enemy physically before the armies begin to function at all.” And under him the Germans developed a deliberate science and strategy of psychological warfare. In this war of machines, the human element is, in the long run, more important than the machines themselves. There must be the will to make the machines, to man the machines, and to pull the trigger. Psychological warfare is directed against that will. Its object is to destroy the morale of the enemy and to support the morale of our allies within enemy and enemy-occupied countries. . . . The ammunition of psychological warfare consists of ideas more powerful than those used by the enemy.
After World War II and during the Cold War, when the enemy shifted from being Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union, CIA covert operations involving information succeeded in preventing communist governments from coming to power in several critical states, such as Italy. CIA operatives were schooled in the black arts of political warfare and the formula was simple: target the three areas that were significant centers of influence: students and youth, labor organizations, and the elites of society, including government officials, media, and other societal leaders. However, the CIA in the decades since has become a politicized organization that is ill-equipped for operating in the Information Age. The agency’s liberal culture dates from the 1960s, when the overzealous anticommunism of Senator Joseph McCarthy drove many liberals in government into the CIA. As a result, CIA covert operations throughout the 1960s and ’70s directed from the top floors of the CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, were carried out with a significant flaw: CIA limited all its support for foreign political opposition groups and parties to those on the left of the political spectrum. None on the right were supported. Angelo Codevilla, a former professional staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, believes these politicized covert action programs of supporting foreign leftists produced “blowback,” in intelligence terms, or unintended consequences, that resulted in the election of Barack Obama as president, the most left-wing politician ever to assume the nation’s highest office. Obama’s grandmother Madelyn Dunham worked as vice president of the Bank of Hawaii, and according to Codevilla the bank had a role in handling bank accounts used by the CIA to funnel money to its covert action programs in support of leftist opposition movements in Asia.
Domestically, the powerful FBI under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover avoided involvement in information warfare. Hoover coveted the FBI’s reputation as both a law enforcement agency and a national security agency but strenuously avoided activities that in any way might have undermined its credibility with senior government leaders and the American public. Two exceptions were the FBI’s campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized blacks and their supporters in the South, and against the Black Nationalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which had been heavily influenced and in some cases penetrated with agents by the Soviet KGB. This would be the FBI’s most damaging political mistake, as the FBI under Hoover would eventually target civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in a campaign of active measures to discredit him. King had the unfortunate distinction of being targeted by both the FBI and the KGB. Files obtained from KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin reveal that King and his followers were the focus of KGB disinformation and agent infiltration operations in a bid to oust him as a leader of the civil rights movement in favor of more violent and radical black leaders.II An intelligence source told me the KGB had penetrated King’s inner circle with Soviet agents, and FBI’s counterspies had detected them communicating closely with the KGB. For Moscow, KGB operations against the black nationalist and civil rights movements were an opportunity to conduct information warfare against the main enemy: the United States.
The 1970s saw the further erosion of U.S. information warfare capabilities. The liberal foreign policies of President Jimmy Carter inadvertently led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—after Carter foolishly announced that the United States needed to shed its “inordinate fear of communism.” The assessment within the Kremlin was that Washington would not respond in any serious way to Moscow’s military drive to develop an overland bridge to the Middle East by taking over the Southwest Asian state. As a result, Afghanistan became a failed state that would host al Qaeda and spawn the September 11 attacks. Despite years of military support and billions of dollars in American aid, the country continues to provide a safe haven for Islamic terrorists engaged in large-scale opium trafficking that is no doubt contributing to the heroin crisis currently gripping America. Carter’s second fiasco was his administration’s role in fostering the takeover of Iran, at one time a key Middle East ally of the United States. Carter supported the Shiite radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, whom the president falsely viewed as a democratic reformer. The hard-line theocracy that was created in Iran remains today the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism and is on a path to having nuclear weapons in ten years under the nuclear deal concluded by the Obama administration. Equally damaging from a national security standpoint was Carter’s wholesale weakening of the CIA under Director Stansfield Turner. It was Turner who recklessly fired hundreds of the agency’s most experienced operatives, a devastating blow to its operations capability from which the agency has never fully recovered. Under Turner, the liberal politicization at CIA accelerated.
A recently released 1978 memorandum from Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski reveals just how hapless Carter and his advisers were in dealing with an expanding Soviet Union that had been aggressively moving to take over significant parts of Africa, using Cuban and East German proxy forces. “I suspect that an impression has developed that the Administration (and you personally) operates very cerebrally, quite unemotionally,” Brzezinski wrote, perhaps using the term cerebral as code for weak. He continued:
In most instances this is an advantage; however, occasionally emotion and even a touch of irrationality can be an asset. Those who wish to take advantage of us ought to fear that, at some point, we might act unpredictably, in anger, and decisively. If they do not feel this way, they will calculate that simply pressing, probing, or delaying will serve their ends. I see this quite clearly in [Israeli prime minister Menachem] Begin’s behavior, and I suspect that Brezhnev is beginning to act similarly.
This is why I think the time may be ri
ght for you to pick some controversial subject on which you will deliberately choose to act with a degree of anger and even roughness, designed to have a shock effect.
Carter proved incapable of projecting power and strength and instead provoked America’s enemies to take advantage of his weakness, a pattern that has been followed under Obama.
The intense politicization within government that ultimately produced the current elimination of effective U.S. information warfare capabilities against foreign enemies was on display in 1983 during an incident that pitted the conservative administration of President Ronald Reagan against entrenched liberals in Congress. In March of that year Reagan announced the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a revolutionary missile defense program that would transform the Cold War confrontational nuclear doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD, by which American and Soviet populations were held hostage to the concept of retaliatory nuclear missile and bomber attacks. MAD was once considered to be a cornerstone of stability, but Reagan rejected the MAD doctrine by calling for the creation of strategic missile defenses—high-speed, precision-guided antimissile weapons that could knock out incoming ballistic missiles at various stages of flight, thus neutralizing their strategic threat. The idea meant that the United States would no longer need nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear war. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz wrote in a March 1989 Pentagon report. SDI, as the program was called, had been dubbed “Star Wars” by critics. But it was an important first step toward realizing the goal of a more secure world. There was one problem, however. For the liberal left elites in government, academia, and think tanks, SDI struck at the heart of an arms control canon, namely the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between Moscow and Washington. While the Soviets had violated the treaty secretly for decades, and under the treaty maintained a nuclear-tipped antimissile system around Moscow, the United States under Carter committed to remaining defenseless by not building strategic defenses. Thus when SDI was announced, liberal Democrats in Congress vehemently opposed the program.