The Intercept

With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 03:00:00 +0000

On the morning of July 22 last year, a Ukrainian woman living in the town of Izium, then occupied by invading Russian troops, was killed in shelling launched by the Ukrainian military. The bomb that killed her was no ordinary weapon.

According to investigators from Human Rights Watch, who visited the scene of the attack, her death was caused by a cluster munition, a weapon much of the world has moved to ban due to the indiscriminate harm that they cause to civilians. The salvo was allegedly fired from the Ukrainian side, according to witnesses, and detonated near the woman’s home, killing her and her dog.

“The attack was very scary. Very loud. I was outside and there were a lot of explosions. The wife of my ex-husband came and told me to hurry to get inside,” one witness told Human Rights Watch, according to a report released late Wednesday night. Another witness, who viewed the victim’s body in the aftermath and helped bury her in a local cemetery, said that her “face and body were severely mutilated by the explosion.”

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more.”

As the Ukraine war drags on, the Biden administration is now reportedly in the final stages of deciding whether to send more of the bombs to the Ukrainian military. The decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine would likely be seen as a setback to nonproliferation efforts aimed at stopping use of the weapon.

The report by Human Rights Watch analyzing the impact of previous cluster munition attacks carried out last summer by the Ukrainian military found numerous dead and wounded civilians in Izium who were hit by exploding cluster bomblets.

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more,” the report said, adding that the true number of casualties was likely greater, as many wounded people had been taken to Russia for medical care and not returned.

Although investigators found forensic evidence pointing to Ukrainian culpability, the Ukrainian defense ministry said in a written letter to Human Rights Watch that “cluster munitions were not used within or around the city of Izium in 2022 when it was under Russian occupation.” The town was liberated by Ukrainian forces in the fall of that year.

The Ukrainian military is currently engaged in a much larger counteroffensive aimed at reclaiming other territories captured by Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country in early 2022.

According to the Washington Post, the administration has recently been taking the temperature of members of Congress on the forthcoming decision. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said he was open to giving Ukraine the weapons. When asked by The Intercept, a number of House Democrats declined to say whether they were for or against the move.

The move to transfer cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military comes on the heels of other U.S. initiatives to train Ukrainians on advanced fighter aircraft, and possibly provide them long-range missiles capable of striking deep into Russian-held territory. The transfer of cluster bombs to the Ukrainians would be much more ethically fraught.

A Ukrainian civilian removes a Russian cluster munition rocket from a field near the villages of Smolyanka and Olyshivka on April 3, 2022.

Photo: Justin Yau/Sipa via AP Images

Banned Cluster Munitions

Cluster munitions are controversial due to the manner in which “bomblets” are scattered around a targeted area, creating secondary explosions that can cause death and injury even long after a conflict has ceased.

The use of cluster attacks during the 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon killed and wounded hundreds of civilians. A decade later, swaths of southern Lebanon are still dangerous for civilians who are periodically killed or maimed by stray bomblets.

The bombs are currently at the center of an international campaign to ban their use in armed conflict. More than 100 states have signed an international convention on cluster munitions vowing not to employ them in war, produce them domestically, or encourage their use in foreign conflicts. Despite public pressure to join, the U.S. has not become a signatory to the convention.

The Russian military has also extensively used cluster munitions during its invasion of Ukraine, including in attacks on populated areas that were said to have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in the early months of the war.

The Ukrainian military was reported to have requested significant transfers of the munitions late last year, though the Biden administration did not render a decision on the request at the time.

If the decision is taken to approve the transfer of cluster bombs to Ukraine now, it may reflect frustration with the pace of the Ukrainian offensive, which has so far failed to make significant gains against Russian forces in the country.

In their report analyzing the impact of Ukrainian cluster bomb attacks on civilians in the occupied town of Izium, investigators from Human Rights Watch noted the potential long-term impacts of untargeted, explosive bomblets left around the region and called on both sides to refrain from their use — lest they kill and injure many more in the years to come. As the conflict grinds on, a legacy of unexploded cluster munitions could keep the suffering of the war going long after the guns go silent.

“Cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine are killing civilians now and will continue to do so for many years,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, in the report. “Both sides should immediately stop using them, and not try to get more of these indiscriminate weapons.”

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Supreme Court: Affirmative Action Is OK — If the Students Are Getting Sent to Die in Wars

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:23:36 +0000

Affirmative action supporters and counterprotesters shout at each outside of the Supreme Court on June 29, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In what is being described as a victory for a merit-based and colorblind approach to college admissions, the Supreme Court Thursday struck down affirmative action as a tool to redress race-based inequalities. The ruling by the court’s conservative majority dealt with affirmative action programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, but would apply across the country.

The precedent set by the court’s decision is primed to transform college admissions standards around the country, yet there is one area where the law mandating diversity in recruitment is remaining conspicuously unchanged: U.S. military academies.

When it comes to national priorities, the defense establishment has long been treated with kid gloves and afforded its own perks and protections. Think of the way fiscal hawks on both sides of the aisle regularly greenlight bloated Pentagon budgets. The divergence on diversity guidelines for elite colleges and U.S. military institutions stands out for its gross irony, not least because the most pernicious forms of affirmative action — those which protect the ruling class — remain untouched.

“The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion.

A quick look at the details of the ruling itself sheds some light on the problem. The U.S. government had previously filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit asking for an exception for military academies. That brief stated that U.S. military leaders “have learned through hard experience that the effectiveness of our military depends on a diverse officer corps that is ready to lead an increasingly diverse fighting force.” Although the court rejected the same logic being applied to elite colleges, it evidently accepted the need for diversity among future generations of West Point graduates, stating in a footnote to the majority opinion that:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

Affirmative Action for Whom?

A common criticism of affirmative action programs at universities is that they undermine merit as a primary criterion for selection. Yet the same concern seems equally, if not more, relevant to U.S. military leadership, particularly given the strong emphasis on national security normally espoused by U.S. politicians and the electorate.

The court is apparently hesitant to prioritize demographic diversity in admissions to colleges that, ultimately, determine the future appearance of the country’s elite. But the same concerns do not seem to apply to the military, where one of the possibilities of membership, rather than joining the gilded class, is being severely injured or killed in one of the U.S.’s many foreign military conflicts.

Despite the court’s ruling, which has been widely celebrated among opponents of affirmative action, it is not entirely clear how much that the composition of elite colleges will change. The decision says that universities may continue to consider in admissions “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”

The far more pervasive form of elite affirmative action — embodied by preferential treatment for legacy admissions — was left untouched by the court ruling.

This apparent loophole potentially allows applicants to continue to be accepted on the basis of racial background, provided they also give a personal statement about their race that could easily become de rigueur in the future.

The far more pervasive form of elite affirmative action — embodied by preferential treatment for legacy admissions, the children of financial donors, athletes, and relatives of school staff — was left untouched by the court ruling. The oversight is a significant one.

There was, however, one mention of it: In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch chastised elite schools like Harvard for their attempts to uphold affirmative action while continuing to defend legacy admissions. Harvard’s “preferences for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives,” he wrote.

Nonetheless, a 2019 study found that a whopping 43 percent of white students at Harvard were beneficiaries of one of these forms of preferential access. While 70 percent of legacy admissions were white, only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian students benefitted from these preferential considerations.

In effect, while rolling back affirmative action, the court left unscathed a backdoor means of demographic engineering in college admissions that is equally indifferent to merit as a criterion.

Sotomayor’s Dissent

The reversal of affirmative action at elite schools will likely have reverberations well beyond the institutions themselves, including downstream changes in the internal culture of workforces and non-governmental institutions that had been encouraged for years to make demographic diversity a priority in hiring.

Yet the apparent inconsistencies in the ruling, including carve-outs for the military and continued preferential treatment for the wealthy and well connected, will likely make the decision a bitter one for many who had supported affirmative action to address America’s history of racial inequity.

In her dissent to the ruling, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the military exemption in particular “highlights the arbitrariness” of the court’s decision. Sotomayor minced few words in expressing the depths of her objections to the ruling, which will likely be a landmark one in the history of America’s post-civil rights legal movement.

“When proponents of those arguments, greater now in number on the Court, return to fight old battles anew, it betrays an unrestrained disregard for precedent,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “It fosters the people’s suspicions that ‘bedrock principles are founded … in the proclivities of individuals’ on this Court, not in the law, and it degrades ‘the integrity of our constitutional system of government.’”

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Don’t Compare Donald Trump to Reality Winner. He’s No Whistleblower.

James Risen — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Former U.S. President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club on June 13, 2023, in Bedminster, N.J.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump has nothing in common with Reality Winner. He also has nothing in common with Terry Albury or Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards.

Winner, Albury, and Edwards each performed a public service by leaking to the press while Trump was president. All three were later prosecuted by the Trump administration and went to prison for telling the truth to the American people.

But don’t confuse Trump’s actions in his classified documents case with what they did. He’s accused of stealing classified information and lying about it, apparently for his own selfish reasons. Public service was never on his mind when he ordered that boxes filled with classified documents be moved around Mar-a-Lago to hide them from the FBI.

After Trump was indicted last week, there were plenty of facile comparisons in the media between his case and those of others like Winner who have been targeted in leak prosecutions. But Winner, Albury, and Edwards were whistleblowers, not narcissists who wanted to hoard government secrets as if they were rare gold coins.

In 2017, Winner was working for a contractor for the National Security Agency when she anonymously mailed an NSA document to The Intercept. The document revealed that Russian intelligence had attempted to hack into U.S. voting systems during the 2016 election; The Intercept published an explosive story based on the document that Winner had provided. The disclosure was so important that a Senate Intelligence Committee report later concluded that the press played a critical role in warning state elections officials about the Russian attempts to hack voting systems. Before the leak to The Intercept, federal officials had done next to nothing to alert state officials to the Russian threat. The Senate report offered powerful evidence that Winner had performed a public service by providing the NSA document to The Intercept.

Albury was an FBI agent who leaked secret FBI guidelines to The Intercept that served as the basis for a series of stories in 2017 revealing that the FBI could bypass its own rules in order to send undercover agents or informants into political and religious organizations, as well as schools, clubs, and businesses. Albury was motivated to disclose the information after he saw that the FBI’s investigative directives led to the profiling and intimidation of minority communities in Minnesota, where he was serving with the FBI, as well as elsewhere around the nation. Members of Minneapolis’s large Somali community later expressed gratitude to Albury for exposing the rules that gave the green light to their harassment.

Edwards was a Treasury Department official who provided confidential documents to BuzzFeed News that revealed widespread money laundering in major Western banks. Before she was arrested in 2018, she provided thousands of “suspicious activity reports” that showed how financial institutions facilitate the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.

Despite the importance of the information all three revealed, Winner, Albury, and Edwards all went to prison during Trump’s presidency. That’s because there is no exception for public service in the laws concerning the mishandling, unauthorized retention, or the public disclosure of classified information. Under U.S. law, it doesn’t matter why someone disclosed classified documents. Motive makes no difference, even if the disclosures served the public good.

As a result, Winner, Albury, and Edwards were not able to argue in court that they shouldn’t go to prison for the crime of telling the truth. That’s one of the many reasons that becoming a whistleblower is such an act of courage. A whistleblower has to be willing to tell the truth to the American people while knowing that there will be no reward, only punishment.

Trump loved sending whistleblowers like Winner, Albury, and Edwards to prison and didn’t care that they had revealed important information that Americans had a right to know. Trump and his administration prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president except the Obama administration. But Barack Obama had eight years in office to target whistleblowers, and Trump only had four. Who knows how many more leak prosecutions Trump will conduct if he gets back in the White House, but there is an excellent chance he will beat Obama’s record.

The stunning fact is that after gleefully sending so many whistleblowers to prison, Trump then stole classified documents on his way out of office and lied about it and hid them when the National Archives asked for them back. He kept hiding them from the Justice Department and the FBI once the matter turned into a criminal case. Trump simply didn’t think that the laws that he had applied so aggressively to others would apply to him.

And so the great irony is the Espionage Act — the archaic and draconian law Trump used to target whistleblowers like Winner who provided classified information to the press — is now being used to target Trump himself. In recent years, press freedom organizations have called for either the reform or outright repeal of the Espionage Act, both because it comes with excessive penalties and provides for no opportunity for whistleblowers to argue that their disclosures are in the public interest. Reforming the law to allow for a public interest exception would help future whistleblowers who follow in the footsteps of Winner, Albury, and Edwards.

Yet that change would do nothing for Trump. He’s just a selfish thief.

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Pentagon’s Secret Service Trawls Social Media for Mean Tweets About Generals

Daniel Boguslaw — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

When the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley enters into his scheduled retirement later this year, one of the perks will include a personal security detail to protect him from threats — including “embarrassment.”

The U.S. Army Protective Services Battalion, the Pentagon’s little-known Secret Service equivalent, is tasked with safeguarding top military brass. The unit protects current as well as former high-ranking military officers from “assassination, kidnapping, injury or embarrassment,” according to Army records.

Protective Services’s mandate has expanded to include monitoring social media for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats and identifying “negative sentiment” regarding its wards, according to an Army procurement document dated September 1, 2022, and reviewed by The Intercept. The expansion of the Protective Services Battalion’s purview has not been previously reported.

The country’s national security machinery has become increasingly focused on social media — particularly as it relates to disinformation. Various national security agencies have spent recent years standing up offices all over the federal government to counter the purported threat.

“The ability to express opinions, criticize, make assumptions, or form value judgments — especially regarding public officials — is a quintessential part of democratic society.”

“There may be legally valid reasons to intrude on someone’s privacy by searching for, collecting, and analyzing publicly available information, particularly when it pertains to serious crimes and terrorist threats,” Ilia Siatitsa, program director at Privacy International, told The Intercept. “However, expressing ‘positive or negative sentiment towards a senior high-risk individual’ cannot be deemed sufficient grounds for government agencies to conduct surveillance operations, even going as far as ‘pinpointing exact locations’ of individuals. The ability to express opinions, criticize, make assumptions, or form value judgments — especially regarding public officials — is a quintessential part of democratic society.”

Protective details have in the past generated controversy over questions about their cost and necessity. During the Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s around-the-clock security detail racked up over $24 million in costs. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt ran up over $3.5 million in bills for his protective detail — costs that were determined unjustified by the EPA’s inspector general. The watchdog also found that the EPA had not bothered to “assess the potential dangers posed by any of these threats” to Pruitt.

Frances Seybold, a spokesperson for the Army Criminal Investigation Division, pointed The Intercept to a webpage about the office, which has been renamed the Executive Protection and Special Investigations Field Office. Seybold did not respond to substantive questions about social media monitoring by the protective unit.

The procurement document — published in redacted form on an online clearinghouse for government contracts but reviewed without redactions by The Intercept — begins by describing the Army’s need to “mitigate online threats” as well as identify “positive or negative sentiment” about senior Pentagon officials.

“This is an ongoing PSIFO/PIB” — Protective Services Field Office/Protective Intelligence Branch — “requirement to provide global protective services for senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, adequate security in order to mitigate online threats (direct, indirect, and veiled), the identification of fraudulent accounts and positive or negative sentiment relating specifically to our senior high-risk personnel,” the document says.

The document goes on to describe the software it would use to acquire “a reliable social media threat mitigation service.” The document says, “The PSIFO/PIB needs an Open-Source Web based tool-kit with advanced capabilities to collect publicly available information.” The toolkit would “provide the anonymity and security needed to conduct publicly accessible information research through misattribution by curating user agent strings and using various egress points globally to mask their identity.”

The Army planned to use these tools not just to detect online “threats,” but also pinpoint their exact location by combining various surveillance techniques and data sources.

The document cites access to Twitter’s “firehose,” which would grant the Army the ability to search public tweets and Twitter users without restriction, as well as analysis of 4Chan, Reddit, YouTube, and Vkontakte, a Facebook knockoff popular in Russia. Internet chat platforms like Discord and Telegram will also be scoured for the purpose of “identifying counterterrorism and counter-extremism and radicalization,” though it’s unclear what exactly those terms mean here.

The Army’s new toolkit goes far beyond social media surveillance of the type offered by private contractors like Dataminr, which helps police and military agencies detect perceived threats by scraping social media timelines and chatrooms for various keywords. Instead, Army Protective Services Battalion investigators would seemingly combine social media data with a broad variety of public and nonpublic information, all accessible through a “universal search selector.”

These sources of information include “signal-rich discussions from illicit threat-actor communities and access to around-the-clock conversations within threat-actor channels,” public research, CCTV feeds, radio stations, news outlets, personal records, hacked information, webcams, and — perhaps most invasive — cellular location data.

The document mentions the use of “geo-fenced” data as well, a controversial practice wherein an investigator draws a shape on a digital map to focus their surveillance of a specific area. While app-based smartphone tracking is a potent surveillance technique, it remains unclear how exactly this data might actually be used to unmask threatening social media posts, or what relevance other data categories like radio stations or academic research could possibly have.

The Army wasn’t just looking for surveillance software, but also tools to disguise the Army’s internet presence as it monitors the web.

The Army procurement document shows it wasn’t just looking for surveillance software, but also tools to disguise the Army’s internet presence as it monitors the web. The contract says the Army would use “misattribution”: deceiving others about who is actually behind the keyboard. The document says the Army would accomplish this through falsifying web browser information and by relaying Army internet traffic through servers located in foreign cities, obscuring its stateside origin.

According to the document, “SEWP Solutions, LLC is the only vendor that allows USACID the ability to tunnel into specific countries/cities like Moscow, Russia or Beijing, China and come out on a host nation internet domain.”

The data used by the toolkit all falls under the rubric of “PAI,” or publicly available information, a misnomer that often describes not only what is freely available to the public, but also commercially purchased private information bought and sold by a wide constellation of shadowy surveillance firms and data brokers. Location data gleaned from smartphone apps and resold by the unregulated mobile ad industry provides nearly anyone — including the Army, it appears — with an effortless, unaccountable means of tracking the phone-owning public’s movements with pinpoint accuracy, both in the U.S. and abroad.

A recently declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence outlines the dramatic and invasive surveillance efforts conducted by the U.S. government through the purchase of data collected in the private sector. Through contracts with private entities, the government has skirted laws enshrining due process, allowing federal agencies to collect cellular data on millions of Americans without warrants or judicial oversight.

While the procurement document doesn’t name a specific product, it does show that the contract was awarded to SEWP Solutions, LLC. SEWP is a federal software vendor that has repeatedly sold the Department of Defense a suite of surveillance tools that closely matches what’s described in the Army project. This suite, marketed under the oddly named Berber Hunter Tool Kit, is a collection of surveillance tools by different firms bundled together by ECS Federal, a major federal software vendor. ECS and three other federal contractors jointly own SEWP, which resells Berber Hunter.

ECS also sells a PAI toolkit under the brand name Argos, whose three main features listed on the ECS website all feature prominently in the Army contracting document. It is unclear if Argos is a rebrand of the Berber Hunter suite, or a new offering. (Neither ECS nor SEWP responded to a request for comment.)

Job listings and contracting documents provide a rough sketch of what’s included in Berber Hunter. According to one job post, the suite includes software made by Babel Street, a controversial broker of personal information and location data, along with so-called open-source intelligence tools sold by Echosec and Zignal Labs. Last year, Echosec was purchased by Flashpoint Intel, an intelligence contractor that reportedly boasted of work to thwart protests and infiltrate private chat rooms.

A 2022 FBI procurement memo obtained by the researcher Jack Poulson and reviewed by The Intercept mentions the bureau’s use of Flashpoint tools, with descriptions that resemble what the Army says in the procurement document about the monitoring of “extremist” chat rooms.

“In relation to extremist forums, Flashpoint has maintained misattributable personas for years on these platforms,” the FBI memo says. “Through these personas, Flashpoint has captured and scraped the contents of these forums.” The memo noted that the FBI “does not want to advertise they are seeking this type of data collection.”

According to the Protective Services Battalion document, the Army also does not want to advertise its interest in broad data collection. The redacted copy of the contract document, while public, is marked as CUI, for “Controlled Unclassified Information,” and FEDCON, meant for federal employees and contractors only.

“Left unregulated, open-source intelligence could lead to the kind of abuses observed in other forms of covert surveillance operations,” said Siatitsa, of Privacy International. “The systematic collection, storage, and analysis of information posted online by law enforcement and governmental agencies constitutes a serious interference with the right to respect for private life.”

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Daniel Ellsberg Wanted Americans to See the Truth About War

Norman Solomon — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 18:28:13 +0000

On a warm autumn afternoon, I sat with Daniel Ellsberg on the deck next to his house. The San Francisco Bay shimmered off in the distance behind him. It was 2021, and more than 50 years had passed since Ellsberg — risking prison for the rest of his life — had provided the New York Times and other newspapers with 7,000 pages of top-secret documents that quickly became known as the Pentagon Papers. From then on, he continued to speak, write, and protest as a tireless antiwar activist.

I asked what the impacts would likely be if pictures of people killed by the U.S. military’s bombing campaigns were on the front pages of American newspapers.

“But why were they lied to? How much would they do if they weren’t lied to?”

“I am in favor, unreservedly, of making people aware what the human consequences are of what we’re doing — where we are killing people, what the real interests appear to be involved, who is benefiting from this, what are the circumstances of the killing,” Ellsberg replied. “I want that to come out. It is not impossible, especially [with] social media, where people can be their own investigative journalists and they can get it out and so forth. Where I have been somewhat disillusioned is not to think that can’t help, but to be aware it’s very far from being a guarantee that anything will change. There’s no question that the media, like the government, collaborates in keeping this from the [public’s] awareness and attention — and that, to some extent, is surely to the credit of the American people, who are surely less responsible having been lied to, than the ones doing the lying. But why were they lied to? How much would they do if they weren’t lied to?”

Ellsberg died today from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 92. While he is best known as the whistleblower who gave the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War to the world, he went on for 52 years to expose other types of secrets — including hidden truths about the psychology and culture of U.S. militarism. His stunning intellect and vast knowledge of the American warfare state were combined with great reservoirs of emotional depth and human compassion, enabling him to lay bare the social pressures and fear operating within the media and politics of a country addicted to waging aggressive war. After his disclosure in early March that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, media coverage of him and his life was extensive. Yet the public discourse scarcely touched on core aspects of the ongoing “war on terror” that he explored when we spoke for an interview that appears in my new book, “War Made Invisible.”

Ellsberg talked about differences between media coverage of September 11 and, later, the U.S. military’s “shock and awe” missile attack on Baghdad that began the Iraq invasion. In response to the horrors of 9/11, he recalled, the Times “did something very dramatic. They ran a picture, a head picture, of each person who had been killed — with some anecdotes from their neighbors, their friends, and their family. This person liked to skydive, or this person liked to play in a band, or little anecdotes about what made them human, what people remembered about them in particular, very gripping, very moving.”

After the Iraq War began, Ellsberg had an idea: “Imagine if the Times were to run a page or two of photographs of the people who burned on the night of ‘shock and awe.’ … It wouldn’t be that hard, if you were on the ground, we weren’t then but we were later, to find the people who were relatives of those people. And say, look, each one had friends, had parents, had children, had relatives — each one had made their mark in some little way in the world until that moment when they were killed — and these were the people we killed, and these were the people who were dying under the bombing, exactly as in our case, where two planes filled with gas burned two buildings.” But such U.S. media coverage was unthinkable. “Of course it’s never happened — nothing like it,” Ellsberg noted.

Looking back at patterns of American attitudes toward war deaths, Ellsberg was not optimistic: “It’s fair to say, as a first approximation, that the public doesn’t show any effective concern for the number of people we kill in these wars. At most, they are concerned about the American casualties, especially if they’re too many. They will put up, to an almost surprising degree, [with] a considerable level of American casualties, but especially if they’re going down and especially if the president can claim success in what he was trying to do. But in terms of people killed in the course of that, the media don’t really ask the question, the public doesn’t ask the question of the media, and when it does come out, one way or another, occasionally, nothing much changes.”

“How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them.”

What is concealed from Americans, he went on, “is that they are citizens of an empire, they are in the core of an empire that feels itself as having the right to determine who governs other countries, and if we don’t approve of them because of their effect on corporate interests, or their refusal to give us bases, or through pipelines of a kind that we need, we feel absolutely right and capable of removing them, of regime change.”

Ellsberg added, “Virtually every president tells us, or reassures us, that we are a very peace-loving people, very slow to go to war, very reluctant, perhaps too slow in some cases, but very determined once we’re in, but it takes a lot to get us to accept the idea of going to war, that that’s not our normal state. That of course does go against the fact that we’ve been at war almost continuously. … That there is deception, that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game, in the approach to the war, in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war, is the reality. How much of a role does the media actually play in this, in deceiving the public, and how difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

This article is an adapted excerpt from the new book “War Made Invisible : How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine,” by Norman Solomon (The New Press, June 2023).

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How Henry Kissinger Paved the Way for Orlando Letelier’s Assassination

James Risen — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:26:22 +0000

On the morning of September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister of Chile living in exile in the United States, was driving to work in downtown Washington, D.C., when a bomb planted in his car exploded, killing him and one passenger while wounding another.

Letelier was assassinated in the heart of Washington by the brutal regime of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, a far-right dictator who gained power in a 1973 coup backed by the Nixon administration and the CIA, overthrowing the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Letelier served as foreign minister for Allende, and later was arrested and tortured by Pinochet. After a year in prison, Letelier was released thanks to international diplomatic pressure and eventually settled in Washington, where he was a prominent opponent of the Pinochet regime.

Even in exile, Letelier still had a target on his back. The Pinochet regime, along with the right-wing governments of Argentina and Uruguay, launched a vicious international assassination program — code-named Operation Condor — to kill dissidents living abroad, and Letelier was one of Operation Condor’s most prominent victims.

Nearly 50 years later, the full story of Letelier’s assassination, one of the most brazen acts of state-sponsored terrorism ever conducted on American soil, is still coming into focus.

Now, the 100th birthday of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which has been marked in the press by both powerful investigations as well as puff pieces and hagiography, offers an opportunity to reexamine the Letelier assassination and the broader U.S. role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically elected government in order to impose a brutal dictatorship. It was one of the darkest chapters in Kissinger’s career and one of the most blatant abuses of power in the CIA’s long and ugly history.

Tanks arrive in front of La Moneda, Chile, in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état led by Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet.

Photo: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images

Making a Coup

The first steps in the covert campaign by President Richard Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA to stage a coup in Chile began even before Allende took office. Their actions were eerily similar to President Donald Trump’s coup attempt following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried to block the congressional certification of the election, culminating in the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

On September 4, 1970, Allende came in first in the Chilean presidential election, but since he did not gain an outright majority, Chile’s legislature had to choose the winner. Scheduled for late October, that legislative action was supposed to be a pro-forma certification of Allende, the first-place candidate, but Nixon, fueled by anti-communist paranoia that led him to oppose leftist governments all around the world, wanted to use that time to stop Allende from coming to power.

The Nixon administration pursued a two-track strategy. The first track included a campaign of propaganda and disinformation against Allende, as well as bribes to key players on Chile’s political scene and boycotts and economic pressure from American multinational corporations with operations in Chile.

The second track, which was far more secretive, called for a CIA-backed military coup.

On September 15, 1970, in a White House meeting, Nixon ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to secretly foment a military coup to stop Allende from becoming Chile’s president. Also attending the meeting was Kissinger, who was then Nixon’s national security adviser, and Attorney General John Mitchell. Helms later said that “if I ever carried a marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day.”

Helms and the other CIA officials involved didn’t think they had much of a chance of mounting a successful coup — and they were right, at least in 1970. Their coup efforts failed that year, but a renewed coup attempt succeeded in 1973, during which Allende died and Pinochet came to power.

Pinochet’s Guardian

By 1976, three years after gaining power in the CIA-backed coup, Pinochet had created a bloody police state, torturing, imprisoning, and killing thousands. Despite its draconian practices, Pinochet’s intelligence service enjoyed close relations with the CIA, while Kissinger remained Pinochet’s guardian in Washington, fending off congressional efforts to punish Pinochet’s regime over its human rights record.

Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him.

By September 1976, when Letelier was killed, Pinochet had good reason to believe he could get away with murder in the heart of Washington. In fact, Letelier’s assassination may have been enabled by a secret meeting between Pinochet and Kissinger three months earlier.

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger — by then the secretary of state for President Gerald Ford — met with Pinochet at the presidential palace in Santiago, just as Pinochet’s vicious human rights record was becoming a major international issue. The Church Committee, the Senate’s first investigation of the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, had just completed an inquiry into the CIA’s efforts to foment a coup in Chile, and had closely examined a CIA scheme in 1970 to kidnap a top Chilean general who had refused to go along with the CIA-backed anti-Allende plots. As part of its CIA-Chile investigation, the Church Committee secretly interviewed the exiled Letelier.

Former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier’s car, following his assassination by car bomb in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 21, 1976.

Photo: Peter Bregg/AP

In the summer of 1975, Church Committee staffer Rick Inderfurth and another staffer quietly interviewed Letelier at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was living with his wife and four children. Inderfurth questioned Letelier about a wide range of issues, including how the overt and covert policies of the CIA and the Nixon administration in the years leading up to the 1973 coup had destabilized the Allende government. Letelier provided valuable insights for the Church Committee’s investigation, but he did not testify in public during its hearings on Chile. The fact that Letelier was interviewed by the Church Committee was reported for the first time in my new book, “The Last Honest Man.”

Even though he lived in Washington, Letelier wasn’t safe from Pinochet.

After the Church Committee’s investigation and other disclosures, Congress was seeking to punish Pinochet’s regime for its use of torture and other human rights abuses, and Letelier met with congressional leaders about how to hold Pinochet accountable. Kissinger, who held broad sway on foreign policy under Ford, was under mounting pressure to publicly reprimand Pinochet.

Kissinger agreed to travel to Chile in June 1976 to give a speech to publicly criticize Pinochet on human rights. But just before his address, Kissinger held a secret meeting with Pinochet to privately tell the dictator that he could ignore the public upbraiding that he was about to give him. Kissinger made it clear to Pinochet that his public criticism was all for show and part of an effort to placate the U.S. Congress. During their private talk, Kissinger made clear that he thought the complaints about Pinochet’s human rights record were just part of a left-wing campaign against his government. Kissinger emphasized that he and the Ford administration were firmly on Pinochet’s side.

“In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger told Pinochet, according to a declassified State Department memo recounting the conversation, published in “The Pinochet File,” by Peter Kornbluh. “I think that the previous government [Allende’s administration] was headed toward Communism. We wish your government well. … As you know, Congress is now debating further restraints on aid to Chile. We are opposed. … I’m going to speak about human rights this afternoon in the General Assembly. I delayed my statement until I could talk to you. I wanted you to understand my position.”

After getting Kissinger’s reassurances, Pinochet began to complain that the U.S. Congress was listening to his enemies — including Letelier.

“We are constantly being attacked” by political opponents in Washington, Pinochet told Kissinger. “They have a strong voice in Washington. Not the people in the Pentagon, but they do get through to Congress. Gabriel Valdez [a longtime Pinochet foe] has access. Also Letelier.” Pinochet bitterly added that “Letelier has access to the Congress. We know they are giving false information. … We are worried about our image.” It is not known whether Pinochet was aware that Letelier had been a secret witness for the Church Committee, or whether the dictator only knew about Letelier’s more public lobbying efforts to get Congress to take action against the Pinochet regime.

During the June 8 meeting, Kissinger did not respond to Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier. Instead, he told Pinochet, “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined [Allende] government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” Given the context of the meeting, during which Kissinger signaled to Pinochet that the Ford administration was not going to penalize him for his regime’s human rights record, Kissinger’s silence in the face of Pinochet’s complaints about Letelier must have been viewed by Pinochet as a green light to take brutal action against the dissident.

Kissinger took further action later in the year that gave Pinochet the freedom he needed to move against Letelier. After the U.S. found out about Operation Condor, State Department officials wanted to notify the Pinochet regime and the governments of Argentina and Uruguay not to conduct assassinations. But on September 16, 1976, Kissinger blocked the State Department’s plans. Kissinger ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter” by the State Department, effectively blocking any effort to curb Pinochet’s bloody plans. Letelier was assassinated in Washington five days later.

Letelier was one of three witnesses of the Church Committee who were murdered, either before or after they talked to the committee. (The other two were Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Las Vegas gangster Johnny Roselli, who were both involved in the CIA’s secret alliance with the Mafia in the early 1960s to try to kill Fidel Castro, a scheme that was the subject of a major investigation by the Church Committee.) Meanwhile, Pinochet remained president of Chile until 1990.

Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 in connection with the human rights abuses he committed while in power, and was placed under house arrest in the United Kingdom until 2000, when he was released on medical grounds without facing trial in Britain. He returned to Chile and faced a complex series of investigations and indictments — but no actual trial in his homeland — until his death in 2006.

Henry Kissinger has never been held to account.

The post How Henry Kissinger Paved the Way for Orlando Letelier’s Assassination appeared first on The Intercept.

The FBI Is Hunting a New Domestic Terror Threat: Abortion Rights Activists

Ken Klippenstein — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 20:30:52 +0000

Following a concerted effort by Republicans to pressure law enforcement agencies to target activists supporting the right to abortion, the FBI dramatically increased its caseload on abortion-related “domestic terrorism.”

Last year, as the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade sparked major protests nationwide, the FBI opened nearly 10 times as many investigations into cases of abortion-related domestic terrorism as it had in 2021, a new internal report reveals. While the report doesn’t say how many of these incidents were motivated by support for reproductive rights and how many were anti-abortion, the uptick follows calls by top Republicans in Congress for the bureau to pursue “pro-abortion terrorism.”

“Pro-abortion terrorism is sweeping our nation,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wrote in a column last June, lamenting that “only after the outcry from the pro-life community did the FBI announce an investigation” into Jane’s Revenge — a small group of activists that firebombed an anti-abortion pregnancy center on June 7, 2021 — and that the attorney general “has yet to launch a wider DOJ investigation.” While conceding “no one has been killed or seriously injured,” Rubio said, “Things will only get worse before they get better.” (Facebook later quietly designated Jane’s Revenge a terrorist organization, as The Intercept reported.)

Rubio’s column cited roughly 50 attacks on anti-abortion activists and institutions, linking to a list posted by the anti-abortion Family Research Council. Apart from the actions of Jane’s Revenge, most of the cases enumerated describe simple vandalism.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, similarly urged the bureau to go after so-called pro-choice extremists. “Responding to the current threat of pro-abortion violent extremism will require the FBI to continue its efforts to identify and investigate cases of abortion-related violence across our country at a high rate,” Grassley wrote in a June 27 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray last year.

As vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then-ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, respectively, both of which oversee the FBI, Rubio and Grassley were both in a position to influence bureau leadership, and it appears the bureau listened.

The FBI’s abortion-related terrorism investigations jumped from three cases in the fiscal year 2021 to 28 in 2022, a higher increase than any other category listed, according to an audit published by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General on June 6. The number of abortion-related cases in 2022 far exceeds that of all previous years included in the audit, going back to 2017.

In the same time frame, FBI investigations into “racially or ethnically motivated extremists” decreased from 215 to 169; investigations into “anti-government / anti-authority” declined even more sharply, from 812 to 240. In fact, the only other category to see an increase in cases was “animal rights / environmental,” which underwent a modest increase from seven to nine cases.

Again, the report does not specify what proportion of the cases are motivated by support for reproductive rights or anti-abortion views. Asked about the specific breakdown, the FBI did not respond to a request for comment. But in testimony before the Senate on November 17, 2022, Wray revealed that the vast majority of the bureau’s investigations are focused on violence against anti-abortion individuals or organizations.

“Since the Dobbs Act decision, probably in the neighborhood of 70 percent of our abortion-related violence cases or threats cases are cases of violence or threats against pro-life,” Wray said. “Now we have quite a number of investigations as we speak into attacks or threats against pregnancy resource centers, faith-based organizations, and other pro-life organizations.”

But experts say the vast majority of serious violence in abortion-related cases is carried out by individuals trying to stop people from having abortions. From 1993 to 2016, 11 murders and 26 attempted murders were carried out by anti-abortion advocates, according to NARAL Pro-Choice California. In contrast, Michael German, a former FBI agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, said that he was not aware of a single case of serious bodily injury caused by abortion rights advocates.

“The FBI should not devote counterterrorism resources to vandalism cases that don’t threaten human life out of some flawed notion of parity.”

“There is a long history of deadly anti-abortion violence in this country,” German said. “The FBI should not devote counterterrorism resources to vandalism cases that don’t threaten human life out of some flawed notion of parity.

“Counterterrorism resources should be directed to the most serious threats,” German told The Intercept. While the Department of Homeland Security defines domestic terrorism such that it “must be dangerous to human life” or critical infrastructure, the FBI does not have this requirement. “Mere vandalism and property damage, while crimes that might deserve state and local police attention, should not be treated as terrorism.”

Since the bureau collapses both anti-abortion and abortion rights into the same abortion-related threat category and doesn’t collect data on specific incidents, they exercise considerable discretion in determining which side to investigate.

“That’s part of why the FBI resists collecting data on domestic terrorism incidents: it frees them to target by bias and ideologies they oppose rather than the data regarding actual acts of violence,” German said.

As the global war on terror draws down, the FBI is increasingly focusing its attention domestically. In 2021, the bureau more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload according to Senate testimony by Wray, who warned that domestic terrorism was “metastasizing across the country.”

While the January 6 uprising is an obvious driver, as the bureau’s focus on individuals supporting reproductive rights makes clear, its domestic terrorism investigations are targeted at both the right and left alike. Wray’s Senate testimony noted that the uptick in their domestic terrorism investigations began in the spring of 2020, when civil unrest arose in response to George Floyd’s murder.

“I think there has been a big push in right-wing media to drum up a fear of pro-choice violence, like they did with ‘Antifa,’” German said. “Agents are probably influenced by it.”

The post The FBI Is Hunting a New Domestic Terror Threat: Abortion Rights Activists appeared first on The Intercept.

The FBI Groomed a 16-Year-Old With “Brain Development Issues” to Become a Terrorist

Murtaza Hussain — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:01:02 +0000

Last week, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a teenager in Massachusetts on allegations of providing financial support to the Islamic State group.

A flurry of reports picked up on the arrest of Mateo Ventura, an 18-year-old resident of the sleepy town of Wakefield, echoing government claims that an international terrorist financier and ISIS supporter had just been busted in the United States. The Department of Justice’s own press release on the case likewise trumpeted Ventura’s arrest for “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization.”

The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old.

The only problem with the case and how it has been described, however, is that according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group. The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else about their intimate online relationship, including his family.

The arrest has shaken his family, who denied allegations that their son was a terrorist and said that he had been manipulated by the FBI. Ventura’s father, Paul Ventura, told The Intercept that Mateo suffered from childhood developmental issues and had been forced to leave his school due to bullying from other students.

“He was born prematurely, he had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him and they said his brain was underdeveloped,” Ventura said. “He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.”

Contrary to the sensational narrative fed to the news media of terrorist financing in the U.S., the charging documents show that Ventura gave an undercover FBI agent gift cards for pitifully small amounts of cash, sometimes in $25 increments. In his initial bid to travel to the Islamic State, the teenager balked — making up an excuse, by the FBI’s own account, to explain why he did not want to go. When another opportunity to travel abroad arose, Ventura balked again, staying home on the evening of his supposed flight instead of traveling to the airport. By the time the investigation was winding down, he appeared ready to turn in his purported ISIS contact — an FBI agent — to the FBI.

There is still much that remains to be known about Ventura’s case, which remains in its early stages. More information may still come to light as it moves to discovery and trial, including about his dealings with the FBI and other activities online.

Yet based on the government’s own account of what led to Ventura’s arrest, there is reason to believe that his case is less a serious terrorism bust than one of the many instances in which a troubled or mentally unfit young man was groomed by undercover FBI agents to commit a crime that would not have otherwise happened.

This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement. A 2014 Human Rights Watch report criticizing the use of informants in terrorism investigations said, “In this way, the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals.”

This FBI tactic was a mainstay of terrorism prosecutions for roughly two decades. While its use lately has waned, the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.

“There is still significant use of informants and undercover agents in FBI investigations who aren’t just gathering information about potential crimes but are actively suggesting ideas for crimes or making it easier for people to do the things that they claim they want to do,” said Naz Ahmad, acting director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, or CLEAR, project at the City University of New York School of Law. “There are documented cases where the government has provided people everything that they needed to execute a plot. Informants and undercover agents have often been used as a tool in these investigations to prod things along.”

“Instead of them telling me that he’s doing what he’s doing online and to take his computer away, they let him keep doing it.”

Paul Ventura said that in 2021 armed FBI agents from visited his home, informed him that his son had been browsing websites “that he shouldn’t be looking at,” and connected him with what they said was a counselor. After the initial visit, he said he had no knowledge of his son’s ongoing communications with the FBI undercover agent online.

“Two years ago, the FBI came to my house and they took his computer and said he’s on these sites he shouldn’t be on. We said OK, and he wasn’t arrested at that time or anything. I didn’t hear from them again after that, but I guess over time things escalated,” said Paul Ventura. “I wasn’t home a lot because I work, and he wasn’t at school because of the bullying. Instead of them telling me that he’s doing what he’s doing online and to take his computer away, they let him keep doing it.”

The facts of the case against Mateo Ventura laid out in the government’s criminal complaint detail how his relationship developed with the FBI.

In August 2021, when he was 16 years old, Ventura began communicating with an undercover FBI agent online. He told the agent of his desire to make “hijrah,” or migrate to territories under control of the Islamic State.

By the time of the discussion, ISIS had been largely vanquished in its home territories of Iraq and Syria, though it is not clear whether Ventura had been aware of this. According to the Department of Justice’s complaint, an undercover FBI agent impersonating an ISIS member communicated to the 16-year-old in broken English, encouraging his decision and expressly telling him not to inform anyone else about their online conversations, including friends or family. The criminal complaint in the case describes the exchange between Ventura and “OCE,” or the “FBI employee acting in an undercover capacity”:

VENTURA: I reached out to brother [A.D.] for hijrah [migration] I dont know if it is still possible but if it is I know it will take sometime.

OCE: Ahh

OCE: Inshallah [if Allah wills it] I help u, but before talk have rule my brother.

OCE: U must no talk about what said here or intention to anyone. No tell family.

No tell friend. No tell ikhwan [brothers] at masjid [mosque]. No one. This for

both are safety.

OCE: Intention stay between U and Allah azzawajal [the mighty and majestic].

Ventura continued chatting with the undercover agent about what he could do for ISIS, including potentially fighting for them in a foreign country. The two settled on him buying a $25 Google Play gift card and sending the redemption code to the FBI agent. At the FBI’s direction, the 16-year-old also recorded an audio file of himself elaborately pledging allegiance to the leader of ISIS and transmitting the audio recording over the chat.

Over the next year two years, Ventura continued sending small amounts of cash through gift cards to the FBI agent, mostly through gaming stores like Steam, PlayStation Network, and Google Play. The amounts of his small transactions, which spanned over roughly two years, added up to a total of $965 during the time that he was a juvenile, and another $705 after he became a legal adult.

All the while, Ventura’s conversations with the FBI undercover operative online continued, including promises to make a passport and assurances that he would teach himself Arabic “very fast” in case he traveled to Egypt on behalf of the group.

In the end, Ventura appeared to get cold feet. In September 2022, when he was 17 years old, he told the agent that he could no longer “go for hijrah,” because he had been “hurt very bad in fall and can no longer walk.” The injury was an excuse that the FBI — which, according to the affidavit in the case, interviewed Ventura six days thereafter — concluded had been made up by the teen.

In January 2023, just after his 18th birthday, Ventura got back in touch with the FBI agent on the encrypted messaging platform. Apologizing for not being communicative in previous months after his supposed injury, Ventura again said he wanted to travel to the Islamic State. The pair discussed the possibility of him dying in an attack by ISIS fighters somewhere in the world or attending a training camp.

At the FBI undercover operative’s direction, Ventura took a video of himself and sent it over the chat, telling the agent that he had a beard now. The FBI agent praised the performance, saying Ventura was “strong” and “Look (sic) like lion.”

Ventura sent the FBI operative another $25 Google Play gift certificate, which he was assured would be used for jihad, before trying and failing to book several flights due to apparent lack of access to a credit card. On April 10 this year, Ventura finally succeeded in booking a Turkish Airlines flight to Egypt.

But instead of boarding the flight, or even leaving his residence on the night it was scheduled, Ventura contacted the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center and reported a tip, stating in a rambling message that he wanted “10 million dollars in duffel bags” in exchange for information on future terrorist attacks. “I known (sic) you thought I am retarded fool but jokes on you I will not admit I sent this or communicate until the cash is delivered,” the message said, according to the criminal complaint in the case.

By this time in the investigation, Ventura had not only seemingly developed cold feet about joining the group, but appeared eager to sell out his supposed ISIS contact to law enforcement.

Ventura called the FBI again several times in the coming days, telling them that he wanted to help with “terror” and again offering to help stop a future ISIS terrorist attack and to provide information about people who were facilitating travel for the group, in exchange for cash and legal immunity for himself.

On April 20, according to the affidavit, he was informed in a phone call from the FBI that the information he had provided was “not specific and therefore not actionable.”

Meanwhile, as his attempts to blow the whistle on the FBI’s own informant in exchange for millions of dollars of cash appeared to stall, Ventura also continued communicating with their undercover operative online, apologizing for missing his flight to Egypt and inquiring about other ways he might travel to join ISIS. On May 16, he sent another Google Play gift card to the agent, with a value of $45.

These interactions continued until Ventura was arrested in early June and charged with one count of “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization” — reference to the gift card donations he had spent years sending to the FBI during their chats online.

Although news reports echoed the Justice Department’s portrayal of the arrest as the foiling of a nascent Islamic State funding operation in the U.S., there is no indication in the allegations against him that Ventura had ever been in touch with the terrorist group.

Following his arrest, Ventura’s father told reporters outside the courthouse that his son was being “railroaded” and is “100 percent a loyal American.”

Ventura now faces up to 10 years in prison, if convicted of the charges of providing material support to a terrorist group.

Cases of ISIS operatives being arrested in the U.S. have become increasingly rare following the group’s defeat several years ago in Iraq and Syria. Even at the peak of the ISIS’s influence, many terrorism cases have been criticized for utilizing entrapment and grooming tactics against people that seemed to cross the line into both encouraging and facilitating them to break the law. Despite growing scrutiny from the public and civil rights groups, those tactics have never been reformed.

“That kid has special needs, he got bullied out of school. He needed help.”

More information may still come out in Ventura’s case about his own actions leading up to his arrest. Based on the FBI’s own account of what took place, however, depictions of Ventura as a dangerous terrorist fundraiser currently spreading in the press are hard to deem credible.

The picture that emerges in the charging documents is, instead, the more familiar tale of an impressionable, vulnerable young man, legally a child at the point the investigation began, groomed by FBI undercover agents online to break the law and generate flashy headlines in the aftermath.

“That kid has special needs, he got bullied out of school,” Ventura’s father told The Intercept. “He needed help.”

The post The FBI Groomed a 16-Year-Old With “Brain Development Issues” to Become a Terrorist appeared first on The Intercept.

House Democrats Refuse to Say Whether They Support Cluster Bomb Shipments to Ukraine

Daniel Boguslaw — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 16:46:33 +0000

Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said recently that he is keeping the door open to sending cluster munitions — widely banned around the world due to their track record of maiming and killing civilians — to Ukraine.

In a May interview with Politico, Smith said that the advantage of cluster munitions “is we have a lot of them. To the extent that we’re unable to provide sufficient ammo in other areas, they could certainly fill that gap.” He also framed the munitions as a potential way to end a conflict with no end in sight. “If our cluster munitions could bring the war to a conclusion sooner, it’s something I’m open to,” Smith said. This followed comments Smith made a week earlier at a Council on Foreign Relations event where he similarly described the pros and cons of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine.

Ukraine has asked the United States to provide it with cluster bombs, which Russian troops have deployed against Ukrainian civilians and which Ukraine has reportedly used as well. The Biden administration has expressed concerns about Ukraine’s requests, but it also hasn’t rejected them outright — and U.S. lawmakers continue to press the administration to provide the weapons. While most of those calls have come from Republicans, Smith’s openness to the idea, amid a general bipartisan consensus on sending arms to Ukraine, shows that congressional pressure is ramping up.

The administration seems unlikely to approve sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, but that the idea is even on the table has raised concerns among international security advocates about the disintegration of humanitarian law and the potential for the U.S. to further erode standing norms of civilian protection. “As long as the administration holds the line, keeping with the approach that so many of our NATO allies and others in the global community takes, that will be positive,” said Jeff Abramson, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association. “It’s frustrating that much of what you’re hearing from [Capitol Hill] is a call for sending cluster munitions. That Representative Smith did not fully cut off the possibility is also wrongheaded. These weapons have not been used by the United States in more than a decade.”

In order to gauge congressional support for the transfer of munitions banned by over 100 countries, The Intercept contacted the other 27 Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, which conducts oversight on U.S. military support to Ukraine, seeking comment on each member’s stance on the issue.

Only two representatives — Donald Norcross, D-N.J., and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif. — responded at all, asking for a deadline to provide comment.

Shortly afterward, Tracy Manzer, communications director for the House Armed Services Democrats, wrote to The Intercept to address its “outreach to other Members of the HASC.” In her email, Manzer provided quotes from Smith seeking to clarify his position.

“I am not open to sending cluster munitions right now. As I have said previously, for the United States to consider providing Ukraine with cluster munitions there are several critical questions that need to be answered. How would the weapons be used? What effect would such action have on the worldwide coalition in support of Ukraine? How might it affect support for Ukraine within the Democratic Caucus and Congress?”

“Russia is already using cluster munitions and has left unexploded ordnance all over Ukraine. Ukraine wants such weapons as a part of their efforts to take back their territory and force Putin to the negotiating table. To clarify a misconception, I am open to having the conversation about this issue with the understanding that crucially important questions be addressed.”

None of the other members responded with their own position on the issue. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

A rocket with cluster bomb is stuck in a building in the frontline city of Avdiivka as Russian-Ukrainian war continues, on March 23, 2023 in Ukraine.

Photo: Andre Luis Alves/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The United States has not used cluster munitions since 2009, when it used the weapons during a strike in Yemen, and cluster munitions have not been produced in the U.S. since the manufacturer Textron shut down production in 2016. Yet the U.S. military maintains massive stockpiles of them. Under a 2017 policy directive, the U.S. military is still authorized to use weapons containing submunitions, in sharp contrast to the dozens of countries that have banned them.

The international community has entrenched norms against the use of cluster munitions, said Cesar Jaramillo, executive director at Project Ploughshares, a peace research institute in Canada, namely because they cause indiscriminate harm to civilians and prolong the impacts of war by leaving unexploded munitions. Cluster munitions fracture before impact, sending out a cascade of small bombs that can impact well beyond their intended target.

Yet neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine is a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions.

In February, Ukrainian officials reportedly urged U.S. lawmakers to press the White House to approve sending cluster munitions to the country. The next month, GOP members atop powerful Senate and House committees pressed Biden on the issue.

In March, Sens. Roger Wicker and Jim Risch and Reps. Michael McCaul and Mike Rogers sent a letter to Biden, criticizing him for failing to waive the 2006 law banning the export of cluster munitions with a failure rate higher than 1 percent. Wicker and Risch are the ranking members on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, respectively, while McCaul and Rogers chair the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees.

“Providing [Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions] will allow Ukraine to compensate for Russia’s quantitative advantage in both personnel and artillery rounds, and will allow the Ukrainian Armed Forces to concentrate their use of unitary warheads against higher-value Russian targets,” the four Republicans wrote.

While Smith’s comments indicate an openness among some Democrats to arm Ukraine with cluster munitions, other Democrats have been more cautious. On Friday, members of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe introduced a bipartisan resolution calling on the Biden administration to provide army tactical missile systems, ATACMS, to Ukraine. Ranking Member Bill Keating, D-Mass., said he opposed providing cluster munitions or other “systems that cause indiscriminate harm to civilians” to Ukraine, but that the ATACMS would allow Ukraine to “strike high-value Russian military targets” that are currently inaccessible. Lauren McDermott, a spokesperson for Keating, did not respond to a question about whether the statement was in response to Smith’s comments raising the possibility of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, but she pointed to two letters Keating led in 2022 to Biden advocating against the use of cluster munitions.

Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions could set a dangerous precedent for war by normalizing the use of indiscriminate weapons and further militarizing and escalating the conflict on both sides, said Jaramillo of Project Ploughshares. “It by definition will serve to prolong the fighting and to create the conditions for further humanitarian suffering. Not to mention that in the background there is the specter of nuclear escalation, another category of indiscriminate weapons.”

“If the United States were to provide cluster munitions, it would lose a great deal of its moral credibility.”

The continued use of cluster munitions won’t make war less horrific for civilians, if that’s even possible, Abramson, of the Arms Control Association, said. “If the United States were to provide cluster munitions, it would lose a great deal of its moral credibility,” he said. The Biden administration has tried to emphasize the idea that the U.S. can lead on civilian protection in the face of autocratic rule, Abramson added. “If he were to send a weapon that historically has primarily, overwhelmingly harmed civilians into the battle in Ukraine, that would be undermining this idea that democracies are actually different than autocracies.”

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DHS Intel Report on Cop City Protesters Cribbed Far-Right Activist Andy Ngo

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 22:56:12 +0000

A Department of Homeland Security agency’s intelligence report about the Atlanta protest movement “Stop Cop City” lifted a sentence nearly verbatim from an article published on a far-right news website a day earlier.

The December 16, 2022, report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Office for Bombing Prevention describes protesters opposed to razing a forest for a massive new police facility as “militants” comprising a “violent far-left occupation” — phrasings identical to an article written by right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo.

“Five militants, part of the violent far-left occupation, were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism and other felony charges,” said the CISA report, referring to protests against the construction of the police facility, dubbed “Cop City” by its opponents.

A day earlier, the Post Millennial, a conservative news outlet founded by Ngo that has faced criticism for its partisan bent and misleading stories on subjects like Covid-19, ran a story with the same sentence, with small cosmetic changes. “Five militants part of a violent far-left occupation in south Atlanta were arrested on Tuesday and charged with domestic terrorism and other felony charges,” Ngo’s original reads. (Neither CISA nor Ngo immediately responded to a request for comment.)

After publication of this story, DHS blocked public access to the intelligence report.

The DHS report came a month before one protester encamped at the proposed Cop City site was killed in a hail of police gunfire — a massive escalation in what has become an ongoing crackdown against the movement.

The term “militants” used by federal agents in December reflects the escalation: a catchall for targets of the U.S.’s so-called global war on terror, the buzzword not typically used to describe domestic actors. That it has filtered into DHS reporting on protest movements is reflective of the new focus on domestic terrorism, particularly after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In March, prosecutors began hitting anti-Cop City protesters with domestic terrorism charges for alleged attacks with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Since then, the trend of terror allegations has continued, ensnaring a growing group of actors in the movement, with more than 40 now facing terror charges. When administrators of a bail fund for protesters were charged with money laundering last week, Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said they had “facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism.”

“The nature of the law enforcement response to the Stop Cop City protests, and the prosecutions of protesters and their supporters highlights how broad domestic terrorism laws are used as a political cudgel rather than a mechanism to improve public safety,” Mike German, a former FBI special agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Intercept.

The CISA report was posted to the Technical Resource for Incident Prevention, or TRIPwire, a resource sharing portal for “expert intelligence analysis” in order to raise “awareness of evolving Improvised Explosive Device (IED) tactics,” according to its website. In March, activists involved in the movement were accused of using Molotov cocktails — which are not listed in a DHS document defining the term — but there does not appear to be any record of IED allegations before the December CISA report.

On Monday, Atlanta City Council will vote on the budget for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, the law enforcement training facility at the center of the controversy. The facility is expected to take up over 85 acres, replete with a mock city for “urban police training.” Cop City, expected to cost $90 million, was announced in 2021 by then-Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Since then, protesters have taken up camp in the forest where the facility would be built, in an effort to block its construction.

On March 5, following the alleged Molotov attack against police, Georgia authorities charged 23 protesters with domestic terrorism. The terror enhancement of the charges have prompted criticism from civil liberties groups.

“Unfortunately, we have seen law enforcement across the country treating environmental activists and racial justice protesters as terrorists, despite the lack of deadly violence associated with this activism,” said German.

The focus on domestic terrorism has been shared by leaders of both parties. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump vowed to designate “antifa” as a terrorist organization. President Joe Biden, in his first full day in office, directed his national security team to conduct a 100-day, comprehensive review of U.S. government efforts to address domestic terrorism — described by the White House as “the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today.”

Since then, charges against participants in the January 6 attack have caused domestic terror prosecutions to increase sharply.

“Unfortunately, we have seen law enforcement across the country treating environmental activists and racial justice protesters as terrorists, despite the lack of deadly violence associated with this activism.”

In 2022, House Democrats passed a bill, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which would have created new offices designed to focus on domestic terrorism specifically, in DHS, the FBI, and the Justice Department. By a vote of 47-47, Senate Republicans blocked the legislation.

The Atlanta protesters are being prosecuted under the same domestic terrorism law that was expanded after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. While the law originally only applied to criminal acts intended to kill at least 10 people, the Georgia legislature expanded the law to include property crimes intending to intimidate or coerce the government — of which the Atlanta protesters stand accused.

As for the CISA report, though it cribbed Any Ngo, German said it made for a limited resource because of the complete lack of citations.

“This type of intelligence reporting is of dubious utility because it doesn’t contain enough detail for law enforcement to assess the credibility of the information provided so they can develop a proper response,” German told The Intercept. “It includes no citations so it doesn’t even provide an avenue for law enforcement to follow up for more information or link events to understand a larger pattern.”

German added, “There doesn’t appear to be any attempt to put these three events in context so police officials could determine whether the events are part of some larger issue of law enforcement concern.”

Update: June 6, 2023
This story has been updated to include a PDF version of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency intelligence report. After publication of this story, the Department of Homeland Security blocked access to the report in its public-facing document portal.

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Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Says He’s a Political Prisoner. Republicans Are Listening.

Mike Giglio — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 15:31:56 +0000

Tasha Adams won her divorce from Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes last month. Three days later, she turned her attention to the Washington, D.C., courtroom where he was set to be sentenced for seditious conspiracy. Prosecutors had asked the judge to give him 25 years in prison for his role in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6; his attorneys had requested time served. Adams was on the government’s side. She’d been with Rhodes as he’d gone from a 25-year-old Army veteran with a high school education to a Yale-educated lawyer and then founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, which she’d helped him build. Now she considered him a threat to the nation, as well as to herself and their six children. She’d recorded a statement for the prosecution to include with their sentencing request. In it, Adams described Rhodes using a backhoe to dig escape tunnels in the yard, grabbing a daughter by the throat, and precariously waving a loaded handgun in the air before pointing it at his head. (Rhodes has denied similar allegations from Adams in the past.) “I think the best thing for Stewart is to be in a place where he can’t harm anyone, or he can’t manipulate more people,” Adams had said in the statement. She hoped the judge would give Rhodes as long a sentence as possible.

As she watched his hearing, though, she wondered if that wasn’t what Rhodes wanted too. She’d expected him to express some conciliation — support, perhaps, for police affected by the riot at the Capitol. Instead, he attacked his trial as rigged and antagonized the judge who’d decide his fate. “A steep sentence here won’t help or deter people,” he said. “It will make people think this government is even more illegitimate than before.” He called himself “a political prisoner.”

Adams was considering how the harsher a sentence Rhodes received, the greater a cause célèbre he’d become on the right. This, she told me, as she followed the hearing on Twitter, would increase his chances for a pardon in a future Republican administration. In fact, Rhodes’s sentencing was playing out as one skirmish in a larger battle to determine how the history of January 6 will be written. From behind the bench, District Judge Amit Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee who also sits on the powerful Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, told Rhodes, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the Republic, and the very fabric of our democracy.” In his remarks beforehand, Rhodes, 58, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, had already issued his reply: “My only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”

Mehta sentenced him to 18 years in prison, the longest term handed down in a January 6 case to date.

The version of Rhodes that Adams described in her statement and divorce filing is a man driven by a will to control and influence, feeding off the adulation of crowds in public while keeping a tight grip on his family in their remote Montana home. These impulses are twisted inextricably with real fear in her stories: that stronger forces are coming for him, disaster is inevitable, his control is slipping. He imagines erecting tripwires outside the house that will trigger a blast of AC/DC music to alert him to the start of a federal raid. He leaves his children bruised from trainings in martial arts and knife fighting designed to teach them to fend off attack and rape. He warns darkly of apocalypse. The power goes out, and he outfits his teenaged son with a rifle and body armor and rustles his family out into the night.

The 2018 divorce filings were unsealed last month. Rhodes responded to Adams’s allegations, in a sworn affidavit, by saying that she and her attorney had “twisted over 23 years of facts in an attempt to accomplish Tasha’s true goal of keeping the children from me.” He noted that her request for a temporary protection order had been denied and claimed his infidelity was the real cause of the rift in their marriage. Yet Adams’s portrayal of Rhodes as someone engaged in a long-running and complicated dance with power offers one way to interpret the contradictions he embodied at his sentencing. He expressed deeply held fears of tyrannical government power, yet he’d also grabbed for it: In open letters before January 6, Rhodes urged Donald Trump to overturn the election and volunteered the Oath Keepers to help enforce this. He was declaring himself a dissident and preparing to begin a very long prison term. He also seemed to be appealing to those powerful enough to one day free him of it.

Trump, who has a commanding lead in Republican primary polls, has made clear in recent months that support for those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 will be not just part of his campaign, but its essence. In March, he held his first official campaign rally in Waco, Texas, home to a deadly 1993 standoff between the federal government and an armed Christian sect whose bloody end has long been a defining event for right-wing militant groups like the Oath Keepers. Standing on a stage at the start of the rally, Trump held his hand over his heart as loudspeakers played a rendition of the national anthem that had been recorded from jail by people arrested in connection with January 6. The recording, which is overlaid with Trump’s voice reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, is credited to the “J6 Prison Choir” and had reached No. 1 on iTunes two weeks before the rally. As Trump and the crowd stood in reverence, video of the attack on the Capitol played above him on a pair of jumbotrons.

It’s the most revealing question for every candidate in the primary just beginning to take shape: If you’re elected president, will you pardon people who’ve been convicted for January 6?

In the first year after January 6, Trump had expressed sympathy for the rioters, but his backing wasn’t full-throated. When I met with Rhodes in January 2022, a week before his arrest, he told me he wouldn’t in the future vote for Trump, who he said had failed to support January 6 defendants and had used the Oath Keepers as “cannon fodder.” After his arrest, Sidney Powell, Trump’s onetime lawyer and a close ally, reportedly stepped in to fund the defense of Rhodes and three other Oath Keepers via her legal foundation, which had raised more than $16 million in the year following the 2020 election. Now Trump has made pardons for January 6 convicts a central promise of his campaign. “I hope Trump wins in 2024,” Rhodes said at his sentencing, adding that many on the right view January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” and “patriots.” For Republicans, the issue of pardons may become a litmus test showing not just the extent to which they’re willing to downplay or excuse what happened on January 6, but also how enthusiastically they’ll embrace it. It’s the most revealing question for every candidate in the primary just beginning to take shape: If you’re elected president, will you pardon people who’ve been convicted for January 6?

On the day Rhodes was sentenced, Ron DeSantis, currently Trump’s top challenger, was asked this question in a radio interview. “On Day One, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who are people who are victims of weaponization or political targeting,” he replied. “And we will be aggressive at issuing pardons.”

This artist’s sketch depicts the trial of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and four others charged with seditious conspiracy in the January 6 Capitol attack in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6, 2022.

Sketch: Dana Verkouteren via AP

In his testimony at sentencing, Rhodes compared himself to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian dissident writer, who spent eight years incarcerated in Soviet prisons.

It reminded me of my first conversation with Rhodes in early 2020. I said I thought his frequent invocations of civil war were dangerous and that civil war is the worst thing in the world. He disagreed, saying the totalitarian nightmares that had unfolded under Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and other dictators showed the need to fight a repressive government before it’s too late. He cited a passage from “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn’s acclaimed book about his imprisonment:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests […] people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

FBI agents approached Rhodes outside a Texas hotel in May 2021 to serve a warrant for his phone. He handed it over, volunteered the passcode, advised the agents that he had a gun in his backpack, and told them that, if they ever needed to arrest him, they could call and he’d turn himself in. He went peaceably when the FBI eventually showed up to take him to jail. So perhaps he realizes that America is nowhere near the kind of dictatorship about which Solzhenitsyn was writing.

Or maybe he’d argue that, as it had been for all the prisoners Solzhenitsyn met in the gulag, submission was the only feasible choice, at least in the moment of arrest.

Rhodes has long considered himself a dissident, even at times on the right. He drew criticism from his group’s own members over his support for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange at a time when they were still heroes of the left. (“Your banner stating ‘Snowden honored his oath’ is sickening and infuriating,” read one letter of resignation I found in a cache of leaked Oath Keepers files. “I have honored my oath for 27 years and will not be associated with an organization that supports a traitor.”) During the George W. Bush administration, when his only claim to public notice was as a blogger, Rhodes was writing about the post-9/11 assault on civil liberties and the growth of the national security state and warning that America could be on a path to tyranny. His talk about dictatorship went into overdrive during Obama’s presidency — though by then it was infused with the blunter and dumber rhetoric of the Tea Party — and hyperdrive under Trump. His open letters to the then-president after the 2020 election called the day of its certification in Congress the last chance to stop the coming tyranny. He urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, overturn the vote, and call up “the militia,” saying he and the Oath Keepers would be in D.C. to help.

Instead, Trump gave an incendiary speech near the White House and returned to the Oval Office. Protesters descended on the Capitol, and two columns of Oath Keepers joined the crowd as it surged into the building. Rhodes remained outside, comparing the rioters to America’s founding patriots in group messages on the encrypted app Signal. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy and two other charges after a trial in which prosecutors didn’t show that there’d been a plan among Rhodes and his members to storm the Capitol or that they’d played a role in the initial breach.

Defense attorneys often refer to the conspiracy charge as a prosecutor’s “darling” because it requires the government to show only that defendants agreed to carry out an illegal act and then took a step to further it. In Rhodes’s case, prosecutors argued that he’d given his members the idea that they needed to do something to stop the transfer of presidential power, and when the riot at the Capitol commenced, they’d seized the opportunity. They focused on the guns the Oath Keepers had stashed in Virginia as a contingency and on the kind of incendiary language I’d critiqued on our first call. They pulled from his Signal messages: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” They also cited passages from his open letters to Trump: “If you fail to do your duty, you will leave We the People no choice but to walk in the founders [sic] footsteps, by declaring the regime illegitimate, incapable of representing us, destructive of the just ends of government — to secure our liberty. And, like the founding generation, we will take to arms in defense of our God-given liberty.” Those letters had been published on the Oath Keepers website, which, along with their accounts on Twitter and Facebook, has since been purged from the internet.

The Russian writer didn’t have the tacit backing of potential future leaders of his country and a political movement with a near-even chance to soon retake power.

Among the many differences between Solzhenitsyn’s situation and Rhodes’s is this: The Russian writer didn’t have the tacit backing of potential future leaders of his country and a political movement with a near-even chance to soon retake power. Yet I imagine that Rhodes has kept in mind how Solzhenitsyn was arrested for political opinions expressed in letters to a friend. Afterward, as Solzhenitsyn recounts in “The Gulag Archipelago,” his writings were cast into a prison furnace and incinerated. “I had expressed myself vehemently,” he writes, “and had been almost reckless in spelling out seditious ideas.” At one point in his miserable imprisonment, he laments, “Only one life is allotted us, one small, short life! And we had been criminal enough to … drag it with us, still unsullied, into the dirty rubbish heap of politics.” Elsewhere, he takes solace in the fact that without his prison sentence, “I would not have written this book” and recounts how “very early and very clearly, I had this consciousness that prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life.”

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, at the foot of the Washington Monument on April 19, 2010.

Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

The first time I spoke with Adams, in the summer of 2020, she asked me to keep the conversation off the record. (She’s since lifted that request.) “I don’t want anyone to know I talked with you,” she said, adding that her divorce proceedings were under seal and a gag order was in effect.

Her separation from Rhodes was only two years old. He’d left their small Montana community for Texas at the start of the year, and Adams was reassessing her views of him and the Oath Keepers after years writing blog posts for the group and helping with its administration.

It was always going to be a right-wing organization, she told me, but at its outset, it existed at the edge of mainstream politics. She and Rhodes had been die-hard supporters of the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, volunteering on his 2008 campaign, and many of the group’s early members were drawn from those circles. Others came over from a web forum called the Mental Militia, whose mission statement held that “Mentalitians are people who believe that ‘consciousness works!’, and who prefer the art of reason over violence … And we are concerned about the direction of today’s industrialized, militarized, economized, high-tech, post-Atomic, government-controlled world.” Some, Adams said, had even been supporters of the anti-war liberal politician Dennis Kucinich.

She told stories in that conversation and others about the paranoia that had prevailed in the family’s remote Montana household: their fears that the home was bugged, waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and tripping over piles of guns. At first, Adams found Rhodes’s conviction that the government was hunting him hard to take seriously, but after the Oath Keepers got involved in standoffs with federal agents at Bundy Ranch in Nevada and elsewhere, the FBI really did summon Rhodes to a meeting, and he really did find himself on what seemed to be a no-fly list, even as his group edged closer to the heart of Republican politics. By the second half of 2020, the Oath Keepers and other right-wing militants were patrolling racial justice protests and aligning with Trump over fears of antifascists and a stolen election. Adams struggled to say how much of his own dystopian talk Rhodes really believed: “Sometimes I think he did and sometimes he didn’t.” She noted the times he’d become convinced that “a world-changing event” was approaching and that he’d emerge as a leader within it.

Now Rhodes is living out the role he wrote for himself long ago, caught in the contradiction of someone both on the fringe and at the core of America’s power structure. As his sentencing approached, he kept up the drumbeat of his political prisoner narrative and at times, seemed to be working at cross-purposes with his own attorneys, who cast Rhodes as a beacon of community service, focusing on his time in the Army and the periodic disaster relief operations the Oath Keepers had conducted and urging that he be judged by those actions. Meanwhile, Rhodes wrote a 46-page letter from jail that was excerpted in the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump news outlet. In it, he said he had been convicted for “who I am” and “what I said.” He warned conservatives that his conviction was “only the beginning of a political persecution campaign aimed at all of you.” He concluded, “They can take my liberty and imprison my body, but they cannot imprison my mind.”

Before Rhodes’s sentencing, Thomas Massie, the iconoclastic, up-and-coming congressional Republican from Kentucky, tweeted, “Stewart Rhodes never entered the Capitol and didn’t commit acts of violence or destruction, yet he’s going to be sentenced Thursday for ‘seditious conspiracy’ … Weaponization of speech?” The idea taking hold on the right that people charged over January 6 are political prisoners feeds on real problems, such as the fact that many of them have been jailed for more than two years without trial, and on the embrace of tools such as censorship and conspiracy charges in the name of protecting democracy. It also feeds on the fervor of the Trump era and the election lie.

Part of the falsity of this movement is that it exists within its own sphere of power and on the coin-flip edge of controlling the country; they talk about the gulag as they set their sights on the presidency. I think about how, under Trump, the Justice Department used a conspiracy charge to threaten more than 200 people who’d protested against the inauguration with decades in prison because a smaller group of them had rioted. The charges against most were ultimately dropped, but only after they spent more than a year in legal jeopardy. I think about how the governor of Texas has vowed to pardon a man who shot a Black Lives Matter demonstrator dead in the street, the celebration of the Kenosha shooter, and laws like the one passed by the Republican statehouse in Iowa in 2021 that shields drivers who run their vehicles over protesters. I think about a country that, after the post-9/11 construction of a domestic surveillance and national security state, has facets of dictatorship already in place and how it always seems primed to tilt further down that path. I think about real dissidents and how badly we need them.

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FBI Reopens Case Around Julian Assange, Despite Australian Pressure to End Prosecution

Ryan Grim — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 15:48:20 +0000

The FBI has reopened an investigation into Australian journalist Julian Assange, according to front-page reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald.

The news that the FBI is taking fresh investigative steps came as a surprise to Assange’s legal team, given that the U.S. filed charges against the WikiLeaks founder more than three years ago and is involved in an ongoing extradition process from a maximum security prison in the United Kingdom so that he can stand trial in the United States.

Biden is now picking a fight with Australia (after offending them by cancelling a trip there over the debt ceiling) by re-opening a case against Australian journalist Julian Assange even as the country calls for his repatriation pic.twitter.com/P2tDMe7uRk
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 1, 2023

Assange is charged under the Espionage Act with obtaining, possessing, and publishing classified information that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes that themselves have gone unpunished.

The Morning Herald reporting also comes amid heightened hopes in Australia that a resolution to the case, which has raised serious press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad, was near at hand. The country’s ruling party has spoken in defense of Assange, as has the nation’s opposition party leader. In early May, a cross-party delegation of influential Australian lawmakers met with the U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging that a deal be struck to return Assange to Australia before U.S.-Australian relations were harmed further by the prosecution.

The U.S. has otherwise complicated its relationship with Australia in recent weeks even as it seeks closer ties in order to compete with China in the region. Australia spent weeks preparing for Joe Biden to make a major visit to the nation in May, only to see him cancel the trip at the last minute to fly back from Japan to continue with debt ceiling negotiations. And this week, the U.S. also warned Australia that some of its military units may be ineligible to cooperate with U.S. forces due to their own alleged war crimes in Australia. It is not lost on the Australian public that Assange is being prosecuted for uncovering and publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes.

In May, the Morning Herald reported, the FBI requested an interview with Andrew O’Hagan, who was brought on more than 10 years ago to work as a ghostwriter on Assange’s autobiography. The FBI may have thought he would be cooperative because O’Hagan’s relationship with Assange soured; O’Hagan publicly criticized Assange as narcissistic and difficult to work with and published an unauthorized version in the London Review of Books instead. But O’Hagan told the Morning Herald he was not willing to participate in his prosecution. “I might have differences with Julian, but I utterly oppose all efforts to silence him,” he said.

In 2010 and 2011, in conjunction with major papers around the world, WikiLeaks published leaked documents and videos related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, and other documents that exposed corruption on a grand scale. The disclosures helped trigger the Arab Spring, popular revolts against dictators across the Middle East and North Africa.

The Obama administration considered prosecuting Assange but decided they couldn’t overcome “the New York Times problem”: They couldn’t figure out, in other words, how to prosecute him but not the Times.

The case is now under the zealous guidance of Gordon Kromberg, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, though the reopening of the investigation suggests the government has doubts that its case will hold up in court.

A coalition of major newspapers around the world has urged the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. Yahoo News reported that the Trump administration considered ways to kidnap or assassinate the journalist.

The U.S. State Department was not immediately able to comment.

Update: June 1, 2023, 12:25 p.m.
The original headline of this story said the FBI has reopened a case “against Assange,” though the precise target of the FBI’s new investigation is not publicly known. The FBI relayed to O’Hagan that it wanted to interview him about his participation in Assange’s autobiography.

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Jamie Raskin and Rachel Maddow, Brought to You by Peter Thiel and Lockheed Martin

Eli Clifton — Fri, 26 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Progressive Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow are outspoken critics of the bloated defense budget and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. Next month, though, both Raskin and Maddow will headline an event sponsored by defense industry giant Lockheed Martin and Palantir, a $26 billion defense contractor founded and chaired by Peter Thiel, the polarizing billionaire and megadonor to Donald Trump.

The appearances by Raskin and Maddow will come as part of TruCon, the conference of the Democratic Party-aligned Truman Center, which runs from June 1 to 4 in Washington, D.C. TruCon’s website describes the conference as an opportunity to see “[t]hought leaders across government, policy, and national security fields speak on the most pressing issues facing America today.”

“Obviously, the real test of integrity is to argue with folks you disagree with, not to cover your eyes and ears and look away.”

For Mark Thompson, a national security analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, the big question for Raskin and Maddow at the conference will be whether they hold their tough positions against defense contractors. If they don’t speak out, Thompson said, it would indicate that sponsors can buy the silence of their outspoken critics.

“If I were Jamie Raskin or I were Rachel Maddow — what a great opportunity to name these companies and say where they’re coming up short,” said Thompson. “Do you, a company, buy my silence or tacit silence by sponsoring this event? Obviously, the real test of integrity is to argue with folks you disagree with, not to cover your eyes and ears and look away.”

According to a source close to Raskin, the conference sponsors were announced after the member of Congress accepted the invitation. Maddow, Palantir, Lockheed, and Truman did not respond to requests for comment.

At TruCon, sponsors are promised access to influential conference participants, according to promotional materials. “Elevate your brand, connect with your customers, feed your employee pipeline in meaningful, exciting ways,” reads a Truman brochure marketing sponsorship opportunities for the event. The brochure repeatedly references the advantages of aligning a company’s “brand” with the Truman Center and TruCon.

For Palantir and Lockheed, which are listed as the two top sponsors on the event website, that means enjoying high-level recognition and association with prominent progressive and other Democratic Party-aligned figures.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., testifies during the Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee hearing on Feb. 9, 2023.

Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Raskin and Maddow — an honoree and keynote speaker, respectively, at the conference — have both been harshly critical of the defense industry at large and specifically Lockheed and Palantir.

Raskin co-sponsored a House resolution in 2020 denouncing “wasteful Pentagon spending and supporting cuts to the bloated defense budget.” The bill, which did not make it to the floor for a vote, highlighted that “the Pentagon had no way to track replacement parts for the $1,400,000,000,000 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program” — a Lockheed project widely considered to be the biggest military procurement boondoggle in history.

For Lockheed Martin, the F-35 is only one of the many upsides the company sees thanks to the Pentagon’s enormous expenditures on contractors. Over half of the nearly trillion-dollar defense budget goes to contractors, and Lockheed Martin is the top recipient of Pentagon dollars, receiving about $75 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. That figure amounts to over one and a half times the entire combined State Department and Agency for International Development budget for the same year, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. Lockheed derived 73 percent of its net sales from the U.S. government in 2022.

When Lockheed CEO James Taiclet was asked last year about whether his company’s government contracts — as compared to the State Department’s budget — represented a reasonable balance, he deflected, saying simply that “it’s only up to us to step to what we’ve been asked to do and we’re just trying to do that in a more effective way.” It was, he said, “up to the U.S. government.”

The company, however, pours staggering sums of money into influencing the government: Lockheed spent $13 million lobbying the federal government last year. Its biggest area of focus was the defense budget, according to OpenSecrets.

For her part, Maddow has been an even more outspoken critic of Pentagon contractors than Raskin. In March 2011, she told her MSNBC viewers, “Defense spending is untouchable because civilian lawmakers defer so deeply to the military, and to the former military officers laced through the contractor world, that if you squint, you would swear that Congress is some lackey puppet parliament in a country where the government has taken over by a junta.”

Maddow has also denounced Thiel, whom she lit into during MSNBC’s coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention, where Thiel spoke.

Referencing Thiel’s company Palantir, Maddow said, “He also runs one of the biggest surveillance companies in the world that does lots of business with the CIA and the NSA and lots of other government agencies, and mass surveillance is a controversial thing in Republican politics.”

Palantir provided software used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in support of the Trump administration’s controversial detention, deportation, and family separation policies — policies denounced by both Raskin and Maddow.

Truman doesn’t seem to have concerns about associating with Palantir and Lockheed. Two Palantir employees are on Truman’s advisory council — Mehdi Alhassani and company Vice President Wendy Anderson — and both of them, alongside Lockheed, are listed as funders in Truman’s most recent annual report. Truman President and CEO Jenna Ben-Yehuda hosted Taiclet, Lockheed’s CEO, for a “fireside chat” last September. The following month, Truman hosted a panel featuring Anderson.

The embrace of prominent defense contractors might seem out of step for a group whose website claims it supports “international engagement through diplomacy first and foremost, and by force only when necessary.” Thompson, though, offered a simple explanation for the turn to weapons money.

“It’s typically tawdry but it’s the way business is done in this town,” the national security analyst said. “If Truman wants to be a player, they have to do events, they need money for events, and they need to barter away their sense of themselves in order to sponsor these events.”

The post Jamie Raskin and Rachel Maddow, Brought to You by Peter Thiel and Lockheed Martin appeared first on The Intercept.

Leaked Report: “CIA Does Not Know” If Israel Plans to Bomb Iran

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:52:23 +0000

Whether Israel’s escalating threats of war with Iran over its nuclear program are saber-rattling or something more serious is a mystery even to the CIA, according to a portion of a top-secret intelligence report leaked on the platform Discord earlier this year. The uncertainty about the intentions of one of the U.S.’s closest allies calls into question the basis of the “ironclad” support for Israel publicly espoused by the Biden administration.

The report — which was first covered by the Israeli channel i24 News and subsequently posted by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes leaked documents — reveals an undisclosed military exercise conducted by Israel. “On 20 February, Israel conducted a large-scale air exercise,” the intelligence report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on February 23, states. The exercise, it says, was “probably to simulate a strike on Iran’s nuclear program and possibly to demonstrate Jerusalem’s resolve to act against Tehran.” There have been several joint U.S.-Israeli military exercises in recent months, including one proudly billed by the Pentagon as the largest “in history.”

“CIA does not know Israel’s near term plans and intentions,” the report adds, speculating that “Netanyahu probably calculates Israel will need to strike Iran to deter its nuclear program and faces a declining military capability to set back Iran’s enrichment program.”

That the U.S.’s premier intelligence service indicated it had no idea how seriously to take Israel’s increasingly bombastic threats to Tehran means that, in all likelihood, neither does the White House. But despite this lack of clarity, Biden has not opposed a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran — and his national security adviser recently hinted at blessing it.

“We have made clear to Iran that it can never be permitted to obtain a nuclear weapon,” Jake Sullivan said in a speech earlier this month, reiterating the administration’s oft-repeated line. The rhetoric reflects what military planners call “strategic ambiguity,” a policy of intentional uncertainty in order to deter an adversary — in this case, around how far the U.S. might go to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But Sullivan went a step further, adding, “As President Biden has repeatedly reaffirmed, he will take the actions that are necessary to stand by this statement, including by recognizing Israel’s freedom of action.”

Sullivan’s statement represents the strongest signal yet that the administration would not oppose unilateral action by Israel. The rhetoric has also been echoed by other administration officials. In February, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, said that “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran] and we’ve got their back.”

“I believe the administration is playing with fire with this kind of rhetoric and with the joint military planning.”

“In the current context this constitutes glibness,” said Paul Pillar, a retired national intelligence officer for the near east, of Sullivan’s statement. Pillar is now a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security Studies. “I believe the administration is playing with fire with this kind of rhetoric and with the joint military planning.” Last week, Axios reported that the U.S. recently proposed cooperating with Israel on joint military planning around Iran but denied they would plan to strike Iran’s nuclear program.

“Biden has dangerously shifted America’s policy on Israeli military action against Iran,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Intercept. “Previous administrations made it crystal clear to Israel – including publicly – that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program would be destabilizing, would not prevent a nuclear Iran and would likely drag the US into a war it could do well without.

“Obama’s clear opposition played a crucial role in the internal deliberations of the Israeli cabinet in 2010 and 2011 when Israel was on the verge of starting war,” Parsi pointed out. In 2009, after then-Vice President Biden said “Israel can determine for itself … what they decide to do relative to Iran,” Obama clarified that his administration was “absolutely not” giving Israel a green light to attack Iran.

Israel’s own military officials concede that an attack on Iran would likely metastasize into a broader regional war. Earlier this month, retired Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi reportedly said that “Israel might have to deal with the Iranian nuclear program,” adding that “this will mean an Israeli attack on Iran which will probably result in a regional war.”

In January, just weeks before Israel’s secret exercise referenced in the intelligence report, the U.S. and Israel conducted what the Defense Department touted as their largest joint military exercise in history. Called Juniper Oak, the exercise involved “electronic attack, suppression of enemy air defenses, strike coordination and reconnaissance,” which experts said “are exactly what the U.S. and Israel would need to conduct a successful kinetic attack on Iran’s nuclear program.”

The unprecedented exercise was made possible by a little-noticed order by President Donald Trump just days before Biden’s inauguration. Using his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Trump ordered Israel be moved from European Command’s area of responsibility, where it had been located since 1983 to avoid friction with its Middle East neighbors, to that of Central Command, the Pentagon’s Middle East combatant command.

Under Biden, CENTCOM, whose area of responsibility includes Iran, has continued to coordinate closely with Israel. In March, Biden’s CENTCOM chief, Gen. Michael Kurilla, said in Senate testimony that the decision to move Israel from EUCOM to CENTCOM “immediately and profoundly altered the nature and texture of many of CENTCOM’s partnerships,” adding that “CENTCOM today readily partners with Arab militaries and the Israel Defense Force alike.”

“In fact, the inclusion of Israel presents many collaborative and constructive security opportunities,” Kurilla said. “Our partners of four decades largely see the same threats and have common cause with Israel Defense Forces and the Arab militaries in defending against Iran’s most destabilizing activities.”

Put simply, for the first time, the U.S. and both its Arab and Israeli allies are structurally aligned against a common foe: Iran.

At the same hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton, who had advocated for the relocation of Israel to CENTCOM weeks before Trump gave the order, raised the possibility of training Israeli pilots in the use of mid-air refuel aircraft. The lack of such aircraft, which allow fighter jets to travel long distances, is a key impediment to Israel’s ability to reach Iranian nuclear facilities.

“One of the opportunities I see is having Israeli Air Force personnel training alongside American personnel on KC 46 tankers, which we expect to provide them in future,” Cotton said. Kurilla, for his part, demurred, replying that training might be better “when they get closer to getting their aircraft … so they can retain that training and go right into the execution of operating them.”

Though Biden campaigned on reinstating the Iran nuclear deal — also called JCPOA, which Obama established and Trump pulled out of — the deal is all but dead.

“With Iran, any concerns about a nuclear program have sometimes been overwhelmed by a desire — based on partisanship in the U.S. and heavily influenced by the government of Israel — to isolate Iran and not do any business or negotiations with it at all,” Pillar told The Intercept. “Hence you had Trump’s reneging on the JCPOA agreement in 2018, with a direct result of that reneging being that there is now far more reason to be worried about a possible Iranian nuclear weapon than there was when the JCPOA was still in effect.”

Should Iran acquire a nuclear weapon, it would likely trigger a dangerous regional arms race. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has made clear that Riyadh would “follow suit as soon as possible” with its own atomic bomb should Tehran obtain one.

But one key fact is often left out of discussions about Iran and the bomb: There’s no evidence that it’s actually pursuing one.

As the Pentagon’s most recent Nuclear Posture Review plainly states, “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.” More recently, CIA Director William Burns reiterated that point in an interview with CBS in February. “To the best of our knowledge,” Burns said, “we don’t believe that the Supreme Leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program that we judge that they suspended or stopped at the end of 2003.”

Iran’s policy could, of course, change. And tensions are rising in large part because of the U.S.’s recent posturing. For example, following the Juniper Oak exercise, Iran responded with its own military exercises, which Iranian military commander Maj. Gen. Gholam-Ali Rashid said they consider a “half war” and even a “war before war.”

In April, CENTCOM announced the deployment of a submarine armed with guided missiles in the Mediterranean Sea. This was likely a message directed at Iran, which quickly responded by accusing the U.S. of “warmongering.”

Earlier, in October, CENTCOM issued an extraordinary press release featuring Kurilla, the CENTCOM chief, aboard a submarine armed with ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in the Arabian Sea — another message for Iran.

On May 9, Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder announced that the military would be increasing its patrols in the Strait of Hormuz, through which many Iranian vessels travel. In his remarks, Ryder made particular mention of the P-8 Poseidon aircraft and the role it would play in bolstering maritime surveillance of the area.

The same aircraft made international news in 2019, when Iran disclosed that it almost downed a P-8 carrying U.S. service members that it claimed had entered its airspace, opting instead to shoot down a nearby drone. The U.S. military scrambled jets to strike Iran in retaliation, only to be called off by Trump 10 minutes before the attack when a general told him that the strikes would probably kill 150 people. The strikes would not, Trump said, have been “proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

The post Leaked Report: “CIA Does Not Know” If Israel Plans to Bomb Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Transcripts of Kissinger’s Calls Reveal His Culpability

Nick Turse — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:09:00 +0000

President Richard Nixon was in rare form, though in reality, it was none too rare. “The whole goddamn Air Force over there farting around doing nothing,” he barked at his national security adviser Henry Kissinger during a phone call on December 9, 1970. He called for a huge increase in attacks in Cambodia. “I want it done!! Get them off their ass and get them to work now.”

As Nixon rambled and ranted — calling for more strikes by bombers and helicopter gunships — Kissinger’s replies were short and clipped: “Right.” “Exactly.” “Absolutely, right.” We know this because, while Nixon was fuming about “assholes” who said there was a “crisis in Cambodia,” the conversation was being recorded. It wasn’t the secret White House taping system that finally laid Nixon low as part of the scandal that came to be known as Watergate, but Kissinger’s own clandestine eavesdropping system. Later, it was up to Kissinger’s secretary Judy Johnson to transcribe that night’s exchange and add in the single, double, triple, and even quadruple exclamation points to capture the spirit of the call and accurately punctuate the president’s words.

Johnson was new on the job when she heard the December 9, 1970, exchange. She was just one of many Kissinger secretaries and aides who, during his years working for the White House, either listened in on an extension and transcribed conversations in shorthand or typed up the transcripts later from Kissinger’s own Dictabelt recording system that, according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1976 book “The Final Days,” was hooked up to a telephone “housed in the credenza behind his secretary’s desk and … automatically activated when the telephone receiver was picked up.”

The transcripts offer a window into policymaking in the Nixon White House, Kissinger’s key role, and how so many Cambodians came to be killed by American military aircraft. Johnson was somewhat reluctant to talk about them and expressed surprise that they were publicly available.

Decades later, the heated December 1970 exchange didn’t stick out in Johnson’s mind, she told The Intercept. None of their conversations did. It was a long time ago and, she said, “there was a lot of stuff going on” at the White House. Johnson didn’t know whether Nixon was aware of Kissinger’s eavesdropping activities or why her boss recorded all his calls. Ask him yourself, she said. When I tried to interview him, Kissinger stormed off and his staff ignored follow-up requests for more than a decade. Johnson also cautioned that it was very hard to get an accurate sense of a conversation from the transcripts alone. There were nuances, she said, that were missing.

“Those conversations were strenuously edited,” said Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who resigned in protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and had listened to many conversations between Nixon and his national security adviser. The men and women who took down the text didn’t completely eliminate the spirit of the conversations, but if you were listening to calls in their raw, original form, it was more disconcerting. “It was worse because the words were slurred and you knew you had a drunk at the other end,” he said of Nixon.

Did Johnson suspect that Nixon had been drinking when he called to direct policy and give orders? “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” she said. Any evidence is apparently gone forever. In a 1999 letter to Foreign Affairs, Kissinger claimed that the tapes of phone calls made in his office were destroyed after being transcribed. No notes or other materials involved in the transcription survived either, according to a 2004 report by the Nixon Presidential Materials Staff of the U.S. National Archives.

President Richard Nixon meets with national security adviser Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office on Oct. 15, 1971.

Photo: Wally McNamee/Corbis via Getty Images

Johnson joined Kissinger’s staff in late 1970, before moving on to the White House press office in 1971 where she stayed until Nixon’s resignation in 1974. After a brief stint in the administration of President Gerald Ford, she moved to California and worked as a researcher for Nixon, who was then writing his memoirs. She might have been starry-eyed when she first arrived at the White House, she told me, but listening in on high-level phone conversations quickly disabused her of the notion that these were “super people.” She termed Nixon’s coarse talk “typical male language.”

Johnson took down Kissinger’s conversations using shorthand, she told me, repeatedly emphasizing how difficult it was to transcribe conversations like these perfectly. A “shit” or a “damn” might go missing, but there was no deliberate censorship and nothing was sanitized, she said. Morris recalled it differently. While Nixon’s remarks might be prettied up, he told me, it was Kissinger’s own acid-tongued ripostes that subordinates were supposed to excise to protect their boss. Privately, Kissinger called Nixon a madman, said he had a “meatball mind,” and referred to him as “our drunken friend.”

“I just had a call from our friend,” Kissinger told his aide Alexander Haig moments after getting off the phone with Nixon on that December night, according to Johnson’s transcript. The president “wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia,” Kissinger told Haig. “He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?” In a notation, Johnson indicated that while it was difficult to hear him, it sounded as if Haig started laughing.

When I mentioned these orders and asked about Nixon’s drinking, Johnson emphasized that there were buffers in place. Policy changes, she told me, weren’t as simple as a presidential order given by phone. Many discussions would occur before instructions were carried out. But Kissinger’s immediate and blunt relay of Nixon’s command suggests otherwise. The raw number of U.S. attacks in Cambodia does too. While they had no explanation for it at the time, The Associated Press found that compared with November 1970, the number of sorties by U.S. gunships and bombers in Cambodia had tripled by the end of December to nearly 1,700.

Was the reason for it — and the Cambodian deaths that resulted — a drunken president’s order, passed along swiftly and unquestioningly by Henry Kissinger? Nixon and Haig have been dead for many years, and Johnson passed away earlier this month. That leaves only Kissinger to answer the question — and to answer for the deaths.

The post Transcripts of Kissinger’s Calls Reveal His Culpability appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Blamed the Press for Military Looting in Cambodia

Nick Turse — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:07:00 +0000

In September 1966, two U.S. helicopters crossed the border of South Vietnam and flew 20 miles into the neutral kingdom of Cambodia. Near the town of Snuol, they blasted a Cambodian army outpost with eight rockets, killing one soldier and wounding four others. The air assault was blamed on “pilot error,” and it was just one of many lethal U.S. helicopter attacks in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Three and a half years after the errant airstrike, U.S. forces would again attack Snuol, but this time it was no mistake. Instead, U.S. troops deliberately assaulted the town as part of America’s “Cambodian incursion,” an ill-fated invasion that President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, hoped would win the Vietnam War.

A previously unrevealed military investigation — declassified in the 1980s but buried deep in the files of Vietnam War-era inspector general’s documents in the nation’s archives — shows that after U.S. soldiers were caught looting Snuol in May 1970, the Army launched a pro forma investigation, worked to minimize the story, and even tried to blame the press corps for sacking the town. The Army, however, never questioned its own reporter on the scene: a journalist working for the venerable U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes. In an interview with The Intercept, he laughed at the notion that journalists had looted Snuol.

The Snuol revelations are part of an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents assembled by The Intercept as part of a reflection on the life and crimes of Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday.

Kissinger, the architect of America’s 1969 to 1973 bombing of Cambodia and a proponent of the 1970 invasion, acknowledged that 50,000 Cambodian civilians were killed during his tenure crafting America’s war policy. Experts have conservatively estimated the actual total may be three times higher.

In a TV speech to the nation from the White House, President Richard Nixon announces that several thousand American ground troops have entered Cambodia on April 30, 1970.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

The Sack of Snuol

On April 28, 1970, Nixon issued an order that was opposed by his secretary of state and secretary of defense but endorsed by Kissinger: The U.S. military would invade Cambodia. Two days later, in a televised address to the nation, Nixon announced the assault and offered a history lesson loaded with lies. Since 1954, when an international agreement formally ended a U.S.-backed French war to maintain their colonies in Indochina, he said, U.S. policy had been “to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people.” His statement belied the covert cross-border missions and secret bombings being carried out — and hidden from the American public and Congress — on his orders throughout the previous year. “In cooperation with the armed forces of South Vietnam, attacks are being launched this week to clean out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam border,” he continued. “This is not an invasion of Cambodia. … Our purpose is not to occupy the areas. Once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw.”

U.S. troops and armored vehicles streamed across the border but encountered few enemy soldiers and saw little pitched combat. Kissinger had “no doubt about the operation’s success” and publicly described it as a victory, but the CIA later determined that the capability of enemy forces in Cambodia had not been “substantially reduced,” while the National Security Agency deemed the invasion an “unmitigated disaster.”

Four Kissinger staffers resigned over their boss’s role in planning the invasion, arguing that it would achieve none of its objectives and lead to “blood in the streets” at home. They were right. As predicted, the “incursion” sparked widespread campus unrest across America, including at Kent State University, where members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students during a protest a few days later.

A Kent State University student lies on the ground after National Guardsman fired into a crowd of demonstrators on May 4, 1970, in Kent, Ohio.

Photo: AP

A week after the killings at Kent State, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rushed Nixon and Kissinger a report on the private phone conversations of Morton Halperin, a Kissinger protégé and national security aide whose home phone Kissinger had ordered tapped. According to an FBI transcript, Halperin predicted that the “most certain consequence” of the invasion would be “that a large number of Cambodian civilians would be killed and labeled Viet Cong.” He, too, was right.

As U.S. troops plowed through the countryside, the 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment was tasked with taking the town of Snuol. According to Army documents, Brig. Gen. Robert M. Shoemaker ordered that minor resistance should not necessitate the town’s destruction. “Try to avoid shooting into crowds of civilians,” his subordinate Lt. Col. Grail Brookshire, the commander of the 2nd Squadron, 11th Cavalry Regiment, told his men on the outskirts of the town, according to an account from New York Times reporter James Sterba, who was there to cover the battle. “In other words, if you’re taking light fire and there are civilians in the area, try to return the fire without losing all the fuckin’ civilians.” In a recent conversation with The Intercept, Brookshire emphasized that when his forces encountered a mixed group of North Vietnamese troops and “Cambodian refugees,” he would not allow his men to open fire on them.

When they encountered enemy resistance as they entered Snuol, Brookshire nonetheless ordered his tanks to turn their guns on the town and called in bombers and helicopter gunships, leveling buildings to dislodge North Vietnamese forces. The next day, Brookshire’s men moved fully into Snuol.

While it was a major battle in the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, the invasion of Snuol wasn’t significant in terms of the wider war in Indochina. Taking the town did not cost a single American life and left only five U.S. troops wounded. Leon Daniel, a former Marine and Korean War veteran who covered the operation for United Press International, rode into Snuol on one of the Army’s tanks. “The only dead I saw were obviously Cambodian civilians, but the U.S. Army claimed later it had killed 88 Communist troops in the area,” he wrote. “I doubt it.” All told, he saw four dead: a little girl and people he assumed were her family. They had all been killed by napalm. He also watched U.S. soldiers

helping themselves to what little was left in an area of shops that had been destroyed. The first items taken were beer and soft drinks because it was very hot. Other GIs took suitcases, mirrors and shoes. I saw a motorscooter strapped to one tank. … Other soldiers broke locks off a few sheds that were still standing. One shed was set on fire after it was looted of several cases of batteries.

Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett described soldiers smashing open the doors of shops to steal watches, clocks, and other items before setting the stores ablaze. “I saw one soldier run from a burning Chinese noodle shop with his arms full of Cambodian brandy … and two others wheeled out motorcycles and tied them to the turrets of their vehicles,” he recalled in his 1994 memoir “Live From the Battlefield.” “After about an hour of looting and merrymaking an officer came by and yelled, ‘Get your hands off that stuff, we’re moving on.’ The soldiers laughed and mounted their vehicles.”

U.S. tanks and armored personnel carriers of the U.S. 11th Armored Calvary Regiment move through a rubber plantation inside Cambodia toward the Snuol airfield on May 12, 1970.

Photo: AP

Looting or Lies?

While Arnett’s dispatch from Snuol was published in its entirety around the world, the versions carried by American news organizations were missing a critical piece of reportage: any mention of the looting. The AP had decided, in the wake of the killings at Kent State, to censor the story. “Let’s play it cool,” Ben Bassett, the late, longtime foreign news editor of The Associated Press wrote in a cable to the AP bureau in Saigon, explaining that “in present context [mention of the looting] can be inflammatory.”

With the AP’s Saigon staff up in arms, Arnett fired off a message to the home office. “I was professionally insulted by New York’s decision to kill all my story and picture references to the Snuol looting on grounds that it was inflammatory and not news,” he wrote, recounting the cable in his memoir. “To ignore the sordid aspects of America’s invasion of Cambodia would surely be a dereliction of a reporter’s duty and I find it impossible now to continue to compromise my reporting to suit American political interests.” Arnett, who had previously won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war in Vietnam, then leaked the story of AP’s censorship to Kevin Buckley of Newsweek, who had also reported from Snuol.

With the press and Congress demanding answers, the Army launched a cursory investigation into “the extent of damage… and the veracity of news accounts” about U.S. troops’ role in the looting, according to the formerly classified Army records.

“My soldiers haven’t been looting,” Brookshire had told a TV crew. But footage showed otherwise. A soldier was filmed handing bottles to a colleague on a tank who said, “If you find any more sodas, get ’em.” Another was seen pilfering a radio. Still another was caught rooting through a shed.

“I don’t know what kind of Scotch it was because the label was in Cambodian,” one of Brookshire’s men told Gloria Emerson of the Times, “but it wasn’t bad at all.” As civilians drifted back into Snuol, they found a sea of debris: shattered glass, burned bicycles, twisted metal, and busted bricks, amid huge craters that had swallowed up homes and shops. “We want no shooting or killings by anyone here, and look what has befallen us,” one resident told Emerson. “We just want to earn our living,”

An armored personnel carrier rolls past wrecked structures in the ruined town of Snuol, Cambodia, on May 7, 1970.

Photo: AP

Blaming the Messengers

In June 1970, the Army concluded its investigation into the sack of Snuol. About half the structures in Snuol were “destroyed or damaged” by U.S. bombs, napalm, tank rounds, and small arms fire, according to an inspector general’s report. The Army also discovered more dead Cambodians than reporters had seen, noting that troops found 11 bodies “presumed to be civilians.”

“Reports of looting and pillage are confirmed by statements in the file,” a follow-up report by an Army staff judge advocate noted. That report corroborated accounts of soldiers stealing a “motorbike, cases of soft drinks, sunglasses and razor blades,” while disputing reports that GIs pilfered Cambodian currency, beer, and other items.

The staff judge advocate’s report stated that there was “no evidence of a general rampage through undestroyed shops” and raised an alternate theory about the looting: Any theft “was done by civilian reporters in their wandering about the village.”

The Times’s Sterba never made it into Snuol, and Newsweek’s Buckley said that he left before the looting occurred. Gloria Emerson and Leon Daniel died in 2004 and 2006, respectively. However, The Intercept spoke with one reporter on the scene who should have been first on the Army’s witness list.

While the Army’s investigation failed to mention it, the military’s own newspaper, Stars and Stripes, had a reporter in Snuol. Army Specialist Jack Fuller — who went on to win a Pulitzer in 1986 and serve as editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of the Tribune Publishing before his death in 2016 — rode into Snuol atop one of Brookshire’s tanks. He watched as 11th Cavalry troops began stealing radios, soft drinks, and alcohol.

“I knew it was a story,” he told The Intercept in a 2010 interview, speaking of his article, which included an account of GIs pillaging the town. “Looting of any dimension by American soldiers was a story for Stars and Stripes, in my view.”

Fuller laughed out loud when I read him the staff judge advocate’s conjecture about the civilian press looting the town. “I certainly saw no correspondents grabbing anything,” he said, noting that, unlike soldiers, members of the media had easy access to alcohol and no need to steal it.

Fuller recalled running into Arnett after the flap with AP. “He said: ‘For god’s sake, AP kills my story and Stars and Stripes runs yours. Stripes has more courage than AP,’” Fuller told me, noting that he had mentioned the looting deep in his story, while Arnett reported it more prominently in his article.

Arnett did not respond to email inquiries to be interviewed for this story.

A 1st Air Cavalry Division soldier reads a U.S. News and World Report at a firebase inside Cambodia on June 29, 1970.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

The Butcher of Snuol

In June 1970, an Army spokesperson announced that the looting in Snuol was limited to “several, perhaps five or six, cases of soda pop, which were consumed.” A motorcycle that was taken had been returned to its owner, the Army said, and a tractor would be returned once its owner was located.

No mention was made of the theory that the press had pillaged Snuol.

The two-month Cambodian incursion left 344 American soldiers and 818 South Vietnamese troops dead. There were, however, “no reliable or comprehensive” statistics for Cambodian civilian casualties, although the Pentagon estimated that the operation rendered 130,000 Cambodians homeless. The invasion proved only a minor inconvenience for North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. By the end of June 1970, most U.S. troops had left the country, and the North Vietnamese soldiers had moved back into the region around Snuol. By late October, America’s South Vietnamese allies were fighting their way back into the town.

Grail Brookshire did, however, get something out of the incursion. His troops’ looting of Snuol became a joke — and Brookshire gave himself a grisly, though tongue-in-cheek, nickname.

In a conversation this month, Brookshire defended his troops and told The Intercept that they “got a bum rap” from reporters. He expressed a low regard for the press, then and now, and a belief that they are “part of the deep state.”

In 1972, having recently returned from four years’ reporting in Southeast Asia, Buckley gave a talk at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, during which a man in the back asked numerous well-informed questions. “He and others swarmed me when the event was over — and I asked him his name and where he had been,” Buckley told The Intercept.

“Grail Brookshire,” the man responded.

“You mean —” Buckley began, but before he could finish the sentence, the man interrupted.

“That’s me, Grail Brookshire, the Butcher of Snuol,” he told Buckley. (When we spoke recently, Brookshire didn’t recall the particulars of this exchange from 51 years ago, but said it sounded like the type of “smart-ass remark” he would make.)

“You guys said my troops systematically looted the place,” Brookshire told Buckley. “My god, my men couldn’t do anything systematically.”

The post U.S. Blamed the Press for Military Looting in Cambodia appeared first on The Intercept.

Notorious 1973 Attack Killed Many More Than Previously Known

Nick Turse — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:05:00 +0000

Ny Sarim had lived through it all. Violence. Loss. Privation. Genocide.

Her first husband was killed after Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge plunged Cambodia into a nightmare campaign of overwork, hunger, and murder that killed around 2 million people from 1975 to 1979. Four other family members died too — some of starvation, others by execution.

“No one ever even had time to laugh. Life was so sad and hopeless,” she told The Intercept. It was enough suffering for a lifetime, but it couldn’t erase the memory of the night in August 1973 when her town became a charnel house.

Ny was sleeping at home when the bombs started dropping on Neak Luong, 30 tons all at once. She had felt the ground tremble from nearby bombings in the past, but this strike by a massive B-52 Stratofortress aircraft hit the town squarely. “Not only did my house shake, but the earth shook,” she told The Intercept. “Those bombs were from the B-52s.” Many in the downtown market area where she worked during the day were killed or wounded. “Three of my relatives — an uncle and two nephews — were killed by the B-52 bombing,” she said.

The strike on Neak Luong may have killed more Cambodians than any bombing of the American war, but it was only a small part of a devastating yearslong air campaign in that country. As Elizabeth Becker, who covered the conflict as a correspondent for the Washington Post, notes in her book “When the War Was Over,” the United States dropped more than 257,000 tons of explosives on the Cambodian countryside in 1973, about half the total dropped on Japan during all of World War II.

“They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence.”

“The biggest mistakes were in 1973,” she told The Intercept. “They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence. During those months ‘precision bombing’ was an oxymoron.” Neak Luong, she concurred, was the worst American “mistake.”

State Department documents, declassified in 2005 but largely ignored, show that the death toll at Neak Luong may have been far worse than was publicly reported at the time, and that the real toll was purposefully withheld by the U.S. government.

In his 2003 book “Ending the Vietnam War,” Henry Kissinger wrote that “more than a hundred civilians were killed” in the town. But U.S. records of “solatium” payments — money given to survivors as an expression of regret — indicate that more than 270 Cambodians were killed and hundreds more were wounded in Neak Luong. State Department documents also show that the U.S. paid only about half the sum promised to survivors.

Cambodian civilians wounded by a U.S. warplane at Neak Luong on August 6, await transportation to hospital on Aug. 7, 1973.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

The Price of a Life

The death warrant for Neak Luong was signed when U.S. officials decided that American lives mattered more than Cambodian ones. Until 1967, U.S. forces in South Vietnam used ground beacons that emitted high frequency radio waves to direct airstrikes. But the U.S. stopped using the beacons after a radar navigator on a B-52 bomber failed to flip an offset switch, causing a bomb load to drop directly on a helicopter carrying a beacon instead of a nearby site designated for attack. The chopper was blown out of the sky, and the U.S. military switched to a more reliable radar system until the January 1973 ceasefire formally ended the U.S. war in Vietnam.

At that point, the more sophisticated radar equipment went home, and the less reliable ground beacons came into use in Cambodia, where the U.S. air war raged with growing intensity.

In April 1973, according to a formerly classified U.S. military history, American officials expressed concern that “radar beacons were located on the American Embassy in Phnom Penh” and raised “the possibility that weapons could be released in the direct mode,” striking the U.S. mission by accident. Within days, that beacon was removed. But while Americans at the embassy were safe, Cambodians in places like Neak Luong, where a beacon had been placed on a pole in the center of town, remained at risk. “It should have been put a mile or so away in the boondocks,” a senior U.S. Air Force officer told the New York Times in 1973.

On August 7, 1973, a secret cable shot from the beacon-less U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh to the secretaries of State and Defense and other top American officials in Washington. At approximately 4:35 a.m. in Cambodia, according to Deputy Chief of Mission Thomas Enders’s message, Neak Luong was “accidentally bombed by a yet undetermined [U.S. Air Force] aircraft.”

Ny said that her cousin, who served with the U.S.-allied Cambodian army and spoke English, got on the radio shortly after the bombing and asked an American what had happened. He was told that the bombs were dropped in error, she said.

It later became clear that a navigator had again failed to flip the offset bombing switch.

Villagers in Neak Luong dig through rubble searching for bodies and belongings on Aug. 7, 1973.

Photo: AP

“No Great Disaster”

Col. David Opfer, the U.S. Embassy’s air attaché, quickly flew to the town to survey the situation, he told The Intercept. “I remember that some of the injured people were very happy to see somebody arrive, and I sent some of the most seriously wounded people back to the hospital in Phnom Penh in my helicopter,” he said. (Opfer died in 2018.)

Opfer told the foreign press corps in Phnom Penh that the bombing was “no great disaster.”

“The destruction was minimal,” he announced at a press briefing, even though Enders, in the secret cable, had already informed U.S. officials that damage was “considerable.”

In a November 2010 interview, Opfer reiterated that he didn’t consider the damage to Neak Luong significant, and that it was limited to a small area. “It was a mistake,” he explained. “It happens in war.”

Sydney Schanberg, who reported for the New York Times in Cambodia, recalled Opfer’s briefing. “He said the casualties weren’t severe,” Schanberg, who died in 2016, told The Intercept. “He said there were 50 dead and some injured.” Opfer admitted that he didn’t actually know the number. “Even then I wasn’t sure how many,” he told The Intercept.

Schanberg, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia, was skeptical of the pronouncement and set out to see for himself. He was thrown off a Cambodian military flight to Neak Luong, but Schanberg’s fixer Dith Pran got them to the town by boat, and they interviewed survivors until local officials detained the journalists for taking photographs of “military secrets.” The U.S. Embassy, meanwhile, tried to wrest control of the story by arranging for a group of five Western reporters to take a quick look around with little opportunity to speak to townspeople.

Schanberg and Pran, who spent a day and night under house arrest, watched their press colleagues through the window of the building where they were confined. “They didn’t see enough to write a detailed story and they hadn’t talked to anybody,” said Schanberg, noting that the pool reporters were only on the ground for about 20 minutes.

Ny Sarim told The Intercept that soldiers from the U.S.-allied Cambodian military also kept residents from making their way downtown, but that even from a distance, the damage was unmistakable. When she finally got through the cordon, she saw massive craters and twisted metal. “It was a total wreck,” Schanberg told me. “Everything had been hit.”

Schanberg’s August 9, 1973, front-page Times story on Neak Luong emphasized Opfer’s minimization of the damage; a second article and an editorial soon after detailed U.S. efforts to thwart Schanberg from covering the story.

In a confidential cable back to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Emory Swank mentioned “the New York Times correspondent’s accusation that the air attaché office attempted to block journalists’ access to Neak Luong” and defended the officer. “Colonel Opfer has done well in trying circumstances,” he stated, while casting the foreign press corps as “demanding and hostile.” Opfer told The Intercept that the Cambodian military had detained Schanberg and Pran. “They always get things mixed up and don’t tell it as it really is,” he said of the press.

Schanberg took a different view. Opfer, he said, “was absolutely unskilled with the press. I felt bad for the man, in a way, because he was telling us what he had been told to tell us. A lot of the senior officers felt that we didn’t give anybody a fair break — but the Cambodians weren’t getting much of a break, were they?”

On Aug. 7, 1973, a day after being injured in the U.S. bombing of civilians in Neak Luong, a baby waits for transportation to the hospital.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

A Grand Bargain

Officially, 137 Cambodians were killed in the Neak Luong bombing and 268 were wounded, according to the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. Months later, Enders, in a confidential, December 1973 cable that went to Kissinger and then-Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, confided that the U.S. had actually paid out solatium for 273 dead, 385 seriously wounded, 48 who suffered “mutilation,” and 46 victims of slight injuries. All told, that figure — 752 people hurt or killed — was 86 percent higher than the official number.

Enders stated that the U.S. had not sought to verify the numbers, but that the tally had been certified by the Cambodian regime. The final number of wounded and dead, he noted, “is higher than the official count given by [the Cambodian government] to the press and therefore should not be released.”

In the December 1973 cable, Enders admitted that the U.S. had never established a policy for “the payment of medical expenses for persons injured by U.S. errors,” and that the bombing of Neak Luong was “the only such incident which has occurred in Cambodia.” But just a day after the Neak Luong bombing, a State Department cable referenced a “second accidental bombing” at Chum Roeung village that killed four to eight people and injured up to 33. The Pentagon blamed the “error” on a F-111 bomber’s “faulty bomb-release racks.” By then, the U.S. had dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs throughout the countryside and killed, according to experts, as many as 150,000 Cambodians.

Two weeks after the bombing of Neak Luong, Swank, the U.S. ambassador, publicly signed an agreement on compensation with the Cambodian government. “We desire to compensate, insofar as possible, the survivors of the tragedy,” he said in a brief speech, adding that the U.S. would pay $26,000 to rebuild the damaged hospital in Neak Luong and provide $71,000 in equipment.

The next of kin of those killed, according to press reports following his speech, would receive about $400 each. Considering that in many cases, the primary breadwinner had been lost for life, the sum was low: the equivalent of about four years of earnings for a rural Cambodian at the time. The financial penalty meted out to the B-52 navigator whose failure to flip the offset switch killed and wounded hundreds in Neak Luong was low too. He was fined $700 for the error. By comparison, a one-plane sortie, like that which bombed Neak Luong, cost about $48,000 at the time. A B-52 bomber cost about $8 million.

In another confidential cable sent in December 1973, Thomas Enders made a final accounting of solatium payments to those who had lost a relative in Neak Luong. They had actually not received the $400 per dead civilian that they had been promised. In the end, the U.S. valued the dead of Neak Luong at just $218 apiece.

The post Notorious 1973 Attack Killed Many More Than Previously Known appeared first on The Intercept.

Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings

Nick Turse — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

TA SOUS, Cambodia — At the end of a dusty path snaking through rice paddies lives a woman who survived multiple U.S. airstrikes as a child.

Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did they drop bombs here?”

The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been well documented, but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of previously unreported attacks that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian civilians during Kissinger’s tenure in the White House. When questioned about his culpability for these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.

An exclusive archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents — assembled from the files of a secret Pentagon task force that investigated war crimes during the 1970s, inspector generals’ inquiries buried amid thousands of pages of unrelated documents, and other materials discovered during hundreds of hours of research at the U.S. National Archives — offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of civilian deaths that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people. The documents also provided a rudimentary road map for on-the-ground reporting in Southeast Asia that yielded evidence of scores of additional bombings and ground raids that have never been reported to the outside world.

The road to Tralok Bek, Cambodia, in 2010, left. Meas Lorn, right, poses for a portrait in Ta Sous, Cambodia.

Photos: Tam Turse

Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and looted by U.S. and allied troops.

The incidents detailed in the files and the testimony of survivors include accounts of both deliberate attacks inside Cambodia and accidental or careless strikes by U.S. forces operating on the border with South Vietnam. These latter attacks were infrequently reported through military channels, covered only sparingly by the press at the time, and have mostly been lost to history. Together, they increase an already sizable number of Cambodian deaths for which Kissinger bears responsibility and raise questions among experts about whether long-dormant efforts to hold him accountable for war crimes might be renewed.

The Army files and interviews with Cambodian survivors, American military personnel, Kissinger confidants, and experts demonstrate that impunity extended from the White House to American soldiers in the field. The records show that U.S. troops implicated in killing and maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments.

Key Takeaways

Henry Kissinger is responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and groundbreaking interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.
The archive offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people.
Previously unpublished interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks reveal new details of the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war.
Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.
When questioned about these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.

Together, the interviews and documents demonstrate a consistent disregard for Cambodian lives: failing to detect or protect civilians; to conduct post-strike assessments; to investigate civilian harm allegations; to prevent such damage from recurring; and to punish or otherwise hold U.S. personnel accountable for injuries and deaths. These policies not only obscured the true toll of the conflict in Cambodia but also set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond.

“You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia. That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants thought to have died in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands

All the while, as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards, and rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their lives.

Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there.

Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In 1973, during his Senate confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, Kissinger was asked if he approved of deliberately keeping attacks on Cambodia secret, to which he responded with a wall of words justifying the assaults. “I just wanted to make clear that it was not a bombing of Cambodia, but it was a bombing of North Vietnamese in Cambodia,” he insisted. The evidence from U.S. military records and eyewitness testimony directly contradicts that claim. So did Kissinger himself.

In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped 500,000 or more tons of munitions. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around 160,000 tons of munitions on Japan.)

At a 2010 State Department conference on U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia from 1946 through the close of the Vietnam War, I asked Kissinger how he would amend his testimony before the Senate, given his own contention that tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians died from his escalation of the war.

“Why should I amend my testimony?” he replied. “I don’t quite understand the question, except that I didn’t tell the truth.”

President Richard Nixon speaks about the Cambodian campaign in 1970 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

“Anything That Flies on Anything That Moves”

One night in December 1970, Nixon called his national security adviser in a rage about Cambodia. “I want the helicopter ships. I want everything that can fly to go in and crack the hell out of them,” he barked at Kissinger, according to a transcript. “I want gunships in there. That means armed helicopters. … I want it done! Get them off their ass. … I want them to hit everything.”

Five minutes later, Kissinger was on the phone with Gen. Alexander Haig, his military aide, relaying the command for a relentless assault on Cambodia. “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?”

Two years earlier, Nixon had won the White House promising to end America’s war in Vietnam, but instead expanded the conflict into neighboring Cambodia. Fearing public backlash and believing that Congress would never approve an attack on a neutral country, Kissinger and Haig began planning — a month after Nixon took office — an operation that was kept secret from the American people, Congress, and even top Pentagon officials via a conspiracy of cover stories, coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged airstrikes in Cambodia as occurring in South Vietnam. Ray Sitton, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and Congress.

Kissinger, who went on to serve as secretary of state in the Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In the decades that followed, he has continued to counsel U.S. presidents, most recently Donald Trump; served on numerous corporate and government advisory boards; and authored a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he came to the United States in 1938, amid a flood of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he continued on to an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1954. He subsequently joined the Harvard faculty, working in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs until 1969. While teaching at Harvard, he served as a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before his senior roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations. A believer in Realpolitik, Kissinger heavily influenced U.S. foreign policy between 1969 and 1977.

Through a combination of relentless ambition, media savvy, and the ability to muddy the truth and slip free of scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and government functionary into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. While dozens of his White House colleagues were engulfed in the swirling Watergate scandal, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger emerged unscathed, all the while providing fodder for the tabloids and spouting lines like “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed, wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and laid the groundwork for the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership cannot be exonerated for committing genocide on the Cambodian people, said Kiernan, the Yale scholar, but neither can Nixon nor Kissinger escape responsibility for their role in the slaughter that precipitated it. The duo so destabilized the tiny country that Pol Pot’s nascent revolutionary movement took over Cambodia in 1975 and unleashed horrors, from massacres to mass starvation, that would kill around 2 million people.

Kaing Guek Eav (known as “Duch”) who ran the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and murdered in the late 1970s, made the same observation. “Mister Richard Nixon and Kissinger,” he told a United Nations-backed tribunal, “allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp golden opportunities.” After he was overthrown in a military coup and his country was plunged into genocide, Cambodia’s deposed monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leveled similar blame. “There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia,” he said in the 1970s. “Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger.”

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, and Chile to East Timor, Laos, and Uruguay. But Hitchens reserved special opprobrium for Kissinger’s role in Cambodia. “The bombing campaign,” he wrote, “began as it was to go on — with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Mr. Kissinger in this precise respect.”

Others went beyond theoretical indictments. As a teenager, Australian-born human rights activist Peter Tatchell felt greatly affected by the U.S. war — and war crimes — in Indochina. Decades later, believing that there was a strong case to be made, he took action. “It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go,” he told The Intercept by email.

“It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go.”

In 2002, with Slobodan Miloševic, the former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on trial for war crimes, Tatchell applied for an arrest warrant at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in London under the Geneva Conventions Act of 1957, an act of Parliament that incorporated some components of the laws of war as defined by the 1949 Geneva Conventions into British law. He alleged that while Kissinger “was National Security Advisor to the U.S. President 1969-75 and U.S. Secretary of State 1973-77 he commissioned, aided and abetted and procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” Judge Nicholas Evans denied the application, stating that he was not “presently” able to draft a “suitably precise charge” based on the evidence Tatchell submitted.

When the arrest warrant was denied, Tatchell tried to engage international humanitarian organizations to help or take over the case, he told The Intercept, but they “did not see it as a priority.” He tried unsuccessfully to contact potential American witnesses and engage U.S. human rights groups.

But Tatchell maintains that Kissinger should still have his day in court. “I believe that age should never be a barrier to justice. Those who commit or authorise war crimes should be held to account, regardless of their age,” he wrote, “providing they have the mental capacity for a fair trial, which I understand is the case with Kissinger.”

Illustration: Matthieu Bourel for The Intercept; Source Photograph: AP

Five Decades of Impunity

Kissinger and his acolytes frequently cast blame for the American war in Cambodia on the North Vietnamese troops and South Vietnamese guerrillas who used the country as a base and logistics hub, while giving short shrift to U.S. involvement there. “What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam’s occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards,” wrote former Kissinger aide Peter Rodman. But three years earlier — long before most Americans knew their country was at war in Southeast Asia — U.S. “bombs hit a Cambodian village by accident … killing several civilians,” according to an Air Force history. And the “accidents” never stopped. Between 1962 and 1969, the Cambodian government tallied 1,864 border violations; 6,149 violations of its air space by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces; and nearly 1,000 civilian casualties.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow: a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes to achieve his boss’s promised “honorable end to the war in Vietnam” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.

In 2010, I traveled to Cambodia to investigate decades-old U.S. war crimes. I searched the borderlands, looking for villages mentioned in U.S. military documents, carrying binders filled with photos of Cobras, Loaches, and other aircraft, asking villagers to point out the military hardware that killed their loved ones and neighbors. My interviewees were uniformly shocked that an American knew about attacks on their village and had traveled across the globe to speak with them.

To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow. To Cambodians on the front lines of the conflict, the war was a shock and a horror.

For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations around the world. A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims, survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated 9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.

Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights groups have documented systemic killing of civilians, underreporting of noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright impunity extending from the drone pilots who slay innocent people to the architects of America’s 21st-century wars in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan — which revealed that the U.S. air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people — finally forced the Defense Department to unveil a comprehensive plan for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian casualties. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks a concrete mechanism for addressing past civilian harm.

The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia 50 years later is nil.

I share some responsibility for the delay in publishing these accounts. For 13 years — while I was reporting on drone strike victims in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and civil wars from Libya to South Sudan — survivors’ accounts from Cambodian villages like An Lung Kreas, Bos Phlung, Bos Mon (upper), Doun Rath, Doun Rath 2, Mroan, Por, Sati, Ta Sous, Tropeang, Phlong, Ta Hang, and Udom were lodged in my notebooks. Other projects and imperatives, coupled with the vagaries of the news industry that doesn’t always view past atrocities as “news,” kept them there.

When I conducted my interviews, in 2010, the life expectancy in Cambodia was about 66 years. Many of the people I spoke with — their ages in this article pegged to the date we spoke — are likely dead. Few in these rural villages had cellphones 13 years ago, so I have no way to reach them. But their accounts remain vibrant and the horrors they recounted have not diminished. Nor has their pain necessarily passed on with them from this world. We know from Holocaust survivors, for example, that trauma can have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether genetically or otherwise. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on — along with the architect of that country’s agony.

Map: The Intercept

Memories of Atrocity

Crossing a bridge over the Mekong River, I sped into the Cambodian countryside, along highways where SUVs passed tiny carts pulled by tiny ponies, motorbikes loaded with sheaves of bamboo or brightly colored textiles or baskets of squealing pigs, and ancient flatbed trucks piled high with rough-hewn, ochre bricks. I rolled through market towns of open-air butcher shops and wooden stalls selling cases of motor oil or motorcycle helmets or child-sized bags of rice or cases of Angkor Beer. I raced past thick, unruly forests and rubber plantations and rice fields where you could spot lines of water buffalo loping, single file, along the paddy dikes. Finally, I turned off the pavement onto a path of rutted, red dirt, looking for villages unknown even to the local police. At the end of one of these dusty, pitted trails, I found a hamlet straddling the border with Vietnam.

The air in Doun Rath was dry and musty during the day and punctuated, in the late afternoon, by the comforting smell of cooking fires that wafted up to wooden homes built on stilts to maximize air circulation on sweltering days like these.

I came looking for members of a ravaged generation who had survived both the American war and the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed. One of them, Phok Horm, spry and 84 years old at the time of our meeting, with close-cropped salt and pepper hair, told me: “Bombing was very common in this area. Sometimes, it happened every day. Sometimes there were dive bombers. Sometimes, the aircraft with the legs of a lobster would fly over and shoot at everything.”

In a photo taken in 2010, Phok Horm, 84, reflects on the attacks she survived in the village of Doun Rath.

Photo: Tam Turse

Vietnamese guerrillas operated in the nearby forest, Phok and fellow village elders recalled. They came to Doun Rath to buy supplies from residents already living hard lives, growing rice and selling it across the border in Vietnam, before the war flooded the hamlet with refugees from other bomb-ravaged Cambodian villages. But the guerrillas generally weren’t present during the attacks. “Many people here were shot,” said Chneang Sous, who was in his 20s during the conflict. “Most of them were Cambodian.”

When the shooting started, villagers would scatter, running for the uncertain protection of paddy dikes and, as the war dragged on, subterranean bunkers that families dug beside their homes. Min Keun, a teenager in 1969, remembered the regular intrusion of “lobster legs” in the skies over the village. “People would panic. They would run. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they would be killed,” she recalled. “There was so much suffering.” Min and others remembered helicopters firing on fleeing villagers. Water buffalo and cattle were repeatedly machine-gunned. At night, the helicopters’ bright search beams lit up the darkness as they hunted for enemy forces. Bombs might fall at any time.

Around 1969, Phok’s husband was caught in the open during a “bombardment” and hit in the neck with shrapnel. He hung on for seven days before succumbing to his wounds. Chneang recalled an instance when an American Huey gunship popped up from behind a tree line, forcing villagers to bolt for safety. The helicopter raked the area with machine gunfire, killing his aunt and uncle. Nouv Mom told me that his younger sister was gravely wounded in a 1972 bombing. Vietnamese guerrillas arrived after the attack and took her away for medical treatment, but his family never saw her again. All told, survivors believed that more than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks.

In nearby Doun Rath 2, former village chief Kang Vorn said residents led a simple life before the war, growing rice, beans, and sesame seeds. They began to see Vietnamese guerrillas around 1965, but the bombing didn’t begin until about 1969. Vet Shea, a one-eyed woman, recalled that the attacks intensified as time went on. “Sometimes we were bombed every day. Once, it was three or four times in one day,” she said. She herself survived a helicopter attack targeting farmers working in the nearby fields. “I ran flat out when I saw it,” Vet told me. “One person was wounded. A few others died.”

Thirteen elders of Doun Rath 2 did their best to recall the names of the dead. “Nul, Pik, Num, Seung,” said Sok Yun, an 85-year-old who relied on a weathered walking stick, as she ticked off the names of four villagers killed when their bomb shelter collapsed under a direct hit from an airstrike. Vet said her aunt was slain in another attack. Tep Sarum was just a teenager when a bomb hit his aunt’s house, killing her. Mom Huy, 80 years old at the time of our interview, said deaths and injuries from the bombs were common, while Kang, the former chief, estimated that at least 30 villagers were wounded by airstrikes but survived.

Just how many people in and around Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 were killed by Nixon and Kissinger’s war was already lost to history when I visited. The U.S. documentary record is quite sparse, but it does exist. On the night of August 9 and the morning of August 10, 1969, according to an Army inspector general’s report, a U.S. “Nighthawk” helicopter team — consisting of one Huey, equipped with a spotlight and high-powered M-60 machine guns, and a Cobra gunship outfitted with a powerful Gatling gun, rockets, and a grenade launcher — was operating in a so-called free fire zone near the South Vietnamese border with Cambodia.

The previously unreported investigation reveals that while only some members of the helicopter crews mentioned sporadic ground fire that night, they all agreed that lights were seen in “living structures.” Helicopter crew members claimed that radar operators told them they were over South Vietnam, but the radar operators said otherwise. One of them, Rogden Palmer, speaking to investigators about the Huey commander, said:

[H]e told his Tiger bird (the cobra accompanying him) that he thought he saw a light. At this time I advised him that he was close to the Cambodian border, and he rogered my transmission. Night Hawk and Tiger started circling … about the same time I advised him that he appeared to be over the border. I don’t remember if he rogered my transmission, but I beleive [sic] he did. At one time I told him he was over the border.

Apparently undaunted, the Huey focused its searchlight on the houses and the Cobra gunship commenced a firing run, blasting three of what the Pentagon documents referred to as “hooches” — shorthand for civilian dwellings — with machine gunfire and rockets filled with “flechettes,” tiny nails designed to tear through human flesh.

The U.S. investigation determined that the helicopters “did engage a target in the vicinity of the Cambodian border which could have been the village of Doun Rath.” The survivors in Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 didn’t recall this particular incident, emphasizing that attacks were so common for so long that they blended together. The report concluded that the “aircraft commander exercised poor judgement [sic] in engaging a target under these circumstances.” The inspector general, however, recommended that “no disciplinary action be taken,” and until I arrived decades later no one, apparently, had tried to investigate what actually happened in Doun Rath.

Fifty years on, most U.S. attacks in Cambodia are unknown to the wider world and may never be known. Even those confirmed by the U.S. military were ignored and forgotten: cast into history’s dustbin without additional reviews or follow-up investigations.

On January 6, 1970, for example, five helicopters breached Cambodian airspace and fired on the village of Prastah, killing two civilians and severely wounding an 11-year-old girl, according to an Army inspector general’s summary report. That perfunctory review found that helicopter gunships from the 25th Infantry Division had fired on enemy forces, who allegedly withdrew into Cambodia. The inquiry determined that the “gunships continued to engage and rounds did impact in Cambodia.” As to the question of civilian casualties and property damage resulting from the attack, the report stated only that “it was possible that civilian personnel … could have been struck by fire from the gunships and some crops could have been destroyed.” There is no indication that anything was done to compensate the survivors.

In the early evening of May 3, 1970, a helicopter circled the Cambodian village of Sre Kandal several times, scaring villagers and forcing them to flee, according to a formerly classified Army report. The file states that witnesses said a “helicopter of unknown type circled their village several times. They became frightened and started to run, at which time the helicopter allegedly fired.” According to Cambodians who the U.S. military encountered just after the attacks, three people suffered burns when a home was set ablaze in the attack and one person was wounded by shrapnel. One of the burn victims, his name likely engraved in the hearts of his Cambodian relatives but otherwise lost to history, later died.

U.S. helicopter gunships fly over Cambodia in 1970.

Photo: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

“Everything Was Completely Destroyed”

Less than a month after Kissinger and Haig began planning the secret bombing of Cambodia, the U.S. launched Operation MENU, a callously titled collection of B-52 raids codenamed BREAKFAST, LUNCH, SNACK, DINNER, DESSERT, and SUPPER that were carried out from March 18, 1969, to May 26, 1970. The attacks were kept secret through multiple layers of deception; Kissinger approved each one of the 3,875 sorties.

Survivors say that living through a B-52 bombing is unimaginably terrifying, bordering on the apocalyptic. Even within the confines of a deep, well-built bomb shelter, the concussive force from a nearby strike might burst eardrums. For those more exposed, the earth-shaking strikes could be extraordinarily lethal.

One morning, at the end of a busted dirt and gravel road near the Vietnamese border, I found Vuth Than, 78 years old at the time, with a shorn head of bristly gray hair and a mouth stained red with juice from betel nut, a natural stimulant popular in Southeast Asia.

Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,” Vuth Than told me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It was so terrible. Everything was completely destroyed.”

Exposed by North Vietnam’s Hanoi Radio and confirmed by the New York Times in May 1969, the secret bombing of Cambodia was officially denied and unknown to the public and the relevant congressional committees at the time. Congress and the American people were kept so deep in the dark that on April 30, 1970, as he announced the first publicly avowed U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia to strike at suspected enemy base areas, Nixon could baldly lie, telling the country: “For five years neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.”

It was only in 1973, during the Watergate scandal, that the secret bombing allegations came to the fore, prompting the first effort to impeach Nixon on the grounds that he had waged a secret war in a neutral nation in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Eventually, that article of impeachment was voted down in the name of political expediency. In the face of the other charges, however, Nixon resigned from office.

“That was in essentially unpopulated areas and I don’t believe it had any significant casualties,” Kissinger told me at the 2010 State Department conference, titled “The American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975,” when I questioned him about the bombing. It was effectively the same reply he offered British journalist David Frost during a 1979 NBC News interview in which Frost charged that Kissinger’s Cambodia policy set in motion a series of events that would “destroy the country.” Kissinger stormed out of the studio after the taping and Frost quit the project, alleging interference by NBC, which was then also employing Kissinger as a consultant and commentator. NBC later released a transcript of the interview but allowed Kissinger to amend his comments through an attached letter to NBC News President William Small.

“We did not start to destroy a country from anybody’s point of view when we were bombing seven isolated North Vietnamese base areas within some five miles of the Vietnamese border, from which attacks were being launched into South Vietnam,” Kissinger told Frost. In typical fashion of seizing on discrepancies and muddying debates, he accurately denied Frost’s contention that Base Area 704 was bombed — a mistake stemming from a typographic error in a Pentagon document — during the secret B-52 attacks, noting that “base area 740” was actually attacked. He said recommendations of targets were accompanied by a statement “that civilian casualties were expected to be minimal.”

There were in fact 1,136 civilians living in Base Area 740, according to the Pentagon; a formerly top secret Air Force report, declassified decades after the Frost interview, noted that only 250 enemy forces were present there. An Army document I discovered in the National Archives also notes that the military was aware that civilians “were wounded/killed by B-52 strikes in Base area 740” between May 16 and 20, 1970, around the time of the SUPPER attacks. According to the confidential case file, those slain and injured were “Montagnards,” members of an ethnic minority whose “hamlets were not accurately reflected on commonly used maps.”

Meak Hen, left; Koul Saron, center; and Meak Nea, right, speak with reporter Nick Turse in Tralok Bek in 2010.

Photos: Tam Turse

“I Was the Only Survivor of My Whole Family”

In 2010, the village was officially known as Ta Sous, but to its inhabitants it was still known by its name during the American war: Tralok Bek. “Every house had a bunker during the war. But during the day, if you were out tending to the cows, your life might depend on a termite hill and whether you could hide behind it,” Meas Lorn explained. “Planes dropped bombs. Helicopters strafed. Many people died,” said Meak Satom, a gray-haired man with a gold tooth. A B-52 strike in 1969 killed about 10 people, including a young friend, he recalled.

While I interviewed locals about the many attacks that occurred there during the war, Sdeung Sokheung said little. But when I brought out a binder filled with photographs of many different types of American aircraft, she zeroed in on an F-4 Phantom. Pointing at it, she said that as a girl, she had witnessed the bombing of Ta Hang village, about eight kilometers away, by that type of plane.

After finishing our interviews in Tralok Bek, I traveled winding dirt roads, past stunted bushes and the occasional thin, tan-colored cow, until we reached an area of dry, rock-hard rice paddies and towering palms. A few minutes later, in a rustic wooden home, I found 64-year-old Chan Yath, a woman with a substantial head of dark hair and teeth stained from chewing betel nut. I asked if there had been a bomb strike in the area during the war. She said yes; a family had been nearly wiped out. The lone survivor, she explained, was her cousin, An Seun. A younger woman was dispatched to find An and, 20 minutes or so later, we saw her — a tiny, aging mother of 10 — ambling along a narrow paddy dike path leading to the rear of Chan’s home. “During the time of a full moon,” said An, referring to a Buddhist holy day, she was off visiting her grandfather’s house. “At around 10 a.m., an airplane dropped a bomb on my home. My parents and four siblings were all killed,” she told me with wet eyes and a catch in her throat. “I was the only survivor of my whole family.”

During these same years, the U.S. was also conducting clandestine, cross-border ground operations inside Cambodia. In the two years before Nixon and Kissinger took over the war, U.S. commandos conducted 99 and 287 missions, respectively. In 1969, the number jumped to 454. Between January 1970 and April 1972, when the program was finally shut down, commandos carried out at least 1,045 covert missions inside Cambodia. There may, however, have been others, ostensibly launched by Kissinger, that were never disclosed.

From January to May 1973, between stints as deputy assistant to the president for national security and White House chief of staff, Al Haig served as the vice chief of staff of the Army. Retired Army Brig. Gen. John Johns told me that during this time, he was in Haig’s office at the Pentagon when an important call came in. “I was briefing him on something, and the red phone rang, which I knew was the White House,” Johns recalled. “I got up to leave. He motioned me to sit down. I sat there and heard him tell them how to cover up our intrusions into Cambodia.”

Johns — who had never before revealed the story to a reporter — was relatively sure that Haig was referring to past covert actions, yet did not know if the operations were made public or who was on the other end of the phone line. But Kissinger was responsible for many of the cross-border missions, according to Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council. “A lot of the time, he was authorizing the ongoing covert excursions into Cambodia,” he told me. “We were running a lot of covert ops there.”

Illustration: Matthieu Bourel for The Intercept; Source Photograph: AP

“How Could the People Escape?”

After two days of driving local roads asking for directions, I turned off a highway onto a red dirt track that cut through lush farmland and finally spilled into a border village of simple wooden homes amid a sea of variegated greenery. During the war, these houses had looked much the same, said village chief Sheang Heng, a wiry man with calloused hands and bare feet wearing a loose dress shirt that had once been white. The only real change was that corrugated metal had replaced most of the old thatch and tile roofs.

In 1970, when Sheang was 17 years old, this village was on the front line of America’s Cambodian incursion. Halfway around the world, at Kent State University, members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students during a May 4, 1970, protest against this new stage in the war. While that massacre received worldwide attention, a larger one in Sheang’s village three days earlier went unnoticed.

On May 1, 1970, helicopters circled the Cambodian village of “Moroan” (an American’s phonetic spelling of the name) before opening fire, killing 12 villagers and wounding five, according to a formerly classified U.S. document that, until now, has never been publicly disclosed. After the assault, another helicopter landed and carried off the injured; the survivors fled their village to another named “Kantuot,” located in a neighboring district.

There is no village in Cambodia named “Moroan,” but the hamlet near the Vietnamese border where I located Sheang was, he said, called Mroan. As in the other Cambodian border villages I visited, focusing on a lone attack cited in U.S. military documents left residents baffled, given that they had endured many airstrikes over many years. Still, when asked about the date, Sheang gestured toward what is now the far edge of the village. “Many died in that area at that time,” he recalled. “Afterward, the people left this village for another named Kantuot.”

Mroan, Cambodia, in 2010.

Photo: Tam Turse

Sheang and Lim South, who was 14 years old in 1970, said that many types of aircraft battered Mroan, from helicopter gunships to massive B-52 bombers. As Sheang — who lost his mother, father, a grandfather, a nephew, and a niece, among other relatives, to airstrikes — told me about the relentless attacks, his eyes reddened and went vacant. “The explosions tossed the earth into the air. The ‘fire rocket’ burned the houses. Who could survive? People ran, but they were cut down. They were killed immediately. They just died,” he said, trailing off as he moved to a far corner of the room and slumped to his knees.

Each survivor told a similar story. Lim’s sister and three brothers were killed in bombing raids. Thlen Hun, who was in her 20s in the early 1970s, said her older brother was killed in an airstrike. South Chreung — shirtless in dress pants with a vibrant orange krama, the traditional Cambodian scarf, around his neck — told me that he had lost a younger brother in a different attack.

Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead, they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines, people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself, then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S. Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said Sheang.

Sheang and Thlen said that about half the families in Mroan — some 250 people — were wiped out by U.S. attacks. They led me to the edge of the village, a riot of foliage in every shade of green that sloped into a depression, one of several remaining nearby bomb craters. “About 20 people were killed here,” said Sheang gesturing toward the crater. “It used to be deeper, but the land has filled it in.” Thlen — slim, with graying hair, her brown eyes narrowed in a perpetual squint — shook her head and walked to the crater’s edge. “It was disastrous. Just look at the size,” she said, adding that this hole was just one of many that once dotted the landscape. “How could the people escape? Where could they escape to?”

A boy stands at the edge of a bomb crater in Mroan in 2010.

Photo: Tam Turse

The Stolen Suzuki and the Girl Left to Die

The results of Nixon’s December 1970 telephone tirade and Kissinger’s order to set “anything that flies on anything that moves” were immediately palpable. During that month, sorties by U.S. helicopters and bombers tripled in number. Soon after, in May 1971, U.S. helicopter gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds, along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.

How many similar killings occurred will never be known. Cover-ups were common, investigations were rarely undertaken, and crimes generally evaporated with the fog of war. But there were ample opportunities for mayhem and massacre. In the two years before Nixon took office, there were officially 426 helicopter gunship sorties in Cambodia, according to a Defense Department report. Between January 1970 and April 1972, there were at least 2,116. In January 1971, Congress enacted the Cooper-Church amendment, which prohibited U.S. troops, including advisers, from operating on the ground in Cambodia, but America’s war continued unabated. Evidence soon emerged that the U.S. was violating Cooper-Church, but the White House lied about it to Congress and the public. “As long as we didn’t set our foot on that ground, we basically weren’t there, even though we did missions there every day,” Gary Grawey, an Army helicopter crew chief who flew daily missions in Cambodia during the spring of 1971, including the May mission that killed the young girl, told me.

“They attacked that village,” Grawey said, noting that both the South Vietnamese and American troops shot up the hamlet. “They were shootin’ and they didn’t even know who they were shootin’ at,” he recalled, adding that the victims were “women and children,” just “regular villagers.”

It started at half past noon on May 18, 1971, according to an Army investigation file and previously unreported summary documents produced by a Pentagon task force in 1972, when three U.S. helicopters — a “hunter-killer team” conducting a reconnaissance mission — skimmed the treetops inside Cambodia. The team came upon a village where they spotted motorcycles and bicycles that, according to crew members’ testimony, were suspected of being part of an enemy supply convoy. Hovering above, the Americans tried to motion for people on the ground to open packs on the vehicles. When the villagers instead began moving away, the highest-flying helicopter fired two incendiary rockets, a numbingly common tactic to draw out enemy personnel who might be hiding nearby. While the crew of one of the helicopters reported taking isolated ground fire, no Americans were killed or wounded, nor were any enemy personnel or weapons ever found.

According to a confidential report discovered in the U.S. National Archives and published here for the first time, the high-flying helicopter then “rocketed and strafed the buildings and surrounding area with approximately 15 to 18 rounds of high explosive rockets and machine gun fire.”

Capt. Clifford Knight, pilot of the “low bird,” said that his gunner shot an apparently unarmed man, clad in civilian clothes, who was “trying to run away.” The gunner, John Nicholes, admitted it, noting that the killing took place after the initial rocket barrage.

Capt. David Schweitzer, the “high bird” commander, testified to rocketing and strafing the area and calling for the insertion of South Vietnamese, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam, troops to search for suspected enemy forces. According to a summary of the testimony of Grawey, the helicopter crew chief who ferried an elite ARVN Ranger team and an American captain, Arnold Brooks, to the village:

CPT Brooks and the ARVN Rangers acted “hog wild” when they deplaned, shooting up the area although they received no return fire. … [H]e did observe 5 to 10 Cambodian personnel that appeared to be wounded, but that he did not know if they were wounded from air or ground fire.

Decades later, Grawey reconfirmed details of the incident in an interview, noting that, as the ARVN deployed from the helicopter, he told Brooks that “he was not to get off my bird.” But Brooks, whom Grawey described as “gung ho,” pulled rank and ignored him. Brooks — who he said was carrying a non-regulation “machinegun” — started shooting indiscriminately.

Davin McLaughlin, the commander of a replacement “low bird” that was called in when the first helicopter ran short on fuel, similarly noted that the South Vietnamese met no resistance and, according to the documents, “grabbed what they could.” A summary of the testimony of his gunner, Len Shattuck, in the investigation file adds:

The ARVN Rangers appeared melodramatic when they were inserted and in his opinion fired excessively in the area. … He stated that there were approximately 15 wounded personnel in the area and that he observed 2 males 50-60 years of age, and one female 8-10 years of age, that appeared to be dead.

In a 2010 interview, Shattuck told me that he didn’t fire a shot that day and stressed that he only saw one section of the village. What he saw there, however, stayed with him. “We came into a smoking village,” he said. “I witnessed dead bodies. I witnessed some wounded people that appeared to be civilians. … We didn’t evac[uate] anybody.” Shattuck remembered the little girl as even younger than indicated by his testimony, just 3 to 5 years old, and that she was covered with blood. “She was pretty badly shot up,” he recalled.

As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes, tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army documents. Brooks acknowledged his service in Cambodia during a telephone conversation and asked for a formal interview request by email. He did not respond to that request or subsequent ones.

Agness, according to an Army investigator’s summary, said that he received “a radio request to evacuate a wounded girl [but] denied on instructions of CPT Brooks since he was fully loaded with the ARVN Ranger team, a motorcycle and he was low on fuel.” The stolen Suzuki was presented as a gift to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Carl Putnam, who was later seen tooling around base on it, according to the investigation documents. The Army concluded that the wounded girl, left behind for the sake of the Suzuki, died.

Furious, Gary Grawey resolved to report Arnold Brooks. “I was really pissed at the time,” he told me. “I said I would report him, which I did.” A previously unreported final status report on the “Brooks Incident,” contained in the files of the Pentagon war crimes task force, concluded that allegations of excessive bombardment, pillage, and a violation of the rules of engagement had been “substantiated.” While no enemy weapons or war materiel were found in the village, according to the report, civilian casualties “were estimated at eight dead, including two children, 15 wounded and three or four structures destroyed. There is no evidence that the wounded were provided medical treatment by either U.S. or ARVN forces.”

Putnam and a direct subordinate were issued letters of reprimand — a low-grade punishment — for their “actions and/or inactions” in the case. (Putnam died in 1976.) While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.

A U.S. jet bombs a suspected Khmer Rouge advance position while a government soldier walks into the dry rice field with a gun on his shoulder in Samrong, Cambodia, on July 10, 1973.

Photo: Roland Neveu/LightRocket via Getty Images

Backing the Genocidaires

When Henry Kissinger hatched his plans for the secret bombing of Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge numbered around 5,000. But as a 1973 CIA cable explained, the Khmer Rouge’s recruitment efforts relied heavily on the U.S. bombing:

They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda. … The [Khmer Rouge] cadre tell the people … the only way to stop “the massive destruction of the country” is to remove [U.S.-backed junta leader] Lon Nol and return Prince Sihanouk to power. The proselyting cadres tell the people that the quickest way to accomplish this is to strengthen [Khmer Rouge] forces so they will be able to defeat Lon Nol and stop the bombing.

The U.S. dropped more than 257,000 tons of munitions on Cambodia in 1973, almost the same amount as during the previous four years combined. A report by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that “the intense American bombing in 1973 increased the cumulative number of refugees to nearly half of the country’s population.”

Those attacks galvanized Pol Pot’s forces, allowing the Khmer Rouge to grow into the 200,000-person force that took over the country and killed about 20 percent of the population. Once the regime was in power, the political winds had shifted and Kissinger, behind closed doors, told Thailand’s foreign minister: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” He then clarified his statement: The Thai official should not repeat the “murderous thugs” line to the Khmer Rouge, only that the U.S. wanted a warmer relationship.

In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S., however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.

That same year, Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of large nations.”

In 2001 and again in 2018, the late chef and cultural critic Anthony Bourdain offered sentiments shared by many, but rarely put so eloquently:

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic.

In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he ducked investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and quickly leaving Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths in Cambodia or anywhere else.

Illustration: Matthieu Bourel for The Intercept; Source Photograph: Getty Images

“Play With It. Have a Good Time.”

“To spare you is no profit; to destroy you, no loss” was the cold credo of the Khmer Rouge. But it could just as easily have been Kissinger’s. In 2010, I followed up with Kissinger, pressing him on the contradiction in his claims about only bombing “North Vietnamese in Cambodia” but somehow killing 50,000 Cambodians, by his count, in the process. “We weren’t running around the country bombing Cambodians,” he told me.

The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates otherwise, and I told him so.

“Oh, come on!” Kissinger exclaimed, protesting that I was merely trying to catch him in a lie. When pressed about the substance of the question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a good time.”

I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He stalked off.

Cambodians in villages like Tralok Bek, Doun Rath, and Mroan didn’t have the luxury of such an easy escape.

The post Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings appeared first on The Intercept.

Inside the Pentagon’s New “Perception Management” Office to Counter Disinformation

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 17 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Not long after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched what it called the Office of Strategic Influence, which would seek to “counter the enemy’s perception management” in the so-called war on terror. But it quickly became clear that the office, operating under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, would be managing those perceptions with its own disinformation.

As the New York Times reported at the time, its work was to “provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion.” In the nascent Internet age, observers worried the propaganda could boomerang back on Americans.

“The question is whether the Pentagon and military should undertake an official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad,” the Times reported in 2004. “But in a modern world wired by satellite television and the Internet, any misleading information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by American news outlets.”

Now, two decades later, “perception management” is once again becoming a central focus for the national security state. On March 1, 2022, the Pentagon established a new office with similar goals to the one once deemed too controversial to remain open. Very little has been made public about the effort, which The Intercept learned about through a review of budget documents and an internal memo we obtained. This iteration is called the Influence and Perception Management Office, or IPMO, according to the memo, which was produced by the office for an academic institution, and its responsibilities include overseeing and coordinating the various counter-disinformation efforts being conducted by the military, which can include the U.S.’s own propaganda abroad.

The memo contains a hypothetical exercise shedding light on the kind of work the IPMO does for the Pentagon:

Let’s say DoD wants to influence Country A’s leaders to stop purchasing a weapon system from Country B (because we believe the continued purchasing might jeopardize DoD’s military advantage, in some way, if the U.S. ever had to engage in armed conflict with Country A.) Assuming the IPMO has worked to establish the desired behavior change, how might key influencers be identified that have sway over these leaders’ thought processes, beliefs, motives, reasoning, etc. (including ascertaining their typical modes and methods of communication)? Thereafter, assuming an influence strategy is developed, how might the DIE or IC determine if DoD’s influence activities are working (aside from waiting and watching hopefully that Country A eventually stops purchasing the weapons system in question from Country B)?

The memo is signed by the IPMO’s acting director, James Holly. Holly previously served as director of special programs for U.S. Special Operations Command. He has an extensive intelligence background, having served as intelligence chief for an unnamed paramilitary in Iraq, according to publicly available biographies.

The Pentagon never publicly announced the office, which has not been reported on in any detail, but it was described in a budget document last year as a response to the shifting geopolitical environment away from counterterrorism and back toward great power competition, of the kind seen in the Cold War. Though the budget does not identify the office’s funding, procurement records suggest that it numbers in the multimillions.

The IPMO would “employ a broad scope of operational capabilities to address the current strategic environment of great power competition,” it states. “It will develop broad thematic influence guidance focused on key adversaries; promulgate competitive influence strategies focused on specific defense issues, which direct subordinate planning efforts for the conduct of influence-related activities; and fill existing gaps in policy, oversight, governance, and integration related to influence and perception management matters.”

Also established in 2022, according to the budget document, was the Defense Military Deception Program Office, tasked with “Sensitive Messaging, Deception, Influence and other Operations in the Information Environment.”

While perception management involves denying, or blocking, propaganda, it can also entail advancing the U.S.’s own narrative. The Defense Department defines perception management in its official dictionary as “[a]ctions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.” This is the part that has, historically, tended to raise the public’s skepticism of the Pentagon’s work.

The term “perception management” hearkens back to the Reagan administration’s attempts to shape the narrative around the Contras in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration sought to kick what his Vice President George H.W. Bush would later call the “Vietnam syndrome,” which it believed was driving American public opposition to support for the Contras. Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, directed the agency’s leading propaganda specialist to oversee an interagency effort to portray the Contras — who had been implicated in grisly atrocities — as noble freedom fighters.

“An elaborate system of inter-agency committees was eventually formed and charged with the task of working closely with private groups and individuals involved in fundraising, lobbying campaigns and propagandistic activities aimed at influencing public opinion and governmental action,” an unpublished draft chapter of Congress’s investigation into Iran-Contra states. (Democrats dropped the chapter in order to get several Republicans to sign the report.)

The Smith-Mundt Act, passed in 1948 in the wake of the Second World War, prohibits the the State Department from disseminating “public diplomacy” — i.e., propaganda — domestically, instead requiring that those materials be targeted at foreign audiences. The Defense Department considered itself bound by this requirement as well.

After the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon triggered backlash after U.S. propaganda was disseminated in the U.S. In 2004, the military signaled that it had begun its siege on Fallujah. Just hours later, CNN discovered that this was not true.

But in 2012, the law was amended to allow propaganda to be circulated domestically, under the bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, introduced by Reps. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, which was later rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act.

“Proponents of amending these two sections argue that the ban on domestic dissemination of public diplomacy information is impractical given the global reach of modern communications, especially the Internet, and that it unnecessarily prevents valid U.S. government communications with foreign publics due to U.S. officials’ fear of violating the ban,” a congressional research service report said at the time of the proposed amendments. “Critics of lifting the ban state that it may open the door to more aggressive U.S. government activities to persuade U.S. citizens to support government policies, and might also divert the focus of State Department and the BBG [Broadcasting Board of Governors] communications from foreign publics, reducing their effectiveness.”

The Obama administration subsequently approved a highly classified covert action finding designed to counter foreign malign influence activities, a finding renewed and updated by the Biden administration, as The Intercept has reported.

The IPMO memo produced for the academic institution hints at its role in such propagandistic efforts now. “Among other things, the IPMO is tasked with the development of broad thematic messaging guidance and specific strategies for the execution of DoD activities designed to influence foreign defense-related decision-makers to behave in a manner beneficial to U.S. interests,” the memo states.

As the global war on terror draws to a close, the Pentagon has turned its attention to so-called great power adversaries like Russia and China. Following Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, which in part involved state-backed efforts to disseminate falsehoods on social media, offices tasked with combating disinformation started springing up all over the U.S. government, as The Intercept has reported.

The director of national intelligence last year established a new center to oversee all the various efforts, including the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.

The Pentagon’s IPMO differs from the others in one key respect: secrecy. Whereas most of the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-disinformation efforts are unclassified in nature — as one former DHS contractor not authorized to speak publicly explained to The Intercept — the IPMO involves a great deal of highly classified work.

That the office’s work goes beyond simple messaging into the rarefied world of intelligence is clear from its location within the Pentagon hierarchy. “The Influence and Perception Management Office will serve as the senior advisor to the USD(I&S) [Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security] for strategic operational influence and perception management (reveal and conceal) matters,” the budget notes.

When asked about the intelligence community’s counter-disinformation efforts, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress this month, “I think DIA’s perspective on this, senator, is really speed: We want to be able to detect that and it’s really with our open-source collection capability working with our combatant command partners where this is happening all over the world — and then the ability to turn something quickly with them, under the right authorities, to counter that disinformation, misinformation.”

The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Correction: May 19, 2023
Holly was previously director of special programs for U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, not the director of Special Operations Command.

The post Inside the Pentagon’s New “Perception Management” Office to Counter Disinformation appeared first on The Intercept.

How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic

James Risen — Tue, 09 May 2023 10:00:16 +0000

On the night of December 23, 1975, Ron Estes, the CIA’s deputy station chief in Athens, was lounging on the couch in his girlfriend’s apartment when the man who worked as a driver for his boss, Richard Welch, burst through the front door.

“A shooting, and Mr. Welch is down,” the driver yelled.

Estes grabbed his coat and ran outside, ignoring his girlfriend’s pleas to stay.

At Welch’s house in the Greek capital, Estes saw the station chief lying on his back on the sidewalk, his wife, Kika, kneeling beside him. Blood covered Welch’s face, and Estes could see immediately that he was dead. “I didn’t need to feel for a pulse,” he said in an interview. A police car arrived, and Estes asked the officer to call an ambulance. When no ambulance arrived, they hauled the body into Welch’s car and Estes and Welch’s driver followed the police officer, siren blaring and lights flashing, through the streets of Athens to the nearest hospital. A medical team was waiting; they quickly placed Welch on a gurney and took him to an examining room. There, a doctor placed a stethoscope on Welch’s chest and confirmed to Estes that he was dead.

Welch was 46 years old. A career CIA officer, he had been the CIA’s Athens station chief for six months.

At the hospital, Welch’s driver finally caught his breath and told Estes what had happened. He had driven Welch and his wife home from a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, then stopped in front of the walled compound that enclosed Welch’s house to open the front gates. As Welch and his wife got out, three armed men in a black car pulled up behind them, burst out of the car, and confronted Welch.

“Put your hands up!” one of the men told Welch in Greek.

“What?” Welch asked in English.

One of the gunmen leveled his .45 caliber handgun and fired three times. An autopsy later showed that the first shot hit Welch in the chest, rupturing his aorta and killing him instantly. The three men got back in their car and sped away. That’s when Welch’s driver rushed to get Estes.

The hospital lobby soon filled with journalists, who had most likely heard about the shooting by monitoring the city’s police radio. Estes realized that many of them already seemed to know that Welch had been the CIA’s station chief. Steven Roberts, a New York Times reporter in Athens who covered Welch’s murder, wrote the next day that he had been talking with Welch at the ambassador’s Christmas party an hour before the shooting.

A spokesperson from the U.S. Embassy arrived, and Estes slipped away from the crowd of reporters. The police found the gunmen’s car, which had been stolen, abandoned several blocks from Welch’s home.

Back at the CIA station, Estes sent cables to CIA headquarters and talked on a secure phone with a top agency official. “When I finished briefing him, he said, ‘I could only hear about half of what you said.’” Estes recalled. “‘Send me a cable repeating what you said immediately. We’ve got to go to the president.’”

An undated photograph of Athens station chief Richard Welch before his death in 1975.

Photo: The Boston Globe, 1975

Welch’s assassination was huge news and struck a painful political nerve in Washington, coming at the end of a year of stunning disclosures about the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community by the Senate’s Church Committee, which, throughout 1975, had been conducting the first major congressional investigation of the CIA. The Church Committee uncovered so many secrets and generated so many headlines that pundits were already calling 1975 “the Year of Intelligence.”

Before the Church Committee was created in January 1975, there had been no real congressional oversight of the CIA. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees did not yet exist, and the Church Committee’s unprecedented investigation marked the first effort by Congress to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the CIA — and to curb its power.

Sen. Frank Church, the liberal Democrat from Idaho who chaired the committee, had come to believe that the future of American democracy was threatened by the rise of a permanent and largely unaccountable national security state, and he sensed that at the heart of that secret government was a lawless intelligence community. Church was convinced it had to be reined in to save the nation.

The Church Committee’s unprecedented investigation marked the first effort by Congress to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the CIA — and to curb its power.

To a great degree, he succeeded. By disclosing a series of shocking abuses of power and spearheading wide-ranging reforms, Church and his Committee created rules of the road for the intelligence community that largely remain in place today. More than anyone else in American history, Church is responsible for bringing the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the government’s intelligence apparatus under the rule of law.

But first, Church and his committee had to withstand a brutal counterattack launched by a Republican White House and the CIA, both of which wanted to blunt Church’s reform efforts. The White House and CIA quickly realized that the Welch killing, which occurred just as the Church Committee was finishing its investigations and preparing its final report and recommendations for reform, could be used as a political weapon. President Gerald Ford’s White House and the agency falsely sought to blame the Church Committee for Welch’s murder, claiming, without any evidence, that its investigations had somehow exposed Welch’s identity and left him vulnerable to assassination.

There was absolutely no truth to the claims, but the disinformation campaign was effective. The Ford administration’s use of the Welch murder to discredit the Church Committee was a model of propaganda and disinformation; an internal CIA history later praised the “skillful steps” that the agency and the White House “took to exploit the Welch murder to U.S. intelligence benefit.”

The Welch case has long since served as a classic example of how to exploit and weaponize intelligence for political purposes. The George W. Bush administration’s efforts to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11; the Republican obsession with the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, and their use of it to discredit then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Donald Trump’s efforts to portray himself as the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy can all be traced back to the way U.S. leaders exploited Welch’s 1975 killing.

The White House and CIA were aided in their propaganda campaign by the fact that Estes did not go public at the time with his account of what really happened in Athens. Now, nearly 50 years later, Estes has finally broken his silence. In interviews for our new book, “The Last Honest Man,” he talked in detail about the murder and its causes with a journalist for the first time, supplying new evidence that Welch’s assassination stemmed from the toxic politics of Athens — not Washington.

Greek Cyprist demonstrators storm the gate of the U.S. Embassy as police fire tear gas on Aug. 19, 1974.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

Welch’s killing was a direct result of the feverish political climate that gripped Greece in the mid-1970s. In July 1974, the right-wing military junta that ruled Greece backed a coup in Cyprus to oust the island’s president and create a union between Greece and Cyprus. Making Cyprus fully Greek was a longtime objective of Greek right-wing ultranationalists, but the move immediately prompted a Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Greek junta leader Dimitris Ioannidis bitterly blamed the United States for not stopping the Turkish invasion.

Greek hostility toward the United States spread. On August 19, 1974, a pro-Greek mob attacked the U.S. embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, and both U.S. Ambassador Rodger Davies and a local embassy employee were killed. After a ceasefire, Cyprus was divided into Greek and Turkish zones; the disastrous outcome of the coup in Cyprus later led to the collapse of the military junta in Athens. But anger in Greece toward the United States continued unabated.

The relationship between the CIA and Greece’s Central Intelligence Service, known as the KYP, was also poisoned. Soon, someone had leaked the names of Welch and a few other officers in the CIA’s Athens station to the Greek press.

In November 1975, Welch’s name and home address were published in English language and Greek language newspapers in Athens. The information “was obviously leaked by hostile KYP officers,” Estes said in the interview, “because the only names leaked were those in liaison contact with KYP.” (CIA overseas stations often included officers who were in liaison contact with the intelligence service of the local country — their identities as CIA officers thus declared to the service so they could meet with them and trade intelligence — and others who were not identified so they could spy without the knowledge of the local government.)

Welch was not hard to find; he lived in a luxurious villa that had been the official residence of the CIA station chief for decades. After his name and home address were published in the press, Estes talked to him about whether he should move. But Welch and Estes concluded that the threat was minimal. “We both agreed that political assassination was not part of the fabric of Greek history or culture,” Estes recalled.

It was a fatal miscalculation. Welch’s murder was carried out by a new, extremely violent Greek leftist guerrilla organization called 17 November. While right-wing Greek nationalists hated the United States for betraying Greece over Cyprus, left-wing Greeks blamed the United States for helping to install the military junta in Athens in 1967. The 17 November group was named for an anti-junta protest by students that was brutally broken up on November 17, 1973. Welch was 17 November’s first target. (The group continued to conduct terrorist attacks in Greece, including the murders of other American officials, until it was finally crushed in 2002.)

Estes reported the truth back to CIA headquarters: that Welch had been murdered by Greek terrorists after being publicly exposed by the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. His story was buried in the service of a more helpful political narrative.

After Welch’s murder, emotions were running high in the CIA station in Athens. On the night of the assassination, Estes had to restrain another CIA officer after he grabbed a pistol and threatened to seek revenge by killing the KGB’s Athens Rezident, Welch’s Soviet counterpart.

Welch’s murder hit Estes hard as well. He and Welch had come up through the ranks of the agency together, and by 1975, they were close friends who met to play chess every Sunday. Welch and Estes had previously served together in Cyprus, and they understood the island’s status as a battlefield in the long-running conflict between Turkey and Greece. While serving in Cyprus, Estes said, Welch had recruited the personal secretary of Cypriot President Makarios III to spy for the CIA.

Estes was eager to solve his friend’s murder, without waiting for the Greek police. At the time, he didn’t know about the new leftist 17 November organization since Welch’s killing was its first operation. Instead, Estes focused his investigation on a right-wing terrorist group.

He and other CIA officers in Athens grilled their local sources and found that a gunman associated with a Greek-Cypriot right-wing paramilitary group known as EOKA had left Athens on a flight to Nicosia, Cyprus, the day after Welch’s killing. The gunman was known to have killed people in Cyprus with a .45 handgun — the same kind of weapon used to kill Welch.

When he worked in Cyprus years earlier, Estes had recruited an EOKA hitman to work for the CIA. “When I left Cyprus, he told me that whenever the CIA wanted something done that it didn’t want to do itself, call me,” recalled Estes. “So, after Welch was killed, I sent a case officer to Nicosia to meet him and tell him that Ron Estes sent him.”

The CIA officer asked the Cypriot agent if he knew the EOKA killer who had flown from Athens to Cyprus the day after Welch’s murder. The hitman said he did. The CIA officer told the hitman to go meet the man and ask him if he’d killed Welch.

The hitman reported that, when he confronted the EOKA killer, the other man was so scared that he offered to plead his innocence to the CIA himself. An American case officer then met with the man in Laranca, Cyprus, where he passed a CIA-administered polygraph.

Estes’s conviction that Welch had been exposed by the KYP and murdered by Greek terrorists, and the fact that CIA officers were conducting their own murder investigation on the ground in Cyprus, were not made public in Washington at the time. That information would only have gotten in the way of the campaign to exploit Welch’s murder to discredit the Church Committee.

Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence speaks to the press in Washington, D.C., on July 22, 1975.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

By late 1975, Ford and the CIA were both worried about their public standing. The Church Committee’s disclosures of intelligence abuses had weakened the CIA, and the White House was concerned about the political impact of the committee’s disclosures on Ford, the first commander-in-chief who had never been elected either president or vice president. Ford had been the obscure House minority leader in 1973 when he was chosen as vice president under the 25th Amendment by then-President Richard Nixon and Congress. Ford replaced Spiro Agnew, who had been forced to resign amid a corruption scandal; he became president when the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in August 1974. Ford was headed into a tough presidential election campaign in 1976, and he wasn’t even assured of winning the Republican nomination. He faced a formidable challenge on the right from former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, and so Ford was eager to prove his conservative bona fides.

Now, with Welch’s assassination, the White House and CIA quickly realized they had been handed a political gift — a martyred hero whose death they could lay at the feet of liberal Democrat Church.

Largely through innuendo, the White House and the CIA blamed the Church Committee for Welch’s death, claiming that its investigations had somehow led to his exposure.

It didn’t matter that Welch’s murder had nothing to do with the Church Committee. It didn’t matter that Estes had told CIA headquarters that the Greek intelligence service had leaked Welch’s name and address to the Greek press as revenge for U.S. policy in Cyprus. Largely through innuendo, the White House and the CIA blamed the Church Committee for Welch’s death, claiming that its investigations had somehow led to his exposure.

The day after Welch’s murder, Welch’s father, who had been living in Athens with his son, asked Estes to see if Welch could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Welch had never served in the military, so burial at Arlington would require a special exemption.

Estes says he cabled CIA headquarters about the request, and Ford quickly gave his approval. That led to a grand political moment, stage-managed by the White House.

A U.S. Air Force plane flew Welch’s body from Athens to Washington. Welch’s son, a Marine lieutenant wearing his dress blues, accompanied his father’s body on the flight. The plane delayed its landing, circling Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington for 45 minutes so its arrival could be broadcast live during the morning network television news programs.

Daniel Schorr, a CBS News correspondent who covered the event, wrote in his personal journal, which was published in Rolling Stone in 1976, that “the public relations people explain that the big cargo plane, already overhead, will stay in a holding pattern and land at 7 a.m. so that it will be available for live televising on network morning news programs. We do in fact carry it live on the CBS Morning News.”

Welch’s January 6, 1976, funeral service at Arlington was attended by Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and CIA director William Colby. No president had ever before attended the funeral of a slain CIA officer.

After the funeral service, Ford stood beside Welch’s widow while Welch’s coffin was placed on a horse-drawn caisson. “We watch, and film … the same caisson that carried the body of President Kennedy, the folded flag given to the widow by Colby,” wrote Schorr in his journal.

CIA director William Colby, third from left, stands with the family of Richard Welch at his funeral on Jan. 6, 1976.

Photo: AP

“It is the CIA’s first public national hero,” Schorr wrote. “I have a sense that Welch, dead, has one more service to render the CIA. He will be turned into a symbol in the gathering counter-offensive against disclosure.”

While Ford, Kissinger, and Colby attended Welch’s funeral, the FBI was investigating a death threat against Church in retaliation for Welch’s murder, sent by a group calling itself Veterans Against Communist Sympathizers.

Another prominent Washington official also attended Welch’s funeral: George Herbert Walker Bush, who had just been nominated to succeed Colby as CIA director. Ford had chosen Bush after firing Colby, who Ford believed had cooperated too readily with the Church Committee’s inquiries. The opening battle between the White House, the CIA, and Church would be fought over Bush’s confirmation in the Senate.

Church saw Bush’s nomination as an effort by Ford to put a partisan hack at the CIA, someone who would do the bidding of the White House just as Congress was seeking to curb the agency’s abuses. Church viewed Bush’s nomination as a direct attack on the Church Committee.

The chance to be CIA director came at a critical moment in Bush’s career. Until then, he had a poor record in elected politics. He won a House seat from Texas and served two terms but then lost a campaign for the Senate in 1970. After that, Bush started to rise in the Republican ranks through a series of appointed positions. He served as chair of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, a job that forced him to make repeated public excuses for Nixon but earned him credit for party loyalty. He also served as United Nations ambassador under Nixon and as head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China under Ford.

Ford was considering Bush to be his running mate in 1976; the job as CIA director seemed like a stepping stone. But first, Bush had to get past Frank Church.

Even as he was still working on his committee’s investigations and reports, Church went all out to block Bush’s confirmation. On December 16, 1975, Church testified as a witness against Bush during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Bush’s confirmation was “ill-advised,” Church told the committee, because of his partisan political background and because he had refused to rule out running as vice president in 1976. Church complained that the White House was using the CIA as a “grooming room” for Bush “before he is brought on stage next year as a vice presidential running mate.”

But Welch’s murder quickly changed the political calculus of the confirmation fight in favor of Bush — and against Church.

The White House and CIA followed a subtle but effective strategy to use the Welch murder to help get Bush confirmed, while also poisoning the political climate for Church and his Committee. Immediately after Welch’s murder, the CIA sought to blame the Fifth Estate, a left-wing group based in Washington that published Counter Spy, a small left-wing magazine that had previously printed long lists of CIA officials’ names, including Welch’s when he served in Peru. Agency officials also blamed Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who had just published “Inside the Company,” a controversial book that had listed the names of hundreds of CIA officers and agents.

Many observers saw the CIA’s efforts to blame Counter Spy and Agee as a way to shift the blame for Welch’s murder from Greek terrorists to the CIA’s American critics. And if the public inferred that those American critics also included Church and his committee, so be it.

Conservative pundits quickly made the link explicit. In early January 1976, right-wing columnist Smith Hempstone wrote that the blame for Welch’s murder should be shared by “the congressional committees that for nearly a year have been holding the CIA up to ridicule and verbal abuse.” Around the same time, an anonymous, pro-CIA newsletter, the Pink Sheet, called Welch’s murder “a tragic reminder of a very basic truth: There are individuals and organizations in this country whose activities are aiding the enemies of the U.S. Are we to be impotent against such fifth columnists in our midst? Please write to your congressman and senators and ask what they propose to do about this increasingly dangerous problem. Instead of harming our internal security agencies, Senator Frank Church and his colleagues should be investigating outfits like the Fifth Estate.” The Pink Sheet’s diatribe was included in CIA files and publicly released by the CIA among other documents declassified in 2004. It is not clear whether the newsletter was published by someone affiliated with the CIA.

Meanwhile, former CIA officers began to make themselves available to the press to attack Church. One of them, Mike Ackerman, told reporters that the Church Committee shared the blame for Welch’s death, adding that the committee should have conducted its investigations without publicly disclosing agency operations.

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis saw through the unfolding White House-CIA strategy.

“Understandably, the Welch case has brought to a boil the resentment felt by CIA veterans at critics of the agency,” Lewis wrote. “But it is another matter entirely to use the murder of Richard Welch as a political device, as President Ford and his national security assistants are evidently trying to do now.”

Colby’s “denunciation [of Fifth Estate] plainly had a larger purpose: to make the case that the CIA needs more secrecy in general than it has been getting lately,” Lewis wrote. “President Ford and his colleagues, judging by their recent comments, hope to prevent any thoroughgoing reform of the CIA. They will use the Welch case to that end, in particular to resist limits on covert action and to reduce congressional scrutiny.”

The Washington Star’s Norman Kempster agreed, noting that “only a few hours after the CIA’s Athens station chief was gunned down in front of his home, the agency began a subtle campaign intended to persuade Americans that his death was the indirect result of congressional investigations and the direct result of an article in an obscure magazine. The nation’s press, by and large, swallowed the bait.”

The campaign by the White House and the CIA to exploit Welch’s murder ensured Bush’s confirmation as CIA director. On January 27, 1976, Bush sailed through the Senate on a vote of 64-27. Ford made only one concession to the Senate before the vote: He announced that Bush would not be his running mate in 1976.

Four years later, Bush was elected vice president on the ticket with Reagan.

The false narrative that Welch had been murdered because of reckless disclosures in Washington remained powerful for years afterward, ultimately leading to legislation that made it illegal to publish the names of covert CIA officers, a law that has since often been abused by the government to crack down on whistleblowers and dissent.

CIA director William Colby, left, arrives for questioning by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence accompanied by George Cary, legislative counsel for the CIA, on May 21, 1975.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

After Welch’s murder, public support for the Church Committee waned. Church was stunned by the sudden reversal of the political climate and angered that Bush continued to push the false story around Welch’s killing even after he became CIA director.

During one closed hearing of the Church Committee soon after Bush had been confirmed, “Bush blurted out, ‘You were responsible for Welch’s assassination,’” recalled Fritz Schwarz, the Church Committee’s chief counsel. “It pissed off everybody. We forced Bush to apologize during the hearing.” Still, the Bush family continued to push false narratives about the Welch murder for years. In the 1990s, Agee, the former CIA officer, sued Barbara Bush for libel after she wrote in her memoir that Welch had been killed after Agee’s book blew his cover. The suit was dropped in 1997 after Bush acknowledged that Agee’s book was not responsible for Welch’s assassination.

Meanwhile, Church also had to convince other senators, whose support for his committee was wavering in the face of the White House and CIA disinformation campaign, that his investigation was not responsible for Welch’s murder.

“One of the things we did was tell other senators that we didn’t reveal Welch’s name,” recalls former Church Committee staffer Loch Johnson. “We had to make it clear to other senators that we had nothing to do with it.”

The controversy over Welch’s murder hit just as Church was about to launch his own bid to run for president in 1976. After the Church Committee had completed its investigations, Church announced his candidacy in March 1976. But by waiting until the committee’s work was done, Church started off far behind the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. Still, Church surprisingly won several primaries before dropping out and became a leading contender to be Carter’s running mate. When Carter instead chose Walter Mondale, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Church began to suspect that CIA officials had worked behind the scenes to torpedo his selection. Church confided to his son that, just before the Democratic convention in New York, he’d gotten a call from the CIA saying the agency had been told that The Economist magazine was going to publish a story revealing that the Church Committee had been infiltrated by the KGB.

“Can you imagine any rumor more certain to spook a presidential candidate than that his prospective vice president has overseen an operation which was infiltrated by the KGB?” Church told his son, Forrest, who recounted the conversation in his 1985 memoir.

It turned out that the reporter the CIA had told Church was writing the story did not exist, and no story was ever published. “Church’s feeling that he had been sandbagged by the CIA might have been an illusion,” Forrest Church wrote. “One thing is certain, however. There is no member of the Senate whom the leaders of our intelligence services would have less preferred sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Former Church staffer Peter Fenn corroborated that account: “We talked a good deal about the CIA torpedoing him.”

The CIA’s hatred of Church didn’t end in 1976.

In 1980, Church was facing a tough reelection campaign in Idaho. As the election loomed, Rep. Steve Symms, a hard-right Republican who represented Idaho’s first congressional district, appeared the most likely candidate to run against him. Symms, whose family owned a large fruit ranch near Caldwell, Idaho, had been plotting to take on Church for years. He had even urged Bob Smith, his friend and chief of staff, to run against Church in 1974 as a stalking horse.

But just in case Symms had any last-minute doubts, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s former chief of counterintelligence, stepped in to give him a push.

Angleton felt he had been humiliated by being forced to testify in public before the Church Committee, and Church was at the top of his personal enemies list. In the late 1970s, Angleton, who was originally from Idaho, began meeting with Symms to convince him to run against Church.

“He was from Boise, and he really despised Frank Church,” Symms said in an interview. “He used to come over to see me in the House,” he added. Angleton would recount to Symms all the damage he claimed Church had wrought on the CIA, Symms said, and then Angleton would say, “You should run against Church.”

“I got exposed to that [intelligence] stuff through Angleton,” Symms added. “I still remember him coming over to my office and sitting on my couch, and he would smoke one cigarette after another. He would kind of put his leg up and talk to me on intelligence. He wanted Church defeated.”

Symms beat Church in 1980, which was cause for celebration in CIA circles.

“After I won the Senate race, I was invited to a party at someone’s house and I was just about the only person there who was not former intelligence,” Symms recalled. “It was quite impressive to meet all these people and see how deeply they all despised Church.”

This article was adapted from “The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys — and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy” by James Risen with Thomas Risen, which will be published on May 9, 2023, by Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © 2023 by James Risen. All rights reserved.

The post How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic appeared first on The Intercept.

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