The US Intelligence Community Is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside
First published in July 2018
Dmitry Orlov

In today’s United States, the term “espionage” doesn’t get too
much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk
of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans’ own efforts to
understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term
“intelligence.” This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending
on how you look at things.

First of all, US “intelligence” is only vaguely related to the game of
espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being
played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves
collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it
to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact
that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide
capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that
get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten,
commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that
those released are never interfered with again because doing so would
complicate negotiating future spy swaps.

In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing
prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent
bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent
things, such as “Al Qaeda.” There was no such thing before US
intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

Most recently, British “special services,” which are a sort of Mini-Me
to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit
to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent
whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him
using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based
on no evidence.

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There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and
British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good
old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful
Novichok stuff the British keep at their “secret” lab in Porton Down
doesn’t work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general:
whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the
discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge
sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative
is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently
verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don’t
add much value.

A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the
courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the
source is the person on trial and the method—treason—can be divulged
without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional spies
who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double
agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the
professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or,
failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting
disinformation.

Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special
counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in
Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to
Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it’s been
misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on
Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather
than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack,
and couldn’t have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia.

Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict
Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court
because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: “61.1 A
citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or
extradited to another state.”

Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this
sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing
their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the
courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.

That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn’t
have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft
Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in
downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to
rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged
hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous
career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.

He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of
wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the
Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had
been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen,
then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself.
So, where’s the gratitude? Where’s the love? Oh, and why are the DNC
perps not in jail?

Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on
criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by
Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in
return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and abetted a
convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to begin
serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way,
donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton
election campaign.

In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from
questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have
the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official made the
startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again,
which part of 61.1 don’t they understand?

The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to
the traditional definitions of espionage and
counterespionage—“intelligence” in US parlance—which is to provide
validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best
ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we
disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what
we can actually observe: the purpose of US “intelligence” is not to
come up with or to work with facts but to simply “make shit up.”

The “intelligence” the US intelligence agencies provide can be
anything but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose
is allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact,
they consider facts harmful—be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or
conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden—because facts
require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure
fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily discernible.

The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of
the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while
pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent
(borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military
operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they
are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight:
“moderate” terrorists and so on.

One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from
real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à
la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The
Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this
evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the
process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive
seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping
lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed
with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in
the latest revision, a traitor.

Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He
waffled. A light-hearted answer would have been:

“What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course
they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they
can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently
lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that
they haven’t lied since. And that, based on the information that is
available, is an impossible task.”