Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence

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James Bamford is forty years late in discovering that Israel not only spies against the US, but does so constantly and comprehensively, effectively escaping prosecution at the highest levels of government in Washington, and almost always lower down. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Full Book Name: Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence The catastrophic handling of the ‘Russiagate’ debacle — to include the credulity with which the FBI investigators approached the Steele Dossier and the credence those who publicly propagated it lent to what the author rightly calls a “deliberately leaked, largely phony but sensational” document — is well covered in the book. Still, Bamford has convinced the French publisher Hachette to print a news update of the Israeli takeover of the US government.

SPY FIGHT, SPY FLIGHT, SPY FAIL - Dances With Bears SPY FIGHT, SPY FLIGHT, SPY FAIL - Dances With Bears

One difficulty with such an approach is that a scattershot, anecdotal presentation muddles his argument that there has been a general breakdown of US CI.Taken in the aggregate, what the author seems to be saying is that American CI has failed to mount an effective defense against cyber compromises; influence operations and old-fashioned human spying. But these three messages are red. Sometimes there's another one, with the same text as #1 but orange. What does that mean? Did the "red" spy refuse in #1 to rat you out, but if the message is orange, they killed the spy without even asking? The author’s characterization of Maria Butina as the “scapegoat” for a flawed investigation rather than as a suspected Russian agent against which a persuasive case could not be made is, likewise, problematic.The author is, as he convincingly argues, surely right in expressing concern about the role politicization played in the ‘Russiagate’ affair. The fact that large numbers of Americans are consequently concerned about unequal application of the law and misuse of authority, thereby undermining their trust in — and hence the mission-effectiveness of — organizations charged with protecting our country from real CI threats should concern us all. Benjamin Church, Edward Bancroft and — most infamously — Benedict Arnold damaged the patriot cause during the Revolution.Of the three, only Arnold’s treason was revealed before he could operate for a significant period as a spy — and then only by happenstance, rather than due to any concerted counterintelligence effort.George Washington lamented the leaking of his military plans in the press of the day, saying that he “wished that our printers were more discreet”.And Abraham Lincoln famously quipped, “It’s not me that cannot keep a secret, it’s the people I tell that can’t.”However, Bamford missed his own evidence that for as long the decade between 2006 and 2016, Smolenkov had been reporting to the CIA what he saw, heard, or read, and what his Agency handlers wanted to know. However, from all of that Bamford has managed to discover from its “most secret and highest-ranking spy” was that in 2016 Putin had approved doing what the Russian secret servces could do to damage Clinton. Some secret.

Spy vs. spy (not THAT one) : r/EvolveIdle - Reddit Spy vs. spy (not THAT one) : r/EvolveIdle - Reddit

Perhaps far worse is the threat to the lives of scores of courageous Chinese agents who have volunteered to spy for the US within their own country. Over the past decade, more than a dozen agents recruited by the CIA have been killed or imprisoned. James Bamford . . . rips away the secrecy with [ The Puzzle Palace]. There have been glimpses inside the N.S.A. before, but until now no one has published a comprehensive and detailed report on the agency. The quality and depth of Mr. Bamford's research are remarkable . . . Mr. Bamford has emerged with everything except the combination to the director's safe. In some sections it appears that he may even have that . . . By revealing the scope and opening up the operations of the N.S.A. without giving away its most sensitive secrets, Mr. Bamford has performed an important public service with this impressive book.” One gets used to differing opinions and sources, and I fully agree that his anti-Israel inclination is Although the FBI has legal charge of the investigation of cases covered by the Espionage Act, responsibility for the implementation of CI functions, rests with individual agencies in accord with their missions and mandates. This is not the most efficient structure.But the establishment of anything resembling a surveillance state sufficiently robust to obviate all the threats the author cites being anathema to our values, we have rightly opted to prioritize respect for individual rights over efficiency in the way we deal with actual and potential CI threats. The author denounces as “dangerous” leaks such as that he says occurred at “the highest levels of the CIA”, an action he contends resulted in the loss of the Agency’s most valuable spy in Russia”. I have no idea whether this allegation is true.If it is, I join the author by condemning such unauthorized disclosures in the harshest terms.Frankly, not a joy to read, but I learned a great deal from it about the tragic decline of democracy in the USA. I mean I knew that before by Bamford has some very interesting if excruciatingly detailed stories. high level meeting with Trump - See The Mad Hatter, who also connects with Maria.. Disagree that the author is discursive. Thank you for reading. If the Israeli plots are facts with which Bamford excites readers as stranger than fiction, the Russian ones are fictions dressed up by his FBI, CIA and NSA sources to be stranger than facts. Most of them unidentified sources, natch.

Why do my spies always suck? : r/civ - Reddit Why do my spies always suck? : r/civ - Reddit

It must also be said that the author’s clear anti-Israeli biases — views abundantly evident in the book — detract from his argument. For instance, he claims that Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their land; draws uncritical parallels between Israel and apartheid era South Africa and asserts that claims that “phony charges of anti-Semitism” charges levelled against supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are “the tired, go-to weapon used to instantly silence the press and critics of Israel”.Given the histories of the high-profile critics of Israel cited by the author, he might do well to consider the possibility that when people make anti-Semitic remarks, they might actually be anti-Semites. In 1983, David resigned after it was determined that he was inappropriately using his government position to assist Chinese nationals in obtaining entry into the United States. But months before, as if taking his place, his thirty-year-old brother Alex had joined up and also became a clandestine officer. He was born in Hong Kong and, like David, lived for a time in Shanghai. Both also graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Following extensive training at The Farm, he was also provided with the identities of the agency's networks of spies, the various covcom details, and was sent to the Far East. Seven years later he left the agency, and around 1995 he moved to China, there oddly being no restrictions on former spies moving to their target nations. Therefore, little is known about his activities there. The unidentified source is not the only problem of Bamford’s book. For Bamford and his sources are a symptom of the bigger problem which now infects, disables, and discredits much of what passes for investigative journalism in the US, one of the last holdouts for the practice in the English language – it having been wiped out already in England, Canada, and Australia, surviving only by the skin of its teeth in South Africa. Alexander Yuk Ching Ma and his older brother David were both veterans of the CIA's clandestine operations division. David was born in Shanghai in 1935, a time of smoky jazz clubs, bustling casinos, and opium dens. The Pudong District, on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River, became the country's major financial hub, and decades later it would also become its high-tech eavesdropping hub.Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, revealed in a rare speech in 2022 that the domestic intelligence agency had “more than doubled” its efforts against China in recent years and was “running seven times as many investigations” over “Chinese activity of concern” than in 2018. Not a single suspect has been prosecuted in the UK for spying for China, compared with almost 150 in the US in the past three years alone, the Telegraph can disclose. Further I don't like Hollywood movies, so using that as a framing device in addition to the 2016 election & its aftermath, just felt like it was propping up the same mechanisms that brought Donald Trump to office. Also before this, Bamford notes that North Korea was NOT a giant Potemkin village, let alone one without a façade. If you now look at the resultant screen it screams at you that the spy is killed but if you read the text, the mission was successful.