Thy Adverse Party is Thy Advocate

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

I read this a few months ago, and didn’t take a pen to it, so these are mostly recollections. It’s definitely one of the best books of 2023.

Spyfail came out at the beginning of last year, and you can almost think of it as a roadmap to some of what has happened since. It is the sort of book that would make any American want to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats, as Mencken would say. It also serves as a review of many of the stupidities of the Trump years, that most reporters, especially the Politico types, thought were so very important. It’s also a vindication of that Claud Cockburn chestnut, “never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

It shows that, as top intelligence officials were appearing more often on cable news, taking on a political role that in years past they kept a tasteful distance from, the agencies they came from had increasingly been failing to protect America’s secrets.

There is a fair amount of thespionage covered here, and it begins with the Sony Pictures hack, which is a real comedy of errors. The Interview, a movie about a film crew assassinating Kim Jong-Un under the guise of making a movie, becomes a real-life international incident, which the North Koreans avenged by hacking the studio, more or less taking control of it. It’s Seth Rogen and Amy Pascal, the former haggling for his artistic rights to show the blood spatter from Jong-Un’s face, and the latter pretending she has a good eye for movies, are the dopey duo here. Of course the Japanese didn’t care for this sort of rocking the boat. Pretty much only a neocon would.

Of course the Obama administration was endlessly solicitous of the Hollywood set, Obama himself being a sort of silver-screen construction, and their tacit approval—Bamford calls it a “secret … thumbs-up” gave the North Koreans the impression that they were broadcasting their intentions. Seth Rogen is a funny guy, but we don’t want him starting any wars.

It is of course completely true that if the administration had told Sony Pictures to tone it down, the Israelis would have hit the Obama administration for its weakness toward David Frum’s Axis of Evil, and Fox and the conservative media would have been all over it. The movie was of course a complete flop.

It was a bit of a surprise to me how big a role North Korea has played in a lot of this hacking. Given that many of their top guys in cyber-espionage are trained in China, though, it seems like an open question how much of this is just the Chinese content to mess with the United States with a degree of plausible deniability.

There is an open question about the identity of the party known as Shadow Brokers, who put up some of the most sophisticated NSA cyber weapons for sale. The lead suspect, fingered by Bamford, is a Booz Allen contractor. Bamford writes he was “far right and a strong Trump supporter.” He’s a fan of Michael Savage, and supporter of the Tea Party. This is the sort of weird collection of things that suggests Israel, rather than Russia, to me. One of the weird things about Bamford’s account is Shadow Brokers didn’t appear to have found a buyer for some of them. That too is suggestive of the Israelis.

The case of Arnon Milchan is covered in depth here, the movie producer who helped steal nuclear technology for Israel. His testimony against Benjamin Netanyahu is more or less the only reason not to hang the bastard—if ever there is ever a good instance for applying the death penalty, nuclear espionage is it. Surely it is only Hollywood privilege, or Jewish privilege, that saves his neck from the noose. He doesn’t deserve it. This is the relevant paragraph, which goes into the ZOA’s role in betraying the United States:

NUMEC’s president was Zalman Shapiro, who also served for a time as president of the local Pittsburgh chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. … With very close ties to the Israeli nuclear scientists involved in the secret nuclear program at Dimona, by the mid-1970s he had become the chief suspect in the unexplained loss of five hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium from the plant.

When Milchan starts to get in trouble is when he starts smuggling krytrons, which are a cathode tube that can be used as nuclear triggers.

There are the usual betrayals that result when things involve the Israelis, in which Milchan walks free, and the various people he recruited into breaking the law for him, like Richard Smyth, end up in prison for long sentences. At the DOJ level, the general MO is impunity for Israelis, harsh punishment for people who cooperate with them. If I were Jewish, I would be somewhat concerned about the social implications of this for people who are savvy about national security matters.

As an exercise, pull up his list of movies from Wikipedia, and think about how many you’ve seen, and how they’ve shaped how you think about things. Now think about how the purpose of Arnon Milchan was to wash cash for the Israelis, through Hollywood. He avoided paying taxes in both the U.S. and Israel.

Milchan was involved in promoting the cause of the South African apartheid government, as he today promotes the Israeli apartheid government, and Bamford writes at some length about the strategic and practical dimensions of the partnership between these two countries. Milchan was involved in the Broadway production Ipi Tombi, after which the Harkness Theater shut down. Milchan was close to Roman Polanski, and produced a staging of Amadeus in which Polanski played Mozart. This is the sort of thing that would make the liberal Jews I grew up around, who often conceive of the purpose of their religion as playing a prophetic moral role in the world, very uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of historical background in here on the U.S.-Israel relationship, some of which was already familiar to me but is a good account if you don’t know it. For instance, the nuclear test conducted in the Carter administration in cooperation with South Africa. The Pollard case is covered here, in he drives into the Israeli embassy and the Israeli ambassador cuts him loose to the FBI, not wanting to cause an international incident.

Of course the book wouldn’t be complete without the corruption surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu, the consummate gangster politician. He’s bribed with cigars, and his wife is bribed with Dom Perignon Rosé.

This is an amusing anecdote involving MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi:

I asked, “why haven’t you looked into Israel?” Suddenly his eyes widened, and he immediately reverted to sign language. He put one finger to his lips and waved another over my tape recorder in what seemed an attempt to make it disappear. Understanding the strange pantomime, I turned off the recorder.

Mr. Figliuzzi knows what it takes to retain a contributorship on a major network.

The fourth section of the book details the Netanyahu trial and the hilariously dysfunctional government of Israel. It’s difficult to express the delta between Israel’s propaganda on the right and the reality of a government descending into rule by gangsterism.

Section five covers in depth the Adelson network’s illegal interference in American politics. In 2016 the pro-Israel donor community put together an enormous pile of cash to fight BDS. What this has resulted in in practice is a bunch of young people being targeted and harassed. What it substantively reflects is the growing awareness, especially by heads of university endowments, that putting money with these Likudnik gangsters is a recipe for having your money stolen. It’s not just about BDS, it’s about criminals wanting to get their hands on American money.

Here’s how Bamford puts it:

Netanyahu was asking Adelson’s task force to launch, on Israel’s behalf and with its secret financial and intelligence support, a nationwide covert operation targeting Americans. It was a dangerous proposition with the potential of turning those taking part into foreign agents of the State of Israel, a serious crime. Before the night was over, the group had raised upward of $50 million for Netanyahu’s propaganda war inside the United States; tens of millions more would covertly come from the Israeli government through a variety of hidden fronts and shell organizations. At the same time the summit was taking place, Netanyahu was meeting with his top national security and intelligence officials. He told them they would receive at least $30 million from the government for the secret offensive, and with the help of Adelson’s group and others possibly as much as $900 million.

Again, this is just flagrantly illegal. At a certain point much of this, run through the IAC, became too much for Haim Saban, and it was Adelson and Adam Milstein running things, the latter being a convicted felon. Here’s more:

In Washington, addressing a private meeting of Adelson and Milstein’s Israeli-American Council, General Vaknin-Gil issued a stark warning, “In order to win,” she said, “we must use tricks and craftiness.” They would include threats, intimidation, harassment, covert influence operations, troll farms, fearmongering, blacklists, and espionage.

A big part of this, Bamford restates often, is pressuring American Jews to break the law. What is described here about Canary Mission, and Sanford Diller, is clearly illegal as well. These organizations work hand-in-glove with the Israeli government:

For Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Canary Mission acts as a key intelligence asset, as does the Israel on Campus Coalition. The list of Americans identified by the group’s campus spies is used to prevent those individuals from entering Israel, including both Jews and Palestinians attempting to visit family.

This is actually nothing new. The Roy Bullock case demonstrates that ADL assets were used for the same thing decades ago. What is somewhat new is some of the financing for Canary Mission is very shady and runs through Israel:

…years ago a family living in Israel’s illegal settlements came to the United States and set up shop in New York City as a nonprofit “charity,” calling itself the Central Fund of Israel. Therefore, the Diller family, through San Francisco’s Jewish Federation, actually “donated” their money to the Central Fund in New York, and in return received a substantial tax rebate. And then the Central Fund simply transferred the money to Megabit Shalom’s bank account in Israel. Under the scheme, billionaires and wealthy Jewish foundations get richer while American taxpayers subsidize the blacklisting and terrorizing of their own children in college.

There is interesting material about the Jewish machine in Southern California, which put up Henry Waxman and the fairly extreme Adam Schiff, who is in most of the press rendered as a liberal.

Some of the material about Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi and the Israelis has been published in The Nation and written about here on this blog, so no need to go over that, but suffice it to say the account makes it very clear the Israelis were using Wikileaks as a cut-out in the DNC leaks scandal.

There’s a sort of Jane Goodall moment in which the notoriously dumb gentle giant Mike Pence is introduced to Itamar Ben-Gvir, and is presumably too deep in the catatonic trance evangelicals slip into whilst in the Holy Land to realize he’s talking to a convicted supporter of terrorism.

There are other stupidities. George Nader being involved in approaching and bribing the Hillary Clinton campaign for the Emiratis, for instance. If this book isn’t enough to convince you that the entire class of treasonous, constantly hedging political consultants needs to be put up against the wall and shot, nothing will.

It seems like most of the smart people in the U.S. and Israel have realized by this point that there’s something deeply wrong in the “special relationship.” The China stuff is a lot more disturbing, some of which dates back to the Bush era. The signals-plane crash off the coast of Southern China is a good case study in how a lot of procedures one would think are routine are simply not followed. All of this stuff involves Jim Clapper, Michael Hayden, and George Tenet, none of whom were ever held accountable for these dramatic failures. Clapper, for one, “was having dinner with the head of North Korea’s intelligence agency at the same time that his counterpart was conducting the largest cyberattack against a U.S. company in history.”

Among the saddest failures here is how the Russiagate hysteria in 2016-2017 led to the necessity of extracting the CIA’s top spy in the Kremlin, Oleg Smolenkov, while the whole rogues’ gallery of top intelligence professionals were spilling their worthless guts to the television networks. Of course, all of them were too craven to talk about Israel, the actual country the Steele Dossier served. Instead, the FBI decided they needed a Russian to string up, and they picked Maria Butina, who seems like a nice girl, but hardly a red sparrow type.

The impression one gets from the 2016 intrigues is a lot of people getting their wires crossed, a lot of people wanting to engage in the dark arts, but both sides basically working for different Israeli factions and being unwilling to talk about it. Hillary Clinton doing her usual nasty insinuations, then with the help of the neocons, and Trump being run by the Jewish mafia. Everybody’s casting aspersions, none of which make a great deal of sense, and everybody is trying to look like the one who takes national security and prestige seriously, while they burn it all down. Stupid, stupid, stupid. A national disgrace.