5. China stealing U.S. arms and military technology from Hong Kong: defector
6. CIA reveals name of FOURTH spy who betrayed the US during Cold War
7. Britain's Secret War With Russia
8. All U.S. Travelers Abroad Should Submit to Facial Recognition Scans, Says Homeland Security
9. Notes on Designing the Marine Corps of the Future (From the Commandant)
10 . War Crime Pardons and What They Mean for the Military
1. Subversive StatecraftThe Changing Face of Great-Power Conflict
Subversive statecraft is a cool sounding name though I do not think our Statesman will like. But how different is it from Political Warfare?
George F. Kennan defined political warfare as "the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace." While stopping short of the direct kinetic confrontation between two countries' armed forces, "political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command... to achieve its national objectives." A country embracing Political Warfare conducts "both overt and covert" operations in the absence of declared war or overt force-on-force hostilities. Efforts "range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures..., and 'white' propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of 'friendly' foreign elements, 'black' psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states." See George Kennan, "Policy Planning Memorandum." May 4, 1948.
Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations. Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989)
U.S. policymakers have been slow to recognize the growing threat of subversion and remain ill-equipped to counter it. A quarter century of unipolarity seems to have caused Washington to forget one of the most important lessons of the Cold War. In the meantime, new technology has lowered the costs of subversion while U.S. military superiority has increased its attractiveness.
Policymakers have three options for responding to the threat of subversion. The first is to reduce the motive, which requires addressing underlying policy disputes. In principle, it may be possible to find an agreeable settlement; third parties can offer their good offices and mediation services, help enforce and guarantee negotiated deals, or condition rewards on the resolution of disputes. But in reality, there are few examples of third parties successfully shepherding lasting settlements to the kinds of policy disputes that typically invite subversion.
A second option for policymakers is to eliminate the means of subversion-that is, to find ways to address the grievances that make potential local proxies open to cooperation with external sponsors. This may be possible in some cases, but not in most.
Since options one and two have at best long odds of success, the focus should instead be on a third one: increasing the costs of subversion. Policymakers must learn to recognize foreign subversion when it does occur; to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate forms of external support; and to impose steep punishments on states that use subversion as a disruptive form of statecraft.
The success of this third option depends on the credibility of the threats and the severity of the costs. For example, the United States has repeatedly criticized Pakistan for supporting the Afghan Taliban, and the administrations of Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama both cut security aid and threatened harsher punitive measures. But these efforts have had little effect. U.S. threats to escalate lack credibility because Washington clearly needs Pakistan's help to build a durable peace in Afghanistan-and because Pakistan, which must live with its neighbor, is confident that it can outlast the United States, which can leave at any time.
To improve credibility, the United States needs to use threats carefully and judiciously and be willing to demonstrate resolve when necessary. Raising costs for offending states will require the United States to bear some of its own. It will need to spend political capital to coordinate with allies and multilateral organizations to enforce punishments on offenders. It will require tailored punitive measures built on an understanding of domestic politics in the offending country. It may even require sacrificing some short-term interests in order to enhance deterrence of subversion in the long term.
Just as states have adapted to a world in which conventional force is no longer commonly used, so too must they adapt to the new normal of subversion. Conflict has not declined; it has merely evolved. And if war is politics by other means, then subversion is war by other means.
A rebel fighter in Baluchistan, Pakistan, March 2006Scott Eells/The New York Times/Redux
The U.S. security and intelligence communities are buzzing with talk of the return of great-power competition. Beijing and Moscow increasingly vie for influence on the global stage. China is remaking the map of Southeast Asia, rolling out infrastructure projects across the developing world, and creating new regional and global institutions. Russia's intervention in the Middle East and in eastern Europe has restored its geopolitical relevance. And in Washington and other Western capitals, policymakers and pundits fret that Chinese and Russian competition with the West could, before long, give way to conflict.
Should great-power conflict come, however, it will bear little resemblance to the traditional interstate wars that analysts study, that academics teach, and for which militaries train. Those wars rarely occur anymore, and that is a good thing for humanity. Instead, conflict plays out indirectly, through a kind of proxy warfare called "foreign subversion."
Foreign subversion is a covert, indirect form of modern statecraft. It involves empowering illicit and armed nonstate groups that act as extensions of a sponsor state. These proxies inflict damage on target states with the aim of deconsolidating them and creating ungoverned space. Their attacks distract the target state and deny it resources, creating bargaining leverage for the sponsor.
Although subversion featured prominently in the Cold War, policymakers have only recently begun to pay attention to the problem of subversion in its updated form. This oversight has been costly to Western interests. Russian subversion deprived Ukraine and Georgia of control over significant swaths of territory. Pakistani subversion has prevented the Afghan state from consolidating any authority beyond Kabul. And Iranian subversion against the Yemeni government and against Saudi Arabia destabilizes the Persian Gulf region. With the exception of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, which Russia annexed directly, Moscow, Islamabad, and Tehran outsourced their dirty work to local proxies that proved to be highly effective extensions of their external sponsors.
For the United States, it is not enough merely to recognize that great-power conflict-indeed, most conflict-is unlikely to take the form of traditional warfare. Policymakers must adapt and forge strategies for a reality in which threats emerge from the gray zone between war and peace. Above all, they must raise the costs for those who attempt subversion in the future.
WAR IS DEAD, LONG LIVE WAR
That policymakers have largely overlooked the use of subversion is not surprising, given the decline of interstate war over the last 75 years. For centuries, force was the key instrument of statecraft and the primary means through which states pursued their interests. But hot conflicts between great powers have all but disappeared, and the wars that do occur tend to be limited, brief, and low intensity.
A confluence of factors explains the unprecedented period of peace since 1945. The advent of nuclear weapons dramatically raised the costs and risks of war, as did economic interdependence and globalization more generally. Changing modes of economic production reduced the value of seizing and holding territory. New international institutions and laws help states resolve conflicts without violence, and changing ideas about the appropriate use of conventional force have reinforced restraint.
But to view the decline of visible and extreme violence between states as evidence of a decline in conflictual international politics would be a mistake. The Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz stressed that war is a means to an end-the continuation of politics by other means. States use force to pursue their aims and interests when bargaining breaks down. Those aims and interests have not disappeared; states have just changed their preferred method of pursuing them. Rather than use force directly to achieve their goals, they engage in subversion-empowering a third-party, nonstate proxy with the aim of weakening the territorial state authority of an adversary. Whereas traditional conflict achieved this end directly through military force, subversion outsources the work to a proxy.
When used effectively, subversion sows disorder that strikes at a target state's sovereignty.
The indirect nature of subversion is crucial to its value as an instrument of foreign policy. By outsourcing the imposition of costs to nonstate actors, subversion requires less military capability and fewer financial resources than conventional force. It is also less visible, which reduces the likelihood of detection. And when it is detected, ambiguity permits plausible deniability. These features are highly advantageous in an international environment in which conventional force is costly and legally proscribed.
The contemporary use of subversion in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere bears some resemblance to its Cold War antecedents, but with crucial differences. The Soviet Union and the United States were more focused on regime change than on territorial deconsolidation; the proximate objective was securing the center rather than crippling it. Today, subversion has a different goal: producing weak states or ungoverned spaces-that is, to disrupt rather than to overthrow, to divide rather than to conquer. When used effectively, subversion sows disorder that strikes at a target state's sovereignty.
MOTIVE AND MEANS
Two signs indicate that a state is likely to use subversion: a motive and a means. The motive generally arises when a state is locked in a severe, salient, and intractable policy dispute with another state. The means depends on the existence of proxies on the ground-agents willing to disrupt order and govern in lieu of state authorities. These agents cannot be easily manufactured out of thin air. In virtually all cases of subversion, foreign sponsors empowered existing aggrieved groups with ambitions to defy the political center.
Subversion is especially attractive when states have few other tools in their foreign policy toolkits. Beijing, for example, has not yet engaged in subversion because China's economic might endows it with economic instruments of statecraft that are unavailable to Russia, Pakistan, or Iran. China's importance to global value chains, the size of its market, and the magnitude of its official finances give it sufficient sources of foreign policy leverage (although if its economy were to slow, subversion could become more attractive).
Subversion has helped drive two challenges that have bedeviled the United States and its partners for decades: ungoverned spaces and state weakness.
Most states, however, lack such a full suite of foreign policy tools. (For them, the primary alternative is military force.) Subversion gives these states a way to gain bargaining leverage, divert an adversary's attention, and tie down military and fiscal resources. It should come as little surprise, then, that subversion has helped drive two challenges that have bedeviled the United States and its partners for decades: ungoverned spaces and state weakness. The terrorist and criminal organizations that take up residence in ungoverned spaces are responsible for a range of "public bads," and weak and poorly developed states consume a disproportionate share of U.S. attention and resources. Much of what the United States spends on security cooperation assistance around the world is aimed at countering these risks.
As a result, even states such as China and Russia that possess a wider range of foreign policy tools may find subversion increasingly attractive. In recent years, Chinese assertiveness and Russian resurgence have forced weak states from the top of the U.S. policy agenda, but it is a mistake to assume that the problem will not reemerge. Rather than portending a return of traditional interstate conflict, great-power competition is more likely to play out through proxies in more fragile target states. The great powers will not be directly victimized, since they are not at risk of territorial deconsolidation, but they will face real dangers of being drawn into and bogged down in target countries.
GRAPPLING WITH THE GRAY ZONE
U.S. policymakers have been slow to recognize the growing threat of subversion and remain ill-equipped to counter it. A quarter century of unipolarity seems to have caused Washington to forget one of the most important lessons of the Cold War. In the meantime, new technology has lowered the costs of subversion while U.S. military superiority has increased its attractiveness.
Policymakers have three options for responding to the threat of subversion. The first is to reduce the motive, which requires addressing underlying policy disputes. In principle, it may be possible to find an agreeable settlement; third parties can offer their good offices and mediation services, help enforce and guarantee negotiated deals, or condition rewards on the resolution of disputes. But in reality, there are few examples of third parties successfully shepherding lasting settlements to the kinds of policy disputes that typically invite subversion.
A second option for policymakers is to eliminate the means of subversion-that is, to find ways to address the grievances that make potential local proxies open to cooperation with external sponsors. This may be possible in some cases, but not in most.
Since options one and two have at best long odds of success, the focus should instead be on a third one: increasing the costs of subversion. Policymakers must learn to recognize foreign subversion when it does occur; to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate forms of external support; and to impose steep punishments on states that use subversion as a disruptive form of statecraft.
The success of this third option depends on the credibility of the threats and the severity of the costs. For example, the United States has repeatedly criticized Pakistan for supporting the Afghan Taliban, and the administrations of Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama both cut security aid and threatened harsher punitive measures. But these efforts have had little effect. U.S. threats to escalate lack credibility because Washington clearly needs Pakistan's help to build a durable peace in Afghanistan-and because Pakistan, which must live with its neighbor, is confident that it can outlast the United States, which can leave at any time.
To improve credibility, the United States needs to use threats carefully and judiciously and be willing to demonstrate resolve when necessary. Raising costs for offending states will require the United States to bear some of its own. It will need to spend political capital to coordinate with allies and multilateral organizations to enforce punishments on offenders. It will require tailored punitive measures built on an understanding of domestic politics in the offending country. It may even require sacrificing some short-term interests in order to enhance deterrence of subversion in the long term.
Just as states have adapted to a world in which conventional force is no longer commonly used, so too must they adapt to the new normal of subversion. Conflict has not declined; it has merely evolved. And if war is politics by other means, then subversion is war by other means.
2. China Fires 'Great Cannon' Cyber-Weapon At The Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Movement
The Great Cannon of China doesn't get fired very often, but when it does the consequences for whoever it is aimed at can be hard-hitting. Operating from behind the Great Firewall of China and used sparingly as the negative press it generates is substantial, this cannon doesn't launch physical projectiles but cyber ones. It's
a state-operated, distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber-weapon, and now it has taken aim at an online forum used by pro-democracy movement protesters in Hong Kong to help coordinate their anti-government demonstrations.
What is the Great Cannon of China?
While not as well-known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), a DDoS tool put to very effective use by the Anonymous hacking group when
attacking websites supporting the Church of Scientology and later those opposed to WikiLeaks, the Great Cannon has the potential to be a much more significant threat. It works by hijacking web traffic from users within the boundaries of the government-controlled Great Firewall of China and redirecting that traffic to websites external to it. This is achieved by "injecting" malicious JavaScript code into the insecure HTTP connections of sites visited by Chinese users. This interception allows the operators of the cyber-weapon to target a chosen web resource with a DDoS attack.
What is a DDoS attack?
A Distributed Denial of Service attack is when a threat actor sends more access requests, of various technical flavors, to a web server than it can handle. The more of these superficially "genuine" requests that are sent simultaneously, the harder it is for the website to function normally. The bigger the attack, the slower the targeted site becomes in dealing with ordinary users trying to connect, ultimately resulting in the site going offline. Some of the biggest and best-known websites have been taken offline by such attacks. Perhaps most notoriously of late when Wikipedia, the seventh most popular site on the planet, was the victim of
a massive DDoS attack.
In the case of the LIHKG forum attack, it would appear that malicious JavaScript files are being served from URLs that would typically provide analytics tracking scripts. The Great Cannon of China has been swapping a number of these script requests, on the fly, with ones containing malicious code.
The Great Cannon of China takes aim at Hong Kong protesters
According to a report from Chris Doman, a security researcher at AT&T Alien Labs, the Great Cannon of China started the current attack on November 25. This follows an initial attack on August 31 when the LIHKG forum, the Hong Kong equivalent to Reddit. The forum was targeted as it has been used by members of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protest movement to coordinate demonstrations.
An official
statement from LIHKG regarding the DDos attack on August 31, stated that the total number of server requests that day exceeded 1.5 billion. "The enormous amount of network requests have caused internet congestion and overload on the server which has occasionally affected the access to LIHKG. The website data and members' information are unaffected," the statement confirmed.
Doman said that it's not likely to succeed in this instance, partly as the LIHKG has robust anti-DDoS mitigation in place and "partly due to some bugs in the malicious JavaScript code that we won't discuss here." Which doesn't make it any the less disturbing, given that it shows the Great Cannon has not been forgotten about.
Indeed, while it has been reported that the attack tool had not been used for two years before the LIHKG attack, Doman said that an attack against a Chinese-language news site has been ongoing during the last year. These attacks started in August 2017, using significantly updated code from the most notorious previous
DDoS attack targeting the Github website in 2015.
That Doman identified bugs in the current attack code, which is mostly the same as the 2017 instance, is a saving grace. For now. If China decides to dust down the big cyber-guns for more active duty in the future, I think it's safe to say that the code will be sharpened up, making it harder to defend against. Not forgetting that any firing of such
a geopolitical cyber-weapon brings with it the potential danger of collateral damage to your business.
3. Dates set for murder trials of Navy SEAL, Marine Raider in death of Green Beret
The two remaining co-defendants
charged in the strangulation murder of a Green Beret staff sergeant while on deployment in Africa now have trial dates set for early 2020.
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Mario Madera-Rodriguez and Navy Chief Special Warfare Operator Tony E. DeDolph both face the
possibility of life in prison if convicted in the June 4, 2017, death of Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar.
Each faces a general court-martial on their charges.
Madera-Rodriguez was arraigned on charges of conspiracy to assault and battery, obstruction of justice, burglary, felony murder, involuntary manslaughter, hazing orders violation and making a false official statement, according to court records. DeDolph was scheduled for arraignment in January.
One SEAL and one Raider are negotiating plea deals in the case.
By: Todd South
Dedolph's trial is scheduled in Norfolk, Virginia, from March 23 to April 3. Madera-Rodriguez's trial is set for April 20 to May 1, according to a press release from Navy Region Mid-Atlantic public affairs.
"If found guilty of felony murder, each could face life in federal prison without parole, reduction in rank to E-1, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and either a dishonorable or bad conduct discharge," according to the press release.
Maxwell was sentenced to four years in military prison after having been charged with negligent homicide, hazing and making false official statements.
A picture at Naval Station Norfolk awaiting the start of a special court-martial for Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Adam Matthews for charges connected to the strangulation death of Army Green Beret Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar in Bamako, Mali on June 4, 2017.
Matthews was the first to plea and laid out previously unconfirmed details about Melgar's death in offsite embassy housing in Bamako, Mali, where all five men were serving on duties to counter local extremist militia activities. Matthews received a year of confinement and bad conduct discharge for his role in the death.
He told the court that he, Maxwell, DeDolph and Madera-Rodriguez and an unidentified British special operator together planned to break into Melgar's room, restrain him, duct tape him and video record him in a sexually embarrassing incident all in retaliation for what the group perceived as personal slights made by Melgar during the preceding deployment, which was nearing an end.
He testified that DeDolph placed Melgar in a chokehold while the others attempted to restrain him. But during the assault, Melgar stopped breathing. He said the men attempted to revive him but were unsuccessful.
I wonder if any of these components come from north Korea. Dr. Bruce Bechtol's book North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa: Enabling Violence and Instability outlines the relationships between north Korea and Iran and other actors in the Middle East and Africa. I would suspect that some of these components could be traced to north Korea.
WASHINGTON - A Navy warship has seized a "significant cache" of suspected Iranian guided missile parts headed to rebels in Yemen, U.S. officials said Wednesday, marking the first time that such sophisticated components have been taken en route to the war there.
The seizure from a small boat by the U.S. Navy and a U.S. Coast Guard boarding team happened last Wednesday in the northern Arabian Sea, and the weapons have been linked to Iran.
Officials said the incident illustrates the continuing illegal smuggling of weapons to Houthi rebels and comes as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were meeting, with Iran as the main topic.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands during their meeting in Lisbon on Wednesday. (Patricia De Melo Moreira, Pool/AP)
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details about a sensitive military mission. In a statement, Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a Pentagon spokesman, said a U.S. warship inspection discovered a cache of weapons and advanced missile components. He said, "An initial investigation indicates that these advanced missile components are of Iranian origin."
The U.S. has consistently accused Iran of illegally smuggling arms to Houthi rebels battling the Yemeni government and has seized smaller and less sophisticated weapons in transit. The missile parts found in this latest incident were described as more advanced than any others previously seized.
Since the spring, the Pentagon has beefed up its military strength in the region, adding about 14,000 troops, ships, aircraft and other assets in response to what officials said is a growing threat from Iran. Officials have been considering
another increase of several thousand forces, which could include air, naval and ground troops, and weapons systems, but no decisions have been made.
According to the U.S. officials, the guided-missile destroyer
Forrest Sherman was conducting routine maritime operations when sailors noticed a small wooden boat that was not displaying a country flag. The Navy and Coast Guard personnel stopped, boarded the boat for inspection and found the weapons.
Officials did not provide the exact number of missiles or parts but did describe it as a significant cache and said it was headed to Yemen. They said the small boat was towed into port because a leak was discovered during the inspection, and the people on the boat were transferred to the Yemeni Coast Guard. The officials did not say where the crew of the small boat was from. The weapons are still on board the U.S. ship.
The officials said the U.S. is still examining the weapons to specifically pinpoint their origin. But they said the missile parts had all the hallmarks of previous Iranian weapons that have been found in Yemen or Saudi Arabia.
Smuggling weapons into Yemen is a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution.
The guided-missile destroyers Nitze and Mason carried out Tomahawk strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen more than two years ago. So who are they?
By: Myriam Renaud, University of Chicago
Houthi rebels control much of northern Yemen, and a Saudi-led coalition, allied with the internationally recognized government, has been fighting them since 2015. A localized cease-fire in
the port of Hodeida was brokered last December by the U.N. but was never fully implemented. Saudi Arabia has been holding indirect talks with the Houthis in Oman, and officials have said that momentum is building in other efforts to end the war.
On at least four occasions during 2015 and 2016, the U.S. seized suspected Iranian weapons during similar ship inspections. In those cases, however, the arms were smaller and less sophisticated.
Nearly two years ago, U.S. officials laid out a display of truck-sized missile remnants at a military base in Maryland, telling reporters that they had been launched into Saudi Arabia from inside Yemen. At the time, then-U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said U.S. intelligence experts had concluded "unequivocally" that the weapons came from Iran.
Haley and the Trump administration used the display to substantiate repeated claims that Iran had been funneling weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen.
While the U.S. did not point to a specific delivery of the weapons remnants by Iran to the Houthis, officials said that markings and other characteristics indicated the missiles were manufactured in Iran. One shredded piece of metal displayed to reporters bore the logo of Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group, an Iranian defense entity under U.S. sanctions. And others had specific technical characteristics, such as a certain valve, that only Iranian missiles have.
At the time, the Iranian government insisted that it was not sending missiles to Yemen, where Shiite Houthi rebels aligned with Iran have taken over much of the country. Iran's envoy to U.N., Gholamali Khoshroo, called the accusations "fake and fabricated" evidence that illustrates America's "irresponsible, destructive and provocative role" in the region, according to a statement.
5. China stealing U.S. arms and military technology from Hong Kong: defector
Excerpts:
Mr. Wang separately claimed to have taken part directly in the kidnapping and rendition to China in October 2015 of Lee Bo, a Hong Kong bookshop owner wanted by Beijing for selling dissident material.
The current Hong Kong protests were set off six months ago by plans to introduce a law that would make such renditions legal.
Mr. Bo was kidnapped for his role in publishing the book "Xi Jinping and His Six Women," about the Chinese leader's mistresses.
Mr. Wang claimed the kidnapping operation was part of Chinese military intelligence efforts targeting democracy advocates in Hong Kong and, ultimately, to "conduct sabotage and suppression of democracy."
Several Chinese media outlets operating in the former British colony were identified in the defector's statement as being controlled by China, including Hong Kong Satellite TV, whose chairman Hao Wang is accused of holding a military post equivalent to a division commander within the General Staff Department.
The front organization also gathered intelligence on pro-democracy advocates and others that were then placed under surveillance, Mr. Wang said.
Regarding work on Hong Kong universities, the defector claimed that Qing Gong, the wife of Mr. Xiang, led efforts to recruit agents among student populations to support Beijing's policies. The agents would be called on to confront and politically attack pro-democracy students, Mr. Wang said.
Many of the pro-China students, he said, were dispatched from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, a school linked to the Chinese military, and trained in intelligence skills.
China's government has shot back at the allegations, describing Mr. Wang as a "fraud" linked to past financial crime.
China stealing U.S. arms and military technology from Hong Kong: defector
Chinese President Xi Jinping inspects a guard of honor outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, January, 2010. (Associated Press) ** FILE ** more >
China's military is engaged in an elaborate covert smuggling operation in Hong Kong to steal U.S. and other western arms and military technology, according to a Chinese intelligence official who has defected to Australia.
Wang Liqiang described the operation in an official statement to Australian authorities that also revealed details of a major Chinese influence campaign aimed at swaying the upcoming presidential election in Taiwan, and aggressive efforts to undermine democracy advocates in Hong Kong.
Mr. Wang worked until the past spring as a mid-level official in a Chinese military front organization controlled by the General Staff Department of the Chinese military, the department in charge of intelligence operations, according to his sworn statement to the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization (ASIO).
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"I have been personally involved in a series of espionage activities that were in breach of the principles of democracy and morality, as well as activities intending to control media and public opinion," Mr. Wang said, according to an English language translation of the statement.
Mr. Wang broke with the Communist Party of China after he was ordered to travel to Taiwan in May to take part in multi-million dollar covert operations aimed at manipulating the Taiwan elections. He defected rather than carry out the mission and is currently seeking political asylum for himself, his wife and an infant child.
A copy of his 17-page statement was obtained by The Washington Times. The statement was first reported by Australian news outlets 60 Minutes Australia, The Age, and the Sydney Morning Herald.
A U.S. official said Mr. Wang's information is very detailed and appears credible, although his legitimacy as a defector has not been determined independently of the ASIO, a U.S. intelligence ally.
Former Defense Intelligence Agency counterintelligence official Nick Eftimiades, a China specialist, said that based on public statements he believes Mr. Wang is a legitimate defector. "They will determine more during the debriefing process," he said. "They certainly have already done that otherwise this would not have gone public. He is young and came out after the Hong Kong protests started so he has motivation."
China, through state media, has denounced Mr. Wang as a financial criminal and sought to discredit his reported disclosure secrets.
A spokesman for the Australian Embassy did not return emails seeking comment. A Chinese Embassy spokesman also did not return an email seeking comment.
In his statement, Mr. Wang warned repeatedly that he fears for his life and worries Chinese intelligence agents operating in Australia will kidnap and kill him to prevent the disclosure of secrets on a range of subjects.
Mr. Wang claimed to have worked for several years for a military front company that gathered intelligence and stole advanced technology, using Hong Kong's open trading system. The targets included U.S. military satellite and aerospace technology and research on guided missiles.
Through the front company, China Innovation Investment Ltd., a publicly-listed Hong Kong firm, China's military successfully used Hong Kong to covertly buy weapons banned for export directly to China, according to the defector's statement.
The process involved purchasing arms and missiles, shipping them Hong Kong and then dismantling them and secretly sending them to China, Mr. Wang said in the statement without elaborating precisely.
"In fact, the so-called advanced weapons in China have been predominantly acquired through such channels," he said.
Web of operations
Regarding influence operations in Taiwan, Mr. Wang said the goal was for Taiwan to "lose its sovereignty" while China seeks "to replace the Republic of China with rule of the Communist Party of China."
Republic of China is Taiwan's official name.
Mr. Wang also said the front company he worked for had operations aimed at infiltrating Hong Kong universities and media outlets.
A second Chinese military intelligence front, the Hong Kong-listed company, China Trends Holding Ltd., was also identified in Mr. Wang's statement.
Both companies' executive director, Xiang Xin and alternate director, Kung Ching, were detained by Taiwanese authorities on Nov. 25, after reports about Mr. Wang's activities first emerged in Australia.
Based on the statement given to Australian authorities, Mr. Xiang appears to have been Mr. Wang's intelligence handler. Mr. Wang said that Mr. Xiang served for many years in large military intelligence organization in China and was dispatched to Hong Kong to create the two front companies to support the intelligence operations.
Mr. Xiang's wife, Qing Gong, is also working as a Communist Party of China agent, the defector claimed.
Mr. Wang also said that in addition to arms procurement and influence operations, the military intelligence fronts were used to spy on Chinese officials who fled to Hong Kong after losing out in factional Chinese Communist Party (CCP) disputes.
For example, Mr. Wang revealed that a senior Chinese Communist Party official Li Yuanchao, who was vice president of China from 2013 to 2018, made a "forced retreat" to Hong Kong. Intelligence agents, including Mr. Wang, sought to pressure him into returning to the mainland as part of an investigation.
Mr. Wang said he and several other agents met with a relative of Mr. Li's at the Shangri-La Hotel in Hong Kong. They threatened Mr. Li's wife as part of the pressure campaign and then began targeting the company he owned, identified as Leshi Internet Information and Technology Corp.
The company is among the largest online video outfits in China and is based in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, near China's border with Hong Kong.
Known as Le.com, the company was placed under investigation in April and is struggling financially.
"The crisis of Le.com has never been a financial crisis as it has been known," Mr. Wang said. "It is in fact a political crisis. It was the faction strive [sic] inside the Communist Party of China that caused the collapse of this company."
Another internal CCP factional dispute involves current Chinese Premier Li Keqing who has sought to deregulate financial markets and provide more incentives for business in China by promoting peer-to-peer lending.
To gain greater control over the financial sector, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has cracked down on the so-called "p2p" lending, according to Mr. Wang.
"The Communist Party of China suppressed these [p2p] organizations under the pretext that it is for the benefits of the people," he said. "In fact, the real purpose behind [this] is to prevent the Chinese financial market from getting too active."
Mr. Wang stated that his boss, Mr. Xiang, told him he could have been a provincial governor but chose to remain undercover in Hong Kong to avoid factional fighting in Beijing.
With regard to Taiwan election manipulation operations, meanwhile, Mr. Wang said the Chinese military-run influence campaign in Taiwan was a prime reason he broke with the CCP.
China's influence operations in Taiwan, he said, included providing Chinese currency worth roughly $1.42 million to presidential candidates of Taiwan's main opposition party, the pro-Beijing Kuomintang or KMT.
The Chinese influence operations also spread fake news attacking the ruling, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan, Mr. Wang stated.
Fifty Internet companies controlled by the Chinese military are working in Taiwan, and restaurants and hotels on the island are being used for intelligence collection, he said.
Cultural exchange programs from the mainland also are being used funnel money to pro-China groups and media as part of the campaigns. "We believe that if we help KMT win the election, then China wins the US," Mr. Wang said of the operations.
Subterfuge in Hong Kong
Mr. Wang separately claimed to have taken part directly in the kidnapping and rendition to China in October 2015 of Lee Bo, a Hong Kong bookshop owner wanted by Beijing for selling dissident material.
The current Hong Kong protests were set off six months ago by plans to introduce a law that would make such renditions legal.
Mr. Bo was kidnapped for his role in publishing the book "Xi Jinping and His Six Women," about the Chinese leader's mistresses.
Mr. Wang claimed the kidnapping operation was part of Chinese military intelligence efforts targeting democracy advocates in Hong Kong and, ultimately, to "conduct sabotage and suppression of democracy."
Several Chinese media outlets operating in the former British colony were identified in the defector's statement as being controlled by China, including Hong Kong Satellite TV, whose chairman Hao Wang is accused of holding a military post equivalent to a division commander within the General Staff Department.
The front organization also gathered intelligence on pro-democracy advocates and others that were then placed under surveillance, Mr. Wang said.
Regarding work on Hong Kong universities, the defector claimed that Qing Gong, the wife of Mr. Xiang, led efforts to recruit agents among student populations to support Beijing's policies. The agents would be called on to confront and politically attack pro-democracy students, Mr. Wang said.
Many of the pro-China students, he said, were dispatched from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, a school linked to the Chinese military, and trained in intelligence skills.
China's government has shot back at the allegations, describing Mr. Wang as a "fraud" linked to past financial crime.
Beijing is known to use allegations of crime or corruption to discredit dissidents and opponents of the Chinese government.
Shanghai police issued a statement on Nov. 24 claiming Mr. Wang is a "fugitive suspect," who was found guilty of financial fraud three years ago as part of an investment scheme, the Financial Times reported.
Chinese state-run news reports also maintain that a fraudulent passport, which Mr. Wang claims was provided to him for his mission to Taiwan, contained obvious errors and therefore, he could not be a legitimate intelligence defector.
Mr. Wang, however, noted that he had recognized the flaws in the passport.
In an interview with Australia's "60 Minutes" on Nov. 24, the defector said that "Taiwan was the most important work of ours." He added that Chinese agents infiltrated media, temples, and grass roots groups there.
The director general of ASIO, Mike Burgess, said last week that the Australian intelligence services are taking Mr. Wang's allegations seriously and are "actively investigating" his claims.
6. CIA reveals name of FOURTH spy who betrayed the US during Cold War
Daily Mail · by Andrew Court For Dailymail.com · December 5, 2019
The identity of a fourth spy who passed on US atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s has been unveiled in a new article published by
the CIA's in-house journal.
The article's authors have named the American traitor as electrical engineer Oscar Seborer, following their examination of recently declassified FBI documents and a study of archival materials from the KGB.
Seborer, who passed away in 2015 at the age of 93, worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico in the 1940s, when American physicists were developing the world's first-ever atomic bomb.
The research and development of the nuclear weapons were part of a top-secret program known as The Manhattan Project.
Seborer is alleged to have sent highly-confidential information about the bomb developments to the Soviets, for whom he worked under the code name 'Godsend'.
The US detonated the world's first-ever atomic bomb July 16, 1945, in New Mexico.
However, the country was left stunned when their communist rivals in the Soviet Union successfully tested their own atomic bomb just four years later.
The fact that the Societs managed to replicate the atomic bomb so quickly intrigued government officials and investigators, who later determined that there were spies in America's midst passing on detailed information to their enemies.
The CIA's in-house journal has identifed electrical engineer Oscar Seborer (circled) as a fourth spy who shared secrets with the Soviet Union while he worked for the US on the development of the atomic bomb
The US detonated the world's first-ever atomic bomb July 16, 1945, in New Mexico
The US was left stunned when their communist rivals in the Soviet Union successfully tested their own atomic bomb just four years later. The first Soviet atomic bomb test on August 29 1949 is pictured
The identities of three spies have already been named. Like Seborer, they were all employed at the the Los Alamos Laboratory while the US was developing the atomic bomb.
In 1950, physicist Klaus Fuchs was the first to be arrested, after it was uncovered that he passed on detailed information about the hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union.
According to
The Atomic Heritage Foundation, experts estimate that Fuchs' intelligence 'enabled the Soviets to develop and test their own atomic bomb one to two years earlier than otherwise expected'.
He was charged with violating the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Fuch's testimony led to the arrest of a second spy, David Greenglass, who worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory as a machinist. He plead guilty and served nine and a half years in prison for his treachery.
Meanwhile, Theodore Hall, who was the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, was identified as the third spy in 1990.
However, by that time, Hall was elderly and living in the United Kingdom, and did not face espionage charges.
Working on The Manhattan Project was highly-classified and employees were sworn to secrcy
Three men have already been identified as spying for the Soviets while working at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico in the 1940s. They are (from left) Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass and Theodore Hall
The men worked on the development of the atomic bomb here at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico
All three men escaped the death penalty for their treason, unlike two other US spies who were executed for giving Russians information on The Manhattan Project.
When David Greenglass confessed that he was a mole for the Soviet Union, he also told investigators that his sister, Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg, and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, were also passing back information to the Communist country.
Neither of the Rosenbergs refused to give up any information following their arrests in 1950.
A jury subsequently found them both guilty of espionage in a trial that gripped the country.
Judge Irving Kaufman told the Rosenbergs at their sentencing: 'I consider your crime worse than murder.
'Plain deliberate contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed. In committing the act of murder, the criminal kills only his victim.
'The immediate family is brought to grief and when justice is meted out the chapter is closed.
'But in your case, I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.
'Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.'
The Rosenbergs were both executed in 1953.
Ethel and Julis Rosenberg were executed for handing over information to the Soviets. During their trials, they refused to give up any information on their operation or to answer any questions
After the Soviet Union developed their own atomic bomb in 1949, America expanded their nuclear weapons program, which created an arms race between the two competing countries.
President Truman announced that the US would build an even more destructive atomic weapon, known as a hydrogen bomb, and the Soviet Union soon followed suit.
History reports that 'the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact' on citizens of both the US and the Soviet Union in the ensuing decades.
After the Soviet Union developed their own atomic bomb in 1949, America expanded their nuclear weapons program, which created an arms race between the two competing countries. Scientists are pictured working on a nuclear rocket reactor at Los Alamos Laboratory in 1960
Meanwhile, the CIA says more information about Seborer is likely be forthcoming as more documents are declassified.
The son of Polish-born Jewish immigrants, Seborer was born in New York in 1921 and joined the US army in October 1942. He began working at Los Alamos two years later, when he began sending secrets back to the Soviet Union.
Researchers have expressed confusion as to why he would betray his country, although it is believed both of his brothers were also Soviet spies.
Perhaps scared of being identified as a traitor, Seborer fled the United States for the Soviet Union in 1951 and did not return to America before his death more than five decades later.
History reports that 'the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact' on citizens of both the US and the Soviet Union in the decades after the spies shared their secrets. A US thermonuclear test on October 31, 1952 is pictured
7. Britain's Secret War With Russia
Excerpts:
But despite alleged British confidence-and clear Russian amateurism on occasion-it is clear that Moscow landed real blows in its 2018 communications battle with London. The
U.K. was at times blindsided, fell into traps, made mistakes, and saw a worrying subsection of public opinion run toward conspiratorial skepticism. It is beyond doubt that Russia had some success muddying the waters of blame throughout the summer of 2018.
That may well have been enough for the
GRU. With campaigning for the 2020
U.S. presidential election now well under way, the focus of Russian disinformation efforts might once again shift to the United States. Is it prepared for what is to come? What did Moscow learn from its six-month propaganda war with Britain?
"No matter what action you take against Russian intelligence services, they are going to put a massive amount of resources into a divergence campaign," said Bill Evanina, the head of counterintelligence for the
U.S. government. "Vladimir Putin's most amazing trait is his ability to deny that today is Thursday, and to convince people of that."
In Spiez, they know what that is like. "These people had us in the crosshairs," Bucher told me. Who's next?
Britain's Secret War With Russia
The poisoning of a double agent sparked an intelligence and PR battle between London and Moscow, the details of which are only now emerging.
Tucked away in a drab industrial estate on the outskirts of the Swiss town of Spiez lies a multistory concrete office block flanked by a parking lot and a soccer field. A modest gate with a small plaque is all that greets visitors. A river rolls behind the building, fed from the peaks of the Blüemlisalp massif above. This is the Bernese Oberland, the corner of Switzerland where James Bond met Blofeld in a revolving mountaintop hideaway; where Sherlock Holmes plunged to his death.
The building in question, an outpost of Switzerland's Federal Office for Civil Protection, might be unassuming-home to just academics, engineers, apprentices, and technicians-yet its occupant, the Spiez Laboratory, is world-renowned. The elite facility focuses on global nuclear, chemical, and biological threats, and is one of a limited number of sites designated by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (
OPCW) to conduct research and analysis. Safely under the protective cloak of the country's diplomatic neutrality, Spiez Laboratory carries out its work with little fanfare or controversy.
Over the course of a few months in 2018, however, this gentle existence was upended, as the lab became caught in a cold war between Russia on one side and the United Kingdom and the West on the other, fought in public and in the shadows, online and in person, occasionally flashing hot in deadly fashion. From the attempted assassination of a double agent in a sleepy English city to the expulsion of scores of Russian diplomats from Western capitals, this fight would grow and morph, drawing in a chemical-weapons attack in Syria and rolling scandals about Russian sports doping.
Through it all, Russia and Britain went toe-to-toe in an international intelligence and
PR battle, one in which each landed blows, exposing fissures in their respective systems and societies. Yet, as
NATO leaders meet in London this week to discuss the future of the military alliance 70 years after its founding, other lessons emerge, with implications for the wider contest between Russia and the West, which are vying for influence, respect, security, and raw geopolitical power.
Whereas
NATO was founded to unite the Western world against the threat of conventional military aggression by the Soviet Union, eventually contributing to the Communist bloc's demise, the alliance is today confronted with a recalcitrant Russia that seeks to leverage propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion and discontent, and that exhibits a willingness to use its traditional military force and intelligence agencies to expand its influence. It is a Moscow that is able to project disproportionate power-despite being dwarfed in economic size and resources by even mid-tier Western countries-thanks to a web of international influence, aggression, tactical cunning, and criminality.
At the same time,
NATO and its members are divided, distracted, and shorn of a coherent strategy to deal with Russia's efforts. The grouping's superpower, the United States, is led by a president whose commitment to the alliance's underlying principle of collective defense is in doubt; its other significant members are consumed by domestic strife (Britain),
NATO's strategic future (France), or lack the military might and political will to fill the gap (Germany). And faced with a new array of threats from Russia, the alliance has more than once been caught unawares, at times thanks to its own unforced errors but also in no small part due to a lack of long-term vision to do anything other than de-escalate tensions. Despite Russia deploying a chemical weapon on the streets of a
NATO member (also Britain), the country's international freeze is already beginning to thaw, its economy is growing, and its leadership, on the face of it at least, remains secure. It has successfully expanded its influence in the Middle East and has secured its illegal land grab in Crimea.
The period from the attempted murder of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in March 2018 to a major Western counterblow exposing Moscow's behavior in October 2018 offers a window not just into these challenges, but also into others that are only just emerging as technological advances change the very nature of information warfare. To understand how the battle played out, I spoke with several current and former officials-government aides, communications advisers, and members of the intelligence services-as well as politicians in London, most of whom would speak only on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive intelligence matters. I also consulted security, diplomatic, and cyber experts. (The Russian embassy in London declined to respond to a series of detailed questions I sent them, instead referring me to on its website in which Moscow denies any involvement in the poisoning and claims it was an act carried out by the British secret services.)
Unlike a conventional battle, though in keeping with much of modern conflict, there are no obvious measures to determine who won and who lost. The months-long information war that Russia fought with Britain was one in which mistakes were difficult to judge and success hard to immediately quantify.
This is a story about disinformation and spycraft. It is also a story that again and again returns to the tiny Swiss town of Spiez.
The details of the Skripal poisoning are well known: On the night of March 4, 2018, the former Russian spy, who was living in retired exile in Britain, was found alongside his daughter, who was visiting from Russia, foaming at the mouth on a park bench in Salisbury, 90 miles southwest of London.
Eight days later, then-British Prime Minister Theresa May formally accused Russia of carrying out the attack. Britain's Porton Down military-research facility-which, alongside the Spiez Laboratory, is one of the centers of expertise accredited by the
OPCW-had determined that the Skripals were poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok. The chemical weapon, May told Parliament, had been smuggled into the country by two hitmen working for Russia's military-intelligence agency, the
GRU. In response, Britain and its allies in 28 countries expelled more than 150 suspected Russian spies. Russia protested its innocence and denounced the Western response. (Skripal and his daughter ultimately survived. Another woman, Dawn Sturgess, died, after spraying what she thought was perfume, but was in fact Novichok, onto her wrists, and a police officer was hospitalized while investigating the poisoning of the Skripals.)
Details of the information war that ensued are only now emerging.
By the time May made her allegation in Parliament, a Russian campaign to discredit it was already in full swing. In just the first week after the attempted assassination, according to five British officials who spoke with me, the
U.K. government tracked 11 alternative theories about the Skripal poisoning that all originated in Russia. A by King's College London found that Russian-government funded outlets
RT and Sputnik alone were responsible for 138 separate and often contradictory narratives about the Skripal poisoning in the four weeks following the incident. These included claims that the poison came from Porton Down; that the Skripals were never, in fact, poisoned; even that the poisoning was designed to distract from Brexit. Russian media also speculated variously that it was a British plot, an American plot, a Ukrainian plot, or a plot to frame Russia. May that she had been personally accused of inventing Novichok.
The onslaught of such stories in the weeks and months after the Skripal attack-and their success in reaching a wide and receptive audience-emerges in lists of the most viral social-media content from that period. This data was gathered for
The Atlantic by the online monitoring company NewsWhip, which tracks how many "interactions" a particular news story has garnered on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest-measured by the number of likes, shares or comments it has received. In some cases, there appeared to have been genuine orchestration of these efforts, but other instances show opportunism, with Russia-friendly outlets jumping on apparent contradictions in Britain's public statements.
Moscow's goal, according to
U.K. officials tasked with monitoring and counteracting the Russian propaganda war, was simply to flood social media with false narratives and information that would cast doubt on the established British and Western positions, not with the goal of offering one particular alternative explanation, but simply to muddy the waters sufficiently to make people question their own government. Russia denies the allegation and the
U.K. government itself of manipulating the media with leaks and censorship.
This Russian strategy is wearily familiar to former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe (as well as the United States, during the 2016 presidential election), officials and experts I spoke with said. And early in the summer of 2018, there were concerning signs for London that it was having some effect. Internal government polling carried out in the months after the poisoning showed that a significant proportion of the population did not believe the British government's assertion that Russia was behind the attack, according to an official briefed on the data, with the most skeptical being those aged 18 to 24. A September 2018 government memo, shared with
The Atlantic, that distilled the results of polling showed that the "perception of Russian culpability" stood at just 55 percent. This was down from a peak of 65 percent at the end of March-the month of the attempted murders. (One of May's aides told me that this lack of trust in government is now a major structural challenge when dealing with incidents of national security.)
Some of those I spoke with insisted that such setbacks were only temporary, but all largely agreed that Russia reacted quickly and effectively. "There was a private admission that we had lost the information battle," one senior
U.K. government official involved in the British counterattack told me. "We had ceded the ground. The Russians were just really quick off the mark."
Numerous stories by outlets such as
RT and Sputnik promoted dueling theories as to who carried out the Skripal poisoning, but when it comes to sowing confusion, one story stands out, and Spiez was at the center of it.
On April 14, 2018,
RT an article that would go on to become the most viral news story in 2018 about the incident as measured by online interactions, NewsWhip data shows. According to
RT, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that a "Swiss lab" had discovered that a different toxin was used to poison the Skripals-not Novichok, but
BZ, which was, as
RT put it, "in service" in the United States, Britain, and other
NATO countries.
The report would go on to be shared on social media by
RT as well as by accounts such as the WikiLeaks Task Force, which describes itself as the "official support account," verified with a blue checkmark on Twitter. The story would rack up 137,360 social-media engagements, still the most of any story published on the Skripal affair.
And yet the article was entirely misleading. Spiez was indeed one of a small number of international centers chosen by the
OPCW to confirm the conclusions reached by Porton Down, and it did find a different toxin from Novichok. But that was part of the process: After receiving samples from the Skripal poisoning from the U.K., the
OPCW, following protocol, added a new substance into the batch for quality control-a test, in effect, to ensure that Spiez's and other laboratories' results were accurate. If they did not find the added element, then whatever else they found could not be trusted. The toxin added by the
OPCW was a derivative of
BZ.
It would be surprising if Lavrov was not aware of this distinction. On April 11, the
OPCW, of which Russia is a member, confirmed the British findings in a report that named the control substance. Was it a simple misstep on the foreign minister's part? How did he know that Spiez had done the testing? That the Swiss lab was among those chosen by the
OPCW to confirm Porton Down's conclusions was kept confidential as per the
OPCW's security protocols, a rule seen as "sacrosanct," according to one of the
U.K. officials who spoke with me. Andreas Bucher, a spokesman for Spiez, told me that the research facility did not even know which other sites were used to test the findings. The Russian embassy in London declined to comment on the incident when I asked them about it.
Unsure of how to respond without confirming that it was one of the laboratories chosen by the
OPCW, something it was not allowed to do, Spiez initially published saying that it could not comment on Lavrov's assertions, and then later released saying that it had "no doubt Porton Down has identified Novichok." Lavrov claimed to be quoting from Spiez's report on its tests, but Bucher said he had falsely cited the report. "We don't write prose," he said. "We write formulas."
The
U.K. government itself did not respond to Lavrov's claims. The Spiez tweet partially correcting the story received only about 1,000 retweets-less than 1 percent of the engagements recorded by the original
RT story. Regardless, the claim was out there, being shared across the world, even though the
OPCW itself had said that its laboratories had Britain's original findings.
If the most viral Skripal-related story illustrates how Moscow's propaganda machine looked to actively plant disinformation, the second on that list highlights how Russia was able to take advantage of unexpected openings as well.
The Independent, an online British outlet, on April 3 based on an interview given to Sky News by Gary Aitkenhead, Porton Down's chief executive. Aitkenhead said that the British facility had confirmed that the toxin used in Salisbury was Novichok, but that its scientists "have not identified the precise source" of where it came from. Just days earlier, though, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had claimed that Porton Down had confirmed that the nerve agent originated in Russia.
The apparent contradiction exploded into life online, with the
Independent story getting picked up and promoted by Kremlin supporters, as well as by the Russian embassy in Skopje, North Macedonia, an
RT journalist in North America, and even a Facebook account, "San Diego For Bernie Sanders 2020," eventually receiving 93,999 interactions on social media, according to NewsWhip, a high figure even for a story that was dominating the news. Britain rushed to repair the damage after a 10 Downing Street rapid-response unit, which monitors web traffic and works closely with the national-security communications team, noticed the story gaining traction online. (One security official told me that government analysis of social media showed that Salisbury-related posts made up 12 percent of the entire
U.K. digital conversation on April 3, the second-highest figure during the entire crisis, after the day May blamed Russia for the attack.)
Later that day, Porton Down tried to clarify Aikenhead's remarks, that the facility's "experts have precisely identified the nerve agent as a Novichok. It is not, and has never been, our responsibility to confirm the source of the agent." Security officials contacted journalists to explain the discrepancy, with calls made to Sky News in particular with a request for a public clarification. A week later, the
U.K. released sent from May's national-security adviser to the secretary-general of
NATO, which formally laid out the charges against the Russians.
The episode is seen by those inside Britain's security communications team as the most serious misstep of the crisis, which for a period caused real concern.
U.K. officials told me that, in hindsight, Aikenhead could never have blamed Russia directly, because that was not his job-all he was qualified to do was identify the chemical. Johnson, in going too far, was more damaging. Two years on, he is now prime minister.
The aftermath of the Skripal poisoning illustrated not only a
PR offensive waged by outlets sympathetic to Moscow, but also the breadth of the Russian state's capabilities and efforts to include its diplomatic corps as well as its intelligence agencies.
At the same time the media blitz was taking place, the Russian embassy in London was writing letter after letter to the U.K.'s Foreign Office with scores of detailed questions that British officials argued were designed to tie up their time and attention. From March 6-two days after the Skripal assasination attempt-to February 18, 2019, the embassy fired off dozens of
note verbales, or official diplomatic correspondence, with 41 requests and 57 questions. (The Russian embassy has a list of these demands.) Inside the
U.K. government, an official told me, this barrage was referred to as a "diplomatic DDoS attack," a reference to the cyberstrike in which a server is shut down simply by overwhelming it.
At the same time, a surge in malign Russian bot activity was detected online, in which social-media accounts were activated to amplify and spread messages. In the six weeks following the Skripal poisoning, through to the April 13 air strikes on Syria launched by the U.K., U.S., and France in response to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons, British officials say they calculated a 4,000 percent increase in this type of activity.
The
GRU, the same organization that dispatched the two hitmen to Salisbury, also played a role, and, once again, Spiez was at the heart of it.
In May, 2018,
OPCW facilities around the world received an email apparently from the Spiez Laboratory inviting them to a conference for specialists in chemical and biological warfare. The conference itself was real, the third such meeting organized by the Swiss research site, and the email was sent in the name of the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, the government agency responsible for the laboratory. Attached was a Word document that purported to contain information about the meeting.
There were, however, small giveaways that all was not right: The shade of red on the Swiss flag in the top left corner of the document was slightly off, and some formatting in the letterhead was wrong (the abbreviation
FOCP-for Federal Office for Civil Protection-was used on the wrong line). In fact, the Word document contained malware that would embed itself into any computer that opened the file. But it would take weeks for anyone to notice, and only in July 2018 did Spiez issue on its Twitter account that an email had been sent in its name without its knowledge, one that was actually a sophisticated spear-phishing attack, a cyber Trojan horse known as an advanced persistent threat, in which a computer is accessed by stealthily giving attackers full control of the compromised host's network.
Who was behind the attack-and what they hoped to achieve-has never been confirmed. The Russian embassy declined to address this specific case when I asked them about it. Kaspersky, a cybersecurity firm that analyzed the incident, told me that it did not know for certain who the hackers were, whether they had been successful, or even what their goal was.* In the shadowy world of spycraft, it's almost impossible to be sure about what is a false flag and what is real, the company said.
Britain's National Cyber Security Centre is less circumspect, however, "with high confidence that the
GRU was almost certainly responsible."
Through a special "link door" from 10 Downing Street, deep inside the Cabinet Office in central London, lies the
U.K. government's main emergency-response center: Cabinet Office Briefing Room A-or Cobra. This is the British equivalent of the White House Situation Room. It is where emergency meetings are held at times of crisis, to coordinate strategy in the most secure environment.
Attached to Cobra are a number of boardrooms where officials can listen in to what their ministers are discussing inside. Throughout the spring and summer of last year, a group of some of the most senior government communications officials, dubbed "Comms Cobra," met daily to discuss how to respond to the Russian disinformation blitz. They were in full crisis mode-not only was the Russian campaign overwhelming in its scope, but Russia seemed to be one step ahead of the
U.K. as well.
Among the measures the group took was to tighten the circle of who was in the know. At one point in the summer, the number of people, government departments, and agencies involved in responding to the Salisbury case was huge. The Department for Environment was leading the cleanup and the Home Office was dealing with security, while London's Metropolitan Police, Britain's intelligence services, and the local police force were investigating. Salisbury's local council, the Foreign Office, Downing Street, and the Cabinet Office were involved too.
New processes were put in place, raising the level of official secrecy on some communications and resulting in often cumbersome procedures. Instead of having a single phone number for meeting participants to dial in to, for example, the Metropolitan Police-which leads Britain's national counterterror and security operations-began holding conference calls by dialing each individual separately, one after the other, infuriating officials who were left waiting on the line for half an hour before discussions could start.
On September 5, 2018, Britain finally made its move. May told the House of Commons that the two Russian spies responsible for the Skripal poisoning had been identified, news that, because of the tightened communications, only a select number of cabinet ministers were even aware of. She outlined which flight the pair had arrived on, when and how they visited Salisbury, when they arrived at the Skripals' house, and which flight they took back to Russia.
CCTV footage was released of the two at various stages of their trip. Traces of Novichok were even found in their shared hotel room, May said. Hours earlier, the Metropolitan Police had held a "lock-in" with security journalists to brief them on the findings. (The Russian embassy the
CCTV recordings of the two Russians "only confirm the fact of their visit to Salisbury and do not point at any wrongdoings.")
The effect of the surprise information barrage was dominance online. Only two of the 10 most viral stories in the weeks following the announcement were sympathetic to Russia, according to NewsWhip. Finally, officials recalled, it felt as though the
U.K. was the aggressor. "This was all kept secret to put the Russians on the hop," one told me. "Their response was all over the place from this point. It was the turning point."
Amid an apparent failure to counter the British case, the accused hitmen appeared on Russian state media that they had visited Salisbury on a sightseeing trip. Inside the Cabinet Office in Westminster, an official said, Britain's security communications team sat "glued to the telly" watching their claims but ultimately decided not to react-across Europe, satirical
TV shows and websites were picking up the story and making fun of it.
If September was the month Britain wrested control of the Skripal narrative, October was when it rocked Russia with a significant blow of its own, one that was months in the making.
On April 10, a month after the poisoning, four men arrived in the Netherlands on diplomatic passports. Three days earlier, Assad, a key ally of Russia, had launched a chemical-weapons attack on a suburb of Damascus, and the
OPCW, which is based in The Hague, was tasked with investigating not only the Skripal poisoning but also the Syrian chemical-weapons attack. The men, all Russian intelligence officers, had been assigned a hacking operation in which they were to target the
OPCW's networks by sneaking in via Wi-Fi connections.
From their arrival, however, the group (subsequently as belonging to
GRU Unit 26165) was being monitored by the Dutch security services, and on April 13, the four were arrested. Two of them had left their equipment in the trunk of a rental car parked outside the
OPCW's headquarters. For the Dutch, British, American, and Swiss secret services-all of which were involved in the operation-they had obtained a treasure trove.
The abandoned equipment revealed that the
GRU unit involved had sent officers around the world to conduct similar cyberattacks. They had been in Malaysia trying to steal information about the investigation into the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and at a hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a World Anti-Doping Agency (
WADA) conference was taking place as Russia faced sanctions from the International Olympic Committee. Britain that the same
GRU unit attempted to compromise Foreign Office and Porton Down computer systems after the Skripal poisoning.
The arrests were not immediately made public, though. On October 4, the
U.K. published a list of transgressions by the Russian state and specifically the
GRU unit that was caught. That morning, the British ambassador to the Netherlands joined the Dutch defense minister at a press conference in The Hague where they lifted the lid on the attempted Russian hack of the
OPCW. In the afternoon, the
U.S. Department of Justice announced charges against seven
GRU agents linked to the Dutch investigation, accusing them of hacking into
WADA and the
OPCW, and of cyberattacks aimed at a
U.S. nuclear-energy facility. Security officials in London told me that everything was carefully coordinated and timed to coincide with the
U.S. indictments. A joint statement from the British and Dutch prime ministers was released to ram home the message. The Russian embassy declined to comment on the operation or the U.S. indictment.
During the week of the
OPCW press conference just one of the top 25 most viral stories was from a pro-Russian outlet-and even this was a relatively straightforward piece from . "There were some signs that we had landed a blow," one senior security official told me.
The
OPCW was not the only target on the unit's itinerary on its trip through Europe. According to the
U.S. indictment, also in the
GRU team's possession on the day they were arrested were train tickets to Basel, Switzerland. American authorities allege that they would have then traveled onward-to Spiez.
Having been at the forefront of the international
PR battle with Russia, the
U.K. feels that it is now well placed for any future battles. It has created a national-security communications team based at the heart of government in 10 Downing Street and the adjoining Cabinet Office. Communications strategy is now seen as being part of national-security strategy.
Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the U.S.-based Wilson Center specializing in disinformation who has advised the Ukrainian government on how to combat the Russian threat, told me that the
U.K. effort was "leaps and bounds ahead of what we had seen before." British officials did a good job of highlighting "all the absurd claims" coming out of Russia, she said. "The fact the
U.K. system was able to respond under such stress shows the system was working as it should," she added, pointing in particular to Britain leading the coordinated expulsion of diplomats. "We've not seen anything like it since the Cold War. The
U.K. is filling in the leadership gap where the
U.S. now cannot-or will not."
Still, if Britain won a victory, it was tactical, not strategic. Officials say the problem for Western countries is that while Russia might be a relative economic minnow, it has continued to fund its national-security state to superpower levels while
NATO has become on the
U.S. for its defense since the end of the Cold War. Russia is also aided and abetted by a willingness to ignore international law, norms, and conventions-and the West's apparent refusal to do the same in return. (Russia's intervention into British politics remains a live issue, after the
U.K. government a report into Moscow's infiltration before Britain's election this month.)
Even more fundamentally, in the absence of any coordinated Western strategy to forcefully respond to a crisis sparked by limited forms of Russian aggression, Moscow has been able to achieve a significant expansion of its influence. By moving quickly, Russia changed the rules of the game on the ground before the West could react. Whether in Syria, Crimea, or elsewhere, Russia has filled a vacuum left by American withdrawal or indecision-in some cases literally, by moving troops to occupy territory abandoned by the U.S.-meaning that any subsequent retaliation from Washington comes with an even greater risk than before, leading to further inaction. The effect, as in Syria, is to hand victory to Russia for as long as it can sustain the cost of Western sanctions or diplomatic isolation.
A similar story played out in Britain, where the full reaction to the Skripal assassination was slow-moving, taking months to play out. The cost imposed on Moscow-the loss of spies and networks around the world, as well as the damage to the Russian intelligence service's reputation for efficiency and skill-was serious, but appears to have been absorbed. Moscow may have gone relatively quiet about Skripal (an October by the Russian embassy in London linking to a
Guardian about Donald Trump expressing skepticism that Moscow was behind the poisoning is a rare recent intervention), but it has not changed its behavior.
And yet, the West has already been showing signs that it wants a thaw in relations. In August, the leaders of the world's most powerful Western countries, the G7, met in Biarritz, France, where Trump that Russia could be allowed back into the club. And he's not alone in seeking to soften his country's stance. The same month, French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech saying that it was time for Europe to "pacify and clarify our relations with Russia," arguing that pushing Moscow away would be a "profound" strategic error, and setting out opposition to any further economic sanctions on Russia. He has since repeated that message in an interview with and again last week in the run-up to today's
NATO summit.
Those sanctions (which, along with Russia's expulsion from the G8, were the result of the country's annexation of Crimea) hit the Russian economy, but far from strangled it. In 2018, Russia's
GDP grew 2.3 percent. While growth is projected to slow in 2019 and 2020, Russia's economy is nevertheless expected to continue to expand, .
Since the October announcement, the
U.K. has seen the Russian threat ease off, only for it to be replaced by other foreign-policy priorities: The future of the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal is uncertain and Tehran is testing the West's collective patience; North Korea has resumed ballistic-missile tests; and months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have raised the specter of China taking more aggressive steps there.
But despite alleged British confidence-and clear Russian amateurism on occasion-it is clear that Moscow landed real blows in its 2018 communications battle with London. The
U.K. was at times blindsided, fell into traps, made mistakes, and saw a worrying subsection of public opinion run toward conspiratorial skepticism. It is beyond doubt that Russia had some success muddying the waters of blame throughout the summer of 2018.
That may well have been enough for the
GRU. With campaigning for the 2020
U.S. presidential election now well under way, the focus of Russian disinformation efforts might once again shift to the United States. Is it prepared for what is to come? What did Moscow learn from its six-month propaganda war with Britain?
"No matter what action you take against Russian intelligence services, they are going to put a massive amount of resources into a divergence campaign," said Bill Evanina, the head of counterintelligence for the
U.S. government. "Vladimir Putin's most amazing trait is his ability to deny that today is Thursday, and to convince people of that."
In Spiez, they know what that is like. "These people had us in the crosshairs," Bucher told me. Who's next?
Mike Giglio contributed reporting.
8. All U.S. Travelers Abroad Should Submit to Facial Recognition Scans, Says Homeland Security
When we say we have to compete with China I hope we do not mean implement similar population and resources control measures and oppressive procedures.
All U.S. Travelers Abroad Should Submit to Facial Recognition Scans, Says Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security wants mandatory facial scans for all Americans traveling in or out of the country. A
proposed rule change states:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is required by statute to develop and implement a biometric entry-exit data system.
To facilitate the implementation of a seamless biometric entry-exit system that uses facial recognition and to help prevent persons attempting to fraudulently use U.S. travel documents and identify criminals and known or suspected terrorists, DHS is proposing to amend the regulations to provide that all travelers, including U.S. citizens, may be required to be photographed upon entry and/or departure.
This terrifying possibility would expand on DHS pilot programs that have "already been
rolling out across more than a dozen US airports," with the alleged goal of identifying people who overstay their visas,
explainsPC Mag.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
explains how it works:
Just before entry or exit, each international traveler's photo is taken, either by CBP-owned cameras or equipment provided by the airlines, airport authority, or cruise line. CBP's biometric matching service, the Traveler Verification Service (TVS), compares the new photo with DHS holdings, which include images from photographs taken by CBP during the entry inspection, photographs from U.S. passports, U.S. visas and other travel documents, as well as photographs from previous DHS encounters.
Right now, U.S. citizens entering or exiting the country with a valid U.S. passport aren't required to let border authorities snap their pic. CBP states:
Travelers who do not wish to participate in this facial comparison process may notify a CBP Officer or an airline, airport or cruise line representative in order to seek an alternative means of verifying their identities and documents. CBP discards all photos of U.S. Citizens within 12 hours of identity verification.
On the accuracy of this system, CBP points out that "
with high quality photos, the most accurate algorithm can identify matches with only a 0.2 percent error rate" (emphasis mine), which is not exactly a reassuring metric.
"Travelers, including US citizens, should not have to submit to invasive biometric scans simply as a condition of exercising their constitutional right to travel," Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement. He continued:
Time and again, the government told the public and members of Congress that US citizens would not be required to submit to this intrusive surveillance technology as a condition of traveling. This new notice suggests that the government is reneging on what was already an insufficient promise.
Airport Technologynotes that Homeland Security has "plans to install biometric scanners at 20 of the country's largest airports by 2021."
9. Notes on Designing the Marine Corps of the Future (From the Commandant)
Excerpt:
I am not so naïve to think that undertaking such a bold endeavor will be straightforward. But, the urgency of the challenge before us compels action. We will not allow a failure of imagination to define this period of our collective naval or Marine Corps history. We will continue to challenge the status quo and continue to ask all the hard questions - regardless of the discomfort they produce. We will continue to rigorously wargame - and at a much-accelerated pace to facilitate learning. We cannot and will not get this wrong.
Notes on Designing the Marine Corps of the Future - War on the Rocks
The Marine Corps is not optimized to meet the bold demands of the
National Defense Strategy. While our ranks are filled with phenomenal marines - warriors who are smarter and more adaptable than ever - the design of our force, how we organize for combat, our equipment, and our warfighting capabilities, are no longer aligned to the potential adversaries America faces. My number-one priority as commandant of the Marine Corps is to design a force suited to the reality of the pacing threat as prescribed by the
National Defense Strategy.
Based on a threat-informed, ten-year time horizon, we are designing a force for naval expeditionary warfare in actively contested spaces. It will be purpose-built to facilitate sea denial and assured access in support of fleet and joint operations. As we continue to explore design options through wargames supported by independently verifiable analysis, now is a good time to share some of the initial observations and assumptions behind our efforts, the hypotheses we seek to validate, and the preliminary conclusions we have reached on investments and divestments. I expect to release the first results of our force design effort this spring.
The rapid expansion of China's area-denial capabilities, coupled with its pivot to the sea as the primary front in a renewed great-power competition, have fundamentally transformed the environment in which the U.S. military will operate for the foreseeable future. For the first time in a generation, sea control is no longer the unquestioned prerogative of the United States.
Beyond building peer military capabilities, China has emphasized operations below the level of armed conflict, leveraging asymmetries resulting from our differing organizations of government and society, force designs, and understanding of the laws of war. For example, a diverse set of paramilitary organizations have joined China's traditional military units to upend
Mahan's and
Corbett's long-held theories of sea control, the result being an Indo-Pacific region increasingly, "confronted with a
more confident and assertive China that is willing to accept friction in the pursuit of a more expansive set of political, economic, and security interests." While the joint force can and does compete, we must acknowledge that we will not balance every asymmetry. America's commitment to international laws and norms will always guide our military options.
Instead, the joint force should bend the character of future war such that we regain the competitive advantage. In order to do this, the naval services must innovate to generate favorable asymmetries which present America's adversaries with critical dilemmas. This will require new concepts and approaches to compete with, and deter, China and other potential adversaries. It will also require the naval services to operate outside our traditional comfort zone and embrace a new cooperative mindset to maximize the reach of American seapower. How can the United States integrate and leverage the authorities of the Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and interagency to develop its own "
cabbage strategy," complicating Beijing's decision cycle? How do the naval services employ this strategy afloat in partnership with allies and partners? How do we win the information battle?
The rise of a peer competitor has compelled the naval services to reexamine the fundamental assumptions upon which we have built the current force. Within the Marine Corps, existing processes for force development have too often led to unimaginative results, as we tend to become prisoners of platform-based thinking, seeking incremental improvements in current capabilities and methods. To regain the strategic initiative, the Marine Corps needs new capabilities to fight in new ways to generate new strategic options for future decision-makers.
With this in mind, our force design team made the following assumptions. First, forward bases and legacy infrastructure within the adversary's weapons engagement zone are now extremely vulnerable. Second, large ships and those with large electronic, acoustic, or optical signatures are highly vulnerable within the weapons engagement zone, and to an increasing degree, immediately outside it. Third, adversary missile and air forces are optimized for the anti-ship fight. Fourth, while sea control or denial has traditionally been the exclusive domain of afloat naval forces, ground based long-range precision fires and missiles are increasingly capable of affecting maritime operations. Finally, sub-surface naval capabilities will continue to have a decisive advantage over surface capabilities.
While the Marine Corps must be prepared to operate across the entire spectrum of conflict, its first priority as a naval service ought to be deterrence, as the cost of competition will always be less than the cost - in both blood and treasure - of armed conflict. To align the Marine Corps with the
National Defense Strategy in the context of great-power competition, the Marine Corps must be trained and equipped as a naval expeditionary force-in-readiness that is prepared to operate inside actively contested maritime spaces in support of fleet operations. Both joint and initial service-level wargames support this hypothesis, and reinforce the conclusion that naval expeditionary stand-in forces can generate technically disruptive, tactical stand-in engagements that confront aggressor naval forces with an array of low signature, affordable, and risk-worthy platforms and payloads. Our concepts of
Stand-In Forces and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations are the Marine Corps' primary ways to deliver long-range anti-ship fires, operate sensors to cue naval and joint kill-chains, and control
key maritime terrain. In concert with naval and air forces operating outside of the weapons engagement zone, these stand-in forces significantly complicate any adversary's decision-making calculus.
Building the naval expeditionary force of the future will require an honest assessment about the relevance of both current and planned capabilities, organizations, and equipment. Initial findings from our force design-related wargames are sharpening our understanding of the investments and divestments required to align the force with the
National Defense Strategy. It is increasingly clear that the Marine Corps is over-invested in capabilities and capacities purpose-built for traditional sustained operations ashore, including:
Surge-layer capacity resident within the reserve component and the current maritime prepositioning force;
Manned anti-armor ground and aviation platforms;
Manned ground transportation and associated movement capabilities;
Traditional towed-artillery that cannot be modified for potential high-velocity projectile use;
Manned ground reconnaissance;
Short-range mortar systems lacking necessary precision, range, and lethality;
Non-lethal small tactical unmanned aircraft systems;
Excess equipment maintained in administrative storage;
Exquisite platforms with unsustainable manpower/personnel requirements; and
Vehicles, aircraft, and systems that the service can neither afford to procure or afford to sustain over their anticipated lifespans.
At the same time, we are under-invested in naval expeditionary capabilities and capacities that support fleet operations, including:
Unmanned lethal and non-lethal ground and amphibious vehicles;
Unmanned aerial, ground, surface, and underwater logistics vehicles/vessels;
Mobile and rapidly deployable rocket artillery and long-range precision-fires to include anti-ship missiles;
Mobile air defense and counter-precision guided missile systems, to include directed energy systems;
Loitering munitions;
Signature management;
Electronic warfare;
Expeditionary airfield capabilities and structure to support manned and unmanned aircraft and other systems from austere, minimally developed locations;
Offensive mining capabilities; and
Lethal and risk-worthy surface vessels to include large undersea vessels.
I am not so naïve to think that undertaking such a bold endeavor will be straightforward. But, the urgency of the challenge before us compels action. We will not allow a failure of imagination to define this period of our collective naval or Marine Corps history. We will continue to challenge the status quo and continue to ask all the hard questions - regardless of the discomfort they produce. We will continue to rigorously wargame - and at a much-accelerated pace to facilitate learning. We cannot and will not get this wrong.
Gen. David H. Berger is the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.
10. War Crime Pardons and What They Mean for the Military
Excerpts:
Despite our clear pessimism, it's still important not to overstate the repercussions of Trump's pardons. Both norm enforcement and norm socialization processes are deeply embedded into the ethos of the U.S. armed forces. Vanquishing these mechanisms would take much more than the stroke of a pen, even by the president. As Richard Spencer, the former secretary of the Navy who was fired for resisting Trump, has
stated, "Americans need to know that 99.9 percent of our uniformed members always have, always are and always will make the right decision."
That's important to remember because - although the president plays a critical role in governing the U.S. armed forces - how the military operates is first and foremost a function of its membership. Social norms, once established, are difficult to break completely. Exaggerated claims about the detrimental impacts of Trump's pardons don't give enough credit to the countless officers and enlisted members who remain committed to upholding the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military law. Their determination reassures us that respect for the law of war isn't "
history."
We understand the deep opposition to Trump's pardons - and we share it. We don't think his actions completely decimate the law of war or imply that the vast majority of U.S. military personnel won't continue to advance its principles. Yet they undoubtedly raise serious concerns about ensuring compliance with the laws of war and about maintaining the distinctive culture of the U.S. military. Ultimately, pardons for war crimes (and other similar dismissals of the law of war)
will harm the U.S. military's potential to maintain the highest values of professionalism and honor - values that have long been its hallmarks.
War Crime Pardons and What They Mean for the Military - War on the Rocks
It has all the ingredients for good drama - inflammatory tweets, public threats, and Navy SEALs. But the public shouting match over the
recent firing of U.S. Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer by President Donald Trump for his handling of the prosecution of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher isn't just entertaining TV. It raises profound questions about the military's ability to enforce discipline and order within its ranks and also to promote a broader culture of respect and integrity.
The firing came on the heels of a spate of activity in which Trump, even
against the wishes of his own secretary of defense, chose to grant leniency to several accused or convicted war criminals. Specifically, the president
pardoned two soldiers, Special Forces Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, previously set to
go on trial for
killing a detainee, and Army Lt. Clint Lorance,
found guilty of murder in 2013. Trump also offered
clemency to Gallagher,
convicted in July 2019 for posing for a photo with the body of a teenager he was accused of killing. Trump's controversial decisions have provoked heated reactions both inside and outside the military, with much of the debate centering on how the pardons affect the ability of U.S. servicemembers to
carry out their jobs.
More alarmist
voices, including historian and West Point graduate Waitman Wade Beorn,
claim that Trump is "demolishing America's military institutions and replacing them with his own cult of personality and bankrupt values system." Skeptics, however, like Duke law professor and U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.,
insist that "it is absurd and ... insulting to think that troops will, because of the President's actions in a handful of cases, now go on some kind of rampage of 'Laws of War' illegality." Dunlap, for example, cites a recent
headline in the
New York Times - "Trump's Pardons for Servicemen Raise Fears That Laws of War Are History" - as evidence of overwrought concerns.
Who's right? Put simply, it's not an "either-or." Skeptics are correct to push back on the most extreme claims that Trump's pardons somehow demolish or fundamentally upend the laws of war within the U.S. military. Such laws have
developedovergenerations, and they can't be easily undone by a single president. To suggest otherwise is to underestimate the resilience of laws governing U.S. military operations. Yet just because Trump's interventions don't mark the end of an era in respect for the laws of war doesn't mean the decisions aren't deeply troubling - or that critics aren't right to denounce them.
It's naive to think that the president can promote a culture of impunity within the U.S. armed forces and not trigger adverse consequences - both in garrison and on the battlefield. Normalizing pardons for war crimes by defending them as a reasonable use of
presidential powers isn't only wrong; it sets a dangerous precedent. Critics of Trump's pardons are right to express anger over the interventions because they only deteriorate the capacity of the U.S. military to constrain the unauthorized use of force by its members and to ensure that the military abides by the principles of justice and integrity in war.
Trump's pardons weaken the two primary mechanisms by which the U.S. military engenders respect for the law of war by combatants: 1) norm enforcement and 2) norm socialization. By norm enforcement, we mean the methods by which commanders impose a set of rules and regulations governing troop behavior on the battlefield. By norm socialization, we mean the leadership messaging and training that contribute to the overall organizational culture of the U.S. military. When both of these mechanisms are undermined, the U.S. military is at greater risk of straying from its guiding principles.
Pardons Muddle Norm Enforcement Processes That Regulate Combatant Conduct on the Battlefield
Scholarship has
longestablished that one of the key ways that organizations influence the behavior of their members is through enforcement of institutional norms. Leaders utilize rewards and penalties to regulate the actions of individuals. The enforcement of organizational
norms through formal rules and laws is vital for all organizations, including those in both the public and private sectors. For the
military, however, where combatants are called upon to inflict lethal violence,
judicial and
nonjudicial punishment is imperative for regulating organizational norms and constraining the use of force.
Extensiveresearch shows that the
enforcement of military law and rules is indispensable to how commanders project authority over their troops. Frontline combatants rely on commanders both to set the objectives of military missions and to establish
legal and
policyboundaries for the employment of violence. Throughout the nation's history, the U.S. military has established rigorous internal mechanisms for enforcing such codes, including prosecution under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice and the authority of commanders to institute nonjudicial punishment for rule breakers.
Conflicting
signals from the president make it harder to instill respect for military law among servicemembers engaged in combat. In particular, they risk precipitating dual loyalties based on contradictory enforcement criteria whereby the commander-in-chief encourages
one set of rules and commanding officers
another. Pardons, particularly for egregious crimes committed on the battlefield, signal that norm enforcement within the military isn't a priority. When enforcement is relaxed, this blurs the line over what will and won't be tolerated when it comes to resisting directives from superiors.
All soldiers in the U.S. military are taught to discern what constitutes appropriate battlefield conduct. But amid the "
fog of war," where soldiers are forced to make split-second, life-or-death decisions in
ethically fraughtscenarios, the expectation that wrongdoers won't be held to account may encourage, or at least not deter, behavior inconsistent with military law. Even if pardons only raise marginal doubts about whether violations of military law will be condoned, that may be enough to lead some soldiers to defy orders - or to think certain acts are acceptable when in fact they breach military law.
Pardons Interfere with Norm Socialization Processes That Underpin U.S. Military Culture
Research also
demonstrates that diverse types of institutions regulate the activities of their members via
socialization of organizational norms.
Norms can fill the gaps in prescribing ethical behavior not directly codified in formal enforcement mechanisms. Through this vital mechanism, organizations leverage
training and leadership messaging to promote institutional cultures. Studies demonstrate that
leaders, in particular, hold
greatpower in shaping the
norms and
culture of professional military organizations. In this way, the commander-in-chief - the U.S. military's highest command authority - sets the tone for how the armed forces orient themselves.
Since the Vietnam War, the U.S. Department of Defense has devoted significant
attention to promoting the U.S. military's norms of
ethical conduct and respect for the
rule of law, as embodied in service core values and the principles underlying the law of armed conflict. The core
values of the U.S. Army, for instance, include respect, service, honor, and integrity; the U.S. Marine Corps
promotes notions of honor and the "warrior ethos."
Similarly, the U.S. military emphases abidance of the legal norm of civilian immunity, represented by the principles of distinction and proportionality, in its promulgation of the
law of war. Servicemembers spend countless hours during their careers receiving training on ethics, professionalism, rules of engagement, and the law of war. Consequently, norms of ethical conduct form a central aspect of the "identity" of many U.S. servicemembers. The desire to advance a higher
purpose and to foster
justice also motivates many to join the military in the first place.
Before Trump, commanders-in-chief have, with some exceptions, reinforced these values by paying rhetorical deference to the laws of war. For example, President Barack Obama
declared that "adherence to the domestic and international standards governing armed conflict is not only congruous with the United States' most cherished values, but is a source of strength that enhances both the legitimacy and sustainability of operations critical to our national security." Even if the United States hasn't always lived up to its lofty aims, such language cultivates norms of respect for the law of war.
Leadership influence can cut both ways, however - a phenomenon the U.S. Army experienced amid the tumult of the George W. Bush-era
torture policies. Today, Trump's contempt for the laws of war - a dismissal now promulgated by both conservative news
cheerleading and
GOP support on Capitol Hill - undermines the normative "
core" of the U.S. military based on ethical behavior and adherence to the rule of law. Over the long run, top-down disregard of U.S. military norms can chip away at these ideals, prompting servicemembers to question the organizational principles in which they believe.
Military Partisanship May Amplify These Effects
The potential long-term impacts of Trump's pardons may be all the more heightened by the ideological orientation of the military's membership.
Studyafterstudy shows that U.S. military members lean right politically, particularly in the officer corps. In America's
hyper-partisan atmosphere, it's likely that Trump's actions may have been driven by a
desire to score political points, both among his Republican base and among servicemembers and veterans. This not only raises questions about the purity of Trump's motives, but it also presages that the effects of the pardons may be especially far-reaching.
Trump's statements surrounding the pardons could give the impression that a lack of consensus exists within the U.S. government about the virtue of the laws of war and that differences of opinion are politically motivated. For example, in the lead-up to his pardons, the president
mocked: "We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!" At a campaign rally in Florida before Thanksgiving, Trump
boasted, "Just this week, I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state. You know what I'm talking about. ... People have to fight."
Given that the U.S. military is predominantly composed of conservative-leaning members, Trump's pardons - together with his power to frame the debate via the bully pulpit - are likely to resonate within a certain subpopulation of the military. The president's advocacy, supported by influential sources within the
conservative social environment, can significantly amplify the norm-shifting effects of his pardons - far beyond the "normal" effects that such acts might generate otherwise. This will make it more difficult for the damage of Trump's pardons to be isolated or contained.
The Bottom Line
Despite our clear pessimism, it's still important not to overstate the repercussions of Trump's pardons. Both norm enforcement and norm socialization processes are deeply embedded into the ethos of the U.S. armed forces. Vanquishing these mechanisms would take much more than the stroke of a pen, even by the president. As Richard Spencer, the former secretary of the Navy who was fired for resisting Trump, has
stated, "Americans need to know that 99.9 percent of our uniformed members always have, always are and always will make the right decision."
That's important to remember because - although the president plays a critical role in governing the U.S. armed forces - how the military operates is first and foremost a function of its membership. Social norms, once established, are difficult to break completely. Exaggerated claims about the detrimental impacts of Trump's pardons don't give enough credit to the countless officers and enlisted members who remain committed to upholding the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military law. Their determination reassures us that respect for the law of war isn't "
history."
We understand the deep opposition to Trump's pardons - and we share it. We don't think his actions completely decimate the law of war or imply that the vast majority of U.S. military personnel won't continue to advance its principles. Yet they undoubtedly raise serious concerns about ensuring compliance with the laws of war and about maintaining the distinctive culture of the U.S. military. Ultimately, pardons for war crimes (and other similar dismissals of the law of war)
will harm the U.S. military's potential to maintain the highest values of professionalism and honor - values that have long been its hallmarks.
Andrew M. Bell(@AndrewBellUS) is an assistant professor in the department of international studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and served with the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thomas Gift (@TGiftiv) is a lecturer in the department of political science at University College London and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics United States Centre.
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
