Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI have been compared to Walker, but the Naval Institute Press in a 2010 retrospective on the Walker spy ring offered this:
Soviet spy chief Boris Solomatin offered a more nuanced perspective when author Pete Earley interviewed him in Moscow nearly ten years after Walker’s arrest. Refusing to compare the Walker case with that of former CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames, another high-profile spy for the Soviet Union, [Solomatin] observed that agents must be judged on the content of the information they deliver. Ames provided the names of Russians spying for the United States and thus affected the KGB-CIA espionage war. Ames’ information “would have been used to identify traitors,” he said. “That is a one-time event. But Walker’s information not only provided us with ongoing intelligence, but helped us over time to understand and study how your military actually thinks.” John Walker had been the Soviets’ key source on Navy submarine missile forces, which Solomatin viewed as the main component of the American nuclear triad. The KGB spymaster also noted that Walker helped both superpowers avoid nuclear war by enabling Moscow to appreciate true U.S. intentions – a goal the American articulated as one of his aims.
http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2010-06/navys-biggest-betrayal
Notice the importance that the former head of Soviet Intelligence placed upon “true U.S. intentions.” While he tries to claim that Walker contributed to some “greater good” – a dubious (but perhaps true) proposition – it nevertheless highlights how important intelligence services consider “plans and intentions” of U.S. foreign policy.
I was sitting at home one night, having dinner with my youngest daughter, when the news was going on about the Hillary Clinton email server scandal. I turned up the volume and listened closely for the first time. The early reporting was that she had set up her own private email server, presumably at her home in Chappaqua, New York, and had run all of her emails, both personal and State Department emails, through that private server.
I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. I turned, open-mouthed, to one of my daughters:
“I can’t fucking believe it,” I said. Not exactly incisive analysis.
She looked at me, understanding only that I was shocked, and trying to be supportive: “Not good, eh?”
“It’s the worst national security breach in history. And no one is talking about it.”
She looked up from her dinner. “Damn,” she said, with some earnestness.
Even at a young age, you can only hide travels to Afghanistan and that giant beard on your face for so long before a child guesses that something is up. I’d had to discuss my “work” with my kids and ask them to help me in maintaining my cover. As if my disappearances for long stretches of time without any communications home were not difficult enough on them as kids, circumstances had forced me to add the requirement that they help me maintain my cover. Thus, my daughter was well aware of the time I spent in the CIA, so her reaction to my comment contained the understanding that I wasn’t prone to hyperbole on these kinds of matters and I’d more than a little background on intelligence and classified materials from my time learning to steal other countries’ – and even terrorist organizations’ – secrets.
In the months since the Hillary email scandal broke, it’s played out like political kabuki theater for me; a pre-planned, ritualized dance with the actors all playing their roles perfectly. First, there were the denials.
Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate. Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing…. Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation. I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system.*
— Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, interview with CNN, July 7, 2015
(*This is a whopper of Homeric proportions – and I’ll let readers decide whether the appropriate analogy is the mythology of the ancient Greek poet or the prevarications of the donut eating head of the Simpsons clan).
Then, the media, both the left and the right, run to their respective corners and begin the process of portraying the incident in the best/worst light possible. This always includes complete ignorance of the subject matter and a vapid, sound-bite driven analysis by its “experts” who inevitably say stupid shit that reveals they have no idea of what they’re speaking. The link here is typical. It’s not horrible, but it is woefully lacking on the scope of the problem with the Secretary of State having her email server run off of her own private server.*
*This tracks with a wonderful observation made by my friend – and boss – Greg Glassman over breakfast one day.
“Ever notice how when something is reported in the press on a subject that you know a lot about, that you inevitably wind up thinking to yourself, ‘This is totally wrong. They have no fucking idea what they’re talking about?'”
“Mmhmm,” I nodded, over my coffee. I had noticed it over a career that had encompassed several fairly high profile cases with which I’d been involved. The reporting was universally lacking in what really mattered, if not outright wrong. The analysis was generally dumb, too.
“What makes you think it’s only the things you know about that are like that?” He paused and looked at me. I stopped chewing.
He had made that observation and I had just confirmed it. That was only an n of 2, but I started thinking about my friend the state cop and times I’d seen reporting on high-profile cases he was handling…yep. Then I thought of my other attorney friends and their experiences with the media…oh boy.
After the denials come the recriminations – or the bounceback – as I like to think of it. When the flat out denials don’t work, and the thing starts to pick up steam, then it becomes a “political witch hunt.” Hilary Clinton is perhaps the most famous person to ever invoke this during the controversy surrounding her husband’s Presidency, including the now-famous quote about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to get the serially philandering Lip-biter in Chief. At the time it seemed only like the wonderful naïveté of a wife trying to support her beleaguered husband. The reality is that it’s just the standard Act III of all of these political scandals.
Act Four is usually the doldrums. The media – and the people who consume it – generally have the attention span and focus of a speed freak at a video game arcade. Before anything approaching in depth reporting, investigating, or analysis can be done, the latest Caitlyn Jenner-like story comes along and poof! the subject is forgotten and the news cycle spins on.
In rare cases, we get to see an Act V – the Return if the Scandal – and that typically spells doom for the protagonists in these stories. In Act V, like Jason from Friday the 13th, or any Sylvester Stallone move franchise – it. just. won’t. go. away. In media terms, the story has “traction” or “legs.” And that is typically because some government official, in this case the woman holding one of the seats as a Principal of the United States of America, the Secretary of State, has done something so egregious that even her status as one of our “TOP MEN/WOMEN” will not insulate her from the press. They smell blood.
Let me now return to the beginning and try to add some context to just how bad this email scandal really is. I don’t care about the “scandal” aspect of it, so much as I care about the National Security implications of it. Hillary Clinton may be the most venal, malicious person to ever work in American politics – at least in the top 10 – but I get none of the usual schadenfreude that I should out of seeing another socialist get their comeuppance. Not in this case, where it comes at the expense of the national security of our country and our ability to conduct foreign affairs. The entire press and public seems blissfully unaware of how bad this is.
Let me state that I am not a TV pundit or a beltway insider. I have, however, been in the U.S. military and was a member of the intelligence community for some time. Combined service would be in the range of 25 to 30 years. I’ve handled everything from Confidential to Top Secret to Code Word and even Bigot List intelligence materials. And, by a painful coincidence, I’ve even been accused of mishandling classified materials – and investigated for it. (It’s a long story for another time, but think bad divorce and a career that involves handling classified materials and you can imagine the rest). I’ve been involved in both prosecutions and military criminal defense matters that required classified handling procedures under the Military Rules of Evidence. I’ve worked in SCIFs and I’ve seen the very best the U.S. can muster in SIGINT – before Edward Snowden was spilling the beans to the world about what the NSA was doing to every American’s email communications.
Anyone with any sense wants to stay as far away from that stuff as possible. It’s taught as a matter of course in Basic School (26 weeks of infantry training for every Marine Officer) that becoming the Classified Materials (or CMS) Custodian as one of your primary duties can only end badly. I know great officers who have had their careers ended because they lost a piece of crypto on an exercise – on U.S. soil, in training areas, where the odds of it falling into foreign intelligence service hands is about nil. e.g. Imagine you’re out on a night patrol in the swamps of Camp Lejeune and you’re a hard-charging Lieutenant. Your Marines are professionals and part of their training for a deployment includes using the actual cryptography gear – let’s say something fairly standard, nothing exotic, like an encrypted radio – that they’ll use on the deployment or in combat. If one of those “fills” should get dropped out of someone’s pack while doing a river crossing at night, that is the end of that Lieutenant’s career in the Marine Corps. No bullshit. It’s generally a double-signed fitness report (or at least it used to be in the “Old Corps”) and you’re at terminal rank or one more…and that’s it.
Now, let me try to come at this a different way and explain how intelligence gathering works. Let’s suppose, you, the reader, were the head of a foreign intelligence service, one with interests hostile to the United States’. Let us suppose that you were coming up with a list of things you’d like to know about the United States. Even a simpleton would likely put U.S. foreign policy goals, intentions, plans, capabilities, strategy, etc. fairly near the top of a target list. Typically, in Human Intelligence collection (HUMINT), one would start trying to find targets – people with access to that kind of information – and then begin the process of hopefully recruiting a person for subversion – to commit espionage against the U.S. and give a foreign intel service the kind of information I’m discussing.
The Secretary of State is a cabinet position. While there, Hillary Clinton answered to only one person on matters of foreign affairs – the President of the United States. ANY communications she had on matters of state – ANY – would almost of necessity be classified. Hell, her exact travel schedule is classified. What she was eating and her health would be considered a matter of significant interest to a foreign intelligence service. How can I say that? Because that’s exactly how WE would treat information about her foreign counterpart in any other country. If Iran’s or China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs were traveling abroad, you can be absolutely certain he is a target of our highest intelligence gathering capabilities. They know this. It’s part of the job from the moment they step into it. Hillary Clinton was one of only twenty people in the entire United States government who had classification authority herself.
As this scandal has continued to evolve, it’s now come out that (1) Hillary Clinton took the unprecedented step of setting up her own private email server for her State Department emails outside of any of the protections that everyone else in the State Department had, namely that those email servers are controlled, maintained, and housed in secure facilities that are both physically and electronically protected from outside intrusion; (2) it is now evident that she farmed that responsibility out to some firm in Denver, Colorado, and that up until recently their servers, through which Hillary’s email would have run, were housed in – ahem – less than ideal conditions; (3) she has repeatedly lied about whether or not she had classified materials on her private email server; (4) she has utterly failed in her responsibility – the one that every single person in the U.S. government who handles classified material has – to safeguard such materials; (5) she knowingly and intentionally destroyed her emails – by wiping the server – without ever submitting them for clearance to ensure that they could be deleted and meed not be preserved for the record; and (6) she did all of this at a time when she was subpoenaed as a witness in a Congressional investigation, namely the Benghazi matter, which directly dealt with what she knew and when in her role as head of the Department of State.
In short, Hillary Clinton is guilty of a list of felonies longer than your arm. If that seems unfair, please ask yourself why General David Petraeus was prosecuted for mishandling of classified information and he committed the certainly less egregious sin of sharing classified work matters with a reporter. He did not, for example, give his entire DoD email address inbox to a non-cleared company with non-cleared employees.
To return to the viewpoint of a foreign intelligence service, if I were the head of Soviet, or Chinese, or Iranian (etc) intelligence, Hillary Clinton setting up her own private email server “off the reservation” – and outside the protective walls where State Department email traffic is normally kept – would be an absolute intelligence bonanza, the likes of which has never been seen. Try to imagine this: what would you think if you heard that the UK’s Foreign Minister had done the same thing? Your reaction (if you thought about it would be), “Wow, that is galactically fucking stupid!” followed by “Holy shit! Someone could have hacked that so easily!” Exactly.
At a time when we’ve just learned that the Office of Personnel Management had its secure, protected, encrypted servers hacked and everyone’s SF-86 (including mine) is now in the hands of the Chinese, how in the holy fuck can Hillary Clinton stand in front of us with a straight face and say, “Meh. No biggie. Quit making a big deal out of this.”
I mean, the audacity of it is stunning.
Unless one is a moron, you have to assume at this point that (1) Hillary Clinton’s emails, every last one of them, is in the hands of every worth-a-shit intelligence service in the world… (with all due respect to Platte River Networks, I’m confident the Chinese and Russians could take that server down in the time it would take someone to go to lunch and order a sandwich); (2) therefore, the intentions and plans of the United States’ foreign policy is also in the hands of every worth-a-shit intelligence service in the world; (3) the woman seeking the highest office in the country – to be the President of the United States – is compromised.
Read that again and think about it: every email she wrote is almost certainly in the hands of foreign intel services.
People trying to defend Hillary will claim that I have no proof that such a thing happened, so that it’s baseless speculation… except for the aforementioned hack at OPM. Or the fact that in 2013, longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal had his email hacked – and it included emails to Hillary’s private email address and server, as reported by the Washington Post back in March.
Perhaps it’s not the case, but it doesn’t change the fact that she hired non-cleared folks to run her obviously classified emails. Does she know if those people were simply bought off by the Russians? Or the Chinese? Did she do anything to check on that before setting up the email server? (I’m going to go out on a limb and say, “No” to that one). That one of our highest government officials did this – and she is trying to convince us that she’s the best choice for President of the United States – makes this whole thing like something out of Theater of the Absurd.
Then there’s the even deeper analysis that has been mentioned only in passing so far – why did Hillary do this in the first place? She can’t possibly be that stupid. Then again, it all makes perfect sense if one simply takes a look at the Clinton Foundation, that nebulous organization to which seemingly everyone wanting something has at some point contributed. This includes, as just one example, Ian Telfer, the head of Russia’s government uranium company, Uranium One. Telfer made four different contributions to the Clinton Foundation, to the tune of a rather paltry $2.35 million, while that company had matters pending before the State Department to buy United States’ uranium. Breitbart reported on this back in April, 2015:
Put simply, Hillary promised to disclose all donations to the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Giustra initiative—the place where Ian Telfer made his four hidden donations while the pending transfer of U.S. uranium to the Russian government sat on Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s desk.
You can’t even make this up. The NY Times reported on it, as well.
Let me put it a little more starkly: The head of Russia’s government uranium company secretly contributed $2,350,000.00 to the Foundation of the United States’ Secretary of State and then later got his request to buy United States’ uranium approved – by the same Secretary of State. Has there ever been anything more brazenly corrupt? Yet it was reported on as if the real essence of the problem was that Hillary (er- the “Clinton Foundation”) broke her/its promise to the Obama Administration to report such matters. And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg that is supposedly contained in “Clinton Cash,” the book written about various donations made to the Clinton Foundation, including a number wherein former President Bill Clinton racked up extensive speaking fees (paid in the form of donations to the Clinton Foundation), in a number of cases by governments, individuals, or companies with matters pending before his wife as the head of the U.S. State Department. Like this one with Sweden. Or this minor $1.9 Billion windfall to GE, which coincidentally made a donation to the Clinton Foundation at the same time and whose CEO has refused to release his company’s emails with the Secretary of State.
Jeez, I wonder if somehow all of those 30,000+ emails that Hilary attempted to wipe off of her server might have anything to do with any of that?
I’ve reached the point now that I can’t even take politics seriously. We’ve got what amounts to the single-largest National Security breach in U.S. history by a principal of the U.S. government all because of her desire to use her position as Secretary of State – and her husband’s as a former POTUS – to rack up massive donations for their private Foundation – and right out in the public eye! It’s like there was a special at “Felonies ‘R Us!” If the citizens of this Republic decide they want that woman as President, and do elect her, we will get exactly the government we deserve.
In fact, a broader look at the candidates for the 2016 election reveals such a depressing collection on both sides (with a few exceptions who, of course, are running way near the bottom of their respective polls) that one can only conclude that the people of the United States no longer even pretend that they want honesty, integrity, or fidelity to this country from their leaders… but that’s a post for another day.
UPDATE: I was having dinner with my youngest daughter and the television was on in the background, some news outlet reporting on the Hillary Clinton email scandal. There was a cut to the press conference where Mrs. Clinton was responding to reporters and there was a testy exchange about what emails she deleted. In the very beginning of the exchange, one can’t hear the full question, but she answer with this:
“Well, my personal emails are my personal business.”
- Press Conference Response to Ed Henry, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015.
My seventeen year-old, without looking up from her dinner, said: “Hunh. Her emails are her personal business… How come she supports the NSA looking at all American citizens emails, though? I mean, how come her emails are her personal business – and none of the government’s business now – but OUR emails are not OUR personal business?”
I couldn’t believe it. In the span of ten seconds my seventeen year-old cut through all of the bullshit and rhetoric to get to one of the greatest hypocrisies of this whole email scandal that no one – and I confess I hadn’t thought of this either – has even brought up: the sheer audacity of Mrs. Clinton’s position that for anti-terrorism purposes, it’s perfectly okay for the National Security Agency, DEA, and other government agencies to use electronic interception, backdoors from email/cellphone/electronic communication providers, and the force of legislation to ensure they can read our private, completely non-governmental email, text messages, etc. HOWEVER, the email serve that she set up for herself while working as the frigging Secretary of State is none of the public’s business and she’s allowed to simply delete 32,000 or so emails that she and her staff deemed “personal.”
Leave it to a teenager to instantly ferret out adult hypocrisy. It’s like they’re wired for it.
Benjamin felt a nose nuzzling at his shoulder. He looked round. It was Clover. Her old eyes looked dimmer than ever. Without saying anything, she tugged gently at his mane and led him round to the end of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written. For a minute or two they stood gazing at the tatted wall with its white lettering.
‘My sight is failing,’ she said finally. ‘Even when I was young I could not have read what was written there. But it appears to me that that wall looks different. Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?’
For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran:
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
After that it did not seem strange when next day the pigs who were supervising the work of the farm all carried whips in their trotters.
Animal Farm, p. 50-51 (George Orwell, 1945)