"The Quiet Conflict": The FBI Vs. The CIA/NSA On The Steele Dossier

The quiet war between compromised HUMINT and SIGINT

Waldo, c’est moi

The public disclosure by a CIA analyst Michael van Landingham that the CIA always knew that Steele dossier was fake ought to have gotten more attention than it did.

So let’s tuck into his story as recounted in Rolling Stone:

One of the biggest frustrations van Landingham faced while working on the report came not from the Russians but from within the U.S. government.

The FBI threw him a curveball in the form of the Steele Dossier — a compilation of uncorroborated gossip about Trump and Russia. The dossier was compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, who had worked as an occasional paid source for the FBI. 

The dossier’s most notorious bit of gossip was a dubious claim that Trump had been filmed by Russian intelligence ordering sex workers to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed for him during a 2013 trip. (Trump has repeatedly denied the so-called “pee tape” claim.) Other tantalizing tales included a fake story that former Trump fixer Michael Cohen had secretly traveled to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials. 

Rumors of the dossier had been swirling for a while but one morning in December 2016, an FBI analyst sent over a copy of Steele’s work to the CIA before the entirety of its contents had become public.
Van Landingham started reading and thought, “This is garbage.” 

“On the first read, the Steele Dossier was indefensibly trash. The worst possible information dressed up as clandestinely obtained intelligence. It was a joke,” he says, disdain creeping into a furrowed brow as he recounts the encounter. 

The Bureau’s decision to send it to the Agency annoyed him. “Someone takes a dump on your front doorstep and you’re like, ‘What do I do with this?’ Because you’ve got to touch shit or it’s going to sit there.” 

What galled van Landingham even more was the FBI’s request that the CIA use the dossier as evidence to support analytic judgments in the report he was working on. By that point, he’d been working long hours for weeks, and the strain of it led him to be blunt.

“I told my bosses, ‘I’m going to quit if you put this in there. I won’t participate in this anymore because this is just obvious nonsense,’” he says.

The Agency stood by its analysts. Brennan later told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA’s analytical branch “was very concerned about polluting the [report] with this material.” In the face of their objections, the CIA and FBI struck a compromise that the Agency would not include or use the dossier in the final ICA but “agreed to place the material in an annex,” according to the committee’s report.

…

The report found broad agreement within the intelligence community except for one point: Had Putin ordered Russia’s spy services to meddle in the election merely to cause bipartisan chaos, or had he wanted Trump to win? 

Van Landingham, his CIA colleagues, and the FBI concluded with high confidence that Putin had done it in order to help Trump. The NSA disagreed somewhat and assigned only moderate confidence to the judgment. The report spelled out both CIA and NSA’s confidence levels in the final unclassified report, allowing readers to see the scope of the narrow disagreement.

Reading this piece, I find myself wondering: Is it possible that Rolling Stone has been swept from its foreign malefactors? Sure feels that way. Are they really getting to the heart of the Tory treachery within the Steele dossier?

And if it did get swept who might have helped that happen?

You might recall, dear reader, that I got my start talking about the Rolling Stone fake rape hoax at the University of Virginia, complete with the whole Washington Post profile. (Did you know I was a “divisive blogger”? It’s been a strange ten years.)

For that effort I picked up a few Northern Virginia friends who I’ve gotten to know better during my sojourn in the D.C. suburbs. We play chess, go for beers and of course do puzzles.

If you’re curious I recommend reading James Bamford’s work on the history of the NSA. It’s particularly illuminating though perhaps a bit dated.

The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization (1982)

Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency. (2001)

The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. (2008)

How technology is developed has a material outcome on election outcomes and, in turn, economic realities.

Obama had Facebook and YouTube. Trump had Twitter. Biden had Dominion and Smartmatic. Harris has the NSA. Did you know that her old boyfriend Montel Williams was one of the first Black Americans to work at NSA? In 1983 Williams was transferred to Naval Security Group Activity (NSGA) Maryland at Ft. Meade, Maryland, where he worked with the National Security Agency.

Naval officer Montel Williams

So I have known the NSA types a lot earlier than I have publicly discussed, especially when they spotted me when I participated in various nerd pursuits in the greater Boston and L.A. areas. Or, to be more precise when they spotted those spotting me. As the NSA isn’t technically allowed to monitor American calls — sure, Jan — they monitor those monitoring us.

Most foreign governments have these spotters in our society who track and process our young. In the olden times they did things like buy SAT data or have professors on campus who recruited promising American youngsters.

Think Carroll Quigley and a young Bill Clinton — or “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua and her creepy husband Jed Rubenfeld capturing (or was it grooming?) a young J.D. Vance and countless clerks for Judge Kavanaugh and the Federalist Society.

I, for one, love this sort of stuff. My favorite article on this subject actually comes from the Russians. (See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “There is Absolutely No Reason in the World to Believe That Bill Clinton Is a CIA Asset—Except for All the Evidence,” CovertAction Mag, January 3, 2022).

You can see vestiges of this today like foreign sponsorship of chess tournaments or through fellowships. (Looking at you, Rex Sinquefield and Peter Thiel.)

Peter Thiel makes first move at chess championship

To some extent you could argue that Facebook was this processing on steroids and that Instagram is it on opioids. What we’re really talking about here is the selection process.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sergey Brin participated in Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.

You’ll notice that there are all kinds of ways in which the same graduates of the same colleges continually get all the venture funding — Harvard, MIT, Stanford. Allegedly this funding follows these schools because the people at these schools are oh so smart but then maybe it’s also so that no one will ask any questions about what exactly they’re up to. The system works until it doesn’t work anymore and maybe there’s been too much money chasing too few interesting ideas or people. Maybe this is Silicon Valley’s problem generally.

And yet all that collection means that you have to follow certain people who live very strange lives. I consider us the Waldos of the current moment. Or perhaps many Curious Georges narrowly avoiding capture. (When I was recruited by the FBI the compromised agent in charge described me as a “Forrest Gump” of the Trump years. This suited me just fine as Curious George was Gump’s favorite book.

“Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread man!” as one of my friends — another Waldo — used to say when we met up in Lisboa a few years ago. He advised me to dispense with my cryptocurrency lest I be murdered.

Or if you prefer, there are many Lazlos.

The emotional final scene of The Lives of Others suggests that there might even be good people within our national security apparatus.

At the time I didn’t appreciate that Lazlo meant “glorious ruler.”

What’s the difference between the NSA and a fairy godmother? The NSA is real and it has the power to turn people off rather than make their dreams come true.

And the NSA has been engaging in a quiet war with those of us who were targeted by the compromised FBI using some of us as bait.

The Tories, for their part, gave up one of theirs — FBI agent Charles McGonigal — and pretended that the problem was over. They gave him up to Mattathias Schwartz who soon went to the compromised New York Times.

There was a lingering question of just how many counterintelligence FBI agents were. The answer, of course, is that nearly all of them were, and that the NSA knew as much but needed fake excuses to neutralize the compromised agents. I was only too happy to oblige.

Schwartz says it’s a greed problem but I’m not so sure. The recent decision to begin paying police officers more may well be consistent with this effort to make them less susceptible. What if we paid cops based upon how many crimes they solved?

Of course were you the NSA, maybe what you’d do is have a Genius get caught and then track all the communications he was sending to the FBI?

Maybe he knew that all along.