July 15, 2018
With Friday’s indictments of
Russian intelligence officers, Ray McGovern and Bill Binney have written an
open letter to President Trump making clear that the “evidence” behind the
indictments is as fraudulent as the intelligence alleging WMD in Iraq. It is
being published exclusively here ahead of the Trump-Putin summit on Monday.
BRIEFING FOR: The
President
FROM: Ray McGovern, former CIA briefer of The President’s Daily Brief,
and William Binney, former Technical Director at NSA
SUBJECT: Info Your Summit Briefers May Have Missed
We reproduce below one of our most recent articles on
“Russia-Gate,” which, in turn, draws from our Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity Memorandum
to you of July 24, 2017.
At the time of that Memorandum we
wrote:
“Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National
Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by
a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from
the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent
cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an
external storage device.
Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations
is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an
Internet capability for a remote hack.”
“We do not know who or what
the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI,” we wrote. However, we
now have forensic evidence that shows the data provided by Guccifer 2.0 had
been manipulated and is a fabrication.
We also discussed CIA’s
cyber-tool “Marble Framework,” which can hack into computers, “obfuscate” who
hacked, and leave behind incriminating, tell-tale signs in Russian; and we
noted that this capability had been employed during 2016. As we pointed
out, Putin himself made an unmistakable reference to this “obfuscating” tool
during an interview with Megan Kelly.
Our article of June 7, 2018, explains further:
“Still
Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack”
If you are wondering why so
little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S.
election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It
could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never
bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate
as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity — including two “alumni” who were former National
Security Agency technical directors — have long since concluded that Julian
Assange did not acquire what he called the “emails related to Hillary Clinton”
via a “hack” by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got
them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee
computers who copied the material onto an external storage device — probably a
thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this
in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.
On January 18, 2017 President
Obama admitted that
the “conclusions” of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian
hacking got to WikiLeaks were “inconclusive.” Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA
“Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in
Recent U.S. Elections” of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian
President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no
direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the
“handpicked” authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from
expressing “high confidence” that Russian intelligence “relayed material it
acquired from the Democratic National Committee … to WikiLeaks.”
Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.
Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA
“assessment” became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA),
ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off
the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could
not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of
victory all by herself. No, it had to have been the Russians.
Five days into the Trump
presidency, McGovern had a chance to challenge Schiff
personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff
still “can’t share the evidence” with me … or with anyone else, because it does
not exist.
It was on June 12, 2016, just six
weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the
pending publication of “emails related to Hillary Clinton,” throwing the
Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias
in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie
Sanders. When the emails were published on July 22, just three days
before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what we call a
Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails
by blaming Russia for their release.
Clinton’s PR chief Jennifer
Palmieri later admitted that
she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with
instructions “to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to
process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from
the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary
Clinton.” The diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept
shouting “The Russians did it,” and gave little, if any, play to the DNC
skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer’ Fox, Bernie
didn’t say nothin’.
Meanwhile, highly sophisticated
technical experts, were hard at work fabricating “forensic facts” to “prove”
the Russians did it. Here’s how it played out:
June 12, 2016: Assange
announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish “emails related to Hillary
Clinton.”
June 14, 2016: DNC
contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server
and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: “Guccifer
2.0” affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the “hack;” claims to
be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was
synthetically tainted with “Russian fingerprints.”
The June 12, 14, & 15 timing
was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to
associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and
to “show” that it came from a Russian hack.
Enter Independent
Investigators
A year ago independent
cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best
known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the “handpicked
analysts” who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The
independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the
record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the “hack” that
day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.
Rather it originated with a copy
(onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider —
the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June
12, 2016 for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found
and the “fluid dynamics” principle of physics applied, this was not difficult
to disprove the
validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)
One of these independent
investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May 31 published new evidence that
the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United
States, and not from Russia.
In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum
to President Donald Trump we stated, “We do
not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.”
Our July 24 Memorandum
continued: “Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be
related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made
aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish
a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled ‘Vault
7.’ WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA
contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the
information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.
“No one has challenged the
authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array
of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA’s
Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA
Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John
Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President
Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]
Marbled
“Scarcely imaginable
digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100
mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and
duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault
7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the “Marble Framework”
program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as ‘news fit to print’
and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been
mentioned since.
“The Washington Post’s
Ellen Nakashima, it seems, ‘did not get the memo’ in time. Her March
31 article bore
the catching (and accurate) headline: ‘WikiLeaks’ latest release of CIA
cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.’
“The WikiLeaks release
indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use ‘obfuscation,’
and that Marble source code includes a “de-obfuscator” to reverse CIA text
obfuscation.
“More important, the CIA
reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report,
Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a
‘forensic attribution double game’ or false-flag operation because it included
test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.”
A few weeks later William Binney,
a former NSA technical director, and Ray McGovern commented on
Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version published in The
Baltimore Sun.
The CIA’s reaction to the
WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director
Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates
“demons,” and insisting; “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really
is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors
like Russia.”
Our July 24 Memorandum
continued: “Mr. President, we do not know if CIA’s Marble Framework, or
tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for
hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA’s Digital
Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These
are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President
Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24,
2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and
Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during
which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ]
“We also do not know if you
have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his
interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager –
to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7
disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin
pointed out that today’s technology enables hacking to be ‘masked
and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand
the origin’ [of the hack] … And, vice versa, it is possible to set up
any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are
the exact source of that attack.
“‘Hackers may be anywhere,’
he said. ‘There may be hackers, by the way, in the United
States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck
to Russia. Can’t you imagine such a scenario? … I can.’
New attention has been drawn to
these issues after McGovern discussed them in a widely published
16-minute interview last
Friday.
In view of the highly politicized
environment surrounding these issues, we believe we must append here the same
notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24, 2017:
“Full Disclosure: Over
recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the
public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh
impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we
in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread
truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence
colleagues.
“We speak and write without
fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what
presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental.” The fact we
find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly
politicized times.
Ray
McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, was chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy
Branch and briefed the President’s Daily Brief one-on-one from 1981-1985.
William
Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director
of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of
the collection systems still used by NSA.
No comments:
Post a Comment