Free Republic

A linguist for the Department of Defense pleaded guilty on Friday to passing classified information about U.S. human intelligence sources to an individual with ties to Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist organization, the Department of Justice said. Mariam Taha Thompson began sending the information after the U.S. killed Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander, in an airstrike in early 2020, according to court documents. Thompson, who held a top secret security clearance, had been stationed at a Special Operations Task Force facility in Iraq from mid-December 2019 until her arrest a few months later. Years before she began passing classified...

For over a year, we have been waging a relentless, nearly solitary battle in apprising the Congress and the American public about a billion dollar boondoggle and scandal: the lack of credible Arabic translators for our national security and intelligence agencies. As a result hundreds have been killed in Iraq from infiltration of our military and civilian intelligence agencies by agents of Islamist terrorists. Our FBI and CIA have been infiltrated by Muslim linguists who have successfully evaded polygraph tests and been able to pass on vital information to terror groups in the Middle East such as Hezbollah. Tens of...

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq. The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables...

Deputy assistant director Jonathan Moffa’s testimony, which has been obtained exclusively by National Review, suggests there was more going on than has yet been admitted. The deputy assistant director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jonathan Moffa, was involved with the Russia–Trump investigation from the start. He was asked, in a closed-door Capitol Hill interview on August 24, 2018, to describe his role: “I was the section chief over counterintelligence analysis during the period of the election,” Moffa told lawmakers and staff. “And as a result, I had analysts who reported to me who supported the full range of the...

Having had his sentence for betraying the nation commuted by President Barack Obama, former soldier Chelsea Manning is making the rounds of various public speaking appearances. One of these took place in the Big Apple at the New Yorker Festival yesterday. When the question came up of the hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents he dumped out into the public sphere, Manning claimed that he had not, in fact, done anything wrong. The reason? They weren’t “intelligence documents” but rather “historical data.” And no… I’m not even kidding. (Fox News) Chelsea Manning on Sunday told a crowd at the annual...

Former DIA Officer Who Spied for China Hated Trump Court documents reveal Chinese intelligence targets BY: Bill Gertz A former Defense Intelligence Agency officer who spied for China worked secretly as a Beijing agent for five years and revealed in an intercepted phone call he was motivated in part by hatred for President Trump. Ron Rockwell Hansen, a DIA operations officer until 2006, was arrested June 5 and pleaded guilty on Friday in Utah to attempting to sell national defense secrets to China. He faces 15 years in prison under a plea deal. Sentencing is set for Sept. 24. Court...

The Senate on Monday released 500 pages of documents, including text messages between demoted counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. One of the formerly redacted texts suggests that the FBI may have been snooping into the Trump campaign way earlier than previously believed. Without mentioning any campaign specifically, the December 2015 text message refers to "oconus lures," which is FBI lingo for spies outside the continental United States. Strzok was leading the Clinton investigation at the time and would go on to play a central role in the Trump/Russia probe. It is being assumed...

Full title EXCLUSIVE: Disgraced FBI Officials Claimed ‘Insurance Policy’ Text Was About Whether To ‘Burn Longstanding Sources’ Peter Strzok and Lisa Page told Congress that a text they exchanged referring to an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency was a reference to a discussion about potentially “burning” a longtime FBI source in the event of an aggressive investigation of the Trump campaign. Page described the unnamed source as “sensitive and reliable.” Strzok said the source was “very sensitive.” Both told lawmakers that they and FBI officials were concerned that ramping up an investigation of the Trump campaign might expose the...

More than 70 foreign nationals working as spies for the CIA in Iran and China were systematically identified and slaughtered in the past decade, due to a ridiculously weak web-based system the CIA used to communicate with foreign assets it couldn’t reach directly. This according to a devastating November 2 report in Yahoo News written by journalists Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin (center-left, but generally trustworthy). Although the Iranian roll-up occurred in 2011, and the Chinese rout occurred from 2010 to 2012, the CIA did not remedy the root cause of the problem in its transient messaging scheme until 2013,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources from 2010 to 2012, hobbling U.S. spying operations in a massive intelligence breach whose origin has not been identified, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Investigators remain divided over whether there was a spy within the Central Intelligence Agency who betrayed the sources or whether the Chinese hacked the CIA's covert communications system, the newspaper reported, citing current and former U.S. officials.

A former CIA officer was indicted Tuesday on charges that he planned to give confidential U.S. government documents to the Chinese government, according to U.S. Department of Justice. Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, of Hong Kong, was indicted by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia. He is charged with one count of conspiracy to cater or deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government and two counts of unlawfully retaining documents related to the national defense. Mr. Lee, who is naturalized U.S. citizen, was found to be in possession of two notebooks containing the true...

Remember the outrage when CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to newspaperman Robert Novak? Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, accused the Bush White House of doing it in retaliation, because her husband was a critic of its war policy. Wilson said it would be “fun to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.” Only one problem: Rove didn’t do it. The State Department’s Richard Armitage did. Now the worm has turned. Last week, Glenn Greenwald, the man who helped Edward Snowden get stolen American secrets published, wrote an article naming the woman — a...

The Justice Department has filed charges against a former FBI agent accusing him of leaking classified documents to a news outlet. Terry Albury, whom Minnesota Public Radioreported worked on counterterrorism matters at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, stands accused of two counts — “knowingly and willfully” transmitting national defense information to The Intercept, and refusing to hand over a document related to terrorism recruitment. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, officials filed a two-page felony information document, which the paper described as “a charging document that typically signals an imminent guilty plea.” The documents Mr. Albury is accused of giving to the...

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day. The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward. Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used...

If true, the latest revelation about Hillary Clinton’s secret e-mail system goes way beyond “smoking gun.” It reaches the level of full core meltdown when it comes to US national security and the safety of American intel sources. Fox News reporters Catherine Herridge report that the Inspector General has noted that information in one or more e-mails contained information classified as “HCS-O,” denoting extraordinarily sensitive material that could put a human intel source at high risk if exposed.

**SNIP** Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA operative outed by the W. Bush administration, also chimed in. “Astonishing: White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan,” she tweeted in a sardonic message on Monday. The name of the CIA’s chief of station in Kabul, the agency’s top spy in Afghanistan, was listed among the 15 officials briefing Obama upon his arrival at Bagram Air Base. The White House only caught the error when Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson alerted the press office, after Obama’s schedule was included in an email that was circulated to as many as 6,000 members of the media.

The White House will investigate how Obama's press team managed to accidentally leak the name of the CIA's Chief of Station in Kabul. Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has deputized White House counsel Neil Eggleston to look into how the name of the top U.S. spy in Afghanistan ended up on Obama's itinerary for his weekend trip to Afghanistan, which was emailed to an estimated 6,000 members of the press. Eggleston will review what led to the disastrous mistake and make recommendations to prevent such a disclosure from happening again.

Hillary Clinton posted and shared the names of concealed U.S. intelligence officials on her unprotected email system. Federal records reveal that Clinton swapped these highly classified names on an email account that was vulnerable to attack and was breached repeatedly by Russia-linked hacker attempts. These new revelations — reminiscent of the Valerie Plame scandal during George W. Bush’s tenure — could give FBI investigators the evidence they need to make a case that Clinton violated the Espionage Act by mishandling national defense information through “gross negligence.”