<\/p>\n
Barbara Boland
\nThe American Conservative<\/p>\n
Abombshell\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0published by\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0Friday alleges\u00a0that Russia paid\u00a0dollar bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan\u00a0to kill U.S troops. Obscured by an extremely bungled White House press response, there are at least three serious flaws with the reporting.<\/p>\n The article alleges that GRU, a top-secret unit of Russian military intelligence, offered the bounty in payment for every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan, and that at least one member of the U.S. military was alleged to have been killed in exchange for the bounties. According to the paper, U.S. intelligence concluded months ago that the Russian unit involved in the bounties was also linked to poisonings, assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe. The\u00a0Times<\/em> reports that United States intelligence officers and Special Operations forces in Afghanistan came to this conclusion about Russian bounties some time in 2019.<\/p>\n According to the anonymous sources that spoke with the paper\u2019s reporters, the White House and President Trump were briefed on a range of potential responses to Moscow\u2019s provocations, including sanctions, but the White House had authorized no further action.<\/p>\n Immediately after the news broke Friday, the Trump administration denied the report\u2014or rather, they denied that the President was briefed, depending on which of the\u00a0frenetic, contradictory White House responses you read.<\/a><\/p>\n Traditionally, the President of the United States receives unconfirmed, and sometimes even raw intelligence, in the\u00a0President\u2019s Daily Brief,<\/a>\u00a0or PDB.\u00a0Trump\u00a0notoriously does not read his PDB, according to reports.<\/a><\/p>\n Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in a statement Saturday night that neither Trump nor Vice President Pence \u201cwere ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n On Sunday night, Trump tweeted that not\u00a0only was he not told about the alleged intelligence, but that it was not credible.\u201cIntel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP\u201d Pence, Trump\u00a0wrote Sunday night on Twitter.<\/p>\n Ousted National Security Advisor John Bolton said on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d Sunday that Trump was probably claiming ignorance in order to justify his administration\u2019s lack of response.<\/p>\n \u201cHe can disown everything if nobody ever told him about it,\u201d said Bolton.<\/p>\n Bolton is one of the only sources named in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article. Currently on a book tour, Bolton has said that he witnessed foreign policy malfeasance by Trump that dwarfs the Ukraine scandal that was the subject of the House impeachment hearings. But Bolton\u2019s credibility has been called into question since he declined to appear before the House committee.<\/p>\n The explanations for what exactly happened, and who was briefed, continued to shift Monday.<\/p>\n White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany followed Trump\u2019s blanket denial with a statement that the intelligence concerning Russian bounty information was \u201cunconfirmed.\u201d She didn\u2019t say the intelligence wasn\u2019t credible, like Trump had said the day before, only that\u00a0there was \u201cno consensus\u201d\u00a0and that the \u201cveracity of the underlying allegations continue to be evaluated,\u201d which happens to almost completely match the Sunday night\u00a0statement from\u00a0the White House\u2019s National Security Council.<\/p>\n Instead of saying that the sources for the Russian bounty story were not credible and the story was false, or likely false, McEnany then said that Trump had \u201cnot been briefed on the matter.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe was not personally briefed on the matter,\u201d she said. \u201cThat is all I can share with you today.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult to see how the White House thought McEnany\u2019s statement would help, and a bungled press response like this is communications malpractice, according to sources who spoke to\u00a0The American Conservative.<\/em><\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a deeper dive into some of the problems with the reporting here:<\/p>\n 1. Anonymous U.S. and Taliban sources?<\/strong><\/p>\n The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0article repeatedly cites unnamed \u201cAmerican intelligence officials.\u201d\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0articles \u201cconfirming\u201d the original\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0story merely restate the allegations of the anonymous officials, along with caveats like \u201cif true\u201d or \u201cif confirmed.\u201d<\/p>\n Furthermore, the unnamed intelligence sources who spoke with the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0say that their assessment is based \u201con interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a red flag, said John Kiriakou, a former analyst and case officer for the CIA who led the team that captured\u00a0senior al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you capture a prisoner, and you\u2019re interrogating him, the prisoner is going to tell you\u00a0what he thinks you want to\u00a0hear,\u201d he said in an interview with\u00a0The American Conservative<\/em>. \u201cThere\u2019s no evidence here, there\u2019s no proof.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho\u00a0can forget how \u2018successful\u2019 interrogators can be in getting desired answers?\u201d\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0Ray McGovern,\u00a0who served as a\u00a0CIA analyst for 27 years.\u00a0Under the\u00a0CIA\u2019s \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques,\u201d Khalid Sheik Mohammed famously made at least 31 confessions,<\/a>\u00a0many of which were completely false.<\/p>\n Kiriakou believes that the sources behind the report\u00a0hold important clues on how the government viewed its credibility.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t\u00a0know who the source is for this. We don\u2019t know if they\u2019ve been\u00a0vetted, polygraphed; were they a walk-in; were they a captured prisoner?\u201d<\/p>\n If the sources were suspect, as they appear to be here, then Trump would not have been briefed on this at all.<\/p>\n With this story, it\u2019s important to start at the \u201cintelligence collection,\u201d said Kiriakou. \u201cThis information\u2026 appeared in the [CIA World\u00a0Intelligence\u00a0Review]\u00a0Wire, which goes to hundreds of people inside the government, mostly at the State Department and the Pentagon. The most sensitive information isn\u2019t\u00a0put in the Wire; it goes only in the PDB.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf this was\u00a0from a single source intelligence,\u00a0it wouldn\u2019t have been briefed to\u00a0Trump.\u00a0It\u2019s not vetted, and it\u2019s not important\u00a0enough.\u00a0If you caught a\u00a0Russian who said this, for example, that would make it important enough.\u00a0But some Taliban detainees\u00a0saying\u00a0it to\u00a0an\u00a0interrogator, that does not\u00a0rise to\u00a0the threshold.\u201d<\/p>\n 2. What purpose would\u00a0bounties serve?<\/strong><\/p>\n Everyone and their mother knows Trump wants to pull the troops out of Afghanistan, said Kiriakou.<\/p>\n \u201cHe ran on it and he has said it hundreds of times,\u201d he said. \u201cSo why would the Russians bother putting a bounty on U.S. troops if we\u2019re about\u00a0to leave Afghanistan shortly\u00a0anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s leaving aside Russia\u2019s own experience with the futility of Afghanistan campaigns, learned during its grueling 9-year war there in the 1980s.<\/p>\n If this bounty campaign is real, it would not appear to be very effective, as\u00a0only\u00a0eight U.S. military members were killed in Afghanistan in 2020.<\/a>The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0could not verify that even one U.S. military member was killed due to an alleged Russian bounty.<\/p>\n The Taliban denies it accepted bounties from Russian intelligence.<\/p>\n \u201cThese kinds of deals with the Russian intelligence agency are baseless\u2014our target killings and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and we did it on our own resources,\u201d Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, told\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. \u201cThat changed after our deal with the Americans, and their lives are secure and we don\u2019t attack them.\u201d<\/p>\n The Russian Embassy in the United States called the reporting\u00a0\u201cfake news.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n While the Russians are ruthless, \u201cit\u2019s hard to fathom what their motivations could be\u201d here, said Paul Pillar,\u00a0an academic and 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency,\u00a0in an interview with\u00a0The American Conservative.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cWhat would they be retaliating for? Some use of force in Syria recently? I don\u2019t know. I can\u2019t string together a particular sequence that makes sense\u00a0at this time.\u00a0I\u2019m not saying that to cast doubt on reports the Russians were doing this sort of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n