so, is Joe pulling another MBS/Khashoggi, or was the defense lobby doing its thing/WMDs?: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/na...bounties-dead-u-s-troops-biden-admin-n1264215 Remember those Russian bounties for dead U.S. troops? Biden admin says the CIA intel is not conclusive The Biden administration made clear Thursday that the CIA has only "low to moderate confidence" in its intel on alleged Russian bounties for U.S. troops. WASHINGTON — While he was campaigning for president, Joe Biden treated as fact that U.S. intel agencies had determined Russia had paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan. "I don't understand why this president is unwilling to take on Putin when he's actually paying bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan," Biden said of President Trump, speaking to Kristen Welker of NBC News during the Oct. 22 presidential debate. Such a definitive statement was questionable even then. On Thursday, it became more clear that the truth of the matter is unresolved. Last fall, while Biden was a candidate, Pentagon officials told NBC News they could not substantiate that such bounties were paid. They still have not found any evidence, a senior defense official said Thursday. And the Biden administration also made clear in a fact sheet released Thursday that the CIA's intelligence on the matter is far from conclusive, acknowledging that analysts labeled it "low to moderate confidence." The White House fact sheet explaining new sanctions over Russian misbehavior made clear that Russia was not being sanctioned over the issue. It used careful language, referring to "reported Afghanistan bounties." "The administration is responding to the reports that Russia encouraged Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan based on the best assessments from the Intelligence Community," the fact sheet says. "Given the sensitivity of this matter, which involves the safety and well-being of our forces, it is being handled through diplomatic, military and intelligence channels." In intelligence parlance, moderate confidence means the information is plausible and credibly sourced, but not quite corroborated enough to merit a higher rating. Low confidence means the analysis was based on questionable or implausible information — or information too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid inferences. It can also reflect problems with the credibility of the sources. It's perhaps the latest example of how much uncertainty pervades the gray world of espionage, in which sources aren't always reliable and intercepted communications don't always mean what they seem to. As former CIA director Michael Hayden has said, "If it was a fact, it wouldn't be intelligence." Asked at a press briefing Thursday whether the White House believed the CIA assessment, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki did not answer directly. She said the reason the confidence level was “low to moderate,” is because some of the information came from Afghan detainees, and also due to the challenging operating environment in Afghanistan. “This information really puts the burden on Russia and the Russian government to explain their engagement here,” she added. After Biden became president — and began receiving more detailed intelligence briefings — his comments about the alleged Russian incentive payments became more careful. On Jan. 25, for example, he referred to "reports of bounties." The Russian government has denied paying bounties to the Taliban to kill Americans. Democrats pilloried the Trump administration because the president never raised the issue of alleged bounties with the Russians. Many foreign policy experts said they should have done so, even if the evidence didn't add up to proof. But in making those criticisms, Democrats, including Biden, imbued the intelligence with a certainty that appears to have been unmerited. U.S. intelligence agencies have for years documented Russian financial and military support to the Taliban, but the news that the CIA detected a Russian program to incentivize the killing of American service members — first reported last year by the New York Times — appeared to represent a significant escalation. Officials familiar with the matter told NBC News that the CIA based its findings on two main avenues of intelligence: Financial records seized in a raid in Afghanistan and comments by a detainee. Military officials say they have looked hard but found no other evidence to corroborate that such a program existed. In September, Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, whose remit includes Afghanistan, told NBC News, "It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me." "We continue to look for that evidence," the general added. "I just haven't seen it yet. But … it's not a closed issue." McKenzie's comments reflected a consensus view in the military. Defense Secretary Mark Esper told the House Armed Services Committee in July that "All the defense intelligence agencies have been unable to corroborate that report. "That has not changed, a senior official with direct knowledge told NBC News Thursday. McKenzie said in September that if he could establish that the Russians were offering payments to kill Americans, he would push to forcefully respond. But the intelligence is far from conclusive, he said. "I found what they presented to me very concerning, very worrisome. I just couldn't see the final connection, so I sent my guys back and said, look, keep digging. So we have continued to dig and look because this involves potential threats to U.S. forces, it's open," he said, adding, "I just haven't seen anything that closes that gap yet." A U.S. military official familiar with the intelligence added at the time that after a review of the intelligence around each attack against Americans going back several years, none has been tied to any Russian incentive payments. McKenzie could not be reached for comment, but the official familiar with the intelligence told NBC News Thursday that no Taliban attack had been tied to Russia.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/22/pentagon-russia-attacks-us-troops-484150 Pentagon investigated suspected Russian directed-energy attacks on U.S. troops Defense officials have briefed congressional committees on the use of mysterious weapons against American service members. The Pentagon has briefed top lawmakers on intelligence surrounding suspected directed-energy attacks against U.S. troops, and officials identified Russia as a likely culprit, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The Defense Department had been investigating the incidents, including those targeting its personnel around the world, since last year, according to four former national security officials directly involved in the probe. Pentagon officials informed at least two key groups of lawmakers earlier this year, in written form and in-person, about the investigation. POLITICO spoke with congressional officials who were briefed on the suspected attacks as part of their oversight duties of the Pentagon. The briefings included information about injuries sustained by U.S. troops in Syria, the people said. The investigation includes one incident in Syria in the fall of 2020 in which several troops developed flu-like symptoms, two people familiar with the Pentagon probe said. After this article was published, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told lawmakers during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that he has seen "no evidence" of such attacks against U.S. troops in the Middle East. A Pentagon spokesperson declined further comment on the Pentagon’s interactions with Capitol Hill or any internal investigation. The incidents of suspected directed-energy attacks by Russia on Americans abroad became so concerning that the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity conflict began investigating last year, according to two former national security officials involved in the effort. It’s unclear exactly how many troops were injured, or the extent of their injuries. The investigation is part of a broader effort to look into directed-energy attacks on U.S. officials across multiple agencies in recent years. Since late 2016, close to 50 officials have reported symptoms of a mysterious illness that became known as “Havana syndrome” among U.S. diplomats posted in Cuba. Symptoms included acute ringing and pressure in the ears, as well as loss of hearing and balance, fatigue and residual headaches. Some victims have suffered long-term brain damage. Directed-energy attacks on U.S. spies and diplomats are well-documented; the CIA recently set up its own task force to look into the issue. But the recent Pentagon effort to look into similar incidents affecting U.S. troops has not previously been reported. Circumstances surrounding these incidents are murky, and U.S. officials have encountered difficulties in attributing the suspected attacks to any particular weapon or country. A directed-energy attack uses highly concentrated electromagnetic energy, including high-powered radio frequency or microwave devices and particle beams, to harm a target. The attacks can take different forms, from jamming electronic equipment to causing pain or permanent injuries. A report commissioned by the State Department and released in December pointed to “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” as the most probable cause for the “Havana syndrome” incidents. News of Russia’s alleged behavior comes as President Joe Biden is already staring down an increasingly aggressive Moscow, moving to impose a second round of sanctions last week for its cyberattacks and interference in U.S. elections. That round of sanctions notably excluded an effort to stop a major Russian pipeline project, and it came as historic numbers of Russian troops are assembling on its border with Ukraine. The investigation evolved into a larger discussion involving the National Security Council, the CIA, State Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said three former national security officials involved in the discussions. The members of Congress privy to top-secret intelligence, known as the Gang of Eight, were notified about Russia’s suspected targeting of Americans in Syria using directed energy, according to the two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The Senate Armed Services Committee was also briefed, the people said. Pentagon investigated suspected Russian directed-energy attacks on U.S. troops Dems' ambitions narrow as political reality sets in The congressional officials briefed on the incidents said the Pentagon believes that the nature of the directed-energy attacks is similar to those carried out against Americans in Cuba, but was hesitant to draw direct parallels. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, told POLITICO that he’s awaiting further information on the issue. “I know that we’re going to be having a discussion, a briefing on that, informal — and frankly, it’s going to be confidential,” he said in a brief interview. “So let’s wait and see.” Sen. Jim Inhofe speaks during a press conference. U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) speaks during a press conference following the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon. | Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images Inhofe declined to elaborate on the forthcoming discussion. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang of Eight, expressed concern about Russia’s aggression in the Middle East. “I think that’s a question that has to have answers,” Rubio said in an interview. “And beyond that, we’ve all seen some of these attacks on diplomatic facilities. I don’t want to link the two, but again, I just can’t comment on any of that.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, declined to confirm any details about any briefing on directed energy use in Syria. “On a number of topics where we have been briefed in a classified setting, I think the American people need and deserve to know more,” he added. The alleged attacks prompted a Pentagon investigation, and officials there came to believe Russia was responsible for the attacks. But a formal attribution can be complicated, as the symptoms of injuries related to directed energy could also have a variety of other causes. Another major challenge is that officials can’t always track the devices, which can be small and portable, the people said. A former national security official told POLITICO that, in one instance, officials suspected that directed energy had injured a Marine in Syria; but a Pentagon investigation later concluded that the Marine’s symptoms were the result of food poisoning. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute who focuses on technology and national security, said the topic can be troublesome from an intelligence standpoint. “The problem is — and I think we saw this at the embassy in Cuba, but honestly with a lot of these stories over the years — it’s just really hard to know why people are getting sick unless you have the weapon or some technical means of knowing if there’s a particular beam being focused on a place,” he said. “We still have no idea what the hell is going on at the embassy in Cuba,” he added. “Those people have been reporting all those symptoms for years and the question is, are they being targeted? Is this some eavesdropping equipment that’s having an effect on them? You just don’t know.” But any public statements on this topic from the U.S. government would also generate skepticism. Phil Coyle, former director of the Office of Operational Test and Evaluation at the Pentagon, urged caution. “It seems far-fetched to me — harder to do by far than just killing American soldiers with bombs or bullets,” Coyle said. “The advantage, of course, of some imaginary weapon is maybe there would be no attribution. Nobody would be able to tell, which I guess is the situation you’re describing in Syria. All we know is these soldiers got sick, and we don’t know whether it’s food poisoning or something else that made them sick, so we can’t blame the Russians. And that of course was part of the problem in ... Cuba.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/politics/russian-bounties-nsc.html Russian Spy Team Left Traces That Bolstered C.I.A.’s Bounty Judgment But the U.S. lacked “evidence that the Kremlin directed this operation,” newly declassified information about the Russian team showed. WASHINGTON — In early 2020, members of a Taliban-linked criminal network in Afghanistan detained in raids told interrogators that they had heard that Russians were offering money to reward killings of American and coalition troops. The claim, that Russia was trying to pay to generate more frequent attacks on Western forces, was stunning, particularly because the United States was trying at the same time to negotiate a deal with the Taliban to end the long-running war in Afghanistan. C.I.A. analysts set out to see whether they could corroborate or debunk the detainees’ accounts. Ultimately, newly declassified information shows, those analysts discovered a significant reason to believe the claim was accurate: Other members of the same Taliban-linked network had been working closely with operatives from a notorious unit of the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, known for assassination operations. “The involvement of this G.R.U. unit is consistent with Russia encouraging attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan given its leading role in such lethal and destabilizing operations abroad,” the National Security Council said in a statement provided to The New York Times. The statement was originally drafted and declassified to serve as talking points for officials to use in briefing reporters last month about U.S. sanctions and other punishments against Russia. The White House took diplomatic action — delivering a warning and demanding an explanation for suspicious activities — about the bounty issue, but did not base sanctions on it. The Biden administration did impose sanctions for Russia’s SolarWinds hacking and election interference. In briefing reporters, a senior administration official noted that the intelligence community had assessed with “low to moderate confidence” that Russia had offered bounties. The official, focusing on other complex issues, skipped over most of the newly declassified information that had been prepared to explain what the government knew about the bounty issue. Afterward, some commentators treated the bare line about confidence levels as a new development that amounted to the government walking back its suspicions from 2020. But The Times had reported last summer that different intelligence agencies, while agreeing on the assessment itself, disagreed on whether to put medium or lower confidence in it. The evidence available to analysts — both alarming facts and frustrating gaps — essentially remains the same. The release of the full talking points as a statement is the government’s most detailed public explanation yet about how the C.I.A. came to the judgment that Russia had most likely offered financial incentives to reward attacks on American and allied troops. It also sheds new light on the gaps in the evidence that raised greater concerns among other analysts. In the world of intelligence analysis, moderate confidence means the judgment was based on information deemed to be credibly sourced and plausible. Low confidence flags significant concerns about the quality of the sourcing underlying a judgment. In the case of the bounty intelligence, officials have said the surveillance-focused National Security Agency more sharply discounted its confidence in the assessment — to “low” — because of a key gap. It had not intercepted any smoking-gun electronic communication about a bounty plot. (The Defense Intelligence Agency shares that view, while the National Counterterrorism Center agrees with the C.I.A.’s “moderate” level, officials have said.) But the statement reveals that despite that disagreement over how to rate the quality of available information underlying the core assessment, the intelligence community also had “high confidence” — meaning the judgment is based on high-quality information from multiple sources — in the key circumstantial evidence: Strong ties existed between Russian operatives and the Afghan network where the bounty claims arose. “We have independently verified the ties of several individuals in this network to Russia,” the National Security Council statement said. It added, “Multiple sources have confirmed that elements of this criminal network worked for Russian intelligence for over a decade and traveled to Moscow in April 2019.” The declassified statement also opened a window into American officials’ understanding of the Russian operatives, known as Unit 29155 of the G.R.U. The government has previously resisted talking openly about the group, although a Times investigation in 2019 linked it to various operations, citing Western security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. By contrast, the National Security Council statement identified other “nefarious operations” around the world that the government thought the squad had carried out — to explain why the discovery of its involvement with the Afghan network was seen as bolstering the credibility of the detainees’ claims about Russian bounties. “We have a strong body of evidence of the activities of this G.R.U. unit,” the statement said, accusing it of “a plot to violently disrupt Montenegro’s legislative election in 2016,” of the 2018 poisoning of a former G.R.U. officer, Sergei V. Skripal, in Salisbury, England, and of “assassinations across Europe.” The American government’s decision to declassify intelligence about Unit 29155 for public discussion came as two European countries publicly raised suspicions recently that the unit was responsible for sabotage operations on their soil. In mid-April, the prime minister of the Czech Republic said there was “clear evidence,” assembled by intelligence and security services there, establishing “reasonable suspicion” that Unit 29155 was involved in two explosions at ammunition depots that killed two Czechs in 2014. He said the government would expel nearly 80 Russian diplomats. Days later, the prosecutor general’s office in Bulgaria announced that it was investigating a possible connection between Unit 29155 and four explosions at ammunition depots over the past decade. At least two happened while members of the unit were frequently traveling in and out of Bulgaria, the office said. Some of the destroyed arms in both countries, according to officials, belonged to Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian arms manufacturer who was poisoned in 2015 along with his son and an executive in his company. Officials have previously accused Unit 29155 in that attempted assassination. While most previous reports about Unit 29155’s activities have centered in Europe, its leader, Maj. Gen. Andrei V. Averyanov, has experience in Central Asia. He graduated in 1988 from the Tashkent Military Academy in what was then the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, a year before the Soviet pullout from bordering Afghanistan. The government apparently did not declassify everything. The White House statement described but did not detail certain evidence, keeping its sources and methods of information-gathering secret. It did not specify the G.R.U. unit’s number, but officials have said it was Unit 29155, and the two prior operations the statement mentioned have been attributed to it elsewhere. The White House also did not identify the members of the Afghan network it accused of direct interactions with Unit 29155. Three officials have previously named them as Rahmatullah Azizi, a onetime drug smuggler who grew wealthy as a middleman for the Russian spies, and Habib Muradi. Both escaped capture and are said to have fled to Russia. And it made no mention of other circumstantial evidence officials have previously described, like the discovery that money was transferred from a G.R.U. account to the Afghan network. In an interview published April 30 in a Russian newspaper, Nikolai Patrushev, the chairman of Russia’s Security Council, again said it was false that Russia had covertly offered bounties for killing American troops in Afghanistan, adding that there was no evidence that it had done so. The White House statement also brought into sharper focus two gaps in the available evidence that analysts saw as a reason to be cautious. Military leaders have repeatedly pointed to one in public: The intelligence community lacks proof tying any specific attack to a bounty payment. “We cannot confirm that the operation resulted in any attacks on U.S. or coalition forces,” the National Security Council said. The other reason for caution is an absence of information showing that a Kremlin leader authorized Unit 29155 to offer bounties to Afghan militants. “We do not have evidence that the Kremlin directed this operation,” the statement said. The Biden administration’s briefing to reporters last month reignited a debate over the political implications of the C.I.A.’s assessment — and the Trump White House’s handling of it — that unfolded last year and dwelled in part on confidence levels. The Times reported last June on the existence of the C.I.A. assessment and that the White House had led an interagency effort to come up with options to respond but then authorized none. Facing bipartisan criticism, the Trump administration defended its inaction by playing down the assessment as too weak to take seriously, falsely denying that it had been briefed to President Donald J. Trump. In fact, it had been included in his written presidential daily briefing in late February, two officials have said. In congressional testimony, military leaders based in the United States who regularly interacted with the Trump White House said they would be outraged if it were true, but they had not seen proof that any attack resulted from bounties. But some military officials based in Afghanistan, as well as some other senior Pentagon and State Department officials, thought the C.I.A. was right, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations at the time. Among those who found the evidence and analysis persuasive was Nathan Sales, the State Department’s politically appointed top counterterrorism official during the Trump administration. “The reporting that Russia was placing bounties on American soldiers’ heads was so serious that it warranted a robust diplomatic response,” Mr. Sales said this week in an email. A top Pentagon official and the secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, later delivered warnings over the issue to their Russian counterparts, effectively breaking with the White House. After the briefing last month, some Trump supporters — as well as some left-wing critics of the C.I.A. and military interventions — argued that the C.I.A.’s bounty assessment had been debunked as evidence-free “fake news,” vindicating Mr. Trump’s dismissal of the issue last year as a “hoax.” Russian propaganda outlets echoed and amplified those assertions. Michael J. Morell, a former acting director of the C.I.A., said another factor had fostered confusion. When analysts assess something with low confidence, he said, that does not mean they think the conclusion is wrong. Rather, they are expressing greater concerns about the sourcing limitations, while still judging that the assessment is the best explanation of the available facts. “A judgment at any confidence level is a judgment that the analysts believe to be true,” he said. “Even when you have a judgment that is low confidence, the analysts believe that judgment is correct. So in this case, the analysts believe that the Russians were offering bounties.”
China urges closer Afghanistan ties as US withdrawal looms https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-china-business-ece4d88d97f845a4c0e1d0e1be7bbb31