SUMMARY: Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA officer, was arrested this week on charges of mishandling classified information. A massive mole hunt inside the agency has been on for years for the person who may have helped the Chinese government roll up a significant piece of the U.S. spying network in that country. John Yang learns more from Adam Goldman of The New York Times.
SUMMARY: Former CIA Director John Brennan, National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, and NSA chief Mike Rogers appeared before congressional hearings on Tuesday, amid reports that President Trump asked Coats and Rogers to help him push back against an FBI investigation into whether his campaign coordinated with the Russian government. Margaret Warner offers a recap of their testimony.
SUMMARY: WikiLeaks published thousands of pages on Tuesday of what it says are files about the CIA and its hacking activities. The material comes reportedly from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence and includes a range of documents which describe cyber tools for hacking cellphones, computers, television and even vehicles. Jeffrey Brown speaks Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times about the revelations.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The material comes from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. It includes a range of documents from 2013 to 2016 which describe cyber-tools for hacking cell phones, computers, television, and even vehicles.
The documents also contain computer code. One program, dubbed Weeping Angel, entails infecting Samsung smart TVs, turning them into bugging devices. Another program is aimed at hacking Apple and Android cell phones, undercutting encryption on services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.
WikiLeaks also says these documents show that when the CIA discovered flaws in computer code written by Apple, Google, or Samsung, [and] it failed to notify those companies about the vulnerabilities to allow fixes to be made.
Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times has been covering this, and joins us now.
Mark, welcome to you.
So, the CIA hasn't said much so far. What do we know about the authenticity of the documents and where they came from?
MARK MAZZETTI, The New York Times: Well, we're still trying to confirm the authenticity.
We have several people we have spoken to today who say they believe they're authentic. We have heard nothing thus far from the government indicating that they are not. Some people we have spoken to have said that some of the code names that were cited in the documents are, indeed, legitimate.
So it does appear at the moment — and I should say at the moment — that they are legitimate.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, when you look at the totality, Mark, of all of these cyber-tools that being described, help us understand, what are they aimed at? What is this program about?
MARK MAZZETTI: Well, they're a series of — and we're talking about thousands of documents that are laying out some of the tools the CIA allegedly has to carry out hacking of any number of different devices (as you said, [for example] cars) against foreign adversaries or people overseas.
I should stress that there is — unlike the Snowden disclosures, there were not specific mentions of where these have been used. But they're more sort of like the toolkit the CIA has. And it's pretty expansive, if the documents are to be believed.
And in terms of where they came from, you asked. I mean, that's another thing we're still trying to figure out. WikiLeaks said today that they had a source come to them who was concerned about the use of these tools. We don't know anything about the source. And there's a lot of questions still at the moment.
SUMMARY: A day after WikiLeaks published documents on the CIA's tools for hacking into personal electronics, Reuters reported that intelligence officials are focused on contractors as the likeliest source of the leak. How is the CIA likely responding to the revelations? Former CIA Director Leon Panetta joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the consequences for counterterrorism efforts and more.
SUMMARY: WikiLeaks' release of a trove of documents about the CIA's ability to breach smartphone and TV encryption was a revelation of potential vulnerabilities that surprised many. Hari Sreenivasan separates fact from fiction about their capabilities to take advantage of those devices with Brian Barrett, news editor of Wired, and how to be mindful about the reality of today's “internet of things.”
SUMMARY: Security cameras caught the moment death was unleashed in Istanbul. Police shot one of the armed attackers and then he detonated his bomb. Passengers stampeded for the exits as flying glass and debris cut bodies to shreds. It was another attack at an international airport and, for Turkey, a direct hit on its economic ambitions. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Investigators in Istanbul, Turkey, have spent this day trying to reconstruct the assault that turned Ataturk Airport into a killing field.
Three suicide bombers left widespread carnage, 42 dead, more than 230 wounded, but no claim of responsibility.
Special correspondent Jane Ferguson begins our coverage from Istanbul.
JANE FERGUSON, Special Correspondent: Operations resumed at Europe’s third busiest airport, amid the stark signs of terror, glass panels riddled with bullet holes, and blood splattered on ceilings.
The attack began last night, shortly before 10:00 p.m. local time. Security cameras captured one attacker just after being shot by police, and then setting off his bomb. That touched off a stampede to get outside, and away from danger.
ADAM KEALLY, Witness: One guy had holes in his back from shrapnel or from glass.
HACER PEKSEN, Airport Worker (through translator): People were wounded. People fell down in front of me. Four people fell in front of me. They were torn into pieces.
JANE FERGUSON: In the hours after the attack, Turkish officials pointed to the Islamic State. The group was blamed for a suicide bombing in January that killed several tourists near the famed Blue Mosque in Istanbul.
And today marked two years since ISIS declared its so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Moreover, Turkey backs the U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria, and on Monday, the Turks moved to improve relations with Russia, which carries out its own airstrikes in Syria.
Both Russian President Putin and President Obama called Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today to offer condolences. Back in Istanbul, the human toll of this latest attack is still being felt by relatives and friends of the wounded.
SERDAR TATLISU, Relative of Victim (through translator): We are waiting for some kind of solution. We can hear that people are wailing here. We cannot cope anymore. We can’t stand still.
JANE FERGUSON: The Turkish government has worked for years to build an international airline and to make Istanbul Airport one of the biggest hubs in the world. Any attack against this airport is an attack against the economic ambitions of the Turkish government. They know that.
And so just a day after the attack, the airport is completely reopened and it’s business as usual. Some travelers at Ataturk today were trying to do the same. They say the risk of attacks at major airports is now a reality they have come to terms with.
SUMMARY: CIA Director John Brennan sat down with Judy Woodruff to discuss the repercussions of the Istanbul attack and whether the U.S. was vulnerable to similar attacks. He was asked about Secretary of State John Kerry’s comments that Iran has been helpful in the fight against ISIS. “They need to do more,” he said. He also weighed in on the Benghazi report and the impact of Brexit on intel gathering.
SUMMARY: As the Turks went about the sad task of burying the victims of the Istanbul airport terror attack, civilian fears mounted and calls increased for Ankara to act against ISIS. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and has been criticized for turning a blind eye to the so-called jihadi highway — the Islamic State’s use of Turkey to get recruits into Syria. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports.
Steven Spielberg’s movie captures the essence of the Cold War in the tale of a man whose “legend” was so encompassing, U.S. agents did not learn his true identity until the Soviet Union started to collapse.
Hollywood loves the smoke and mirrors of espionage. For decades, it has made a dirty, dangerous business look glamorous on silver screens.
“Bridge of Spies,” the cold-war epic directed by Steven Spielberg, contends for six Academy Awards Sunday, including best picture. The brilliant Briton Mark Rylance is up for best supporting actor. He plays the Soviet spook who the FBI knew as Col. Rudolf Abel before and after his arrest in New York in 1957. Tom Hanks stars as the noble lawyer James Donovan, who defended the mysterious colonel up to the Supreme Court. In 1962, at the behest of the CIA, Donovan handed his imprisoned client over to the Russians in exchange for the captured pilot of a U–2 spy plane shot down over Sverdlovsk. The swap took place at the Berlin bridge connecting communist East Berlin to the West — thus the title.
The movie tries to be true to life. But it reconstructs five grim years in two hours and twenty-one minutes. As it often is, the truth was stranger than its fictional portrayal.
I’ve written on American intelligence over three decades, as a reporter for The New York Times and as the author of histories of the CIA ("Legacy of Ashes") and the FBI ("Enemies"). I see Rylance, an actor’s actor, as the heart of the film. He bears an astonishing resemblance to Abel; his silence and cunning captures the essence of espionage. A gray man in a gray suit slips through the shadows in a black-and-white world carrying encrypted secrets.
Now to the story’s facts and fictions:
J. Edgar Hoover had been on the warpath against Soviet spies for a decade when a drunken KGB courier walked into the U.S. Embassy in Paris in April 1957. Reino Hayhanen feared for his life, having fouled up to a fare-thee-well. He had taken $5,000 intended for the American Communist underground in New York, gone on a bender, and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. The CIA station chief delivered him to the custody of the FBI in New York. After the defector dried out, he gave the Bureau its first deep look inside a Soviet spy operation in the United States. Hoover’s nightmare came to life.
Hayhanen told the agents an astounding story. He had a legend — a false identity — and a forged American passport when he boarded the Queen Mary for New York. He served as a courier carrying money and encoded microfilm messages sent to and from Moscow. Many messages were hidden in hollowed-out coins, secreted in New York’s parks and sidewalks. (A trick nickel makes a cameo appearance in the movie.) Hayhanen named his top superior as the First Secretary of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations — who had just left New York, never to return — and his main contact as Col. Abel, alias “Emil Goldfus,” an artist with a studio in Brooklyn.
The FBI’s Edmund J. Birch led a squad trailing the artist. Carrying a hidden camera in a briefcase outside a Manhattan restaurant, he got a clear shot — “one beautiful picture of his face,” Birch remembered. Haynahen identified the face as Abel’s. The FBI watched the suspect around the clock. He never did anything suspicious. The evidence was hearsay.
The Bureau wanted to make an espionage case but they lacked clues. Hoover was livid. On his orders, without a warrant, and outside the law, his agents grabbed Abel, tossed his apartment, and found extensive evidence of spy craft.
But unless the FBI broke Abel, the illegally seized evidence was likely to be inadmissible in court. He was initially charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the immigration statute that the Justice Department used when an espionage case could not be made.
FBI agents grilled him for more than two years — first in a broiling prison for illegal immigrants outside McAllen, Tex., on the Mexican border, at “a wetback camp, in a wire cage,” said the FBI’s Ed Gamber, who interrogated Abel for six weeks and later testified in court. “He was a gentleman, he was polite; he was a nice guy.” And he never broke. Then teams of FBI agents braced him at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, one of the toughest prisons in the United States. “I’ll talk with you about art, mathematics, photography, anything you want to talk about, but don’t ask me about my intelligence background,” Abel said. “I have not said anything, and I’m not going to now.”
Playing Abel in “Bridge of Spies,” Rylance has a great line eliding that silence in three words. If he cooperated, he asks, “Would it help?” History suggests not.
In real life, prosecutors persuaded a federal judge to allow use of the evidence they had seized. Abel was quickly convicted and sentenced to thirty years. Donovan almost immediately won an appeal before the Supreme Court, which granted an extraordinary 90 minutes for argument. He cited the Constitution’s ban against warrantless searches and jailing, arguing that Abel’s arrest and imprisonment were an affront to American justice.
Anyone who follows the court may be shocked to read that, after long deliberation, only five justices sided with the government. The minority of four wrote: “This is a notorious case, with a notorious defendant. Yet we must take care to enforce the Constitution without regard to the nature of the crime.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was outraged. “We would have to expose all our intelligence sources and methods in order to obtain a conviction,” Eisenhower fumed at a National Security Council meeting attended by Vice President Richard M. Nixon in May 1960, seven weeks after the decision– and shortly after the U–2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down. “About all the FBI can do is keep spies under surveillance.”
The only thing of import Abel ever said to the FBI was an insult: “American intelligence walks in baby shoes.” And he had a point. Not until the end of the cold war did the CIA and the FBI learn that the man they knew as Abel was an entirely different person.
He was born in 1903 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, as Willie Fisher, the son of a Bolshevik. He went to the Soviet Union, became a committed Communist, and was given training, a legend, and a role in Moscow’s spy network before World War Two. He came to the United States after the war and worked in silence, undetected, for nearly a decade. And he lived on for nearly a decade after the great swap, dying on November 15, 1971.
Twenty years on, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. And today another colonel trained by its vicious spy service rules in the Kremlin.
Hollywood would never greenlight that movie. No one would believe the script.
SUMMARY: The director of the CIA is ordering sweeping reforms designed to dramatically change the agency starting at the top. Associated Press reporter Ken Dilanian joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what is changing and why.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): CIA Director John Brennan announced Friday that he is ordering sweeping reforms designed to dramatically change the agency, starting at the top.
But exactly what is changing and why?
Yesterday, I spoke with Associated Press intelligence reporter Ken Dilanian.
Why did the CIA director feel these changes were necessary in the first place?
KEN DILANIAN, Associated Press: Well, I’m not sure he’s going to be completely leveling with us about that.
But I can say that it comes amid the backdrop of a series of intelligence failures, where the CIA has not — has not predicted major global developments, whether you want to talk about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the movement of Russian troops in the Ukraine or the rapid rise of the Islamic State.
So, there is a feeling out there that, while the CIA has done some things incredibly well since 9/11, there are also some gaffes. And the world is changing a lot. So — so, Director Brennan assembled a group of experts and internal people and looked for three months intensively at the agency’s functions and came up with this plan.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, one of the suggestions was to break down the wall that exists between the analysts and the operators. And to most of us, we — I didn’t realize that there was that wall in the first place.
KEN DILANIAN: Right. And that is fundamental. That is the biggest change Brennan is implementing here. And that is fundamental to the agency’s character since it was created in 1947.
You know, the operators are people who recruit spies, who run covert operations. And they have their own bosses. They work in their own offices for the most part. And the analysts are different. They’re more like college professors. They take the intelligence collected by the operators, and they interpret it, and they write papers that are presented to the President.
Now, there are parts of the CIA where those two are connected now, including the Counterterrorism Center that has been pursuing al-Qaida since 9/11, but, for the most part, they don’t work together. And under this change, they would begin working together in 10 so-called centers, which would sort of either be geographic areas of the world or in some cases subject areas, like counterproliferation.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including the $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the government and the Senate’s investigation of the CIA’s interrogation methods.
