The secret history of the secret history of the intelligence business

I keep reading this story that's going around about a former KGB officer from Kazakhstan who wrote on Facebook that Trump was recruited as a Russian asset during a visit to Moscow in1987. An entire substructure of facts and rumors and speculation has swirled around Trump and Russia ever since the day in Florida in 2016 that Trump uttered his infamous “Russia if you're listening” remark at a press conference urging Russia to look into, you guessed it, Hillary's emails. Then there was the Mueller report that while failing to come up with a provable conspiracy between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign, certainly established that Trump was the beneficiary of an all-out effort by Russia to aid in his election. Mueller was even able to indict Russian intelligence officers and civilians working for the Russian government who either interfered actively in the election for Trump or aided him by flooding social media with fake news and Russian propaganda.

But you don't have to go back to the Mueller report or take the time out of your day to peruse the Steele dossier to ask yourself these questions: What the hell is Trump doing now, and who benefits? The Latin phrase for “who benefits,” Cui bono, should probably be engraved on his headstone right beneath his name when the time comes, because of the executive orders that he issues practically every time he opens his mouth.

Most recently, on Friday, Trump issued an executive order cancelling all funding for the US Agency for Global Media, which the Washington Post describes as “the parent agency of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio and TV Marti, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Open Technology Fund, which works to circumvent internet censorship.” The White House press release explaining its defunding of the Voice of America alleged that VOA has been spreading lies and “radical propaganda.”

The Post reports that the “VOA and its affiliates reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week,” including countries with regimes that severely limit the access of their own populations to media that is not under the control of their governments, like China, Russia, Iran, Hungary, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela. The current VOA director, Michael J. Abramowitz, posted on Saturday on Facebook, “I learned this morning that virtually the entire staff of Voice of America — more than 1300 journalists, producers and support staff — has been placed on administrative leave today. So have I.”

According to Max Boot, a conservative columnist for the Post, Abramowitz was until last year the president of a thing called Freedom House, which Boot identifies as “one of the oldest and most respected human rights organizations in the world.” Freedom House is among a constellation of organizations that had their funding either eliminated or severely cut when Trump had his henchman, Elon Musk, go after the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Among the other groups that were defenestrated at the same time was the National Endowment for Democracy, (NED) a quasi-governmental organization that is funded privately and in part by an act of Congress. The NED runs the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, the Journal of Democracy, the World Movement for Democracy, the Center for International Media Assistance. If those groups sound like they might be CIA fronts, it's because that in addition to their do-gooder work for democracy around the world, they are.

USAID has also been used by the CIA as a front for gathering intelligence internationally. Certainly, USAID has done a lot of good around the world, feeding people who are starving in nations in the midst of civil war, working to prevent AIDS and treat AIDS patients with drugs that poor nations cannot provide for their citizens, and digging wells in arid regions where there is no clean water.

That's the thing about doing good works: when you hand out food to people who are hungry and drugs to people who suffer from disease and provide them with water that doesn’t make them sick, they tend to be willing to tell you things they wouldn't otherwise reveal to strangers. So, the CIA has used some USAID workers as both informal and formal intelligence agents over the years. The NED has been used in much the same way. They've sent people to democracy conferences and meetings of groups promoting democracy in foreign nations where democracy is in its infancy or endangered. They make friends with people working for NGO's and for domestic political organizations. That's the way you collect intelligence. You make friends. You get people to talk to you. You talk to people who have been places where Americans aren't welcome. You make friends with people who live in dangerous areas where Americans working for our government simply don't want to go. Doing all of this, you gather information, rumors, names of people who might be working for countries unfriendly to us, like Russia and China, who are doing the same thing we are doing -- using front organizations to gather information for their own purposes.

This kind of stuff has been going on for decades and virtually defines the way the Cold War was fought between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. The U.S. used fronts like the National Student Association to gather information from countries in Eastern Europe and from countries in Asia that did business with China when we had no diplomatic relations with that country. A decent case could be made that at least in part we won the Cold War with the Soviet Union with some of the front organizations funded by and run by the CIA back in the day. We're still gathering information about Russia and China and what they're doing not only in their own countries but overseas and in countries over which they seek influence. The VOA not only provided information through its broadcasts to countries with despotic regimes, reporters from the VOA gathered information that they didn't put on the air but shared with American intelligence agencies that were interested in what they knew about what was going on in countries not friendly to the United States.

Here is a story about how the gears in the intelligence business turn overseas. In the late 70s, I became friendly with a man in the movie business who ran a company that provided something called film completion bonds to motion picture companies. Nearly every movie that's made is a separate corporation, even if it's funded by one of the major studios, but especially if its funding comes from a consortium of various sources like wealthy individuals, film institutes from foreign countries, and other sources. People are reluctant to invest in movies unless there is some kind of guarantee that the movie they've put money into will get made. A film completion bond is a form of insurance that that will happen. The typical bond insures that at least one print of the movie will be made and shown in at least one motion picture theater for paying customers.

My friend's name was Sidney Kaufman, and he had a very interesting background. He had been a White House liaison to the OSS during World War II, and after the war in Europe he continued to work in intelligence gathering through his connections with the film industry in European countries. During that time, he got to know the two men who produced the first nine James Bond movies, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. The office in New York he let me use actually belonged to Broccoli and Saltzman. Through Kaufman, I learned how those two guys who owned the James Bond franchise made so much money. The Bond movies did extremely well in this country of course, but it was overseas where the big money was, because they were huge there. The problem was foreign distribution, which was known to be a total scam. The way it worked was, you sold the rights to show a film in a foreign country, for which you received an advance payment against a percentage of the box office sales. The problem was that they lied about how much money they took in from your film, and there was no way to prove their lies so you could collect your money.

Broccoli and Saltzman had intelligence contacts with the Mossad in Israel. They made a deal with the Mossad to use its agents to surveil movie theaters when the first James Bond movie opened overseas. The agents would position themselves outside box offices and use one of those little thumb clickers to count the number of people who walked into showings of the film. This was done in cities all over Europe, India, Japan -- anywhere the James Bond films were showing, which was everywhere. When it came time for Broccoli and Saltzman to collect their percentage of the box office totals, the foreign distributors of course lied to them about how many tickets they had sold. But Broccoli and Saltzman had actual figures from individual movie theaters, courtesy of the Mossad, and they could use those figures to extrapolate by the number of theaters owned by the distributors and determine estimated totals of their box office take. They demanded their money, and the foreign distributors laughed at them, until Broccoli and Saltzman told them they owned the entire James Bond film franchise and they would be making many more movies, and those distributors wouldn't get even one of them unless they paid up now.

They paid, and Broccoli and Saltzman got rich, and the Mossad got its cut too.

Take the motion picture theater box office receipts, and substitute information, and insert for Mossad the people working for USAID and the NED and the World Movement for Democracy and the Center for International Media Assistance, and all the rest of the quasi-autonomous non-governmental and yet very much governmental organizations used by the CIA, and you get a pretty good picture of how intelligence gathering works, or has worked, at least until Donald Trump and Elon Musk came along and started disassembling these elaborate networks that have been used for information gathering and influencing foreign governments for decades.

Cui bono? Do you think for a moment that Vladimir Putin's Russia has retired any of its non-governmental intelligence gathering networks? They haven't even tried to hide the assistance they provided to Trump in his election campaign last year. In fact, one of Putin's pals was quoted saying that Trump owes them: "To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” That little jewel of a quote came from Nikolai Patrushev, a member of Putin’s inner circle and former Secretary of the Russian Security Council.

So, who benefits from Trump's deconstruction of these U.S. intelligence networks, both official and non-official? We know he put a certifiable loon in charge of U.S. intelligence overall as head of the national office of intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been unapologetic about her admiration for both Russia and Vladimir Putin, and her belief that there's absolutely nothing wrong with Russia's invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine.

There is something of a question in my mind about how much Trump really understands about the damage he's done to American intelligence by doing away with USAID and the NED and now the VOA and the rest of our foreign broadcasting networks like Radio Liberty. But it doesn't really matter what he knows because the damage he's done is right there for everyone to see. They took the name of USAID off its headquarters building, for crying out loud. Certainly the thousands of USAID employees here in the United States and overseas who have been fired are not benefiting from Trump and Musk and their tossing away of decade after decade of good works that has done around the world.

What you might call the secret history of the secret history of the way the United States collects intelligence is not widely known in this country, but you can be sure of one thing: it is known to Vladimir Putin and his henchmen in Russia, and it is known to Xi Jinping in China, and it's known to the other countries who are, if not our enemies, at least very much not our friends.

Cui bono? Not you and me and our fellow citizens, but I'd be willing to bet that Donald Trump has figured out a way to fatten his own wallet from all the damage he has done to the foreign policy and national security interests of this country.