Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a new freeze in relations between the United States and Russia. But for some veterans of the CIA and FBI, the spy wars that punctuated the first Cold War never really ended.

During the 1980s, in the final decade of the Cold War, three Americans who spied for the Soviet Union — CIA officers Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen — are known to have helped Moscow identify, arrest, and imprison or execute most of the Soviet agents who were secretly spying for the United States. Those agent losses left the CIA virtually in the dark in Moscow for years. Ames and Hanssen were eventually caught and arrested and today remain in federal prison, while Howard defected to Moscow, where he died in 2002.

Now there is growing evidence that there may have been a fourth major American spy who was never caught. According to a new book, a mole hunt for the “fourth man,” who was suspected of being a CIA officer, began in the 1990s, but no one has ever been arrested or charged in the case. Secret details of that investigation are being disclosed for the first time in “The Fourth Man,” a new book by former CIA officer Robert Baer, which is due to be published Tuesday.

“The story of the Russian double agent in the CIA who got away may sound like some unfinished piece of business from the Cold War,” Baer observes in his book. But “it’s starting to look more like the mystery of the fourth man is a lot more historically significant than an old-school spy tale. It’s part of the much larger story of how America completely missed Putin and the KGB’s resurrection.”

The fact that U.S. officials believe there was a “fourth man” inside the CIA was first disclosed in 2003 in “The Main Enemy,” a book I co-authored with former CIA officer Milt Bearden. Baer has now provided a wealth of new details about the case, including the key role of a KGB agent who supplied crucial information to the CIA on the fourth spy. I interviewed several former CIA and FBI officials this week who agreed that there was a fourth mole.

“I believe there is a fourth man, and a lot of things point that way,” Jim Milburn, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was involved in the investigation, said in an interview this week. “There is more that I can’t talk about. It all leads to my sense that there is a fourth man.”

“Absolutely there was a fourth man,” added John Lewis, former FBI assistant director for national security. “We had a lot of unexplained things that couldn’t be explained by the three others.”

In many ways, the narrative of the “fourth man” investigation reads like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” the John le Carré novel about a mole hunt inside British intelligence. Baer’s book reveals that the seeds of the case go back to 1988, when a CIA officer stationed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, first met a KGB officer named Alexander Zaporozhsky. The CIA gave Zaporozhsky the code name “GTZORRO” and nicknamed him “Max.” As a series of CIA officers continued to meet Zaporozhsky over the years, he began to provide clues revealing that the KGB had moles inside U.S. intelligence, according to Baer. At some point, Zaporozhsky suggested that the KGB had two moles, one in the CIA and another in the FBI, although he didn’t know their names. One was known inside the KGB as “Karat,” and the other as “Rubine.”

Zaporozhsky’s information about the existence of two moles came long before either the CIA or FBI was convinced that Moscow had double agents inside U.S. intelligence. Before Zaporozhsky, “there’d been devastating, unexplained losses of CIA Russian agents … and there certainly were those who suspected the problem was a mole. But there was nothing in the way of air-tight evidence to support the theory,” writes Baer.

Zaporozhsky’s evidence ultimately led to Ames at the CIA and Hanssen at the FBI, Baer writes. He describes Zaporozhsky as one of the most important Russian spies the CIA ever had. At some point, Zaporozhsky also began to tell the CIA that there was yet another KGB mole inside the CIA, one who was believed to be ranked higher in the organization than Ames. American spy hunters began to call that the “big case.”

First Arrests

In 1994, Ames was arrested and charged with spying for Moscow, thanks in part to the information Zaporozhsky had provided.

After Ames was arrested, the CIA secretly created a new counterintelligence team to try to determine whether there were any losses that could not be explained by Ames or Howard, who had defected to Moscow in 1985. The agency’s team, Baer writes, included CIA officers Laine Bannerman, Diana Worthen, and MaryAnn Hough. They began to sift through old tips, leads, and other evidence relating to compromised agents and operations that couldn’t be explained by either Ames or Howard. Eventually, they became convinced that there were at least two more moles. Some of their evidence pointed toward Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001.

Baer’s book discloses that the team still believed there was another, fourth mole — thus coming to the same conclusion as Zaporozhsky. This was confirmed to The Intercept by one of the now-retired CIA investigators: “I do believe there is a fourth man,” said Worthen in an interview this week.

In 1996, a CIA officer met again with Zaporozhsky, this time in Tbilisi, Georgia. He told the CIA that he believed he had come under suspicion in Moscow. But he also said he had heard that Russian intelligence had recruited another American CIA officer. This officer had been recruited in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was now assigned to “the Farm,” the CIA’s training center outside Williamsburg, Virginia. With Zaporozhsky’s information, the CIA was quickly able to identify CIA officer Harold Nicholson as a Russian spy, and he was arrested in November 1996.

But Nicholson had never worked in the CIA’s Soviet or Russian operations and so was quickly ruled out as being the “fourth man.”

In 1998, Zaporozhsky was resettled in the United States by the CIA, pulled out of Moscow along with other agents believed to be in danger. With Zaporozhsky and its other agents gone, the CIA was in the dark in Moscow just as Putin was beginning his rise to power.

Zaporozhsky misread Putin’s Russia too. After he resettled in the United States, he made the mistake of traveling back to Russia, where he was arrested and then spent years in prison. He was released and sent back to the United States in 2010 in one of the biggest spy swaps ever conducted. Zaporozhsky was one of four people whom Moscow sent back to the U.S. in exchange for 10 Russian “sleeper” agents arrested by the United States. The story of the Russian “illegal” agents who had burrowed into American society, including Anna Chapman, who became a celebrity as a result of her spying, became the inspiration for the popular television series “The Americans.”

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When allegations of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians emerged in the United States, Congress and the White House hit the ground running. They’ve since engrossed themselves in scouring through the legal avenues to hold the Kremlin accountable: war crime tribunals, asset seizures, and sanctions — including collective punishment of the Russian people.

Allegations of American atrocities during the so-called global war on terror have hardly evoked the same desperate calls for justice. The U.S. government has long met international demands for accountability with hostility. Starting late last year, the New York Times’s explosive investigations into civilian deaths in botched U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East arrived just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. No requests for a war crimes tribunal were heard from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., now the Senate’s biggest champion for an International Criminal Court, or ICC, investigation into Russia. And a new reform initiative the Defense Department launched in the exposé’s wake is delayed with minimal pushback from Congress.

The loss of life in Ukraine has been horrific. The United Nations announced Tuesday that it can confirm Russia’s war has killed more than 3,300 civilians since the invasion began February 24, though it expects that the actual figure is thousands higher. For reference, the U.S. war on Iraq killed nearly 8,000 civilians in the first three months following the March 2003 invasion, the Iraq Body Count estimates.

“Like most of the civilized world, I have been absolutely horrified by the … assaults against Ukraine on residential buildings, schools, synagogues and churches, and even critical infrastructure including nuclear power plants,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., chair of Congress’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, said during a hearing last week. Citing in particular the discovery of hundreds of bodies, some of whom appeared to be summarily executed, in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, Cardin argued: “The scale and pattern of these crimes clearly suggests to me that war crimes are being committed by the Russian military on the orders of Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin must be held accountable for his unprovoked bloody attacks on the Ukrainian people.”

A number of countries and international entities have begun investigations to prepare for potential war crime prosecutions. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack told the commission that the U.S. is supporting inquiries by the United Nations, ICC, and any national court around the world that may have jurisdiction, including the Ukrainian government, which a State Department team is already advising. Graham told The Intercept last week that he’s talking to the White House about sending $15 million to aid the Ukrainian prosecutor’s efforts.

“We are committed to robust law enforcement and diplomatic cooperation to ensure that there is no safe haven for those who might commit atrocities,” Van Schaack said during the commission’s hearing.

The U.S. is also reviewing the extent of its own legal authorities. In the House of Representatives, Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., sought to allow the White House to seize Russian oligarchs’ assets and give them away to Ukraine, but the American Civil Liberties Union helped kill it as a result of due process concerns. In the Senate, Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Graham are exploring changes to the law to enable domestic prosecutions of noncitizens who may have committed war crimes overseas.

Graham has also been cheering on the ICC’s abilities to investigate war crimes after Republicans have spent years deriding the court. (The Trump administration sanctioned ICC personnel investigating alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and at CIA sites overseas.) In a change of attitude, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution led by Graham earlier this year pledging support for any ICC inquiry into allegations of Russian atrocities.

But the U.S. has imposed limitations on the assistance it can provide the ICC, which it is not party to, in an attempt to evade accountability. The 2002 American Service-Members’ Protection Act, for example, prevents the U.S. from sharing intelligence to support ICC inquiries in order to safeguard U.S. troops from prosecution. But there’s some wiggle room. The Justice Department determined over a decade ago, as the New York Times reported, that the U.S. can provide help for “particular cases.” And Graham told The Intercept that he’s looking to change current regulations, but only “for the limited purpose of helping ICC with information we have about Russian activity in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, after the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe hearing, Cardin told The Intercept: “I’m not too concerned physically where the trials take place. I want to make sure there’s accountability.” Asked if the U.S. needs to modify laws to allow for intelligence sharing with the ICC, Cardin said he asked if there’s anything more to do, and he’s been told they have all the authority they need but “if they need anything further we’ll be glad to give it to them.”

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, center, and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Britain’s Karim Khan, right, visit a mass grave on the grounds of the Church of Saint Andrew in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 13, 2022.

Photo: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

While the U.S. races to hold Russia to account, very few American lawmakers have turned the scrutiny inward. A notable exception is Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who led several of her progressive colleagues last month calling for the U.S. to join the ICC and repeal the 2002 law that restricts U.S. assistance to the court’s investigations. But otherwise, the United States has largely neglected to look at itself in the mirror.

In its groundbreaking series, the New York Times revealed earlier this year that the U.S. has killed thousands of civilians in botched airstrikes throughout the Middle East since 2015. In July 2016, the publication found, the U.S. intended to bomb Islamic State “staging areas” in northern Syria but actually massacred more than 120 villagers seeking shelter. In March 2019, U.S. jets struck and killed 70 people in the eastern Syrian town of Baghuz when the operators of separate American drones flying overhead knew them to be mostly women and children. Repeatedly, retroactive assessments by the Pentagon were downplayed and resulted in no disciplinary action, and the U.S. made fewer than 12 condolence payments to survivors.

Following these discoveries, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a retired four-star Army general who commanded U.S. military operations in the Middle East from 2013 to 2016, called for reform. “We strive diligently to minimize the harm that armed conflict visits upon civilian populations, but we can and will improve upon our efforts to protect civilians,” Austin wrote in a January memo to Pentagon leadership. “We will revisit the ways in which we assess incidents that may have resulted in civilian harm, acknowledge the harm to civilians that resulted from such incidents, and incorporate lessons learned into the planning and execution of future combat operations and into our tactics, techniques, and procedures.”

In the January 27 memo, Austin called for an action plan within 90 days of issuance. But it’s not yet finished. During a House Armed Services Committee hearing in early April, Austin said the review was about 30 days in. Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. César Santiago-Santini told The Intercept that the 90-day process remained ongoing. (Asked by Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., whether the Pentagon would take another look at cases of civilian harm that were dismissed, Austin also said during the hearing that “at this point, we don’t have an intent to relitigate cases from before.”)

Marking the original three-month deadline, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo. — who are members of the armed services committees — introduced two new bills in late April that would codify several of Austin’s directives into law. Asked what motivated her to propose these measures now, Warren told The Intercept: “The stories keep mounting up about civilian casualties, and the inability or outright refusal of the Department of Defense to make a careful accounting.” Referring to Austin’s memo, she added, “I want to see some results.”

In an email to The Intercept, Annie Shiel, a senior adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict who endorsed the new legislation, explained that having involvement from Congress can help guarantee the success of the Pentagon’s reforms. “And while it’s encouraging that civilian harm is being recognized as a high priority at the Department,” she said, “success will require sustained engagement not only from the [Defense Department], but also from Congress — to support the Secretary’s ongoing efforts, to hold the Department accountable for its commitments, and to fill critical remaining gaps.” (The bills will ensure a new center of excellence to advance civilian protection measures, for instance, will outlast the current administration.)

In the Senate, Warren’s bills have the support of Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ill., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. But otherwise, her efforts to keep pressure on the Pentagon weren’t top of mind for influential legislators. Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the most powerful Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee respectively, told The Intercept last week that they hadn’t reviewed the proposals yet. They’ll play a pivotal role in determining whether the bills make their way into the annual defense policy bill, which would be the likeliest legislative vehicle to pass them into law.

The International Criminal Court on March 29, 2022, in The Hague, Netherlands.

Photo: Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

In an opinion column for MSNBC last month, Middle East expert Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, laid out a compelling argument for why many countries in the Global South have not joined the U.S.’s efforts to sanction Russia in response to its war on Ukraine. “Many of these states also see flagrant hypocrisy in framing the Ukraine war in terms of the survival of the rules-based order,” he wrote. “From their vantage point, no other country or bloc has undermined international law, norms or the rules-based order more than the U.S. and the West.”

The hypocrisy and excuses for the U.S.’s unwillingness to submit to a fraction of the scrutiny it’s now demanding of Russia were perhaps most blatant in a Washington Post op-ed last month by former Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and George W. Bush administration attorney John Bellinger III.

“The United States can help the court in appropriate cases while still strongly opposing ICC investigations (including of U.S. personnel) that do not meet the court’s strict threshold requirements,” Dodd and Bellinger wrote. “The ICC was created to prosecute only the most serious international crimes that are not addressed by the nations that commit them, not to investigate every allegation of misconduct.”

Of course, the U.S. has already managed to dodge ICC inquiries. When the court’s chief prosecutor reopened an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan last year, it dropped allegations against the U.S. and its allies, choosing to focus only on the Taliban and the Islamic State. Just a few weeks before, the U.S. ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan with a drone attack that the Defense Department initially called a “righteous strike” against the Islamic State. The Pentagon later acknowledged the attack hit and killed 10 civilians, including seven children.

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Despite staging a massive military buildup on his country’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack in February, according to senior current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

In December, the CIA issued classified reports concluding that Putin hadn’t yet committed to an invasion, according to the current and former officials. In January, even as the Russian military was starting to take the logistical steps necessary to move its troops into Ukraine, U.S. intelligence again issued classified reporting maintaining that Putin had still not resolved to actually launch an attack, the officials said. “The CIA was saying through January that Putin had not made a decision to invade, but he was putting in place pieces for an invasion,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss classified matters. “I think Putin was still keeping his options open.”

It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade, the senior official added. With few other options available at the last minute to try to stop Putin, President Joe Biden took the unusual step of making the intelligence public, in what amounted to a form of information warfare against the Russian leader. He also warned that Putin was planning to try to fabricate a pretext for invasion, including by making false claims that Ukrainian forces had attacked civilians in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The preemptive use of intelligence by Biden revealed “a new understanding … that the information space may be among the most consequential terrain Putin is contesting,” observed Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institution.

Biden’s warning on February 18 that the invasion would happen within the week turned out to be accurate. In the early hours of February 24, Russian troops moved south into Ukraine from Belarus and across Russia’s borders into Kharkiv, the Donbas region, and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

The intelligence community’s assessment that Putin waited until almost the last minute to decide to start a war with Ukraine, which has not been previously reported, is significant because it could help explain how ill-prepared and uncoordinated the Russian military has appeared since it invaded. There have been widespread reports that Putin kept many Russian leaders out of the loop, that they were stunned by his decision to attack, and that the Russian government was not fully ready for war. “I was shocked because for a long time, I thought that a military operation was not feasible. It was not plausible,” Andrey Kortunov, a member of a Kremlin panel of foreign policy advisers, told Britain’s Sky News on March 2. Kortunov said that he and other foreign policy advisers had been sidelined by Putin.

The Russian president has instead surrounded himself with a small circle of like-minded military and intelligence officials who do his bidding. This has prompted outside experts to describe the current Russian government as being run by a siloviki, or a small cadre of senior people with security, intelligence, and military backgrounds. It means that an increasingly isolated Putin made the decision to invade largely by himself. But that isolation makes it difficult to control a sprawling enterprise like a major war.

It’s possible that Putin made his decision earlier than U.S. intelligence concluded that he did. Current intelligence officials who described the CIA’s reporting on Putin’s intentions refused to identify the specific intelligence the agency used to determine when he decided to invade, making it difficult to judge the quality of the assessments. For example, whether U.S. intelligence was able to determine Putin’s plans because it gained access to his personal communications — thus giving the U.S. real-time information about his thinking — remains a closely guarded secret.

The Russian president has surrounded himself with a small circle of like-minded military and intelligence officials who do his bidding.

Several former intelligence officials said they doubt that the U.S. has access to Putin’s personal communications and instead believe it is more likely that the U.S. relied in part on intercepted communications among others in the Russian government and military. As Putin issued orders, increasing numbers of government and military officials had to be notified, and those officials then had to notify others around them. As a result, the Russian president’s plans for such a large-scale invasion couldn’t remain secret for long.

While Putin’s intentions were difficult for U.S. intelligence to determine, the Russian military’s troop buildup along the border with Ukraine was much easier to monitor. Over the past year, in fact, Russia did little to conceal its huge military deployments along the border with Ukraine. Last April, U.S. intelligence first detected that the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border. Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later moved back to their bases, but U.S. intelligence determined that some of the troops and materiel remained near the border, the current and former intelligence officials said. The intelligence community realized that by only withdrawing part of its forces, Russia was making it easier to mount a quick mobilization later.

In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but the crisis began to build again in October and November, when U.S. intelligence watched as Russia once again moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine. Pentagon analysts began to warn that the scale and costs of the deployment were much larger than would be required if Putin were bluffing, said current and former officials familiar with the intelligence.

As U.S. intelligence monitored the Russian troop buildup, there was some concern among officials handling Russian operations inside the CIA about how aggressively they were being allowed to conduct spy operations against Moscow. Early in 2021, some officials involved in Russian operations inside the CIA said that they were facing at least a temporary pause on a series of sensitive covert operations related to Russia, according to a former U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge of discussions among the officials involved in Russian operations. The former official said that William Burns, Biden’s CIA director, was seeking to temporarily halt some high-risk and potentially provocative operations to give the new administration a chance to try to reset relations with Putin after the weird and controversial relationship between Putin and Donald Trump. The former U.S. president had been investigated for his ties to Russia, and his relationship with Putin often seemed submissive, poisoning every aspect of U.S.-Russian relations.

The Biden administration “wanted to see if they could avoid kicking over a hornet’s nest called Russia.”

“There was a deep desire for a stable and predictable relationship with Russia,” the former senior CIA official told The Intercept. The Biden administration “wanted to see if they could avoid kicking over a hornet’s nest called Russia.”

A CIA spokesperson denied that there were any restrictions imposed on operations against Russia, calling the idea that Burns had sought to limit high-risk spy missions to give Biden a chance to reset relations with Putin categorically false.

Senior intelligence officials said that the only real shift in Russian operations was to increase the agency’s focus on intelligence related to Ukraine instead of pursuing other Russia-related targets. In the first few months of the Biden administration, U.S. intelligence officials began working more closely with Ukrainian intelligence to help the country prepare for a possible Russian invasion, the senior agency official said.

As the intelligence began to show the Russian escalation along the Ukrainian border, top CIA officials became increasingly focused on Ukraine long before it burst into the headlines as a global crisis. “I saw Burns in December, and he was really agitated by the Russian buildup,” said the former senior intelligence official.

Yet for several critical weeks last fall, senior policymakers in the Biden administration remained deeply split over how best to respond. At that time, the administration was reluctant to dramatically and immediately increase arms shipments to Ukraine.

Alexander Vindman, the former Army officer who handled Ukraine policy at the National Security Council and who became a whistleblower in Trump’s impeachment over the Ukraine scandal, says that Trump was largely responsible for delaying arms shipments to the country. Vindman said in an interview that the toxic politics surrounding Trump’s handling of Ukraine continued to make officials in the Biden administration wary of how aggressively to handle Ukraine policy last year.

In 2019, Trump froze military aide to Ukraine to try to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Biden, then a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. Trump was impeached by the House for his attempt to pressure a foreign leader to meddle in a U.S. election but was later acquitted in the Senate. “Trump’s freeze on arms transfers made Ukraine toxic for the remainder of the Trump years, and I think Biden saw it as a toxic issue too,” Vindman said. “We lost three years’” worth of aid to Ukraine because of Trump’s efforts to intimidate Zelenskyy, he added. (Vindman testified before Congress during the impeachment; he was subsequently forced out of his job at the White House and later retired from the Army, saying that his chain of command did not shield him from pressure from the Trump administration.)

By February, however, as the U.S. intelligence community issued specific warnings that an invasion was imminent, the period of indecision among Biden administration policymakers came to an end. Since the invasion, the U.S. and its NATO allies have poured arms into Ukraine to help the nation defend itself. But Biden has imposed limits, and this week he rejected a Polish proposal to transfer fighter jets to Ukraine.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said that Putin has been surprised and disappointed by the Russian army’s problems so far and by the strength of the Ukrainian resistance. A U.S. intelligence official told Congress this week that as many as 4,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began.

The senior intelligence official said that the Ukrainian intelligence service, which worked with the CIA to prepare for the invasion, has performed well since the Russian attack, but did not provide any details.

“Clearly Putin’s expectation was that this would be a much easier enterprise than it is,” the senior U.S. intelligence official said.

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Since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Peter Daszak has been at the center of a heated, and at times vicious, debate over the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The parasitologist helms the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, a wildlife conservation organization that aims to understand and prevent infectious diseases; the organization has received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from U.S. agencies, much of which Daszak distributes to labs around the world. Starting in 2005, he worked closely with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who was a key partner on a 2014 National Institutes of Health grant to research bat coronaviruses in China. The Intercept has published over 2,500 pages of documents and communications from the grant following a Freedom of Information lawsuit — information that has transformed public understanding of the research conducted under the grant.

Those documents have shown that in its efforts to head off and prepare for a pandemic, EcoHealth Alliance oversaw an experiment in which researchers intentionally made coronaviruses more pathogenic and transmissible. One grant report contained evidence that the research group also did an experiment with infectious clones of MERS, another deadly virus. While none of the experiments described in the grant materials released so far could have sparked the current pandemic, the documents raise serious questions about biosafety and oversight at NIH. Early in the grant, research on certain coronaviruses was subject to a U.S. government ban, but notes on communications between NIH staffers and EcoHealth Alliance obtained by The Intercept showed that the federal agency allowed Daszak to take the lead in shaping a plan to evade that moratorium.

Meanwhile, a grant proposal published by the internet research group DRASTIC last September showed that in 2018 EcoHealth Alliance applied for funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to look for novel furin cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses. According to the proposal, which was not funded, EcoHealth planned to insert furin cleavage sites into the spikes of SARS-related viruses — an idea that drew attention because scientists had already noted that such a site is unique in the subclass of viruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs.

The Intercept repeatedly sought comment from EcoHealth Alliance on these revelations. EcoHealth initially responded. In September 2021, a spokesperson denied that the organization had conducted the research on the deadly MERS virus that was described in the NIH proposal. After documents obtained via FOIA later showed that such research had in fact been done, Daszak stated that the spokesperson had been misinformed. EcoHealth Alliance then stopped responding to The Intercept’s questions. In late February, Daszak replied to email inquiries and offered to talk. He spoke with us on March 1. In a wide-ranging interview conducted over Zoom, he addressed questions that have swirled around EcoHealth Alliance for the past two years, defended his organization against what he characterized as unjust accusations, and railed against the questioning he has faced from congressional Republicans, the NIH, and news organizations, including The Intercept.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Responding to the Outbreak

We’re curious when you first heard about the outbreak in Wuhan.

If you look at my Twitter account, you’ll see a tweet on New Year’s Eve of 2019 —

But before the tweet, what was the moment when you first learned about it?

It was a couple of days before that. We heard from our contacts in China that something was going on, that there were cases of a disease in Wuhan. I think it was December 30. We looked on Chinese social media and found the rumors about it there. But we heard from many scientists in China.

Many of the virologists and other scientists we speak to say that we don’t have enough information to determine whether Covid-19 emerged from natural spillover or as a result of research. Do you agree with that?

Do I agree that it’s possible that Covid-19 emerged through a lab leak? Of course. It’s been widely reported that we shut down discussion on that. But in the WHO report, which I was part of — and in fact I led the animal environmental side for the WHO side — we state that it’s extremely unlikely. We don’t state that it’s impossible it came from the lab. Of course it’s possible.

One of the many reasons that the origin of Covid-19 became such a sensitive and divisive issue was the sense, based on your communications about the Lancet letter, that you orchestrated a response among scientists and then made an effort to distance yourself from that effort. Do you want to say anything about that episode?

You said, “One of the reasons why this has become so divisive is because of the Lancet thing.” You could say that about many things. It’s because we didn’t release the DARPA proposal. It’s because we didn’t release our emails. It’s because, early on, we said very strongly that this came from nature, and that this lab leak stuff is preposterous. The real reason this has become so divisive is because it’s being used politically. That’s it.

Scientists disagree over an issue where there’s no definitive proof. And for this issue, there’s no definitive proof. And there may never be. But what we do know is the weight of evidence points strongly to emergence from farmed wildlife in China.

Since the WHO report even, there are something like 12 scientific papers that have been published or put up online from good scientists pointing towards that origin. And I’ve looked at every single document that’s come out of the folks who are trying to show it came out of the lab, and there is no evidence yet for that. It’s all about implied motives, databases that were taken offline, people that aren’t on a website, or innuendo around something. Any one of those things can be explained by the normal process of doing science.

An aerial view of the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China’s central Hubei province on April 17, 2020.

Photo illustration: Soohee Cho for The Intercept; Getty Images

Controversial Research

Did EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute of Virology, through its partnership with EcoHealth Alliance, ever insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus genetic sequence?

Of course we did not do that. I really don’t understand how that could be a question at this point — it’s beyond the pale. That’s not in our plans and it’s not any of our reports, so of course we didn’t do that.

But isn’t it the case that you submitted a grant proposal to DARPA to do so?

We did submit a proposal to DARPA. I’ve not checked through the one that’s online that it’s the correct document. What I do know is it was widely reported that DARPA rejected that because there were concerns about safety issues. That is absolutely untrue. The document that allegedly is DARPA’s response, their review of our proposal, I’ve never seen that before. It was never sent to us. I don’t know if it’s real.

DARPA had a process by which people who didn’t get funded could do an interview with them to find out why they didn’t get funded. So I did that. Never once did they mention any concerns or issues around safety; never once did they mention gain-of-function. The reason they told us it was rejected was because the amount we asked for was too much for them. They couldn’t afford it. They actually encouraged us to resubmit in different ways. We then had protracted conversations with them about funding specific parts of it. They liked the proposal.

Was any of the work described in that proposal completed prior to its submission? We were told by multiple sources that when you submit a grant, that at least some of the work would have been done.

When you write a grant proposal and propose to do a new line of research, which is what we did, we would not be doing that research before we submit the proposal. That’s not how it works.

When we asked if you had ever inserted a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus, you responded with outrage. But that is what was described in the DARPA proposal.

No. What you said is, did we insert a furin cleavage site? And what I said was, of course not! If we had done that work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it would have been published by now. It would have been made public in our reports to the NIH. The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple.

But you acknowledge that you proposed to DARPA to insert a furin cleavage site?

I refute that that was the goal of the DARPA proposal. The idea was not to insert a furin cleavage site in a virus to see what happens. That’s not what was proposed. The proposal was to look for those polybasic cleavage sites in nature because we knew that that was the potential to make a virus more able to infect people and move from person to person. If we found mutations around that polybasic cleavage site that looked like it could be evolvable, the idea was then that Ralph Baric’s lab at UNC would do some work to see how evolvable that site was. So that work never happened. The proposal was not funded.

Did you find any of these cleavage sites in naturally occurring viruses that you collected?

The proposal was not funded so we didn’t do that work. We’ve not found polybasic cleavage sites. However, they are in many coronaviruses from bats. Papers from Europe show mutations around that cleavage site that suggest strongly that that furin cleavage site could evolve very easily in nature. I’m sure there are viruses out there with it. I’m convinced that it could have easily evolved during the first stages of the pandemic, as the virus got from bats, perhaps into an intermediate host in a wildlife farm, or into people.

Did you resubmit the proposal?

We had conversations with them over many months about bits they would like to fund or they wanted to fund. We did not get funded. We did not do the work.

So you didn’t think the DARPA proposal was relevant to the investigation into the origin of the pandemic?

A proposal that was not funded and work that was never done is not relevant to the origins of Covid. Of course not!

When asked if you had done this work with the furin cleavage site, you said no.

For the furin cleavage site, you should really ask Ralph Baric. He wrote that section of the DARPA grant.

So you’re saying that that would be a good question for Ralph Baric, whether he has done any of these insertions?

I don’t know what Ralph Baric has done. But I doubt that he would go ahead and do that work without the funding.

Some virologists were dismayed to see the insertion of furin cleavage sites in this proposal.

I don’t know why anyone would be dismayed at that because furin cleavage sites were first researched in influenza viruses. And it’s well known that that’s something you should look for if you’re interested in virulence factors. Second, there’s actually a published paper from way before our proposal was submitted, way before the pandemic, where a group actually inserted a furin cleavage site into SARS-CoV-1. So we were right to look for that. And I think the proposal stands as a valid and actually quite predictive effort to understand the risk of viruses. You’ve got to look at the big picture of why we do this research. We’re not doing it as a sort of academic interest, “what would happen if you put a cleavage site there?” No. This work is done to say: What viruses are there out there in the wild that have the potential to emerge in people? And can we do something to stop them? Develop vaccines, develop therapies, stop people making contact with those animals.

Your grant, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” included an experiment using humanized mice. Were other humanized mouse experiments conducted by you and/or WIV?

Not by us, no.

What about by WIV?

Well, you need to talk to WIV about what else they were doing. We were doing one line of work with them.

Were you aware of any?

No, of course. I’d tell you if I was aware.

Were there viruses from elsewhere in Southeast Asia that were sent to the WIV?

No. This is a commonly put about story that’s simply not true. WIV did not receive viruses from all around the world.

How many actual viruses do they have?

WIV does not have the biggest collection of viruses from bats in the world. There’s 20,000 bat samples, something like that, tiny fecal pellets from bats.

Right now I don’t know exactly how many bat coronaviruses are in culture and freezers at the WIV. But from our work, I know that out of the SARS-related coronavirus, they were only ever able to culture a handful. I think three cultures. It’s not easy to do.

In November 2019, you tweeted that you had identified over 50 novel SARS-related coronaviruses, including some that cause SARS-like signs in mice and didn’t respond to monoclonal antibodies.

Yes.

What are these 50 viruses? And are they public?

This is a complex thing that’s been widely misinterpreted. It’s actually quite simple. What we had were hundreds of genetic sequences of coronaviruses from bats. We published them in that paper. They’re not all new viruses. As we went through the sequence data and analyzed it, we refined what you might call a new virus versus a known virus. That’s all. It’s scientists refining and analyzing.

One ongoing point of contention between you and NIH is about lab notebooks and the communications around experiments.

NIH has made a bunch of requests that are completely reasonable, that we’ve dealt with very quickly and sent them the information that they required. And in many cases, NIH had the information already. What’s happening here is you’ve got an office of the director that’s dealing directly with us and completely cutting out the program staff who’ve got all the data they need. NIH has also asked us for a number of things which to any balanced and independent reviewer are impossible for us to supply.

Clearly in coming up with Year 4 and 5 progress reports, EcoHealth Alliance had information and draft reports on these humanized mouse experiments. Did you share those with NIH?

Of course not. You don’t share draft reports. You share the final report.

Here’s what happens, it’s a very standard procedure: We are subcontracting to a lab in China to do some work. Every year we have to file a report to NIH to tell them what we’ve done for the year, how we’ve spent the money, and whether we’ve achieved the goals of the grant. So, we contact our subcontractees and we say, “Send us the information. Let us know what successes you’ve had this year and whether you’ve had problems and issues. Put it all in a report and send it to us.” And then we use that to produce a report for NIH. That’s why there are some editing issues around that. We move them around a bit, and we send a final report. A draft report is just a worse written version of the final report. There’s no special information that’s got intelligence value or anything.

Then why not share them?

We’ve not been asked for a draft report by anybody.

You’ve been colleagues with Shi Zhengli, the Chinese bat coronavirus expert who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, since 2005?

Yes.

So is it the kind of relationship where you would be generally aware of all the work that she was involved in? Can you say a little bit about what your level of awareness of other stuff she was doing?

We were aware of most of the stuff she was doing. Of course. These people weren’t hiding anything from us. They are scientists.

I’ve sat through dozens of meetings with people from Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they talk openly about unpublished work. And, by the way, RaTG13 was one of the sequences in a paper published — in I think 2015. So they weren’t hiding anything from us.

Early on, after she learned about the outbreak, Shi said she was worried that somehow a virus might have leaked from her lab. A lot of people we speak to — virologists who do this kind of work — are the ones who seem most in touch with that possibility, that this stuff happens.

Very specifically, it happens when you have cultures of viruses in flasks, and you’re then doing experiments with high concentrations of virus. It rarely happens if ever from an animal sample, especially a saliva sample from a bat. What Shi Zhengli was saying at that time was, “Oh, no, it’s a coronavirus. I need to go back and check on those viruses that we’ve got and see: Is it one of them?” And she did, and it wasn’t. That’s what any reasonable person would do.

You implied in early 2020 that RaTG13 was not fully sequenced by WIV until late 2019 or later. And then afterwards, Shi revealed that it had actually been fully sequenced in 2018. When and how did you first learn about the true date that this virus was sequenced?

I don’t actually know the true date of when this virus was sequenced. I didn’t see an interview with Zhengli where she said, “We sequenced it in 2018.” I don’t know when and I don’t think they ever got the full genome. There are parts of that virus that aren’t correctly sequenced. Bear in mind, RaTG13 was not from a sample collected under the NIH grant. So we didn’t have any oversight on that or any knowledge of it.

A colony of bats in a cave in the Maramagambo forest of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda.

Photo illustration: Soohee Cho for The Intercept; Getty Images

Missing Data

Did you have access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s database of viral samples and sequences that went offline in September 2019?

I’ve never actually seen the database. I’ve seen pages of it from the internet, Twitter, chats. But I’ve never looked at the database.

Did your staff have access to it?

No. We didn’t need to! We had all the data we needed. Some folks find this missing database indicative of a cover-up or something. When we were in Wuhan [with the WHO mission] in the Institute of Virology, I said, “Why did you take the database offline?” And their response was, “We took it offline before the outbreak. We were then getting hacking attempts, hundreds, thousands of hacking attempts. So we decided it wouldn’t be wise to put it back up.” Now, you may not believe them. But it is a perfectly reasonable explanation. And I think people should try and go for the most likely reasonable explanation for these things.

So why did they take it offline in September 2019?

They told us — and it’s in the WHO report — that they were trying to update it to make it modern. WIV was trying to present itself like a globally significant virology institute, and it is. But when you look at Chinese websites, they can be really old and stuffy and clunky. What they were trying to do, they told us, was to make it interactive so that you can click on something and a map would show. They were trying to make it fit in with the national databases.

I find it quite ironic that the focus on the database of WIV is so intense, whereas what actually happened was we took the data and, with China, put the data into the NIH’s own database to make it public. That’s a great win for the U.S.

In April 2020, you wrote in an email, “It’s extremely important that we don’t have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release to Genbank at this point. As you may have heard, these were part of a grant just terminated by NIH. … Having them as part of PREDICT will being [sic] very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.” Why did you think that publishing these sequences would bring unwelcome attention?

Because we just had our grant terminated by NIH.

So you didn’t think it would be important to release this data, given that there was a pandemic?

Those sequences were released publicly by publishing them in a scientific paper, which is what scientists do. The email that you’re reading out is not about whether sequences should be made public; it’s about whether sequences should be made public via a USAID mechanism or via publishing through the NIH mechanism. And what I was saying to the UC Davis team that ran PREDICT was that these are NIH-funded sequences and should be reported through the NIH system. It’s really that simple.

And which paper were they reported in?

Latinne et al, published in Nature Communications. We were struggling to get that paper out. It was very, very difficult, once the pandemic started, to keep communication with Chinese scientists. The utmost priority as a scientist is to get the data published, not to upload it into some database that’s going to take months to go through. And by the way, that database is somewhere on the USAID government system. It’s very difficult to find. The paper had already been submitted for publication, and the sequences were uploaded into GenBank, the NIH system. And then once the papers were accepted, they became public. And that’s exactly what we did.

Are there sequences that have not been made public?

To my mind, there are no sequences of SARS-related coronaviruses that have not been made public. Some people think there are still viruses that are SARS-related that haven’t been put in GenBank. That’s not true. We’ve uploaded all of the SARS-related coronavirus sequences, or we’ve reported them to NIH, or we’ve published them in scientific papers. And in fact, for most of them, we’ve done all the above. We had them all uploaded before the pandemic. Most of them anyway.

You were on the WHO mission to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2. When the NIH grant documents were released, it was a surprise to many people that animal experiments were being done at Wuhan University. If you knew this information, did you share it?

It wasn’t a surprise to NIH because the NIH knew about them.

Right. But did you share that information with the WHO committee or with others who were investigating the origins?

The Wuhan University BSL-3 facility is what we’re talking about. They do humanized mouse work. That was not looked at by the WHO origins group. It’s a BSL-3 lab that had humanized mice under BSL-3 conditions. It’s highly unlikely to be the source of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Did you mention it to the committee?

I mentioned all my work to the committee, of course. We talked about it, for sure.

The Challenges of Public Scrutiny

Dr. Michael Lauer at the NIH has repeatedly asked you for biosafety records from the WIV and said that he has been unable to get some of them.

He says that, but it’s not true. We’ve supplied everything we could possibly supply on the issues that they’ve asked for.

In one of his letters to you, Lauer asked about the biosafety oversight of the work at WIV. In your response to him, you wrote that it consisted of semiannual meetings with the lead investigator and assessments of compliance with all conditions of the award. Biosafety experts have said that this falls short of the level of oversight one would want for this kind of work. You mentioned in an exchange with Lauer that you were offering to pay from EcoHealth’s own coffers for additional biosafety measures. Why did you offer to do this? Did you feel that the biosafety oversight was adequate?

We’re talking about a world-class virology lab run by the Chinese government that is probably the best virology lab in China, and China is very good at virology. It’s very efficiently run, and the biosafety conditions are very good. Just because people think that Covid-19 might have come from WIV doesn’t mean that therefore our oversight of biosafety wasn’t sufficient. We did everything normal in oversight of that lab.

Then why did you suggest these additional measures, if the others were already adequate?

Because I was worried that they were going to terminate our other grants. This is the key driving force for every action we’ve taken since April 24, 2020. I don’t know why people don’t realize that.

Once NIH shows you that it’s willing to terminate your funding and kick people out of a job and put your whole organization under pressure simply because a single politician tells them to, then you start worrying about every other grant and contract that NIH controls. We live in fear that they’re going to do similar abrupt terminations with no cause and no rationale and no logic.

What I was doing then was saying to Michael Lauer, please be reasonable. We’re trying to do everything we can, within the normal bounds of what organizations do. We probably have the best biosafety and field teams in the world.

We’re overcompliant and yet still being accused of lack of compliance.

On February 24, House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans sent a letter to NIH alleging that it is “highly suspicious” that EcoHealth reported the humanized mouse experiment results over two years, and suggesting that more work may have been done that was not reported. How would you respond to that?

This is a simple issue of Chinese nationals writing a report and then us drafting our report to NIH. So there’s a word in there where they say we continued the studies. That doesn’t mean they continued infecting mice with new viruses. No. What it means is they continued doing the research on the one experiment that they’ve done. And that continuation is a lot of work. So they did all the pathology, which means at the end of the experiment, you take all the mice, and you look at every organ in the body. You do detailed microscopical analysis. It takes months. So that’s why it dragged on because you’ve got months of after-the-experiment analysis. And we included the mortality data as part of the pathology data. That’s completely normal.

The House Energy and Commerce Republicans don’t write to us, they write to NIH. Sometimes we hear about it, sometimes we don’t. NIH doesn’t copy us on their responses. Then eventually we get a letter from NIH asking questions, which we always respond to, always within the timeframe and always refuting any allegations with evidence. So that’s what we’ve done.

The latest letter from the House Energy and Commerce Republicans accused us of being overfunded, effectively having two grants to do the same thing. It’s simply not true. The USAID PREDICT grant has completely different goals to the NIH coronavirus grant. For instance, PREDICT looks for between seven and 18 different viral families within samples, not just coronaviruses. NIH is focused solely on coronaviruses. So the goals are different.

The agencies do, as a standard procedure, a review of a grantee’s other proposals to see if there’s overlap between them, because they don’t want to fund the same thing twice. This is absolutely refutable with documentary evidence.

What’s your understanding of the Republicans’ motivation?

Any bipartisan requests for information from the House or the Senate, we’ve responded to. We’ve been working with the U.S. government since the pandemic began to get information to them about every single aspect of this pandemic, including unpublished data. The politicians who are attacking us probably don’t realize or know or care, in some cases. When there’s a request from one side of the political spectrum, we try not to respond to that. We’ve had hundreds of questions sent to us by letter, including requests for thousands of pages of documents. We don’t have the staff to do that. And bear in mind our grant has been terminated and now suspended. We don’t have access to funding. We don’t have the staff to do this work. It’s a horrible, cruel irony that, on the one hand, your funding is cut; and on the other hand, there are now outrageously huge number of demands for us to do work to show data from that funding that’s been cut.

Don’t you have ongoing funding for two other NIH projects?

Yes. Well, you can’t use that money.

What have you been asked to get by NIH that you feel you can’t get?

There are a whole series of things that we’ve been unable to get. A vial of virus. Information on a person that was removed from the website (I did ask them that, and they gave us an explanation, which is perfectly reasonable). NIH asked us for an inspection of the WIV. Every right-minded person on the planet realizes that the World Health Organization asked for an inspection of that lab, and we did go into the lab and ask questions and go around the facilities. For NIH to say that I should organize a U.S.-only, NIH-based or National Academy-based inspection of the lab facilities is a request that is way beyond what’s possible. You know, you can’t go into CDC as a foreigner and do an inspection of the lab.

NIH writing to us saying, “We demand that you do this,” puts us in jeopardy and it’s a security risk. If I was to take that letter from NIH and go to the Beijing airport and say, “I’m here to do this,” I would be arrested and put in jail and probably put on trial, in the same way that scientists from China have come to the U.S. and tried to take vials of virus back to China and been arrested and convicted. NIH doing this is clearly a way for them to try to get the public behind a decision they made that was political about terminating our grant. Ever since that decision, we’ve been put under similar pressure over and over again. The Republicans write to NIH with some fairly outrageous accusations. NIH responds and says, “Don’t worry, we will go and make EcoHealth do this, this, this, and this.”

I don’t think that those questions are posed to truly get to the bottom of the origins of Covid. While the House Republicans are putting pressure on NIH for tiny bits of administrative information, scientists are going out and finding that actually things are really pointing towards a natural origin. And meanwhile, we’re left refuting each one of those allegations. They’re all false. There’s no substance to them at all.

A good proportion of the public have been pushed by misinformation to believe a narrative — and this narrative is repeated daily — that gain-of-function work was funded by Tony Fauci as a back channel to China, and EcoHealth funneled funds to China. Those stories are very beguiling, they sort of make you feel, “Ah! I knew it.” But actually, there’s not a grain of truth to them. Every single action that EcoHealth Alliance has taken has been things that scientists do in the normal course of doing their work.

Closing down that line of research means we lose eyes and ears on the ground in China. And it doesn’t benefit us from a public health point of view or a national security point of view. It’s a huge mistake.

The post Peter Daszak Answers Critics and Defends Coronavirus Research appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In the days leading up to the January 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol, officials inside the Department of Homeland Security were feeling anxious. Within the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the sole component of the federal government authorized to disseminate threat information to state and local law enforcement agencies, analysts had watched as maps of the Capitol were circulated online amid talk of hanging Democrats, murdering protesters, and dying in a blaze of glory.

The Homeland Security officials warned each other to be vigilant going to and from work as the “Stop the Steal” rally to protest the results of the 2020 election approached. Expecting violence, some planned to stay home when the day finally came. Despite the measures they planned to take for their own safety, however, and the abundant evidence that January 6 was a powder keg waiting to blow, the federal office responsible for warning the rest of the government about dangerous events decided to keep its concerns to itself.

These are the findings of a DHS Office of Inspector General report released Tuesday that calls for “essential changes” to I&A, the department’s troubled intelligence office. The 50-page report documents how the various divisions of I&A — from open-source intelligence “collectors,” to its counterterrorism wing, to officials posted at “fusion centers” around the country — repeatedly encountered evidence of preparations for violence at the Capitol and chose not to report that information to a wider audience.

As early as December 21, 2020, according to the report, I&A officials internally circulated information about an individual describing plans to kill protesters by the dozens; calls to bring weapons to Washington, D.C.; an increase in weapons brandished by individuals already in the capital; and threats of violence against “ideological adversaries,” law enforcement agents, and government officials. None of that information made it outside the office prior to January 6, however. While one I&A official did submit information about the various threats to be approved for a report on January 5, the inspector general noted, that release was not approved and disseminated until two days after the siege, at which point four people who were at the event were dead, including one who was shot by a Capitol police officer.

“In the weeks before the events at the U.S. Capitol, I&A identified specific open source threat information related to January 6 but did not issue any intelligence products about these threats until January 8,” the report said. “On several occasions leading up to January 6, collectors messaged each other about the threats they discovered online.”

The inspector general pointed to two core explanations for I&A’s inaction: a rushed hiring push in 2019 that put inexperienced and untrained officials on the job and public backlash following the office’s targeting of journalists covering the George Floyd protests in 2020.

The report is the latest blow for I&A, which has long been the subject of criticism for its troubled relationship to constitutionally protected protest activities and among those who see the post-9/11 office as unnecessarily duplicative in a world where the FBI already exists. In the summer of 2020, I&A was embroiled in controversy when documents leaked showing that analysts had created files on journalists covering the George Floyd protests. Soon after that, Brian Murphy, the head of I&A at the time, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the two top officials at DHS pressured his analysts to downplay intelligence involving threats from the far right and to amplify intelligence supporting the president’s reelection messaging on the dangerousness of left-wing agitators. The DHS political appointees in question, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, denied the allegation.

“As Secretary Mayorkas has said, the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a violent assault on our democracy,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “Over the past fourteen months, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has strengthened intelligence analysis, information sharing, and operational preparedness to help prevent acts of violence and keep our communities safe.”

In addition to implementing a first of its kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, the official noted that since the Capitol siege, I&A has conducted “more than 70 engagements with partners across every level of government, in the private sector, and local communities regarding emerging threat,” while the department as whole has issued “more than 95 intelligence products related to domestic violent extremism.”

In December, President Joe Biden nominated Kenneth Wainstein, a former adviser to President George W. Bush and chief of staff to longtime FBI Director Robert Mueller, to take over the intelligence office.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, welcomed the inspector general’s report. “I’m glad that the IG made it clear that our intelligence agencies under the previous administration should have done much more before the January 6th attack on the capitol,” Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Thankfully, Office of Intelligence and Analysis has agreed with IG’s recommendations and I look forward to working with it on implementing them.”

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a sharp critic of surveillance excesses at DHS — from Customs and Border Protection’s targeting of journalists, lawyers, and immigration advocates at the border to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that vacuumed up millions of Americans’ financial records — said the report was indicative of a pattern of problems at the nation’s largest law enforcement agency that had impacted his own hometown.

“The new Inspector General Report is another reminder that multiple federal agencies failed to appropriately respond to the very real, public threats to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Wyden said in a statement to The Intercept. “That failure came only a few months after DHS officials inappropriately collected and shared intelligence about reporters and other people who posed no threat to homeland security in Portland.”

“Clearly DHS Intelligence activities need an overhaul to ensure that the department is focused on real threats, not harassing reporters and non-violent protesters,” the senator added. “The public also deserves more information about DHS’s intelligence activities, and I am pleased that Ken Wainstein, the nominee to head the Department’s intelligence office, has committed to me to conduct an immediate review on how to increase transparency.”

The inspector general’s findings indicate that the dysfunction that plagued I&A in the summer of 2020 continued into the winter of 2021.

In one passage, the report presents a series of messages that two “collectors,” officials responsible for trawling through open-source information to identify domestic security threats, exchanged late on the night of January 2, after one of the officials noticed that people were sharing a map of the Capitol online.

“I feel like people are actually going to try and hurt politicians,” the official who came across the map wrote. “Jan 6th is gonna be crazy, not to mention the inauguration.”

The official suspected that their supervisors would order extra shifts for the event, writing, “Watch us get surged for that lol.”

The second official had a similar feeling, adding that the Proud Boys — a right-wing street-fighting gang — were in town the night before. A few hours later, the first official wrote again.

“Like there’s these people talking about hanging Democrats from ropes like wtf,” they said.

“They’d need alot of rope,” the second official replied. “I think DC is pretty much all democrat haha.”

“I feel like people are actually going to try and hurt politicians.”

By 2:53 a.m., the first official had arrived at a succinct description of the threats they were seeing: “I mean people are talking about storming Congress, bringing guns, willing to die for the cause, hanging politicians with ropes,” they wrote.

According to the inspector general, neither official considered filing a report describing what they were seeing. “When reviewing threats pertaining to January 6 events, the collectors generally concluded that the statements online were hyperbole, and not true threats or incitement, because they thought storming the U.S. Capitol and other threats were unlikely or not possible,” the report said.

One collector who spoke to the oversight investigators recalled describing to a colleague how “nervous” they were after seeing a group of people who looked “like they are going to battle” post about their arrival in Washington. “Yet, these collectors did not draft any intelligence products reflecting possible safety concerns in the area,” the report said.

The inspector general traced some of the inaction to shift changes in the summer of 2019 that resulted in an exodus of collectors from I&A. The office responded with a hiring blitz, bringing in replacements “mostly at entry level positions, with many not having Federal government or intelligence experience.”

“As of January 6, 2021, 16 out of 21 collectors had less than 1 year of experience, and some of these new collectors said they did not receive adequate training to help determine when threat information should be reported,” the report said.

“One collector said people were afraid to do their jobs because of the fear of being reprimanded by I&A leadership and concerns about congressional scrutiny.”

Fallout from the summer of 2020 disclosures — which included hearings on Capitol Hill and a separate inspector general report published, ironically, on January 6, 2021 — may have also played a role in the inaction. Out of the 24 collectors the inspector general interviewed, 22 said that their reporting approach “was affected by the scrutiny they received” the previous summer, when DHS deployed Border Patrol tactical teams in response to protests in Portland, Oregon, and compiled “intelligence reports” on members of the media. When considering the potential for violent actors mixed in with racial justice protests, it was an anything goes approach, the collectors said; in the runup to January 6 there was a “pendulum swing” in the other direction.

“They explained that they thought almost anything was reportable during the Portland protests, but they were hesitant or fearful to report information related to January 6 events,” the report said. “One collector said people were afraid to do their jobs because of the fear of being reprimanded by I&A leadership and concerns about congressional scrutiny. Another explained there was a ‘chilling effect’ on their approach to reporting following the summer of 2020.”

Despite I&A’s failure to do its core job in one of the most important moments in the nearly two-decade existence of DHS, the inspector general’s recommendations for correcting course were mild, focusing mostly on improved training and guidance. The inspector general did, however, gesture at the historical significance of the January 6 siege and the need for change, particularly in the event of another attempted government overthrow.

“I&A staff disagree about whether an intelligence product from I&A would have affected the outcome on January 6,” the report said. “Nonetheless, the issues we found during our review demonstrate the need for essential changes at I&A to ensure it is better equipped to respond to similar events in the future.”

Update: March 10, 2022, 1:47 p.m. ET
This article has been updated to include a statement from the Department of Homeland Security that was received after publication. 

The post “Jan 6th is gonna be crazy. … lol”: DHS Officials Expected Violence at the Capitol, Kept It to Themselves appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In October 2020, the FBI and the Justice Department announced the arrest of six Michigan militia members who called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen. The FBI claimed that federal agents had thwarted an elaborate plot hatched by the men to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“These alleged extremists undertook a plot to kidnap a sitting governor,” FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Josh P. Hauxhurst said in a statement. “Whenever extremists move into the realm of actually planning violent acts, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force stands ready to identify, disrupt, and dismantle their operations, preventing them from following through on those plans.”

In addition to those charged federally, eight other members of the Wolverine Watchmen were arrested on state charges related to the plot. The arrests made national news, in part because a group of right-wing extremists plotting to kidnap a high-profile Democrat fit with the prevailing media narrative at the time that President Donald Trump was fomenting violence as part of his reelection campaign. The announcement of the kidnapping plan even knocked a hurricane’s landfall out of the top spot on CBS Evening News.

But the circumstances of the case and the megaphone the Justice Department used to publicize it were familiar. As with the prosecutions of more than 350 international terrorism defendants caught in post-9/11 FBI terrorism stings, in which agents or informants provide encouragement and weapons for criminal plots, questions of entrapment quickly emerged in the Wolverine Watchmen case. The FBI had used at least a dozen informants and several undercover agents to build the case. One of the group’s key members, known as “Big Dan,” was an FBI informant. Another, an apparent explosives expert whose role was critical to the alleged kidnapping plan, was in fact an FBI undercover agent.

“There’s nothing wrong with using confidential sources to help facilitate or move along an investigation, but it becomes really dicey when, in a case like this one, there are nearly as many informants as there are defendants,” Michael Sherwin, the former deputy attorney general for national security during the Trump administration, told The Intercept. “That’s a huge red flag, making you wonder if this is one of those cases that are manufactured to increase stats.”

Sherwin, a career federal prosecutor, also served as the acting U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia during the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden administration. Because Sherwin had prosecuted a Chinese businesswoman who trespassed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his arrival in Washington under Attorney General Bill Barr was initially viewed by some as further evidence of a politicized Justice Department. Sherwin approved of providing internal FBI records to lawyers representing former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was charged with making false statements to the FBI. In a controversial move, the Justice Department then sought to dismiss the case against Flynn.

Despite his role in controversial and high-profile cases, however, Sherwin wasn’t seen by everyone as a political henchman. The Miami Herald’s editorial board, whose members were familiar with Sherwin’s long career as federal prosecutor in Florida, suggested that President Joe Biden retain Sherwin at the Justice Department. And when Biden asked 56 Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys to step down, Sherwin wasn’t among them.

Sherwin was the top federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia during the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and he went on to lead what became the largest criminal investigation in American history, giving him a unique perspective on how the government is responding to domestic extremists and how politics and public pressure have shaped that response.

“January 6 was significant,” he said. “Were there dangerous actors there? Yes. Were there other just garden-variety criminals who got arrested? Of course. But the thing I think people are losing sight of is that this is nothing new. Going back to Ruby Ridge, going back to Waco, going back to Oklahoma City, going back to the militia groups in Michigan and Arizona — this is something that has existed for decades.”

Sherwin took the national stage in March 2021, when he gave an interview to “60 Minutes” in which he said he believed that in the cases of some Capitol rioters, the facts of their alleged crimes could support charges of sedition, a rarely filed and serious criminal offense. (His prediction came true nearly a year later, when federal prosecutors charged Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and 10 others with seditious conspiracy.) Although the Justice Department had given Sherwin permission to speak about the January 6 investigation at news conferences, they had not authorized him to speak to “60 Minutes,” and a U.S. District Court judge overseeing one of the January 6 cases complained that Sherwin’s “60 Minutes” interview had “the potential to affect the jury pool and the rights of these defendants.” The Justice Department launched an internal probe of Sherwin for violating Justice Department media protocols. The probe’s results have never been released. Sherwin later resigned from the Justice Department to take a position in private practice, a move he says he had previously been planning.

Michael Sherwin, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, speaks on the investigation into the Capitol Hill riots on Jan. 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Sarah Silbiger-Pool/Getty Images

Having witnessed firsthand how the Justice Department was changing its approach to domestic extremist cases, Sherwin questions whether highly publicized FBI stings might exaggerate the threat in the same way that similar stings produced hundreds of Islamist terrorism cases and helped inflate the perceived danger of international terrorism inside the United States. The Michigan sting involving the plot to kidnap Whitmer is emblematic of his concern. “This case is a disaster,” Sherwin said.

Jury selection in the federal trial of the Wolverine Watchmen began this week. Defense lawyers have signaled that they will argue that their clients were entrapped, and while entrapment defenses have rarely succeeded in international terrorism sting cases, the Justice Department appears concerned. Prosecutors cut a plea deal on the eve of the trial with one defendant, Kaleb Franks, in exchange for his testimony that he was not entrapped by government agents.

“The key to the government’s plan was to turn general discontent with Gov. Whitmer’s COVID-19 restrictions into a crime that could be prosecuted,” defense lawyers wrote in a joint motion. “The government picked what it knew would be a sensational charge: conspiracy to kidnap the governor. When the government was faced with evidence showing that the defendants had no interest in a kidnapping plot, it refused to accept failure and continued to push its plan.”

During the first two decades after 9/11, undercover terrorism stings became common, allowing the FBI to nab would-be terrorists and justify billions of dollars in counterterrorism funding but also leading to potentially illegal mass surveillance of Muslims and accusations of entrapment.

Now, as the Justice Department creates a new domestic terrorism unit and the FBI reorients to combat a perceived growing threat from domestic extremists, the Wolverine Watchmen case suggests that federal agents may rely on the same sting tactics that helped overstate the risk of Islamist terrorism to investigate potential domestic extremists.

Extremists Among Us

The conflict between right-wing extremism and federal law enforcement isn’t new in America. Nearly four decades before the creation of the FBI, the agency’s predecessor, known as the Bureau of Investigation, received authority to investigate the Ku Klux Klan and prosecute its members in federal court. More recently, the Oklahoma City bombing; the standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho; and investigations of militia groups shaped federal law enforcement agencies’ response to domestic extremists.

But after the 9/11 attacks, Congress expanded anti-terrorism laws and powers and the Bush administration reorganized the FBI into an agency focused primarily on counterterrorism, with the threat of Islamist extremism the paramount concern. The Justice Department formed an entirely new branch, the National Security Division, which was initially so consumed by the threat of international terrorist groups that domestic extremism investigations did not fall under its purview. Even after domestic terrorism became part of the National Security Division’s mandate, a double standard defined the first two decades after 9/11: Islamist extremists involved in bombing plots were always charged under anti-terrorism laws, such as using weapons of mass destruction and providing material support to terrorists, while domestic extremists engaged in similar crimes usually faced lesser explosives charges.

This double standard had the effect of playing up the threat from Islamist extremists, as the Justice Department issued press releases touting these terrorism charges and media coverage followed dutifully, while downplaying the threat of domestic extremists, whose prosecutions were often not announced with the same fanfare, if they were announced at all. Trump’s call as a presidential candidate for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” tapped into the Islamophobic hysteria that the Justice Department had helped create over 15 years of high-profile terrorism prosecutions.

FBI officials investigate the site of an explosion at the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minn., on Aug. 15, 2017.

Photo: David Joles/Star Tribune via AP

Violence from individual Trump supporters, inspired by the candidate who went on to become president, began to alter that narrative even as the Justice Department remained hesitant to bring terrorism charges against right-wing actors. When Emily Claire Hari (who was convicted under the name Michael) led a group of people inspired by Trump-related conspiracy theories to bomb a mosque in Minnesota and try to a bomb women’s clinic in Illinois, the Justice Department didn’t bring terrorism-related charges.

Still, the Hari case was one of several during Trump’s presidency that raised questions about potential violence by his supporters. Inside the FBI, some agents eventually described these threats as “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists.” In the fall of 2018, a strip club DJ in Florida named Cesar Sayoc started mailing bombs to current and former Democratic Party officials and news organizations, among others. Sayoc drove a white van whose windows were covered in stickers that praised Trump and denigrated media organizations and Democratic Party politicians. His arrest made international news: a perfect vision of the feared Trump supporter as terrorist.

Sherwin, who had come to Miami in 2007 as a federal prosecutor after serving as a Navy intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, was by then a top national security prosecutor in the Justice Department. He was the lead prosecutor who tracked, captured, and interrogated Sayoc in South Florida. In line with the Justice Department’s practices at the time, Sherwin charged Sayoc with explosives violations and making threats. But the case, under withering media scrutiny that included live helicopter coverage of the FBI investigation, quickly became a political football inside the Justice Department. Sayoc was extradited to New York, where several of his bombs had been sent, in a move that Sherwin saw as the Justice Department making decisions in response to public and political pressure.

“Cesar Sayoc sent a litany of mail bombs to a lot of high-profile individuals and the media,” Sherwin said. “Those bombs were all constructed in South Florida. They were all mailed from South Florida. He was detained and arrested in South Florida. The case ends up in New York because of politics, because it got a lot of headlines, because people at Main Justice at the time hooked up different people in the Southern District [of New York] with bringing the case there.”

In Manhattan, prosecutors took the step, then uncommon in prosecutions of domestic extremists, of filing weapons of mass destruction charges against Sayoc — terrorism charges that required approval from the Justice Department’s National Security Division. This treatment was more in line with the way the Justice Department had handled bombing cases involving Islamist extremists. In U.S. law, weapons of mass destruction are defined so broadly that they could include any sort of crude improvised explosive device, making the law’s application subject to political will. (Notably, the charges in the Michigan sting case include conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.)

“It goes back to feeding the beast — allowing people to get headlines and funding.”

“Cesar Sayoc was making real devices,” Sherwin said. “They were extremely low-wattage devices he learned to make on the internet with firecracker residue. They were devices my 18-year-old son could have made watching YouTube. They were active, but they weren’t constructed properly. I think they would have taken off a finger, but they wouldn’t have killed anyone. Is that a weapon of mass destruction? Look, I don’t want to fence with the definition of WMD under the U.S. criminal code, but I think sometimes labels are overextended on individuals, and it goes back to feeding the beast — allowing people to get headlines and funding. Sometimes, if a case straddles on just a regular criminal case and maybe — maybe — it has a breadcrumb of a domestic terrorism case, it’s thrown over the line and called a domestic terrorism case, because it makes the numbers look better. It justifies money and spending on Joint Terrorism Task Forces and everything else.”

That’s what happened in some international terrorism prosecutions during the two decades after 9/11, Sherwin said. The Justice Department has charged more than 80 defendants in international terrorism cases with using or conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. In some of these cases, the bombs were just as crude and infective as Sayoc’s.

Although domestic terrorism is defined in U.S. law, the Justice Department and the FBI have been unclear about what constitutes a domestic terrorism case and how many cases are open at any given time. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept obtained a 60-page domestic terrorism case list, from 2018, from the National Security Division. While heavily redacted, the list shows that the Justice Department had broken down domestic terrorism offenses into what prosecutors termed “affiliations,” including abortion extremism, anarchist extremism, animal rights extremism, Black separatist extremism, environmental extremism, and militia extremism.

While the list included some defendants whose crimes could be considered terrorism — such as Glendon Scott Crawford, who was arrested following an FBI sting in which he tried to build a radiological “death ray” to kill Muslims — it also included individuals whose terrorism label appeared questionable, such as a college student who sent an empty threat and a Native American activist who fired a handgun while resisting arrest during a protest.

FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during a hearing in Washington, D.C., on March 2, 2021.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

In recent testimony before Congress, the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, has thrown out large numbers to describe the FBI’s domestic terrorism case load. In 2017, he told Congress that there were “about 1,000 open domestic terrorism investigations.” Three years later, he claimed that number had risen to 2,000. Six months after offering that number, Wray told Congress that the FBI was handling “around 2,700 investigations.”

Having seen how politics shaped the Sayoc prosecution and how numbers drive policy and funding in Washington, Sherwin views Wray’s numbers skeptically, since the FBI is under political pressure to show a muscled response to domestic extremism. “So of course, you pump up those numbers,” Sherwin said. “Maybe it’s 100 full field investigations, but you pump up that number to 2,000, even if it’s just the opening of a preliminary assessment on one 17-year-old in his basement in Ohio.”

The Whitmer Plot

Pete Musico wasn’t hiding his contempt for Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who’d been elected just two years after Great Lake State voters helped send Trump to the White House.

A white man in his early 40s with a long beard and short-cropped hair, Musico aired his rough-edged political views in the oversharing way people seem to favor nowadays — through hastily recorded videos mostly from the driver’s seat of his car and then uploaded to YouTube. So what if the camera angles were unflattering, the picture jerky, and the background noise distracting? Musico had something to say.

“We all carry guns. We all got guns,” he declared in one video. “There will be a civil war in this country.”

Musico’s platform wasn’t exactly big. His videos rarely garnered more than 100 views, and some got fewer than 10. His YouTube account had started innocently, with a short video of his 13-year-old daughter dancing with her mother. But after Trump took office in 2017, Musico began recording video rants about the “deep state,” immigration, taxes, and gun control. He fashioned himself as a citizen journalist and claimed that he’d tried to secure an interview with Whitmer. “As soon as I get the interview with her, we’re going to go live … OK?” Musico told his audience from the driver’s seat of his car.

But Musico wasn’t the only one making videos during this period. The FBI was filming too.

Musico and his son-in-law, Joseph Morrison, had started the Wolverine Watchmen. They recruited people through Facebook and invited them to tactical trainings on land around Morrison’s home, about 30 miles west of Ann Arbor. Some of those who attended were FBI informants.

The training sessions evolved into talk of violent anti-government plots, some allegedly proposed by a man named Adam Fox, a then-37-year-old with a scraggly beard and a paunch. The talk of these plots took on urgency and detail during training trips to Ohio and Wisconsin, which were secretly paid for by the FBI. The Wolverine Watchmen discussed a proposal to “black bag,” or kidnap, politicians, though a few members of the group initially thought the idea couldn’t work. As alternatives, they discussed planting explosives at police stations or storming the state Capitol in Lansing with a 200-man force equipped with machine guns and sniper rifles. But Fox still allegedly pushed for the “black bag,” and the plan was very specific: They’d kidnap Whitmer, whom Fox referred to as “this tyrant bitch,” and then try her for treason in their very own kangaroo court. “Snatch and grab, man,” Fox told some members of the group. “Grab the fuckin’ governor. Just grab the bitch, because at that point, we do that, dude — it’s over.”

Protesters against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, amid shutdown orders for the coronavirus pandemic, rally on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on May 14, 2020.

Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images

In the summer of 2020, after Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” in response to pandemic restrictions and protests erupted in the state, about a dozen members of the Wolverine Watchmen began surveilling Whitmer’s vacation home. They came up with an audacious plan: Bomb the lead car in the governor’s security detail, kidnap her, and then use explosives to destroy a nearby bridge, cutting off any police officers trying to mount a rescue. But the group’s ability to pull off this “Rambo”-style plan was questionable, even to the Wolverine Watchmen themselves. Fox, whom the government would later describe as the group’s ringleader, had so much trouble remembering the street number of Whitmer’s vacation home that the others called him “Captain Autism.” (Fox has claimed that he was often high on marijuana during this time.)

Lawyers for Fox and his co-defendants have argued that there would not have been a plot to kidnap Whitmer were it not for the FBI’s financing and encouragement through its use of undercover agents and at a least a dozen paid informants.

And so, as the trial of the Wolverine Watchmen begins, a federal jury in Michigan will grapple with a question that has been a staple of similar cases involving alleged supporters of ISIS or Al Qaeda: Was this threat real or manufactured by the FBI?

The post Echoes of FBI Entrapment Haunt Failed Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.