The Biden-Harris Iranian Spy Problem Blows Up
Irangate just landed on the White House, shortly before our election – but will voters notice this significant espionage-influence scandal?
It’s happened again. Somebody stole highly classified U.S. intelligence documents and posted them on the open Internet, exposing America’s sensitive spy sources and methods to the world.
If this sounds familiar, it should. In recent years, the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community have been plagued by leakers stealing highly classified intelligence and exposing it to the public – and our enemies. First came Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning, an Army junior intelligence analyst who in 2010 stole more than a half-million classified documents and passed them to WikiLeaks. Worse arrived in 2013 when National Security Agency IT contractor Edward Snowden stole then fled to Russia, via Hong Kong, with over a million classified documents from NSA and a host of DoD and IC agencies. In early 2017, Reality Winner, a former U.S. Air Force enlisted Persian linguist who was working as a contractor at an NSA facility in Georgia, stole a TOP SECRET-plus NSA report on Russian election interference and leaked it to The Intercept, which published it. Most recently, there was Jack Teixeira, the junior analyst assigned to an intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, who chose to purloin classified information, including TOP SECRET reports from DoD and IC agencies, then post them to Discord in early 2023. All these cases raised fundamental questions about DoD and IC security vetting procedures as well as issues regarding the suitability of maladjusted Millennials and Zoomers to hold sensitive national security positions.
What’s happened in recent days is similar, but more politically charged – and potentially much more serious. Last Friday, U.S. classified documents (or what purported to be) appeared on a Telegram channel called Middle East Spectator, which has 170,000 followers and boasts a pro-Iranian take (“independent, but not unbiased,” as it asserts) on the news. Its affiliated X (formerly Twitter) account claims to be based in Iran. The channel stated that it had received the documents that day, from “an anonymous source on Telegram who refused to identify himself,” adding that their authenticity could not be verified. Nevertheless, the documents were explosive in their content.
The first was a classified report titled “Israel: Air Force Continues Preparations for Strike on Iran and Conducts a Second Large-Force Employment Exercise, 15-16 October 2024.” This is current intelligence (released in IC channels on Oct. 16, just two days before it was leaked on Telegram) describing Israeli Air Force exercises in preparation for a major attack on Iran, presumably in retaliation for Tehran’s recent missile barrages aimed at Israel. This report is derived from NSA signals intelligence reporting in mid-October, buttressed by imagery intelligence from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Importantly, it mentions not just covert UAV activity by the Israeli military, but also IAF exercises with two kinds of air-launched ballistic missiles, which rank among the IAF’s most modern and secretive weaponry. This is detailed TOP SECRET intelligence derived from spy satellites and is meant only for U.S. audiences.
The second report is just as sensitive. It’s an NGA report issued on Oct. 16, as a visual aid to accompany the first report. Titled “Israel: Defense Forces Continue Key Munitions Preparations and Covert UAV Activity Almost Certainly for a Strike on Iran, 16 October 2024,” it runs through what the IC knew from GEOINT about Israeli military activity preparing to hit the mullah regime. The report, which likewise is classified TOP SECRET, is derived from spy satellites, and cannot be viewed by foreign nationals, states up front, “We cannot definitively predict the scale and scope of a strike on Iran, and such a strike can occur with no further GEOINT warning.” Two sentences jump out: “The IAF continued covert UAV operations on 16 October. UAVs enable long-range covert surveillance in Iran and throughout the region.” In other words, Israeli secret eyes in the sky are on top of things. Then this:
We did not observe any Jericho II medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) activity on 16 October. Israel likely dispersed MRBMs on 1 October, and we lack indications that the dispersal has concluded. MRBM dispersal is almost certainly defensive; we have not observed indications that Israel intends to use a nuclear weapon.
Officially, the U.S. Government pretends that Israel doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but the spooks have known the truth for many decades, namely that Israel has lots of nukes. The good news is that the IC assesses that Israel doesn’t plan to nuke Iran. The bad news is that NGA can’t track Israel nuclear platforms like the Jericho II with precision.
The leak of these two highly classified current U.S. intelligence reports on Telegram landed like a bombshell. Here was proof that Israel is seriously preparing to strike Iran, good and hard, no matter what the Biden administration thinks about that. The Israel First Moron Brigade went into overdrive on social media: “BREAKING: Biden-Harris-Blinken regime is SPYING on Israel’s military!” To be shocked by this, you must possess zero awareness of real-world diplomacy and statecraft. Outside the highly anomalous Anglosphere Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which was born in the Second World War, where we really don’t spy on each other, at least not in any serious way, everybody spies on everybody. Allies spy on allies: every day, 24/7. It’s normal, indeed expected. The U.S. and Israel possess a robust defense and security partnership, yet we spy on them, and Israel certainly spies on us. Outrage that NSA and NGA are issuing classified intelligence reports, based on sensitive SIGINT and GEOINT, about Israeli military activities which might cause World War Three, is suitable only for children.
To get the most basic question out of the way: Yes, these documents are real, or at least they certainly appear to be, speaking as someone who has seen many such TOP SECRET-plus intelligence reports from myriad IC agencies. They look right: the classifications (including the arcane IC abbreviations) are accurate and properly formatted, plus the reports read as if written in the somewhat stilted fashion of America’s spy agencies. If these purloined documents aren’t real, they were assembled by an intelligence service which has seen lots of such highly classified U.S. IC reports, in order to convincingly fake one. Therefore, Occam’s Razor supplies the proper answer in this case, as usual.
There is a bona fide scandal here. Since these reports appeared on a Telegram channel which is, at a minimum, very friendly to the mullah regime, and is quite possibly controlled by Iranian intelligence, it’s reasonable to conclude that the intent of the leak was to curtail any Israeli attack on Iran, while causing trouble for Israel’s friends in Washington, DC. The current Biden-Harris administration doesn’t count among those friends, at least not in Israeli eyes.
This, therefore, can be construed as an Iranian effort at election interference, so close to our voting on Nov. 5. Which is something Tehran has been seeking to do, between hacking Trump campaign emails, then attempting to fence them to journalists, while contracting would-be assassins to take out the former and possibly future president. By revealing to the world that U.S. intelligence knows plenty about Israel’s plans to strike Iran, somebody who’s friendly to Tehran is seeking to influence American politics and their interaction with Israel.
President Joe Biden professes that he’s “deeply concerned” by the leak of such highly classified intelligence. On cue, there’s a major investigation underway by DoD and IC counterintelligence investigators to determine exactly how such TOP SECRET intelligence wound up on the open Internet. That can’t happen by accident, since highly classified IT networks operated by DoD and the IC don’t touch the Internet in any direct way. You can’t download a TOP SECRET report on to your personal email – say, to send it to Telegram – by accident: that can only happen by design, with clear intent to break the law. Whose intent was it, then?
DoD and IC counterspies must first rule out the most alarming possibility, namely that Iran got access to these highly classified reports because their hackers have infiltrated our most secret IT systems and networks. That can’t be ruled out, Tehran’s top hackers are no slouches, indeed they represent a significant global threat, but this possibility is also the least likely explanation for how these documents wound up posted on Telegram. It’s similarly relatively easy and straightforward to rule out.
Which beings us to the more likely possibility that somebody inside the U.S. Government with access to these IC reports decided to steal and leak them, presumably to help Iran (or at least hurt Israel and its friends in this country). Here there’s good news. Partly in response to the Manning and Snowden leak disasters, our counterspies have quality tools at their disposal to firmly shut the barn door after the classified horses have run out. With current forensics, it’s relatively simple to determine who’s printed off which classified documents with precision, including exactly where and when. With such information, it’s straightforward for counterspies to narrow down the suspect list of potential leakers with speed. Reality Winner, who printed off that TOP SECRET NSA report in her office then anonymously mailed it to The Intercept, was in FBI custody two days before that outlet published her stolen intelligence.
Whodunit? It’s likely that there are multiple Iranian moles lurking inside DoD and the IC at present. In truth, the Obama-Biden-Harris administrations, which have governed this country for 12 of the last 16 years, have been positively swiss-cheesed with well-placed Friends of Tehran holding top jobs. This sensitive issue has been largely avoided by the media, yet this newsletter has reported on this scandal in considerable detail, with experienced counterspy eyes. At the heart of this dubious affair lurks Rob Malley, the academic-cum-bureaucrat who made the 2015 Iran Deal, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, happen for President Barack Obama, then was brought back by Team Biden to resurrect JCPOA after President Trump killed it. Malley failed to accomplish that, but he did wind up at the center of a spy scandal which the Biden White House has struggled mightily to suppress.
What we know for certain is that Malley’s elite government career hit the wall in the spring of 2023 when his security clearances were suspended and he was escorted from his State Department office, under suspicion of espionage involving Iran. Repeated Congressional queries about the status of the Malley case have been ignored by the White House, while the suspect has returned to academia. Team Biden-Harris is running out the clock, since Malley is unlikely to face criminal charges under this administration. What seems to have happened, based on counterspy accounts, is that Malley illegally downloaded classified information to his personal email, which was then hacked by Iranian spies. Making a bad situation worse, Malley lied to the FBI when their agents asked him about this case. At best, Malley – the driver of U.S. policy towards Iran in the Obama and Biden administrations – was uncomfortably close to Tehran; at worst, he’s his generation’s Alger Hiss. Democrats aren’t shedding any light on this important case, while their media outlets, running interference, don’t show much interest either.
We can rule out Malley, who’s been out of classified access since spring 2023, as the leaker here. But the disgraced Malley was a mentor for a generation of Democratic foreign policy cadres with an interest in Iran and the Middle East. How about Phil Gordon, leading Democratic foreign policy maven who served President Obama and since 2021 has been Vice President Kamala Harris’ own National Security Advisor? Gordon’s been tight with Malley for years plus he possesses longstanding ties to known Tehran fronts like the National Iranian American Council. Any counterintelligence inquiry would want to eliminate Gordon as a suspect here.
Which leads us to Ariane Tabatabai, a Gordon protégé who, despite being unmasked over a year ago as a leading member of a Tehran-controlled influence operation, has somehow managed to maintain her position as the chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. That position is one of the most sensitive in the Pentagon (SOLIC has access to extremely classified information about DoD and IC activities worldwide, including covert action) and it requires TOP SECRET-plus clearances. How Tabatabai has maintained all that for more than a year after she was outed as a tool of Tehran is a genuine mystery. Yet again, Congressional oversight inquiries into this case have been stonewalled by the White House.
Today, social media was aflutter with poorly sourced claims that Tabatabai has been identified as the mole who leaked to Telegram. There’s no evidence for that assertion, while it would be extremely foolish for someone in her position, already under suspicion for her ties to Iran, to make herself such an easy counterintelligence target. All the same, Tabatabai must be ruled out as the mole in any leak investigation. Anyone who’s close to Tabatabai, professionally or personally, must also be ruled out.
In technical terms, it shouldn’t be difficult for DoD and IC investigators to determine who printed off the purloined documents, then leaked them to Telegram (they may not be the same person, of course: moles are known to collaborate). They may know already. Whether the Biden-Harris administration possesses the political will to let the counterspies do their job is another matter. In normal times, such a high-profile investigation, touching multiple agencies, would be coordinated by the National Security Council, specifically by the NSC’s director for intelligence programs. That big job is currently held by Maher Bitar, who in his position has access to every IC secret. He is no hardliner towards Tehran. When he was a student at Georgetown University, Bitar held a leadership position with Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical group that’s an apologist for HAMAS (itself an Iranian proxy) which has coordinated anti-Israeli protests at campuses nationwide during the Gaza War.
I’m therefore not putting money on the Biden-Harris administration getting to the bottom of this leak mystery too quickly. The scandal here isn’t that somebody stole highly classified intelligence and passed it to an Iranian outfit to post it on the Internet. The real scandal is that Team Obama-Biden-Harris has allowed our government to be penetrated at the highest levels by agents of Iran and related Islamist groups, enemies of America and the West. Unmasking the leaker may reveal ugly secrets about the Democrats and what they represent these days, so don’t hold your breath, dear readers. The unpleasant truth is that for nearly a decade now, Democrats have claimed that Donald Trump and the Republicans are shills for the Kremlin, when the real shills of our enemies – Iran but also China – are the Democrats themselves. Russiagate was largely imagined; Irangate is painfully real. For Democrats, counterintelligence has become a partisan cudgel to beat up Republicans, often with spurious McCarthyite accusations, not the gravely serious national security matter which it is. Electing Kamala Harris, who has surrounded herself with Friends of Tehran – an enormous security scandal which our media ignores – guarantees more intelligence leaks and worse, as World War Three looms.