FBI's Stefan Halper Oversaw CIA Spying Operation On Carter Administration
FBI mole Sefan Halper oversaw a long-forgotten CIA operation that involved illegally spying
on the Carter administration on behalf of George.
H.W. Bush.
Halper helped snoop on Carter's campaign, passing foreign policy decision along to Reagan
campaign officials in 1980.
Theintercept.com reports: Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming
that the FBI during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign,
and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity.
The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning.
"Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political
purposes, into my campaign for president," Trump tweeted, adding: "It took place very
early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a "hot" Fake News story.
If true – all time biggest political scandal!"
In response, the DOJ and the FBI's various media spokespeople did not deny the core accusation,
but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an "informant," not a "spy"), and
then began using increasingly strident language to warn that exposing his name would jeopardize
his life and those of others, and also put American national security at grave risk.
On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as "a top-secret intelligence
source" and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name "could risk
lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence
to the CIA and FBI."
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who spent much of
last week working to ensure confirmation of Trump's choice to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel,
actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they
tried to obtain the identity of the informant.
"Anyone who is entrusted with our nation's highest secrets should act with the gravity
and seriousness of purpose that knowledge deserves," Warner said.
But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation's largest media outlets, everyone
knows the name of the FBI's informant: Stefan Halper.
And Halper's history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal
in the 1980 election.
Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI's highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading
claims that they made to try to prevent Halper's identity from being reported.
To begin with, it's obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump
campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential
election spying campaign.
It was not until several years after Reagan's victory over Carter did this scandal emerge.
It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine
officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker,
who was a Bush loyalist.
The NYT in 1983 said the Reagan campaign spying operation "involved a number of retired
Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive."
The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its "sources identified Stefan
A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the
traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge."
Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig
as part of the Nixon administration.
When the scandal first broke in 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper's handler for
this operation was Reagan's Vice Presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush, who had been
the CIA Director and worked there with Halper's father-in-law, former CIA Deputy Director
Ray Cline, who worked on Bush's 1980 presidential campaign before Bush ultimately became Reagan's
Vice President.
It quoted a former Reagan campaign official as blaming the leak on "conservatives [who]
are trying to manipulate the Jimmy Carter papers controversy to force the ouster of
White House Chief of Staff James Baker."
Halper, through his CIA work, has extensive ties to the Bush family.
Few remember that the CIA's perceived meddling in the 1980 election – its open support
for its former Director, George H.W. Bush to become President – was a somewhat serious
political controversy.
And Halper was in that middle of that, too.
In 1980, the Washington Post published an article reporting on the extremely unusual
and quite aggressive involvement of the CIA in the 1980 presidential campaign.
"Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory — perhaps ever — has attracted
as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director Bush,"
the article said.
Though there was nothing illegal about ex-CIA officials uniting to put a former CIA Director
in the Oval Office, the paper said "there are some rumblings of uneasiness in the intelligence
network."
It specifically identified Cline as one of the most prominent CIA official working openly
for Bush, noting that he "recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon
White House aide, be hired as Bush's director of policy development and research."
In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around Hillary
Clinton.
As The Intercept has previously documented:
Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York
Times but claimed that "Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian
Federation."
George W. Bush's CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a "clear
and present danger" to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election,
went to the Washington Post to warn that "Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir
Putin" and said Trump is "the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly
held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited."
So as it turns out, the informant used by the FBI in 2016 to gather information on the
Trump campaign was not some previously unknown, top-secret asset whose exposure as an operative
could jeopardize lives.
Quite the contrary: his decades of work for the CIA – including his role in an obviously
unethical if not criminal spying operation during the 1980 presidential campaign – is
quite publicly known.
AND NOW, as a result of some baffling choices by the nation's largest news organizations
as well as their anonymous sources inside the U.S.
Government, Stefan Halper's work for the FBI during the 2016 is also publicly known
Last night, both the Washington Post and New York Times – whose reporters, like pretty
much everyone in Washington, knew exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles
that, while deferring to the FBI's demands by not naming him, provided so many details
about him that it made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is.
The NYT described the FBI informant as "an American academic who teaches in Britain"
and who "made contact late that summer with" George Papadopoulos and "also met repeatedly
in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page."
The Post similarly called him "a retired American professor" who met with Page "at
a symposium about the White House race held at a British university."
In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant
was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described
him as what he actually is: "the informant is well known in Washington circles, having
served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A.
in past years."
Despite how "well known" he is in Washington, and despite publishing so many details about
him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his name, the Post and the
NYT nonetheless bizarrely refused to identity him, with the Post justifying its decision
that it "is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials
that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts."
The NYT was less melodramatic about it, citing a general policy: the NYT "has learned the
source's identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety,"
it said.
In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details about the
FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly pretending that they
were obeying FBI demands not to name him.
How does that make sense?
Either these newspapers believe the FBI's grave warnings that national security and
lives would be endangered if it were known who they used as their informant (in which
case those papers should not publish any details that would make his exposure likely), or they
believe that the FBI (as usual) was just invoking false national security justifications to
hide information it unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers
should name him).
In any event, publication of those articles by the NYT and Post last night made it completely
obvious who the FBI informant was, because the Daily Caller's investigative reporter
Chuck Ross on Thursday had published an article reporting that a long-time CIA operative who
is now a professor at Cambridge repeatedly met with Papadopoulos and Page.
The article, in its opening paragraph, named the professor, Stefan Halper, and described
him as "a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts."
Ross' article, using public information, recounted at length Halper's long-standing
ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray Cline, was a top CIA official
during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had long worked with both the CIA and its
British counterpart, the MI6.
As Ross wrote: "at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief
of MI6.
In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence
consulting group that lists 'UK and US government agencies' among its clients."
Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted, with seeming pride, about the fact
that they did not name the informant even as they published all the details which made
it simple to identify him.
But NBC News – citing Ross' report and other public information – decided to name
him, while stressing that it has not confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:
The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the
Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal
Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment, consulting on Russia and China
issues, according to public records.
THERE IS NOTHING inherently untoward, or even unusual, about the FBI using informants in
an investigation.
One would expect them to do so.
But the use of Halper in this case, and the bizarre claims made to conceal his identity,
do raise some questions that merit further inquiry.
To begin with, the New York Times reported in December of last year that the FBI investigation
into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos
drunkenly boasted to an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton.
It was the disclosure of this episode by the Australians that "led the F.B.I. to open
an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether
any of President Trump's associates conspired," the NYT claimed.
But it now seems clear that Halper's attempts to gather information for the FBI began before
that.
"The professor's interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening
of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium," the Post reported.
While it's not rare for the FBI to gather information before formally opening an investigation,
Halper's earlier snooping does call into question the accuracy of the NYT's claim
that it was the drunken Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI's interest in
these possible connections.
And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at least some factions within
the FBI, were trying to gather information about the Trump campaign earlier than had
been previously reported.
Then there are questions about what appear to be some fairly substantial government payments
to Halper throughout 2016.
Halper continues to be listed as a "vendor" by websites that track payments by the federal
government to private contractors.
Earlier this week, records of payments were found that were made during 2016 to Halper
by the Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment, though it not possible from
these records to know the exact work for which these payments were made.
The Pentagon office that paid Halper in 2016, according to a 2015 Washington Post story
on its new duties, "reports directly to Secretary of Defense and focuses heavily on
future threats, has a $10 million budget."
It is difficult to understand how identifying someone whose connections to the CIA is a
matter of such public record, and who has a long and well-known history of working on
spying programs involving presidential elections on behalf of the intelligence community, could
possibly endanger lives or lead to grave national security harm.
It isn't as though Halper has been some sort of covert, stealth undercover asset for
the CIA who just got exposed.
Quite the contrary: that he's a spy embedded in the U.S. intelligence community would be
known to anyone with internet access.
Wittes' claim that all of this resulted in the "outing" of some sort of sensitive
"intelligence source" is preposterous given how publicly known Halper's role as
a CIA operative has been for decades.
But this is the scam that the FBI and people like Mark Warner have been running for two
weeks: deceiving people into believing that exposing Halper's identity would create
grave national security harm by revealing some previously unknown intelligence asset.
Wittes also implies that it was Trump and Devin Nunes who are responsible for Halper's
exposure but he almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the
Washington Post.
And note that Wittes is too cowardly to blame the institutions that actually made it easy
to identify Halper – the New York Times and Washington Post – preferring instead
to exploit the opportunity to depict the enemies of his friend Jim Comey as traitors.
Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on
the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive
intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive
links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation
in the 1980 presidential election.
For that reason, it's easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate
to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble
concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them.
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