Little known outside of the highest levels of Iraqi and allied intelligence agencies, the Falcons have placed a handful of spies inside the ranks of the Islamic State. Its intelligence helped oust the extremists from their last urban strongholds last year and it now aids the hunt for the group’s leaders, like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Recently, an Iraqi-American sting based on Iraqi intelligence led to the arrest of five senior Islamic State members who had been hiding in Turkey and Syria. Iraqi officials say the Falcons have foiled hundreds of attacks on Baghdad, making the capital the safest it has been in 15 years.
American military officials consider the agency as good as they get among non-Western spy services.
“It has proved to be an extremely valuable unit,” said Col. Sean J. Ryan, a spokesman for the American-led military coalition in Baghdad. The Falcons, he said, have diminished the threat of the Islamic State by infiltrating its cells, killing its leaders and terrorists, and destroying its weapons.
.. “A drone can tell you who has entered a building but it can’t tell you what is being said in the room where the men have gathered,” he said. “We can, because our people are inside those rooms.”
.. When he was young, the Sudani family had lived in Ramadi, in Iraq’s Sunni Muslim heartland.
.. Captain Sudani’s ability to adopt the Ramadi accent would help his credibility with the group.
But as a Shiite, he was unfamiliar with Sunni rituals and prayer. So he pored over the Quran, memorizing verses favored by jihadists and learning the chants they used for praying and killing.
.. His first days with the Islamic State were filled with training on religion and explosives.
A few weeks later, a senior Islamic State official in Mosul called. He assigned Captain Sudani a key part in the logistics chain for suicide bomb missions in Baghdad. Believing him to be a Baghdad native, the group considered him crucial to get bombers past checkpoints on the outskirts of the capital and inside the city.
.. Then the Falcons would stage fake explosions and issue fake news releases, sometimes claiming large casualties — part of the effort to keep Capt. Sudani’s cover intact.
A Family in History
“My grandfather was the biggest Communist in America,” he said, “and I became the biggest capitalist in Russia.”
.. Bill Browder created his hedge fund, Hermitage, in 1996. The Kremlin turned on him hard in 2005, declaring him persona non grata. He had been a thorn in the side of Putin’s oligarchs.
In 2008, the authorities arrested Browder’s fearless and whistleblowing lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky — and tortured him to death.
.. I read an obituary of Felix Browder, Bill’s father. I then realized why Bill had asked me to be more specific when I asked, “Any relation?” Felix Browder was one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. (I don’t know from mathematicians.) He was, for example, chairman of the math department at Chicago.
Earl Browder had two more children, two more sons: Andrew and William. The former became the
- chairman of the math department at Brown; the latter became
- chairman of the department at Princeton. And there’s more Browder talent where that came from.
.. He was named after Shakespeare, having been born on the 400th anniversary of the writer’s birth (April 23, 1964).
.. Andrew’s daughter Laura, a professor at the University of Richmond, discovered something in the KGB archives: The dear nanny had been a spy, charged with keeping tabs on Earl. Of course.
.. Earl coined the famous (or infamous) slogan “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” He ran for president in 1936, getting some 80,000 votes.
.. Communists in America were in particularly bad odor. In early ’41, the U.S. government sent Browder to prison on technicalities: passport fraud. But that summer, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and the United States would soon be allies with Uncle Joe.
.. FDR commuted Browder’s sentence as a goodwill gesture.
.. After the war, Browder got on the wrong side of Moscow and was expelled from the American party. He died in 1973, having spent his last years with his son Bill in Princeton
.. Raisa, a Russian mother, and a mother of three sons. A Russian-Jewish mother at that
.. Felix entered MIT at 16. He had his bachelor’s degree in two years. By 20, he had his Ph.D. from Princeton.
.. One of his undergraduate professors testified that Felix was not a party member — and, moreover, that Felix had been the best math student in the history of MIT
.. Bill Browder affirms that his father was not a Communist. Rather, he was “a hard-core leftist professor,” like all the others. “I never met one who wasn’t,” says Bill.
.. Felix was indeed drafted into the Army. Not trusted with sensitive work, he spent two years pumping gas at Fort Bragg.
.. Felix worked on his math and, for the first and only time in his life, was around regular folks.
.. Felix and his wife Eva had another child besides Bill: their son Tom. He entered the University of Chicago at 15. Today, he is a leading particle physicist, dividing his time between Hawaii and Japan, searching for the origin of the universe... Bill was a rebellious kid, and he figured out how to rebel against a family of leftists: become a capitalist. He majored in economics at Chicago, whose department was a den of free-marketeers... In an act of shocking gall, the Russian state is investigating Browder for the murder of Magnitsky — and three other men. Thus do the murderers finger the champion of the murdered. Putin’s predecessors in the KGB would grin in admiration.
.. He could have walked away, tending his millions, but instead he has put himself in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful and ruthless governments on earth.
Maria Butina is just the tip of the Russia iceberg
There is no right to bear arms in Russia, and under this regime there never will be. According to court papers, Butina nevertheless convinced some naive members of the National Rifle Associationthat she was a genuine activist. In doing so, she gained access to their world.
.. They were both seeking to assist political movements they believed to be pro-Kremlin (the Communist Party of the 1930s; the pro-gun wing of the Republican Party of the 2010s). They were both backed by Kremlin money, diverted through cutouts (the Communist International, in the former instance; a couple of Russian oligarchs, allegedly, in the latter).
.. Butina, even if considering only her role as an open, pro-Kremlin activist, also has many counterparts, agents of influence who are openly agitating for Russian interests, now on the far-right edge of Western politics instead of the far-left.
- Gianluca Savoini, the leader of the enigmatic Lombardy-Russia Cultural Association, seems to perform a similar role in Italian politics, even showing up recently as a member of an official Italian government delegation to Moscow.
- Bela Kovacs , a Hungarian member of the European Parliament, is on trial in Budapest on a charge of spying on European Union institutions on behalf of Russia.
.. they too are part of a long-term project, though it’s not a proletarian revolution. Instead, it’s a kleptocratic coup d’état: The modern Kremlin project seeks to undermine Western democracies, break up the E.U. and NATO, and put corrupt relationships rather than the rule of law at the center of international commerce.
.. it’s worth remembering why Golos and his network failed. In large part,
- it was because the center-left — especially the anti-Soviet wing of the American trade union movement — rejected Soviet-style communism in the United States. It’s also because,
- in the 1940s and 1950s, the American political establishment, Democratic and Republican, unified around the need to defeat Soviet-style communism in Europe. And it’s because,
- even in the depths of the Depression, the majority of Americans were never beguiled by the appeal of authoritarianism.
.. A wing of the Republican Party is preparing to double down and support the Russian autocracy, which it believes, mistakenly, is “Christian.”
.. To push back against them, as well as their equivalents from the rest of the autocratic world, we will need not only to catch the odd agent but also to
- make our political funding systems more transparent, to
- write new laws banning shell companies and money laundering, and to
- end the manipulation of social media.
It took more than a generation for Americans to reject the temptations of communist authoritarianism; it will take more than a generation before we have defeated kleptocratic authoritarianism too — if we still can.
Feds Debunk Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory ‘Pakistani Mystery Man’ Leaked DNC Emails
Fox News hosts and Trump pushed the idea that an IT staffer for House Democrats took data from Democrats. Trump’s Justice Department says it’s not true.
Awan’s guilty plea is a letdown for conservatives, who had become convinced that Awan was involved in something much more nefarious than bank fraud.
.. Led by reporting from the Daily Caller News Foundation, Republicans suspected that Awan was somehow involved in data leaks to either Russia or Pakistan. In July 2017, Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera and Sean Hannity speculated that Awan had used his access to Democratic servers to leak the emails from Democratic National Committee leader Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz that were published by WikiLeaks in 2016.
.. Far from spying, the Washington Post reported investigators “instead found that the workers were using one congressional server as if it were their home computer, storing personal information such as children’s homework and family photos,” according to an official.
.. Nevertheless, Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Luke Rosiak said that the Awan story was proof that “Congress was hacked.”
“It basically destroys that Russian narrative just because it shows that they [Democrats] didn’t actually care about cyber-security and they haven’t responded to this,” Rosiak said in April on Fox Business.
.. That conspiracy appeals to President Trump’s supporters because, like the rival conspiracy that the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, it would theoretically mean that Russian hackers weren’t behind the email hacks after all.
.. after interviews with 40 witnesses and reviews of the House Democratic Caucus’s server they came up empty.