Glenn Greenwald’s Half-Truths About the Intelligence Agencies

By Cliff Kincaid

Glenn Greenwald is making headlines on Fox News about the CIA dominating the American media. The other more significant part of the story is that the CIA is doing Russia’s bidding. That’s why the CIA’s role in facilitating the Russia-supplied dossier on President Trump is being covered-up by CIA Director Gina Haspel.

A true leftist, Greenwald understands that Joe Biden is a front man for U.S. intelligence operations that use organizations like NATO and the United Nations, meddle in the affairs of other countries, and get the U.S. involved in foreign wars. Faced with evidence that Biden and his family were involved in corrupt business dealings with Russia, China, and other countries, he says he couldn’t take it anymore and had to write about them. His proposed article for The Intercept was apparently vetoed.

In a bizarre twist, Greenwald says he resigned from an organization he founded and which was financed by billionaire Iranian-American and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

All of this sounds heroic, until one recalls that Greenwald collaborated with Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor and NSA analyst who fled to China and now lives in Russia. The charges against Snowden include violating the Espionage Act, theft of government property (18 U.S.C. 641) and the unauthorized communication of national defense information (18 U.S.C. 793 d).

Snowden gave much of the stolen material to Greenwald.

My 2015 book, Blood on His Hands: The True Story of Edward Snowden, examines how Greenwald may have broken espionage laws by reporting Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency (NSA). But he was never prosecuted.

To be sure, the NSA was caught spying on Americans. But the agency also once did some valuable working catching Russian spies. The Venona program of the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, the precursor to the NSA, monitored Soviet messages to intelligence agents in the U.S. That program confirmed the guilt of nuclear spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed.

Snowden’s disclosures led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise of ISIS, and cyber-attacks from China.

Snowden also made it part of his espionage mission to expose how U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies sometimes cooperate. For example, he talked openly, in violation of his secrecy oath, about the U.S. and Israel developing a computer virus to cripple the Iranian nuclear program.

Former Republican Senator Jon Kylcalled Snowden “this generation’s Alger Hiss,” a reference to the former State Department official who was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying he was a Soviet spy.

Hiss served 44 months in prison. By contrast, Snowden is now being granted Russian citizenship.

Greenwald’s self-serving statements on Fox News ignore the need for a discussion of how enemy intelligence agencies in Russia and China actually operate behind the scenes against America – and sometimes collaborate with the CIA, such as in the case of Trump.

Decades before Russia-gate was concocted as a “scandal” to use against Trump, CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton understood that the headquarters of the Deep State was in Moscow, not Langley. The CIA gave us the phony Sino-Soviet split, which worked to the advantage of China and Russia. It, too, was Russian disinformation.

For his part, Greenwald has worked hand-in-glove with the international Marxist movement against the United States and its allies, including collaborating with Leninist groups such as the International Socialist Organization, and Islamist organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He proudly accepted an award named in honor of Soviet agent and left-wing journalist I.F. Stone.

Greenwald has spoken publicly in favor of “weakening” America, saying that al-Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist attacks on America were “very minimal in scope compared to the level of deaths that the United States has been bringing to the world for decades—from Vietnam to illegal wars in Central America…” He described Anwar al-Awlaki, the American al-Qaeda leader killed in a drone strike, merely as “someone who the U.S. government hates because he speaks effectively to the Muslim world about the violence that the United States commits regionally, and the responsibility of Muslims to stand up to that violence.” Al-Awlaki inspired the Fort Hood massacre, in which 13 were killed.

An American who is gay and lives in Brazil with his “husband,” Greenwald was in the gay pornography business before going into journalism. He opposes Trump’s America-first policies and the right-wing government of Brazil, headed by Jair Bolsonaro.

But none of this has been highlighted on Fox News. Strange.

Referring to the CIA and other American intelligence agencies, he told Tucker Carlson, “They have infiltrated the means of communication domestically. They do it through leaks, clandestine operations and through lies.”

“You are telling the truth,” said Carlson. But not the whole truth. The remnants of the old KGB collaborated with the CIA and the FBI, such as by spreading the Russian dossier on Trump. As we all know by now, Hillary paid for the Russian propaganda and the late Senator John McCain peddled the document to the FBI.

In his 2015 book, Worthy Fights, Obama CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta talked openly about an “occasionally candid relationship” he developed with Mikhail Fradkov, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. He writes that Fradkov wanted “to share information and collaborate on some common operational activities.” It appears that Panetta complied. He also wrote about a meeting with Alexander Vasilyevich Bortnikov, the head of the secret police, the FSB, which was held in a building that still contained a bust of Vladimir Lenin. Panetta wrote about having dinner and drinks in Moscow with Fradkov and discussing how the U.S. and Russia “could share intelligence on issues of common interest.”

Hence, we have clear-cut evidence of an alliance of intelligence agencies that was set in motion under Obama, whose mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was himself suspected of being a Russian agent. The objective is a New World Order, something Joe Biden wrote openly about in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

None of this ever got the attention of Glenn Greenwald. Now, all of a sudden, he’s a hero for daring to write a critical article about Biden at a time when it is too late to make a difference. Where has he been?

Greenwald recognizes the roles played by the CIA, NSA, and so forth. But he has a true blind spot about how the Russian intelligence services work. He has his own far-left agenda that Tucker Carlson seems not to grasp.

E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: kincaid@comcast.net