RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-offbeat-genius-of-a-great-american-spy-11548478837?mod=hp_lead_pos10

In 1976, the CIA’s Moscow station heard some excellent news. One of its most prized sources, a well-placed Soviet diplomat who’d turned on the regime, had been transferred back to Moscow.

The asset, code-named TRIGON, had already been supplied with the T-100, an experimental CIA camera concealed inside a pen, and was in a perfect position to copy scores of classified documents.

The only challenge was getting in touch with him.

Armed with a seemingly limitless budget, the KGB had put an estimated 50,000 spies on the streets of Moscow, wrapping the city in an impenetrable surveillance blanket. Any CIA officer who left the U.S. embassy would be followed by highly-trained teams of 20 or more.

So many CIA assets had been exposed and killed over the last decade that the station had all but stopped trying to arrange face-to-face meetings. Some spymasters in Washington viewed Moscow as a lost cause. The station chiefs had only one card left to play.

When he arrived in Moscow in 1976, Tony Mendez had spent 11 years at the CIA but had little experience in covert operations. He’d originally been recruited as an artist. Now he ran the agency’s disguise branch.

Mr. Mendez met with every field officer in Moscow. He logged their exact clothing and shoe sizes, collected hair samples and color-matched their skin tones. A few months later, he returned from his laboratory with some unusual cargo: enough masks, wigs, dental facades, prosthetics, makeup palettes and made-to-measure costumes to put on a magic show. If the CIA wanted to operate freely in Moscow, its agents had to disappear.

Mr. Mendez and his team trained operatives to apply disguises in layers and showed them how to radically alter their appearance on the street, changing from a man in a suit to an old woman in a shawl in less than 45 seconds. To help them bail out of moving cars undetected, CIA technologists invented the “Jack in the Box,” a briefcase containing a spring-loaded inflatable dummy that popped up in the empty seat.

As far-fetched as it sounds, this experiment in deception and illusion became the central pillar of a unique operational mindset known as “the Moscow Rules.” By learning to outfox the KGB, the Moscow station not only connected with TRIGON, it scored some the biggest espionage coups in American history.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/25/roger-stone-charges-indictment-richard-nixon-what-do-politician-column/2678017002/
Collusion isn’t one of the charges against Richard Nixon-loving political trickster Roger Stone.

The arrest of Roger Stone by Special Counsel Robert Mueller could not have been more dramatically presented. The pre-dawn raid of Stone’s house by a contingent of heavily armed, body-armored agents could easily have fit the arrest of El Chapo rather than an elderly crank with a Nixon fetish.

Despite the breathless media accounts, the actual indictment of Stone is most notable for what it does not include. This was supposed to be the long-rumored linchpin to Russian collusion: The Russians fed information to Wikileaks which fed the information to Stone who fed the information to the Trump campaign.

The raid on Stone’s home clearly made for great television, but the Stone indictment hardly makes for a great collusion case. Let’s be honest. After more than a year of investigation, Mueller nailed a gadfly on false statements, witness tampering and obstruction rather than illegal collusion with Russia.

That’s what has been happening all along. Mueller has almost exclusively charged non-Russian defendants with either false statements or other process crimes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/roger-stone-indictment-underscores-no-trump-russia-conspiracy/

Will the Justice Department ever correct the record?

R oger Stone is the shiny object. The obstruction charges in his long-anticipated indictment, made public on Friday, are not the matter of consequence for the United States.

Nor is the critical thing the indictment’s implicit confirmation that there was no criminal “collusion” conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

What matters is this: The indictment is just the latest blatant demonstration that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI have known for many months that there was no such conspiracy. And yet, fully aware that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had assiduously crafted a public narrative that Trump may have been in cahoots with the Russian regime, they have allowed that cloud of suspicion to hover over the presidency — over the Trump administration’s efforts to govern — heedless of the damage to the country.

The rationale for the Trump-Russia investigation — namely, the notion that the Trump campaign had “coordinated” in the Kremlin’s cyber-espionage operation to meddle in the 2016 campaign — has been nothing more than a suspicion harbored by political, law-enforcement, and intelligence officials who loathed Donald Trump. That there may be a thousand good reasons to dislike Donald Trump is irrelevant, for we are talking about investigations, not politics. Investigative suspicions must be rooted in fact, not contempt.

Not only was the suggestion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy not founded on fact. The officials calling the shots had reason to know that the premise was factually false. In truth, there was no evidence of Trump-campaign complicity in Russian espionage — nothing but the Clinton-campaign generated, unverified Steele dossier. The months-in-the-making Stone indictment is just the latest proof of that.