IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi shows journalists a camera like the ones Iran is removing from nuclear sites, during a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna on June 9, 2022.

Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images

The agreement never really got a chance to take hold, however, because the U.S. broke its word. In a fit of personal pique at his predecessor — and with the encouragement of Israel and the Gulf Arab states — President Donald Trump violated the accord by unilaterally reimposing sanctions and waging a “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at collapsing the Iranian economy.

The deal has been on life support ever since.

Now, the Iranians may be ready to pull the plug on this sick patient. This week, Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that it would be removing 27 cameras that monitor nuclear sites — cameras that were installed as part of the 2015 agreement. This move was described by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi as a “fatal blow” to the agreement, in a statement that also called on both sides to return to the deal.

Grossi is right that the nuclear deal may now be in its final days. But it would be wrong to attribute its death to this final step — which comes only after years of overt violations by the United States.

The U.S. and Iran now appear to be on a glide path to a conflict that no one wanted.

The U.S. and Iran now appear to be on a glide path to a conflict that no one wanted and that diplomats spent years of negotiations trying to avoid. When the deal was signed in 2015, it seemed these efforts had borne fruit. The successful push by hawks aiming to kill the agreement has now brought things to a breaking point. The original motive of the nuclear deal was to avoid a war over this issue that was already looming a decade ago. With no deal, we might again be hurtling toward exactly that war.

Under Trump, the Iranian government continued to partially comply with the nuclear deal in the hopes of reviving it if a Democratic administration came back into power. President Joe Biden did win the White House in 2020, but instead of going back to the deal, he has chosen to maintain the sanctions that Trump imposed — the very measures the nuclear deal was intended to lift.

The sanctions devastated the Iranian economy and drove millions of middle-class Iranians into poverty. If they are lifted in future — doubtful, at this point — it is still unlikely that Iran would ever get the investment from Western companies that it hoped to receive following the original deal. It’s clear now that U.S. sanctions on Iran could be reimposed with any shifting political winds in the U.S. That is a situation which makes it virtually impossible for foreign enterprises to invest there.

The Iranian side lost much when the deal was torpedoed. Now the international community is going to take a possible hit to its aim of stopping nuclear proliferation. The removal of some of the surveillance cameras at nuclear sites means that the world is moving closer to the murky status quo ante that existed before the 2015 nuclear deal.

Although Iran has not said it would build a bomb, whatever nuclear activities that it conducts now will be done with drastically diminished international oversight. The IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, has already said that it believes that Iran is only “weeks away” from having a significant enough quantity of enriched uranium to put them within reach of a bomb. The loss of their surveillance capacity now means Iran could cross that threshold without them even knowing.

“Today, the IAEA is ‘flying blind’ about the details of Iran’s activities because it is unable to retrieve surveillance data being stored on the agency’s cameras as a consequence of U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018,” said John Tierney, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in a press release about the news of the camera removals. “These new steps mean the IAEA is losing more data every day and it will be harder to trace every aspect of Iran’s nuclear program should negotiators find a diplomatic off-ramp to escalation. Once again, the United States, and the world, are better off with the limitations on Iran’s nuclear program than without them.”

At first blush, it might make sense to blame Iran for the rapidly closing window of a revived nuclear deal. Yet to do so ignores the history of the deal and absolves the U.S. of its actions: Why should Iran be expected to continue its compliance during talks over a new deal while the U.S. has not taken any steps toward restoring its own compliance?

The removal of the cameras is another sign of the failures of Washington’s posture toward Iran. The Trump administration bet that it could simply strong-arm Iran into sacrificing its nuclear program without offering sanctions relief or any other concessions in return.

Even though Trump did not want to suffer the consequences of a full-scale conflict with Iran, his withdrawal from the deal has set up for exactly that outcome: The U.S. will continue to reap what Trump sowed. Although Biden served as vice president in an administration that had made the nuclear deal a diplomatic centerpiece, he has been unwilling to return to compliance in a manner that might salvage the agreement .

With nuclear monitoring now curtailed, the same hawks that have long pushed for attacking Iran’s nuclear program will continue to do so . Although Iran has little hope of coming out victorious in a direct confrontation with the U.S. and its allies, it has advanced ballistic missile capacity as well as proxies on standby in many countries. A war with Iran would mean casualties and suffering for the U.S. and its allies unlike any of the wars with nonstate actors that America has fought in the two decades since 9/11.

The U.S. will continue to reap what Trump sowed.

A new war in the Middle East is simply not worth it from the perspective of U.S. interests. The best-case scenario is a signed agreement that controlled Iran’s nuclear program, while giving the Iranians a piece of the global economic pie that would be theirs to lose. Obama himself calculated that such an outcome made the most sense for all involved. Due to the structural inability of the U.S. government, including the Biden administration, to stick to its signed diplomatic agreements, the war that Obama tried to avoid may yet break out.

The deal to avert confrontation was already in hand. We should remember, as costs of the conflict mount, that it was the U.S. that blew up the off-ramp.

The post Iran Is Backing Out of the Nuclear Deal That U.S. Had Already Reneged On for Years appeared first on The Intercept .

Four years ago, five cousins — all civilians — were driving near the Yemeni village of Al Uqla when a missile ripped through their SUV and tossed the car into the air. Three of them were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor, Adel Al Manthari, may soon become the fifth fatality of that U.S. drone strike.

Al Manthari’s feet and legs have recently blackened due to restricted blood flow and, this week, a doctor told him he’s at imminent risk of developing gangrene. Al Manthari needs emergency medical care that he can’t afford. His future now rests with a GoFundMe campaign .

That the limbs — and possibly life — of a civilian drone strike victim now depend on donations to a fundraising website is due to what experts said is an inadequate, arbitrary, and broken civilian casualty investigation and compensation system that has failed victims of U.S. wars for decades.

Despite a top Pentagon spokesperson’s recent claim that the military now embraces accountability regarding civilian casualty allegations, the Department of Defense failed to provide basic information about the 2018 attack and refuses to even acknowledge pleas for assistance or compensation made on Al Manthari’s behalf, much less dip into millions of dollars in funds allocated by Congress for compensation in such cases.

“It was the U.S.’s Hellfire missile that cost Adel his family and his health. It should be the U.S. that pays for the treatment to save his legs.”

“Congress cut DoD a check for millions to pay for exactly this type of scenario,” said Jennifer Gibson, a human rights lawyer and project lead on extrajudicial killing at Reprieve, an international human rights organization representing Al Manthari. “DoD’s refusal to spend even a penny of it — on Adel or any of the thousands of civilians harmed by U.S. drones — sends the message that they simply don’t care about accountability.”

In cases like Al Manthari’s, experts said that compensation is hampered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s resistance to reassessing past allegations of civilian harm.

“It was the U.S.’s Hellfire missile that cost Adel his family and his health,” Gibson said. “It should be the U.S. that pays for the treatment to save his legs. That’s what responsible governments do. They own up to their mistakes.”

A screenshot from a video recorded by a local activist and lawyer shows the aftermath of the March 29, 2018, U.S. drone strike which killed four civilians and critically injured Adel Al Manthari near Al Uqla, Yemen.

Image: Mohammed Hailan via Reprieve

The March 29, 2018, drone strike left Al Manthari, then a civil servant in the Yemeni government, with severe burns to the left side of his body, a fractured hip, and serious damage to the tendons, nerves, and blood vessels in his left hand. The injuries left him unable to walk or work, plunged him into debt for medical treatment, and caused his daughters — aged 8 and 14 at the time of the strike — to drop out of school to care for him.

A 2018 investigation by the Associated Press and a meticulously documented 2021 report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights determined that the victims of the 2018 strike were civilians not, as the Pentagon claimed, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula “terrorists.” In March, Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., asked the Pentagon to open a new investigation of the airstrike that disabled Al Manthari, as well as 11 other U.S. attacks in Yemen.

If Al Manthari’s story sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. From Libya to Somalia , Syria to Yemen , the U.S. military regularly undercounts civilian casualties , according to victims’ family members , investigative journalists , and humanitarian groups that independently investigate claims . For years, exposés by journalists and NGOs have been necessary to push the Department of Defense to reinvestigate attacks and, in limited instances, acknowledge killing civilians.

Last year, for example, a New York Times investigation forced the Pentagon to admit that a “ righteous strike ” against a terrorist target in Afghanistan actually killed 10 civilians , seven of them children. Times reporting also exposed a 2019 airstrike in Syria that killed up to 64 noncombatants and was obscured through a multilayered coverup. And a blockbuster investigation of U.S.-led airstrikes, combining shoe-leather journalism and U.S. military documents, revealed that the air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocents.

After the Times reporting recently won a Pulitzer Prize , the Defense Department offered praise and a rare admission. “We know that we had more work to do to better prevent civilian harm. And we’re doing that work,” said Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby . “We knew that we had made mistakes, we’re trying to learn from those mistakes. And we knew that we weren’t always as transparent about those mistakes as we should be.”

While Kirby was touting a sea change at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin; Anna Williams, the senior adviser for civilian protection; and Cara Negrette, the director for international humanitarian policy, had for almost a month ignored a letter asking that department to reopen the civilian casualty assessment of the March 29, 2018, strike. The letter, sent on Al Manthari’s behalf by Reprieve, asked the Pentagon to provide Al Manthari with emergency medical evacuation and funds to obtain lifesaving treatment. To this day, no one has even acknowledged — much less responded to — the request.

“If the Pentagon is truly committed to changing the culture of secrecy and impunity that has surrounded the U.S. drone program for the last decade, then responding to Adel’s complaint would be a start.”

“It’s hard to take Mr. Kirby’s words at face value when the DoD continues to systematically evade accountability for the lives ended and wrecked by U.S. drone strikes,” said Reprieve’s Gibson. “If the Pentagon is truly committed to changing the culture of secrecy and impunity that has surrounded the U.S. drone program for the last decade, then responding to Adel’s complaint would be a start. Letting it sit on someone’s desk gathering dust while a man loses his legs screams business as usual.”

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for an interview with Kirby. Williams and Negrette both referred The Intercept to Pentagon public affairs, which promptly declined a request to interview either of them. When asked about Al Manthari’s case, a U.S. military spokesperson replied: “We have no updates.” In response to requests for basic information about the 2018 strike, Lt. Col. Karen Roxberry recommended filing a Freedom of Information Act request — a process that can take months or years to yield documents, if they are ever made available at all.

Adel Al Manthari, then a civil servant in the Yemeni government, is treated for severe burns, a fractured hip, and serious damage to the tendons, nerves, and blood vessels in his left hand following a drone strike in Yemen in 2018.

Photo: Reprieve

Earlier this week, after the Pulitzer announcement, Austin expressed a “ commitment to transparency and accountability ” in terms of civilian casualty incidents and declared that “efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations are a direct reflection of U.S. values.” The memo followed a January memo directing subordinates to draw up a yet-to-be-released “ Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan ,” including a review of how the Pentagon “responds to civilian harm, including, but not limited to, condolence payments and the public acknowledgment of harm.”

For decades, the U.S. has relied upon an arbitrary and degrading system of solatia: condolence payments made ex gratia, meaning they are provided as an expression of sympathy rather than an admission of fault for civilians slain or injured during U.S. military operations.

During the Vietnam War, the going rate for an adult killed was $33. Children merited just half that. Payouts in Afghanistan ranged from as little as $124 to $15,000 for one civilian life. Despite a dedicated annual Department of Defense fund of $3 million for payments for deaths, injuries, or damages resulting from U.S. or allied military actions, payments are an increasing rarity. The Pentagon’s most recent report on civilian casualties , released last June, noted that the Defense Department “did not offer or make any such ex gratia payments during 2020.”

“The United States has repeatedly failed to acknowledge and make amends for civilian harm,” Annie Shiel, the senior adviser for U.S. policy and advocacy at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “There are so many civilians like Adel Al Manthari and his family who are grieving the loss of loved ones, dealing with injuries and trauma, or struggling to survive after losing their homes and livelihoods — all while waiting for some kind of acknowledgement or response from the U.S. government that often never comes.”

Even if the United States had an effective system for providing reparations to victims of U.S. attacks, Austin has recently been vocal about not reevaluating past civilian casualty claims. Last month, when Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., asked whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations, Austin replied, “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases.” That may prove to be a death sentence for Adel Al Manthari.

At his May 10 press briefing, Kirby said that “at its very best,” the press “holds us to account.” At every turn, however, the Pentagon has concealed information and obstructed reporting efforts concerning Al Manthari’s case.

“The watchwords of the U.S. drone program,” said Gibson, “have consistently been ‘no accountability, no apology, no compensation,’ and a radical rethink is needed.”

Until then, victims like Al Manthari will need to rely on fundraising websites and the kindness of strangers to stay alive, as the Pentagon boasts about accountability while trafficking in secrecy and impunity.

The post Civilian Victim of U.S. Drone Strike Starts GoFundMe to Save His Legs — and His Life appeared first on The Intercept .

After failing to convince the Biden administration to ship NATO fighter jets to Ukraine, the military-industrial complex is now trying to coax the White House into sending what are, essentially, unmanned fighter jets to counter Russia’s invasion. Kyiv reportedly met with the major defense contractor General Atomics about obtaining the “Hunter-Killer” MQ-9 Reaper drone, armed with Hellfire missiles, which the U.S. has infamously used in botched airstrikes that killed and maimed civilians in Afghanistan, Somalia, and other countries around the world. The company and Kyiv’s allies in Washington are appealing to policymakers to greenlight the export, despite the high risk of escalation that could turn the devastating war nuclear.

Take retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of the influential and General Atomics-funded Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, who penned an op-ed in Forbes advocating for the U.S. to give Ukraine Reapers in March, before Kyiv’s interest was publicly known. He blasted skeptics who voiced concern about offering Poland’s MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, saying they’re “being cowed by Putin,” the Russian president.

In a phone call with The Intercept, Deptula reiterated his hawkish stance, arguing concern about conflict escalation “is being fed by the Russians through a very sophisticated information operations campaign to deter U.S. and NATO actions to assist the Ukrainians. Anything’s fair up to, but not including, the use of NATO forces in the conduct of hostile operations against the Russians.”

“Approve this, US Govt.,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., tweeted last month when the Washington Post reported that Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. met with General Atomics. Notorious for calling on the U.S. to enforce a dangerous no-fly zone over Ukraine, Kinzinger, along with Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Chrissy Houlahan, D-Penn., also asked the Defense Department to report on how long it would take to train a Ukrainian pilot to fly the MQ-9. This week, senior fellows from the General Atomics-funded Hudson Institute wrote an op-ed in The Dispatch endorsing sending Ukraine Reapers as well. And General Atomics sends lobbyists to Washington specifically to influence the strict export policy that the U.S. has enforced to limit the global proliferation of such dangerous drones.

The White House has shown an increased willingness to give Ukraine weapons as the war in Ukraine has dragged on and U.S. aims shift toward seeing a “weakened” Russia . Initially, it was only willing to give shoulder-fired missiles; backpack-sized drones called Switchblades strapped with grenades; and encrypted communications equipment. More recently, the administration has greenlighted heavy artillery weapons, armored personnel carriers, and longer-flying experimental drones called Phoenix Ghosts. Last week, President Joe Biden signed into law the first “lend-lease” program to accelerate military shipments since World War II, and this week, Democrats are trying to fast-track $40 billion to supply Ukraine with more arms and replenish the U.S.’s depleted stockpiles, at the expense of new Covid-19 relief spending.

Along the way, Kyiv and the U.S. defense industry have had a strong ally in the American media, which is constantly asking the administration why it’s not getting more involved. After the Washington Post reported on Ukraine’s discussions with General Atomics, Politico beckoned : “Ukraine wants armed drones. Is the U.S. ready to deliver?”

“It’s not every day that the United States approves the sale or transfer of armed drones to a foreign country — but Ukraine is hoping the Biden administration will heed the call of soldiers on the ground to do just that,” the story led.

If the government approves a deal, Ukraine would be one of only a few countries to receive Gray Eagles or Reapers. Unlike fighter jets such as the F-16, the U.S. hasn’t widely provided them because of an international agreement known as the Missile Technology Control Regime. Aiming to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the nonbinding regime calls on exporters to use a “strong presumption of denial” standard when considering giving advanced drones like the MQ-9 to other countries.

However, following pressure from the defense industry, former President Donald Trump eased that burden in July 2020 as part of a broader effort to expand U.S. arms sales globally, opening the door for the State Department to authorize Reaper exports to the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. The policy shift drew strong rebuke from members of Congress, who may now be tested with a transfer to Ukraine.

Describing the Trump administration’s policy shift, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., now chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at the time , “This reckless decision once again makes it more likely that we will export some of our most deadly weaponry to human rights abusers around the world.” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., quickly teamed up with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and other Democratic and Republican senators on legislation to ban exports of advanced drones, except to NATO members and a handful of other close allies. Ukraine was not on the list.

Asked their positions on giving Ukraine the Reaper now, both Menendez and Murphy said they’d have to review the proposed deal first before taking a position.

“I have to look at that. I have to see what their ability to use it [is]. I have to see how they use it,” Menendez told The Intercept.

General Atomics has already tried to clear up such questions. A company spokesperson told Forbes last month that motivated Ukrainian forces could undergo an expedited training period much shorter than the U.S. Air Force’s mandatory one-year lessons for drone pilots.

Paul, the Senate’s strongest critic of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, warned about the risk of NATO getting drawn in further. “I do understand that there is a danger, and I haven’t fully concluded where I am on this, but you know, there is always the danger of escalation,” he said in an interview. (He added that he would be more comfortable if Ukraine paid for the weapons, but since MQ-9s cost tens of millions of dollars each, that is not likely.)

Bill Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, warned in an email to The Intercept that giving Ukraine armed Reapers would be a major step up from what the U.S. has already supplied. “In my view, Ukraine has the right to defend itself, and some weapons supplies are warranted on that basis,” Hartung wrote. “But supplying large, long-range drones would be a significant escalation in the types of systems supplied to Ukraine, and as such shouldn’t go forward without significant scrutiny by Congress.”

Members of Congress do have the authority to block an export, like when Paul introduced a motion to halt a missile sale to Saudi Arabia in November, which was voted down in the Senate. He distinguished that case from Ukraine, though. “Most of the battles that I’ve chosen on selling arms have been to countries where there’s a lot of people … who’ve talked about their human rights abuses,” Paul said, noting he hasn’t objected to deals with NATO allies. “Ukraine’s not NATO and I’m not a supporter of them being in NATO, but at the same time, I am sympathetic to their plight.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have reportedly used internationally banned cluster munitions during the current war, and have a sizable neo-Nazi faction . Ukraine is also home to one of the largest arms trafficking markets in Europe, meaning weapons sent to Kyiv could end up with unintended militias or in other conflicts abroad.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear whether the State Department has made any formal moves toward a possible Reaper deal. Reporter Michael Peck, writing about the meeting between Ukraine and General Atomics, speculated in Forbes: “[I]t is unlikely that such talks between Ukraine and a U.S. defense contractor would have happened without a green light from the Biden administration.” A State Department official who requested anonymity said it cannot comment on possible arms transfers before formal notification to Congress. General Atomics spokesperson C. Mark Brinkley told The Intercept Tuesday that the company remains in close contact with Ukraine and U.S. government representatives.

Hartung warned that giving Reapers to Ukraine in service of weakening Russia, as stated by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, can especially be dangerous.

“A policy of trying to weaken Russia risks pushing Putin into a corner and increasing the risks of escalation of the conflict to a direct U.S.-Russia war, with all the risks that entails, including the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons,” he said.

The post Military-Industrial Complex Is Itching to Send “Hunter-Killer” Drones to Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept .

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a new freeze in relations between the United States and Russia. But for some veterans of the CIA and FBI, the spy wars that punctuated the first Cold War never really ended.

During the 1980s, in the final decade of the Cold War, three Americans who spied for the Soviet Union — CIA officers Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen — are known to have helped Moscow identify, arrest, and imprison or execute most of the Soviet agents who were secretly spying for the United States. Those agent losses left the CIA virtually in the dark in Moscow for years. Ames and Hanssen were eventually caught and arrested and today remain in federal prison, while Howard defected to Moscow, where he died in 2002.

Now there is growing evidence that there may have been a fourth major American spy who was never caught. According to a new book, a mole hunt for the “fourth man,” who was suspected of being a CIA officer, began in the 1990s, but no one has ever been arrested or charged in the case. Secret details of that investigation are being disclosed for the first time in “The Fourth Man,” a new book by former CIA officer Robert Baer, which is due to be published Tuesday.

“The story of the Russian double agent in the CIA who got away may sound like some unfinished piece of business from the Cold War,” Baer observes in his book. But “it’s starting to look more like the mystery of the fourth man is a lot more historically significant than an old-school spy tale. It’s part of the much larger story of how America completely missed Putin and the KGB’s resurrection.”

The fact that U.S. officials believe there was a “fourth man” inside the CIA was first disclosed in 2003 in “The Main Enemy,” a book I co-authored with former CIA officer Milt Bearden. Baer has now provided a wealth of new details about the case, including the key role of a KGB agent who supplied crucial information to the CIA on the fourth spy. I interviewed several former CIA and FBI officials this week who agreed that there was a fourth mole.

“I believe there is a fourth man, and a lot of things point that way,” Jim Milburn, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who was involved in the investigation, said in an interview this week. “There is more that I can’t talk about. It all leads to my sense that there is a fourth man.”

“Absolutely there was a fourth man,” added John Lewis, former FBI assistant director for national security. “We had a lot of unexplained things that couldn’t be explained by the three others.”

In many ways, the narrative of the “fourth man” investigation reads like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” the John le Carré novel about a mole hunt inside British intelligence. Baer’s book reveals that the seeds of the case go back to 1988, when a CIA officer stationed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, first met a KGB officer named Alexander Zaporozhsky. The CIA gave Zaporozhsky the code name “GTZORRO” and nicknamed him “Max.” As a series of CIA officers continued to meet Zaporozhsky over the years, he began to provide clues revealing that the KGB had moles inside U.S. intelligence, according to Baer. At some point, Zaporozhsky suggested that the KGB had two moles, one in the CIA and another in the FBI, although he didn’t know their names. One was known inside the KGB as “Karat,” and the other as “Rubine.”

Zaporozhsky’s information about the existence of two moles came long before either the CIA or FBI was convinced that Moscow had double agents inside U.S. intelligence. Before Zaporozhsky, “there’d been devastating, unexplained losses of CIA Russian agents … and there certainly were those who suspected the problem was a mole. But there was nothing in the way of air-tight evidence to support the theory,” writes Baer.

Zaporozhsky’s evidence ultimately led to Ames at the CIA and Hanssen at the FBI, Baer writes. He describes Zaporozhsky as one of the most important Russian spies the CIA ever had. At some point, Zaporozhsky also began to tell the CIA that there was yet another KGB mole inside the CIA, one who was believed to be ranked higher in the organization than Ames. American spy hunters began to call that the “big case.”

First Arrests

In 1994, Ames was arrested and charged with spying for Moscow, thanks in part to the information Zaporozhsky had provided.

After Ames was arrested, the CIA secretly created a new counterintelligence team to try to determine whether there were any losses that could not be explained by Ames or Howard, who had defected to Moscow in 1985. The agency’s team, Baer writes, included CIA officers Laine Bannerman, Diana Worthen, and MaryAnn Hough. They began to sift through old tips, leads, and other evidence relating to compromised agents and operations that couldn’t be explained by either Ames or Howard. Eventually, they became convinced that there were at least two more moles. Some of their evidence pointed toward Hanssen, who was arrested in 2001.

Baer’s book discloses that the team still believed there was another, fourth mole — thus coming to the same conclusion as Zaporozhsky. This was confirmed to The Intercept by one of the now-retired CIA investigators: “I do believe there is a fourth man,” said Worthen in an interview this week.

In 1996, a CIA officer met again with Zaporozhsky, this time in Tbilisi, Georgia. He told the CIA that he believed he had come under suspicion in Moscow. But he also said he had heard that Russian intelligence had recruited another American CIA officer. This officer had been recruited in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was now assigned to “the Farm,” the CIA’s training center outside Williamsburg, Virginia. With Zaporozhsky’s information, the CIA was quickly able to identify CIA officer Harold Nicholson as a Russian spy, and he was arrested in November 1996.

But Nicholson had never worked in the CIA’s Soviet or Russian operations and so was quickly ruled out as being the “fourth man.”

In 1998, Zaporozhsky was resettled in the United States by the CIA, pulled out of Moscow along with other agents believed to be in danger. With Zaporozhsky and its other agents gone, the CIA was in the dark in Moscow just as Putin was beginning his rise to power.

Zaporozhsky misread Putin’s Russia too. After he resettled in the United States, he made the mistake of traveling back to Russia, where he was arrested and then spent years in prison. He was released and sent back to the United States in 2010 in one of the biggest spy swaps ever conducted. Zaporozhsky was one of four people whom Moscow sent back to the U.S. in exchange for 10 Russian “sleeper” agents arrested by the United States. The story of the Russian “illegal” agents who had burrowed into American society, including Anna Chapman, who became a celebrity as a result of her spying, became the inspiration for the popular television series “The Americans.”

The post Russia Had “Fourth Man” as Spy Inside the CIA, New Book Says appeared first on The Intercept .

When allegations of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians emerged in the United States, Congress and the White House hit the ground running. They’ve since engrossed themselves in scouring through the legal avenues to hold the Kremlin accountable: war crime tribunals, asset seizures, and sanctions — including collective punishment of the Russian people.

Allegations of American atrocities during the so-called global war on terror have hardly evoked the same desperate calls for justice. The U.S. government has long met international demands for accountability with hostility. Starting late last year, the New York Times’s explosive investigations into civilian deaths in botched U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East arrived just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. No requests for a war crimes tribunal were heard from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., now the Senate’s biggest champion for an International Criminal Court, or ICC, investigation into Russia. And a new reform initiative the Defense Department launched in the exposé’s wake is delayed with minimal pushback from Congress.

The loss of life in Ukraine has been horrific. The United Nations announced Tuesday that it can confirm Russia’s war has killed more than 3,300 civilians since the invasion began February 24, though it expects that the actual figure is thousands higher. For reference, the U.S. war on Iraq killed nearly 8,000 civilians in the first three months following the March 2003 invasion, the Iraq Body Count estimates .

“Like most of the civilized world, I have been absolutely horrified by the … assaults against Ukraine on residential buildings, schools, synagogues and churches, and even critical infrastructure including nuclear power plants,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., chair of Congress’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, said during a hearing last week. Citing in particular the discovery of hundreds of bodies , some of whom appeared to be summarily executed, in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, Cardin argued: “The scale and pattern of these crimes clearly suggests to me that war crimes are being committed by the Russian military on the orders of Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin must be held accountable for his unprovoked bloody attacks on the Ukrainian people.”

A number of countries and international entities have begun investigations to prepare for potential war crime prosecutions. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack told the commission that the U.S. is supporting inquiries by the United Nations, ICC, and any national court around the world that may have jurisdiction, including the Ukrainian government, which a State Department team is already advising. Graham told The Intercept last week that he’s talking to the White House about sending $15 million to aid the Ukrainian prosecutor’s efforts.

“We are committed to robust law enforcement and diplomatic cooperation to ensure that there is no safe haven for those who might commit atrocities,” Van Schaack said during the commission’s hearing.

The U.S. is also reviewing the extent of its own legal authorities. In the House of Representatives, Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., sought to allow the White House to seize Russian oligarchs’ assets and give them away to Ukraine, but the American Civil Liberties Union helped kill it as a result of due process concerns. In the Senate, Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Graham are exploring changes to the law to enable domestic prosecutions of noncitizens who may have committed war crimes overseas.

Graham has also been cheering on the ICC’s abilities to investigate war crimes after Republicans have spent years deriding the court . (The Trump administration sanctioned ICC personnel investigating alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and at CIA sites overseas.) In a change of attitude, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution led by Graham earlier this year pledging support for any ICC inquiry into allegations of Russian atrocities.

But the U.S. has imposed limitations on the assistance it can provide the ICC, which it is not party to , in an attempt to evade accountability. The 2002 American Service-Members’ Protection Act, for example, prevents the U.S. from sharing intelligence to support ICC inquiries in order to safeguard U.S. troops from prosecution . But there’s some wiggle room. The Justice Department determined over a decade ago, as the New York Times reported, that the U.S. can provide help for “particular cases.” And Graham told The Intercept that he’s looking to change current regulations, but only “for the limited purpose of helping ICC with information we have about Russian activity in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, after the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe hearing, Cardin told The Intercept: “I’m not too concerned physically where the trials take place. I want to make sure there’s accountability.” Asked if the U.S. needs to modify laws to allow for intelligence sharing with the ICC, Cardin said he asked if there’s anything more to do, and he’s been told they have all the authority they need but “if they need anything further we’ll be glad to give it to them.”

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, center, and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Britain’s Karim Khan, right, visit a mass grave on the grounds of the Church of Saint Andrew in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 13, 2022.

Photo: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

While the U.S. races to hold Russia to account, very few American lawmakers have turned the scrutiny inward. A notable exception is Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who led several of her progressive colleagues last month calling for the U.S. to join the ICC and repeal the 2002 law that restricts U.S. assistance to the court’s investigations. But otherwise, the United States has largely neglected to look at itself in the mirror.

In its groundbreaking series, the New York Times revealed earlier this year that the U.S. has killed thousands of civilians in botched airstrikes throughout the Middle East since 2015. In July 2016, the publication found, the U.S. intended to bomb Islamic State “staging areas” in northern Syria but actually massacred more than 120 villagers seeking shelter. In March 2019, U.S. jets struck and killed 70 people in the eastern Syrian town of Baghuz when the operators of separate American drones flying overhead knew them to be mostly women and children. Repeatedly, retroactive assessments by the Pentagon were downplayed and resulted in no disciplinary action, and the U.S. made fewer than 12 condolence payments to survivors.

Following these discoveries, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a retired four-star Army general who commanded U.S. military operations in the Middle East from 2013 to 2016, called for reform . “We strive diligently to minimize the harm that armed conflict visits upon civilian populations, but we can and will improve upon our efforts to protect civilians,” Austin wrote in a January memo to Pentagon leadership. “We will revisit the ways in which we assess incidents that may have resulted in civilian harm, acknowledge the harm to civilians that resulted from such incidents, and incorporate lessons learned into the planning and execution of future combat operations and into our tactics, techniques, and procedures.”

In the January 27 memo, Austin called for an action plan within 90 days of issuance. But it’s not yet finished. During a House Armed Services Committee hearing in early April, Austin said the review was about 30 days in. Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. César Santiago-Santini told The Intercept that the 90-day process remained ongoing. (Asked by Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., whether the Pentagon would take another look at cases of civilian harm that were dismissed, Austin also said during the hearing that “at this point, we don’t have an intent to relitigate cases from before.”)

Marking the original three-month deadline, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo. — who are members of the armed services committees — introduced two new bills in late April that would codify several of Austin’s directives into law. Asked what motivated her to propose these measures now, Warren told The Intercept: “The stories keep mounting up about civilian casualties, and the inability or outright refusal of the Department of Defense to make a careful accounting.” Referring to Austin’s memo, she added, “I want to see some results.”

In an email to The Intercept, Annie Shiel, a senior adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict who endorsed the new legislation, explained that having involvement from Congress can help guarantee the success of the Pentagon’s reforms. “And while it’s encouraging that civilian harm is being recognized as a high priority at the Department,” she said, “success will require sustained engagement not only from the [Defense Department], but also from Congress — to support the Secretary’s ongoing efforts, to hold the Department accountable for its commitments, and to fill critical remaining gaps.” (The bills will ensure a new center of excellence to advance civilian protection measures, for instance, will outlast the current administration.)

In the Senate, Warren’s bills have the support of Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ill., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. But otherwise, her efforts to keep pressure on the Pentagon weren’t top of mind for influential legislators. Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the most powerful Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee respectively, told The Intercept last week that they hadn’t reviewed the proposals yet. They’ll play a pivotal role in determining whether the bills make their way into the annual defense policy bill, which would be the likeliest legislative vehicle to pass them into law.

The International Criminal Court on March 29, 2022, in The Hague, Netherlands.

Photo: Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

In an opinion column for MSNBC last month, Middle East expert Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, laid out a compelling argument for why many countries in the Global South have not joined the U.S.’s efforts to sanction Russia in response to its war on Ukraine. “Many of these states also see flagrant hypocrisy in framing the Ukraine war in terms of the survival of the rules-based order,” he wrote. “From their vantage point, no other country or bloc has undermined international law, norms or the rules-based order more than the U.S. and the West.”

The hypocrisy and excuses for the U.S.’s unwillingness to submit to a fraction of the scrutiny it’s now demanding of Russia were perhaps most blatant in a Washington Post op-ed last month by former Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and George W. Bush administration attorney John Bellinger III.

“The United States can help the court in appropriate cases while still strongly opposing ICC investigations (including of U.S. personnel) that do not meet the court’s strict threshold requirements,” Dodd and Bellinger wrote. “The ICC was created to prosecute only the most serious international crimes that are not addressed by the nations that commit them, not to investigate every allegation of misconduct.”

Of course, the U.S. has already managed to dodge ICC inquiries. When the court’s chief prosecutor reopened an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan last year, it dropped allegations against the U.S. and its allies, choosing to focus only on the Taliban and the Islamic State. Just a few weeks before, the U.S. ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan with a drone attack that the Defense Department initially called a “righteous strike” against the Islamic State. The Pentagon later acknowledged the attack hit and killed 10 civilians, including seven children.

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