Washington Post Reveals ISIS was "Partner" Supplying Trump Intelligence Briefing for Russia Officials
by John Helmer - Dances with Bears
May 17, 2017
The CIA and at least one senior staff official of the National Security Council, who briefed the CIA on what Trump had said, are angry at the President for revealing collaboration between IS operatives and their US Government handlers in attacks on Russian targets, including Russian airline travellers.
A report published by the Washington Post on Monday evening claimed Trump had,
“[R]evealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister [Lavrov] and ambassador [Sergei Kislyak] in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.”
The source, according to the Post, was,
“[A] U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said. The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.”
The text of the newspaper publication did not refer to the “partner” as a country, government, or foreign intelligence agency. Instead, referring to the source of intelligence as a “key partner”, the newspaper claimed,
“Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.”
That meant the geographic location where the “partner” was at work inside IS “territory”.
The publication also revealed that it been given access to a verbatim transcript of what Trump had said in his meeting with Lavrov, calling its source “an official with knowledge of the exchange.”
One of the newspaper reporters who wrote the story appeared in a videotaped interview which was published by the Post after the print version appeared. He is Greg Miller (pictured below). Miller, a Californian who worked for the Los Angeles Times before moving to Washington in 2010, “covers intelligence agencies and terrorism”.
Listen carefully to Miller reporting on himself, disclosing his sources in the senior staff of the National Security Council (NSC) and at the CIA. Starting at Minute 1:52, Miller’s identifies what he learned, and how, from “his [Trump’s] own National Security Council members, senior officials who see readouts of what happened. They call the CIA Director – call the NSA chief to warn them, to say, ‘Look, something happened in this meeting with the Russians that we need to tell you about.’ This is in part because they are alarmed and concerned about the blowback. These are agencies, the CIA, that would be directly communicating or dealing with this foreign partner. They would be most concerned about that.”
Miller doesn’t name the officials who read the May 10 Trump-Lavrov transcript and told him. Two senior officials directly concerned with US operations against Russia in Syria and worldwide are Fiona Hill, the NSC director for Russia, and Gina Haspel, appointed on February 2 as the new Deputy Director of the CIA; she is a former head of CIA terrorism and clandestine operations.
On Hill’s connections with Russia, read this. Haspel is a career CIA officer whose country postings and operations remain mostly secret; no verified or official photograph of her can be found.
Left: Fiona Hill at her previous employer, Washington think-tank Brookings; right, CIA Director Mike Pompeo testifying at his nomination hearing at the
US Senate, January 12, 2017; sitting behind Pompeo is his wife, Susan Pompeo.
US Senate, January 12, 2017; sitting behind Pompeo is his wife, Susan Pompeo.
According to the Washington Post text, “after Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.” For background on recent Post news fabrications, read this.
Senior White House officials, including Trump himself and National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster, have disputed the “damage”. According to McMaster, “the president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation.” According to the newspaper,
“the Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.”
The Post added editorially, without a source:
“For almost anyone in government, discussing such matters with an adversary would be illegal.”
McMaster replied the next day: “The premise of that article is false.”
General McMaster on Tuesday at midday, Washington time.
“If you were to say, from where do you think a threat might
come from territory ISIS controls, you would probably be able to
name a few cities, I would think. And so it was nothing you would not
know from open-source reporting in terms of a source of concern.”
The difference between the two versions, the general’s and the newspaper’s, is that the US “partner” is being run by the CIA for Islamic State (ISIS) operations against Russia. The “common threat”, to which McMaster referred – that is, an Islamic State plot against both American and Russian air travellers — is a plot which the senior NSC and CIA operatives do not want to reveal to their real adversary. This, according to Miller and his US official sources, is not Islamic State but Russia.
In his videoclip, Miller reveals his NSC source initiated a call to the CIA, and then Miller himself was told. That means at least one insider, possibly two – one at the NSC in the White House office compound, and one at the CIA, leaked to the Post a story intended to be damaging to Trump.
The reason, according to intelligence sources familiar with the terrorism operations against Russia, is that Trump identified a US tie to Islamic State which is operational against Russian targets. That the Obama Administration and the CIA have been doing this is no secret. Nor is the prospect of Islamic State and CIA plots against Russian and international aviation a secret.
Result of an Islamic State (IS) bombing of a Russian airliner flying
between Sharm el-Sheikh and St. Petersburg on October 31, 2015,
as reported by the BBC. All 224 Russians on board Metrojet Flight 9268
were killed. For more details, click.
Miller also reveals an attempt to cover up, then expose what he, his newspaper management and his US government sources believe was damage to their Islamic State collaborator. Between Minute 0:55 and 1:02 of the videoclip Miller says,
“the problem [sic] is that the United States knows much of this information because of intelligence that came from a partner, another country.”
There is nothing in the published text of the story that says the “partner” was “another country”; that is, another country’s government or intelligence service. In Miller’s videoclip, he doesn’t mention the word “country” again.
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