America’s Throwaway Spies: How the CIA Failed Iranian Informants | Hacker News Reader

America’s Throwaway Spies: How the CIA Failed Iranian Informants

reuters.com

77 pointscpeterso63 comments

I think this article shows a poor understanding of how the CIA works, or how this business works in general. The narrative presented in the piece seems to assert that the CIA has some duty and responsibility to provide for its informants and their families. This is a misunderstanding of the situation and therefore the premise of this entire article is very tenuous and not worth much, in my estimation.

The truth is that CIA agents' job is to turn individuals who can provide something of value to the CIA. They use various methods to turn these resources, primarily relying on human weakness that can be exploited. That resource is then cultivated for the value it provides. That's it. The handler's job is to gain access, whether that be to information or other resources, through the resource. The handler's job is not to provide for the well-being of the resource or their family afterwards, that simply isn't how it works. That isn't how the US government works anywhere, based on my experience. [[ETA, except the VA, we do this for veterans]]

These people have a job to do, a mission, and that's what they're doing. That mission may not be palatable to you, but that is exactly what is going on here. This article, suggesting there is some duty to provide for resources after they've helped the CIA isn't how it works, at all. Any assertions or conjecture to the contrary displays a rather large lack of understanding about how work is prosecuted at the federal level, whether that be in the CIA or not.

If a prospective spy believes they will be burned by their handling organization, then they will never work for the CIA.

That's a good point, but if one were thinking with the mindset you describe then one probably wouldn't be susceptible to the entreaties from their handler in the first place. I think you're not giving credit to how that relationship actually works and the personalities involved, especially the flipped resource.

Yeah if the entire human race consisted of people playing it safe keeping their head down history books would be very different.

Some become sources for money, others are ideologically prepared to die for the cause and there are even nutcases who are just bored.

A correction on terminology might prove enlightening. The US citizens working for the CIA are “spies”, handlers, or agents. Anyone who works for them, eg provides information, is an asset. They're not an employee, advisor, or “spy.” Theyre an asset to be used to the benefit of the United States as long as theyre useful.

That said your point on trust and incentive doesnt hold up to history. Being an asset and providing information to another country almost always ends in prison, or death, or best case exile. The material rewards are laughably small, thousands of dollars typically. And yet agents, of all nations, are good at their job and consistently succeed in recruiting new assets.

Your argument is flawed on so many levels. We are talking about people with emotions not machines to be exploited. Many spies are spying for ideological reasons not in return for any money. They place themselves in enormous danger in order to help the US. To not have the basic decency to even keep their identity secret is frankly reprehensible and irresponsible.

That's your perspective and it's perfectly valid to me, believe it or not. But it's just one perspective. The evidence I've seen has shown that their mission and the way it's prosecuted don't align with your perspective; that's reality and one should be cognizant of that.

It seems to be the modus operandi of the Cia. Approach an asset, cultivate him, exploit him and then dump him with zero regard to his personal safety. On top of that, they are very poor at keeping their spies identities secrets. Or perhaps they don't care.

The attitude you are trying to defend is incredibly arrogant and selfish. I don't believe other countries spy agencies treat their assets with such contempt.

>I don't believe other countries spy agencies treat their assets with such contempt

They absolutely do. Why do you think otherwise? It's not like anyone really has sympathy for spy agencies assets, they are usually active traitors after all. If they weren't betraying someone or something they wouldn't be useful assets, so again it's very hard to drum up sympathy not only in the agencies but from general public too.

I wonder how much overlap there is between people who accept the justifications you describe, and people who claim that it's perfectly fine to persecute and torture Julian Assange because "he endangered US informants".

I think in the Venn diagram you're proposing, there's a lot of overlap.

However, I think it's useful to look at this with a more objective lens in that these CIA employees are doing a job and that they also report to somebody and what that bog-standard relationship looks like. I think understanding how that fairly boring dynamic works in every federal agency may possibly help explain the behavior you're observing more than anything. There's really no great mystery to it.

Sure. There is no great mystery to slavery either, it's a very straightforward concept.

That doesn't mean that people's shock and disgust of the institution is naive or uninformed.

You could make this argument about any relationship. After all, look at everyone who just got burned by Google Stadia.

Everything is a negotiation. Every relationship has the potential for Pareto efficiency. Most aren't Pareto efficient because of information asymmetry, desperation, lack of competence or experience, etc.

You are correct, but at the same time your response shows a poor understanding of politics.

A "rather large lack of understanding" of the CIA on the part of the American public is exactly why the CIA is allowed to do what they do. For that reason, this lack of understanding is cultivated by the media and government.

Yes, my bad. Carry on.

The US is unlikely to continue being able to recruit high value assets if those assets do not have some confidence they will be taken care of.

This sounds more short term thinking on particular individuals in the CIA than anything else

Something I wrote before:

"One of the interesting things about Sarah Chayes book is her description of the relationship between the CIA and the military. In her view, the military was relatively powerless, and lacked the ability to fight back against the CIA. Meanwhile, the CIA undermined the goals of the military in Afghanistan, especially when it came to fighting corruption."

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thieves-of-state-part-4-of-...

Thieves of State

Why Corruption Threatens Global Security

By Sarah Chayes, 2015

Page 50–52

The CIA continues to cover itself in shit and serve as a national embarrassment. The time has long since passed that we need to unravel this mess. From botched coups, to exploding cigars, torture chambers, and burned informants the CIA seems only capable of pissing away money and making us look terrible internationally.

And in what circumstances would you hear about their successes?

World peace? Enemies forced to cooperate? Wars won? I mean the list would be almost endless.

Just like the list of their proved fuckups and outright careless evil done because 'we can' and 'who is gonna stop us'

> World peace?

Please tell me which world are you living in. I'd like to move there.

Which wars did the CIA help to win?

Looking at recent stories about the CIA; there's this one, then one about how a report saying the CIA warned Germany about oil pipeline attacks in the summer somehow leaked, and one of then recreating a terrorists hideout they bombed. They seem to enjoy bragging.

We can look back to the now public records of the early days of the agency and see that they were fuck ups from the start. We can see glimpses from KGB records exposed in the mitrokhin archives. There are leaks, and exposed diplomatic cables. Nothing paints a positive picture. Moreover, the constant embarrassment is very real.

I think there are (at least) two failure modes for this kind of agencies:

1- They fail to stop state-level enemies, they fail to predict attacks, they fail to assist friendly troops.

2- They break the laws of their own country, commit torture, treason or what can be considered crimes against humanity in the pursuit of their mission.

What we are seeing belongs in the second category. Whether it's also the first is harder to assess (though like others have mentioned, their historical track record is less than stellar).

Precisely. Its easy to criticize an agency when one is only privy to the failures. What the public sees is such a tiny fraction of what actually goes on, including positive publications. Its a tough aspect of working in the intelligence community honestly, and especially concerning when many people want to de-fang US foreign intelligence.

As others have pointed out they frequently brag about their alleged successes. They also lack any oversight by congress or the presidency(in practice). They’re also know to have surveilled and threatened active members of congress.

They posed as a polio eradication effort to try and find Bin Laden, and failed nothing their stated aim and literally prevented the eradication of polio. It’s unforgivable.

I’m not against having intelligence as an arm of the state department and accountable to congress, but the CIA is a malignancy on the body politic.

Just look at the public record:

1. Knowing Russia would invade Ukraine - Success

2. Knowing Iraq had no WMD - Fail

3. Correctly predicting Iranian Nuclear progress/ambitions - Repeated fails

4. Knowing the USSR would collapse - Fail

5. Sept 11th - Mega fail

Compare those items with candidates for success. For instance, the CIA failed to discover Sept 11th. Have they ever foiled, has anyone in the US who might work with the CIA every foiled such a large attack? No.

The same for other areas: Maybe the CIA predicted North Korea would have nukes when they did. That would give them a one in 3 (the others being Iran and Iraq) success rate at WMD intelligence.

Even with the "assume they got everything right that we don't KNOW they got wrong" level of credulity, they're not as good as flipping a coin...

There were idiots on YouTube already predicting the russian invasion back in autumn last year. You didn't have to be the CIA to see that it was going to happen as soon and the roads dried.

Yea, this one didn't take a genius. Anyone who mildly kept track of eastern European affairs and Russia knew something was about to happen as soon as Russia started moving large numbers of troops. I guess if we want to give the CIA a victory here, maybe we knew about the movements earlier because of the CIA, but the conclusion those movements came to didn't need a CIA agency to predict.

The CIA is not an independent agency, they do as the ametican public tell them.

Wrong on both counts.

The CIA has a blank check and does whatever the fuck they want. Much of it opposed by most Americans if they ever find out about it.

Congress and the president have oversight over anything they di. I din't see how "blank check" is relevant.

75 years of history disagree with you. Unless you believe the public told the CIA to arm the Mujahideen, overthrow Allende, invade Panama, recruit Nazis, traffic drugs - should I go on?

The public voted congress and presidents who run the cia into office so yeah,they did.

The only president of the last 80 years that has called for CIA oversight was JFK, who…

As for Congress, the idea that they know any more about the CIA’s activities than the average citizen is laughable.

They do know, they have oversight hearings regularly in a SCIF. As much as the CIA is romanticized, they can get in big trouble if they go rogue. They also have inspector generals for stuff like this and brief the president daily. The president can fire anyone in the CIA technically. Whil conspiracy theories sound cool and spooky let's stick to evidence unless you simply don't want blame for wars and chaos your voting causes. And that boys and girls is one more reason why I don't vote.

It's not a conspiracy theory, you just aren't reading the news. The Senate Intelligence Committee has stated that they weren't aware of the CIA's bulk data collection program until the public was. Did Congress authorize CIA intervention in Iran, Guatemala, or Nicaragua? Did Congress provide effective oversight of CIA torture in the Middle East? No, because they weren't even aware of it until 2009. Are you going to claim that all these instances are one-offs, or see them as signs of a systemic problem within our intelligence agencies?

The president was aware of the interventions in those countries and gave approval (if you remember the nicragua/contras scandal with raegan for example). I would like to think he is also briefed on their data collection but if they are like the NSA they went through DoJ for approval on any domestic collections but if they didn't they can be prosecutes and if they are not being prosecutes then blame your president who appointed and can fire the attorney general and the senators who approves the nomination. The only scenario voters are not responsible is if there is a "deep state" that operates outside of the democratic process and checks+balances.

Arming the Mujahideen sucessfully grinded the USSR and hastened its collapse, just as arming Ukraine would hasten Russia's disintegration. The plan was sound, however both of these strategies can backfire, as we've seen in the first case.

Disintegration was never the goal, just like with vietnam and china the goal is containing and preventing their territorial expansion. It is a lesson learned the hard way with hitler and poland.

Even knowing now about al-qaeda and 9/11, arming and training mujahideen in afghanistan was not a mistake.

Ukraine having just applied for NATO membership, I would say you are comparing apples and oranges. Even the muslim NATO member Turkey that is hostile against the US despite the US giving them nukes hasn't backfired.

Maybe the renewed cold war will prompt the CIA to get their shit together. The Russians have been actively sabotaging things in the EU through useful idiots and corrupt politicians.

One person who was able to sucessfully trick them so far is Marine LePen, who gladly takes their money while she keeps losing elections.

Sun Tzu's Art of War divides spies into five categories: Local spies; inward spies; converted spies; doomed spies; surviving spies.

These people seem to be in the doomed spies category.

"Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our spies to know of them and report them to the enemy."

This made me sick to my stomach. Absolutely revolting behaviour by the CIA against extraordinarily brave Iranians who risked their lives and even did prison time to help.

If you think that’s bad, you should read up on what the author Tim Weiner did. He outed a CIA informant in the newspaper because he could, which directly led to the man’s death. Timothy Weiner has blood on his hands.

Source: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-road...

"If you think CIA incompetence leading to hundreds of informants being burned is bad, wait til you hear about a journalist publishing a story that maybe burned one informant for what they consider a good reason."

Journalists have a duty to report information. Spies chose their profession and must live with the risks. It is not complicated.

The difference between a journalist and a spy, then, is the size of their audience?

And their employeer. It seems that journalists also cultivate sources and use some spycraft in communications. One does so for their government/country, the other for their newspaper.

John le Carré (the late novelist who was a British intelligence officer in the 1960s) was once asked why states have intelligence agencies when investigative journalists often do the same sorts of things and often report the same information spies do, and he responded that while this is often the case, the problem is that governments tend not to listen to journalists.

That's wrong. Most journalists recognise that when there's a risk of causing someone's death if they release certain details, they have to consider whether or not it's responsible to do so. So while they do exist to sell newspapers (or, more likely, get clicks for online ads) the majority of journalists and orgs aren't quite heartless enough to literally name an informant knowing it'd cause them to be exposed and killed.

In this case though, Weiner did not "literally name" the informant in The New York Times article [1]. He referred to the informant as a "retired terrorist" without giving a name.

In general, you're right about the principle of keeping sources anonymous to avoid harm. One principle in journalism ethics [2] is to "identify sources clearly" so the public can better understand a source's motives. But the other is to minimize harm ("Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort.") to both the sources and the public, motivating anonymity in certain cases.

However, in this instance, Weiner didn't name the informant in the article.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/21/world/cia-re-examines-hir...

[2] This is just one ethical code, but many ethical codes are essentially very similar: https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Do journalists have a duty to report information that kills innocent people?

In some countries it’s a dangerous thing to be gay, do journalists have a right to out gay people?

I read the show notes but didn't listen to the podcast. Is this really true? The linked New York Times article by Weiner never names the subject, but instead reports on a "retired terrorist" [1]. I don't see this an "outing."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/21/world/cia-re-examines-hir...

It's the same thing every single time: https://www.wsj.com/articles/left-behind-after-u-s-withdrawa...

Serious question - given its track record, why would anyone trust the CIA at this point? The promise of something better? Blackmail?

There is no good reason to trust it.

People will literally give up their entire life savings in order to have someone guide them across miles of desert in 100 degree weather for just the chance to get into this country. Others are paid money, blackmailed, or they have ideological reasons.

The united states has a long history of abandoning allies on all levels, from states to spies and nation. Both foreign and domestic (FBI informants). It's incredibly irresponsible as it destroys trust and can reverse years of work (see: Afghanistan, Iraq, Kurdistan etc etc.) It looks like its institutional.

The story here is USA constantly meddling around the world, while claiming to be the victim of unacceptable meddling.

Abandoning diplomacy and international agreed nuclear agreement, in favor of spy and sabotage, planting the seeds for the next "revolution"

They deserve it if they believed the CIA would help them. Not smart.

The second guy was clearly not smart having walked into an US consulate to collaborate with the CIA. Maybe he was very pissed off or has seen stuff he strongly disagreed with in his line of work.

Damn this is sad to read, lots of wasted assets.

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