The criminal intelligence leaks continue to flow to the New York Times. In a report posted yesterday, the Times described a memorandum produced by the National Intelligence Council “in recent days"—but after the Times’ original June 26 story claiming that Russian military intelligence was paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan—which it claims tries to maximize the uncertainties surrounding the intelligence allegedly indicating that Russian military intelligence paid bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan and that Trump did nothing about it. The memo was described to the Times by three unnamed officials.
“The memo is said to contain no new information, and both its timing and its stressing of doubts suggested that it was intended to bolster the Trump Administration’s attempts to justify its inaction on the months-old assessment, the officials said,” the Times reports. “Some former national security officials said the account of the memo indicated that politics may have influenced its production.” But, one must ask, was there no politics behind the leaks to the Times?
The Times reports that the memo said that the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center had assessed with “medium confidence,” while other parts of the intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, said they did not have information to support that conclusion at the same level. The memo is said to lay out the intelligence that informed the agencies’ conclusions, the Times continues. It declared that the intelligence community knows that Russian military intelligence officers met with leaders of a Taliban-linked criminal network and that money was transferred from a GRU account to the network. After lower-level members of that network were captured, they told interrogators that the Russians were paying bounties to encourage the killings of coalition troops, including Americans.
The memo reportedly says that neither the NSA nor the DIA had direct evidence confirming that the GRU was, in fact, paying bounties. It seems that further, despite Afghan chatter about bounties, that American officials were unable to link any GRU payments to specific attacks.
