A memorandum produced in recent days by the office of the nation’s top intelligence official acknowledged that the CIA and top counterterrorism officials have assessed that Russia appears to have offered rewards for killing US and coalition troops in Afghanistan, but emphasized uncertainties and gaps in the evidence, according to three officials.
The memo is said to contain no new information, and both its timing and emphasis on doubts suggested it was intended to bolster the Trump administration’s attempts to justify its inaction in the months-long assessment, officials said. Some former national security officials said the memo report indicated that the policy may have influenced its production.
The National Intelligence Council, which reports to national intelligence director John Ratcliffe, produced the two-and-a-half-page document, an alleged sense of the community memorandum. Dated July 1, he appears to have been commissioned after The New York Times reported on June 26 that intelligence officials had evaluated months ago that Russia had offered rewards, but the White House had yet to authorize a response.
The memo said that the CIA and the National Counter-Terrorism Center had evaluated with medium confidence, which means it was credible and plausible in origin, but they were not nearly certain, that a unit of the Russian military intelligence service, known as GRU, offered the rewards, according to two of the officials reported on their content.
But other parts of the intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, which favors electronic surveillance intelligence, said they had no information to back up that conclusion at the same level, so they expressed less confidence in the conclusion, according to the two officials. A third official familiar with the note did not describe the precise levels of confidence, but also said that the CIA was higher than other agencies.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Ratcliffe’s office declined to comment. Officials familiar with the memo described it on condition of anonymity.
It is not uncommon for the intelligence council to produce brief, all-source evaluations of important issues, especially if the agencies’ analyzes differ, said Gregory F. Treverton, council president from 2014 to 2017. But he expressed concern that The An evaluation of Russia’s alleged rewards program could be politicized to fit the White House’s characterization of intelligence in this regard.
“I hope the process still maintains its integrity, but I have real concerns, given the pressures these analysts are under,” Treverton said in a telephone interview.
Matthew G. Olsen, a former director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center who also held other national security posts during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, also said that the description of the memo’s content raised the appearance of possible politicization .
“These products are never final, always – there are always warnings, holes, judgments, and ratings,” said Olsen. “The White House described it as unverified, but it was never verified, so it seemed like a misrepresentation. It would be very easy, if you want to take a different turn, extract them and amplify the ways in which it is not conclusive. ”
Ratcliffe, previously a Republican congressman known for his outspoken support for Trump, was confirmed in late May.
The memorandum is said to present the intelligence that informed the agencies’ findings. He stated that the intelligence community knows that Russian military intelligence officers met with leaders of a Taliban-linked criminal network and that the money was transferred from a GRU account to the network. After lower-level members of that network were captured, they questioned interrogators that the Russians were paying rewards to encourage the killings of coalition troops, including the Americans.
However, the two officials who discussed the memorandum in more detail said they emphasized that the government lacks direct evidence of what criminal network leaders and GRU officials said in face-to-face meetings, so they cannot say more certain that Russia specifically offered rewards in exchange for assassinations of Western soldiers.
Two suspected criminal network leaders believed to have met with the GRU: Rahmatullah Azizi, a drug smuggler who became wealthy as an intermediary for Russian spies, and a second man named Habib Muradi, according to three officials, fled to Russia after this year’s raids, where several of her subordinates were captured.
The note also emphasized that the National Security Agency had no surveillance to confirm what the captured detainees told interrogators about the rewards, according to officials. The agency intercepted financial transfer data that provides circumstantial support to the detainees’ account, but the agency has no explicit evidence that the money was a reward payment.
The memo also said the Defense Intelligence Agency had no information that directly connected the alleged operation to the Kremlin, authorities said. But previous evaluations had also said it was unclear to what extent the rewards were approved by the Russian government. Intelligence officials suspect that a GRU section known as Unit 29155, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe aimed at destabilizing the West or taking revenge on renegades, is behind the alleged plot.
The memo came when the administration, in response to bipartisan demands from Congress, released reports to lawmakers this week. Another person familiar with one of the briefings said lawmakers were told that the intelligence community had great confidence that Russia was encouraging Taliban attacks on US and coalition forces and that the GRU had officers in Afghanistan. with ties to the Taliban.
But, the person said, although there were talks between Afghans about possible rewards for the attacks, US officials were less certain when it came to linking the Russians to the acts of specific Taliban militants or associated criminal units, or showing that the Russians they had actually paid for specific attacks. At one point, about half a million dollars in cash was seized in a raid on a compound, raising suspicions, but investigators couldn’t say for sure if it was reward money.
Informants told Congress it was unclear whether the Russians were behind or paid for an episode investigators are said to have focused on: the murder of three Marines in an April 2019 bombardment outside of Bagram Air Base. . An official said the new note said it cannot be established with certainty that Russian actions led to that attack.
The United States has accused Russia of providing small arms support to the Taliban for years. Following the interagency investigation, the intelligence assessment that Russia’s support had intensified to directly encourage more attacks on Americans and other coalition troops was included in Trump’s written daily report in late February, officials said.
However, Trump is known to rarely read his daily report. Administration officials have publicly said that he was not “informed,” but remained shy about whether the assessment was in writing. At congressional briefings, according to participants, administration officials have emphasized that Trump was not informed “orally.”
The assessment of the problem also served as the basis for an inter-agency meeting in late March convened by the National Security Council, at the end of which officials were assigned to develop a menu of possible responses. The list that followed started with a diplomatic complaint to Russia and turned into sanctions and other punishments, authorities said.
But despite receiving that list months ago, the Trump White House has not authorized any action. The administration seemed to have indefinitely sidelined the issue, officials said, until the Times article last week sparked an uproar in Congress, prompting a new look.
