Officials told the Times that the timing and highlights of the memorandum, which is said to contain no new details, imply that its goal was to strengthen the administration’s efforts to defend silence on the news. Multiple former national security officials told the newspaper that the memo’s description suggested it may have been influenced by political intent.
The note claims that the CIA and the National Counter-Terrorism Center had evaluated with “medium confidence” that a unit of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU offered the rewards, two of the officials briefed on the content of the note told the Newspaper.
But the National Security Agency and other members of the intelligence community determined that they did not have adequate evidence to reach that level of certainty and, therefore, had less confidence in the determination, the two officials told the newspaper. A third official familiar with the note told the Times that the CIA’s level of confidence in the conclusion was higher than that of other agencies.
A spokeswoman for the DNI office declined to comment. CNN has also contacted the CIA.
The Times reported Friday that the note allegedly runs through the intelligence behind the agencies’ findings. This included reports of meetings between Russian military intelligence officers and leaders of criminal networks with links to the Taliban, of a GRU account that transferred money to the network, and of low-level captured network members who confirmed the use of rewards by part of Russia to stimulate such killings.
However, the two officials who drafted the memo in more detail told the Times that the memo emphasized the lack of evidence of what GRU officials and network leaders said exactly during the meetings, and therefore could not Be sure that Russia explicitly rewards extended for the death of American soldiers.
He also emphasized that the NSA lacked surveillance footage of the alleged rewards accounts of the captured members or clear evidence that the money transferred was to pay the rewards, officials told the Times.
The memo also states that the Defense Intelligence Agency lacked evidence that directly links the alleged reward offers to the Kremlin, officials told the newspaper.
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