https://theintercept.com/2018/
mpaign-stefan-halper-oversaw-
ction/
Stefan Halper Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential
Election
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal
involving the 1980 election
<https://www.nytimes.com/1983/
-inside-data-on-carter.html> , in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA
officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA
Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught
running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot
involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign
policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew
of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.
In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the
core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an “informant,”
not a “spy”), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that
exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put
American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post
described the informant
<https://www.washingtonpost.
ussia-investigation-at-center-
2018/05/08/d6fb66f8-5223-11e8-
e> as “a top-secret intelligence source” and cited DOJ officials as arguing
that disclosure of his name “could risk lives by potentially exposing the
source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.”
To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor
the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that
1980 Presidential election spying campaign.
==============================
===
The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a
CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election
Glenn Greenwald <safari-reader://theintercept.
May 19 2018, 10:27 a.m. -
An extremely strange episode that has engulfed official Washington over the
last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it
revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper.
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal
involving the 1980 election
<https://www.nytimes.com/1983/
-inside-data-on-carter.html> , in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA
officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA
Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught
running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot
involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign
policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew
of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.
Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI
during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and
they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity. The
controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning.
“Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for
political purposes, into my campaign for president,” Trump tweeted
<https://twitter.com/
took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot”
Fake News story. If true – all time biggest political scandal!”
In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the
core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an “informant,”
not a “spy”), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that
exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put
American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post
described the informant
<https://www.washingtonpost.
ussia-investigation-at-center-
2018/05/08/d6fb66f8-5223-11e8-
e> as “a top-secret intelligence source” and cited DOJ officials as arguing
that disclosure of his name “could risk lives by potentially exposing the
source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.”
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who spent
much of last week working to ensure confirmation of Trump’s choice to lead the
CIA, Gina Haspel, actually threatened his own colleagues
<https://www.politico.com/
598042> in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the
identity of the informant. “Anyone who is entrusted with our nation’s highest
secrets should act with the gravity and seriousness of purpose that knowledge
deserves,” Warner said.
But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media
outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper. And
Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the
scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly
inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent
Halper’s identity from being reported.
To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor
the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that
1980 Presidential election spying campaign.
It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this
scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan
administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate,
including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.
The NYT in 1983 said
<https://www.nytimes.com/1983/
-inside-data-on-carter.html> the Reagan campaign spying operation “involved a
number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly
secretive.” The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its
“sources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing
24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the
person in charge.” Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick
Cheney, and Alexander Haig as part of the Nixon administration.
When the scandal first broke in 1983, the UPI suggested
<https://www.upi.com/Archives/
l-charged-Thursday-
this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush, who
had been the CIA Director and worked there with Halper’s father-in-law, former
CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who worked on Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign
before Bush ultimately became Reagan’s Vice President. It quoted a former Reagan
campaign official as blaming the leak on “conservatives [who] are trying to
manipulate the Jimmy Carter papers controversy to force the ouster of White
House Chief of Staff James Baker.”
Halper, through his CIA work, has extensive ties to the Bush family. Few
remember that the CIA’s perceived meddling in the 1980 election – its open
support for its former Director, George H.W. Bush to become President – was a
somewhat serious political controversy. And Halper was in that middle of that,
too.
In 1980, the Washington Post published an article
<https://www.washingtonpost.
old-going-out-to-the-bush-
m=.31d0898a8187> reporting on the extremely unusual and quite aggressive
involvement of the CIA in the 1980 presidential campaign. “Simply put, no
presidential campaign in recent memory — perhaps ever — has attracted as much
support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director
Bush,” the article said.
Though there was nothing illegal about ex-CIA officials uniting to put a former
CIA Director in the Oval Office, the paper said “there are some rumblings of
uneasiness in the intelligence network.” It specifically identified Cline as one
of the most prominent CIA official working openly for Bush, noting that he
“recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide,
be hired as Bush’s director of policy development and research.”
In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around
Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept has previously documented
<https://theintercept.com/
ias-russia-beliefs-are-no-
Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New
York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/
ndorsing-hillary-clinton.html> but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr.
Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and
NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump
<http://edition.cnn.com/
d-live.cnn> a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then,
less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn
<https://www.washingtonpost.
l-fool/2016/11/03/cda42ffe-
ff2c3b02> that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and
said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held
in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”
So as it turns out, the informant used by the FBI in 2016 to gather information
on the Trump campaign was not some previously unknown, top-secret asset whose
exposure as an operative could jeopardize lives. Quite the contrary: his decades
of work for the CIA – including his role in an obviously unethical if not
criminal spying operation during the 1980 presidential campaign – is quite
publicly known.
And now, as a result of some baffling choices by the nation’s largest news
organizations as well as their anonymous sources inside the U.S. Government,
Stefan Halper’s work for the FBI during the 2016 is also publicly known
Last night, both the Washington Post
<https://www.washingtonpost.
ion-met-with-three-trump-
b656-a5f8c2a9295d_story.html?
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/
tigation.html> – whose reporters, like pretty much everyone in Washington, knew
exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles that, while deferring to
the FBI’s demands by not naming him, provided so many details about him that it
made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is. The NYT described the FBI
informant as “an American academic who teaches in Britain” and who “made contact
late that summer with” George Papadopoulos and “also met repeatedly in the
ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page.” The Post similarly called him
“a retired American professor” who met with Page “at a symposium about the White
House race held at a British university.”
In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that
this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence
asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “the informant is well
known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican
administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.”
Despite how “well known” he is in Washington, and despite publishing so many
details about him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his
name, the Post and the NYT nonetheless bizarrely refused to identity him, with
the Post justifying its decision that it “is not reporting his name following
warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him
or his contacts.” The NYT was less melodramatic about it, citing a general
policy: the NYT “has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name
informants to preserve their safety,” it said.
In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details
about the FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly
pretending that they were obeying FBI demands not to name him. How does that
make sense? Either these newspapers believe the FBI’s grave warnings that
national security and lives would be endangered if it were known who they used
as their informant (in which case those papers should not publish any details
that would make his exposure likely), or they believe that the FBI (as usual)
was just invoking false national security justifications to hide information it
unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers should name
him).
In any event, publication of those articles by the NYT and Post last night made
it completely obvious who the FBI informant was, because the Daily Caller’s
investigative reporter Chuck Ross on Thursday had published an article
<http://dailycaller.com/2018/
that a long-time CIA operative who is now a professor at Cambridge repeatedly
met with Papadopoulos and Page. The article, in its opening paragraph, named the
professor, Stefan Halper, and described him as “a University of Cambridge
professor with CIA and MI6 contacts.”
Ross’ article, using public information, recounted at length Halper’s
long-standing ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray
Cline, was a top CIA official during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had
long worked with both the CIA and its British counterpart, the MI6. As Ross
wrote: “at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief
of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative
<https://thecsi.org.uk/> , a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists
‘UK and US government agencies’ among its clients.”
Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted
<https://twitter.com/
pride, about the fact that they did not name the informant even as they
published all the details which made it simple to identify him. But NBC News –
citing Ross’ report and other public information – decided to name him
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/
confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:
The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a
former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a
paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net
Assessment, consulting on Russia and China issues, according to public records.
Terry Payne
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