SpyTalk

This is the first episode in a series. Ms. Cohen was a deputy assistant secretary for human rights in the Carter administration.

Author’s note: If you choose a career in international human rights, expect the intelligence community to show up at your doorstep. Sometimes their agents will wine and dine you if they think you could serve their interests. Other times, they will intimidate and harm you if they think you could be a threat. Usually they are indifferent to the consequences of their actions. These are my stories.

Was I A Card-Carrying Communist?

In the mid-1970s, in New York, I received a letter from the FBI informing me I was a member of the Communist Party. Accompanying the letter was a 60-page file revealing that for more than 10 years I had been followed, my phone had been tapped, and FBI agents had hounded me. The names of informants were blacked out.

The trouble with the file was that the FBI had been following around a Roberta Cohn.

OPINION

Intelligence officials who have little understanding of what the FBI does to counter foreign terrorist threats are proposing stripping the bureau of its primary role in conducting counterintelligence.

It’s not the first time.

In the latest iteration, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is proposing giving primary authority over counterintelligence, which includes uncovering and countering foreign terrorist threats, to her agency. House Republicans are already pushing the plan in proposed legislation.

Five Eyes Rift: The U.K. and Canada have suspended intelligence-sharing with the U.S. over the Trump administration’s attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, CNN reported. Dutch intelligence officials previously said they were restricting sharing over concerns about the “politicization of intelligence” and “human rights violations,” TIME reminded. “Sometimes you have to think on a case‑by‑case basis: can I still share this information or not?” said Erik Akerboom—director-general of the AIVD, the General Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands—in an interview with Dutch outlet De Volkskrant on Oct. 18. “We cannot say what we do or do not share. But we are more critical.”

President Obama’s former director of national intelligence James Clapper is one of more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials who have recently received subpoenas in a fast accelerating but still puzzling Justice Department investigation into the handling of issues related to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, a source familiar with aspects of the probe says.

Rick Crawford spent four years in the Army defusing bombs. It was kind of a family tradition, the five-term Republican told a local paper a few years ago. “I’m a second-generation bomb tech. My dad was a bomb tech, too,” he said. But life in the hurt locker wasn’t for him. Four years was enough—although rough stuff still had an appeal: To help pay for college he worked as a rodeo cowboy until an injury put an end to that. Even with a B.A. in Science from Arkansas State University, though, he returned to the rodeo as an announcer. Not only that, he became a “singing cowboy,” often crooning from a horse. Finally, he settled into a successful career hosting and operating a farm news network broadcast to radio stations across the South and Midwest.

Then, in 2011, came the call to run for Congress.

Capitol Hill is a place where talents at roping horses and defusing bombs could be useful, metaphorically speaking, especially today at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which was supposed to be a haven of discreet bipartisanship when it was formed in 1977 to rein in abuses by the CIA, NSA and FBI. With the advent of the Trump era, however, it’s turned into another raucous political battleground and conspiracy theories boiler room. And Crawford, 59, stands with those who suspect the intelligence establishment has been out to get MAGA Republicans and their president—the so-called “Deep State.”

Veterans Day honors all our fallen in service, but the costs over the past 20-plus years now have been borne mostly by those sent to …

ODNI Move on FBI: Russia-friendly Tulsi Gabbard and her MAGA allies in Congress are making a bid to wrest counterintelligence—the art of catching adversary spies and rooting out foreign terrorist and domestic violent extremist threats—from the nearly century long grip of the FBI. “Gabbard’s office seems to believe that the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division is irredeemably politicized—which is to say anti-Trump,” Quinta Jurecic and Shane Harris reported in The Atlantic. “If we do nothing,” a commenter in an administration memo soliciting opinions warned, “the same deep state actors who have egregiously weaponized counterintelligence for political purposes will be empowered.” The FBI Agents Association, with many friends on Capitol Hill, is fighting back.

As a Pentagon consultant during the first Trump administration, Douglas Farah participated in war game exercises contemplating what might happen in Venezuela if president Nicolas Maduro were forced from power.

Although carefully hedged, the conclusions were stark: There would most likely be violent clashes throughout the country—among military units still loyal to the regime, an increasingly powerful drug cartel and, most ominously, two extreme leftist Colombian guerrilla armies, the FARC and the ELN, who have “greatly expanded” their control of huge swaths of western Venezuela. The rebels “have decades of combat experience” and “view the United States as their principal enemy,” Farah wrote in an unclassified report for Pentagon intelligence officials after participating in the Venezuela war games.

In short, there would be “chaos for a sustained period of time with no possibility of ending it,” Farah, the president of IBI Consulting, a security firm that specializes in Latin America, said this week on the SpyTalk podcast, elaborating on his report about the prospects for a post-Maduro Venezuela.

NOW THAT WE’RE ON THE CUSP OF A REGIME CHANGE EFFORT in Venezuela, someone at the CIA ought to dig into the agency’s archives and dust off the file on Operation Ajax, the 1953 plot that toppled Iran’s leftist prime minister.

The agency considered Alax a huge success at the time and for many decades to follow. The coup returned Iran’s pro-American monarch to his throne, its oil to its British and American claimants, and its standing in Washington as a Cold War bastion against the Soviets next door. Its legend dimmed, of course, after Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the shah and made life miserable over the next 46 years for a succession of American presidents, including the present one.

It certainly wouldn’t hurt to take a second look. There are some relevant takeaways to be found in its history—and in the official accounts of many other CIA-quarterbacked coups—on what can go wrong, as well as what must go right as covert CIA operatives in Venezuela work beneath President Trump’s ostentatious military campaign to rattle the country’s leftist authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro.

In the early 1990s, veteran investigative reporter Ronald Kessler cut an unusual deal with the FBI, one that was blessed at the very top by its then-director William Sessions: Kessler would be given unfettered access to the J. Edgar Hoover building for a planned book that would provide an exclusive behind the scenes look at how the FBI really operates.

But Kessler’s book project didn’t work out exactly as he had planned— as Sessions much to his chagrin soon discovered. In the course of his reporting, Kessler told me this week he was “shocked” to learn—thanks to tips from agents on Sessions’ own security detail—about alleged ethical abuses by the director himself. Among them: On multiple occasions, Sessions, a former federal judge, had used an FBI jet for personal trips, including jaunts to San Francisco to see his daughter and flying with his wife to Atlantic City to attend a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at the Sands Hotel & Casino (which comped him the tickets).

Kessler’s discoveries produced an uproar.