It would be hard to imagine a less likely candidate that Donald Trump for President of the United States.  To many Trump was a relic of the 80’s, an aging, uneven dilettante, a serial womanizer, a repeat bankrupt, a narcissistic Manhattan B lister, a media bull shitter and obnoxious loudmouth.

To others he was a successful real estate tycoon a deft business genius turned flamboyant reality TV star. To those who loved his TV series The Apprentice he was an American icon, a golden haired symbol of hard won success and outspoken support of America and Americans. To law enforcement Trump had lawyered up and papered over misdeeds that ranged from mob connections, affairs, money laundering, and to the media elites who worked for the broadsheets. He used mob savvy lawyers like Roy Cohn and later a softer, equally crooked version called Michael Cohen to do his dirty deniable clean-up work. Trump was a long time Manhattan publicity whore, a man who even posed as “John Barron” or “John Miller” as his own PR person to compliment himself and now possibly suffering from some geriatric ailment that prevented him from forming a compete sentence.  There was no way a tainted throw-back like Trump would ever win an election, let alone pay for one. Unless you were running against Hillary Clinton.

Initially, the conservative right backed an outsider, a plain speaker, a tough talking patriot who would focus his efforts on restoring the esteem of the much maligned middle aged white conservative male and someone who didn’t care what the elite media or the entitled left thought. That man was Ted Cruz.

When Ted Cruz lost steam after losing in the Indiana primary on May 3, 2016 to Donald Trump, the extreme right and the center right gravitated to the reality show star. The man with wasta and a rapidly growing following was now Trump. Trump, with a little help and a lot of money, could be the perfect wrecking ball to swing in the sclerotic insider world of DC and smash down the  politically correct left. This appeal was also bolstered by a general sense of dread that the elderly Hillary Clinton, much abused wife of Bill Clinton, former Senator who moved to New York and frequent flier mile secretary of state had been carefully placed into political positions to assuage her naked hungry for power. The Democrats had elected a man from mixed parentage, why not the first woman?

Despite what the left considered an ideal candidate, Clinton appeared to just patiently await her coronation. She did not connect with voters. Aloof, entitled and not in touch. It was not an ideal election and the poor choices sparked fierce debate. A knock down slugfest creating a perfect place for someone to light a fire. Something the world of social media was happy to do.

Trump had no money to win and Clinton was drowning in it. Elections run on advertising and image. Raising funds requires making bargains with the devil and using every tactic available. What was needed was something that would push the ball over the line. Cinton had weak points. Trust, arrogance, inability to tell the truth, a dodgy family foundation, deleted emails…there must be something in those deleted emails….if they could be found. Clinton’s camp found finding fault with Trump laughably easy All they had to do was Google the thousands of outrageous statements, deplorable acts and thousands of silly statements.

Surprisingly, this mudslinging only emboldened Trump. His followers didn’t trust the media. He would simply tweet if he had something to say and the media would go nuts chasing Trump’s insulting tweets until he tweeted again.All of this perfectly in line with Steve Bannon’s desire to destroy the cozy old school relationship between government and the media. Bannon’s history as a investor in Hollywood, turned propaganda film maker turned blogger made him an outsider and Trump inflamed the old school media with his lack of respect.

Tweeting vs Sunday print editorials is perfect OODA loop stuff. The O.O.D.A. Loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act was Col John Boyd’s way of explaining to fighter pilots in the 50’s how combatants go through the process of reacting to stimulus Boyd’s idea was that if you move faster than your opponent you will always maintain the initiative. Even if what you are doing does not make sense. It is more important to confuse and wrong foot the enemy until you strike. So Donald Trump and his strategic advisor Steve Bannon worked the short game while a group of supporters worked the long game. If Clinton wanted coverage on Sunday news shows and magazine profiles, Bannon was happy to roll ini the viral mud of social media. It was all about controversy the electricity that drives popular discussion and top of mind awareness.  He needed fuel to stoke this fire just as he had built up Brietbart on bashing Clinton and Obama.

The press still has not regained their balance. Demanding, facts, in depth interviews, real concepts Bannon and Trump just fired off more tweets more Facebook ads and laughed all the way to the bank. Trump’s media maven Brad Pasquale spent 80% of their ad budget on Facebook and created another perfect way to alienate the main stream media. A business that relied heavily on campaign ads to swell their coffers.  It also created a petri dish for Russian trolls and fake news as the monetization of clicks drove thousands of enterprising people to capitalize on Trump’s stickiness and viral qualities. The election was so viral that Romanian kids could create hyperbolic political ads and fake news sites and then use monetization sites like Adsense to make up to $10,000 a day. Trolls not pundits rose to the top of the food chain.

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Controversy needs dirt. There were plenty of willing miners that searched for dirt that would be used to feed the trolls.

The Clinton Dirt posse were a strange cabal of characters straight out central casting. They range from Chicago investment banker Peter W. Smith, then an aging and now dead scandal monger, Iowa activist Sam Clovis an obese radio host, Charles C. Johnson  a short pudgy red headed ginger muckracker, former folk singer and Reagan era speechwriter Dana Rohrabacher, ex-Blackwater neo-mercenary Erik Prince, Knight of Malta and former Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, Rohrbacher employee and Prince supporter Paul Behrends, Victoria Toensing (muckraking media savvy lawyer for Clovis and Prince)  and even Prince’s best buddy and role model Olly North of Iran Contra fame popped up in media reports. Other than Johnson and Prince (who also worked together against Weiner) It was the 80’s all over again. And this election suddenly seemed to be all about dirt and dirty tricks.

This group of aging political super villains (to the Democrats at least) appeared to act in concert or in support of candidate Trump’s National Security Team under General Mike Flynn. Flynn was not a politician, he was a war fighter, so the people he picked seemed heavy on enthusiasm and short on diplomacy. The extreme took front and center, with neocons. alt-rights and just plain scary featured prominently. An Iran Contra level of paranoia, slippery dealing and skullduggery took hold. Conversations, speeches and memos with terms like “deep state”, “fake news”, “political warfare”, “information campaigns” and “islamofascism” peppered conversations. There was an enemy out there, but the comingling of enemies that included Antifa, Muslim Brotherhood, Clinton supporters, Marxists, ISIS and the media made for a heady brew.

When Trump assembled his “brightest minds” foreign policy team the media had to hit Google to figure out who they were. It didn’t help that the reality show candidate said he formed his world view by watching television on the weekends.  His starting line-up was Joseph E. Schmitz, Gen. Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Walid Phares and would be chaired by Jeff Sessions.  Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from the later investigation into Russian interference because he actually met with Russians as did most if not all of the rest except for pro-Israel, Lebanese-born Christian Walid Phares who was a virulent critic of Islam and Kellogg who had briefly run the Iraq CPA and had worked for intelligence contractors after becoming an expert on network centric warfare

Almost immediately various elements of the Russian government began reaching out to this crew to offer “Clinton Dirt”. It is important to remember that at a certain point the right assumed that Clinton had deleted both embarrassing and sensitive emails and assumed that many of these were Classified or above.  The most high profile “Clinton Dirt” was the June 2016 meeting between Trump campaign staff and Russians. But the search began much earlier.

Some of the team surreptitiously travelled to Europe to make contact. The spring summer and fall of 2016 were full of multiple random meetings with multiple random Russians and Trump proxies. That intensity of randomness about one topic and within that short window would make the whole affair not random at all. This was in addition to the formal contacts the Trump team had with the Russian ambassador in the U.S.

Trump was no stranger to Russia or Russians in his business dealings. His checkered business past swung from grandiose to bankrupt to cash flush. His decision to shift from building and owning to licensing meant he had to be a brand. The idea of a TV show that featured him as wealthy and successful self-made man was perfect. In 2004 The Apprentice was born, produced by TV’s most successful reality show producer, former nanny and Venice T-shirt hawker Mark Burnett. It also meant the classic TV watching demographic began to meet the man from Queens as a tough, no nonsense purveyor of the poor man’s view of American Dream. Trump insists he made over 200 million dollars over the 14 seasons he was on the show and was able to successfully license his name on properties from hotels to golf courses. More importantly Trumphad managed to gild his tarnished brand with thin 12 carat TV reality star gold. .

Trump had plenty of Russian customers, friends and was working on a hotel in Moscow  (among other locations) before his run for office but he would constantly downplay his business and personal interests in Russia to the media during the campaign. Did Russia really figure into Trump’s thinking during the election?

The one area where Russia was important in the campaign was the general sense was that Trump wanted to move Russia away from Iran in their war against extremists in Syria and move our support towards Israel and the Gulf dictators in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Trump was going to not only embrace Assad but work with Russia to push back Iran. The reverse of what Obama tried to do in overthrowing Assad using covert “moderate” rebels trained by the CIA. Trump’s idea of working with the Russians was dangerous, it had elements of Stalin working with Roosevelt in World War Two against a common enemy only to watch most of Eastern Europe vanish into the Soviet empire. President Obama, seeing decades of endless warfare had moved away from the anti Iran/pro Israel Neocon vision of a new Order in the Middle East.

The other incentive to include Russia was a multi-billion-dollar plan from ACU Strategic Partners to bring nuclear power to the Gulf States with Russian nuclear reactors. A project Flynn had helped push before joining the Trump machine. A plan that would haver required lifting sanctions from the Russian state owned nuclear energy company Rosatom and VTB bank.  Instead of waiting for after the election to not interfere with the current President’s policies, Trump’s people jumped right into the middle of foreign policy discussions on multiple and confusing fronts. Searching both for damaging information against opponent Clinton and discussions on their foreign policy plans to drop sanctions and partner with Russia.

George Papadopoulos was approached by Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud. Excited he contacted Sam Clovis about his March 24, 2016 meeting with “Putin’s niece” Sam Clovis’ lawyer is Victoria Toensing, Erik Prince’s lawyer. By August of 2016, Clovis was encouraging Papadopoulos to set up a meeting. Manafort disagreed, insisting that a low level person should travel to Russia to meet and discuss dropping sanctions.

The clown circus continued. Russians appeared to pop up from every nook and cranny offering Clinton Dirt but delivering nothing. When samples were found, they were forgeries. There was even attempts to counter the idea that the Russians were hacking. In August of 2016, that Florida political operative Aarons Nevinsalso reached out to Guccifer, as did Roger Stone. Stone first tried to say that Guccifer 2.0 was not a Russian hacker.

In the summer of 2016, Joseph Schmitz was the former Inspector General for the DoD, turned Blackwatermeltdown-era lawyer had been accused of slow rolling investigations against George W. Bush officials, pitching wonky arms dealsto rebels in Syria. He approached the FBIand other government agencies to verify an offer to hand over the missing Clinton emails from the Dark Web. The offer came via an American contractor he code named “Patriot”. Schmitz took the material to at least two federal agencies and two congressional committees he realized he had been duped.

Carter Page went to Hungary towards the end of the summer and later told the House Intelligence Committee he “did a lot of sightseeing and went to a jazz club. Not much to report.” He did note that “there might have been a Russian in there” Page would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI. The FBI had been granted a FISA surveillance warrant in October of 2016.

Why would so many Trump campaign members be lying about meeting with Russians?

Donald Trump Jr, got an email from Rob Goldstone on June 3 2016 saying that “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

Trump Jr. would later fly to Paris the day before election day to give a $50,000 speech at a think tank. He lunched with  At the Hotel Ritz Paris with Syrian Peace activist Randa Kassis a women who supports Russian intervention in the war, and her French husband, Fabien Baussart. A man with Russian ties who is said to have nominatedRussian President Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize. She summarized her October meeting on Facebook: “I succeeded to pass [to] Trump, through the talks with his son the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria”

In addition to the globetrotting there were a host of supporters and insiders who made suspicious trips. Suspicious only because the Trump team kept insisting these meetings weren’t happening. In November of 2017.  Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak would say that it would take him 20 minutes to list all the Trump people he met with or spoken to on the phone. His recollection did include lengthy meetings with Jeff Sessions and with Mike Flynn on sanctions.

What had turned into an attempt to shape or perhaps reverse Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East found Trump being played by Russian intelligence. To the media, during the campaign, all of this is just churn, no smoking gun, just multiple examples of Trump’s campaign people acting out John Le Carre novels but getting nothing in return, only finding more and more tentacles reaching out from Moscow hoping to get sanctions lifted to free up Putin’s money.

As October 2016 and the election loomed it was clear there was no Clinton Dirt to be had, and Hillary had as she said wiped her servers clean, “like with a cloth”.  With Clinton climbing in the polls, Trump needed that October Surprise, even if there wasn’t any dirt on Clinton.

Perhaps some enterprising supporter could invent some?

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Peter W. Smith (who died at 81 in May of 2017) bankrolled muckrakers going back giving $25,000 to support the State Troopers who ratted out Bill Clinton and hired then Breitbart reporter Chuck Johnson to find Hillary Clintons missing emails. According to Johnson, he had first met in 2013 when they worked on opposition research on President Obama. It’s not quite clear why a second term President would be of much interest. But Johnson worked with Andrew Auernheimer aka “the Weev”, a convicted hacker living in the Ukraine to help him out. Smith had put 50,000 of his own money and a donor had provided 100,000 in additional funds.

Just after July 22, 2016 When WikiLeaks began publishing the DNC emails, Smith contacted Matt Tait a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Tait was covering Clinton’s email woes and as an expert on hacking,

Smith assumed that Tait could help him with to the “Clinton Dirt”. Smith conveyed the impression that he was a Trump campaign insider and told Tait that someone from the “Deep Web” had offered his team erased emails and could Tait verify that they were real? Tait had little interest in Smith and wrote up a blog pieceto memorialize the conversation.

On July 27, Donald Trump tweets, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”  The July 13, 2018  DoJ indictmentinsist that on the same day, Russian hackers then tried to gain entry into Hillary Clinton’s personal servers. The 20,000 DNC emails released on July 22, 2016 by Wikipedia three days before the Democratic National Convention. Despite the cartoonof an angry Clinton in front of a computer with bombs and money (remember she primarily used a Blackberry) this was still not the “Clinton Dirt” Trump was seeking.

Later on, Tait remembers is being sent an invitation to join Trump associated opposition effort dated September 7, 2016 and labeled, “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016”. KLS Research. the company authoring the report was owned by Smith and registered in Delaware. For nitpickers, a pedagogical summary is not actual evidence but facilitates the presentation of evidence. The assumption was that Clinton had done something illegal but complicated and that crowdsourcing hackers and data would put together a convincing case before the election. The goal was to hire hackers to find anyone or someone who had Clinton Dirt on the dark web.

Again, there was no actual evidence the purpose of the document was to recruit hackers to find and analyze the Clinton Dirt. Tait remarked at the need of the dirty tricksters to create a corporation designed to avoid campaign reporting linked to his recollection that Flynn had asked for go between to receive Clinton emails from the Russians. Tait was also upset that his name had been included and he had no interest in participating. Tait was intrigued enough to start poking holes in the theory of Russians being the source of the DNC hack.

What did happen was an ever expanding analysis of the Guccifer 2.0 documents by the digirati that concluded that Guccifer 2.0 spoke very bad Romanian, had artificially put time codes in documents and tripped up when he made a change to a Word .doc on West Coast time under the name “Ernesto Che’. And that there was no clear evidence of Russian or Western authorship.  The slipup Tait had spotted was someone on the West Coast of the U.S. had added an invisible space in Word’s “Track Changes” features to “brand” the document. A peculiar idiosyncrasy that none other than Matt Tait first noticed.

On January 16 2017 the late Smith wrote an interesting blog before his death and laid you the whole hacking affair blaming Obama’s spin doctors on bringing in Russia as the culprit.

1. (Clinton’s email) operated on a virtually unprotected server. Its contents were openly available to nation-states and to individuals. WikiLeaks said it was in possession of the 33,000 or so missing Clinton emails and has sat on them for nine months without releasing them.
2. Guccifer (Marcel Lehel Lazar), an individual self-trained in cybersecurity, successfully hacked into 100 private email accounts of prominent U.S. and world government officials with ease. His unchallenged legal testimony indicated no Russian involvement.
3. John Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign, had his commercial email account hackedwhen he fell for a bogus password-change request. His emails were released through WikiLeaks, with no evidence of Russian involvement.
4. While Guccifer 2.0 is an individual who claims to have modeled his work after the original Guccifer, his DNC server leaksresulted in the resignation of the discredited head of the DNC. The material was readily available from the DNC site, which had protection deficiencies which were unattended to for 18 months. WikiLeaks said that the copies delivered to them came from a leak from a disgruntled DNC staffer, not a hack.
5. DCLeaks appears to involve individuals in the Washington, D.C. area who are interested in disseminating political information. Included in these emails were those belonging to the author, which were on a weakly-protected state GOP server. It is difficult to see that such mundane content would be of interest to Russia.

- Peter W. Smith

To make matters more obvious a bizarre PR campaign was mounted in Washington D.C. to show a fictional/documentary film to convince the media and lawmakers Bill Browder does the best job of laying this out in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee :

“Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet intelligence officer naturalised as an American citizen, was hired to lead the Magnitsky repeal effort. Mr. Akhmetshin has been involved in a number of similar campaigns where he’s been accused of various unethical and potentially illegal actions like computer hacking.

Veselnitskaya also instructed U.S. law firm Baker Hostetler and their Washington, D.C.-based partner Marc Cymrot to lobby members of Congress to support an amendment taking Sergei Magnitsky’s name off the Global Magnitsky Act. Mr. Cymrot was in contact with Paul Behrends, a congressional staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, as part of the anti-Magnitsky lobbying campaign.

Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act. He contacted a number of major newspapers and other publications to spread false information that Sergei Magnitsky was not murdered, was not a whistle-blower, and was instead a criminal. They also spread false information that my presentations to lawmakers around the world were untrue.

As part of Veselnitskaya’s lobbying, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Chris Cooper of the Potomac Group, was hired to organize the Washington, D.C.-based premiere of a fake documentary about Sergei Magnitsky and myself. This was one the best examples of Putin’s propaganda.

They hired Howard Schweitzer of Cozzen O’Connor Public Strategies and former Congressman Ronald Dellums to lobby members of Congress on Capitol Hill to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to remove Sergei’s name from the Global Magnitsky bill.

On June 13, 2016, they funded a major event at the Newseum to show their fake documentary, inviting representatives of Congress and the State Department to attend.

While they were conducting these operations in Washington, D.C., at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.”

Browder makes the case that the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration were deeply hiring Putin and his inner circle but why the oblique approach? And why didn’t they just do something on the Clinton Dirt they had been so eagerly offering…but never producing?

Rinat Akmetshin, and this unusual cast of characters including Paul Behrends, Erik Prince, Natalia Veselnitskaya  would appear at Dana Rohrabacher’s Liberty Ball at the Library of Congress. The 680 photos of the participants have been since taken down but snagged by a number of people on social media

Rinat Akhmetshin & and Natalya Veselnitskaya at Dana Rohrabacher’s Liberty Ball at the Library of Congress, Friday, January 20th, 2017

Next Part Three

The post The Hack Part Seven appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

© 2018 Sarah Sole, all rights reserved. https://sarahsole.art/

“The campaign had no contact with Russian officials,”

“It never happened, there was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”

Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks November  11, 2016

“One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

Read Part One

As we learned in Part One, the hacking of emails, devices and computers are just one tool in the psyops toolbox. But it is what the hacker does with what they find that is important.  Even if nothing is found during the hack, the public cyber shaming of the victim for being incompetent on how they handle their communications can be a powerful psyops weapon as in the case of Hillary Clinton. An elderly woman who insisted on using Blackberry phones and telling her younger aide Huma Abedin”to print this out”. Huma used to also backup her Blackberry on her husband’s, laptop at home. Clinton as Secretary of State was expected to use government email to provide a historical record and a certain level of security. It would be discovered after she left office that she never used a .gov email address and had carefully wiped out her personal after her lawyers printed out the emails she felt were relevant. From this came the concept that Clinton had destroyed sensitive or incriminating emails. The unproven absence of something can be equally damaging as finding something during a hack.

So we begin our journey to find the fabled “Clinton Dirt” something that may have never really existed during the campaign but somehow allowed foreign powers, carpet baggers, hustlers and hangers-on to undermine the integrity of an election, and thereby casting doubt on the legitimacy of the democratically elected President. The search for Clinton Dirt was so powerful, so seductive that it created numerous provable links to Russian proxies and entities, none of whom actually had Clinton Dirt. Why would Russians promise they had Clinton Dirt and never deliver?  Was this a clever trap? The perfect way to ensnare a Presidential Candidate whose followers seemed obsessed with the idea that Hillary Clinton was a crook? Was this the perfect way to seduce Trump to prove that he was a crook and linked to Russian influence?

Is Donald Trump a Russian lackey? His staff’s constant denials set against the actual proof of clandestine, low key meetings and a list of compromised associates might appear to contradict his denials. There is no direct link of direct benefit to Trump but there is a stunning amount of circumstantial evidence that links dozens of Russia citizens to both Trump’s business and political campaign. Almost as if it was carefully planned that way knowing full well that there would be efforts to draw direct lines between Putin and Trump.

The allegation of Russian collusion would not be directly connected if Trump had not specifically asked the Russians to find Hillary’s missing emails. On July 27, 2016 Trump looked at the camera at a press conference and said” Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”. Not Trump. The media.

Phishing emails from numerous Russian sources began to bombard the Clinton personal servers. So despite joking that the media would be all over any hidden emails from Clinton,  is that the proof that Trump conspired to hack Clinton?

It would be too simple to believe that is how the hack began. In reality the Internet Research Agency aka “the troll factor) was founded in the summer of 2013 in Putin’s home town of St. Petersburg, They had already begun supporting Trump in 2015 by essentially backing anyone who ran against Clinton. Trump became the de facto candidate of choice.

Was Hillary Clinton hiding something in her deleted emails she “wiped clean, like with a cloth” as she said on August 2015? Probably. But there is no evidence that Clinton even really seriously used email for anything important. Most of the emails that were labeled as sensitive to classified were simply passing through along with the tedious back and forth of travel and meeting needs. Essentially if Clinton was involved in dirty deals or underhanded activities, she was smart enough not to create an email record.

Her response captured her sense of tone deafness after it was revealed her IT people had used a professional program called BleachBit to wipe out any useful data on her New Jersey-based server before handing it over to law enforcement. If you are towards the right you will believe that Hillary Clinton is hiding something terrible, or rather was hiding something and had to delete her emails.

Or are both narratives wrong?

Was the bizarre number of people linked to Russia offering Trump Clinton Dirt, but never delivering it,  a very clever way to entrap him into looking like he was working with the Russians? Could it be that Clinton or Obama was catfishing Trump with proxies offering Clinton Dirt that didn’t exist?

Fusion GPS, the manager and producer of the Steele Dossier had another client in addition to the Democrats. Prevezon Holdings, or rather through BakerHostetler, the law firm that represented Denis Katsyv in his fight to get sanctions lifted. According to records, Fusion GPS was paid $523,651 between March and October 2016 to find damaging information against Bill Browder, the main instigator of the Magnitsky Act and sanctions.

Katsyv had also hired Russian lawyer and FSB informant Natalia Veselnitskaya to represent his company in the U.S. plea bargains. Incredibly, Glenn Simpson, the owner of FusionGPS met with Veselnitskaya just hours before and right after the Russians met at Trump Tower. This puts an entirely different spin on the reason for the Trump meeting when it becomes apparent of  Fusion GPS role in not only providing Trump Dirt to Russia and what appears to be quarterbacking the meeting with Trump’s people. Remember the two spies were being squired around DC by Paul Behrends to promote lifting of sanctions, but offered to provide Clinton Dirt to Trump Jr.

The June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was odd. It was set up by Rob Goldstone. Goldstone worked for the Russian oligarch, Aras Agalarov, and his wannabe pop singer son, Emin.  Both had been part of getting Trump to stage the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. In a fascinating do-loop Veselnitskaya had shared Fusion GPS Steele Dossier with Yuri Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia which Goldstone offered to Trump Jr after Paul Behrends who worked for Dana Rohrabacher had pimped Veselnitskaya all over D.C. in incredibly clumsy attempt to smear Magnitsky and lift sanctions. There was a loop here.

Rob Goldstone sent an email to Donald Jr. promising that “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras (Agalarov, real estate magnate) this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and be very useful to your father.” this was the intro to Veselnitskaya. Who didn’t have anything on Clinton and quickly turned the conversation to sanctions. Even odder was the Trump cover story that Veselnitskaya was there to discuss the lifting of the banning of Russian child adoptions by Putin in retaliation for the sanctions. Perception? Trump was colluding with Russians to affect the elections. Reality? A waste of time, but a very public waste of time that would be be pointed to as proof of collusion.

Goldstone would later shrug it off and tell the Independent, “If I’m guilty of anything, and I hate the word guilty, it’s hyping the message and going the extra mile for my clients. Using hot-button language to puff up the information I had been given,”

A perfect example of tertiary effects of psyops in which Trump’s enemies may have set a trap, knowing his desperate need for “Clinton Dirt”. The Trump camp would actually find themselves saddled with the appearance of potential criminality and Russian collusion. So did Fusion GPS, the same company that created and shopped the “Trump in bed with Russians” Steele Dossier, also make money setting up Trump to look like he was in bed with the Russians?

If it is proven that neither Trump or Clinton were hacked and that neither had a ulterior motive in hiding anything would it really matter anymore? Each side was fed a narrative that was comfortable to them. Both sides burdened with a narrative that has yet to be based on actual proof.

Such is the power of hacking the human brain.

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Not knowing,  or not having evidence, is a powerful weapon to use against a target in a psyops campaign. Just like lying, or not telling something,  to the FBI is a powerful tool in flipping witnesses.  Why was Hillary Clinton allowed to choose which emails to hand over and why was she allowed to delete these emails she felt were irrelevant? Why were her associates devices seized and searched for classified information?

Worse, why wasn’t Clinton and her lawyers treated the same way by the FBI as Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen? These are legitimate questions that support Trump supporters views that there is a “deep state” friendly to Obama era appointees and staff. A very Soviet idea but one that has support in the way that now fired Trump opponent Peter Strozk firewalled any expansion of the search beyond Clinton’s server.

Although forensics and aggressive FOIA’s are still piecing together what happened, the Clinton records aka emails while Secretary of State are being demanded in 38 different lawsuits.  It is not surprising that the missing emails became the single most inflammatory part of the 2016 election cycle and as we will show, cost Clinton the election.

In the run up to the 2016 election, those around Trump were virulently anti-Clinton and wanted those emails. Trump himself consistently accused his opponent of hiding something, being a criminal and going as far as creating the “lock her up” chant. Donald Trump and his camp hoped that something was those missing emails that would disgrace Clinton and be part of what could be used or an “October Surprise”. A term used to describe a piece of surprising news or shocking discovery about a political candidate that is dropped just before voters decide on which party will run the country.

The most famous example of an October Surprise is the 1980 release of the Iranian-held hostages as soon as Ronald Reagan took office. A despicable act of cruel deceit engineered by campaign manager and spook William Casey according to author Gary Sick who investigated a plot to ensure that President Carter would look powerless and not be elected.  Casey had been in the OSS in World War Two and run the European intelligence network. After Reagan was elected he headed the CIA and was responsible for a robust approach against Soviet influence around the world. Carter’s perceived inability to release the hostages crushed his reelection hopes.

This Reagan-era dirty trick was not forgotten by a group of Reagan-era Trump supporters who include Iran Contra figure Oliver North, close friend Erik Prince former boss and Reagan speechwriter Dana Rohrabacher and others. Trump seemed to gather Reaganites around him even though he had a history of being a liberal’s liberal and a libertine. Family values, religion, conservative values did not seem to square with the oft married, oft gossiped 80’s era social icon from Queens. But for this election he was right, perhaps right of right. Alt Right.

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Libertarians have always yearned to hack the Republican party. Terrified to to stray too far right, Trump offered the chance to enter uncharted water. Anarchistic almost. Steve McEveety, a deeply religious film producer that had worked for Mel Gibson at Icon and with Erik Prince on an anti-Iran film called the Stoning of Soraya M. McEveety introduced Bannon to Prince in late June of 2012.  After the death of Andrew Breitbart and a cash infusion from the Mercers, Bannon wanted to move fast and break things. He gathered around him lightening rods for controversy. Prince who had interned with Rohrabacher and Behrends was an ideal shit magnet.  Bannon was fascinated by my article on Benghazi. Prince and Bannon became fast co-conspirators against Hillary Clinton.

Erik Prince although too young to be a Reaganite, but was a Reagan-era groupie. He had gathered around himself many cast off conservatives ranging from his lawyer Victoria Toensing, Olly North, Paul Behrends, Dana Rorhabacher and many others. His father Edgar Prince had built and funded conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and supported Bush Sr and Reagan. He had a retro appeal to conservatives and even the mention of his company name Blackwater would trigger endless arguments among right and left wingers.

Prince also had a burning hatred for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who he publicly blames for singlehandedly disassembled and destroying Prince’s Blackwater business legacy. A business built on working for the State Department providing armed guards, aircraft and vehicles in Iraq under Bush Jr, and then destroyed when President Obama and what would have been his new boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came into power

Prince tends to minimize the bloody murders by his employees in Nissour Square as the reason for his company’s demise. Clinton not only took away Prince’s billion-dollar source of income but had 7 federal agencies on his tail until Prince was forced to sell all his contracting businesses and move to Abu Dhabi in 2010. So with the idea that a Republican would return to office, Prince and the Reaganite gaggle literally appeared at Trump’s doorstep waiting down at the bar until summoned up the elevator.

Once the Mercer family and Trump installed Breitbart firebrand and Benghazi basher Steve Bannon in August of 2016, big and little donor money began to flow. Reagan political dinosaur Paul Manafort and Trump’s tower tenant had been running Trump’s campaign for free since March 29, but although he had hitched the Republican money wagon to Trump’s campaign, it was quickly discovered he had other agendas. On July 24, 2016, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked Manafort “Are there any ties between Mr. Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?” on ABC’s “This Week” Manafort replied”No, there are not, It’s absurd and there’s no basis to it.”

Manafort held out as long as he could but when it was clear that Trump was cutting him loose, he flipped.

Paul Manafort would be slammed to the curb hard by Robert Mueller. First put on trial for laundering millions of dollars from his political work in Ukraine with any reference to Trump and the campaign omitted. Manafort went down hard. He was acting a second trial and threw in the towel. All part of the surgical dissection of connective tissue by Mueller.

The Mueller prosecution may deftly sidestep Clinton Dirt, Russians and Trump and go directly to the heart of the matter. Money laundering. According to his business partner, Prince is said to have been paid $13 million a month by the UAE for his arms length Reflex Response contract in cash. Paid in newly minted, 100 dollar bills banded and sequential. Paul Manafort is accused of moving millions from his work in the Ukraine, and Michael Cohen is going to go on trial for hustling millions for access to Trump. All of them hoped Trump would give them top cover. None received it.

As former Trump advisor and insider Steve Bannon is quoted to have said, “this is all about money laundering”.

In Michael Wolf’s book Fire and Fury,  Bannon is said to have said about , “Their (Mueller’s) path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner. “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner stuff,”

It’s not clear why Trump chose Reagan-era archival villians and political operatives like Roger Stone and his former partner Paul Manafort formerly partners in Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly were dusted off and put to work getting Trump elected. Stone had always considered Trump an ideal candidate for President and boasted about his skill at crafting falsehoods and dirty tricks. Manafort had just spent a few years working Pro-Russian Ukrainian politics. Everyone seemed old, in exile and burnt, everyone brought baggage. Trump didn’t seem to care.

They bragged of their lobbying work for dictators and warlords under President Reagan and they kept busy. Manafort’s work in the Ukraine kept him busy and well heeled, something he had done for a variety of dark horses. He is famous for turning Maoist warlords like Angola’s Joseph Savimbi into U.S. backed freedom fighters is not easy, but in a world where image is everything it didn’t much to fool the media. Roger Stone kept insisting that Trump could be President, some thought that endorsement would actually hurt Trump’s chances.. After four months putting together a political machine, Manafort was ultimately fired as was Stone after a number of “two-martini tweets” as Stone calls them.

Eventually when the media began to research his inner circle’s missteps, Trump would methodically throw each of them down the media well, hoping their baggage would drown them.

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Next Part Three

The post The Hack – Part Two: The Hunt for Clinton Dirt appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Read Part One and Part Two of The Hack By Robert Young Pelton

Secretary of State Clinton returning from Asia stops to pose for photos on a refueling stop at Miramar California,  Aug 30, 2012 Photo: Cpl. Jamean R. Berry

Who Hacked Who?

In Part One of The Hack we learned that after a Romanian cab driver reset Sydney Blumenthal’s email password and published screen shots on The Smoking Gun on March 15, 2013. We also know that Hillary Clinton did not use a .gov address for her work as Secretary of State, she barely even used a computer, instead relying on her non secure Blackberry and assistant Huma Abedin to organize her life.  In 2014 when her 62,320 emails were subpoenaed Clinton’s lawyers handed over printed out copies of emails and over a professionally erased server with the explanation that Clinton was choosing “not to keep” 31,830 personal and unrelated emails. And we learned that all her electric communications during her first three weeks of her job as Secretary of State vanished when her staff switched to new, more secure server.

All this was discovered during and after the Benghazi hearings and triggered a hunt for the missing emails. Weaponized for the 2016 elections by the Trump campaign staff and camp followers. 

In Part Two we went inside the search for “Clinton Dirt”. A quest by inner members and hanger-ons of the Trump campaign for the deleted emails that also seemed to attract the interest of Russians hired hackers, eager to drop sanctions and provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.  Those Russians seen the hunger for these missing emails slipped their tentacles fully inside and around the Trump campaign but never provided any of the missing Clinton emails. Based on the original Guccifer’s hack of Blumenthal’s AOL account, it was clear that Clinton emails existed in many other email accounts.  

So why was the nation shocked when on  April 18, 2016 the Democratic National Committee was hacked by a person who called themselves Guccifer 2.0.?

At first the DNC did not know how to respond to the hack. When the CEO of the Democratic National Committee Amy Dacey was told by their IT people that something odd was happening with their servers, Michael Sussman, a DNC lawyer called the President of a company called CrowdStrike. Crowdstrike is a cyber security company owned by Moscow-born CTO Dmitri Alperovitch and former McAfee anti-virus vet George Kurtz.  The investigation was led by former Marine Cyber Red Teamer Marine Robert Johnston.

An organization with the high profile, donor data and sensitive communications during a national election and felony level crimes being committed would normally call the FBI, but the FBI was still investigating Clinton’s use or misuse of a private server and financial irregularities in her charitable foundation…and it was an election. Worse, If the FBI froze the DNC system as evidence or if the media were to link the amateur way the Clinton handled her sensitive State Department work and threw in the childlike way the DNC was hacked, the election might be over for Clinton. For the FBI to announce an investigation and to conduct one that had sever political consequences was highly unusual.

The forensics of the DNC hack, as outlined in reports and a lawsuit filed by the DNC, quickly showed that there appeared to be two different Russian hacking groups involved and that the recent hack was only the latest attempt.

The more appropriate question would have been, had the Democrat’s data ever not been comprised?

The DNC servers and backup servers had been compromised a full year earlier on July 27, 2015 and then again in the more well known attack on April 18, 2016 by “Fancy Bear”, a common software and hacking team used to compromise email systems.

The DNC would later sue the Russians, WikiLeaks and everyone they thought were linked to their hack, insisting that “Russia mounted a brazen attack on American Democracy”. The DNC would complain in their suit that they were forced to “decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers.”

And that was the good news.

The bad news was that in addition to the two (actually three) hacks, every single email in the DNC system had been downloaded to another unknown storage device. And it wasn’t even news to the DNC IT department. In September of 2015 the FBI told the IT department that they had been hacked. And that wasn’t the worst news…the entire State Dept during Clinton’s time had been under attack and even the White House had been hacked as far back as 2014, Our government only discovered this after the Dutch AIVD intel division tipped off the NSA while watching the hack attempts…in real time.  The more appropriate question would have been, had the Democrat’s data ever not been comprised?

Fast forward to 2016 and no one should have been surprised that Clinton’s devices and communications were under attack.  Based on what the FBI had told the DNC and what Crowdstrike later discovered that a foreign government was aggressively trying to gather data about an election and perhaps find compromising information that could be used a d against them. This was linked by the media to the assumption that Trump somehow began this process of illegal hacking when famous dirty trickster Paul Manafort joined his campaign.

Clinton had caught Putin’s attention long before her run for President.

In reality the DNC and Clinton had been outed by the media for terrible security protocol and they decided to spin the hack. The DNC worked out a deal with the Washington Post which ran an exclusive piece on June 14, 2016. The headline screamed “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump”.  The article made it seem like the hacker was after “Trump Dirt” and downplayed the previous disastrous data and customer data breaches. The problem was, there was no Trump Dirt hidden in the DNC servers just a massive dull “oppo” piece constructed from of published articles that an intern could easily assemble using Google or search engine LexisNexis. It wasn’t a big secret that Trump had a lifetime questionable misdeeds and associates. The only real unanswered question that insiders had was who owned Trump?

“It’s the job of every foreign intelligence service to collect intelligence against their adversaries”, said Shawn Henry president of CrowdStrike and assuring donors that no personal data was stolen. Which appeared to later be a fib since the among many docs that hacker Guccifer 2.0 posted on his blog were detailed spreadsheets with donor information. The WaPo article parrots the claim. “The DNC said that no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed or taken suggesting that the breach was traditional espionage not the work of criminal hackers.” Again not true. Every part of the DNC email system including back up servers had been compromised, ever since Clinton announced her run for the office of President on April 12^th of 2015.

Before that there numerous clear indications that the Clintons were also targets of many hacking attempts and attacks. And Hillary Clinton as a private citizen angling for a high profile job in Obama administration had made it very easy for anyone who knew where she lived to find her email addresses, URLs and server location in her home.

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Was Hillary Clinton a tech guru who knew how to hide her comms and data, or was she naive about technology? We know that the Clinton’s transition to private life was focused on access and making money. There is plenty of evidence to show that their approach to security or tech was minimal and amateur.

The Clinton’s had two, very easy to find homes, a 5,152 sq ft brick mansion in Whitehaven and a 1889 built,  $1.7milion  5,232 square foot cut de sac home in Chappaqua, NY. Each had an iMacs in each home office. The once sleek aluminum Apple G5 tower was introduced in 2003 and was discontinued in August of 2006. The legacy URL for the Clintons was wjcoffice.com would forward emails to husband’s “presidentclinton.com” account but Hillary didn’t use that URL for obvious, ironic reasons.  As Senator from New York, she used the Blackberry account; hr15@mycingular.blackberry.net  which didn’t store emails on her home server, just her actual Blackberry handset.  Her other emails and texts were backed up on her server

It is coincidental but on December 23, 2009,  Clinton assistant and keeper of the Clinton IT network,  Justin Cooper sent an article by email to Clinton staff warning them of two massive meltdowns of  Blackberry service caused by software glitches. It was of course read on everyone’s Blackberry. Hillary also asks Cooper on where her messages went:

Original Message 

From: H

To: Justin Cooper Sent: Tue Sep 29 07:16:33 2009

Subject: Lost messages

I’ve lost all messages from 11/9 back to 2008. Anyway to recover since I had drafts saved?

Tuesday,September 29, 2009 7:28 AM

on behalf of Justin Cooper

B6

Re: Lost messages

Yes. They are all backed up on the server the easaiest and quickest way is to log on to the webmail server and click on the drafts folder or the inbox. If you have not used the webmail happy to walk you through that or have huma help you. Your old berry has messages back to august 29 2009 and then only saved messages prior to that. The saved messages should be on your berry as well.

J

New Gear for a New Year

Colin Powell that warned her that if people find out that she was using a Blackberry to do both personal and government business, then all that content including personal communications can become the official record and is subject to oversight and FOIA.

But wait, this is September of 2009, Clinton had a new server installed in her home after she became Secretary of State. Huma Abedin even set up an new URL called clintonemail.com  on January 13, 2009. It would appear that Clinton was using multiple email addresses for personal and official business with overlap between official and personal storage devices. Something not uncommon but increasingly frowned upon as governments turned to electronic communications and knowledge of hacking and data leaks grew exponentially.

On January 24, 2009 the State Department proposed putting together a secure communication system for her but she declined. It was actually former Secretary of State Colin Powell that warned her that if people find out that she was using a Blackberry to do both personal and government business, then all that content including personal communications can become the official record and is subject to oversight and FOIA.

As Secretary of State, Clinton was also surprised to discover that Blackberries were banned in sensitive communication areas or SCIFs. The standard procedure is to put all phones in a locker outside  and pick it up as you leave the secure area. Clinton’s office on the 7th floor of the State Department was a secure area and her phone was banned. Despite this she used her insecure phone backed up to her home server.

On March of 2009, after Clinton began her job as Secretary of State, Bryan Pagliano a Clinton aide turned State Department employee installed two new servers in the Clinton’s basement in Chappaqua New York. Delegated to her assistant Huma Abedin, Abedin turned to long time Bill Clinton assistant Justin Cooper,  “I usually called Justin. He was our go-to guy. He always was, you know, ‘I’m having a problem, can you help me fix it,’ and he always did…”

Cooper along with Doug Band had been around Bill Clinton since 2006 and by 2009 he pulled down a $127,200 annual salary from the Clinton Foundation. Cooper not only helped the former President in his post Presidential career, but also helped him with his book and financials.

After Hillary lost the 2008,  Cooper helped Hillary Clinton with her comms and emails, Cooper turned to Bryan Pagliano who actually put the Clinton email system together. Tech savvy Cooper, watched the activity logs and made it clear to the young Pagliano that wanted to make sure that he had physical access to the server, something the more IT- sophisticated Pagliano didn’t agree with.

Pagliano was smart enough to tell Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills of his concerns about the Clintons using a rudimentary home server and smart enough to refuse to testify in front of congress after being served with a subpoena. Pagliano, who worked for Clinton as a political appointee between May 2009 and February 2013, was granted immunity b the DoJ and also plead the fifth amendment multiple times and refused to cooperate with government investigations into Clinton’s emails. Clearly the disregard his client and boss had for secure communications was becoming criminal.

Clinton also had no interest in responding to the a request from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as to why Pagliano had so few emails on record. The truth may simply be that Clinton used a Blackberry and kept her sensitive business off FOIA friendly .gov channels. Or perhaps Hillary Clinton was very knowledgeable about how communications can be used in politically motivated investigations.

As part of her job, Clinton had “SCIF’s”  (SCIF means Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) installed in her northwest Washington DC home and in Chappaqua, New York, each with a secure phone and fax machine. Her favorite working tool was the lowly Blackberry cel phone, Clinton resigned herself do doing her sensitive office business with the three supplied secure phones, color coded for level of security but outside of the office Clinton and her “berry” were inseparable.

On March 18, 2009, Clinton’s new server set up was installed in Chappaqua, replacing what Justin Cooper would later confirm to Utah Rep Jason Chaffetz in his 2016 missing emails query n 2016 an “out of the box solution.” running on one Apple G5 server and the by now ancient two iMacs, one in each Clinton home.

The new gear was good: a Dell PowerEdge 2900 running Windows Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 running Blackberry Enterprise Server to handle her and the staff’s Blackberry communications. A 3-terabyte hard drive was a good setup for a small to medium sized business and could handle the expected volume of emails Clinton’s team.

How email heavy was Hillary Clinton?  Outgoing not much but incoming was a lot. Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills estimated she received an average of 500 emails a day at this time. There was no clear understanding of what was archived to where or by whom but the new server was reliable in handling the volume of traffic plus Blackberry comms. The servers automatically made daily backups and at some point an external Seagate back drive was added until September when a Cisco Network Attached Storage device was added. Servers are usually backed up to the cloud or stack of hard drives usually configured in a group of hard drives called a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) meaning if drive one goes down the others still have the data. Often these drives are swapped out in and kept in separate locations. In other words there are plenty of ways to backup data if a computer or drive goes down. The G5 server operated without encryption and even  the Clinton URLs did not have an SSL certificate until March 18, 2009 the date the new server was installed. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer allows encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online communication.

Gone Forever

 It also meant that whatever Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was working on electronically as a government employee for the previous seven weeks no longer existed except in files and emails she might have sent to other people

Despite all the various methods available to backup critical data and the seeming lack of basic safeguards, there was one major problem when the new server was installed, intentional or otherwise. When the new server and account hrod17@clintonemail.com was fired up all of Clinton’s previous emails and messages vanished. Forever. Without any any sense of suspicion this meant that when Clinton became an elected federal government official she deleted all of her emails and electronic communications. And the back ups.

It is important to note that the March installation/migration meltdown handled by, Cooper and Pagliano two competent IT Clinton insiders  It also meant that whatever Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was working on electronically as a government employee for the previous seven weeks no longer existed except in files and emails she might have sent to other people. In corroboration of this, Clinton did not provide any emails before March 19, 2009 to the FBI. To the casual observer, the complete and total destruction of all emails and associated attachments was a clear indication that even though Hillary was a Blackberry Luddite, she know how and when to burn the evidence.

The DNC hack would later show the cross over between Clinton’s personal, business and Clinton Foundations communications as Chelsea Clinton, John Podesta and members of both Clinton’s staff would cross pollinate discussions and emails. It could be expected that the missing emails could also contain that same structure. Just as Colin Powell hard warned her earlier about the need to separate personal and business. Let alone classified and Secret communications.

Luckily Huma Abedin was the main conduit for Clinton’s communications. She used a Dell Innova laptop that she shared with her husband Anthony Wiener. Clinton would regularly send, cc and bcc emails from her Blackberry to Abedin for print out or discussion later. It was not known what security was installed on the Innova laptop but anyone who had access to either computer would know the location and ID of everyone on the network.

This mundane laptop will feature prominently in Clinton’s career and not in a good way.

After the disappearance of the first round of personal and government emails, the previous Apple computer hard drive and we assume back ups were wiped clean and repurposed to a Clinton staff member. This type of cavalier handling of government and personal communications would be viewed by investigators as a convenient and deliberate attempt to hide communications rather than the Clinton’s technical incompetence. But without any emails or Blackberry comms surviving what evidence was there other than the act of destroying the data?

Clinton had very savvy tech people handling and closely guarding her data. When matched up against Clinton’s legal background and long years in public office with full knowledge of the laws that require preserving federal and Presidential records the two month missing email gap becomes suspicious and self serving.

If you add the reality that “Evergreen” (as Clinton was codenamed by the Secret Service) was surrounded by security staff and was constantly aware of the strict protocol for transmitting and storing classified, secret and other sensitive government communications the potential for deceit becomes more obvious. Matched up against the clear difference between a server, a backup storage devices, networks, email software, text messages, Blackberry communications and the need to use encryption, passwords, security protocols etc etc. it becomes more problematic. For a person holding one of the most important positions in the world dealing with sensitive diplomatic discussions worldwide,  not caring about the handling and whereabouts of her communications is well, criminal.

Let’s work the argument that  Hillary Clinton didn’t know or didn’t care about all this…

The FBI estimates that Clinton went through about a dozen different Blackberries while Secretary of State, Huma Abedin estimates 11and says that Hillary didn’t even know her own login information. Cooper remembers smashing a couple of Blackberries but it is not know what happened to the others. Clinton preferred the older BlackBerry Curve 8310 with the trackball and would switch handsets based on email was just a small part of her commutation stream, only about a dozen people sent emails. Most went through Abedin, who used the soon to be infamous cheap consumer laptop. There is no evidence of Clinton using a laptop or computer so it can be assumed that Clinton’s aging non secure Blackberry was the weapon of choice and Abedin’s cheap laptop that she shared with her husband were the communication node. Again with all these duplicate devices and backups. Where are the missing emails?

Journalist Garrett M. Graff working for Politico stitched together numerous interviews and documents to paint the clearest story of a group of civil servants simply not able to keep up with technology and dodging rules in the interest of getting things done. That same incompetence. That James Comey would carefully describe as “extremely careless” in an official statement July 5, 2016.  Again let’s just assume that Hillary was behind the curve on technology and security. Let’s also assume that Huma Abedin was the central hub for most of Clinton’s email traffic. It would be more likely that a smart hacker would go after an associate to get Clinton’s emails. Let’s say like, Clinton confidante Sydney Blumenthal who had his archaic AOL account hacked in March of 2013, or John Podesta who in March of 2016 was told to go ahead and click on a bad link that uploaded his password to Russian hackers.

Everybody Must Get Hacked

The list of outside hacks and successful breaches against Clinton staff and friends is impressive.

The first official time Clinton’s personal server was severely attacked was January 9, 2011 according to Clinton employee and server custodian,  Justin Cooper in an interview with the FBI. Someone was using a software program to try multiple passwords to get in. Cooper actually turned the server off. The IP address was quickly blocked. The Clinton server was set up so only a few people could access it, firewall logs and notices were sent to Cooper. Pagliano knew this was deliberate and serious. Cooper also told Abedin that someone was trying to hack into the server. What kept the email safe was the small number of users despite the vast numbers of attempts to guess the passwords.

By the spring of 2011 The Clinton’s email server was under full assault. A number of Clinton’s employees in the State Department employees had been phished and typed in their personal Gmail and Yahoo accounts

On March 11,  Eric Boswell, the State Dept security head sent an email to everyone warning of the attacks but it wasn’t until June that Pagliano trekked to Chappaqua to upgrade the two servers.  The FBI would use forensics and determine that it wasn’t u until January 2013 that someone managed to hack into the Clinton server. The trail was left by someone using the Tor browser and three times, successfully rummaged through a female aide to Bill Clinton. The official version is that this is the only successful hack into the Clinton server. Hillary Clinton would resign as Secretary of State on February 1, 2013.

In would be in March of 2013, that Guccifer would hack into Sydney Blumenthal’s email and Colin Powell’s AOL account, again by resetting the passwords using clues. Guccifer aka Lazar was able to get 30,000 emails, the attachments and address books. The next morning when Blumenthal realized he had been locked out he reset his password and no idea he had been hacked. Now remember the number of times that Clinton staffers were locked out or tried to log into their accounts.  By March 15, the Clinton email URL was public and the server was constantly scanned for weaknesses by Russian sources.

So who was hacking Clinton so hard?

Putin Denies This

On December 3, 2011, Clinton spoke out against Russian “elections that were neither free nor fair”

Vladimir Putin was a former Lt Colonel in the KGB, a spy turned nationalist who had effectively ruled Russia since a curious string of apartment bombings launched him into to power in 1999. He was running for election as Prime Minister in 2009, after taking a time as President due to term limits letting his close friend Dmitri A. Medvedev be President.  He made a powerful outdoor speech in front of an estimated 100,000-supporters at the Luzhniki Stadium on February 23, demanding that foreign interference in Russian affairs should not be allowed.

Vladimir Putin didn’t like Obama’s well intentioned February 2009 “reset” of U.S./Russia relations. America had sat out Putin’s successful war to steal back Chechnya but pushed back as Russia made a grab for parts of neighboring Georgia. In July, 2009, President Obama met with Putin and President Medvedev. In the Moscow meeting, Putin monopolized a breakfast meeting lecturing Obama in a monologue about Russia’s perspective of global politics.

Putin also didn’t like Obama’s new hawkish Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Putin had accused Hillary Clinton of creating unrest in Russia and manipulating the Russian elections.  Prime Minister Putin scolded Clinton publicly in March of 2010. He was upset that sanctions on Russian companies doing business in penalties on firms doing business with Iran, Syria and North Korea was hurting business.

On November 27, 2010 there are a number of attempts to penetrate the Clinton server as detailed in a series of emails between Clinton techs Cooper and Pagliano. Denial of Service attacks, multiple failed log in attempts from at two staffers could also have meant someone changed their passwords forcing them to reset them again to gain access after the hack.

On December 3, 2011, Clinton spoke out against Russian “elections that were neither free nor fair” Putin later accused Clinton of disrupting Russians parliamentary elections and blamed her for sending “signals” to Russian groups to protest. There is no evidence to support a link between Putin’s anger at Clinton and the brute force attempt to hack her server but the timing is worth remembering. As 2011 developed more and more hacking attempts against State Department employees began to unnerve staff as they received more and more “spearphishing” emails.

Before we leave the topic of Justin Cooper as the loyal Clintonite advisor and IT soldier  it is important to note that Clinton daughter Chelsea accused Cooper of loading spyware onto Clinton related emails accounts and devices. “I know Justin reads my Dad’s emails’ Chelsea would complain in a leaked DNC email to John Podesta. Chelsea accuses Cooper of multiple acts of wrongdoing in a November 2011 email including loading spyware on a Clinton foundation staffer’s computer; “Ilya  (Ilya Aspis was a special assistant to Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation) physically saw/caught Justin a couple of days ago reading his bberry and loading the same spyware onto his computer that he loaded onto Bari’s (Bari Lurie, an assistant to Chelsea Clinton). computer”

She continues, “multiple people shared with me how upset they were at hearing how Justin referred to my father in the last week in very derogatory ways widely sadly – Oscar told my father he knows Justin reads his emails”, then Chelsea wraps up,  “As ever, on some of the above I am sure there are three sides as my grandmother would say – his, hers and the truth.”

Again Cooper had worked with in the White House and with the Clinton’s since 1999 and was a key part of the Clinton Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Family Foundation.  The Clinton daughter’s account of Cooper not just a falling out with her father, but hacking into other Clinton devices would bring his need to have access to the Clinton server at Chappaqua into question as well.

Justin Cooper worked for the Clinton’s for 15 years but according to Chelsea, by late 2011 he was clearly not a happy man.

So four years later after Guccifer broadcast Clinton’s email and URL to the world, there was a decision to change data storage again. but they didn’t forget the email Apocalypse of March 2009. Monica Hanley Hillary’s “confidential assistant”, began carefully downloading all of Hillary’s emails from her email accounts onto a old MacBook borrowed from Bill Clinton’s office. The logic was that these emails would be helpful in writing Clinton’s autobiography. In April, it was announced that she would be paid $14 million dollars to write “Hard Choices”, the book that was designed to begin her journey to run for President of the United States. Emails, that were not considered important enough by Clinton to be kept as official records on government servers.

Backing Up The Past

It appears that Hillary Clinton put importance on retaining her electronic communications.

We know the that the Cintons used a plugged Apple. G5 server and lost months of data when they upgraded to a new Dell server at the advice of her employer while Secretary of State. We also know that on June 30 2013 in her return to private life,  Clinton physically migrated her servers and the data that was on her servers at her home to a professional data management company in New Jersey called Platte River Networks. They kept the old servers running for 60 days before migrating to a modern cloud based system backup. The “cloud” stores data across multiple networked storage systems and is better than traditional hard drive or swap out RAID back up. But when the Clinton people found out that her old server was being backed upon the cloud, they specifically terminated that feature. They went back to a traditional hard drive back system.  This is pretty convincing proof of an premeditated need to control data should it need to be quick deleted rather than to archive it. By February 2014, Clinton assistant, Monica Hanley had finished loading 5 years of Clinton’s emails on to the Mac Laptop. She shipped it to New Jersey and them them back it up to an archive email account. The hope at the time was that the emails would also be useful in writing her future memoir.

The exposure of the email account encouraged Clinton’s aides to change the secretary of state’s address. Abedin selected hrod17@clintonemail.com, but the staff feared that they’d lose her existing emails when they changed addresses, so Monica Hanley retrieved an old MacBook laptop from Bill Clinton’s Harlem office and spent several days at her apartment transferring years of Hillary’s emails from the server files into Apple’s Mail program on the laptop.

It appears that Hillary Clinton put importance on retaining her electronic communications.

To understand just how aggressive and often hackers targeted the White House, we go back to the trail of evidence from the Dutch counterespionage group who watched the emails of the White House being hacked in the summer of 2014. As the Russian state spies become emboldened, they watched the attack on the State Department in November of that year. Note that the discussion about the DNC hack narrative removes Hillary Clinton’s very real exposure to hackers and that the White House had been hacked in the summer of 2014.

According to AIVD a unit of Dutch intelligence, the cyber team watched Russian state hackers successfully phish the White House as far up the chain until they got into President Obama’s emails. They did not get access to Obama’s secure Blackberry but by 2014 it was clear the U.S. government had been compromised at the highest levels.

The Dutch agency had located a building in the university complex off Red Square in Moscow where hackers using Cozy Bear tools routinely went after foreign state assets. By November of 2014, the 10 or so Russian hackers working in Moscow had enough email addresses from their White House hack to go after a State Department target. The Dutch patched in the Americans and for 24 hours a cyber battle waged between the Russians and the Americans as the Russians tried to get into State Department computer systems. As the Americans blocked access to their servers, the Russians try various techniques and hacks. None succeeded. Towards the end of 2015, the American hackers at the NSA have used new technology to force their way into mobile phones of a number of targeted Russian GRU intelligence officers. Finally, the counter hack was discovered by the Russians and they shut out the Dutch.

The word “watch” is used repeatedly in this description that is because the Dutch had not only managed to penetrate the Russian hacking network, they had access to the security cameras in the Moscow hacker’s building allowing them to watch in real time.

That evidence along with evidence that Trump insides were actively colluding with Russian intelligence agents was turned over to Robert Mueller to begin his investigation into Russian interference during the election.  An election that began with a scandal over Clinton’s missing emails and then morphed into an investigation into allegations about Trump’s links with Russians to influence the election.  Concerns about attacks on the U.S. government were not idle concerns as American went into the 2016 elections but the Democrats were compromised long before it hit the election cycle news.

The noise from clashing narrative drowned out a lot of the laser type forensics being done by nerds on the internet. Nerds who actually knew what they were talking about.

Who Among You Has Not Been Hacked?

Clinton had ordered someone to wipe out her servers and backups between December. 5, 2014, and March 27, 2015.

The stains of three narratives flow and intermingle was the DNC hack an inside job by a disgruntled employee, did the data get hacked by an unemployed Romanian cab driver or was this a sophisticated orchestrated attack by a hostile nation? Or was it all three? The answer is likely to be the latter.

In December 2014 after discovering that Clinton never used a .gov address,  the State Department asked for her emails, Hillary Clinton through her lawyers handed over over 30,490 separate emails but there were on 55,000 pages in 12 banker’s boxes

Clinton set up a new URL for her email “hrcoffice.com”

On March 2, 2015 the New York Times revealed Clinton had not used a .gov email address, triggering the House Select Committee on Benghazi to subpoena her emails.

During the Benghazi investigation, Clinton’s true mastery of her personal data was revealed. In the fall of 2014, Clinton said her lawyers had reviewed all the emails on her server, Specifically the “hdr22@clintonemail.com” account between January. 21, 2009, to February. 1, 2013. “After the review was completed to identify and provide to the Department of State all of the secretary’s work-related and potentially work-related emails, the secretary chose not to keep her non-record personal emails and asked that her account (which was no longer in active use) be set to retain only the most recent 60 days of email.”

“No emails from hdr22@clintonemail.com for the time period Jan. 21, 2009, through Feb. 1, 2013, reside on the server. Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com e-mails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate and legally authorized.”

Clinton had ordered someone to wipe out her servers and backups between December. 5, 2014, and March 27, 2015.  The FBI would not seize Clinton’s servers until five months after they discovered them.

On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks announced that they had “dumped over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton.”These emails were not hacked but a direct result of a Freedom of Information Act or FOIA”

Continue to Part Four

The post The Hack – Part Three: Deception and Deceit appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

PRESIDENT PUTIN:  (As interpreted.)  (Laughs.)”

Cyber-warfare specialists serving with the 175th Cyberspace Operations Group of the Maryland Air National Guard (U.S. Air Force photo by J.M. Eddins Jr.

Sometimes What You Think Happened Is What Someone Wants You To Think Happened.

By Robert Young Pelton

Note: The name of the cyber company and the owners have been changed.

It’s midnight in Manhattan, Friday January 13^th, 2017 and someone is hacking into Rudolph Giuliani’s server at his corporate headquarters.  A few hours earlier Giuliani, head of a cyber security provider and senior advisor to a law firm was just announced as Trump’s guru on cyber security for the President Elect. The timing of the hack less than a few hours later is not a coincidence. Giuliani’s cyber team had knocked off for the weekend at noon.  Giuliani no stranger to the media but not known for his cyber security skills had appeared on Fox and Friends the day before to boast about his new cyber security effort.

I am on a conference call with the members of SybrTek (the name has been changed at the companies request), a new Texas-based cyber security and big data startup that could be described as the real world equivalent of the Cyber Expendables. Five men each with deep experience singularly and collectively inside the CIA, NSA, JSOC, NASA, SEALS and other government agencies. The “black” teams that support Special Mission Units and covert operations that go as far back as Angola and 80’s Afghanistan. Like a comic book super team, each has an unusual skill in addition to their military and intel training; hacking, jamming, disinformation, Psyops, etc, all honed in real world counter terrorism missions and now available for hire.

These men are not bespectacled nerds yelling “I’m in!” but they are combat vets pushing 60 with the usual assortment of paunches, bad necks, fading vision, military pension checks and about 150 combined years of experience fighting terrorists on the electronic and mud battlefields. They also know that demand for their services is high. America is losing the cyber war not because of terrorists or hackers, but because one of their main enemies was, and is, the glacial pace of their own government to adapt and change to new technology.

Now that they retired they are free to surf the big wave, 30 to 60-day cycle of cyber tool development. Not surprisingly their first clients were overseas. Sentiment tracking of the population for Saudi Arabia’s government to measure the impact of change was one task. Could the kingdom survive a sales tax? How far could they shift to more moderate politics without triggering an uprising? These dull questions are the lifeblood of data analytics.

Their new company deals with the never ending and ever changing problems of hackers; The high level and low level espionage that has been hogging the headlines every since Hillary Clinton wiped her server with a cloth. These men battle in the world of Information Operations aka Strategic Communications aka psyops aka Influence Operations aka dirty tricks. A battleground of selective and targeted information designed to create an alternative universe.

This might require deceiving your opponent,  hacking the enemy, black bagging a server by breaking in and physically stealing computers and hard drivers, creating rumors or fake news or even generating false documents (the OSS called them “Black Letters” in World II), use psychographic profiles to target and rile up certain “excitable”groups, create confusion by rapidly injecting conflicting evidence or statements, run “false flag” operations to fool the enemy and even distribute manufactured or real scandal that might include video of sexual activity, something the Russians call “kompromat”.

Most of these tactics are not actually the end result but are created by proxies to generate secondary and tertiary effects like public outrage, scandal, loss of confidence.  Ideally a population can be controlled by outside forces if they lose trust in their leaders, leaders are  less subject to accountability if the media loses the trust of the public in publishing what is true and what is false.

This group of battered and bruised warriors, hope their dark mastery of the full spectrum of “strategic communications” will match the government, business and public’s sudden realization that the once militarized doctrine of psyops has now become a everyday marketing weapon against civilians. The recent publicity involving Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and election marketing are just a few examples of a new deceptive assault on our senses and thought process.

They hope that harnessing their skills of gathering human intelligence to understanding marketing trends, to even geo-targeting individuals to within a 3 by 3-foot space will provide truth and clarity to clients. Tonight however, they are just trying to find someone to report the hack of Giuliani to. Something the SybrTek team had been doing for members of the Trump transition team since the summer of 2016.

+ + +

Finally our interview was interrupted by an urgent telephone call from the client. “Someone is trying to hacking Giuliani” repeats the former operative to the computer executive as he   watches the screen on his laptop. The hacker has logged in through a backdoor on Giuliani’s site put there by Anonymous. “Somebody didn’t put a patch on some old software and they are in” says one cyber analyst.  “You can tell Anonymous by its malware” he says matter of factly while watching the digital stranger poke around Giuliani’s New York-based server called http://giulianipartners.com.. The timing is perfect. Maybe the new government will take cyber security seriously and they might get a contract.

January 12, 2016 – Rudy Giuliani on Fox and Friends discussing his new role as cyber security organizer for President Trump. His server was hacked hours later.

In early January of 2016, Presidential candidate Donald Trump mentioned that he would bring in private individuals to work on cyber security. He was quickly learning that the vast machine that is the government is slow to react and even slower to adopt rapidly changing threats against computer systems. That 30 – 90 day battlefield during which hackers and counter hackers joust back and forth, generating new software and tricks.

Rudolph Giuliani then went on Fox & Friends on the morning of January 12, saying that he was going to “coordinate all this“. Giuliani is not known for having any experience in cyber security but he did have a consultancy and had a broad business based from his post 9/11 popularity. By that evening, his server was under assault. Keep in mind, it wasn’t the hack, there was nothing of value on the cheap web page, it was the secondary effect of being hacked, that the hackers were after.

Russians weren’t doing the hacking. That night on Twitter, Kansas-based cyber security expert,  Michael Fienen found himself the star of a real time social media crowd attack on Giuliani’s server as thousands of computer nerds began picking apart every aspect of the Giuliani’s servers security or lack thereof. After a long night of real time tweets and surprised at his sudden viral fame, he posted. “If I’d known this was gonna blow up like it did, I’d have given it a witty hashtag. Someone else said #RudyOnRails (a pun on Ruby On Rails open source software) and that made me laugh.”

Tech critics publicly lambasted Giuliani’s system and his simple page for being outdated and easy to penetrate. Critics pointed that the web site using doing everything wrong from running Flash to having multiple open ports to having an expired SSL certificate. It wasn’t that hard.

+ + +

“Hacking”, the criminal electronic act of breaking and entering into a computer or email system to steal or access information is little different than the 1972 Watergate break in and wiretapping of the Democratic National Headquarters hatched by ex-FBI agent, G. Gordon Libby. That analog hack was discovered by a night watchman and later exposed to be part of a much more nefarious election plan by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. Although hacking is a common as physical theft, the act becomes magnified during political campaigns generating doubt in “the system”. A fictional idea that governments are somehow secure and moral.  Political hacking adds a cinematic measure of deceit and intrigue when compared to simply data or information theft from consumers.

In the room with the SybrTekpatched in by phone, the conversation stops as they monitor the activity going in and out of the giulianipartners.com server.

“Holy shit, they just sent Giuliani an email from his own server.

“Did you contact him?

“I just sent one of his guy’s a text”

“Do you want to stop it? This is going to be really fucking embarrassing tomorrow if he gets in”

“We can’t, it’s against the law, we could but a bot on this and send it back to the hacker”

This hack on Giuliani is just one of thousands of attempts every minute against high profile targets particularly against members of political parties. And they are almost impossible to stop and harder to prosecute. Again, this real life hacking scenario was designed to have what is called a “secondary effect”: Embarrassing a Trump team member with the idea that a cyber consultant got hacked within hours of the announcement. Much like the search for Clinton’s missing or deleted or classified emails became the singular scandal of the election.

This hack occurs just after midnight, there is no one in the office, it is when most companies back up their files and if the hacker findsanything of value the appointment of Giuliani and the media payments for scandalous dumps would make the exercise worthwhile. Luckily it is caught and reported to the government authorities by SybrTek. Again, hacking favors the criminal because counter hacking is just as illegal as hacking.

+ + +

The SybrTekcrew rattle off a list of major hacks of political figures on both election teams in the last few months.  Jim (an alias) for a former Navy SEAL says “Information is worth money. There is a $30,000 bounty from Wikileaks for anyone providing proof that Obama is deleting or dumping data. Hackers have been after Trump, his family, the foundations and major supporters forever.”

Jim insists that in the closing hours of the Obama administration IT techs were removing the markers from hard drivers rendering them impossible to search but maintaining the data on the drives.

“Trump can brag that the RNC didn’t get hacked but it was actually just easier to hack the DNC.”

Hacking is illegal, it’s theft, digital breaking and entry, but it is the new normal. Millions and millions of servers have been compromised with all the sensitive and exploitable data along with. Swingers sites like Ashley Madison, email accounts like Yahoo, financial sites complete with addresses, credit card numbers and even the Federal Government’s employee data all end up somewhere for sale somewhere.   It’s not personal, it is just a business.

Listening to the real time hack and discussion in the background, we discuss just how vulnerable our government and their employees are.

“The transition team’s emails are all compromised” says Ray, a former CIA Special Activities Division/Ground Branch officer and Marine, “we were helping some of the team defend against hackers on their personal and business emails but they now have to use a dot gov address. We discovered that the transition emails were hacked in 2008 and 2009 with malware that the government didn’t’ notice. Why because they didn’t’ need to use them in 2012 and it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that we ran some tests and found the bug. We reported it to the NCCIC National Cyber Security and Communications Integration Center and a few other places. That bug has gone on to infect 140 different government departments.” Ray explains. “We could fix it quickly but then again it would be against the law” Ray says with a slice of irony. According to the 586-page report records and submissions to the NCCIC, as of January 13,2017 so far nothing has been done by the Department of Homeland Security.

+ + +

“I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.  But I have — I have confidence in both parties.  I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server.  What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC?  Where are those servers?  They’re missing.  Where are they?  What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails?  Thirty-three thousand emails gone — just gone.  I think, in Russia, they wouldn’t be gone so easily.  I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails” – President Donald Trump

The Intelligence community insists that America is at war with hackers, specifically Russian hackers.  On January 2017, the DNI released a comprehensive report, “Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions, in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution”. On Friday July 13, 2018 the DoJ indicted 12 Russian hackers and alleged that Russian intelligence agents were behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee and other computers. The indictment is very focused, much of this publicity on hacking, cyber security and missing emails started with the controversy around Hillary Clinton’s use of private servers and the deletion of an estimated 31,830 of the 62,320 emails on her server.

The indictment was also well timed, being dropped just before President Trump was to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was clear, the Department of Justice and related agencies were painting a red bullseye on Vladimir Putin, a former Russian spy and naming names. Just before President Donald Trump was about to make a “grand bargain“, in a private meeting and with Russia, America’s former public enemy #1

But let’s go back

The connection between President Trump and SybrTek began with Lt General Mike Flynn. Some of the men on the team worked with Flynn’s during his 33-year military career, particularly during his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn is now a civilian and in the early days of the campaign, was often seen at the side of the yellow haired, casino owner turned reality TV host. The flamboyant Trump and his grim-faced war horse advisor made for an odd couple  A lifetime Democrat, Flynn was part of an advisory group of ex-intel leaders who made themselves available to council candidates about the threats to national security. In July of 2016 Flynn had released a book penned by well-known Neocon Michael Ledeen called “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies Hardcover” and was quite vocal about the need to destroy ISIS.  The hatchet faced and taciturn Flynn had a calming effect on Trump during the campaign according to the SybrTekteam members.

Flynn became a sage advisor who provided Trump clear analysis of confusing events, his battle cred and rough style also appealed to Trump’s fans. Not surprisingly,  Flynn was Trump’s original pick for Vice President.  A few off-putting TV appearances and some over enthusiastic public speeches in which he led anti-Hillary chants to “Lock Her Up” showed that the man who worked in the shadows might not be cut out to be in the glare of the spotlight. Flynn also had enemies on home turf. In addition to his hardline view on ISIS, Flynn’s greatest sin is that he wanted to stop the revolving door black budget gravy train inside the major intelligence agencies. Money that is generously back doored to faithful intel retirees. Money that is in the billions and will never be held accountable to the public. Back i January of 2010. Flynn even suggested that spies should be more like journalists in a controversial report that surprised the intelligence community.

The military has some of the most sophisticated computer tools and techniques. The problem is we fight wars in counties where even electricity is an innovation.

Although Flynn was an Obama pick to run the DIA, Flynn’s aggressive style soon banded the career bureaucrats together into an angry cabal and he was forced out a year early. In demand as an intel pundit, he started Flynn Intel Group. His equally aggressive efforts to woo foreign clients became the target of negative media, focusing on his unregistered lobbying and foreign meetings to pitch his intel firm including his dinner in Russia for Russia Today. At the dinner afterwards Vladimir Putin walked about and sat next to Flynn. Suddenly he was viewed as a Russian proxy. Nobody really held up his client list to see that it also included a wide variety of Middle Eastern and other countries that we do deals with.

Flynn’s new media fame also led to an intensification of hacks on his platforms. In early July 2016, SybrTek told Flynn that his phone had been compromised. Nothing sensitive “I’m an open book” he told the SybrTek team but still,  someone was targeting the Trump campaign team.

SybrTekquickly found the sender of the phishing email that led to the hack.  The ISP, caller code, originators address, registered database was open source. Which led them to two different servers in Poland.

The team then traced the hacker back to yet another server located a small town of 100,000 people in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. They hard pinged a location in a town called Râmnicu Vâlcea.

They quickly found a person attached to the server. A young female Romanian hacker.  Ray remembers seeing her profile picture, “She was cute. She did her homework. She was offering her services at 700 euro to target and hack anyone you wanted. It’s a business. Turned out she had emptied Flynn’s phone… and we found other things.”

Three weeks before the July 18^th Republican convention, the SybrTek team not only found Flynn’s stolen data but stolen data (not emails) from journalist and Clinton confidante and former journalist Sidney Blumenthal  That wasn’t all there was embarrassing material on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump kept on that same server.  They won’t discuss what they found. “Embarrassing” is all they will say about the files. What they found were Clinton’s medical records stolen from a visit to a doctor in Germany.

The team then reported to the government that they had found  sensitive information sitting on a foreign server on both parties. These files on either former candidates have not been released to the media or public. The hackers who hack the hackers are paid to keep their mouth shut and they don’t  want to get caught up in the polarized media hysteria that doesn’t understand the world of hacking.

They are quite vocal about the stunning lapses in simple security taken by both Clinton (who was discovered to be using a private unsecured home computer for government business) and the DNC, an organization that had security systems penciled in for installation but never actually installed them.

Although internal government agencies were concerned about Clinton’s use of a private emails system as early as 2009, hackers had tried numerous times to breach Clinton’s basement stored Apple server. in Chappaqua, New York.  It wasn’t until a December 2012, FOIA request from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington came up empty that the public began to wonder where Clinton’s emails actually were. In June of 2013, Clinton hired Platte River Servers who physically moved her home-based server into a data service center in New Jersey.

+++

Clinton finally hired an expert to deal with data after Romanian hacker named “Guccifer”  dumped a number of emails between Clinton and insider Sidney Blumenthal in March of 2013, Clinton’s private server came to light. Throughout the Benghazi investigation, the idea of Clinton not ever using a .gov email address never really took hold.  Her motivation appeared simple. She and her staff wanted to keep their communications simple away from FOIAs and government employees. Her excuse was that any emails she sent would be resident on the recipient’s government servers. There were concerns about her servers handling sensitive and classified information. These questions would lead to a July, 2016 FBI investigation.

New York Times broke the story in March 2, 2015 letting the world know that Clinton had been using a personal computer at home since 2009. Based on Guccifer’s boasting and Clinton’s high profile address but low profile security, by then the DNC and Clinton staffers and most likely Clinton’s computer had been under attack and most likely had been compromised. The data, movements, communications, plans and files of the former President of the United States, his family and the current Secretary of State would be of the highest interest to all foreign intelligence agencies.  Various tech experts and government officials pointed out that Clinton initially operated her laptop and Blackberry without encryption software making it extraordinarily easy to hack her and other people who communicated with her. In Part Two we will explore just how badly compromised the White House was.

It would be relevant to note that there was little to no mention of Russia in any of this initial U.S. media and political generated furor over Clinton’s lax security and mishandling of government files. There is also the given that hackers have little incentive to broadcast their break in’s. They are happy to sift and sort through compromised computers for years if needed. Had Clinton been hacked? Well her friends had. Why not her email.

+++

On January, 22, 2014, a 40-year old Romanian named Marcel Lazar Lehel was arrestedin Arad near his village of Sâmbăteni. Arad 337 miles west of Bucharest. Lehel was “Guccifer”. In 2013, Guccifer had hacked in a computer and found jpg’s with President George Bush’s home paintings including one of the naked Bush in his bathtub. He stole them from the former president’s sister and he guessed her personal security codes by using Wikipedia.

He had also been busy hacking “into the email and social media accounts of high-profile victims, including a family member of two former U.S. presidents, a former U.S. Cabinet member, a former member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former presidential advisor” according to the nine count DoJ indictment. It was determined that Guccifer was busy hacking between December 2012 to January 2014 mostly out of boredom since he was not working his normal job as taxi driver.

Blumenthal’s files found on the Romanian server, according to the FBI were dated from January 2012. As Hillary Clinton quite rightly predicted, her emails were on other people’s servers just not government ones. Regardless of what security protection Clinton had or didn’t have, her emails were clearly being hacked through her associate’s computers.

In May of 2016, Guccifer told Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge that he had breached Clinton’s server in early 2013 and it was “easy” not just for Lazar but for “everybody”. In the jailhouse interview Lazar provided detailed information on how he breached the server. Lazar also hacked Clinton confidante, Sydney Blumenthal’s AOL emails in March of 2013.  The Romanian insisted that all he had to do was find Clinton’s IP, wait until the ports were open and use software to breach the data. He told Fox “As far as I remember, yes, there were … up to 10, like, IPs from other parts of the world,” referring to other hackers online at the same time. Guccifer’s favorite hack was to reset the password and then use Wikipedia and Google to find the names of pets, or schools used as security questions.

There is no evidence that Clinton’s servers were compromised by Lazar other than Guccifer’s statements, but Clinton’s servers were compromised as we will find out in Part Two.  Things started getting serious in the Spring of 2016…two years after Guccifer went to jail.

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A Wikileaks document dated March 19, 2016 details how John Podesta, Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign received an email from Gmail notifying that someone had logged into his personal Gmail account and to please click on the email to enter his username and password so it could be changed.  Podesta’s Chief of Staff, Sara Latham then pinged the campaign staff tech consultant Charles Delavan (both of whom were was using a hillaryclinton.com email, not the Gmail account in questions). Delvan responded:

“Sara, This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account. He can go to this link: https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both. It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.”

The source of log in was identified by Google as:

Saturday, 19 March 8:34:30 UTC

IP Address: 134.249.139.239

Location: Ukraine

Podesta or his assistant then inexplicably used the phishing link in the email rather than the link Delavan provided. This simple act opened a back door to all of Podesta’s emails and any passwords he may have typed into those emails and more importantly the ability to fool other people on his email list into opening what looked like legitimate documents from Podesta. Again a hacker only reveals their presence once they feel they have enough data to sell. If a freelancer was to market real time access to the DNCs strategy and communications during an election, it would hard to put a price on that access.

Delavan later insisted he meant to type “illegitimate” rather than the word “legitimate” to describe the phishing email.

This is where it starts to get weird. DNC leaders were tipped to the hack in late April 2016 after some had gained entry to the DCCC and then used stolen credentials to then gain entry into the DNC system. The DNC insists that the breach was discovered the month before in April. Not coincidently a site called “DC Leaks” was registered on April 19, 2016. This hack by what was now a team calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 was professional and aggressive. Unlike the more random Guccifer 1.0 , this 2.0 Guccifer appeared to be politically motivated. The goal appeared to get as many files into the public domain even though few of them qualified as “Clinton Dirt”  Over 300 individuals related to Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic political groups had been targeted since March but no Clinton dirt.

There was dirt on Trump. Not very dirty dirt, but it generated the perception that there was an embarrasing dossier on Trump .

Among the files leaked on June 15, was a massive “oppo” file on Donald Trump.  Not the more famous and rancid “golden shower” dossier published in January 2017 by Buzzfeed. The first oppo file was a massive unreadable collection of open source articles.  It was the Steele dossier, which was not hacked, that began to push the Russian/Trump narrative. The Steele file was not only a work in progress but had been actively shopped around to major media outlets who found the accusations salacious and potentially libelous. The shopping began in October 2016, with Mother Jones and that was after Steele had handed over the report in July 2016 to the FBI. The FBI initially agreed to continue to fund Steele’s work but changed their mind. The main architects were a research company called Fusion GPS who inexplicably had  clients Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin.  According to the New York Times, Glen Simpson was not only developing dirt on Clinton via Steele, but working for a law firm, BakerHostetler, representing Prevezon Holdings, the company who had also hired Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin to dig up dirt and attack Bill Browder, the man behind the Magnitsky Act.

“He’s a professional smear campaigner and liar for money,” Browder lashed out at Simpson in the New York Times. “The credibility of anything that he does is in question.”

The Steele Dossier as it became known, is classic Russian kompromat and clearly attempts to link Trump to Russia influence via blackmail and financial dealings with dirty bits sprinkled in to catch the media’s attention. James Comey of the FBI notified President Trump on January 6, 2017 that the intelligence community believed the Russians were attempting to interfere with the election. On January 10, Buzzfeed published the Steele dossier. The singular document had shifted the focus from Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to the   potential of a Russian asset running the country. A perfect secondary effect of psyops.

Remember this is not the massive 211 page open source opposition report that focuses mostly on Trump’s marriages and business squables using published articles.  This clear attempt to conflate one “leaked” dossier with one that created and shopped after the election began the slow spin of the media towards linking Russia with Trump. An accusation that continues to gather speed and substance as Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller continues his investigation and the FBI indicts Russians and Trump associates in numerous indictments.  But the reality was that Trump didn’t win the popular vote, Hillary Clinton did. And the victory in the election was decided by the electoral college.

Where did the idea that Russia had hacked the election and linked to Donald Trump come from?

Continued in Part Two: “The Hunt for Clinton Dirt”

The post The Hack Part One – The Attack On America appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

Back in the late 90’s and early oughts, I used to bump into a well known survival expert named Jeff Randall. If you know Jeff you know he doesn’t tolerate much but he zeroed in pretty quickly on the work I was doing in war zones. We became fast friends and spend many a long night discussing the business of adventure.

We would meet up at the Soldier of Fortune convention or the SHOT show back when real mercenaries, militia members and clandestine folks used to gather around the pool and tell stories.  One of the things Randall kept pestering me about was designing a knife; something I had never really thought of, despite being a product designer and marketer in my past career.

The original prototype for what would launch a entire knife business.

In my travels to conflict, I was more of a “local screwdriver in a bag” kind of self defense carry or a “cheap locally made knife that I could ditch before flying” type.  Randall is an expert on survival training and ran classes in the Peruvian jungles for pilots. Since then, he has branched out into just having fun doing ditch medicine, wilderness, rope and caving type classes. I stuck to entering conflict zones and doing missions with U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan, accompaning South African mercenaries in Somalia fighting pirates and being on the front lines in Libya in Siirt as local militias wiped out ISIS. Each trip was an education on what worked, an what was superfluous.

By 2008, and after ten years of pestering by Jeff, I thought I would give the idea of designing a knife a shot. I knew that the first rule of survival is not to get into trouble.  The second is to make sure you actually have your survival tools with you if you need them.

That meant they had to be small, easy to carry and multi functional. If you really needed a survival tool, it can’t break. This meant the classic Swiss Army Knife or ten dollar gas station knife might cause you more harm than benefit if it broke under hard use.

A key part of all our knife designs is the concept of self confidence; that the tool you bring will perform the job when you need it the most.

I decided to call it the HEST, short for “Hostile Environment Survival Tool” – a knife that could be useful in the wilderness as well as for self-defense. When I was ready to show my design, Jeff was surprised at how compact the knife was. The HEST also had a number of features not found on simple knives. It was beefy, thick and indestructible. I made it out of spring steel, the kind that locals make machetes out of. I refined its finish by enlisting the skills of Shon Rowen, who had perfected a heat treat on the famous high carbon 1095 steel.

H•E•S•T stands for Hostile Environment Survival Tool. Just one minor change like the pry bar can add numerous features and benefits to a survival tool. The two hole provide lashing points and light weight while the pry bar allows the knife to be hammered, saves the tip and is an ideal non lethal self defense tool.

The DPx Gear HEST Original was only four and a half ounces, under eight inches long and was designed to be affordable. Every square millimeter of the knife was examined for usefulness, ergonomics and function. The handles could be removed revealing a hidden storage compartment. The sheath came with a washer designed to remove the scales.

The blade was hardened to Rockwell hardness 58, which allows for stropping or field sharpening, much like professional butchers use high carbon steel instead of exotic harder blends.

Small but tough. The best survival tool is the one you actually have on you when you need it.

There are holes integrated to both lighten and balance with the most unusual feature being the pronounced pry bar where the pommel is. This allows the HEST to be hammered like a chisel, and provides a reverse grip, a non-lethal concealed grip and quite the nasty surprise for back alleys.

The blade has our patented notch for opening bottles, lifting pots and lashing.  The Original continues to sell well and is a knife that has made a lot of friends from professional Bear skinners to Army EOD.

The HEST Original has fans among the military, LEO and even big game hunters. Experts who know why a Shon Rowen heat treat on 1095 is the professionals choice.

DPx Gear HEST ORIGINAL Features and Specifications

Fixed blade survival knife in black textured powder coated, high carbon 1095 hardened and tempered steel with Rockwell hardness of 57-58

• Brass hardware
• Pry bar
• Lashing points
• Wire breaker
• Bottle opener/ Pot lifter/ thumb control point
• Green canvas Micarta scales with hollow storage area
• Designed to be used as a neck knife by removing scales
• Black Kydex sheath with optional belt clip
• Made in America by Shon Rowen in Idaho Falls
• Lifetime warranty

• Weight:  4.40 oz
• Overall Length: 7.63″
• Blade Length: 3.13″
• Blade Thickness:  0.19″
• Handle Material: Green Canvas Micarta

The HEST folder is simple, overbuilt without a single wasted feature or curve. It is also ergonomically designed to fit in the hand as a self defense tool.

The DPX Gear HEST/F Folder.

In 2010, I had sold enough HEST blades to learn that folders are where the real business is. Traditional fixed knives are important tools but folders, well they are a work of art.  At this point, my neophyte entry into knife design needed help.

I leaned on Tom Novak, a young outdoor enthusiast and fan to enter the world of engineering and digital design. Both Tom, a self-taught expert and his talented designer twin brother Andre would later come to work as a team to take concepts to 3D drawings, to digital rendering, then 3D printouts and then finally prototypes that I would take to the rough zones to test.

A three dimensional renderings of the DPx HEST/F to test with customers.

We wanted to retain the ergonomics and function of the fixed HEST in the new folding HEST. I also wanted the frame and blade over engineered and over built.

In my years in the bush as a lumberjack and on various expeditions, I was not a fan of folding knifes due to the horrific injuries they can create and the multiple failures.

The choices of materials for the frame side were easy. A thick but light slab of aviation grade Titanium was an expensive, but perfect material as the back bone of the HEST. on the other side, instead of using a liner and a scale we went with a thick slab of phenolic laminate in a rough grip.  Lighter than using all Ti but well within the requirements I set.

A sturdy hard use pocket knife may not be that big of a deal back home but as you slowly head towards the front lines, having a dependable tool becomes critical. This is a week before entering the fighting in South Sudan for a piece in Vice. You can see the the slogan “When Survival Is Your Life” applies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDSu8wlQG6c

The next task was to design a blade of equal thickness, but stronger. A high carbon German D2 tool steel was chosen. The knife would hold an edge and still take a razor edge for tough tasks like skinning and dirty work. To make sure the knife could not collapse, I introduced an idea in development by Rick Hinderer called a Roto Block. Very similar to a gun safety. Once the dial was turned to “lock” it is physically impossible for the blade to close on the user’s fingers.

I put a lot of usability into the folder design like jimping that worked with gloves and wet hands, but also functioned as wire strippers for household, automotive and thin detonation wire. I had worked in tunnels blasting and always wanted this feature.

The most serendipitous discovery was how well the potholder/opener in the blade worked as a rapid opener. The idea that a knife must open faster than an automatic and to the rear is important in hostile encounters. After a few times opening the DPx Gear HEST/F flippers and autos seem painfully slow and awkward.

The Milspec version of the DPx Gear HEST/F folder features Sleipner steel. A proven hard cutting tool steel formula that keeps on slicing and still can be sharpened in the field. We chose this unusual steel because it has proven itself in the meat processing industry where blade sharpness is measured to the penny.

Simple things like converting the lanyard hole into a standard hex driver was overlooked by most, if not all, knife makers.  Designing features like a deep carry clip that fit on heavy pants or military gear that had the exact amount of tension for rapid deployment was easy.  The trick was designing the whole system to be held on by a stout enough screw that doubled as a glass breaker (complete with Tungsten Carbon insert).  More implementation of ideas that came from hard time in the field.

A folder that was designed to last a lifetime or more

Finally, what made DPx Gear unique was not only were these knives tested in places like Borneo, Somalia, Afghanistan and other hard use environments, but that I keep tweaking them to get it exactly right.

Real lasting customer service is also part of that long term commitment to our customers. Paying attention and respecting customer input again helps us modify, design and built better and better products, by having constant input and feedback.

DPx Gear takes pride in starting everyone of our designs in the field. Only once I can fully feel comfortable that our customer gets everything they expect, do we go into production.

So next time you are in Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan or any other areas where our customers work. Look for Mr DP.

DPx Gear HEST/F 2.0 Features and Specifications

The DPx HEST/F 2.0 is a German D2 tool steel folder mated to a U.S. made Titanium alloy frame with a durable American G10 scale assembled by the craftsmen at LionSTEEL in Northern Italy.

The HEST/F was developed as the direct folding version of the HEST fixed blade knife and was dubbed the 2.0 because there were a number of significant modifications made to the original design of this brutal use folder. The goal was to increase strength without adding weight and to directly address concerns about ease of opening, “strength of lockup and usability.

• Blade is German D2 tool steel polished, then Milspec phosphate coated tumble finish
• 6Al4V Grade 5 titanium alloy frame and spring frame lock
• Patented LionSTEEL RotoBlock system
• American-made G10 handle scale
• 1/4″ hex driver
• Unique wire stripper jimping and hard lashing points
• Thumb grip/bottle opener
• Removable stainless steel clip and glass breaker with integrated lanyard attachment
• Knife includes a unique, collectible Mr. DP skull adjustment tool which is used to adjust the pivot tension and remove/replace the glass breaker screw with an included flat screw. The tool may also be used as a handy EDC by itself.

• Weight:  5.1 oz
• Overall Length: 7.63
• Blade Length:  3.15
• Steel:  D2
• Rockwell Hardness:  60
• Blade Coating:  Milspec Phosphate
• Blade Thickness:  0.19″
• Handle Material:  OD green textured G10/6Al4v Titanium Frame lock”

The Original DPx HEST/F Urban Kickstarter Campaign Models: (T to B) Sterile, Bronze, America and Mr. DP Editions.

The Tougher, Younger, Smaller Brother: The DPx Gear HEST/F URBAN

How do you transfer the rock solid confidence the DPx Gear Original provides in a small urban friendly folder? Easy make it stronger.

As you can imagine, as soon as you announce a product you insist is perfect, the requests for something different begin. I had designed the HEST series for my large hands and less than gentle use of gear. I actually built in the idea of patina into every material and finish. There are many DPx Gear HEST owners who brag on just how beat up and beautiful their blade is.

Everything you expect in a hard use knife but in a smaller tougher package

What I was missing was the trend for people who want a smaller knife, one that fits within legal carry city limits which is roughly a three-inch blade. These knife fans didn’t foresee any trips into Yemen or Syria, but wanted some of the cachet that comes with products used by U.S. Special Forces, first responders and expedition leaders.

With some hesitation, I set about shrinking down the DPx Gear HEST/F 2.0 into what became the DPx Gear HEST/F Urban. I refused to shrink overall strength and thickness ratios, but I did want to upgrade the materials where possible. I also wanted input from the target audience, so we went to Kickstarter in an innovative campaign to both insert consumer ideas and gauge response.

The final product was a tougher knife than it’s big brother. At only 3.35 ounces and with marginally thinner frame and blade, the Urban was small and tough. Adding things like a caged bearing system and all American hardware and manufacturing also made the knife a hit.

So now the DPx Gear HEST family is comprised of the Original Fixed Blade, the HEST/F 2.0 folder and the compact Urban series.

DPx HEST/F Urban Specifications

The DPx HEST/F Urban is the last pocket knife you’ll need for every day carry.

• Small, Tri-gauge wire stripper jimping.  The thumb grip features three notches in the exact gauges to strip household, auto and timer wire for blasting or electronics

• Fully reversible, deep carry pocket clip.  A deep pocket clip means your pocket knife rides as low and unobtrusively as possible in your pocket. The angle of the clip over the frame lock adds additional support to the lock. The DPx HEST/F Urban is made from not just durable materials but stain free materials. Even the clip screws and hardware are designed to take harsh environments with ease.

• A U.S. invented tested and proven frame lock has become the standard locking feature for high-end custom knives. We added a stainless steel cap to reduce wear on the lock face.

• Weight:  3.35 oz
• Overall Length:  6.7″
• Blade Length:  2.9″
• Steel:  CPM S35VN
• Rockwell Hardness:  61
• Blade Coating:  None
• Blade Thickness:  0.16″
• Handle Material:  6Al4v Titanium

The post The Story of How Robert Young Pelton Created DPx Gear appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

This article on ODA 595, General Dostum, John Walker Lindh and the battle at Qali-i-Jangi was originally published in the March 2002 edition of National Geographic Adventure

THE LEGEND OF HEAVY AND THE BOYS  By Robert Young Pelton

The Regulators flew in from Uzbekistan at night on a blacked-out Chinook helicopter. They landed near a mud-walled compound in the remote Darra-e Suf valley in northern Afghanistan. As they began unloading their gear, they were met by Afghans in turbans, their faces wrapped. “It was like that scene in Close Encounters where the aliens meet humans for the first time,” one soldier says later. “Or maybe that scene in Star Wars: These sand people started jabbering in a language we had never heard.” The Americans shouldered their hundred-pound rucksacks while the Afghans hefted the rest of the equipment. The gear seemed to float from the landing site under a procession of brown blankets and turbans.

The next morning, about 60 Afghan cavalry came thundering into the compound. Ten minutes later, another 40 riders galloped up. General Abdul Rashid Dostum had arrived.

“Our mission was simple,” another soldier says. “Support Dostum. They told us, ‘If Dostum wants to go to Kabul, you are going with him. If he wants to take over the whole country, do it. If he goes off the deep end and starts whacking people, advise higher up and maybe pull out.’ This was the most incredibly open mission we have ever done.”

Before heading in-country, the soldiers had been briefed only vaguely about Dostum. They’d heard rumors that he was 80 years old, that he didn’t have use of his right arm. And they’d been told that he was the most powerful anti-Taliban leader in northern Afghanistan. “I thought the guy was this ruthless warlord,” one soldier says. “I assumed he was fricking mean, hard. You know: You better not show any weakness. Then he rides up on horseback with one pant leg untucked, looking like Bluto.”

Dostum dismounted and shook everyone’s hand, then sat on a mound covered with carpets. He talked for half an hour. Dostum’s strategy was now their strategy: to ride roughshod over Taliban positions up the Darra-e Suf Valley, roll north over the Tingi Pass in the Alborz Range, then sweep north across the plains and liberate Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan’s second largest city. When the council broke up, Dostum stood and motioned toward the horses. America’s finest were about to fight their first war on horseback in more than a hundred years.

The rocket howls over the roof of General Dostum’s house in Khoda Barq at about 10 p.m. It’s November 26, my second day in Afghanistan, and already I’m in the middle of a hellacious firefight. Although nighttime gunfire is normal in Afghanistan, there is an urgency to the sound of the deep explosions that come from the 19th-century fortress of Qala Jangi, just over a mile east from Khoda Barq, a Soviet-era apartment complex west of Mazar. The heavy shooting, the worried soldiers, the rapid radio chatter—all signal that something ugly is going on over there.

Airstrikes, AC130’s and Hazara guards had killed all but 86 al Qaeda and Taliban fighters
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Meanwhile, I’m hunkered down, waiting for Dostum. I’ve arranged through intermediaries to spend a month with the general, but for the past week, he has been a hundred miles east, trying to subdue Taliban forces that control the city of Kunduz. General Abdul Rashid Dostum is a man who has rarely been interviewed but has often been typecast as a brutal warlord—usually because of his reputation for winning. He is a kingmaker who works the ethnic minority to choose who will rule and who will fail. A man who is said by some journalists to define violence and treachery. (In his book “Taliban”, author Ahmed Rashid reports a tale he heard that Dostum once ordered his men to drag a thief behind a tank until all that was left was a bloody pulp of gore. Rashid later admitted that not only did he not witness it but it the event was fictional.  Beyond that, all I know is that Dostum, born a poor peasant, grew up to be a brilliant commander, a general, and a warlord—one of the many regional leaders across Afghanistan whose power derives both from ethnic loyalties and from military strength. That he is known to be a deft alliance maker—and breaker. And that he became the first Afghan commander to take over a major city when he entered Mazar-e Sharif on November 10. It’s an irresistible story, made all the more so by a convincing rumor I’ve been hearing since my arrival: that Dostum triumphed with a little help from his friends—specifically, the Green Berets.

As I wait for Dostum to return, though, the constant chatter of machine guns and the badoom badoom of cannons from an American gunship bombarding the fort—Dostum’s military headquarters—suggest that I might be a bit premature in offering any congratulations on winning the war. I soon learn that yesterday some 400 foreign Taliban prisoners overpowered their guards, broke into arsenals, and took over part of the fortress. Right next to where I am staying. I had first tried to meet the General in May of 1997. At the same moment he was trying to flee Mazar from the Taliban assault. I had jumped a train in Tajikistan, snuck into Uzbekistan and remained holed up in a dusty border town. My attempts to convince the Afghans took place in a building in which men with dark beards sat in from of Tony Montana style palm tree sunset wall paper murals. Finally after two weeks they admitted they could not smuggle me across. This time I had less worries with just a few hours waiting for Uzbek guards to look the other way while we hustled our kit over the blockade Friendship Bridge at night.

At 3:30 a.m., I go to bed. Three hours later, I am awakened by a massive explosion a few yards from the house—another near miss by a rocket fired from inside the fort. The sound of canon fire continues without a break but at a slower pace. In the morning Villagers come out in the crisp, golden light of morning, shivering and tired. Some huddle together to watch the gray pillars of smoke from the bombing runs. Others begin the work of the day without even paying attention to the nearby fighting.

In the afternoon, when I visit the 1985 fort called “Qala i Jangi” or Fort of the Soldiers,  bullets sing over my head. Up on the parapets, Dostum’s troops stream toward a gap in the ramparts created yesterday by an errant American 2000 lb bomb. Soldiers run up to the bite in the wall, shoot into the fort, and then scurry back down. I watch a fighter go up to the top, then crumple into a black pile of rags. Astoundingly, after two days of bombardment, the prisoners still control the fort.

ODA 595 Prepares to retrieve the body of Mike Spann from Qala-i-Jangi ©Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Late in the afternoon, a convoy of mud-spattered off-road vehicles pulls up, and a dozen dusty Americans in tan chocolate chip camo climb out. They have Beretta pistols strapped to their thighs like gunslingers and short M-4 rifles slung across their chests. They’re polite but wary about having their pictures taken as they set up their night-vision scopes. After a final check of their gear, they head into the fortress. Later, I find out that they’ve come hoping to retrieve the body of Central Intelligence Agency officer Johnny Micheal Spann, who was killed by Taliban prisoners—the first American combat casualty in Afghanistan.

Dostum arrives that night, ducking to avoid banging his head as he strides through the guest-house door. He takes my hand in a meaty grip and apologizes for being dirty and tired; he has just driven eight hours on a shattered road from Kunduz. He has two weeks of beard, beetling eyebrows, and a graying brush cut. When Dostum frowns, his features gather into a dark, Stalin-like scowl—his usual expression for formal portraits. But when he smiles, he looks like a naughty 12-year-old.

He sits and makes small talk, then excuses himself to take a shower. When he returns, the dark weariness has lifted. Over chai (tea), he announces good news. He has ended the bloody battle for Kunduz by negotiating with Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri, the two most senior Taliban leaders in the north. It seems that the “brutal warlord” has engineered the biggest peaceful surrender in recent Afghan history—more than 5,000 Afghan Taliban fighters and foreign volunteers laid down their arms. He waves the accomplishment aside with a shy smile even as he promises to introduce me to his new trophies—the mullahs. It turns out they’re staying next door, guests in Dostum’s house.

Mullah Faizel, commander of the Taliban Army in the North. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Dostum proves to be significantly more expansive in conversation than his scant press clippings would suggest, and he’s happy to fill me in on his background. Over the next few weeks I privately coin for him a nickname based on the media’s fear and his in person good humor: I call him Heavy D, after the 1980s rapper.  “Dostum” is actually a nickname that means “my friend” was born Abdul Rashid in 1954 in the desolate village of Khvajeh Do Kuh, about 90 miles west of Mazar. Headstrong and known to get into fights,  was adept at the game of buzkashi, in which horsemen attempt to toss the headless carcass of a calf into a circle. Dating at least to the days of Genghis Khan, the violent game is not so much about scoring as it is about using every dirty trick possible—beating, whipping, kicking—to prevent the opposing team from scoring. Buzkashi is the way Afghan boys learn to ride—and it’s the way Afghan politics is played: There are few rules and the toughest, meanest, and most brutal player takes the prize.

After the seventh grade, Dostum left school to help his father on the family farm. At 16, he started working as a laborer in the government-owned gas refinery in nearby Sheberghan, where he dabbled in union politics.

The people of Dostum’s village were so impressed with his leadership that they recruited 600 men for him to command. It was about this time that Abdul Rashid became “Dostum.” In Uzbek, dost means “friend”; dostum means “my friend.” It was a nickname that the young soldier was given for his habitual way of addressing people. When a local singer wrote a song about “Dostum,” the name stuck. He was quick to defend the weak and if negotiations failed he had no shortage of armed men that would stand beside him.

When a Marxist government came to power in a bloody coup in 1978, the new regime’s radical reforms ignited a guerrilla war with the mujahidin who based themselves in the country’s remote mountain ranges.

The young commando Abdul Rashid, quickly rose through the ranks.

Dostum enlisted in the Afghan military—one of the few ways for poor men to escape lives of labor and hardship in rural Afghanistan. He rose through the ranks quickly becoming a paratrooper in 1973, an armored unit in 1978 and Battalion 734 KhAD by 1983. Dostum’s real success was in negotiating enemy commanders to lay down their arms and to join him. He was authorized to transform his Jowyzjani militia into the 53rd Infantry Division in 1988 and ultimately under the Soviet backed regime of Najibullah, he became commander of the 7th Army Corps in charge of all of Northern Afghanistan. Again he began integrating mujahideen into the political military ranks among them his number two against the Taliban Lal Kamadan. At the end of the Soviet period Dostum had 45,000 troops with about half of them as village reserves. If one was to look for the roots of Dostum’s “warlord” reputation it began when he was the direct and most successful enemy of the CIA-backed insurgency of fundamentalist warlords based out of Pakistan. The idea that that Dostum would actually save the day for an embattled America is an irony that has not fully played out.

In the bewildering matrix of Afghan politics, Dostum has frequently—and nimbly—switched allegiances. In the 1980s, as a young army officer in the Soviet-backed government, he fought against the mujahidin. When the regime fell in 1992, three years after the Soviets departed, Dostum fought alongside the mujahidin and helped the Northern Alliance’s legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud battle the fundamentalist Pashtun forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and gain control of the capital. The shelling, raping, pillaging, looting, and house-to-house fighting that then befell Kabul stained the name of every mujahidin commander, including Dostum’s, and fueled his reputation for brutality. Today the government of President Ghani has welcomed the fighters of Hekmatyar from exile in Pakistan and is looking to bring the Taliban into the government. All the while ostracizing the now First Vice President Dostum who is currently in exile in Ankara plotting his next move.

But back in 2001, “Warlord” Dostum who was head of the Jumbesh political party had simpler but identical goals: Align with the U.S. to return from exile in Turkey and bring the Taliban into the new government.  show Dostum the chapter in Rashid’s book that includes the account of the gruesome execution of the thief. Dostum chuckles and denies the allegation. He freely admits that in two decades of war, abuses have been committed by the troops of every commander. “What else do you expect my enemies to say?” he asks. “That I am kind and gentle? I will let what you see be the truth.”

In 1996, when the Taliban rolled into Kabul, Dostum was forced to retreat to his stronghold in Mazar as the mullahs instituted their version of a pure Islamic state. “At first I thought, Why not let them rule?” he says. “Power is not given to anyone forever. If the Taliban can rule successfully, let them.” A year later, betrayed by his second in command, who had defected to the Taliban, Dostum fled to Turkey. The U.S. refused to work with Dostum until former UN envoy Charlie Santos pointed out to the CIA that the only functioning fighting group besides the Panjshiris of Massoud were Dostum’s Uzbeks. Based on history and dossiers full of Pakistani provided intelligence, the Agency wanted nothing to do with Dostum. Santos pointed out that with Massoud dead, and no Pashtun resistance, Dostum was America’s only hope.

The Uzbeks and Hazara took to the mountains to escape the mechanized columns of the Taliban

Those among Dostum’s men who had remained in Afghanistan now became guerrilla fighters, moving on horseback holed up in the mountains under the command of his former number two La. Staying off the roads and in the wilds, they could swoop down and attack the Taliban but could not hold the ground. Dostum’s lieutenants would call him in Turkey and tell him how difficult life had become. They had to kill their horses for food. They didn’t have enough cloth for shrouds, so they had to bury dead comrades in burqas. “People demanded that I do something,” says Dostum. “Commanders, clergymen, women—they would all tell me very bitter stories. I was full of emotions. My friends were struggling against the Taliban, and I was sitting there.”

Dostum says that to help him get back into the fray, the former president of Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani, sliced off about $40,000 from the CIA funds. The CIA had begun to work with Massoud’s people in October of 1999 hoping to pay him to kill Osama bin Laden.  The Turks, long staunch enemies of Islamic extremism, contributed a small sum as well, and, on April 22, 2001, General Dostum and 30 men were ferried into northern Afghanistan on Massoud’s aging Soviet helicopters. “That,” says Dostum, “was when the war against terror began.”

Living in caves and raiding Taliban positions, Dostum’s men slowly began to harass the well-entrenched Taliban along the Darra-e Suf. They moved and attacked mostly at night, riding small, wiry Afghan horses that are well suited to steep slopes and long desert walks. “The money was hardly enough for feeding my horses,” Dostum says. “They had tanks, air force, and artillery. We fought with nothing but hope.”

Then came September 11. Despite actively fighting the Taliban, it was not until Santos introduced Dostum to JSOC that the United States might want to give him some help. Even the CIA was reticent to land paramilitaries and officers to set up the conditions for an Special Forces ODA to be inserted. At the last minute the Agency was told by the SF ground commander that his men were going in with or without the Agency. A small group of CIA that included Mike Spann, flew in to the Darra-e Suf the day before ODA 595 would land.

Now three weeks later the war was supposed to be over. The Taliban had surrendered at Qali i Jangi to CIA officer JR and Dostum and surrenders were under way in Kunduz. The B-Team had already set up shop at the Turkish School in Mazar and was getting ready for the push to Tora Bora. Until a group of 480 al Qaeda and talibs showed up at the gates of Mazar. Dostum and the Green Berets drove by them as they headed for Kunduz.

General Abul Rashid “Dostum”
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The morning after Heavy D’s return from Kunduz, he greets me with a deep, booming “Howareyou?” Today, he tells me, he is eager for me to meet his trophy mullahs.

Next door, in Dostum’s pink house, Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri sit on pillows in a small room. These are two of the Taliban who chased Dostum out of Mazar in May 1997, but still he treats them more like honored guests than prisoners of war. Faizal has his prosthetic leg off. He is a thick man with a pug nose, bad skin, tiny teeth, and a cruel stare. Nuri has the black look of a Pashtun who has endured a lifetime of war. Wrapped in blankets, members of the mullahs’ entourage fix me with soulless stares. Nuri is chatty, although he often looks to the silent Faizal before answering my questions. During the Taliban’s reign, thousands of Hazara Shias were murdered in northern Afghanistan; the mullahs are unrepentant. “We fought for an idea,” says Nuri. “We did all that we could. Now we hope that America will not be cruel to the Afghan people.”

That afternoon, Dostum and I set off for the fort, where the uprising has been all but quelled. He brings the mullahs along, to show them the havoc incited by their foreign volunteers. Perhaps they’ll convince any surviving prisoners to surrender.

After four days of bombardment, the interior of the fort is a scene of utter devastation. Blackened, twisted vehicles are perforated with thousands of jagged holes. The crumpled bodies of prisoners, frozen in agony, are scattered everywhere. Most of the fallen look as if they were killed instantly. Some are in pieces; others have been flattened by tank treads. More than 400 prisoners are said to have died;

I count only about 50 bodies in the courtyard. The estimated 30 Alliance soldiers who died have already been taken away by their friends. When an American team finally recovered Spann’s body, they discovered it had been booby-trapped with a live grenade (which they removed without incident).

It is also rumored that there are many dead and at least two live prisoners holed up in the subterranean bomb shelter. The entrance to the bunker was pierced by cannon shots and is blackened from explosions. Dostum’s men have been throwing down grenades and pouring in gasoline and lighting it, but the foreign Taliban refuse to come up. Dostum implores the mullahs to call down to the bunker and tell the remaining men to surrender. Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri refuse: They claim they don’t know these people.

There are 86 al Qaeda fighter in the basement, including John Walker Lindh. Mullah Nuri insists he doesn’t know them and they refuse to come up.
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The trapped Taliban volunteers, it seems, remain hungry for martyrdom. A day later—Thursday, five days since the uprising broke out—they are still firing sporadically at soldiers removing bodies from the courtyard of the fortress. At least two Red Cross workers who descend into the bunker are shot and wounded.

Later that week, Dostum casually mentions that 3,000 other foreign fighters from the surrender at Kunduz are in a Soviet-era prison in the city of Sheberghan, 80 miles west. Anticipating more fireworks, I head there with him and move into another of his residences, a huge, high-walled compound that includes a mosque and, improbably, an unfinished health-club complex.

By the time the team had arrived in Qali-i-Jangi they were gaunt, sick but eager to keep up the fight. Over 5000 Taliban remained hidden in surrounding villages. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Some American soldiers are billeted upstairs in the guest houses; men in camo pants run up and down the stairs. Their rooms are filled with green Army cots, dirty brown packs, and green flight bags. Rifles, night-vision gear, and boots are strewn everywhere. I head downstairs and discover a group of soldiers bantering cheerfully, mostly in southern accents. They’ve just finished installing a satellite TV. When the television begins to blare, the men stare at the screen. “We haven’t seen a TV or news in two months,” one soldier says apologetically. Transfixed, they watch the Christmas tree being lit in Rockefeller Center.

These are the soldiers I saw back at Qala Jangi preparing to go in and retrieve the body of the dead CIA agent, Mike Spann. “Don’t I know you?” one of them says. “Aren’t you the guy who goes to all those dangerous places?”

It feels more than a bit odd to be recognized for my books and TV show—as someone who specializes in traveling to the world’s hot spots—while poking around a war in Afghanistan. It feels even more odd when I discover that these are Green Berets—soldiers who truly specialize in the world’s hot spots. But I never travel without a few “Mr. DP” hats, so I dig them out of my bag and pass them around.

Over the ensuing days, I take every opportunity to spend time in these makeshift barracks, particularly once I discover that this is the very unit of Green Berets that I’d been hearing rumors about—this is Dostum’s covert support team. At night we sit around talking over stainless steel cups of coffee. Some details of their mission they can’t discuss. Some are provided by Dostum and others. But the story gradually emerges.

There are twelve Green Berets here and two Air Force forward air controllers. Green Berets work in secrecy, so only their first names can be used: There’s Andy, the slow-talking weapons expert who is never without his grenade launcher; back home, he keeps the guns in his collections loaded “so they are ready when I am.” Both he and Paul, a quiet, bespectacled warrant officer, have been in the unit 11 years. Then there’s Steve, a well-mannered southern medic; Pete, the burly chaw spitter; Mark, their blond, midwestern captain; and so on. It’s like a casting call for The Dirty Dozen. Their motto is “To Free the Oppressed”—something they have done so far in this war with no civilian casualties, no blowback, and no regrets.

In between conflict there was time to celebrate. A typical meal at Dostum’s guesthouse.
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

These soldiers, I soon realize, come from much the same background as Dostum’s: sons of miners, farmers, and factory workers; some are men whose only way out of poverty is the military. They range in age from mid-20s to early 40’s. They are men with wives, children, mortgages, bills. Men who are the Army’s elite, who are college educated and fluent in several languages, yet who are paid little more than a manager at McDonald’s. They spend every day training for war, teaching other armies about war, and waiting for the call to fight in the next war.

They are direct military descendants of the Devil’s Brigade, a joint Canadian-American unit that fought in Italy during the Second World War. That group was disbanded and then re-formed in the early 1950s as Special Forces, which John F. Kennedy later nicknamed the Green Berets. The men I’m staying with have dubbed their unit the Regulators, after the 19th-century cowboys who were hired by cattle barons to guard their herds from rustlers. The Regulators have served in the gulf war, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and in other places they can’t talk about. Their home base is Fort Campbell, Kentucky, but they spend only a few months of the year there. The rest of the time they travel.

On the morning of September 11, the team was returning to base after an all-night training exercise. “The post was in an uproar,” says Paul. No one knew just when or where the team would be sent. They cleaned and stowed their gear and awaited the order. And waited. There was talk that the team might be split up—rumors of differences with a commanding officer who didn’t appreciate the traditional independence of the Green Berets. They were all quitting demanding to be sent to other units rather than put up with new commander ideas on what soldiering was. But 9/11 changed all that. Toward the end of September, the word came down: “Pack your shit.”

Fifteen days later, the team boarded a C-5 Galaxy with a secret flight plan. The Regulators’ final destination turned out to be Uzbekistan, where they spent a week building a tent city and waiting for a mission. “We were at the right place at the right time,” says Steve. “Fifty tents later, they told us to pack our shit again.”

First arrival on the Observation Post. Now the tiny group of Americans need to show General Dostum what they can do.

“We had two days to plan,” another Regulator says. “The CIA gave us a briefing.” Although the Regulators were among the first, other small teams of U.S. forces would soon be airlifted in for similar missions, a response to Dostum’s request for American assistance to be sent to other Northern Alliance commanders. In an effort to trim Dostum’s control the CIA would insist that rival commander Ustad Atta Mohammed get his own Green Beret escort several weeks later as he raced Dostum to claim Mazar. Surprisingly Dostum agreed. Once they hit the ground, the Regulators would be writing their own game plan. “Our commanders said they didn’t know what to expect, but at least they were honest enough to admit it,” the Green Beret continues. “They said, ‘You guys will be on the ground; you figure it out.’ ”

Within half an hour of meeting Dostum at the mud-walled compound in the Darra-e Suf, the Regulators swung into action. Some stayed behind to handle logistics and supplies. The rest mounted up and rode north. “It was pretty painful,” Paul says. “They use simple wooden saddles covered with a piece of carpet, and short stirrups that put our knees up by our heads. The first words I wanted to learn in Dari were, ‘How do you make him stop?”

Their most important immediate order of business was to establish themselves in Dostum’s eyes. “The first thing we wanted to do was to say to Dostum, ‘The Americans are here,’ ” Paul explains, “and to make it a fearsome prospect to mess with us.” The Americans set up their gear at Dostum’s command post—which overlooked Taliban positions about six miles away—and immediately began the process of calling in close air support, or CAS. “You see the village; you see the bunkers,” says a second Steve, one of the two Air Force men attached to the team to help coordinate air strikes. “You call in an airplane; you say, ‘Can you see that place? There are tanks. You see this grid? Drop a bomb on that grid.’ Pretty straightforward stuff.”

It took a few hours for bombers to arrive from their carriers. At first, the planes wouldn’t fly below 15,000 feet—the brass was worried about surface-to-air missiles—so targeting was sketchy. But coordination soon improved, and the improbable allies fell into a rhythm: The Americans would bomb; Dostum’s men would attack.

A crude videotape made by one of Dostum’s men shows a battle in the rolling hills of the Darra-e Suf, where the yellow grass contrasts with the deep blue sky. The Americans, up on the ridge, are using GPS units to finalize coordinates. Down below, small Afghan horses are nipping the dry grass on the safe side of the hill, their riders chatting while awaiting the order to charge. The horses cast long shadows in the late afternoon. The only sign that something is about to happen is a white contrail high in the sky. The radio crackles with call signs and traffic broadcast between bombardiers and the American soldiers. First, a soft gray cloud of smoke rises in a lazy ring. Then the concussion: ka-RUMPH!

The tape now shows Dostum, leaning against a mud wall, watching through large binoculars. The dirty gray mushroom cloud slowly bends in the wind. Dostum stays in contact with the Americans by radio, working to help focus the bombing: a man with a seventh-grade education directing the fire of the world’s most powerful military.

Ka-RUMPH! More hits: Tall, fat smoke plumes cast moving shadows on the grass. The riders mount their horses, check their weapons, and begin the one-kilometer sprint to the Taliban front lines. There’s the erratic chatter of AK-47s and the deep dut dut dut dut of Taliban machine guns. Then the radios are jammed with Dostum’s men shouting and celebrating. The Taliban are running.

The videotape cuts to the next morning. Dostum’s men are touring the battle scene. The twisted rag doll bodies of dead Taliban fighters lie heads back, fingers clutched, legs sprawled as if they fell running. Dostum’s men kick the corpses into the trenches and cover them with the tan dirt, not bothering to count the dead.

The Regulators were joined by at least three CIA officers kitted in full combat gear, including a 32-year-old ex-Marine named Mike Spann. “We were surprised at how good they were,” says Captain Mark. “What we are doing now has not occurred since Vietnam. Up until now the CIA has been hog-tied. Now the CIA and spec ops have been let loose.”

Dostum’s men were a loose alliance that grew with every victory against the Taliban

Each night, Dostum would sit down with the Americans and lay out the battle plan for the next day. “He would say he is going to attack at about 2 p.m.,” says Air Force Steve. “So we would put in for priority for the planes.” The team’s primary weapons were not pistols or rifles; they were the most fearsome tools in the American arsenal: F-18s, F-16s, F-14s, and B-52s. They chose not bullets or grenades but ordnance that ranged from Maverick missiles to laser-guided bombs.

In contrast to the Americans’ high-tech warfare, some of Dostum’s tactics would have seemed familiar to the British troops who tried and failed to pacify this region in the 19th century. Before the arrival of the Americans, Dostum fought mostly at night. “He couldn’t expose his small force to Taliban missile strikes,” explains Captain Mark, “so they would hit and retreat. He never sacrificed his men. He would take a village by getting the mounted guys up close. When it looked like they would break the back of the position, he would ride through as fast as he could and keep the Taliban on the run.”

With their knowledge of military history, the Regulators appreciated the ironies of this strange war: “The Taliban had gone from the ‘muj’ style of fighting—in the mountains, on horseback—to working in mechanized columns,” says Will, another member of 595. That heavy reliance on tanks and trucks meant the Taliban wound up fighting a defensive, Russian-style war. “Then, here is Dostum,” says Will, “a guy trained in tanks who’s using tactics developed in Genghis Khan’s time.”

The Regulators’ job was to invent a new form of warfare: coordinating lightly armed horseback attacks with massive applications of American air power—all without hitting civilians or friendly forces. “In an air attack,” says Air Force Steve, “you do one of two things. You can bomb it until there is no resistance, or you bomb and, as soon as the bomb goes off, you charge. By the time they come up and look, you are on them.” The latter approach was well suited to Dostum’s style of attack. “A cavalry charge is an amazing thing,” Will says. “At a full gallop, it’s a smooth ride. The Afghans shoot from horseback, but there is no aiming in this country. It’s more like, ‘I am coming to get you—whether I hit you is another story.’ It’s Old World combat at its finest.

“There’s one time I’ll never forget,” he says. “The Taliban had dug-in, trench-line bunkers shooting machine guns, heavy ma-chine guns, and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. We had an entire 250-man cavalry ready to charge.” The Regulators wanted Dostum’s right-hand man, Commander Lal, to hold off while they got their aircraft in position, but Lal had already given the order. In seconds, 250 men on horseback were thundering toward the Taliban position a mere 1,500 meters away.

“We only had the time it takes 250 horses to travel 1,500 meters, so I told the pilot to step on it,” Will says. “I looked at Lahl and said, ‘Bombs away.’ We had 30 seconds till impact; meanwhile, the Afghan horde is screaming down this ridgeline. It was right at dark. You could see machine gun fire from both positions. You could see horses falling.” An outcrop obscured views of the last 250 meters to the target. The lead horsemen disappeared behind the rocks, and the Regulators all held their breath, praying the bombs would reach the bunkers before the cavalry did. “Three or four bombs hit right in the middle of the enemy position,” says Will. “Almost immediately after the bombs exploded, the horses swept across the objective—the enemy was so shell-shocked. I could see the horses blasting out the other side. It was the finest sight I ever saw. The men were thrilled; they were so happy. It wasn’t done perfectly, but it will never be forgotten.”

Over 3200 prisoners were kept in Sheberghan © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Around eight o’clock on Saturday night, while I’m talking with the Green Berets, one of Dostum’s men comes into the house and asks us to follow him outside. Beyond the high steel gates is a confusion of trucks, headlights, and guns, and the sound of men moaning in pain. Lined up against a wall is the most pathetic display of humanity I have ever seen: the survivors of the bunker at Qala Jangi fortress. Dostum’s men had finally flooded them out by sluicing frigid water into the subterranean room. Instead of the expected handful of holdouts, no fewer than 86 foreign Taliban emerged after a week in the agonizing dark and cold—starved, deaf, hypothermic, wounded, and exhausted. Their captors brought them here en route to the Sheberghan prison.

They send off steam in the cold night, their brown skin white with dust. Some hide their faces, others convulse and shiver. I talk to an Iraqi, as well as to Pakistanis and Saudis—all of whom speak English. On another truck are the seriously wounded. Some cry out in pain, some are weeping, and others lie still, their faces frozen in deathly grimaces.

They put the prisoners back on the truck. A few minutes later, one of Dostum’s men runs up breathlessly, saying there is an American in the hospital. I grab my cameras and ask Bill, a pensive Green Beret medic, to come with me.

The soldiers stay well away from the al Qaeda prisoners as I interview them. They have been blowing themselves up with grenades. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The scene at the hospital is ugly. The warm smell of gangrene and human waste hits me as I open the door to the triage room. Shattered, bearded men lie everywhere on stretchers, covered by thin blue sheets. The doctors huddle around a steel-drum stove, smiling and talking, oblivious to the pain and suffering around them. In the back, a doctor leans over a man with a smoke-blackened face, wild black hair, and an unkempt beard. He lies staring at the ceiling. The doctor yells in halting English, “What your name?” He jabs at the half-conscious man’s face. “Open your eyes! What your name? Where you from?” The man finally answers. “John,” he says. “Washington, D.C.”

The man is terribly thin and severely hypothermic. At first he is hostile, like a kitten baring its claws. He won’t tell me who to contact, or provide any information that would get him out of the crudely equipped hospital. I convince the staff to move him to an upstairs bed, where Bill inserts an IV of Hespan into the man’s dehydrated body to increase blood circulation. As Bill checks for wounds, he talks to the young man briefly in Arabic. I tell the prisoner where he is and who he’s talking to. Bill finds a shrapnel wound in the emaciated man’s right upper thigh and wounds from grenade shrapnel in his back; he also finds that part of the second toe on his left foot has been shot away.

John Walker Lindh was the second Irish American jihadi  I had met who was trained in Bin Laden’s camps. He refused to talk to his parents and he was taken back to our guesthouse for his protection. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

As the Hespan drips into his veins, I fire up the video camera, and the man begins to tell his story. His name, he says, is John Walker. He studied Arabic in Yemen and then enrolled in a madrasah, or religious school, in northern Pakistan. He says it was an area sympathetic to the Taliban and that his heart went out to them.

Six months ago, he traveled to Kabul with some Pakistanis to join the Taliban. Since he can’t speak Urdu, he was assigned to the Arab-speaking branch of Ansar (“the helpers”), a faction that Walker claims is sponsored by Osama bin Laden—whom Walker says he saw many times in the training camps and on the front lines.

He ended up in the Takhar Province, in the northeastern part of the country. Then the war began. After the American bombing campaign decimated their forces, Walker and members of his unit fled on foot nearly a hundred miles west to Kunduz—all for nothing, as it turned out. Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri soon surrendered Kunduz to Dostum, and Walker was imprisoned with the other foreign volunteers in the bunker at Qala Jangi.

When I look at the terrible conditions and the predicament that Walker is in, I have to ask him if this is what he expected.

“Definitely.”

Was his goal to become martyred?

“It is the goal of every Muslim.”

Then the morphine begins to kick in. I suggest to Bill that we remove Walker from the hospital, where he might be killed by other patients, many of whom were fighting against him at the fortress. We transfer him to Dostum’s house, and the next day he’s spirited away at the same time that his story is being broadcast around the world.

When the videotape of my interview with Walker hits the airwaves back in the U.S., the country focuses its white-hot anger on him, and some of that anger spills over onto me. In the conservative press I am criticized for being too gentle in my questioning of an obvious traitor, on the left for cold-bloodedly tricking a helpless boy into incriminating himself.

The team was ordered to exile to meet Donald Rumsfeld and be interviewed by Robin Moore. What happened next was the first of many distortions and fictional retelling of their story. This is the back jacket of The Hunt for Bin Laden ghostwritten by the late Jack Idema and published as non fiction by Random House editor Bob Loomis. The book was quietly taken out of print.

If you drive west from Mazar, past Qala Jangi, past Khoda Barq, past the ancient, crumbling city of Balkh, and head south toward a ridge of snow-dusted mountains called the Alborz Range, you will see a gap—the Tingi Pass. This is where the Taliban made their last stand. The Green Berets call it the Gap of Doom.

Two of the Green Berets I’ve been chatting with—Andy and Paul, the pair with the longest tenure in the company—have decided that I need to see this place for myself, or maybe simply that they need to go see it again one last time. We jump in a Toyota off-road vehicle and set off. Soon we’re winding past an ancient brick bridge that crosses a roaring gorge; on the west side are large caves that shepherds have scooped out of the soft rock over the centuries.

As we drive, Paul tells me that, back in the U.S., even the Regulators are subject to a military culture of rules and red tape. Planning a one-day live-ammo training exercise can require six months of paperwork. “If there is no enemy, then bureaucracy is the enemy,” he says. But on the ground in Afghanistan, they’re on their own. The greatest restrictions they face have been placed on them by Dostum himself. “Dostum was very concerned about us getting too close to the battlefield,” Captain Mark had told me back at the barracks. “In the last two semi-wars we have been in, every time American soldiers get killed we pull out. That is one of the premises Osama bin Laden operates under.” Dostum wasn’t about to let an American casualty put a premature end to his battle plan.

Their closest call came toward the end of the campaign, before they’d reached the Tingi Pass; I’d gotten an account of it last night from Mike, a big, bearded, soft-spoken soldier. The conflict began with several hundred Taliban troops moving into positions on an adjacent hill. Outmanned, the Green Berets decided to move out on horseback. They had gone only about 600 meters when they started taking fire. “I figured I could whip my horse and run across an open area,” Mike said. “I whip my horse, it takes three steps, and stops. The rounds are zinging over my head. Somehow I make it across the open area. I get off the horse and say, ‘Screw this; I’m walking.’

“We set up in a bomb crater and used it as our bunker. We were receiving more fire. It was somewhere between harassing and accurate—enough to keep our heads down. We called in a couple of bomb strikes. We could see a bunch of Taliban come out of another bunker complex off to the south and disappear behind a hill. It took about an hour to get the aircraft. All the while, we could see troops moving and disappearing. I’m looking through the optics while rounds are zinging all around us.” At this point in the tale, Mike nodded toward Paul, who was sitting next to him on the couch at Dostum’s guest house. “Paul here is busy shooting at guys. What we didn’t realize was that the Taliban who we saw coming out of the bunker had gone into the low ground and were sprinting up the hills at us in a flanking maneuver.

“Our Afghans are running out of ammo. Their subcommander has told us at least six times over the radio to get out of there. You have to understand: Dostum had told them, ‘If an American gets hurt . . . you die.’ We were focused on calling in an air strike to take out this truck that had rumbled into view, and now RPG rounds are flying over our heads. We’re not about to stand up and watch what’s going on. The pilot asked us, ‘What’s the effect [of the bomb attack on the truck]?’ We yell over the radio, ‘We don’t know! We’re not lifting our heads up!’

“When we turn around and notice what’s going on, we see our Afghans have split.”

The team decided to call in a B-52 strike practically on their own position—a drastic move considering the planes were flying above 15,000 feet. The enemy was 700 meters out and moving quickly. “Matt yelled, ‘Duck your head and get down!’ And that pilot dropped a shitload of bombs,” Mike said. “You felt the air leave. After the bombs hit, I peeked over the side of the bunker; our horses were gone. We grabbed our stuff and ran.”

The team knew that their story would be stolen, rewritten and misused as Rumsfeld and others seized the moment. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Paul, Andy, and I drive past villages of round, domed huts, past a checkpoint manned by Dostum’s men, and up along the winding road to the Tingi Pass. Three years of drought have broken: A cold rain pours down in gray sheets. We pass the twisted, stripped wrecks of trucks and Toyotas. Afghans in a blue truck are scavenging for parts. The two Green Berets are solemn; they insist on driving through the gap so they can tell their story from the right perspective.

We wind through the tight pass alongside a swollen mountain river, go over the pass, then head a kilometer down the south side of the divide and stop at a freshly mudded house. We get out of the jeep and stand in the rain and slick mud. Paul picks up the story, raindrops dotting his gold-rimmed, government-issue glasses.

“We kept moving north on horseback, but at that point, no one could tell where the front line was anymore. Once we hit Keshendeh-ye Bala, we picked up a road and followed it north in a truck Dostum’s men had captured from the Taliban. At eight that night, we pulled in to Shulgareh, which is the biggest town in the valley. We were ready to throw down the mattress and settle in for the night when one of the security guards came up with a radio and said that Dostum needed someone to go up to the front to call in aircraft. We jumped in the back of a truck and drove up to Dostum’s HQ here in this house.”

In the courtyard, a soft-eyed cow tries to eat spilled oats just beyond its reach. A hundred yards away, villagers stand against a long compound. They huddle in brown blankets, trying to avoid the soaking rain. Paul points to a misty, triangular peak that forms one side of the gap. It served as Paul’s command post.

“When we climbed up to the top of that hill, we could see the Taliban on the other side, regrouping for the final attempt to stop us. They were setting up fixed positions—bunkers with Y-shaped fighting trenches—on the northern side of the gap. It works against tanks, but it’s plain stupid in this terrain. We had unrestricted movement into the gap, which gave us the high ground.”

Andy chimes in. “Whoever gets the high ground first wins the wars here.” From their perch on the east side of the gorge, the Green Berets could shoot directly into the trenches of the Taliban.

“Once the plane got there, it circled about six times,” Paul says. “Every time the plane would circle, the Taliban would run behind their bunker. After four times or so, they didn’t get bombed, so they just stayed there.

I targeted a spot right next to this guy’s head. I was sick of this guy running back and forth getting ammo. Then the bombs are dropped, and I look through the scope and see body parts flying everywhere. We moved our targeting up along the ridgeline to the second bunker. Same thing: We identity it and boom! No more Taliban. I target the third bunker. They just can’t figure it out. The bomb lands and hits and bam! After that hit, all of them took off on foot to Mazar. And that ended the resistance.” As the three of us climb back into our vehicle, I glance at the battlefield. All I see is grass growing beside abandoned trenches. Only Paul and Andy are able to appreciate what happened here.

Early in the afternoon on November 10, Dostum reached Mazar. His men rounded up vehicles that the Taliban had left behind, and Heavy D entered the city as a conquering hero, standing through the sunroof of a Toyota Land Cruiser. The crowds quickly grew; people threw money in the air for good luck. Dostum’s first stop was the blue mosque at the tomb of Hazrat Ali, the revered son-in-law of the Prophet. Men wept as the imam prayed and thanked Dostum for deliverance.

A local mullah sings a prayer of deliverance and thanks to Dostum. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The joy was short-lived. It turned out that 900 Pakistani Taliban had been left behind in a madrasah in the center of a compound about the size of a city block, and they were ready to fight to the death. Dostum and his commanders wanted to negotiate, but the foreign Taliban shot and killed their peace envoys, which left Al-liance leaders with little choice. “We had hardened fighters holed up in the middle of an urban area who wanted to die,” says Will. “And we were going to oblige them.”

The team set up on the roof of a building about 400 meters from the madrasah and called in a strike. When the two aircraft were on location, the Green Berets radioed Alliance commanders to evacuate civilians from the area. The pilots, however, could not lock in on the laser-sighting device that the team was using to identify the target. The madrasah was surrounded for about a mile on each side by identical buildings, which made it difficult for the pilots to pick out the school. “Finally, the pilot says he has the target in sight. I asked him to describe it, just to be sure,” says Will. “He described the building we were sitting on to a T.” Finally, Air Force Steve guided the pilot to the correct building, and he dropped the ordnance: direct hit.

The team cleared him for immediate re-attack, but the pilot radioed back that he had “hung a bomb”—a bomb had not released. When the pilot radioed that he needed to return to base, the other pilot swung into action. On the next pass, three more bombs went through the hole in the roof made by the first bomb, killing most of the holdouts inside.

Under intense pressure, the Regulators had called in a perfect surgical strike—a bomb drop in a crowded urban area without a single civilian casualty. “This is the first close-air-support strike in years in an urban area,” says Air Force Steve. “It was old-fashioned professionalism. The whole team jelled.”

The steel gate to the guest house opens, and Dostum strolls out, hands in pockets, and is ushered into a black Audi Quattro with tinted windows. Dozens of dark-eyed men in turbans scramble into battered Toyota pickup trucks and assorted four-wheel-drive vehicles. Armored personnel carriers jerk to life in clouds of black diesel exhaust. It’s three weeks after the madrasah bombing, and word has come down that 3,000 Taliban are still occupying the city and environs of Balkh, Alexander the Great’s old walled capital, a few miles west of Mazar. Dostum has decided to clean up the region’s last remaining pocket of Taliban himself.

I ride in the warlord’s communications truck, a white Land Cruiser. The Regulators rush to catch up in two mud-covered cars. We roll past weathered villages unchanged in two millennia. Abandoned Soviet-era tanks are scattered about the flat countryside like dinosaur skeletons.

Not everything goes to plan during a raid on a village
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

This part of Afghanistan is ancient, arid, windblown—and is the real cradle of its history and wealth. This is where Alexander ruled, where Zoroaster was born, where Buddhists came on pilgrimages, a center of art, poetry, and study where lions were hunted and where Genghis Khan came to conquer. Now, in a scene that has been repeated over and over for the past 2,000 years, a warlord is arriving.

In a village on the outskirts of Balkh, the convoy rumbles to a halt near an ancient castle that is now a rounded mound of tan mud. The truck-mounted ZU antiaircraft guns are cranked down to eye level. Twenty Urgan missiles point toward the village. Dostum’s men load RPGs and check their ammo drums. About 200 men have taken up positions around the village, eyeing ragged locals, who stare back from a careful distance. It feels like a scene out of a bad Mexican movie.

After a cinematic pause to allow the implications of his arrival to sink in, Dostum phones the village leadership from the Audi: Send out your weapons and any fighters or we’re going in. The deadline is noon.

The general climbs out of the tiny black car and tucks his hands into his belt. He rolls in a John Wayne walk to Commander Lal, who’s in charge of the standoff. The two Afghan leaders study a map with Captain Mark, just in case air strikes are needed. When noon comes and goes, I expect the order to fire. I am surprised, then, to see Dostum wrap his blue turban around his head and chin and stride into the village . . . to talk.

Ironically, it was this sort of diplomatic triumph—the surrender at Kunduz just before my arrival—and not a battle that gave the Regulators their most bitter experience of the war. “We thought Kunduz was [going to be] a full-scale attack,” says Captain Mark. “When we got there, we were sitting on our asses.” It was while they watched the drawn-out surrender that Mike Spann was attacked at Qala Jangi and the uprising began. “This was a guy we considered part of our unit,” says Mark. “If we had been there, Mike’s death would not have happened.”

When they got word of the incident, the unit desperately wanted to get back to the prison. “The info I had was that he was MIA,” Mark says. “We thought he was wounded. The old creed is that we never leave a guy behind.” The Regulators wanted to find the prisoners who had killed Spann and attacked a second CIA man who was questioning the Taliban. “We begged,” Mark says, “but we were told to stay away.” (In the end, the Regulators wouldn’t get clearance to enter Qala Jangi until the uprising was over.)

Commander Abdul Karim Fakir, who was in charge of the fortress while Dostum was in Kunduz, had worked with the Green Berets since they landed in Afghanistan. “I saw this look in Fakir’s eyes,” says Mark, “like, Why didn’t you help?”

Dostum, triumphant on a return to the simple village of his brith. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Dostum has not been home in five years to the village of Khvajeh Do Kuh. His father is old. Two weeks after Dostum descended on Balkh, things have calmed down, so the warlord climbs into the front passenger seat of a Nissan, and we head across a sandstorm-blasted desert. This time there is no convoy; just a son paying his respects to his father. As we drive through a drought-ravaged wasteland, he points out battlefields and the sites of ambushes and skirmishes. Dostum tells me that he has fought on every inch of Afghan soil and can recite the names of his men who have died, describe each battle in detail, and tell you what he has learned from every encounter. He says it sadly.

A few yards before the turnoff to Khvajeh Do Kuh, he gestures to a place where 180 of his men died fighting the Taliban. All I see is brown dirt and men on donkeys leading camels along the road. Nothing of the war, death, exile, and victory that have shaped the man sitting in the front seat. There is an emotional landscape here I cannot see.

As we approach the village, the men and boys are lined up in a perfect row a hundred yards long, waiting to greet Dostum. The general gets out of the car and goes down the line, trying to embrace and talk to each person, but it is getting dark. The crowd of men follows Dostum into his father’s compound.

In a tiny, sparse room are his father, Dostum’s former teacher, and a village elder. The old men are frail, with deeply lined faces. The teacher giggles, his white beard shaking with joy. Dostum’s father talks to his son as though he were a child, telling him that he and the teacher have been praying for his success. They reach out to shake his hand, to embrace him. The men in the room try to act formally, but as Dostum starts to leave, some begin to cry. An old man yells, “God bless you. We are alive thanks to you.” As Dostum stands on the porch, looking at the place of his birth, he chokes up.

He takes me to the hilltop above the village. It’s a high, lonely place. When war first came to Afghanistan, two decades ago, he built his first stronghold here to guard the village. Dostum points to the fresh dirt of new graves in the cemetery. “The men who first defended this post with me are all dead now. The new graves belong to those who were fighting terrorists.” He is silhouetted against the slate-blue sky, the long tails of his silver turban whipping in the wind.

For a brief moment, the general stands triumphant, the conquering hero, the bring-er of peace, the warlord who has ended war in the north—and, therefore, perhaps eliminated his own reason for being. As he leans into the Afghan wind, the light falls, and a moment in history fades.

The first monument to CIA officer Mike Spann, the first casualty in the war on terror was erected by General Dostum. Here Spann interviews Lindh but Lindh remains silent. Moments later Mike would be murdered by prisoners.

Dostum must now change his focus from fighting to rebuilding his country. (Within a week, he will be named deputy minister of defense for the new interim government of Afghanistan.) Now, on most mornings, Dostum emerges from his house, squinting into a crowd of turbaned men waiting for an audience. They sit patiently for hours, clutching tiny pieces of paper, seeking his aid. Dostum’s meetings do not end until well after midnight.

Not long before I’m to leave, Dostum asks for help with a letter of condolence to the widow of Mike Spann. The task inspires him to try to express his feelings about the past two months. He confesses that he had worried at first how the Americans would handle Afghan warfare: “It was cold; the food was bad. The bread we ate was half-mixed with dirt. I wondered if they could adapt to these circumstances. I have been to America and know the quality of life they enjoy. To my surprise, these men felt at home.”

And more than that: The Afghan warlord and his tiny band of American soldiers had clearly formed a bond that only men who have been through combat can understand. “I now have a friend named Mark,” Dostum says, referring to the Green Beret captain. “I feel he is my brother. He is so sincere; whenever I see him, I feel joy.” He pauses for a moment, lost in reflection. “I asked for a few Americans,” he says finally. “They brought with them the courage of a whole army.”

Down the road at the Regulators’ make-shift barracks, a call comes over the Motorola: “Pack your shit.” The men quickly gather their gear, as they have so many times before. Within hours, they are gone.

Afterword.

SFC Bill Bennett RIP
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The team was under orders not to talk to journalists. Since I was a guest of General Dostum it was a little difficult for the men to avoid me. After a while we soon got along. There were some deep unresolved internal conflicts because of the death of Mike Spann and why they over their protests had been sent to Kunduz. After our time in country, I became friends with the men and defended them when they were accused of war crimes by the media. A bizarre story called “The Convoy of Death” surfaced and painted Dostum and the team in a negative light. After days of killing as many Taliban as they could they were accused of murdering prisoners in shipping containers. Newsweek, The New York Times and other outlets insisted that eyewitness had seen American soldiers laughing and shooting into containers. Prisoners were so hot that they had to lick the sweat off each other one man said. An NGO insisted that thousands of corpses were dumped at a graveyard called Dasht-i-Leili outside of Shiberghan but refused to actual exhume them.  It didn’t seem to matter that there was no actual evidence. An odd case of a lack of evidence being brought forward as the evidence. This scandal would tarnish General Dostum’s very real accomplishment of being America’s most aggressive and stalwart ally against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The mystery of missing prisoners was never matched up to the careful medical records kept of each al Qaeda and Taliban detainee kept by doctors and local NGO’s. ©Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The problem is that the the Convoy of Death story is false. I was at the prison in Sheberghan when they unloaded the trucks and watched the Red Cross medics count the dead and note the wounded. The wholesale conversion of talibs to the government side during the Kunduz surrender had created confusion in how many Taliban existed in the North. Was it ten thousand, five thousand,  The actual number was around 3,500 who surrendered, another 460 al Qaeda showed up at the gates of Mazar and around 250 – 300 died of their wounds, disease or suffocation during transport in the frigid weather. I know because I counted the dead bodies. The only mystery was the lack of interest in the NGO, governments and media in investigating the facts.

Although I spoke out on behalf of the team the media, didn’t publish my eyewitness photos and testimony because it would go against a narrative that a Pashtun backed by a European-backed central government must rule Kabul, not a coalition of regional leaders.We did not want the Taliban voting themselves back into power, yet we restrained the grass roots power of the ethnic minorities. Sidelined, and in exile in Turkey, In 2009, Dostum was begged by President Karzai to come back from exile to reelect him and again in 2014 Dostum engineered the victory of President Ghani….only to go back into exile.  To this day the war continues and Dostum as First Vice President remains a staunch ally of America.

Back in 2002 and 2003 the film and book industry were not interested in books or movies about Afghanistan. Our war had been big footed by Iraq. When SFC Bill Bennett invited me over to join the team SCUD hunting before the war he did not like that war. Later on he had a dark  premonition. “I don’t think I will make it through this one” he wrote me in an email just hours before he was gunned down on a raid in Ramadi. It was September 12, 2003. Bill and the team were wearing  armor decorated with my logo when he died. I was asked to sit on the same row as the team during his funeral. An event and a man I will never forget. There is a need to never forget the sacrifices men make in war. We must honor their truth not the fiction that creates more wars.

In Hollywood I was asked to join meetings during which actors and producers pitched the story, read half a dozen books in which the idea of John Wayne like cavalry charges and Dostum’s ogre like cruelty were fictionalized into cartoons. The men know their story and I wrote it down. Some were angry then, some had been through enough wars to see what was coming.

They are currently enjoying some well earned recognition now that the film 12 Strong has been released but again, the film is not anywhere close to the truth. We will never end wars if we don’t understand how to win them. A story of how 12 Americans and a Afghan warlord won the war on terror, if only for a brief time still remains to be told.

© 2018 Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

ryp@comebackalive.com

The post General Dostum and 12 Strong: THE LEGEND OF HEAVY D AND THE BOYS appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

Dirty wars attract a wide variety of odd types: Volunteers, journos, freedom fighters, NGOs, businessmen and even tourists. The traditional concept of war as one group of soldiers battling another until the other side surrenders or is vanquished is long outdated, as are many of the traditional roles associated with such a conflict. Among traditional wars have been the so-called neutrals—journalists, aid workers, NGOs and supposedly civilians protected in battle by The Hague or after capture by the Geneva Conventions. Today’s wars make few distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, warfighter and peacemaker, observer or participant. Researchers will find few clearly delineated targets. The traditional barriers and lines that define players on the battlefield have also blurred.

In the case of journalism, the lines are thoroughly muddled. The roles and positions of citizen journalists, official embeds, propagandists, counter propagandists, hackers, hoaxers, unilaterals and credentialed media are no longer discrete. The NGO and humanitarian world finds itself powerless and targeted, with even the UN scrambling for cover, its workers being kidnapped by the dozen.  There is currently no better place than Syria to delve into these rapidly shifting roles of communication.

A New Day

The Arab Spring looked like it might bypass Syria and strongman Bashar al-Assad. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, emerged from the minority Alawite, a Shi’ite sect, and used force and a massive police presence to govern a Sunni nation. Ophthalmologist Bashar, who never prepared to rule Syria, was selected to lead the country after his brother was killed in his Ferrari driving to the Damascus airport.   Bashar was considered a somewhat secular and progressive ruler until the Arab Spring arrived on March 15, 2011 with massive public demonstrations.

Surprisingly, Bashar took his father’s playbook from the ’80s when Sunnis rose up in Hama, and later crushed resistance with force. But the same strategy that worked 20 years ago didn’t work in an era of cell phones, Twitter and Internet. Syrians began to fight back, creating impromptu militias but gaining support from conservative Sunni backers like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The violence dealt out against the Syrian people and the outcries to bring in the media began to attract traditional journalists from well-known publications.

THE END OF EMBED JOURNALISM

A year ago in March, veteran war reporter Marie Colvin broadcast live from a makeshift media center in Homs that had been pummeled earlier when CNN reported from the same building. Colvin was killed by direct shelling. There was no confusion about who she was, where she was or what she was doing. Her death, along with the ruthlessness of Assad’s regime, sent shockwaves through the media.

In 2012, according to the International Federation of Journalists, 35 journalists were killed in Syria. It is the most dangerous country in the world to report from. By comparison, 24 journalists were killed in Afghanistan since 1992. In 2013 alone at least five journalists have been killed, including Al Jazeera reporter Mohamed Al-Massalmeh, who was shot as he ran across a road, and French magazine publisher Yves Debay who was killed while Free Syrian Army soldiers fought to reclaim a hospital. It is clear that journalists are targets.  Some, like James Foley, Austin Tice, Richard Engel, Temoris Grecko and Balint Szlanko have been kidnapped, almost all in the vicinity of border crossings, the most dangerous of which seems to be the Bab al-Hawa crossing west of Aleppo. In each of these kidnappings, there were neither requests for ransoms nor word of the detainees’ conditions.

After Libya, the conflict in Syria is the second major “unembedded” war. A war in which both experienced and neophyte journalists need only money and gumption to get to the fighting. There is no guarantee of safety or money, and it is a war that shows little mercy. There has been little reward for the risk the media has taken, few international diplomacy gains for the rebels, and even less victory for the government.

Despite the grim statistics, hundreds of journalists, volunteers, fighters, stringers, tourists, aid workers, and even the UN has descended on Syria with little effect on the violence that has killed more than 70,000 and displaced 2.3 million so far.

Dangerous tried to sort out what’s making Syria so deadly and yet so attractive to the press corps.

THE JOURNALIST

“The way I’ve described Syria to others is dark and hopeless, and there is a sense of futility,” says Jane, a broadcast journalist who went to Syria on assignment and who we’ve given an alias to protect her identity. “Very dreary… based on the dead people I saw lying in the streets, the blasé attitudes towards the bodies, the numbers of injuries, the destroyed buildings, the poverty, lacking infrastructure…”

Much like the recent conflict in Libya that resulted in the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi, there are no Western forces present in Syria with which journalists can embed or shield themselves. Assad’s regime has allowed a handful of reporters with government troops, but permissions to join the regime’s ranks are becoming fewer as out-going reports are less agreeable to the government.

Those who have accompanied the Syrian government—largely to show the brutality of the rebels—have been attacked as propagandists. Robert Fisk was shown armless children and brutalized prisoners and then derided for his efforts. The Syrian government continues to enact propagandist censorship on the media under its influence. One Syrian government reporter even interviewed children next to their recently killed mother.  For the media that the government cannot influence, it has resorted to kidnapping, arresting and killing reporters. Reporters Without Borders called Syria “a Bermuda triangle for journalists.”

The Free Syrian Army welcomes the media, but for the most part journalists describe FSA as a disorganized bunch of poorly trained, poorly disciplined and poorly armed young men. The stories tend to ignore the random violence, sectarian division and fundamentalist ideology in the rebel factions, even that they’ve kidnapped journalists.  A lot of the coverage locksteps to the meme of Libyans throwing off the yoke of dictatorship with tacit Western support. Except this is Syria, and many of the groups are foreign jihadis, fundamentalists bent on Sunni domination and fighting for causes unrelated to national liberation.

Syria resembles that of Libya only to the untrained onlooker.

“Libyans had tons of help and aid and protective parties interested in having a hand in the future, thereby lending a hand in ousting Gadhafi,” says Jane, whose next stop is Mali. “Libya was easy to navigate and cover… It didn’t have the same sordid twist that Syria’s got.”

Without Western combatants, gaining access to war is once again easier for a journalist—whether that journalist is aspiring on a shoestring or a seasoned professional on an expense account.  But venturing to the front is also more dangerous without Western soldiers. There is no MEDEVAC, there may not be anyone trained to apply a tourniquet.  Worse, as is the case in Syria, there are those who use the well-known methods of entry, like the Bab al-Hawa crossing, as a buffet table from which to kidnap journalists. And the Syrian government is fine with that. The regime has detained, assaulted and expelled journalists and disabled the mobile-phone network.

In August, President Bashar al-Assad signed a media law veiled in claims of protecting the freedom of expression, but which is open-ended enough to allow for the arrest of journalists and the censorship of published material. But probably the biggest danger is that the Syrian government has shown a proclivity to simply killing Western journalists.

“The feeling inside [Syria] was like the proverbial fish in a barrel,” says Jane. “Fear of getting hit by air, mortar or sniper… Nowhere is safe. I hated covering Syria.”

THE WAR TOURIST

The ultimate put-down to a neophyte visitor to the battlefield is  “war tourist.” That is, someone who appears to be in the midst of misery and violence simply for personal aggrandizement and curiosity.  Ignoring, or perhaps capitalizing on, this term is Toshifumi Fujimoto, a self-proclaimed war tourist from Japan. The story he told curious media in Syria was that he grew bored with his truck-driving job in Japan, bought a ticket to Turkey, and crossed into Syria. From there he posted frontline dispatches to Facebook. He claimed to have no fear of the conflict, credits luck for keeping him alive but warns others that they face certain death if they travel to Syria. To some journalists he tells a story of sadness and wanting to die, to others he points to his dispatches as being a witness. He has a growing cadre of admirers on Facebook who see his personal journey and roughhewn coverage as accessible and honest.

Fujimoto wore Japanese military fatigues and carried two cameras and a video camera around his neck. He tagged along with other journos but with no helmet and no body armor. He said the prospect of death never bothered him because he is part samurai, part kamikaze.  His publicity seemed to feed the media’s need to make their quest more legitimate. In January he was featured in the AFP, the Guardian, The New York Times and many other outlets. Fujimoto’s explanation for being in harm’s way as being: “It fascinates me, and I enjoy it,” which isn’t too far off why professional journalists journey to Syria. Except the journalists make money from their reports of the Syrians’ strife and suffering and mask it under the noble goal of “bearing witness” or “telling the story”, though many admit privately that war is something that gives them more than just a job, it can be an obsession.

In a nod to his AFP interviewer but with no statistics to support it, Fujimoto said, “It’s more dangerous in Syria to be a journalist than a tourist.”

Whether Fujimoto was firing a rifle or a camera, Syrian soldiers weren’t likely to make the distinction. Although he was not filing for a media outlet, his Facebook page quickly swelled to over 3,200 followers, and his posted photos were regarded with respect, essentially turning him into an information outlet. He has now returned to Japan where his presentations on his frontline experience have created another following. He’s reporting—through facts and images—the nature of the conflict and what he saw there.

And in much the same way that Fujimoto now has something to offer, a cadre of budding journalists are making the trip to Syria for the same reason. Some are looking to fast track their career via war reporting. Others are moved by the humanitarian crisis they feel needs coverage. Despite the plethora of disturbing photos and videos, and the high price paid by journalists to capture those images, the West appears to be unmoved, begging the question: Is Syria the place to make your bones?

Apparently, many think so. Journalist “Jane” asked that we change her name. She says the new generation has turned out in Syria, and is easy to spot. Jane is an icon amongst journalists known for both her reporting and bravery in the three decades she has spent covering conflict. She is shocked by the general lack of preparation.

“Their lack of gear in general, protective gear from flak [vest] to helmet, basics like torch or head lamp,” she says. “They’re lacking hostile-environment training, no first aid training, no medical type gear or kit, [and have] a knee-jerk desire to hit the frontlines without backgrounding the situation or the people involved in getting there.”
We talked to one of the newbies who hopes that Syria will project him into the mainstream.

THE NEOPHYTE REPORTER

Tom Daams, 28, a photographer from the Netherlands, heard of the Syrian conflict last August and decided to cover what seemed to be under-reported by journalists. He’d covered riots in Athens and Berlin, but most of his portfolio consisted of portraits of people or their pets.

“The people of Aleppo were pleading to the world to help them,” he emailed from Aleppo. “They just could not understand why the world wasn’t helping them. And I also couldn’t understand why the world was doing nothing. Why does the world turn its back against humanity?”

So he packed a backpack and “filled it with morphine-like painkillers” leftover from a bout with a hernia. He grabbed his camera, 350 Euros and booked a ticket to Turkey. He spent three days in Turkey mustering the courage to cross into Syria—after all, he’d never been to a war zone.

On the third day he took a bus to Kilis, Turkey, which is on the Syrian border, and hired a taxi to take him to the fighting. He had no idea what to expect. His only frame of reference was articles he’d read about other journalists crossing. In the taxi, a quick wave of his passport was all it took to enter Syria.

He was in. He had no money, no contacts, no idea where to go or what to do. But he did have a backpack full of painkillers. At Zarzur Hospital in Aleppo he told the doctors he had medicine to donate. Not surprisingly, they welcomed him. The security guard found him a bed to sleep in. The hospital even had Internet access.

While staying at the hospital, he made friends with a rebel sniper.

“Everyday he woke me up, and I jumped on the back of his motorcycle to head to the front lines. I spent 10 days with this sniper, making friends all over Aleppo.”

After ten days, Daams decided he was ready to leave. He’d feared for his life, been shot at by snipers, even had a flat tire in Assad territory while in a car with eight rebels. But now that he wanted to leave, he didn’t know how. He asked the hospital security guard how he might return to Turkey, and the guard set him up with two fighters from Libya. He decided to illegally cross into Turkey with the Libyans. He admits that this was not a wise decision.

Daams was detained at Oğuzeli International Airport in Gaziantep, Turkey for being in the country illegally. He had no entry stamp on his passport. He was banned from Turkey for three years.

That was in September last year. When Daams returned to the Netherlands, he sold his work from Syria for just over $9,000 USD, which was enough to finance another trip. Unable to enter Turkey, he tried to cross into Syria from Lebanon. It didn’t work. He then tried from Jordan, and that didn’t work either. After trying for two months to get back into Syria, he finally called a Dutch friend with high-level government connections, asking for his ban to be lifted. It worked.

“I now am the second person in Turkish history whose ban has been lifted in such a case,” he claims. When he returned to Aleppo, he says the friends he had made on his first trip had been killed.

Luckily Daams knew of a fellow Dutchman, 21-year-old Wijbe Abma, who was also in Aleppo. Daams asked Abma for a place to sleep.

“Wijbe saved my ass.”

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL AID WORKER

Wijbe Abma is barely old enough to get a job but already has a one-man relief program called Don’t Forget Syria. After finishing a university exchange program in South Korea, Abma was traveling home to the Netherlands when he met a Syrian refugee in Turkey in October. Abma decided to help. He turned to Kickstarter for funding to buy blankets to be handed out to Syrian refugees. His efforts on the Internet have generated tens of thousands of dollars and delivered more than 1,000 blankets. In addition to working the long hours of an NGO, he’s also become a makeshift fixer for journalists, Daams included. When I spoke with Abma he was in Kilis, Turkey—which has become a bottleneck for people entering Syria from the north—about to take a group of Spanish journalists to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey.

“It’s a very easy place for journalists to come and go,” Abma said over Skype. “At any given time there are half a dozen to maybe two dozen journalists here. Many are staying at this hotel. It is one of the cheapest, and there is Internet.”

As is often the case, journalists have congregated where they are safe, where they can file their stories or upload photos, and where they can get a drink after a long day at the front. For about $200 USD, they hire a taxi to take them to Aleppo or refugee camps or other hot spots in Syria. In months past, many journalists reported from Syria during daylight hours and then returned to the safety of Turkey at night. But that is changing.

As the front has moved through Aleppo, media offices sprung up. Journalists could now stay in the city with less fear of government soldiers kicking down the door or shelling the building. Though Daams spent ten days in Aleppo last September, he may not have fully comprehended his vulnerability. The same could be said for the war tourist Fujimoto. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is not safety.

“Most journalists stick to the Free Army region, the liberated region,” Abma said. “It is safer there, in a way. But at the same time it is a region without government, without law. So anything might happen.”

Anything in this case often means getting kidnapped. NBC’s Richard Engel spent five days in captivity. Mexican journalist Temoris Grecko was held with two other journalists for five days. Former US Marine Austin Tice has been missing for more than 200 days. US freelancer James Foley has been missing since November 22.

While Abma is by nature a person prone to help others—refugees, Daams, the Spanish journalists—he recognizes that the war has attracted scores of inexperienced journalists who are in many ways unprepared for the job. Money, contacts, plans and backup plans are necessary. Though it is a war zone and “never fully safe,” as he says, a lack of planning and preparation make it far more dangerous.

Broadcast journalist “Jane” went to Syria on assignment. Being no rookie, and part of an organization, the preparations for her coverage were extensive. And so were the expenses.

“As for expenses, thousands of dollars,” she says. “Tens of thousands for drivers, tippers, hotels, travel, fixers, translators, gear…”

Some insist that regardless of Western and UN inaction or even public disinterest, the story needs to be told. Many journalists like Marie Colvin, have insisted that dramatic images or gripping firsthand stories motivate readers and embarrass governments to move from inaction into action. This oft-stated high-minded motivation drives many new and veteran reporters to share violence, risk their lives and sometimes die with complete strangers in conflicts that have nothing to do with them.

But that cliché of a journalist risking their life to impact society, make a difference, tell the story or document history may have also vanished with the new shape of war.

Nir Rosen is an Arabic-speaking American journalist of Kurdish descent who began a reporting career in Iraq in 2003. His work, often critical of Western policy and often reported from inside insurgent groups for long periods at a time, is highly respected, even by his critics. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and the Washington Post. Even to Rosen, the notion that a journalist can make a difference in a conflict is unfounded.

“Journalists who think they can help are naive or think too highly of themselves,” he says.  He challenges the idea that journalists help or make a difference by risking their lives.

“They are usually harmless parasites who do not harm their hosts. But just like in any conflict, Syria is an opportunity for new journalists to get started. No different from Iraq or Afghanistan where I got started and where I did absolutely nothing to help or make any difference at all in my capacity as a journalist.”

The curious thing is that young activists, like Abma, don’t really need the media to tell their story. Instead, they can use social media to directly seek funds, which then translate into benefit, all the while communicating information. Much to the discomfort of the established media. Abma wrote an article for Foreign Policy magazine, which is read by policymakers worldwide, beltway pundits and of course the media. Suddenly the idea that a person requires bona fide, sage experience and peer approval before publication in august journals has dissolved as social media chooses immediacy and relevancy over sagacity and longevity. The traditional barriers that kept neophytes out of the mainstream discussion have vaporized.

COMBAT ACTIVIST NGO

The latest and most contentious example of this changing stereotype may be 33-year old Matt VanDyke. When Dangerous reached him by phone he was upset. Mostly at journalists who classify him as freedom fighter posing as a journalist and NGOs who see his boundary-blurring role as a lethal threat.

“I am not there to observe. I am there to fight,” he says.  But he was talking about Libya, and not about his new venture in Syria, where he insists in the reverse that he was not fighting but making a “propaganda film.” Unfortunately when he invited donors to “join the Arab Spring,” he and his Libyan musician/fighter friend ended up getting kicked off Kickstarter. But not before 60 donors pledged $15,134 of the modest $19,500 budget to fund his idea. Kickstarter does not support high-risk activities or charities, and none of the donors were charged for their contributions.  His credibility as a fighter had short-circuited his new career as a propagandist.

There are some journalists and NGOs also upset at VanDyke. Mostly for the cavalier and vague way they insist he shifts between a journalist, like writing analyses for the Huffington Post and calling himself an embed on his website, and a freedom fighter.  Being on YouTube yelling takbirs while shooting an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back of a Toyota Hilux in Libya is what he wants to be known for. His published pieces do not make him a journalist, even though a number of media and human rights organizations campaigned for his release from a Libyan jail thinking he was a journalist. According to one journalist, he told his mother that he was in Libya as journalist. According to VanDyke, he never told his mother this, and was thrown in prison as a captured fighter. The confusion over him being a journalist is probably what saved his life. (SEE OUR STORY ON VAN DYKE)

He has been called “reckless and irresponsible” by the execu Committee To Protect Journalists, described as “mentally unstable” by a human rights group executive, and generally pummeled by the working press for putting them at risk.  This does not stop the media from interviewing VanDyke who seem to gain pleasure, as in the case of Fujimoto, in exploiting his media-friendly controversy. It’s a symbiotic do-loop of entertainment, news, information and propaganda.

The general consensus of the working media is that anyone who picks up a gun is a combatant. And anyone who claims to be a journalist should not carry a weapon. A non-combatant in the field or if captured, should be protected, regardless of their stance of country of origin, even though the vast majority of coverage comes from and is favorable to the rebels. VanDyke says he’s never crossed the line and feels he might be the only journalist-fighter-filmmaker-propagandist who knows where those lines are. In the age of polymaths and multitasking, VanDyke doesn’t care what they call him, he just wants his critics to be accurate.

VanDyke, Fujimoto, and Abma now have more in common than uncommon. Each considers his contribution tangible support for the cause, and each has published media on the conflict. With the protection and clear definitions of journalists gone, dirty wars allow for a mixing of roles that defy clean-cut categorization. An aid worker or freedom fighter will never replace the eyes and mind of an experienced reporter, like Marie Colvin, but in the rapidly changing Age of Information, and in a place like Syria, no position is safe.

The post Syria: Wish You Were Here? appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

Thirty-three year old Matt VanDyke is pissed. Mostly at journalists who classify him as a freedom fighter posing as a journalist. “I am not there to observe. I am there to fight.” The irony does not escape Matt who after fighting in Libya decided to return to Syria as a propagandist-documentary maker, and in July, after inviting donors to “join the Arab Spring,” ended up getting kicked off Kickstarter. But not before 60 donors pledged $15,135 of the modest $19,500 budget to fund his “propaganda” documentary. Kickstarter does not support high-risk activities or charities, and the donors were never charged for their contributions.

He went anyways and is now working on a 15-minute film that focuses on young Syrians trying to change their country. He has been called “reckless and irresponsible” by the executive director of the Committee To Protect Journalists, described as “mentally unstable” by a human rights group employee, and on occasion pummeled by the working press.

Journalists are pissed at VanDyke. Mostly for the cavalier and vague way they insist he shifts between journalist and fighter. Credentialed media say that his actions endanger the safety of journalists in rapidly changing and confusing wars like Syria, Mali, Yemen and others.

More irritating to the media is a Heminwayesque self-promotional approach to documenting and participating in conflict. Despite their disapproval of VanDyke’s methods, he has no problem finding a journalist or outlet willing to interview him. In the modern world of love-hate relationships between journalists and their subjects, he may be the most valid, embarrassing and intelligent litmus test of moral purpose in modern conflict coverage.

HISTORY

There has been a historic thread of men who have both documented and participated in combat. Ernest Hemingway was a participant and reporter during the Spanish Civil War, John Reed was a chronicler and then a participant in the Russian Revolution, or Stephen Crane an author who was commended for his service as a courier under fire during the Spanish American War. These men characterize the romantic mythology of rebel/artist that has vanished from modern Western media.

Today’s besieged and politically correct media business is much less romantic. Embedded, insured, censored and literally under attack media workers find less room to influence in the face of social media, less protected in wars of terror and less relevant as their employers cut budgets or steer toward entertainment.

CPJ has documented the deaths of 972 journalists since1992, 70 in 2012 alone. CNN has dumped its investigative division and icons like the New York Times are laying people off. On-the-ground journalists are viewed as propagandists and a source of hostage swaps or revenue when kidnapped.

Despite the lack of any governing morality toward journalists, modern journalism maintains the third rail of excluding fighters from mythical protections supposedly afforded to the media. Their moral high ground of not taking sides has been eroded by military-controlled embeds or rebel groups that routinely chaperone, guide, gather and provide content.

Regardless of the hypocrisy and shifting barriers, the general consensus of the working media is that anyone who enjoys the protection of a media worker while engaged in fighting has crossed the line. VanDyke says he’s never crossed that line and feels he might be the only journalist/fighter/filmmaker/propagandist that knows where the lines are. In the age of polymaths and multitasking, VanDyke just wants his critics to be accurate.

BACKGROUND

VanDyke wanted to work for the American government. After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he was lucky enough to go to Georgetown University in Washington for a master’s degree. He entered the two-year Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2002.

“I educated for the three letter agencies. ‘Why Al Qaeda Targets the US’ was my thesis.” But despite his dreams of fast tracking into the CIA he failed. He blames it on the lie detector tests required.

“I had problems with the polygraph. I told the truth. I spilled my guts on all sorts of embarrassing stuff. They couldn’t get the base line. Inconclusive.”

Van Dyke is upfront about a having obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“I have OCD. I can’t get sugar on me. I feel guilty about the simplest thing. I don’t care if people criticize me but I want them to base it on fact.

“I had a romanticized view of what the CIA does. Now I realize it’s like the post office.”

After graduation VanDyke painted the bottom of boats and did roofs. He remembered watching Alby Mangels films on TV. He ordered the whole series and then decided to make travel adventure films.

He is candid about the challenges of going from sheltered college grad to warzone adventurer. “I was polite. Raised by my mother and grandmother. I had to learn some life lessons and fast. I decided to get out there. A crash course on manhood.”

By 2005 he had the idea that he would travel the world. Matt bought a 650cc bike and went to Spain then to Morocco. “My first day in Africa, I wouldn’t leave my room. My $60,000 Georgetown education never told me anything about squat toilets. I went to the bathroom in the shower. I left early in the morning figuring I messed up their plumbing.

“That’s how much of a pussy I was.”

Local drug dealers tried to convince him to carry hash in his bike. His dreams of adventure didn’t last long. VanDyke broke his collarbone on his third day. “I swerved off and crashed and ended up pinned under the bike.” But after 6 weeks he returned.

He smuggled cars bound for Europe between Morocco and Mauritania. “I lost two Mercedes with my Moroccan-American partner. He cruised the Sahara meeting people that would eventually lead him to friends in Benghazi, Libya.”

In March of 2008 he entered Libya with a business visa. He stayed for six weeks. He spent some time filming local bikers and was arrested by the police and kicked out.

His next stop was Northern Iraq. “I taught English in Irbil. It paid well. In 2009 I did an embed and wrote a front-page article for the Baltimore Examiner. They went out of business after the next issue, and I never got paid.”

His brief attempt at paid journalism left a bad taste but he became serious about documenting his own adventures. He bought body armor, paid for his own equipment, bought his own video. “I started with DV, then HDV then HD.” VanDyke met an American photographer in Iraq named Daniel Britt and together they decided to ride bikes in war zones and film their travels. “‘War Zone Bikers’ we called it.”

They rode through Kurdistan, Turkey, Iran and then into Afghanistan.

They crossed the border into Afghanistan on September 27, 2010 saying they were from Iceland. Dressed like Afghans, they put their bikes on a bus and drove to Kabul to Jalalabad, then the Panjshir valley and up to Bamiyan. They grew beards and carried shotguns hidden under their clothes. Afghanistan provided plenty of adventure. They were arrested numerous times, had their bikes stolen (but recovered them) and even did a little embed journalism so VanDyke could get footage for his film and his partner could make some money.

In December 2010 VanDyke went home.

He wrote a pitch for his television series that Alby Mangel had inspired. He went to TV meetings. But then the revolution in Libya began. His friends in Libya started to ask him through Gmail chat: “Why isn’t anyone helping us?”

On February 26, VanDyke flew to Cairo and entered Libya on March 6 in the evening. The next day he reunited with his 31-year-old friend Nuri, who was in the trucking business. He was surprised to see him in military clothes and a flak vest. Nuri had seized a military base and protected it from looters. The revolution involved everyone. They quickly fixed up a battered Toyota Hilux, mounting DShK’s, a 12.7mm anti-aircraft gun, on the back and joined a group of seven Libyan fighters.

“None of us had rank or paperwork. Qaddafi was winning. It was a dark time. We kept going. I was in a uniform.” He also kept filming. In VanDyke’s mind he was simply doing what every other Libyan was doing, all the while documenting the fight. In his mind, he was there to fight. But that’s not how everyone saw it, particularly Joel Simon, executive director of the CPJ. Simon believes that VanDyke told his mother he was going there as a journalist. VanDyke says that’s just not true.

VanDyke’s group went to Brega to scout the city for a day and find Qaddafi’s defensive positions. “We spend the night. The next morning everything was calm.

“As best as I can recollect, Ali was driving. He hits the brakes, and I lunge forward, I look over at Ali and there is a row of cinderblocks and two white pick up trucks with a little a green flag on the antennae…. Then I wake up in prison.”

PRISON

VanDyke did not see the Qaddafi soldier’s rifle butt that crashed into his head nor did see the impact that his March 2011 disappearance had within the media. He disappeared. His mother, Sharon VanDyke, began to reach out, desperate to find her son. She began doing interviews about her missing son. Politicians, State Department officials, human rights groups, and the media sprang into action.

Although some journalists in Libya had met Matthew and even filmed him yelling takbirs from his war wagon, it was quite clear to most that publicity around his self-documented motorcycle trips, his amateur writings for Georgetown University and the defunct Baltimore Examiner, along with his association with photographer Britt, were the rudimentary bona fides required to classify him as one of the 17 journalists detained by the Qaddafi regime.

The State Department, journalist groups and others continued to search for him assuming he was a wrongfully detained journalist. Hopefully wrongfully detained and not executed like some other unfortunate reporters. On May 23, 2011, Maryland Democrat and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, held a press conference where he pressed the Libyan government for information on VanDyke’s whereabouts. The Libyan government insisted it had no information on VanDyke.

In his Libyan prison cell VanDyke was more concerned about just surviving. “I knew I was in deep shit. I got caught with a camera full of video with me saying, ‘I will fight I am not leaving until Qaddafi is gone.’ I have weapons and ammo. I was wearing a uniform.”

He was found unconscious and loaded by Qaddafi’s soldiers onto a stretcher. When he awoke, they blindfolded VanDyke and put him in a small cell. They told him they were going to kill him. Rough but expected justice for a captured foreign fighter. For some reason they didn’t kill him.

“I was polite to the guards for the first three months. I acted innocent. In case there was some way I could explain away my actions.” The Libyans put him on a plane to Tripoli.

For the next five and a half months VanDyke was confined to a 7-foot-by-4-foot cell with scratch marks on the wall. The previous inmate only made it to 30 scratches. He listened to the sounds of prisoners being tortured. Large black insects lived in the toilet. He paced back and forth under the dim light of a tiny skylight. He ground his fingernails down in case his jailors tried to pull them out. He planned to fake a hunger strike, though never carried it out. Nothing happened. He turned 32 in prison. In early August, his mother and those working to find him were given a ray of hope. The Libyan regime finally admitted he was alive and being held as a prisoner.

Not coincidentally, a few days before August 24, 2011 the prison in Abu Salim was bombed twice, a few minutes apart.

“I heard them banging locks of the doors. A guy bursts in with a Koran and starts to yell. Then the guy in prison clothes said, ‘Qaddafi finished.’ I went with them. We ran to this mosque. The imam handed us money.” After five and half months, he was free.

After his release and sudden appearance, VanDyke did a number of interviews, and when members of the media realized he went there as a fighter, there was a backlash. VanDyke became a celebrity and a pariah.

Then VanDyke disappeared to rejoin the fight and joined the National Liberation Army. For the next few weeks he estimates he had about 40 engagements with the enemy. His tools were not the camera but his truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun, along with his AK47, FN and RPG.

As an amateur soldier, VanDyke didn’t know where to return rounds most of the time. “We were laying down fire at Sirte University. We went house to house in District Two toward the end of the war taking territory. I don’t know if I killed anyone. The range was a few hundred meters.”

The war was won. VanDyke came home on November 7^th 2011.

“I had nightmares every night for the first month after I got home.”

Although his four-year motorcycle odyssey and his time as a freedom fighter have not made him money, he has gained a level of media awareness that he is exploiting.

He is just back from Syria where he documented the struggle of young people to topple the regime of the Assads. Journalists in Aleppo recognized him from Libya and were quick to knock out an article on his new venture. Although VanDyke describes himself as a “filmmaker and an activist,” he fully reserves the right to return as a fighter and, if he wants, to document his activities. The mutual love-hate relationship with certain members of the media still exists. He describes with some disdain the pack journalism in Syria and the ease with some journalists can profit from the misery of others while doing nothing.

“If I can get enough people off their asses to do something, then it will have been worth it.”

The post Matt VanDyke: Filmmaker/Fighter appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

Eric Harroun is from Phoenix, Arizona. He served in the U.S. military from 2000 until a car accident that left him with a plate in his head. He was discharged with full disability in 2003.

Around Christmas of 2010 he visited Egypt and Lebanon. Two years later in September 2012 he returned to Egypt were he got caught up in the celebrations in Tahrir Square. In June of 2012 he was determined to do something with his life. He flew to Istanbul in November of 2012, and in January he was involved with the Free Syrian Army.

On January 26^th he uploaded a video to YouTube that caught the attention of Rita Katz, co-founder of the SITE Intelligence Group. Katz is an Iraqi Jewish woman who sells videos posted by jihadi groups. Sometime in January, Eric friended what looked like a young Iraqi woman who was posting pictures of her in a bikini and full bosomed friends. Eric only had around 361 Facebook friends and as he gained notoriety he began to enjoy his new celebrity status. He posted videos on his page and on YouTube throughout February. In mid-February, the Syrian regime posted a video of him using a stranger in Miami with a different name from Mugshots.com as proof that Harroun was a criminal.  About that time he was pinged by SITES Intelligence, a provider of “Jihadist Threat Warnings” to the U.S. government and other clients.

It is quite normal to post videos of attacks and battles from Syria, and on February 13 Eric said he cheated death again. In the phone video, he’s sweating and looks visibly distressed as he crouches down with an AK in an empty house under fire. In other videos he is relaxing with fellow fighters threatening the regime of Assad.

On February 15 he hits the main-stream news as he posts videos on YouTube. Eric is with his friend “the Chechen” as he drives to inspect a recently shot down Syrian government helicopter.  The problem: the vehicle and his friend, a Syrian descendent of Caucasian fighters, are part of al Nusra, a franchise of al Qaeda created in Iraq ten years ago.

On March 11 he contacted Fox News reporters in Israel and things began to fall apart. He voluntarily went to the US Embassy where he found himself caught in the classic good cop, bad cop game.

When he walked in to the office, the male FBI agent had the Fox News story printed on his desk. The bad cop was a woman from the CIA. Without being warned that what he was about to do was incriminate himself, he volunteered the information that he had shot ten people, traveled and fought with al Nusra and was deeply concerned he might be viewed as a terrorist.

The journalists who interviewed from Fox were Jewish, based in Israel, and got into heated discussion with the part-time jihadi. Eric thinks he was set up and called out as a terrorist by Fox News.

After a series of coy back and forth with Eric, we finally connected on March 14 after he had spent two days being whipsawed at the U.S. Embassy, the last session lasting ten hours.

“I’ll have to hire a fucking Jewish lawyer to sue their asses when I get back,” he said from Istanbul via Skype. “According to Fox News I am going to the Palestinian Territory, and then they said I was going there for violent reason. I should sue those assholes… I was going for peaceful reasons. But now I’m not. It’s too dangerous.”

Eric’s version on how he ended up going to fight with the FSA and ended up with al Qaeda is simple to him.

When he hung around in Turkey for month the buzz amongst young men was “let’s go fight in Syria.” It is a badly kept secret that the U.S., through Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, is recruiting, training and arming rebels to bring down Bashar al Assad. From where he sat in Istanbul and with the Arab Spring still the driving meme, it seemed like a grand adventure.  He crossed the border and was soon taken in by a Free Syrian Army unit. Harroun’s story is that in the confusion of combat he lost track of his FSA unit.

“I was separated from my unit in the fighting,” he said. “I found these guys, I didn’t even know they were al Nusrah until later. I said I need a ride back to my commander. It took 25 days to get them to give me a ride.

“When they’d go out and fight, I’d go along with them. What was I supposed to do? Grab my gun and go. We’re all fighting for the same thing. We’re trying to kill the same people. It’s not like I chose to fight with al Nusra.”

Eric is surprised at the negative portrayal of him as fundamentalist.  “I’m not al Qaeda,” he says. “I like my beer and my smoke, and I like my women. I’m not about the praying five times a day and all that shit.”

During the interview he pointed out that he was eating pork and just “chilling, having a beer and listening to music.” Despite his cool demeanor his meetings at the embassy obviously rattled him.

“I may not be a fighter anymore. After speaking with the FBI guy. If it’s illegal I’m not fighting anymore… If he says I cant go back, I’m not going back.”

But he thinks it’s “bullshit” that an American can’t come and fight.

“It’s illegal for an American to come and fight and that’s bullshit,” he said. He particularly did not like the “CIA lady from upstairs” who played bad cop. To mess with her, he asked her for Stinger missiles. “She didn’t exactly say no. She gave me the name of a guy in Turkey who is supplying weapons to the rebels.”

Erik describes the FBI guy as “nice” but still telling him it is against the law for him to fight in Syria.  Eric said, “I don’t know why they would want to prosecute me… I mean we’re killing the same people. They should give me medal for this shit.”

When asked why he had posted “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist” on his private Facebook (he has just over 300 friends of which we are one of them), he said, “I do have on have in my face book that the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist and I don’t think those reporters like that. That could be causing some problems.”

“I hate Zionists,” he said. The irony that one of the Fox reporters names was “Ben Zion” didn’t seem to sink in. “If they prosecute do you think I could go to federal prison?”

Eric asked us if he was on the no-fly list, if he could sneak back in via Mexico. As we signed off from Skype he said. “The hash is good here, dude. I’ll just chill here…. fuck Assad.”

On March 20^th his FBI “friends” obtained a search warrant for his Facebook account where he had posted a photo of himself posing with an RPG. The location is listed as Turkey, but its good enough for criminal charges. The FBI said he had also posed with “machine guns” not quite clarifying if they mean the heavy weapons on the truck or the AK 47 he held. The FBI references his contentious argument with Fox News and issues that as proof of guilt. And as expected his voluntary discussions with the U.S. embassy to see if he was in trouble, landed him exactly in that trouble he was worried about.

When he got back he was charged in a ten page Criminal Complaint by the FBI for conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction outside the United States.

The post Eric Harroun: Jihadi or Junketeer? appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

After spending eight and half years in the Marine Corps, like a lot of veterans, the Kansas-born officer took a job contracting. He signed on with one of the big, generic-sounding U.S. contractors as a weapons instructor training Afghans in 2011. Like many contracts, the work is hard, hours are long, and conditions are Spartan, but every sunset means good money in the bank. Our contractor spends almost all of his time overseas to make that $220,000 a year. Occasionally he gets a quick furlough stateside to visit friends and family to take care of those numerous nagging chores.

One of those chores is filing federal and state taxes.  Making $200,000 a year is good money, but when he looked at his tax returns he was shocked at how much he had to give right back to the same government that was hiring him. He was aware of the chunky $90,000-plus tax exclusion for expats because he worked overseas. But he was surprised how much he had to cough up in State and Federal taxes.  More than he made back in civilian life—and all in taxes. His fellow contractors had a number of theories and plans to reduce their taxes that involved living offshore, forming corporations and even moving their home address, but this Marine simply paid what his accountant told him to pay and sucked it up.

His girlfriend looked over his tax returns from 2010 and 2011 and suspected he’d overpaid. She invested in a little internet time and phone calls to see exactly what contractors who effectively work and live overseas should pay.  What ensued was a fascinating trip down the tax rabbit hole and fair warning to every contractor that they should seek competent advice as soon as they get their first letter of engagement.

Initially there was much confusion over the use of contractors in the security industry. While the media was arguing “mercenary or contractor” the industry was trying to clarify if security contractors were in fact independent contractors or employees. Bob Wood a lawyer for Wood LLP in San Francisco points out an isolated case in which the IRS actually determined that one security contractor was in fact an employee: “In early 2007, a Blackwater security guard who worked in Afghanistan in 2005 sought back-pay and requested clarification of his status from an IRS office in Vermont. “

On March 30, 2007, the IRS ruled he was an employee. The IRS called Blackwater’s independent contractor classification “without merit.”  While this ruling applied only to one man, the IRS warned that the ruling might “be applicable to any other individuals engaged by the firm under similar circumstances.”

The IRS in this case ruled as it had in many domestic cases of contractor-versus employer-cases, that the working relationship determined the classification, not the employer’s designation.

The IRS found several factors in determining employee versus independent contractor status:

– Blackwater had its personnel sign a written agreement to provide services, and the agreement explained the “type of work and work rotation, and that the worker’s services were an essential part of the services that the firm offers its clients”;

– To protect its financial investment, Blackwater retained the rights to “change the worker’s methods” and to direct the worker;

– Blackwater required the worker to personally perform the services for its client, paid the worker’s travel expenses, performed an evaluation and had the right to suspend the worker” for any violations. In addition Blackwater “contractors” followed instructions regarding his assignment from the client, had no opportunity to realize a profit or incur a loss because the worker did not invest capital or assume any risk.

Blackwater also had contractors sign confidentiality documents to protect this information.  Luckily this single case was not considered policy and security contractors are considered (and taxed) as independent contractors. This puts extra responsibility on the contractor to make sure he gets full benefit from their hard work in the field. Transitioning from a career in the military to essentially a private businessman takes some rethinking.

This lone case turned into a political football and the threat of massive back taxes owed by Blackwater were finally resolved in Blackwater’s favor.  But the lesson is that the world of taxes and security contractors is a murky and ever changing one.

Eventually the IRS realized that trying every case for every contractor was a losing proposition. By lumping hired guns into traditional expat tax classifications, the IRS focused on the “330/365” test.  This shifts the confusion to that of where you hang your hat stateside. The IRS calls it your  “abode”.

Your Section 911 physical presence benefits might be denied if you continued to maintain a residence in the U.S., if you retained your state drivers license, voted in U.S. elections or even returned to the U.S. after your assignment ended.

Last year the IRS waived certain Section 911 rules if an American had left a certain country, after a certain date.  Americans who had left Egypt, Syria, Libya or Yemen due to unrest were allowed to return to the U.S. without tax penalty. But former military that worked in harsher conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan were not allowed to claim those same benefits regardless of the safety conditions. Unfair, confusing, complicated? Yep.  So despite even this advice seek out a tax pro that keeps up with the latest IRS rulings and actions.

One thing the search for a lower tax rate uncovered is that contractors should “reside” in a State with no local taxes. Our Marine discovered that California, his state of residency, is hard on all its residents. The contractor simply thought he was getting taken to the cleaners like everyone else. There are seven states in the U.S. that don’t levy a tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas and Washington. Some of these states have high use taxes and opinions on the quality of life in each state may vary, but you are not going to be physically living there most of the year.

But our Marine turned contractor never thought of this when he took his first contract two years ago.

“My tax guy missed it,” says the contractor, “even after I specifically asked him about it.  Admittedly, he didn’t have much or any experience with overseas contractor tax preparation, which made me nervous.”

He should be nervous.

The security contracting industry has drawn the attention of Congress in the past few years not just for the usual claims of violence, legality and conduct but the IRS has launched it’s own jihad in that prosecutorial environment. When Congress applies pressure, typically the IRS was lock stepped. At least part of this attention can be traced to a single tax preparer:  A company called Blackwater that came from nowhere and was soon providing most of the security personnel to embassies, the CIA and other government agencies in hostile areas.

“If you worked for Blackwater in 2009 chances are you were audited,” says Luke Fairfield, a leading provider of tax service for the industry, in a release posted on former contractor “Feral Jundi”. “Count yourself lucky if you were not, as you are in the minority. If you have not heard of a teammate or fellow employee who has been through an audit I would be surprised. These audits have spread from ex-Blackwater employees to nearly anyone filing for the foreign income exclusion.”

The official story is that a batch of fraudulent returns filed by a preparer for a number of Blackwater employees effectively moved the industry higher up on the IRS’s priority list. The truth is that a new segment of high income earners were simply not filing correctly allowing plenty of financial return for the IRS, usually contracted, auditors. Chris Hughes, a partner at Fairfield Hughes, points to Triple Canopy, who replaced Blackwater on a number of contracts as being the current subject of a rumored “IRS project,” though on a larger scale, it’s the industry that concerns the IRS.

“They find an area when they think they can collect revenue, and they concentrate their resources on it,” Hughes says. “In other words, it’s not always random.”

If you work overseas as a security contractor, you’re in the IRS’s sights and you had better file a clean and correct tax return. Below are three tips to keep the IRS off your back.

1. Contract a Professional

Trained professionals need a trained professional to do their taxes. “Whether or not you understand it, you are responsible for your own return,” says Hughes. “You need to go somewhere [to get your taxes done] where you know you can get good, sound advice and not have to worry about problems with the IRS.”

Hughes and his partner, Luke Fairfield, review past returns of all new clients, and the two “find many, many mistakes.” While finding errors, like incorrect locations of work, may be possible to the amateur, there is no substitute for good hired help. The best way to a qualified certified public accountant is through referral—find someone in the industry who is satisfied with their CPA and contact the accountant.

“It’s not a good idea to use a preparer simply because a friend says, ‘Hey my guy gets $20,000 or $30,000 refunds for everyone,’” Hughes says. Saving money on your taxes should not be the focus of your tax preparation, say the accountants. Rather, the focus should be on filing as clean and correct a return as is possible while maximizing the use of tax benefits and deductions to achieve the lowest tax liability legally possible. The framework of the IRS allows for exemptions that should be viewed as opportunities, but first and foremost you need to avoid the pitfalls. Some sites that advertise tax advice are also fishing for disgruntled contractors who suddenly realize they owe back taxes and choose a legal dodge. Buyer beware. If a web site is screaming at you, perhaps the more low key professionals are where you should turn.

Kaitlin Krozel, a San Diego-based CPA specializing in preparing taxes for expats, says that a tax preparer who is unfamiliar with foreign income regulations can cost their clients thousands of dollars. The good CPAs make the most of their client’s situation and don’t blame

“If you currently have a tax preparer, make sure to ask his or her familiarity with the foreign earned income exclusion, physical presence test, et cetera,” Krozel says. “Also ask if they know how your state of residence taxes overseas income… Most contractors fall under the rules of the physical presence test, which limits the amount of days one can be in the US to claim the full-year income exclusion.”

2. Watch the Straddle

You can qualify for an exclusion but within a tax year. Your start date might straddle two years.  For 2013 is $97,600. That’s the maximum amount of foreign generated income that the IRS will allow you to declare tax-free. It’s called the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, and it can save you a lot of money. It’s also blood in the water for the IRS and, some think, increases your chances of being audited. If you’re audited and you Falsely filed for the exclusion—that is, you filed for it when you don’t qualify for it—you can expect a hefty year-end bill.

According to the IRS you can exclude a certain amount of income if you meet the following descriptions:

• A U.S. citizen who is a bona fide resident of a foreign country or countries for an uninterrupted period that includes an entire tax year,

• A U.S. resident alien who is a citizen or national of a country with which the United States has an income tax treaty in effect and who is a bona fide resident of a foreign country or countries for an uninterrupted period that includes an entire tax year, or

• A U.S. citizen or a U.S. resident alien who is physically present in a foreign country or countries for at least 330 full days during any period of 12 consecutive months.

That’s a lonely window of 34 days to be Stateside for the typical contractor. Not much when you consider there is usually a week of travel just to get home and back. That’s right you have to be IN the foreign country for that gold month and three days. So your time stateside is even more limited.  That’s why you see a lot of long-term contractors moving to Bangkok, the UAE or other regions. For the newbies who don’t get it right, it can be a costly audit…with legal, accounting on top of fines and late fees.

“We get individuals who have very little withholding because they initially believe their foreign earned income is not taxable so they stop their withholdings but ultimately don’t qualify to exclude all or a portion of their foreign earned income from their taxable income,” Hughes says. “As a result, their tax bill can be upwards of $20,000 or $25,000 at the end of the year simply because they are under-withheld. Many are caught unprepared because they may have already spent that money on a new vehicle or included it with a down payment on a new house. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen many times.”

A big part of the withholding pitfall is that contractors falsely assume that filing an IRS Form 673 qualifies them for exclusion. That form, which is submitted to the contractor’s employer, tells the employer to stop all federal withholdings until the $97,600 amount is reached, according to Hughes. Whether the contractor actually qualifies for the exemption in the eyes of the IRS has nothing to do with the Form 673. IRS Form 2555 is the form that is submitted with the taxes to claim the foreign income exclusion.

“The real “gotcha” point is when you start work for a company,” says Jake Allen, former security contractor and founder of the job site Security Contracting Network. “The guys get burned in that first fragmented year. There’s an element of complexity there, but you don’t have to pay all that tax. It’s wise to get a pro to help.”

3. Homeless and Loving It.

“The biggest mistake I see guys make is that they don’t establish residency somewhere or they come home too often,” Allen says. “The guys that are smart just have their wife or girlfriend meet them in some other country and don’t come home more than once a year. Because once you break the seal on that 330-day limit, it costs you.”

Establishing a foreign residency means having a foreign “tax home,” which is basically your place of abode in a “real and substantial sense,” according to the IRS application. Pending a foreign tax home, there are two ways to qualify for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion: Spend at least 330 days of the year outside the US, or demonstrate to the Secretary’s satisfaction that you’re a “bona fide resident” of another country.

To avoid social and economic ties to the US, which can be troublesome when disproving residency here, many young contractors, especially those without wives or families, set up residencies in other countries. But contractors may not claim residency in Iraq or Afghanistan, according the IRS.

Here is the rub, the IRS won’t accept that a contractor resides in what they consider a “combat zones”. Even though danger zones are exactly where contractors live and work.  And the same is true with a residence card from someplace like Kurdistan—it won’t fly with the IRS. In countries approved for contractors to live in, the agency uses common standards to qualify for residency: an electric bill, apartment lease, including involvement in the local economy. Yes the IRS knows the game because they have audited enough security contractors to repeat every story back to you.

“The IRS will look at what the substance of the claim is and compare that to what makes a foreigner a resident in the US,” Hughes says. “We look at it as a claim that’s going to be extremely difficult to sustain.”

You can minimize your taxes by qualifying for foreign residency. But if you live in the US, you can also minimize your taxes by living in states that don’t tax your income: Texas, Florida, Alaska, Nevada, Washington, South Dakota, Wyoming and Tennessee. Conversely, among the worst states that don’t allow for the foreign income exclusion are California, Alabama, Pennsylvania and Hawaii, though state programs within these states may allow for tax breaks in other ways.

If you choose a knowledgeable, reputable preparer, perform due diligence on your Foreign Earned Income Exclusion claim, and are smart about your residency, you can have a hassle-free relationship with the IRS—and save yourself money. You don’t want to garner undue attention from the agency, but you don’t want to distance yourself to where you’re completely off the radar, either. Like a lot of things, avoiding the common pitfalls and complying with regulations will serve you well.

“The best thing for contractors to focus on, what the goal should be,” says Hughes, “is to ask themselves where they can go to get sound tax advice and pay the least amount of tax legally possible without putting themselves in a risky tax position which may jeopardize their ability to continue working in the industry.”

Happy Ending

And what happened to our Marine turned contractor? At the end of the day, his girlfriend sent his tax return to a preparer who knew the IRS nut roll and saved him $50,000. So this tax season, put some money and effort into shopping for someone to do your taxes.

The post The Taxman Cometh: Tips for Contractors appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.