Intel 101: Eric Garland’s tweetstorm on spycraft and the Steele Dossier
Eric Garland is the go-to Twitteratus when it comes to insight on the way intelligence community professionals — government and private — do what they do.
Earlier today, he posted a terrific thread on how Christopher Steele probably assembled the dossier that has driven celebrity real estate mogul Donald Trump to the edge of sanity.
We republish it here on a single page for ease of access. The original thread begins here.
Enjoy — and if you have any interest in what spies do and how they do it, you should follow Garland. He’s that good!
— Dave G.
<INTEL TECHNIQUE THREAD> by Eric Garland
If the Steele Dossier is going to get used by media to drive suspicion, then let’s talk about how HUMINT tradecraft works.
NOTE: WHEN WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THIS STUFF IN PUBLIC, IT MEANS THINGS ARE VERY WEIRD.
That said, it’s 2017, and we’re discussing how “HUMINT” gets verified.
Huh? HUMINT is spook jargon for Human Intelligence – the information derived from people. “We know a guy. He said X.”
This is in contrast to IMINT, Image Intelligence, or SIGINT, Signals Intelligence. Satellite pix, etc: IMINT (Or GEOINT, don’t @ me @NGA_GEOINT)
Radio, email, phone calls, etc: SIGINT
Talking to folks: HUMINT
Steele Dossier is “raw” HUMINT. BTW, I rarely drag out creds on this, but I started as a HUMINT collector in competitive intelligence (for business) 20 years ago.
My company now teaches these subjects, if you’re interested and/or bored. 😎
Collecting information out of people (and knowing when they’re running a play on me): Why yes? In fact, that’s right up my alley!
(Thanks to all you fun people in my DMs) 😀
SO. BACK TO THE STEELE DOSSIER.
Christopher Steele was the subcontractor to Fusion GPS. The project? What Is Up With Trump and Russia?
He collected a HUMINT “dossier.”
BTW – another quick tangent – like many things, referring to them in French makes them Fancy.
Dossier is French for “file folder.”
THE STEELE MANILA FILE FOLDER doesn’t sound like nearly the spy novel, does it?
So, speaking as someone asked to put together HUMINT networks and projects based off them, here’s what a “raw HUMINT dossier” really is.
YOU GUYS READY? OMG SO EXCITING! This is going to get so sexy. OMG. HUMINT. SPYING. MARTINIS. SEX WITH BIKINI CHICKS IN MONACO!
HUMINT: You get some people who’ll tell you stuff.
WHOA, RIGHT
Well, let me hip you to a slightly more realistic (but nevertheless important) image of the SEXXXYNESS OF HUMINT. See pic attached!
Popular conception: You dress up as the President of Peru and infiltrate a U.N. gathering and suck out the juiciest info from other heads of state to save the day!
Reality: You have dudes you know. Or you have people who know some dudes.
Or whatever. And you get what you can that week, and put it in a report.
BTW, in a lot of agencies, the collector only knows what he/she knows.
Only the analysts back home can process it. So you float around and have conversations. Chats. You relaxedly say, “Hey, Nicholas, what’s new, man?” And (with well-trained skills) you try to “elicit” a juicy bit without much notice. FUN FACT: There’s a U-shaped curve for collector effectiveness. At first, you don’t really know what you’re doing, so you don’t give off a weird vibe.
Then, you seem a little weird.
Then, later, you DGAF. 🤣
SO. I’m reading the book COLLUSION (page turner, fun book, read it, not paid to say so, it’s great) and it tells Steele’s story.
He used two or three degrees of separation for the Dossier. This means – totally understandably, given his experience – he sure didn’t dress up like a housekeeper and roam around Moscow.
He had a network. He had people who knew people – who didn’t know Steele.
Pros and cons here.
Pro: You and your clients are protected.
Con: Who the hell gave us this? If your subcontractors are any good, they don’t tell YOU everything, either. They want you protected, and their special value preserved. SO, Steele tells us that he set up a network with a lot of deniability – which may not have worked great since Putin had a bunch of people killed connected to this. That means two things:
Steele got stuff he never could on his own. (Nobody knows everyone useful in any area.)
Steele couldn’t himself verify, precisely, the quality of the output. SO, we’re a year plus later. There’s a BOOK out about Steele’s experience. And TrumpCo is in major hot water.
OMG BUT WHUT ABOUT THE DOSSIER? NO VERRIFICCATIONNS? Well…of course not!
I’m going from personal experience here: nobody’s gonna reproduce your work.
If you admit all your sources, they’re burned – and when it’s national security THEY ARE DEAD DEAD DEAD.
Especially with Russia. ERGO, when you read “THEY COULDN’t GASPVERIFY THE DOSSIER!”
Of course not, you ninny. Steele’s not going to give you his sources so Putin can jam them in a woodchipper. Verification, in the sense of a NatSec or counterintel investigation, is a pretty high bar. IT’S NOT A WORD THAT IS USED ahem
Instead, think: “This guy Steele comes over with his work, we realized we’re way behind, then the USIC and allies get to work.”
Steele was private. They have WAY MORE TOOLS. So of course they don’t bother “verifying” the “unverified” dossier.
You verify with 80 other analysts and sources and allies and SIGINT and pictures from space and all the rest. The IC gets its ass in gear, since apparently…something in the US counterintelligence apparatus…was a little slow.
(This is a big deal)
In the meantime, you can release the Dossier to the public as a slightly-inaccurate teaser of what is to come.
But don’t get confused. The Dossier ain’t got nothing to do with all NATO/#FVEY allies working in concert.
Nothing on Congress.
NOTHING on Mueller.
Strap in.
</THREAD>
