"*sigh* As an old spook watcher and ComSec fan, this article indicates to me that some kind of shakeup in Russian collection inside the U.S. may have happened. But that is all. The authors of this article present as ignorant fools with no background knowledge or competency of any kind in intelligence studies and related technical basics. They simply repeat whatever Big Lie propaganda our spooks feed them, because that's what their publisher pays them to do.
WASHINGTON
— Russian spies in the U.S. conducted a massive operation to track and
collect encrypted FBI radio traffic, but there is no evidence they ever
cracked the codes and obtained the contents of the communications, two
former senior FBI officials tell NBC News.
Nonetheless, the Russian intelligence success, first reported by Yahoo News,
provided Vladimir Putin's government unprecedented insights into the
activities of secret FBI surveillance teams tracking Russian operatives
in the U.S., the former officials said. The breach occurred sometime
around 2010, and was well understood by 2012, the former officials said.
Much of the message traffic the Russians collected was processed in two Russian diplomatic facilities that the
Obama administration closed in 2016, citing Russia's interference in the
presidential election.
"We knew that they
were on to us in terms of radio traffic," one former senior official
told NBC News. "They had a huge effort they threw at it. But we never
saw content."
Yahoo
News cited former officials who said the Russians had access to "likely
the actual substance of FBI communications," but the two former
officials told NBC News they did not believe that to be true. The two
former senior officials said they had seen nothing to suggest Russia
successfully decoded encrypted U.S. government communications. Rather,
the Russians were able to detect and locate secret FBI radio
transmissions, they said.
"What they saw was traffic around certain meetings with people who were talking to them," one former official said.
In
some cases, the insights the Russians gleaned from the location and
movements of FBI surveillance teams led them to stop meeting with
sources in the U.S. the former official said.
The
former official added that the FBI and CIA learned of the Russian
success through some espionage successes of their own, which he declined
to detail.
Chapman
was arrested along with nine other Russians, who were accused of acting
as a network of sleeper agents sent to live in the U.S. under
non-official cover. They were deported to Russia in a spy swap.
It
was long known that the Russians were using their diplomatic compounds
in Maryland and New York as listening posts, which is why the Obama
administration seized them in December 2016, officials said. But the CIA
and FBI also learned that wives of Russian diplomats were working in
the facilities to process FBI radio traffic, said the former senior
official, who had direct knowledge of the matter.
The
news of the Russian success comes after revelations that the CIA's
method of communicating with its informants had been compromised.
NBC News and other organizations reported in 2018 that a secret FBI–CIA task force investigating the case of an American CIA officer spying for China concluded that the Chinese government penetrated the CIA's method of
clandestine communication with its spies, using that knowledge to arrest
and execute at least 20 CIA informants, according to multiple current
and former government officials.
Yahoo News then reported in November that Iran also had cracked the CIA's covert communications
system, resulting in a cascading crisis that put at risk foreigners
around the world who had been recruited by the American spy agency to
provide information.
Both of these matters
are known to the Congressional oversight committees, officials tell NBC
News, but since they are classified, there has been no public
accountability.