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No idea if eternal spy and counterspy cat and mouse game counts as part of culture wars, but here are some recent news from this area.
1/Teixeira leaks were discussed here when they happened, here is the resolution of the case.
We would all agree that 16 years of maximum security prison is price worth paying to impress your gamer buddies in Thug Shaker Central Discord.
2/In related news, important US Foreign Service officer, former ambassador to Bolivia was uncovered to be lifelong spy for ... Cuba.
Another source.
Do not laugh, Cuban DI counts among the better ones in the spook world, infiltrating Washington DC previously while running circles aroud US agents in Cuba. US is rather lucky that Cuba is shithole in every other measure.
3/Another, more pedestrian case of desperate American greed and disgraceful Chicom penny pinching. Surely US top secrets are worth more that $42,000? What insult.
Conclusion: US security is as big shitshow as it had always been. No loyalty (if you keep back stabbing everyone who trusts you, what could you expect), no grand idea inspiring self sacrificing volunteers and no rewards for service either.
Good that any superpower or wannabe superpower competitors are even worse. Notoriously insular Chinese who understand nothing about outside world and have to rely on cash and Chinese ethnic ties, and the less said about Russian Petrov & Boshirov clown show, the better.
Unlike the great and tragic struggle of the First Cold War, the second one is going to be slapstick comedy. Freedom and Democracy (TM) vs. Bright Communist Future(TM) are over.
LGBTQ+BLM vs Xi Jinping Thought is the game now. Enjoy the show.
edit: links now work
I was actually thinking about this subject recently while reading Wikipedia biographies of Soviet spies (this guy died in 2020, after spending 50 years in Moscow post-defection!) from decades ago.
It is telling that the volume of high-profile defection seems much, much lower today than it was at the height of the Cold War. The influence operations we have today are either low level things, like your $42,000 case, or stuff like Bob Menendez being comically and publicly bribed with literal gold bars by the Egyptians, which the intelligence community has obviously known about since it first happened. I think the motivation for high-volume elite defection just isn't there anymore.
When you read the biographies of famous Cold War defectors, almost all of them were motivated by a genuine belief in the Communist system. For every greedy Aldrich Ames there were a half dozen Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blakes and so on who truly believed in the Marxist message and revolution. And it's telling that the few major spies the West has seen since the 1991 have also been motivated either by extreme narcissism (Manning) or by genuine political conviction (Snowden's libertarianism).
Most of the people that were recruited as double agents in the 50s and 60s, certainly in higher-IQ positions, really believed. They believed they were serving global revolution, serving a superior system, and that the sooner the USSR outcompeted the West and the West had its revolution, the better. Many genuinely believed the above would happen in their lifetime, very soon even, such that even if they were discovered and as such either imprisoned or forced to officially defect and flee, they would return home before long.
China and Russia don't really have much to offer American double agents. They can flip the occasional low-level operative with the promise of money, but the scale of US surveillance over global banking is such that multi-million-dollar payoffs to poorly-paid intelligence agents are pretty much impossible to get away with permanently for now, even with crypto (it's not like trying to convert your Chinese monero into dollars to buy anything isn't going to tip anyone off, especially if every bank already has you flagged as intelligence, which they do). Your only options in the case of defection are living a shitty life in Moscow or Beijing as an eternal foreigner in a system that doesn't care about you and which is essentially just a poorer, more authoritarian and more corrupt version of what exists in the West. (And they know it too, which is why Snowden and others will be under permanent surveillance in case they attempt to defect back.)
And I think this is increasingly visible in the way that China and especially Russia conduct international espionage. China outright kidnaps random prominent Americans / Canadians / Brits etc and holds them hostage until its people are released (eg. the Huawei heiress). Russia does the same, but maintains order by assassinating double agents who defect to the West on foreign soil at an increasingly aggressive pace, presumably to keep its people in line and convince them that they'll never be safe if they leave. Foreign influence operations by both nations are increasingly short-termist, amateurish, or just chancers, like the largely abortive attempts via Manafort etc to influence Trump, which were mostly just an embarrassment for everyone involved.
Neither system really has anything to offer. If you become a true enemy of the West you better (a) hope you enjoy your miserable life in Russia or China, (b) hope neither nation tires of you enough to trade you for someone they care about, (c) accept that even many neutral nations (India, the UAE etc) will be 'no go zones' because the US can and will extrajudicially kidnap you and the local government won't care enough to stop you, or they'll just trade you for money/influence/weapons/some other foreign policy goal.
Cuba is arguably the only exception. If you have some cash, or are given some in exchange for defection, you can enjoy a nice, comfortable retirement on the beach. There are plenty of modern-enough international resorts catering to Canadians and Europeans, the weather is good, the food and alcohol are good, it's comfortable and you can live very well for a very small amount of money. And because Cuba isn't Russia or China, you're not a high priority enough threat that receiving visitors or conducting some limited business is impossible. In time, rapprochement of some kind will likely continue (unlike Russia or China where it seems ever less likely), your defection may well be washed under the bridge, and everything will turn out (possibly) fine. And unlike Venezuela or Bolivia, where a successful US-aligned coup led by people who will gladly ship anyone the CIA wants back to Washington is at least possible in the near term, Cuba's system is very unlikely to experience that kind of revolution.
So, interestingly, Cuban intelligence might well have an easier time than their peers in the anti-American axis.
Absolutely banging analysis and write up! My only nit is that you're not correct about the crypto (not a crypto fan here btw as I think really the only value add use case for it is crime and money laundering). It is extremely easy to trade a thumb drive or a wallet number and pass key for cash/gold/land, or oh hey I bought a hard drive on ebay with an old wallet on it so I put it in my coinbase account...the options are endless, as long as you pay your taxes. If you really are a spy you don't even need to go that far, just use someone else's accounts.
Of course! I’m not suggesting it would be impossible for serving senior intelligence personnel to receive crypto as payment when selling secrets, either via a physical wallet or digitally.
But the way that modern KYC / transaction analysis tools have advanced makes it much more difficult to hide the spending of this money than ever before.
If you make $120,000 a year at the NSA, you can’t buy a $4m vacation house in Palm Beach without your bosses knowing; you probably can’t go on a $100k summer vacation to Europe without your bosses knowing; you can’t suddenly become a major shareholder in a highly profitable small business without your bosses knowing. Right now, almost every use case for spending crypto still involves a conversion to dollars and thus some involvement with the regular, heavily surveilled financial system. You can try to transact as much as possible in crypto, but there will pretty much always be signs (especially if you intend to share any wealth with friends and family). Neighbors gossip, people overhear things, notice sudden changes in spending. And if you’re intelligence, you’re on everyone’s list of sensitive accounts.
So sure, you could conceivably receive $5m in crypto and do nothing with it, no differently to how Russia could just give you $5m in a suitcase that you keep under the bed for the rest of your life. But that tends not to satisfy those who sell secrets.
Right but I mean you can just "find" some on an old hard drive. I mean shoot I scrapped a computer with a wallet on it a decade ago. Who can say boo to that? As long as you are paying someone or depositing with a wallet that has been inactive for a while, just in case anyone looks into it while you buy you 4 million dollar home. You're correct in that it would be suspicious if you work in intelligence, better be paid up on your red flag insurance! I suppose I was gaming it out more for the average person.
It can be traced. the only fresh bitcoin is coins direct from miner or major exchange.
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