The Rise of Private Spies
What happens when online investigators and detectives-for-hire take
on intelligence work?
A green, white, and black illustration of a spy, eyes covered with a hat
New Republic, Charlie Savage
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/charlie-savage>/May 10, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY KIT RUSSELL
As WikiLeaks was riding to global fame a decade ago by publishing
archives of leaked American military and diplomatic files, its founder,
Julian Assange,liked to call
<https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/04/assange-wikileaks-radical>his
organization an “intelligence agency of the people.” The slogan conjured
an ideal of gathering and disseminating information solely to improve
public understanding of the world and to enable democracy to better
function, without the presumed machinations of a nation-state spy
agency. But by 2016, WikiLeaks had famously been co-opted by Russia’s
GRU. Through a front entity, the Russian intelligence agencyprovided
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-hackers-who-stole-dnc-emails-failed-at-social-media-wikileaks-helped/2019/11/12/751690ae-0580-11ea-a5e2-fccc16fa3576_story.html>WikiLeaks
with Democratic Party emails, stolen as part of a covert hack-and-dump
operation intended to manipulate the U.S. presidential election. Assange
then stoked theconspiracy theory
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/wikileaks-offers-reward-in-killing-of-dnc-staffer-in-washington/2016/08/09/f84fcbf4-5e5b-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html>—apparentlyconcocted
by
<https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-the-true-origins-of-the-seth-rich-conspiracy-a-yahoo-news-investigation-100000831.html>another
Russian intelligence agency—that the emails had instead been leaked by a
Democratic Party staffer, Seth Rich, who had been murdered in July that
year. In fact, as the Mueller reportshowed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/us/mueller-report-seth-rich-assange.html>,
WikiLeaks had corresponded with and received an encrypted file from the
actual source of the hacked emails after Rich’s death.
We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
by Eliot Higgins
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9781635577303>
Bloomsbury Publishing, 272 pp., $28.00
I kept thinking about the big questions raised by the complex tragedy of
WikiLeaks’ idealistic rise and later debasement—what label to attach to
its various activities as it changed over time, and how difficult it
proved for it to stay out of entanglement with nation-state spy games—as
I read two new books about other intelligence-style activities being
performed outside of government.
Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
by Barry Meier
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9780062950680>
Harper, 336 pp., $28.99
/We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of
News <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781635577303>/, by Eliot Higgins,
tells the story of the online collective of activist-investigators he
founded in 2014. The group has achieved growing fame and respect for
generating breakthrough insights and piercing fogs of disinformation,
very often put forward by Moscow. Bellingcat’s achievements include
helping to prove that Russian-backed insurgents downed a civilian
airliner over Ukraine in 2014, despite the Russian government’s public
denials, and figuring out the true identities of the Russian assassins
who poisoned former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his
daughter in Salisbury, England, in 2018. More recently—and not in the
book—the group developed reports implicating Russian intelligence
inother poisonings
<https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2021/01/27/navalny-poison-squad-implicated-in-murders-of-three-russian-activists/>,
notably of the Russian opposition politicianAlexei Navalny
<https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/14/fsb-team-of-chemical-weapon-experts-implicated-in-alexey-navalny-novichok-poisoning/>.
Celebrating Bellingcat’s work as a series of triumphs for the truth in a
world replete with disinformation, Higgins portrays his network’s
efforts as a “hive mind of amateur sleuths on Twitter, all converging
around the next big question, whether geolocating a fresh photo or
parsing the validity of a social-media video.” As citizen journalists,
he also writes, “We tended to be detail-oriented obsessives, many of
whom had spent our formative years at computers, enthralled by the power
of the internet. We were not missionaries out to fix the world, but we
had enough of a moral compass to repudiate the other routes to an
outsized impact online, such as trolling and hacking. Most of us grew up
assuming we would remain peripheral to the issues of the day, that the
powers that be could just ignore small people like us. Suddenly, this
was not so. It was intoxicating.”
/Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780062950680>/is a decidedly less
optimistic book. In it, the investigative journalist Barry Meier
scrutinizes well-paid skullduggery and shenanigans by several private
investigation firms. (The author and I were simultaneously employed
by/The New York Times/before he left the paper in 2017; however, we were
based in different cities and never worked together.) Among Meier’s case
studies are two instances of sending undercover operatives to con people
into providing information on behalf of dubious clients: Black Cube,
which assisted the disgraced film producer and sex criminal Harvey
Weinstein in his attempts to discredit his accusers and disrupt
investigative journalists on his trail, and K2 Intelligence, which
infiltrated and monitored some public health activists working to ban
asbestos (andturned out
<https://www.leighday.co.uk/latest-updates/news/2018-news/corporate-intelligence-agency-pays-substantial-damages-over-claim-for-spying/>to
have a Kazakh asbestos interest as a client). But Meier focuses most on
a saga that is quite different, but weird and momentous in its own way:
the production of the “Steele dossier,” the notorious compilation of
rumors about Donald J. Trump’s purported links to Russia.
Like Higgins, Meier recognizes that performing intelligence work outside
government can carry a thrill. But he is scornful of the modern-day
private investigations business, which he characterizes as a
“scattershot mix of people, drawn to the work by money, the opportunity
for travel and adventure, and the heady rush of power that comes from
spying on the lives of others.” Retired government spies, ex-law
enforcement officials, and onetime journalists make up the industry,
along with assorted “misfits, oddballs, also-rans, wannabes, and the
occasional sociopath,” he writes. While he concedes that such agencies
can take on legitimate assignments, like finding witnesses for lawsuits
and performing background checks, he asserts that the industry has an
ugly open secret: “the big money is made not by exposing the truth but
by papering it over or concealing it.” The people “who are in constant
need of the services of private operatives and who pay top dollar” are
unlikely to be the good guys. Given how easily nongovernmental
intelligence work can go awry, is Bellingcat a rare exception?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The subtitle of the British edition of/We Are Bellingcat/is/An
Intelligence Agency for the People/. When early promotional materials
for the book were unveiled, the close overlap with the old WikiLeaks
slogan proved awkward. Facing accusations of conceptual theft, Higgins
said it was acoincidence
<https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1297485822619418631>, and that
it was his publisher who hadcome up
<https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1290394410245664773>with the
tagline, whilenoting
<https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1292056455768690688>that
versions of the phrase had appeared in print before Assange adopted it.
In any case, he alsoargued
<https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1355074524686020608>, the
phrase was a more fitting description of Bellingcat: While WikiLeaks
focused on collecting leaked or hacked documents, Bellingcat specializes
in sifting for clues within information that is already publicly
available, and then verifying and analyzing them—just as a real
intelligence agency often performs a lot of processing work to transform
raw data into intelligence reports that can be useful to policymakers.
While WikiLeaks focused on collecting leaked or hacked documents,
Bellingcat specializes in sifting for clueswithin information thatis
already publicly available.
A British college dropout and former office worker, Higgins began to
find his niche blogging about the Syrian civil war under the pseudonym
Brown Moses. From his keyboard and far from the war zone, he developed a
hobbyist’s expertise in different kinds of missiles and guns. Studying
social-media videos and photographs from the battlefield, he posted
insights about what was happening—likeevidence
<http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2012/10/clear-evidence-of-diy-barrel-bombs.html>that
the Russian-backed Assad government,despite its denials
<https://www.channel4.com/news/assad-syria-interview-bbc-barrel-bombs-facts-video>,
was responsible for using barrel bombs that maimed and killed many
civilians, and that the rebels hadreceived
<http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/01/are-yugoslavian-anti-tank-weapons-being.html>a
shipment of anti-tank weapons from the former Yugoslavia. Higgins’s blog
posts began attracting the attention of mainstream journalists covering
the war, and he also began to link up with other online obsessives.
From that initially ad hoc work, Higgins came to recognize the broader
implications of life in the internet era for investigations: Valuable
information is hiding in plain sight online, waiting to be recognized
for its significance and transformed into evidence. In particular,
ordinary participants in and witnesses to important and highly disputed
events, like war crimes, often post videos and photographs on
social-media platforms in real time about what they are seeing.
Investigators often must move quickly to identify and preserve these
materials, lest they be deleted when the frightening enormity of the
event becomes clear. They can then subject them to painstaking
analysis—such as using maps, satellite imagery, background landmarks,
shadows, and other clues to figure out when and where a photo was taken.
Through these methods, scattered and seemingly random material can be
harnessed into an evidentiary trail proving who did what, and who is
lying about it.
In 2013, for example, the United States governmentaccused
<https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/30/government-assessment-syrian-government-s-use-chemical-weapons-august-21>the
Assad regime of carrying out a horrific chemical weapons attack that
killed many hundreds of civilians in Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of
Damascus. But its public report provided scant supporting evidence for
that attribution, leaving a void for online conspiracy theorists to
claim that rebels were instead behind the attack. Higgins helped insert
facts into the public debate. Among other things, he scrutinized
social-media photos of one of the unexploded rockets in the attack,
noting that its warhead was equipped to carry liquid and studying
details in the background and the angle it had hit the ground. “Bit by
bit, I matched everything with satellite imagery from Google Maps,” he
writes.
We had the location. And using shadows in the photo, I determined
the angle of the rocket, thereby estimating the direction from which
it had come. With that, I went to Wikimapia, which allows users to
annotate maps by inserting names and types of structures. I traced
back the likely trajectory of the rocket to determine who held the
area where it had come from. I found a Syrian military installation,
largely encircled by rebel-held territory.
On July 14, 2014, Higgins founded Bellingcat as an online clearinghouse
for several like-minded internet sleuths. (The name, suggested by a
friend, is a reference to a fable about a group of mice who decide to
put a bell on a cat so they can hear it coming.) Just three days later
came the event that would be the group’s first major crusade:
Russian-backed separatist militants in eastern Ukraine mistakenly shot
down a civilian airliner, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, killing all 298
people aboard. Rather than owning up to its responsibility and that of
the insurgents whom it had recklessly armed, Russia sought to cloud what
had happened with denials, distortions, and distractions—including
putting out a video that had been doctored to falsely suggest that the
missile that shot down the plane had been fired from territory held by
the Ukrainian government.
“Nothing stirs the online investigative community like fabrications from
the powerful,” Higgins writes. “Moreover, contradictory narratives about
an event are useful, providing something concrete to either verify or
debunk.” Various other players were also working to get at the
truth—among them, investigators with the Ukrainian and Dutch governments
andjournalists <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32283378>. (The
majority of the slain passengers were Dutch citizens, on their way from
Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.) But the nascent Bellingcat collective found
it could add to the public debate by rapidly sifting clues. Bloggers
went to work, among them Iggy Ostanin, a 25-year-old Russian-born
student living in the Netherlands, who mined sources like social media
posts by bystanders and Russian soldiers. Drawing on this work,
Bellingcat pieced together the missile launcher’s path on the flatbed
truck from Russian territory to the insurgents—and its return journey
with one less missile. His report for Bellingcat was, Higgins writes,
the group’s “breakout moment,” and the first major salvo in a grinding
effort against propagandists and denialists on the topic.
/We Are Bellingcat/is essentially a compendium of such investigations,
and most of its chapters read like more polished versions of the reports
the organization previously published online. These case studies are
characterized by showing the group’s deductive homework—walking the
reader through the identification and verification of each tile in a
gradually appearing mosaic of proof. Sometimes exhaustive discussion of
minutiae is necessary to bolster the credibility of the conclusions
asserted—rebuttals to the inevitable question:/How can you amateurs,
just sitting at computers thousands of miles away, know that/? As a
result, the book can be dense at times. But at its best, it reads like
that moment at the end of Sherlock Holmes stories, when the detective
explains to his sidekick, Dr. Watson, how he deduced the solution to a
mystery from overlooked and seemingly minor clues.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There’s nothing new about private investigators and operatives; as early
as the nineteenth century, mill and mine owners paid the Pinkerton
National Detective Agency toinfiltrate and disrupt
<https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-never-sleep>labor
union movements. But Meier makes the case for taking a close look now at
what he calls the “private spy” industry, arguing that
operatives-for-hire in the twenty-first century are no longer “content
to lurk in the shadows” and have “become more emboldened than ever before.”
The techniques private investigators use, as recounted in/Spooked/,
include some old-school tradecraft, like disguising a surveillance van
with a fake business logo and a phone number that a colleague is
prepared to answer as if that business exists. They can also include
more creepily personal forms of “pretexting,” or pretending “to be
someone they are not—a cop, a bank officer, an employer, a distant
relative—in order to con a stranger into giving them confidential
information.” Of particular interest is their ability to harness the
exploding volume of electronic information that is available about
people. Meier writes:
Hacking and cyber-spying was growing more common among hired spies
because experts who had learned their skill while working for
government intelligence agencies or the military were now selling
them to private customers. In addition, once-costly electronic
surveillance tools developed for use by intelligence agencies or the
police had become cheaper and widely available.… To monitor their
targets, some operatives-for-hire also piggybacked on a system used
by bounty hunters to find fugitives. Several of the major cellphone
carriers sold real-time data about the location of a customer’s
cellphone to licensed bounty hunters to help them locate their quarry.
Meier’s book compiles and synthesizes several stories about recent
private intelligence misadventures. While a fair amount is
aggregation—readers of Ronan Farrow’s groundbreakingreporting
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies>on
Black Cube’s work for Harvey Weinstein, for example, may find portions
of that part of the book to be familiar territory—Meier’s research and
original interviews flesh out the stories and characters involved.
Through his eyes, they are often unsavory people.
The best part of his book, upstaging the other sagas, covers the Steele
dossier; in Meier’s telling, no story illustrates quite so clearly “the
oversized impact that private spies were suddenly having on politics,
business, and our personal lives.” During the 2016 campaign, Democrats
financed opposition research into Trump’s links to Russia. They hired
Fusion GPS, an investigative firm cofounded by a former/Wall Street
Journal/reporter about whom Meier writes with palpable scorn. Fusion
partly subcontracted to another firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, which
was run by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official.
And Steele, in turn, worked with Igor Danchenko, a researcher who
specialized in gathering business-related information involving Russia.
Danchenko traveled to Russia and canvassed for gossip—or, more grandly,
“raw intelligence.” He picked up uncorroborated chatter about possible
collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and relayed it verbally
to Steele. After writing this up in a series of reports, Steele gave
parts of or claims from this “dossier” not only to his client, but also
to the FBI and then to reporters. The FBIincluded
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html>some
claims from it in an October 2016 application to wiretap a former Trump
campaign aide. And BuzzFeedpublished
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia>the
dossier in January 2017, causing a different claim from it, which the
FBI had not included in its wiretap request materials—a rumor about a
purported blackmail sex tape—to lodge in popular culture. But some of
the claims proved to be mistaken, and many others remained thin and
murky. In a mirrors-within-mirrors twist, it has sinceemerged
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/us/politics/steele-dossier-declassified-footnotes-ig-report.html>that
the FBI received equally uncorroborated reports that Russian
intelligence might even have infiltrated Danchenko’s network to sow
misinformation—once again showing how hard it can be for nongovernment
investigators to avoid entanglement with nation-state spy agencies, or
at least the suspicion of it.
Whether you admire Trump or scorn him, this private intelligence product
did harm. For Trump supporters, the dossier’s claims were an unfair
smear, and the FBI’s use of unverified political opposition research in
wiretap applications was outrageous. Yet Trump critics have cause for
complaint, too, because the dossier’s flaws helped the Trump camp
misleadingly discredit the actual investigation into Russian
interference in the 2016 U.S. election and into the nature of myriad
interactions between associates of the Trump campaign and Russia. The
dossier played no role in the FBI’s decision to open the
counterintelligence inquiry; the tainted wiretaps were a minor part of
that effort; and the Mueller report did not use information put forward
in the dossier. ButTrump
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-claims-carter-page-fisa-warrant-began-mueller/story?id=56755015>andhis
allies
<https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/politics/trump-russia-dossier-carter-page-fisa>relentlessly
sought to conflate the two efforts in the public mind.
Danchenko shows up late in/Spooked/, giving the impression that Meier
had already written most of his manuscript when the researcher’s
identity became public in the summer of 2020. Although Russian-born,
Danchenko did not live in Russia and was not a veteran Russian
intelligence official with deep ties to its spy services, as a reader of
Steele’s dossier might assume, given the nature of the claims. Instead,
he turned out to be a relatively young researcher based in the United
States. To Meier, this pedestrian origin of the dossier brought into
focus what he sees as a certain flimflam about the entire
operatives-for-hire industry.
“Private spies prosper because they operate behind a façade, one that
masks the quality of the ‘intelligence’ they sell to clients from
scrutiny,” he writes. “That secrecy is the key to the/Wizard of
Oz/nature of the corporate investigations industry. As long as their
work never becomes public, operatives can claim to customers that they
are selling them ‘strategic intelligence’ when what they are often doing
is selling smoke. It becomes plain after the smoke clears that private
spies don’t just play their targets. Their customers can get played, too.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The way that Danchenko’s identity became public is worth pausing over,
because it resonates with several aspects of the Bellingcat saga as
well. A loose collective of pro-Trump online sleuths had set out to
identify Steele’s primary source, sharing insights and theories with one
another. But they were unable to figure out who Danchenko was. Then, the
user of a brand-new, pseudonymous Twitter account with the handle
@Hmmm57474203, who had not previously participated in the collective’s
discussions, stepped forward and unveiled Danchenko’s name. He linked to
ablog post
<https://ifoundthepss.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-primary-sub-source-revealed.html>that
claimed to have figured it out from a chain of clues in a heavily
censored version of the FBI’s interview report with Danchenko, which the
Trump Justice Department had released. The clues included such obscure
things as the apparent number of letters in the researcher’s blacked-out
name.
When I co-wrote anarticle
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/igor-danchenko-steele-dossier.html>about
the unmasking for/The New York Times/, this raised my eyebrows. It made
me think of a sneaky law enforcement technique I knew about from writing
about surveillance issues: “parallel construction,” which investigators
use when they have found some important piece of evidence through a
classified or perhaps illegal intelligence capability they do not want
to reveal in a courtroom. To mask the true source, they reverse-engineer
an alternative path to the same destination for citation in court
papers: It’s easy to rediscover the needle when you already know where
in the haystack to look. Meier seems to have had a similar thought about
the blog post, writing that its author “might have been an investigative
genius. Then again, people inside the U.S. government who wanted to out
Danchenko might have given him help.”
Meier leaves that thought hanging there. But that summer, I corresponded
some on Twitter with @Hmmm57474203, who engaged a bit, although he
declined to identify himself. An established member of the pro-Trump
internet sleuth community eventually interviewed him andposted the audio
online <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXhxNy4wFW4>. If that person was
something other than what he represented himself to be—a clever,
politically motivated amateur—he did a good job faking it.
Bellingcat has faced its own suspicions and aspersions, put forward both
by Russian state media and by commentators who tend to be fierce critics
of hawkish American and NATO military operations. When not mocking
Bellingcat’s researchers as dilettantes, its critics like to insinuate
that Bellingcat must be a front for Western intelligence agencies
seeking to undermine Russia.
Higgins labels the attacks he has faced as coming from the
Counterfactual Community—“a leaderless disinformation campaign, with
claims leaping from conspiracy theorists to state propagandists to
alternative-media outlets and back,” pushed by a mix of
“anti-imperialists, the pro-Assad, the pro-Russian, the alt-right, the
alt-left” who share “pathological suspicion of the West, especially the
US government.” They presume, he writes, “given how much Bellingcat has
discovered, that intelligence agencies must be feeding us stories. This
only reveals ignorance about what is possible with online investigation.
Verification stands on its own, not on the reputation of Bellingcat, or
America, or Russia, or China. If anyone wants to know where we get our
material, they can read our reports, click the links and judge for
themselves.”
The problem with this rebuttal is that it does not address the
possibility of parallel construction. Compounding matters, Bellingcat is
increasingly moving away from its founding principle of using only “open
source” information, by relying as well on clues in nonpublic data like
flight manifests and cell phone records it has purchased on the black or
gray market. Higgins acknowledges that collecting and using this kind of
evidence—exactly the sort of restricted private data the NSA vacuums up
for government spooks to analyze—pose a challenge to his ideal. “All our
investigations, we believe, must be founded on open-source information.
But in carefully judged situations we will build upon that base,” he
writes, adding: “When we go beyond open sources, we are careful never to
assume that such information—because secretive—is more likely to be
true. On the contrary, we employ heightened skepticism about such
material, demanding an extra layer of corroboration.”
It may be that there simply is no airtight assurance that can satisfy
those who are inclined to wonder whether non-governmental analysts might
occasionally get assistance from spies focused on the same adversary;
social mistrust from one quarter or another will inevitably arise in
this polarized era. Still, to date, I am not aware of credible evidence
for the accusations of planted insights. Bellingcat’s enemies have
pointed with insinuation to its acceptance of grant money from the
National Endowment for Democracy, an independent nonprofit group that
receives funding from the U.S. government. But their efforts have so far
left little tarnish on Bellingcat’s image as an independent,
transnational collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen
journalists—essentially, white-hat freelance intelligence analysts
trying to expose bad guys.
This makes for a sharp contrast to the gray- or black-hat private
investigators Meier has scrutinized, and whose targets are often
journalists, activists, and whistleblowers who are trying to expose bad
guys. (The story of the flawed Steele dossier is a very different kind
of mess, but Meier justifies his focus on it based on its massive
political and cultural fallout.) It seems doubtful, however, that the
people who founded or went to work for firms like Black Cube or K2
Intelligence saw themselves as seeking out ways to assist dubious
actors. In any field, one can start off with ideals and perform work
that is genuinely beneficial or at least respectable, only to find
oneself making compromises toward expedient ends that gradually start to
chip away at one’s moral foundation. And there seems to be something
particularly high-risk about intelligence-style work, attracting both
deep-pocketed interests with secrets to cover up and nation-state spy
agencies looking for ways to engage in clandestine information warfare.
To be straightforward, if I were a CIA or MI6 operative and wanted, as
part of my Spy vs. Spy games with Russian intelligence, to expose
something about Moscow’s misdeeds without leaving any fingerprints, it
would be an obvious temptation to take an insight that is capable of
parallel construction and whisper it into the ear of one of Bellingcat’s
contributors. Western intelligence agencies have been known to be
shortsighted at times, and an official so inclined might not
sufficiently care about the risk that the group’s enemies, whether
sincerely or with cynicism and bad faith, would use any subsequent leak
about that tip as ammunition in their efforts to damage its idealistic
reputation as an intelligence agency just working on behalf of the
public, as Higgins’s British subtitle put it.
The lines between traditional journalists, private detectives,
very-online activist-investigators, and nation-state
intelligenceoperatives constantly threaten to blur.
So Bellingcat must remain vigilant and jealously guard its independence.
The tragic arc of WikiLeaks is a warning that the lines between
traditional journalists, private detectives, very-online
activist-investigators, and nation-state intelligence operatives
constantly threaten to blur. That inherent instability provides a
backdrop to Meier’s fundamental point that people outside government
performing intelligence-style work seem to be having a rising impact.
Whether their intentions and actions are noble, or mercenary and
corrupt, or somewhere in between—whether they are a Bellingcat or a
Black Cube or one of the investigators involved in the Steele
dossier—these entities are all operating outside the channels of
oversight and accountability, however imperfect, that governments
attempt to impose on groups like the CIA. And their influence on
politics, business, and other aspects of our lives is escalating.
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