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    Chinese Intelligence May Be Trying to Recruit Fired U.S. Officials

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    The National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned on Tuesday that China’s intelligence services were using deceptive efforts to recruit current and former U.S. government employees.The center, along with the F.B.I. and the Pentagon’s counterintelligence service, said in an advisory that foreign intelligence agencies were posing as consulting firms, corporate think tanks and other organizations to recruit former U.S. officials.The American government has long said that China uses social networks to secretly recruit people. But former U.S. officials say China now sees an opportunity as the Trump administration shuts down agencies, fires probationary employees and pushes out people who had worked on diversity issues.The warning advised former officials who have security clearances of their “legal obligation to protect classified data” even after they leave the government. It added that China and other foreign countries were targeting a variety of former officials.Postings on the social media platform Bluesky targeted researchers dismissed by the National Institutes of Health, offering them a chance to “pursue career development” in Shenzhen, China.Former officials said other outreach from foreign intelligence services has targeted agents let go from the F.B.I. and military officers who have retired.“Current and former federal employees should beware of these virtual approaches and understand the potential consequences of engaging,” the counterintelligence center said.Chinese intelligence services often begin recruitment efforts by offering a small fee for an innocuous research paper. Over time, the requests push for more sensitive material.The center advised former officials, particularly people with security clearances, to be careful about what they post concerning their government work.Red flags of the recruiting efforts include offers of disproportionately high salaries and flexible work conditions, the center said. Recruiters can also be “overly responsive” to messages from a former government official and give a strange amount of praise.Last month, CNN reported that China and Russia had directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of U.S. federal employees working on national security issues, including targeting people who could be fired.Former officials have said that workers forced out of government jobs can be vulnerable — desperate for work and angry at the government — and could let down their guard. While some approaches, like the ones posted on Bluesky, were obviously of Chinese origin, others may be better disguised, appearing to come from American companies, former officials said.While intelligence and military officials are trained to recognize such efforts by foreign intelligence services, government researchers do not routinely receive the same level of counterintelligence training.The intelligence agencies have not cut as deeply as some departments, like the U.S. Agency for International Development, but the C.I.A. has fired about 80 probationary employees. The National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have also fired workers. More

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      The Secret History of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War

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      <!–> [–><!–> [–><!–>On a spring morning two months after Vladimir Putin’s invading armies marched into Ukraine, a convoy of unmarked cars slid up to a Kyiv street corner and collected two middle-aged men in civilian clothes.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –> <!–> [–> <!–> ]–> <!–> –><!–> –><!–> […] More

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      Trump Administration Deflects Blame for Leak at Every Turn

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      It was a hoax. The information wasn’t classified. Somehow the journalist got “sucked into” the Signal chat, either deliberately or through some kind of technical glitch.In the days since the editor in chief of The Atlantic revealed he had been inadvertently included in a group chat of top U.S. officials planning a military strike on Houthi militants in Yemen, senior members of the Trump administration have offered a series of shifting, sometimes contradictory and often implausible explanations for how the episode occurred — and why, they say, it just wasn’t that big a deal.Taken together, the statements for the most part sidestep or seek to divert attention from the fundamental fact of what happened: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used Signal, an unclassified commercial app, to share sensitive details about an imminent attack in an extraordinary breach of national security.Here’s a look at the main players and what they’ve said about what happened, and how much their reasoning matches up with what transpired.President Trump said the Atlantic’s article was a “witch hunt” and called the journalist a “total sleazebag.”President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the fervor over the Atlantic’s article was “all a witch hunt,” suggesting that perhaps Signal was faulty, and blaming former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for not having carried out the strike on Yemen during his administration.“I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you,” he said, after complaining that “Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen.” The fact that he didn’t, Mr. Trump added, had “caused this world a lot of damage and a lot of problems.” While the Trump administration has criticized Mr. Biden for not being aggressive enough against the Houthis, his administration led allied nations in several attacks on Houthi sites in Yemen in 2024.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Were the Kennedy Files a Bust? Not So Fast, Historians Say.

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      The thousands of documents posted online this week disappointed assassination buffs. But historians are finding many newly revealed secrets.In June 1973, a C.I.A. employee wrote a memo at the request of William E. Colby, the agency’s director, listing various ways the C.I.A. had, to put it delicately, “exceeded” its charter over the years.The seven pages matter-of-factly described break-ins at the French Consulate in Washington, planned paramilitary attacks on Chinese nuclear facilities and injections of a “contaminating agent” in Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union. The memo ended with an offhand aside about John A. McCone, the agency’s former director.“Finally, and this will reflect my Middle Western Protestant upbringing, McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, would and could raise eyebrows in certain quarters,” the author wrote.It was just one paragraph in the roughly 64,000 pages the National Archives posted online this week as part of the latest — and supposedly final — release of its vast collection of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.But for some of the scholars who immediately started combing through the documents, the brief passage, seen unredacted for the first time, raised eyebrows for sure.“This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the C.I.A., which, boy, would be explosive if we could get documents about,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside the 24-Hour Scramble Among Top National Security Officials Over the J.F.K. Documents

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      President Trump’s national security team was stunned and forced to scramble after he announced on Monday that he would release 80,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with only 24 hours’ notice.Administration officials had been working on releasing the records since January, when Mr. Trump signed an executive order mandating it. But that process was still underway on Monday afternoon when Mr. Trump, during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, said the files would be made available the next day.By the time the files were made public on Tuesday evening, some of the country’s top national security officials had spent hours trying to assess any possible security hazards under extreme deadline pressure.John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been emphasizing to senior administration officials that some documents had nothing to do with Mr. Kennedy and were developed decades after the assassination, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. He wanted to make sure that other officials were fully aware of what the files contained and would not be caught off guard, but he was clear that he would not seek to impede any files from being released, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.Soon after Mr. Trump spoke on Monday afternoon, officials at the National Security Council quickly convened a call to map out a plan to take stock of which documents still needed to be unredacted. The release had to be coordinated with the National Archives and Records Administration. Some officials raised concerns about unintended consequences of rushing the release of the files, including the disclosure of sensitive personal information like the Social Security numbers of people who were still alive, the people said.Officials involved in the process of declassification said the number of files had expanded greatly over many decades because, with each investigation into Kennedy-related material, information that had nothing to do with the assassinated president has come under that umbrella. In some cases, that includes documents created decades after his death, according to one person with knowledge of the process.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?

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      Why the newly released documents won’t put out the fire.On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, “It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.”The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy’s in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself.Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the “twilight struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air.Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      C.I.A. Director Says U.S. Has Paused Intelligence Sharing With Ukraine

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      The C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe said on Wednesday that intelligence sharing with Ukraine had been paused alongside military aid to pressure its government to cooperate with the Trump administration’s plans to end the country’s war with Russia.Speaking on Fox Business, Mr. Ratcliffe applauded the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement on Tuesday praising President Trump and insisting that he supported peace with Russia. Mr. Ratcliffe said he thought intelligence sharing would resume.“President Zelensky put out a statement that said, ‘I am ready for peace and I want President Donald Trump’s leadership to bring about that peace,’” Mr. Ratcliffe said. “And so I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen, I think will go away, and I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have, to push back on the aggression that’s there.”On Tuesday, after Mr. Trump ordered a halt to military assistance, officials differed on whether the United States was continuing to share intelligence. One official said all intelligence that was not directly related to the protection of Ukrainian troops had been put on hold. Another official said that exception covered most intelligence sharing, and information still was flowing to Ukrainian forces.Mr. Ratcliffe said on Wednesday that Mr. Trump asked for a pause on intelligence sharing. And his comments suggest that the C.I.A. put at least some of its intelligence sharing with Ukraine on hold for a short time.Trump administration officials have said the pauses were a warning to the Ukrainians of the consequences if they did not cooperate with Mr. Trump’s peace plan. The details of those plans remain unclear. Mr. Trump has spoken approvingly of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and his aides have endorsed elements of the country’s ideas for ending the war.But European countries are trying to develop their own plan that could win over both Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky. More

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      Sept. 11 Plea Deal Includes Lifetime Gag Order on C.I.A. Torture Secrets

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      The clause is included in a disputed plea agreement between a Pentagon official and the man accused of planning the attacks that killed 3,000 people.Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the prisoner at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who is accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, has agreed to never disclose secret aspects of his torture by the C.I.A. if he is allowed to plead guilty rather than face a death-penalty trial.The clause was included in the latest portions of his deal to be unsealed at a federal appeals court in Washington. A three-judge panel is considering whether former Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III lawfully withdrew from a plea agreement with Mr. Mohammed in the capital case against five men who are accused of conspiring in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000.The C.I.A. has never taken a public position on whether it supports the deal, and the agency declined to comment on Friday. But the latest disclosure makes clear that Mr. Mohammed would not be allowed to publicly identify people, places and other details from his time in the agency’s secret prisons overseas from 2003 to 2006.It has been publicly known for years that Mr. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times by the C.I.A. It has also been revealed that waterboarding was done by a three-person interrogation team led by Bruce Jessen and James E. Mitchell, two former contract psychologists for the agency. Details of Mr. Mohammed’s violent treatment, including rectal abuse, have emerged in court filings and leaks.But the agency has protected the names of other people who worked in the “black site” prisons, notably medical staff, guards and other intelligence agency employees. That includes the people who questioned Mr. Mohammed hundreds of times as he was shuttled between prisons in Afghanistan, Poland and other locations, which the C.I.A. has not acknowledged as former black sites.Now, a recently unredacted paragraph in Mr. Mohammed’s 20-page settlement says he agreed not to disclose “any form, in any manner, or by any means” information about his “capture, detention, confinement of himself or others” while in U.S. custody.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Considers Kennedy’s Daughter-in-Law for C.I.A. Deputy Director

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      Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a former C.I.A. officer who is married to the son of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., raised alarms for publishing a book about her work at the agency without going through a review process.President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter-in-law to serve as the deputy director at the C.I.A., according to four people briefed on the matter.Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, 44, a former C.I.A. officer who is married to Mr. Kennedy’s son, met with Mr. Trump last week to discuss the job, the people said. The position does not require Senate confirmation, unlike the director job.Mr. Kennedy, who is the president-elect’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is among those encouraging Mr. Trump to hire her, according to two people close to the Trump transition team. Like others interviewed for this article, they spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.In an interview in 2023, Mr. Kennedy said it was “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the C.I.A. was involved in the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.Ms. Fox Kennedy, who served as her father-in-law’s campaign manager, has raised alarms within the agency and among some lawmakers, in part because she published a book about her time in the C.I.A. in 2019 — while Mr. Trump was president — without going through the lengthy government review process required to check that classified information is not made public.Some former officials questioned details in the book about Ms. Fox Kennedy’s meetings in Pakistan with Islamic extremists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More