In late October, President Joe Biden issued two supplemental funding requests. The first, primarily to support Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s war against Russia, became the $95 billion National Security Act, which the Senate passed in February. This week, Biden urged House leadership to pass the bill as soon as possible.

Never has the president appeared more committed to advancing one of his priorities. Biden delivered a rare Oval Office address specifically to market the plan — something he hasn’t done for any other proposal — and designated the funding as “emergency requirements.” In the weeks and months that followed, he ensured that it remained at the top of Congress’s agenda, even if that meant delays to other legislative business. His hard work paid off: The current bill gives Biden pretty much exactly what he asked for.

The second proposal is half the size of the first and funds domestic programs such as grants to child care providers and disaster relief. This request wasn’t designated as emergency spending.

While Biden personally and repeatedly urged Congress to approve his foreign policy plan, there is not a single instance of him even mentioning his domestic proposal in a statement since offering it on October 25. It hasn’t made an appearance on his personal or presidential X accounts either. Indeed, the way the proposal is written suggests that Biden never intended it to be taken seriously. The foreign policy request is a 69-page, fully drafted legislative proposal that’s formally addressed to the House speaker; the domestic request is a two-page summary table.

The disproportionate amount of political — and regular — capital Biden put into his military spending proposal compared to his domestic, anti-poverty measure characterizes the disconnect between Washington’s idea of “national security” and what security actually means to working-class people and families. If there were alignment, the domestic proposal would be a bill by now.

The National Security Act 2024 puts the U.S. on track to spend more on its military this year than it did annually on average during World War II. Seventy percent of the $95 billion bill is designated for the Pentagon, as is another $886 billion Congress authorized in December. Altogether, the pending fiscal year 2024 Pentagon budget stands at $953 billion.

But as Biden pushes for the largest military budget in the postwar era, 63 percent of U.S. adults say rising prices are a source of hardship; 41 percent report difficulty paying for basic needs like food, housing, child care, and utilities; and 23 percent said they were unable to pay an energy bill in full in the last year. These measures of financial distress are all higher than what they were on average in fiscal years 2021, 2022, or 2023. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, the president’s focus is on weapons.

In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, the president’s focus is on weapons.

The largest provision in the domestic plan is a one-year, $16 billion extension to the American Rescue Plan’s Child Care Stabilization program, which saved the already-fragile child care sector from collapse during the pandemic by keeping workers employed and costs down for families. More than 220,000 child care programs received assistance, including the Sammy Center, a nonprofit preschool in Salt Lake City, Utah. “I am eternally grateful for the stabilization grants,” founder Maria Soter told me. “The funding was my lifeline.”

The expiration of stabilization grants on September 30 set in motion an unfolding disaster. To compensate for the funding shortfall, child care programs across the country are closing, downsizing, cutting wages, or raising costs. In October, more than a third of providers who once received stabilization funding said they had already increased tuition. Knowing she would have to raise tuition at her preschool, Soter said that in the lead-up to the grants’ expiration, “there were nights I didn’t sleep.” Although most parents could afford the extra $300 per month to keep their child enrolled, she lost four students because of the increase.

Absent new stabilization funding, 3.2 million children could lose access to child care. Financial hardship will likely get worse too: Many working parents are now paying more for child care or working less to assume those duties themselves. Households are projected to lose nearly $9 billion in earnings annually from parents reducing their work hours or leaving their jobs entirely to cover the new gaps in child care coverage.

Spending $16 billion on child care would blunt rising financial hardship and promote children’s well-being. The National Security Act, meanwhile, spends $16.5 billion to sustain Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 12,500 Palestinian children.

This bill shouldn’t exist for another reason. Providing military aid to Ukraine wouldn’t require a supplemental bill had Biden not excluded funding for it from the $886 billion Pentagon budget hoping to avoid trade-offs.

To the delight of military contractors, his plan worked. All told, the U.S. arms industry should expect a windfall of about $64 billion from the National Security Act, or four times the money it would take to mitigate America’s child care crisis.

The post Biden Is Bankrolling Israel’s War Amid Growing Financial Hardship at Home appeared first on The Intercept.

Some opposed to Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza think the flyers are propaganda, a crass manipulation of suffering designed to cement a bond between the United States and Israel and ensure that Washington continues to give Israel both a free hand and what it wants in weapons to continue its assault on Gaza, exempt from the so-called Leahy Law, which prohibits supplying weapons to states involved in wide-scale human rights violations. As we approach the two-month mark since the hostage-taking, the posters have become rallying points in what is shaping up to be a global war for hearts and minds. Videos of people ripping down the flyers have gone viral, providing evidence that those who claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians are heartless and inhumane. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” CNN’s Jake Tapper recently said of the posters being ripped down. Some Americans, Tapper said, “are actually rooting for the hostage takers.”

As a New Yorker and historian who has worked on political terror in Latin America, I think there is another way to tell the story of the controversy these posters are causing, why some see them as a plea for help and others a call for war. They exist in a loop. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say it’s an endless return, a vortex of shared, unending trauma, starting with the Holocaust, continuing through death-squad terror in Latin America, onward to 9/11, and now to Gaza and back to the Shoah.

Night and Fog

In Latin America, the repressive tactic of “disappearing” enemies of the state came into widespread use in the early 1960s, as Washington mobilized its allies to ensure the containment of the Cuban Revolution. The tactic itself emulated Adolf Hitler’s famous 1941 Nacht und Nebel, or Night and Fog, decree, which directed security forces operating in occupied territories, mainly France, to capture dissidents and hold them incommunicado. Most were executed. The Nazis coined a neologism for these victims, vernebelt, which loosely translates as transformed into mist. Latin Americans called their missing los desaparecidos, the disappeared. It was an especially cruel method of repression. Family members and friends exhausted their energies dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies trying to find some hint of where their loved ones might have been taken, only to be met with indifference by government officials. “To disappear” is normally an intransitive verb, meaning the object of the sentence is doing the action. “My keys disappeared.” “That book disappeared.” Latin Americans turned it into a transitive verb, used often in what linguists call the adversative passive voice, to indicate an unfortunate occurrence: “She was disappeared.”

By whom? Everyone knew. The sentence’s subject noun was left unstated, underscoring the covert nature of the death squads: Fue desaparecido. Into the mist.

As violence intensified in Guatemala in the early 1980s, relatives and comrades of those taken by security forces would, within days, put up flyers on city walls with their faces, names, and dates of disappearance, along with, often, the unions or political organizations to which they belonged. The walls of union halls were filling with photographs of the missing, yet this was still a moment when it was possible to believe that the Left was in ascendence. Deborah Levenson, a historian who documented the 1985 siege of Guatemala City’s Coca-Cola plant during this period, says that images of the missing were not meant to convey defeat, nor to preserve what later would be called “historical memory.” Levenson, in response to a query for this essay, recalls that the bottling plant’s cafeteria was adorned with large photographs of the vanished staring down on surviving militant unionists as they ate. The missing and the dead alike were understood to be something like Christian martyrs, who had sacrificed their lives for those fighting for a better life. The subtext was clear, she said: “The loss of this person will not stop us but make us stronger.”

But the Left in Guatemala, as throughout Latin America, was defeated, brutally so, and the meaning of the public photographs of the missing changed. They evolved from inspiration to accusation, evidence of crimes against humanity, proof that this person once lived and now is gone. By the end of the 1980s, death squads, police units, and military detachments had, in addition to committing run-of-the-mill extrajudicial assassinations and massacres, disappeared thousands in Chile; tens of thousands in Argentina; around 10,000 in El Salvador; and 45,000 in Guatemala. As Gabriel García Márquez told his Swedish audience in his 1982 Nobel acceptance lecture, it’s “as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala.” This form of repression has outlived the Cold War; more than 100,000 Mexicans have disappeared over the last two decades, victims of a never-ending war on drugs.

Defeat brought forth the need to find an appropriate way to render the disappeared, a way to fully represent both the specific individual who had been taken and the magnitude of what had been lost. In Argentina, the junta had been disappearing people since 1976, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s, in increasingly bold actions taken by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, that people began to openly come out into the street with photographs of their missing. Elías was last seen in the clandestine concentration camp El Vesubio on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1978. His son, a friend of mine, remembers his mother making their placard with a heavy black marker. The family had little money, so a human rights organization paid to have the photograph from Elías’s citizenship card enlarged.

In late 1983, a collective of Argentine artists working with relatives of the disappeared decided it was time to defy the generals and stage a large demonstration, and they searched for an artistic medium that could convey the enormity of the suffering, some way to represent both humanity and its loss. One of the organizers landed on panel series titled “Each Day at Auschwitz” by the Polish artist Jerzy Skapski. Skapski had crammed each poster with thousands of silhouettes, meant to represent the people who were killed daily at the death camp.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

It made sense for this group of activists to look to the Holocaust for ideas on how to represent loved ones taken. The Argentine junta was viciously antisemitic, and Latin America was indispensable in the creation of Israel, casting more than a third of the total United Nations votes in 1947 in favor of partition and voting unanimously, all 18 Latin American nations, for Israel’s admission into the U.N. The horror of Hitlerism resonated in Latin America. Pablo Neruda made anti-Nazism a topic in his writings, and Jorge Luis Borges addressed the Holocaust in his short stories. For decades, the Latin American Left understood itself as struggling against local variants of fascism, as if World War II hadn’t ended but merely shifted venues.

Skapski’s silhouettes captured exactly what the Argentines hoped to convey: an outline of loss, a trace of something that was at once particular and universal, a human and humanity.

On September 21, 1983, as Buenos Aires’s city center, the Plaza de Mayo, filled with protesters, organizers asked those who had lost family members to lie down on sheets of white paper and let an artist draw outlines of their bodies. The name of the disappeared, along with the date they went missing, was then painted on the silhouette. By the end of the day, thousands — some say 30,000 — silhouettes were plastered on the walls of government buildings surrounding the plaza and adjacent streets. Later, the sheets were turned into stencils and the images spray-painted on walls, making it look as if ghostly shadows were walking the streets of Buenos Aires.

The event was called the siluetazo, which might best be translated as silhouette-a-thon, and it was the largest protest against disappearances in Latin America of its time. Soon, similar silhouettes began to appear in other Latin American cities. Most recently, the silhouette image was used to represent the 43 Mexican students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who, in 2014, were brutally executed and disappeared by Mexican security forces.

I’ve walked by untold numbers of desaparecido posters. One still sees them today, decades after the worst of Central America’s terror, plastering walls in the center of Guatemala City; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Where are they?” they ask.

The 9/11 Missing

In New York after 9/11, the spontaneous display of “missing” posters seemed familiar. The flyers reportedly started in response to rumors that the city’s hospital beds were filled with thousands of unconscious, unidentified victims and that some people were found walking the streets with amnesia. The first set was done in a rush, with hastily compiled information about a missing person, including their height and weight and the color of their hair and eyes, along with where they worked and on what floor, in either the north or south tower. As the days went by and the rumors of unidentified survivors proved untrue, the posting continued, with physical details giving way to more personal information, including details about their children, their partners, and their hobbies.

Within a week, they were everywhere in the city, taped to chain-link fences, pasted on walls and lamp posts and on subway entrances. The walls of St. Vincent’s — since closed and sold to developers, like so many of New York’s community hospitals in the early 21st century — were covered with them. Many of the victims and left-behind family members were of a different status than the Latin Americans who were disappeared. They lived in the most powerful nation in the world, in history, and presumably most weren’t especially politically active, unlike the majority of Latin America’s disappeared. The World Trade Center, though, employed hundreds of migrant workers, many undocumented, from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador. The union UNITE HERE counted 43 immigrant workers at Windows on the World among the dead.

“The whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.”

Class and status mattered nothing in the dust and rubble. All shared a disorientation that was recognized by Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean writer who has devoted himself to considering the problem of Latin America’s “disappeared.” “Suddenly,” he wrote in an essay published in the Los Angeles Times just after the towers fell, “the whole United States was forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those missing.” Such pain was routine for much of the world, leading Dorfman to hope for a kind of reconciliation, a way to end the “famous exceptionalism” that had kept the United States sequestered from much of the world. “Their suffering is neither unique nor exclusive,” he wrote, but rather connects them “with so many other human beings who have suffered unanticipated and often protracted injury and fury.”

Dorfman was wrong on that score. George W. Bush’s advisers were already determined to “move swiftly” — as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said before the sun set that first day, according to the notes of an aide — to “go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.” Liberal and neocon hawks were quick to lay out the case for an expansive war, not just to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice, but also to remake the Middle East in a way that would ensure U.S. global dominance. On September 14, George W. Bush, standing atop a crushed fire truck with a bullhorn in hand and a firefighter by his side, let the world know it would soon hear from the United States.

The “missing” flyers, though, were like flowers pushing up through cracks in cement. Some displays had American flags, but they were small and had nothing of vengeance about them. They conveyed a range of feelings, none of them warlike. It took your breath away, coming upon a wall or a chain-link fence papered with them. The photographs showed victims as their relatives wanted to remember them: holding pets, hugging partners, or playing with their children, or just a close-up portrait. Some had hearts and flowers drawn in yellow, blue, red, and green, perhaps by the victims’ children. They were intimate portraits, handmade by people who knew the missing, and, like their Latin American counterparts, they were affirmations of humanity.

For a few brief weeks, as the country was being prepped for what we were told would be a prolonged campaign, these flyers continued to affirm life’s fragility, as brittle as the tape holding them in place. No doubt many families of the World Trade Center dead did want revenge and were roused by Bush’s rallying cry. Yet judging from the composition of most flyers, the people who made them weren’t thinking about geopolitics or civilizational wars. They weren’t trying to crystalize an us-versus-them absolutism. I don’t remember any of them mentioning Al Qaeda. They were the closest atheist New Yorkers would come to the sacred.

Pointless Provocations

The posters made on behalf of the October 7 Hamas victims are different. Mintz, one of the artists who came up with idea, describes herself as a “visual poet,” but there’s no poetry in this particular work. Moral values are inescapably artistic in nature, as E.L. Doctorow wrote in his 1977 essay “False Documents,” and these flyers convey a martial aesthetic. They are starkly uniform in arrangement, all topped with an uppercase “KIDNAPPED” headline running in block letters. Under the header to the left is a picture of a victim or victims, and to the right, their details. The information, though, is sparse. Sometimes the flyers don’t even give names, but simply say “entire Israeli family” or “young Israeli couple.”

It’s the generic sameness of the posters, complete with QR codes, not the individuality of the missing, that is most striking. Sen. John Fetterman has wallpapered his entire outer office with these flyers, a strident brick-like array of red, black, and white. Fetterman says they are staying up until all the hostages come home. Over 200,000 Arab Muslims, including many Palestinians, live in Pennsylvania; were they to enter that antechamber, would they feel welcomed or excluded by what they saw there?

The critic Roland Barthes used the word “punctum” to describe an eye-catching detail in an image that establishes a relationship between a viewer and the objects and people in the image. In these “kidnapped” posters, the punctum, to me at least, is the word “Israeli,” an insistence that the most important thing about the kidnapped is not their humanity, but their nationality. In this sense, they differ from their Latin American and 9/11 forebears, which stressed a universality, a shared human vulnerability and collective mourning. The nationalism of the “kidnapped” flyers is underscored by the artists’ decision not to include, in some form or other, Palestinians in Gaza in their art project. A few posters do make mention of “Argentines” and other nationalities, including unidentified “migrant workers,” taken by Hamas. Yet amassed together on a wall, they don’t — as did past projects to visually eulogize victims of political terror in Latin America, New York, and during the Holocaust itself, including Skapski’s memorials — seem concerned with transmuting terror into a deeper commitment to a shared universalism. The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

The statement of the “kidnapped” posters is different: We want you to share our outrage against Hamas’s atrocities, but the pain and right of retribution, unlimited, belongs to Israel alone.

Over the last few days, after a blessed but limited ceasefire went into effect, Hamas and Israel have exchanged scores of captives. Among those released by Hamas were a number of migrant Thai workers, while both sides have freed children and elderly people. For a moment at least, the joy of family reunions, smiles, tears, and hugs among both Israelis and Palestinians raised hopes that out of shared pain and vulnerability, a common humanity could emerge, a reprieve from the bellicosity of the “kidnapped” posters. As I write this, I can almost hope that the peace will hold. But Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has made it clear that “the respite will be short.” Once the ceasefire is over, the Israel Defense Forces will resume its assault on Gaza “with intensity” in a war that may last months more.

Meanwhile, the “kidnapped” posters have been transformed into antagonistic performance art. Supporters of Israel put them up, at times in places intentionally meant to provoke, such as near Palestinian restaurants. And then advocates for Palestinians pull them down, with the video of the act posted online, taken as evidence that what really moves those who claim to care about Palestinians is antisemitism, that they are so coldhearted they can’t bear to leave a memento of a stolen child on the wall. A report in Miami’s New Times found cases in which individuals had put the poster up with a clear intention of videoing someone tearing it down, in a bid to have them fired from their place of employment. Viral videos posted by defenders of Israel show defaced posters, some with feces.

We live in a precarious time of heightened sensitivity. Contretemps over slogans, placards, and posters can deepen schisms, charging routine acts with malicious meaning, transforming every utterance into an insult. We should tread carefully and avoid, at all costs, pointless provocations. 

War does radicalize, so it is useful to keep in mind that even the most obscene slurs and outrages — including painting synagogues with antisemitic graffiti, or Israel’s supporters telling anti-Zionist Jews that Hitler should have gassed them — are byproducts of the main thing: killing and kidnapping; siege; occupation; dispossession; the bombing of hospitals, bakeries, and refugee camps; the denial of water and electricity to civilians; and the massacre and maiming of children.

The post How to Read the Israeli “Kidnapped” Posters appeared first on The Intercept.

The disturbing indictment of 61 people who protested the Georgia police training facility commonly referred to as “Cop City” lays bare everything that is wrong with RICO laws and the prosecutors who abuse them. Even the author of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, on which the Georgia law is based, agrees that it’s meant to fight organized crime, not stifle dissent.

The implications of the indictment for press freedom may seem like an afterthought considering everything else that is terrible about it. Its working theory is essentially that whenever some members of a protest movement commit crimes, everyone involved in the movement is responsible for the “conspiracy,” no matter how tenuous their connection to the alleged offense. It seeks to criminalize a centuries-old political theory — anarchism — and to frame the activism following George Floyd’s murder as a plot by domestic terrorists (the indictment says the quiet part out loud by listing the date Floyd was killed as the start of the “conspiracy”). Perhaps most importantly, it has upended the lives of all those baselessly indicted.

That said, the threat to press freedom is real and shouldn’t be ignored. Any source considering talking to a journalist about a protest or controversial cause couldn’t be blamed for thinking twice after reading the indictment.

“Defend the Atlanta Forest uses websites, social media, and statements to traditional media to sow disinformation and propaganda to promote its extremist political agenda, legitimize its behavior, and recruit new members,” prosecutors allege. “[I]n an effort to de-legitimize the facts as relayed by law enforcement … members of Defend the Atlanta Forest often contact news media and flood social media with claims that their unlawful actions are protected by the First Amendment.” 

The indictment also alleges that Defend the Atlanta Forest has “worked with external entities to produce videos and podcast interviews” where they discuss “anti-authority movements”; that the group holds “media-attended press conferences to control the story and promote their own narrative”; and that it posts “press releases, misleading information, propaganda, and disinformation” on its website.

The message is clear: Try to spread opinions cops don’t like through the media, and you might find your name listed after “State v.”

Incidentally, it was cops, not protesters, who broke the law in trying to control the media narrative about Cop City. Here’s video of an officer threatening to arrest a journalist and seize his footage unless he agrees to give police favorable coverage. And when a journalist tried to cover the protests firsthand, they stole his notes. At another protest two days after the indictment, police shot down and seized a documentary crew’s drone as it filmed the events. But, according to the indictment, seeking to influence media coverage is a “traditional activity of anarchist organizations.”

The indictment’s framing of “zines” containing “anarchist ideas” as evidence of some sinister plot is just as dangerous as its effort to criminalize talking to journalists. The indictment might leave the impression that the zines contain nothing but catnip for wannabe radicals. In reality, many of them are academic — or even journalistic — in tone. They discuss everything from public records revealing Cop City contractors’ political contributions to research by environmental organizations on the projects’ impact on carbon sequestration rates. One, called “A Brief History of the Atlanta City Prison Farm,” contains 164 footnotes. Sure, the zines include ideas some may find disagreeable. But citing them as proof of a conspiracy is an affront to the First Amendment. 

And the indictment’s assaults on publishers don’t stop there: It also finds criminality in, for example, taking photos and videos of officers to “spread the message of Defend the Atlanta Forest,” posting photos of the Atlanta Police Foundation project manager, and posting links to news stories about the protests.

Federal appellate courts with jurisdiction over Georgia have joined courts everywhere else in declaring filming and photographing police in public to be protected First Amendment activity. But the indictment nonetheless lumps actions like these into the “conspiracy,” often through the laughably convoluted allegation that they were intended to “cause and induce the construction officials to withhold records, documents, and testimony in official proceedings.”

The indictment also threatens the press by attacking basic digital security practices journalists and activists both routinely use to avoid illegal surveillance. Ironically, the same prosecutors trying to criminalize taking pictures and talking to journalists can’t think of any reason why protesters might have wanted to avoid prying government eyes, or prepare for potential run-ins with cops, unless they were committing actual crimes.

Prosecutors also allege that protesters’ intent to break the law is evidenced by their “memorizing or writing the Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s phone number on their body in case of arrest.” As we wrote in April, journalists, like protesters, write legal aid numbers on their persons “not because journalists intend to commit crimes [but] because police have an unfortunate habit of arresting journalists for doing their jobs.”

They also cite protesters’ use of “online security measures which disguise a user’s true identity, such as the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN)” and their use of “end-to-end encrypted messaging app[s] Signal or Telegram” to “prevent[] law enforcement from viewing their communication.”

Technologies like VPN and encryption aren’t criminal; press freedom organizations recommend them to journalists worldwide. Last month’s unlawful police raid of a newsroom in Marion, Kansas, provides a clear illustration of why journalists should use encryption. Same goes for other noncriminals whose communications might interest law enforcement. Earlier this year, we learned that police in North Carolina cited a journalist’s anarchist beliefs as a pretext to illegally search their phone (which, fortunately, was encrypted).

If certain Cop City protesters committed real crimes, then prosecutors can bring charges against those protesters, individually, that are proportionate to their alleged infractions. Instead they’re trying to elevate relatively small-time offenses, like property damage and allegedly improper petty reimbursements, into racketeering — and throwing the First and Fourth Amendments to the wind in the process. Prosecutors are sworn to uphold the Constitution; drawing criminal inferences from things like talking to journalists to avoiding illegal surveillance is offensive.

Scholars and activists have criticized RICO laws, and particularly their use against First Amendment activity, for decades. This unconstitutional indictment should finally force lawmakers to do something about the problem.

The post Cop City Indictments Threaten Press Freedom Too appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, accuses the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department, and local police officers of overstepping their authority in infiltrating, surveilling, and requesting search warrants aimed at Colorado Springs activists. The FBI’s targeting of racial justice activists was revealed in February by The Intercept and the podcast series “Alphabet Boys.”

In a separate federal case in Denver, the Justice Department last week did not deny that the government’s initial investigation of racial justice activists was prompted by speech. That filing — the government’s first public response to revelations that the FBI infiltrated the racial justice movement in Denver using a violent felon as a paid informant — claimed that the “violent nature” of the activists’ statements “made them a legitimate subject of investigation.”

The two cases stem from the same source. During the summer of 2020, the FBI secretly hired an informant, Michael “Mickey” Windecker, to infiltrate the racial justice movement in Denver. While being paid by the FBI, Windecker accused movement leaders of being informants themselves; encouraged violence at protests; and tried unsuccessfully to entrap two Black activists in a plot to assassinate the state’s attorney general.

Internal FBI reports showed that Windecker, a tattooed, cigar-smoking white man who drove a silver hearse, first attended racial justice demonstrations in the Denver area in May 2020. Windecker then approached the FBI, claiming to have unique information about racial justice protesters. But Windecker’s tips, according to initial FBI reports, were entirely about speech. As an example, Windecker claimed one Black activist, Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall, said of the city of Denver: “We need to burn this motherfucker down.”

Based on statements he claimed to have overheard and a recording he secretly made of Hall speaking vaguely about training and revolution, the FBI enlisted Windecker as a paid informant and asked him to pose as a racial justice demonstrator.

The FBI, in its reports, stated Windecker had come forward voluntarily out of some sort of duty to protect the United States, but the bureau’s documented knowledge of Windecker complicated that claim: The FBI was aware that Windecker had prior arrests in at least four states and had been convicted of misdemeanor sexual assault and felony menacing with a weapon. The FBI also knew that Windecker had a long history of working the system as an informant, going back as far as two decades earlier, when he’d been a jailhouse snitch in a murder-for-hire case. Nevertheless, the FBI paid Windecker more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020.

Windecker’s work for the FBI resulted in at least two investigations: one in Colorado Springs, led by a young female detective, and the other in Denver, led by Windecker himself. Both are now under scrutiny in federal court.

“Unconstitutional Actions”

While investigating racial justice demonstrators in Denver, Windecker provided information about a protester who was active in both Denver and Colorado Springs, according to FBI records. That prompted the bureau to recruit a young Colorado Springs Police detective, April Rogers, to infiltrate the activist community there. Wearing provocative clothing, the pink-haired Rogers suggested she was a sex worker named “Chelsi Kurti.” She offered to volunteer at the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs.

During the pandemic summer of unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, members of the Chinook Center organized a protest near the home of a police officer involved in the fatal 2019 shooting of a young Black man, De’Von Bailey. For more than a year after the demonstration, Rogers, pretending to be an activist, secretly collected information about members of the Chinook Center; she also tried unsuccessfully to lure at least two activists into gun-running stings engineered by the FBI. The information Rogers surreptitiously collected from the Chinook Center, coupled with the use of a new FBI program called Social Media Exploitation, allowed the FBI and its local law enforcement partner to build dossiers on individual activists without warrants.

After building the intelligence files, Rogers participated in a 2021 housing rights protest organized by the Chinook Center. As The Intercept reported in March, Colorado Springs police, armed with intelligence reports created by the FBI’s Social Media Exploitation program and filled with photos from social media, eagerly awaited the protesters they planned to arrest. “Boot to the face,” a police officer, Scott Alamo, said gleefully as he flipped through the pages of activists’ photos, his body camera recording the comment. “It’s going to happen.”

The cops, dressed in riot gear, violently arrested several activists on charges related to their roles in the protest near the police officer’s home a year earlier. As police stormed in to make arrests, Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike. She saw a cop charging toward her and reacted.

“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”

The charging officer sidestepped the bike, but the encounter was captured by a police body camera.

Armendariz Unzueta was not arrested that day. In the days after, local police couldn’t determine her identity because she had been wearing a face mask and a bike helmet. But Daniel Summey, a Colorado Springs detective assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, started looking for the mysterious cyclist by searching the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists.

Summey found Armendariz Unzueta on social media, matching her bicycle helmet and shoes to photos online. He then wrote an application for a warrant to search her home, but the warrant was based on activities that are protected under the First Amendment. Summey noted, for example, that the demonstration Armendariz Unzueta participated in included red flags, which Summey claimed were a “radical political symbol.” In his search warrant application, Summey also gratuitously appended a full-page photo of Armendariz Unzueta in a bikini that had nothing to do with the investigation. “Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta said of the photo’s inclusion.

The ACLU’s lawsuit against the FBI and Colorado Springs Police Departments alleges that the search warrant targeting Armendariz Unzueta and additional warrants to obtain private chats associated with the Chinook Center’s Facebook account and the group’s membership roster essentially criminalized First Amendment-protected activities and violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“The warrants targeting Chinook and Armendariz were part of a pattern and practice of unconstitutional actions intended to teach activists a lesson: Colorado Springs police would retaliate against political expression with dragnet warrants to chill free speech,” the ACLU of Colorado alleges in its complaint, the first lawsuit related to FBI’s surveillance of activist groups in Colorado during the summer of 2020.

Policing “Violent” Speech

Remarkably, the Justice Department isn’t denying that the FBI’s investigations of activists in Colorado were related to potentially First Amendment-protected activity. In the Denver criminal case, the Justice Department acknowledged that the FBI’s investigation there during the summer of 2020 was based on speech, albeit of a “violent nature.”

The admission came last week in the criminal case of Hall, the primary Black activist targeted by the FBI and its informant, Windecker, during the summer of 2020. The Justice Department was compelled to respond to Hall’s motion to vacate his felony conviction for buying and giving a firearm to Windecker, a convicted felon who was not allowed to have a gun.

Windecker asked Hall to buy him the gun after failing to persuade Hall and another Black activist to join an FBI-engineered assassination plot supposedly targeting the state’s attorney general. Hall bought the Smith & Wesson handgun for Windecker, despite knowing that Windecker was a convicted felon, and pleaded guilty to the federal charge in January 2022. He was sentenced to three years of probation.

But following the reporting by The Intercept and “Alphabet Boys,” Hall petitioned the court to vacate his conviction based on his previous lawyer’s alleged failure to investigate Windecker fully and pursue an entrapment defense. Hall claims that Windecker, who made public death threats while being paid by the FBI and claimed to have killed Islamic State fighters as a volunteer for the Kurdish Peshmerga fighting force, threatened to harm him if he didn’t buy him the gun. Windecker’s threats of violence weren’t secret. In one YouTube video, Windecker, while secretly being paid by the FBI, states: “I have a plan to kill everybody in the fucking room if need to be.”

“We believe he could have prevailed with an entrapment defense,” Lisa Polansky, a Colorado lawyer who was recently appointed to represent Hall in his effort to vacate his conviction, told The Intercept.

The Justice Department described Hall’s claims as “meritless,” but Denver federal prosecutor Rajiv Mohan acknowledged that FBI reports showed that Hall and other racial justice activists were initially targeted following Windecker’s reports about speech. Mohan claimed, however, that Hall’s decision to buy a gun for the FBI’s informant was independent of “any outrageous government conduct in relation to speech.”

The FBI’s investigation in Colorado is the first documented case of federal agents infiltrating the racial justice movement during the summer of 2020. Although the Justice Department and the FBI have said little about it, the probe has garnered attention on Capitol Hill. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon called it “a clear abuse of authority.” Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina quipped: “This is what the FBI does.” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio submitted The Intercept’s article about the FBI activity in Denver into evidence in his Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The post Lawsuit Targets FBI Probe of Racial Justice Activists appeared first on The Intercept.

As she watched his hearing, though, she wondered if that wasn’t what Rhodes wanted too. She’d expected him to express some conciliation — support, perhaps, for police affected by the riot at the Capitol. Instead, he attacked his trial as rigged and antagonized the judge who’d decide his fate. “A steep sentence here won’t help or deter people,” he said. “It will make people think this government is even more illegitimate than before.” He called himself “a political prisoner.”

Adams was considering how the harsher a sentence Rhodes received, the greater a cause célèbre he’d become on the right. This, she told me, as she followed the hearing on Twitter, would increase his chances for a pardon in a future Republican administration. In fact, Rhodes’s sentencing was playing out as one skirmish in a larger battle to determine how the history of January 6 will be written. From behind the bench, District Judge Amit Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee who also sits on the powerful Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, told Rhodes, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the Republic, and the very fabric of our democracy.” In his remarks beforehand, Rhodes, 58, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, had already issued his reply: “My only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”

Mehta sentenced him to 18 years in prison, the longest term handed down in a January 6 case to date.

The version of Rhodes that Adams described in her statement and divorce filing is a man driven by a will to control and influence, feeding off the adulation of crowds in public while keeping a tight grip on his family in their remote Montana home. These impulses are twisted inextricably with real fear in her stories: that stronger forces are coming for him, disaster is inevitable, his control is slipping. He imagines erecting tripwires outside the house that will trigger a blast of AC/DC music to alert him to the start of a federal raid. He leaves his children bruised from trainings in martial arts and knife fighting designed to teach them to fend off attack and rape. He warns darkly of apocalypse. The power goes out, and he outfits his teenaged son with a rifle and body armor and rustles his family out into the night.

The 2018 divorce filings were unsealed last month. Rhodes responded to Adams’s allegations, in a sworn affidavit, by saying that she and her attorney had “twisted over 23 years of facts in an attempt to accomplish Tasha’s true goal of keeping the children from me.” He noted that her request for a temporary protection order had been denied and claimed his infidelity was the real cause of the rift in their marriage. Yet Adams’s portrayal of Rhodes as someone engaged in a long-running and complicated dance with power offers one way to interpret the contradictions he embodied at his sentencing. He expressed deeply held fears of tyrannical government power, yet he’d also grabbed for it: In open letters before January 6, Rhodes urged Donald Trump to overturn the election and volunteered the Oath Keepers to help enforce this. He was declaring himself a dissident and preparing to begin a very long prison term. He also seemed to be appealing to those powerful enough to one day free him of it.

Trump, who has a commanding lead in Republican primary polls, has made clear in recent months that support for those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 will be not just part of his campaign, but its essence. In March, he held his first official campaign rally in Waco, Texas, home to a deadly 1993 standoff between the federal government and an armed Christian sect whose bloody end has long been a defining event for right-wing militant groups like the Oath Keepers. Standing on a stage at the start of the rally, Trump held his hand over his heart as loudspeakers played a rendition of the national anthem that had been recorded from jail by people arrested in connection with January 6. The recording, which is overlaid with Trump’s voice reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, is credited to the “J6 Prison Choir” and had reached No. 1 on iTunes two weeks before the rally. As Trump and the crowd stood in reverence, video of the attack on the Capitol played above him on a pair of jumbotrons.

It’s the most revealing question for every candidate in the primary just beginning to take shape: If you’re elected president, will you pardon people who’ve been convicted for January 6?

In the first year after January 6, Trump had expressed sympathy for the rioters, but his backing wasn’t full-throated. When I met with Rhodes in January 2022, a week before his arrest, he told me he wouldn’t in the future vote for Trump, who he said had failed to support January 6 defendants and had used the Oath Keepers as “cannon fodder.” After his arrest, Sidney Powell, Trump’s onetime lawyer and a close ally, reportedly stepped in to fund the defense of Rhodes and three other Oath Keepers via her legal foundation, which had raised more than $16 million in the year following the 2020 election. Now Trump has made pardons for January 6 convicts a central promise of his campaign. “I hope Trump wins in 2024,” Rhodes said at his sentencing, adding that many on the right view January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” and “patriots.” For Republicans, the issue of pardons may become a litmus test showing not just the extent to which they’re willing to downplay or excuse what happened on January 6, but also how enthusiastically they’ll embrace it. It’s the most revealing question for every candidate in the primary just beginning to take shape: If you’re elected president, will you pardon people who’ve been convicted for January 6?

On the day Rhodes was sentenced, Ron DeSantis, currently Trump’s top challenger, was asked this question in a radio interview. “On Day One, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who are people who are victims of weaponization or political targeting,” he replied. “And we will be aggressive at issuing pardons.”

In his testimony at sentencing, Rhodes compared himself to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian dissident writer, who spent eight years incarcerated in Soviet prisons.

It reminded me of my first conversation with Rhodes in early 2020. I said I thought his frequent invocations of civil war were dangerous and that civil war is the worst thing in the world. He disagreed, saying the totalitarian nightmares that had unfolded under Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and other dictators showed the need to fight a repressive government before it’s too late. He cited a passage from “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn’s acclaimed book about his imprisonment:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests […] people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

FBI agents approached Rhodes outside a Texas hotel in May 2021 to serve a warrant for his phone. He handed it over, volunteered the passcode, advised the agents that he had a gun in his backpack, and told them that, if they ever needed to arrest him, they could call and he’d turn himself in. He went peaceably when the FBI eventually showed up to take him to jail. So perhaps he realizes that America is nowhere near the kind of dictatorship about which Solzhenitsyn was writing.

Or maybe he’d argue that, as it had been for all the prisoners Solzhenitsyn met in the gulag, submission was the only feasible choice, at least in the moment of arrest.

Rhodes has long considered himself a dissident, even at times on the right. He drew criticism from his group’s own members over his support for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange at a time when they were still heroes of the left. (“Your banner stating ‘Snowden honored his oath’ is sickening and infuriating,” read one letter of resignation I found in a cache of leaked Oath Keepers files. “I have honored my oath for 27 years and will not be associated with an organization that supports a traitor.”) During the George W. Bush administration, when his only claim to public notice was as a blogger, Rhodes was writing about the post-9/11 assault on civil liberties and the growth of the national security state and warning that America could be on a path to tyranny. His talk about dictatorship went into overdrive during Obama’s presidency — though by then it was infused with the blunter and dumber rhetoric of the Tea Party — and hyperdrive under Trump. His open letters to the then-president after the 2020 election called the day of its certification in Congress the last chance to stop the coming tyranny. He urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, overturn the vote, and call up “the militia,” saying he and the Oath Keepers would be in D.C. to help.

Instead, Trump gave an incendiary speech near the White House and returned to the Oval Office. Protesters descended on the Capitol, and two columns of Oath Keepers joined the crowd as it surged into the building. Rhodes remained outside, comparing the rioters to America’s founding patriots in group messages on the encrypted app Signal. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy and two other charges after a trial in which prosecutors didn’t show that there’d been a plan among Rhodes and his members to storm the Capitol or that they’d played a role in the initial breach.

Defense attorneys often refer to the conspiracy charge as a prosecutor’s “darling” because it requires the government to show only that defendants agreed to carry out an illegal act and then took a step to further it. In Rhodes’s case, prosecutors argued that he’d given his members the idea that they needed to do something to stop the transfer of presidential power, and when the riot at the Capitol commenced, they’d seized the opportunity. They focused on the guns the Oath Keepers had stashed in Virginia as a contingency and on the kind of incendiary language I’d critiqued on our first call. They pulled from his Signal messages: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” They also cited passages from his open letters to Trump: “If you fail to do your duty, you will leave We the People no choice but to walk in the founders [sic] footsteps, by declaring the regime illegitimate, incapable of representing us, destructive of the just ends of government — to secure our liberty. And, like the founding generation, we will take to arms in defense of our God-given liberty.” Those letters had been published on the Oath Keepers website, which, along with their accounts on Twitter and Facebook, has since been purged from the internet.

The Russian writer didn’t have the tacit backing of potential future leaders of his country and a political movement with a near-even chance to soon retake power.

Among the many differences between Solzhenitsyn’s situation and Rhodes’s is this: The Russian writer didn’t have the tacit backing of potential future leaders of his country and a political movement with a near-even chance to soon retake power. Yet I imagine that Rhodes has kept in mind how Solzhenitsyn was arrested for political opinions expressed in letters to a friend. Afterward, as Solzhenitsyn recounts in “The Gulag Archipelago,” his writings were cast into a prison furnace and incinerated. “I had expressed myself vehemently,” he writes, “and had been almost reckless in spelling out seditious ideas.” At one point in his miserable imprisonment, he laments, “Only one life is allotted us, one small, short life! And we had been criminal enough to … drag it with us, still unsullied, into the dirty rubbish heap of politics.” Elsewhere, he takes solace in the fact that without his prison sentence, “I would not have written this book” and recounts how “very early and very clearly, I had this consciousness that prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life.”

The first time I spoke with Adams, in the summer of 2020, she asked me to keep the conversation off the record. (She’s since lifted that request.) “I don’t want anyone to know I talked with you,” she said, adding that her divorce proceedings were under seal and a gag order was in effect.

Her separation from Rhodes was only two years old. He’d left their small Montana community for Texas at the start of the year, and Adams was reassessing her views of him and the Oath Keepers after years writing blog posts for the group and helping with its administration.

It was always going to be a right-wing organization, she told me, but at its outset, it existed at the edge of mainstream politics. She and Rhodes had been die-hard supporters of the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, volunteering on his 2008 campaign, and many of the group’s early members were drawn from those circles. Others came over from a web forum called the Mental Militia, whose mission statement held that “Mentalitians are people who believe that ‘consciousness works!’, and who prefer the art of reason over violence … And we are concerned about the direction of today’s industrialized, militarized, economized, high-tech, post-Atomic, government-controlled world.” Some, Adams said, had even been supporters of the anti-war liberal politician Dennis Kucinich.

She told stories in that conversation and others about the paranoia that had prevailed in the family’s remote Montana household: their fears that the home was bugged, waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and tripping over piles of guns. At first, Adams found Rhodes’s conviction that the government was hunting him hard to take seriously, but after the Oath Keepers got involved in standoffs with federal agents at Bundy Ranch in Nevada and elsewhere, the FBI really did summon Rhodes to a meeting, and he really did find himself on what seemed to be a no-fly list, even as his group edged closer to the heart of Republican politics. By the second half of 2020, the Oath Keepers and other right-wing militants were patrolling racial justice protests and aligning with Trump over fears of antifascists and a stolen election. Adams struggled to say how much of his own dystopian talk Rhodes really believed: “Sometimes I think he did and sometimes he didn’t.” She noted the times he’d become convinced that “a world-changing event” was approaching and that he’d emerge as a leader within it.

Now Rhodes is living out the role he wrote for himself long ago, caught in the contradiction of someone both on the fringe and at the core of America’s power structure. As his sentencing approached, he kept up the drumbeat of his political prisoner narrative and at times, seemed to be working at cross-purposes with his own attorneys, who cast Rhodes as a beacon of community service, focusing on his time in the Army and the periodic disaster relief operations the Oath Keepers had conducted and urging that he be judged by those actions. Meanwhile, Rhodes wrote a 46-page letter from jail that was excerpted in the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump news outlet. In it, he said he had been convicted for “who I am” and “what I said.” He warned conservatives that his conviction was “only the beginning of a political persecution campaign aimed at all of you.” He concluded, “They can take my liberty and imprison my body, but they cannot imprison my mind.”

Before Rhodes’s sentencing, Thomas Massie, the iconoclastic, up-and-coming congressional Republican from Kentucky, tweeted, “Stewart Rhodes never entered the Capitol and didn’t commit acts of violence or destruction, yet he’s going to be sentenced Thursday for ‘seditious conspiracy’ … Weaponization of speech?” The idea taking hold on the right that people charged over January 6 are political prisoners feeds on real problems, such as the fact that many of them have been jailed for more than two years without trial, and on the embrace of tools such as censorship and conspiracy charges in the name of protecting democracy. It also feeds on the fervor of the Trump era and the election lie.

Part of the falsity of this movement is that it exists within its own sphere of power and on the coin-flip edge of controlling the country; they talk about the gulag as they set their sights on the presidency. I think about how, under Trump, the Justice Department used a conspiracy charge to threaten more than 200 people who’d protested against the inauguration with decades in prison because a smaller group of them had rioted. The charges against most were ultimately dropped, but only after they spent more than a year in legal jeopardy. I think about how the governor of Texas has vowed to pardon a man who shot a Black Lives Matter demonstrator dead in the street, the celebration of the Kenosha shooter, and laws like the one passed by the Republican statehouse in Iowa in 2021 that shields drivers who run their vehicles over protesters. I think about a country that, after the post-9/11 construction of a domestic surveillance and national security state, has facets of dictatorship already in place and how it always seems primed to tilt further down that path. I think about real dissidents and how badly we need them.

The post Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Says He’s a Political Prisoner. Republicans Are Listening. appeared first on The Intercept.

Provenance

Thorough investigators will try to establish the provenance of leaked materials from a dual perspective, seeking to ascertain the original points of acquisition and distribution. In other words, the key investigatory questions pertaining to the origins of the leaks are where the leaker obtained the source materials and where they originally shared them.

To establish the point of acquisition, investigators will likely first enumerate all the documents that were leaked, then check via which systems they were originally disseminated, followed by seeing both who had access to the documents and, if access logs permit, who actually viewed them.

What all this means for the budding leaker is that the more documents you share with your friends, the tighter the noose becomes. Consider the probabilities: If you share one document to which 1,000 people had access and that 500 people actually accessed, you’re only one of 500 possible primary leakers. But if you share 10 documents — even if hundreds of people opened each one — the pool of people who accessed all 10 is likely significantly smaller.

Keep in mind that access logs may not just be digital — in the form of keeping track of who opened, saved, copied, printed, or otherwise interacted with a file in any way — but also physical, as when a printer produces imperceptible tracking dots. Even if the printer or photocopier doesn’t generate specifically designed markings, it may still be possible to identify the device based on minute imperfections that leave a trace.

In the meantime, investigators will be working to ascertain precisely where you originally shared the leaked contents in question. Though images of documents, for instance, may pass through any number of hands, bouncing seemingly endlessly around the social media hall of mirrors, it will likely be possible with meticulous observation to establish the probable point of origin where the materials were first known to have surfaced online. Armed with this information, investigators may file for subpoenas to request any identifying information about the participants in a given online community, including IP addresses. Those will in turn lead to more subpoenas to internet service providers to ascertain the identities of the original uploaders.

It is thus critically important to foresee how events may eventually unfold, perhaps months after your original post, and to take preemptive measures to anonymize your IP address by using tools such as Tor, as well as by posting from a physical location at which you can’t easily be identified later and, of course, to which you will never return. An old security adage states that you should not rely on security by obscurity; in other words, you should not fall into the trap of thinking that because you’re sharing something in a seemingly private, intimate — albeit virtual — space, your actions are immune from subsequent legal scrutiny. Instead, you must preemptively guard against such scrutiny.

Digital Barrels

Much as crime scene investigators, with varying levels of confidence, try to match a particular bullet to a firearm based on unique striations or imperfections imprinted by the gun barrel, so too can investigators attempt to trace a particular photo to a specific camera. Source camera identification deploys a number of forensic measures to link a camera with a photo or video by deducing that camera’s unique fingerprint. A corollary is that if multiple photos are found to have the same fingerprint, they can all be said to have come from the same camera.

A smudge or nick on the lens may readily allow an inspector to link two photos together, while other techniques rely on imperfections and singularities in camera mechanisms that are not nearly as perceptible to the lay observer, such as the noise a camera sensor produces or the sensor’s unique response to light input, otherwise known as photo-response nonuniformity.

This can quickly become problematic if you opted to take photos or videos of your leaked materials using the same camera you use to post food porn on Instagram. Though the technical minutiae of successful source camera identification forensics can be stymied by factors like low image quality or applied filters, new techniques are being developed to avoid such limitations.

If you’re leaking photos or videos, the best practice is to employ a principle of one-time use: to use a camera specifically and solely for the purpose of the leak; be sure not to have used it before and to dispose of it after.

And, of course, when capturing images to share, it would be ideal to keep a tidy and relatively unidentifiable workspace, avoiding extraneous items either along the periphery or even under the document that could corroborate your identity.

In sum, there are any number of methods that investigators may deploy in their efforts to ascertain the source of a leak, from identifying the provenance of the leaked materials, both in terms of their initial acquisition and their subsequent distribution, to identifying the leaker based on links between their camera and other publicly or privately posted images.

Foresight is thus the most effective tool in a leaker’s toolkit, along with the expectation that any documents you haphazardly post in your seemingly private chat group may ultimately be seen by thousands.

The post What to Do Before Sharing Classified Documents With Your Friends Online appeared first on The Intercept.

In the run-up to the rally, Trump hasn’t mentioned the events of 1993. Instead, he has grabbed hold of the news cycle by warning of his potential indictment and arrest over an alleged campaign finance violation in 2016 and evoking the specter of violence. He urged his followers to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” He warned that an indictment could lead to “death and destruction” and “create years of hatred, chaos, and turmoil.” He added: “They are not coming after me. They are coming after you. I’m just standing in their way.” These statements channel the same anxieties that Waco has long stirred about the existential danger of a federal government controlled by Democrats.

Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes — who was convicted last fall of seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6, 2021, the last time Trump called on his followers to defend him — told me in an interview before his arrest that he’d seen the “existential slaughter” of Waco as “a huge wake-up call.” Mike Vanderboegh, founder of the Three Percenters, another national militant group whose members were charged over January 6, viewed Waco similarly. It made him and other militia leaders believe they could be the government’s next victims. Before his 2016 death, Vanderboegh told the historian Robert Churchill of Waco: “It scared the crap out of us, and we couldn’t count on anybody but ourselves.” Trump’s message to militants on the right has long been that they can count on him. He speaks their language about the “deep state,” traitorous liberals, and the potential for civil violence. His presidency marked the first time militant groups felt they had an ally in the White House; neither Vanderboegh nor Rhodes had love for either Bush administration. This was why people from a constellation of groups, from Oath Keepers and Three Percenters to small, little-known outfits around the country, joined the crowd at the Capitol on January 6.

Look just beneath the surface, and you can see Trump and his allies playing directly into the particular fears and narratives of right-wing militancy. On November 19, 2020, Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani unleashed his campaign’s master theory of how the election had been stolen. It went something like this: America’s foreign adversaries, including Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, had teamed up with powerful business interests and politicians to hack Dominion voting machines. It may have sounded strange, but it also fit the outlines of something called the New World Order conspiracy theory. The militant right has been fascinated by this for decades, including in the post-Vietnam era, when the movement was dominated by Ku Klux Klan paramilitaries. The theory can take several forms, the most virulent of which holds that a cabal of elite Jewish businessmen are trying to undermine America and other Western democracies from within to establish a global tyranny; they pay off politicians and sow chaos via animalistic hordes of immigrants and racial and religious minorities. The more palatable version of the story does away with race and religion and keeps the focus on the threat of tyranny at the hands of a globalist elite intent on taking away the rights of patriotic Americans, starting with guns. Rhodes expressed sympathy with the latter version, and Vanderboegh with a less conspiratorial reading of it. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was a believer in the former. He thought that Waco previewed a coming battle against the New World Order. In the lead-up to his rally there, Trump and his allies have echoed the New World Order theory, claiming that George Soros, the Jewish American investor and philanthropist, is behind the pending charges against him. Trump called Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney leading the investigation, who is Black, a “SOROS BACKED ANIMAL.” The Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance accused Bragg of being “bought by George Soros,” pursuing baseless charges against Trump while he “allows violent criminals to walk the streets.”

The investigation, which centers on an alleged hush-money payment by Trump to porn star Stormy Daniels, is arguably the least serious of the litany he faces. This has made it even easier for Trump to bring rank-and-file Republican leaders such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on board with his persecution narrative. It’s the typical dynamic with Trump: an opposition that seems to inadvertently strengthen his hand while he lines up the backing of deeply irresponsible and cynical Republican allies. Yet Trump has been signaling that this campaign will be different from his last two: more divisive and violent in its rhetoric, more revolutionary in its aims, and more openly intertwined with right-wing militancy and its apocalyptic mindset. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month, he called his 2024 campaign “the final battle.”

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” he said at the conference. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Former U.S. President Donald Trump dances while exiting after speaking during a rally at the Waco Regional Airport on March 25, 2023 in Waco, Texas.

“A Coded Message of Revolution”

Trump’s campaign has denied choosing to hold the rally in Waco because of its history. But the event, which will be held at the city’s airport, comes as the violence of 1993 resurfaces in the public consciousness. Last month marked 30 years since the start of the siege, an anniversary that will continue until April 19. Two television series have been launched to coincide with it: a six-part dramatization on Showtime and a three-part documentary on Netflix called “Waco: American Apocalypse.”

Back in 1993, the people living in a compound known as Mount Carmel on the outskirts of Waco were members of the Branch Davidians. Their leader, David Koresh, said he was a prophet and that God had spoken to him, telling him to prepare his followers for an apocalyptic battle. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives suspected the Davidians of having an illegal weapons cache in the compound that included machine guns and grenades. Instead of speaking with Koresh, the ATF sent agents to raid the compound in a military-like operation. Four were killed in the ensuing fight, which ended in a ceasefire, requested by the ATF so it could evacuate its wounded and dead. A joint siege of the compound by the ATF and FBI followed, featuring armored vehicles, heavily armed federal agents, and a crush of TV news teams. Then-President Bill Clinton had come into office a month earlier with promises of stricter gun control; some Americans saw their worst fears about gun confiscation and federal overreach coming true. The siege reached its ugly conclusion on April 19, as federal agents again went on the offensive, sparking another shootout and a massive fire inside the compound. The number of Branch Davidians who died was deemed unsettled in a special counsel’s report because some of the bodies were commingled and burned beyond recognition.

On the far right, the Waco dead became martyrs for gun rights and a scare story about the willingness of a Democratic-controlled federal government to violently crush resistance.

On the far right, the Waco dead became martyrs for gun rights and a scare story about the willingness of a Democratic-controlled federal government to violently crush resistance. Militia groups mobilized. Churchill, the historian who interviewed key militia leaders from this period for his definitive book on the movement, put Waco at the center of their motivations, tied closely to Clinton’s gun control push, the steady militarization of law enforcement agencies, and an earlier federal raid that had killed the wife and child of a white supremacist in Ruby Ridge in Idaho. The movement was rooted, Churchill wrote, “in its members’ perception that their government had turned increasingly violent.” One militia leader told him, “Waco was the second shot heard round the world.”

McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran and white nationalist in his 20s, had visited Waco during the siege and was incensed by its bloody outcome. When he set off a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, he billed it as revenge for Waco. He did it on April 19, 1995, the two-year anniversary of the mass death at Mount Carmel.

Militia leaders of the 1990s condemned McVeigh, but as fears of right-wing militancy spiked and investigative pressure intensified, the movement dwindled. Yet Waco remained central to the militant movement’s belief system when it reemerged in 2009 after Barack Obama’s election. Vanderboegh, who’d first become a leader in the 1990s, told Churchill in an interview the historian shared with me that he believed the government had sent a message: From now on, it would be “operating by Waco rules. It’s this catch-22: ‘We will do anything that you can’t keep us from doing.’ And it told the rest of us out here, you know, we’re kind of paying attention and we’re saying, ‘We’re next year’s Davidians, or the year after that. Somebody has got to do something.’”

This created a mindset across the movement, Vanderboegh added, that “[an] attack on one is an attack on all.”

Vanderboegh went on to found the Three Percenters, one of the two largest militant organizations in the post-2009 wave, alongside Rhodes’s Oath Keepers. Rhodes hadn’t been involved in the movement’s earlier iteration but remembered well watching Waco play out on TV as a young libertarian working at a gun store in Nevada. He often cited a quote attributed to Vanderboegh: “No more free Wacos.” For Rhodes, it wasn’t that the Branch Davidians or Koresh were heroes. In his telling, the story was primarily about the bad guys: the Clinton-led government and mainstream politicians and journalists who, as he saw it, “dehumanized” the hard-line Christian gun owners cordoned off in their compound. This dehumanization, he believed, helped to pave the way for the government violence that followed. He worried about a similar dynamic playing out in the political and media climate of the present day. Rhodes, who has a law degree from Yale and is of Mexican descent, seemed to sympathize with one Waco victim in particular: Douglas Wayne Martin, a Black, Harvard-educated attorney in his 40s. Martin called police when the initial ATF raid began, claiming the government had fired the first shots, and then called a city council member, asking him to contact the media. He died in the compound on April 19, along with three of his children.

In an interview in the summer of 2021, as he braced for his own possible arrest, Rhodes recounted the arsenal government forces brought in for the Waco siege and raid — armored vehicles, helicopters from the National Guard — and the violence that followed. He saw the heavy-handed government tactics at Waco as designed “to prove a point, set an example.” I asked him what point they were making. His response: “Don’t fuck with us.” On trial last fall for seditious conspiracy, Rhodes cited Waco again, saying that when he’d infamously gotten the Oath Keepers involved in the Bundy Ranch standoff with federal authorities in 2014, it was to keep the Bundy family “from being Waco’d.”

The contradiction, of course, is that there is no overreach greater than overturning an election, which is what Trump tried to do — and what Rhodes aimed to help him accomplish. In open letters in the buildup to January 6, Rhodes asked Trump to overturn the vote and deploy the National Guard to administer a new election, then call the Oath Keepers and other armed Americans to help put down any pushback. Trump’s segment of the right, Rhodes included, spent 2020 dehumanizing liberals as traitors and Black Lives Matter protesters as domestic terrorists. The idea that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy was necessary to justify the idea of launching an anti-democratic power grab of their own.

Tom O’Connor, who was an expert on right-wing militant violence in the FBI before retiring in 2019, recalled how Trump’s infamous request in a 2020 debate for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” had been taken by members of the group as a call to action. He worried that — whatever Trump might have intended with the rally’s location and whatever he might say on Saturday evening — the decision to hold it in Waco will send a powerful signal to those who are listening for it: “It will be perceived as a coded message of revolution to those on the extreme.”

Tactical Patience

I had called up a different former FBI agent, Michael German, after Powell and Giuliani gave their Dominion press conference in November 2020. German had gone undercover in militia groups in the post-Waco era, and he recalled the times during his embeds when the faxes would begin to whir with rumors of black helicopters and warnings that the globalist invasion by forces of the New World Order was finally happening. These were the most dangerous moments, he told me — when militiamen were so paranoid that violence felt more likely. Only in late 2020, the rumor-mongering was happening on a national scale, and the messages were coming from the president and his legal team. As January 6 approached, Rhodes published an open letter urging his members to D.C., “to stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup.”

At Rhodes’s trial, this letter and other extreme rhetoric were used against him. The prosecution never proved that there’d been a plan among Rhodes and the Oath Keepers to storm the Capitol — a fact that gave pause to some journalists observing the proceedings, including me. Prosecutors focused instead on the general sense that Rhodes had given his members that they needed to do something to stop the transfer of power and halt the conspiracy he believed was playing out before it was too late. Trump, more than anyone else, created this sense, yet the buck has not stopped anywhere close to that high. And now again, Trump is asking his supporters to rally to his defense. It reminds me of something Rhodes told me days before his arrest: that Trump had used the Oath Keepers as “cannon fodder.” After Rhodes’s arrest, Powell reportedly stepped in to fund Rhodes’s legal defense. Trump has since vowed that he will pardon January 6 convicts if he returns to the presidency.

“They’re not anti-government. They’re anti-Democrat.”

I was talking recently about militancy with Eric Robinson, a lawyer who was an official with the Joint Special Operations Command until 2018 and before that worked at the National Counterterrorism Center. His professional focus was overseas, and his study of American militancy is personal in nature. It comes from growing up with an interest in America’s Civil War and then seeing one for himself as a captain with the 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad, where he learned, he says, “what civil war thinks and talks like.” Robinson noted how poorly the typical label of “anti-government” fits the militant groups on the right today. “They’re not anti-government. They’re anti-Democrat,” he said. They see themselves, he added, “as the legitimate authority” in America, awaiting the time when they will come to power.

One trait of a successful insurgency is what military strategists call tactical patience. The Taliban had this mindset. So did insurgents in Iraq: Defeats were temporary, and eventually the war would tilt back in their favor. Members of Al Qaeda in Iraq who were imprisoned during the U.S. occupation could wait it out until their side regained enough power to spring them; one of the first things the Islamic State did when it took the city of Mosul in 2014 was open the jails. This is not to ascribe any similarity between people convicted over January 6 and jailed Islamist militants, except for one: Both are cadres of the committed. I imagine Rhodes and others will be paying close attention to Trump’s inaugural rally and wondering what it means for the once and perhaps future president to be giving his speech at the airport in Waco. They might be thinking that all along, time has been on their side.

The post What It Means for Trump’s Campaign to Start in Waco appeared first on The Intercept.

“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.

The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.

“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.

“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”

But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.

As the FBI’s Colorado Springs investigation reveals, Denver wasn’t the only city where federal agents infiltrated racial justice groups that summer. Working through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership with local police, the FBI assembled files on local activists using information secretly gathered by Rogers.

Once Rogers gained trust among the activists, she tried to set up at least two young men in gun-running conspiracies. Her tactics mirrored those of Windecker, who tried to entrap two Denver racial justice activists in crimes, including an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser that went nowhere.

To reveal what happened in Colorado Springs, I obtained search warrant applications, body-camera video from local police assisting the FBI investigation, and recordings of conversations involving federal agents; reviewed hundreds of pages of internal FBI records about Social Media Exploitation, a program federal agents used to monitor racial justice activists nationwide; and interviewed about a dozen activists who were targeted in the federal probe.

The FBI declined to be interviewed about the Colorado Springs investigation and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions. The Colorado Springs Police Department also declined to comment, referring all questions to the FBI.

For her part, April Rogers won’t say anything. When called as a witness in a state court hearing, she testified that the Justice Department instructed her not to answer questions about the FBI investigation. “I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers said under oath. The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to make her available for an interview.

This FBI investigation in Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, shows that federal law enforcement had embarked on a broad, and until now, secret strategy to spy on racial justice groups and try to entrap activists in crimes. “It’s disturbing, but not surprising, to learn the FBI’s reported targeting of racial justice activists in 2020 wasn’t limited to Denver,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept. “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”

The probe in Colorado Springs also raises questions about FBI priorities and the bureau’s perceptions of threats. As federal agents investigated political activists there, they also launched, and promptly dropped, an investigation of a man running a neo-Nazi website — a decision that would have deadly consequences.

“Nowhere Is Safe”

The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Colorado Springs, as in cities across the nation in the summer of 2020. Activists there were angered not only by Floyd’s death, but also by the killing of a local man, De’Von Bailey, who was shot in the back by police officers in 2019.

On August 3, 2020, as racial justice demonstrations roiled the nation, Colorado Springs activists organized a protest outside the suburban home of Alan Van’t Land, one of the officers involved in Bailey’s death.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a murderer,” a demonstrator yelled into a bullhorn.

“Murderer!” the other demonstrators repeated.

“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you an assassin,” the man with the bullhorn continued. “Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a racist. Alan Van’t Land, you are a pig.”

“Pig!” the demonstrators chanted. “Pig!”

They blocked the road through the neighborhood, and the protest escalated. A driver trying to pass through got into a verbal altercation with Charles Johnson, a Black activist and college student. Following the argument, Johnson allegedly swatted the driver’s phone out of his hands.

Other demonstrators recorded the encounter, and that and other footage from the protest circulated among far-right social media accounts as examples of the apparent dangers of racial justice and antifascist activists. Michelle Malkin, a conspiracy theorist who lives in Colorado Springs, tweeted: “Nowhere is safe.”

Most of the protesters wore face masks due to the pandemic, making it difficult for police to identify them, but the FBI had a source on the inside: Rogers, the young detective who suggested that she was a sex worker named Chelsie. The day after the demonstration, Rogers contacted Jon Christiansen. She said she had a filing cabinet to donate.

“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We need all kinds of stuff,’” Christiansen remembered telling her.

A couple of days later, Rogers dropped off the cabinet.

“This giant filing cabinet,” Christiansen told me, pointing to it inside the Chinook Center. “In retrospect, after the fact, we’re like, ‘Right, that looks like a filing cabinet that would be in a police station.’”

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

Rogers began volunteering regularly to help with administrative tasks. Several organizations used the Chinook Center as an office, including a local tenants’ union and a group that organized racial justice demonstrations, and Rogers had access to their membership records and email accounts. Christiansen didn’t know that Rogers, rifling through various files, was feeding information to the FBI.

For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.

On July 31, 2021, the Chinook Center activists organized a housing rights rally to coincide with the city’s 150th-anniversary celebration. Rogers and other demonstrators marched down the city’s streets, many carrying “Rent Is Theft” signs and wearing red shirts that read “Housing Is a Human Right.”

The activists did not know that Colorado Springs police, working with the FBI, planned to arrest several of them that day.

“Boot to the Face”

Sitting in a police cruiser, Officer Scott Alamo waited for the protesters. His body camera recorded him talking to other officers in the car.

“Well, boys,” Alamo said. “We sit, we wait, we get paid.”

Alamo pulled out a report with pictures of the activists they intended to arrest. The report, which Alamo accidentally revealed on his body camera, appeared to be a product of an FBI program known as Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, which allows the FBI and local police to mine social media for information about individual Americans without warrants. The photos in the report weren’t mugshots; they were images from social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Internal records obtained by The Intercept last year revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department used SOMEX to collect information about racial justice demonstrators in that city. Additional documents obtained by the national security-oriented transparency nonprofit Property of the People show that the FBI monitored social media activity, including Twitter posts and Facebook event pages, of racial justice activists in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. These internal documents also revealed that the FBI wanted to keep its social media activity secret. One document described the FBI’s need for new software solutions that could provide more invasive data mining of social media while maintaining “the lowest digital footprint.”

As Alamo looked at the SOMEX report, he focused on a photo of Jon Christiansen taken from one of his social media profiles.

“Professor?” Alamo asked his colleagues in the car, referring to Christiansen’s position as a sociology professor at a local college. He continued flipping through the report. “Boot to the face,” Alamo announced gleefully. “It’s going to happen.”

And it did. More than a dozen cops stormed into the housing march looking for activists whose photos they’d seen, including Christiansen and Johnson, the man who’d gotten into the altercation at the demonstration a year earlier.

Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike just beyond the melee. “And I see what I thought was a bunch of cops dog-piled on the entire crowd,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, they’re coming for everybody, then? What the fuck?’ Just shell-shocked.”

As she turned around, Armendariz Unzueta saw a police officer dressed in riot gear charging toward her. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in. Another officer’s body camera captured the encounter.

“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”

The bike’s bell gave off a short ring as it hit the concrete, landing between Armendariz Unzueta and the charging officer. The bike did not touch the officer, who sidestepped it and continued toward the crowd of demonstrators.

“I just reacted,” Armendariz Unzueta told me.

Armendariz Unzueta was wearing a bike helmet, oversized sunglasses, and a face mask, making her difficult to identify from the video. But police, working with the FBI, knew where to look — no warrant needed — for their most-wanted cyclist: social media.

“Sometimes You’ve Got to Laugh to Keep From Crying”

A Colorado Springs detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force started looking for the mysterious masked woman with the bicycle. Daniel Summey pulled up the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists and then searched their friends lists. From there, Summey found Armendariz Unzueta’s accounts, including photos in which she wore the same shoes and helmet that could be seen in the police body-camera footage.

Summey wrote a search warrant application for Armendariz Unzueta’s home. In it, he observed that demonstrators at the housing march carried red flags. “The red flag is significant in that it is a radical political symbol, and designates the march … as revolutionary and radical in nature,” he wrote, basing his claim on this website about red flags, which notes that “the red flag has, predominantly, become a symbol of socialism and communism.”

Summey’s application suggested that the FBI was using political ideology as a basis for investigation, which is against the bureau’s stated policy. “We don’t investigate ideology,” the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee in 2019.

Summey also attached pictures of Armendariz Unzueta from social media, including a nearly full-page photo of her in a bikini that had no relevance to the investigation.

“Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta told me when I asked her about it.

Police searched her home, took her bicycle and electronic devices, and charged her with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer — a second-degree felony.

Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta (left/top) pushed her bike down in a panic as a police officer in riot gear charged toward her during a housing-rights march. Minutes later, police arrested Charles Johnson (right/bottom), forcing him to the ground. Left/top photo: Colorado Springs Police Department. Right/bottom photo: Colorado Indigenous Brown Berets.

“I Never Saw Any Grenades”

Rogers, meanwhile, began to invite young male activists to her apartment. In a recording I obtained, an FBI agent in Colorado Springs confirmed that meetings between Rogers and at least two activists occurred. Although the possibility of a sexual encounter appeared to be implicit in the invitations, the meetings took unexpected turns.

One of the activists lured to a meeting with Rogers described walking into the apartment. “And there’s two guys sitting there with her,” he said. The activist asked not to be identified because he feared that being publicly associated with an FBI investigation could cost him his job.

Rogers asked if he could find her an illegal gun to buy, the activist recalled. “I’m not going to sell one to you illegally,” the activist, a firearms enthusiast, told Rogers and her two companions. He then left.

Rogers invited over a second man, Gabriel Palcic, who was active in the tenants’ union that kept its paperwork at the Chinook Center. Like the first activist, Palcic entered the apartment to find two men with Rogers. They said their names were Mike and Omar. “Mike was missing his left leg from the knee down. Omar was kind of a Middle Eastern-looking guy with a big beard,” Palcic told me. “Both had tattoos. Both were very buff.”

Palcic said Mike and Omar claimed to be truckers who trafficked in illegal weapons. They told him they could get grenades, TNT, and AK-47s, and they asked if he wanted to buy anything.

Intrigued, Palcic met Mike and Omar several more times; during one encounter, they showed Palcic what they claimed was a fully automatic AK-47. “I never saw any grenades or TNT or any of that other shit they were talking about,” Palcic told me.

Palcic continued to hang around with Mike and Omar because they were generous, buying him meals, drinks, and cigars when they met. “There were a few times where they were obviously pumping drinks into me,” Palcic remembered. “‘Yeah, do you want another double shot of that 16-year Scotch?’”

But Palcic eventually told the two men he didn’t want any weapons and stopped returning their calls and text messages. Palcic has not been charged with a crime, according to publicly available court records.

Not long after, Armendariz Unzueta, the woman accused of assaulting a police officer with her bike, was granted access to the evidence in her case, which included police body-camera video from the day of the incident. Among the footage was the recording from Alamo’s body camera, which captured the officer flipping through the report filled with social media photos of activists.

Alamo’s body camera captured something else that day. In the recording, he mentioned that there were police officers secretly among the protesters at the housing march. He said there were two undercover cops and four plainclothes officers. He then looked at a photo on his phone.

“A picture of April, with her giant boobs,” Alamo said and laughed, apparently referring to one of the undercover officers in the crowd.

The activists at the Chinook Center watched the video. At the time, they didn’t know who April Rogers was. “There was a process of elimination,” Jon Christiansen said. “And then eventually we were able to triangulate that April Rogers was Chelsie.”

That’s when Rogers disappeared from the activist scene in Colorado Springs.

“Those Were, In Fact, Undercovers”

In the spring of 2022, while researching how the FBI’s 2020 investigation in Denver had expanded into Colorado Springs, I started contacting activists and gathering records there. At the same time, seemingly by coincidence, FBI agents took a renewed interest in the case, calling activists and knocking on doors. One of the activists they contacted was Autum Carter-Wallace. Her doorbell camera recorded agents coming to her home when she was away. One of the agents called her while outside her home.

“We came down to chat with you if you’re available,” the agent said in the voicemail. “I think it would be great to sit down with you and talk to you about some things that we are concerned about as it relates to things happening in the community.”

Carter-Wallace called the federal agent, who asked her about Palcic. She told the agent that she didn’t know him. The agent then told Carter-Wallace that the FBI had obtained video from a demonstration showing her standing next to Palcic.

“A protest with, like, a thousand people. I’m standing near one guy. You think I know him?” Carter-Wallace responded.

Agents also visited the home of one of the activists whom Rogers had tried to engage in an illegal firearms transaction. This activist agreed to meet with agents at the FBI’s office in Colorado Springs on the condition that he be allowed to record their conversation. The activist then provided me with a copy of that recording.

The agent on the recording confirmed the activist’s suspicions: that the two men with Rogers were undercover agents trying to entrap him in an illegal firearms transaction.

“You felt there was a gun-running conspiracy we were trying to throw at you, which those were, in fact, undercovers,” Brandon Kimble, the FBI agent, said during the recorded conversation. “However, they basically were in town to do a meeting with Gabe [Palcic] to sell him hand grenades.”

Last summer, after returning from a trip to England, Palcic was detained by agents at Denver International Airport. The agents provided him with copies of court-authorized search warrants that allowed for a tracking device to be installed on his truck and for his phone’s GPS data to be collected.

Palcic called me immediately after leaving the airport. “They basically recounted for me that they were looking into me, you know, because I inquired about acquiring weapons,” Palcic said. “And they said that, you know, they have recordings of all the conversations I had with the [undercovers] — which, obviously, you know?”

Palcic claimed that the agents told him the FBI was investigating the Chinook Center and the entire activist movement associated with the nonprofit.

“I Respectfully Decline to Answer”

In June 2022, I returned to Colorado Springs to attend a state criminal court hearing involving Charles Johnson, the activist arrested at the housing rights march. State prosecutors charged Johnson with theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest for his activities at various protests in the summer of 2020.

During the hearing, Johnson’s lawyer, Alison Blackwell, called Rogers to testify over prosecutors’ objections. Rogers entered the courtroom, this time wearing a long black wig and a black disposable face mask. A Justice Department lawyer, Timothy Jafek, sat at the prosecution table and spoke privately with Rogers before she took the witness stand.

The judge asked Rogers to take off her mask. She pulled it down to her chin.

“When you were marching in the housing march, were you doing that for the Colorado Springs Police Department?” Blackwell asked Rogers.

“I was, uh, under the authority of the FBI,” Rogers answered meekly. She looked over at the Justice Department lawyer, her body rigid.

“OK. And how many other FBI agents were in that march?” Blackwell asked.

“I respectfully decline to answer,” Rogers said, looking again at the Justice Department lawyer.

“Did you think my client was a terrorist threat at any point?”

“I respectfully decline to answer.”

“You can just say no,” Blackwell said, exasperated.

“I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers admitted.

Sitting in the courtroom, some of the activists from the Chinook Center snickered as this absurdity played out. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case and had no authority in that courtroom, silenced a local cop on the witness stand as a state judge looked on from the bench. Jafek declined to comment as he left the courtroom that day.

“People have become more cautious, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

The following month, as part of a deal to avoid jail time, Johnson pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a highway for his role in a June 2020 racial justice protest.

Meanwhile, Armendariz Unzueta, whose criminal prosecution for pushing her bike down in a panic revealed the evidence that blew Rogers’s cover, is completing a deferred prosecution agreement. Under its terms, the felony charge against her will be dropped if she does 25 hours of community service and writes a letter of apology.

Shaun Walls, a Black activist who helped start the Chinook Center, said the FBI’s activity has had a chilling effect. “What they did has been effective,” Walls said. “People have become more cautious about what they’re doing, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”

“Something Went Boom”

A few months later, in November 2022, a Colorado man who ran a neo-Nazi website and had briefly been investigated by the FBI, at the same time federal agents were spying on the Chinook Center activists, committed a horrific crime.

Armed with AR-15-style rifle, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. An Army veteran at the club tackled Aldrich, preventing what would have otherwise been a much deadlier mass shooting. The attack made national news and drew comparisons to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded.

As with the killer in the Pulse attack, the FBI had previously investigated the Club Q shooter. In the summer of 2021, after family members reported that he was building a bomb in a basement and had threatened to kill them, FBI agents opened an investigation of Aldrich. They closed that inquiry less than a month later.

As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.

“We like to say our successes generally don’t make the news,” Kimble, the FBI agent who helped put together the failed gun-running stings against the Colorado Springs activists, said in the recorded conversation a few months before the Club Q shooting. “When we screw up, it’s because something went boom or there was a mass shooting.”

Eleanor Knight contributed research.

The post The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes appeared first on The Intercept.

Forty-nine African leaders convened in Washington for the U.S.-Africa summit, the first such gathering hosted by the U.S. since 2014. At the Peace, Security, and Governance panel on December 13, Presidents Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of Somalia, and Mohamed Bazoum of Niger joined African Union Chair Moussa Faki Mahamat in appealing for more U.S. security and counterterrorism aid.

The speeches delivered by each of these leaders poignantly illustrated what some might refer to as “empire by invitation,” wherein ostensibly sovereign leaders reproduce colonial power relations by inviting a more expansive role for imperial actors in their own affairs.

This is clearest in Somalia, where Mohamud recently asked the U.S. to loosen restrictions on its drone strikes targeting al-Shabab, despite documentation of, and lack of accountability for, the rise in civilian deaths due to drone strikes. “Not only does AFRICOM utterly fail at its mission to report civilian casualties in Somalia,” Amnesty International noted in 2020, “but it doesn’t seem to care about the fate of the numerous families it has completely torn apart.” While the Biden administration initially went to great lengths to suggest that it would curb former President Donald Trump’s lenient approach to drone warfare in Somalia by imposing more restrictions on the U.S. Africa Command, it continues to grant the military considerable leeway and has yet to publicly reject Mohamud’s request.

In the midst of a catastrophic food crisis, Mohamud has declared war on the Somali population by calling on all civilians to leave al-Shabab-controlled territory, warning that they risk becoming collateral damage if they do not physically distance themselves from the group. Mohamud’s approach amounts to a form of collective punishment, as his government is holding the entire population responsible for the actions of a small minority. Given that so many have already been displaced by drought and war, the assumption that further relocation is even possible shows a callous disregard for the challenges confronting ordinary Somalis.

The Somali president’s privileging of military solutions aligns perfectly with the primary interest of the Biden administration: addressing what it perceives to be threats to national and international security. Panelists such as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Samantha Power of the U.S. Agency for International Development approached political dynamics in Africa — whether in the form of hunger, unemployment, outward migration, popular protest, or coups — through the lens of risk and instability, rather than as the product of a longstanding scramble for African resources and a market-oriented global economy that has exacerbated marginalization and inequality.

The overarching message was that economic desperation and political frustration should be understood as threats that call primarily for one kind of solution: containment, and, if necessary, the use of violent force. None of the speakers on the Peace, Security, and Governance panel acknowledged that, particularly since the establishment of AFRICOM, the U.S. has in many ways contributed to the very instability it claims to want to solve, with the rise of al-Shabab in the aftermath of the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia a case in point.

Pax Africana or Pax Americana?

In his remarks at the summit, Mahamat highlighted the efforts made by the African Union to establish its own security architecture. Noting that the continent’s national armies are “underequipped,” he stressed the importance of having permanent special forces at the continental level that would be “more flexible” and “more offensive” in their approach.

Mahamat was referring to the African Standby Force, a mechanism that has yet to become fully operational. Championed for its potential to offer “African solutions to African problems,” the extent to which such a force will in fact be African-led is the source of considerable debate. At a time when the U.S. is wary of the costs associated with its own direct intervention — whether in dollars, lives, or legal and political blowback — the Pentagon’s Africa Command increasingly relies on a growing number of African security forces to assume the burden of counterterrorism missions on the continent. Partnerships with elite African military units allow U.S. forces to rely on proxies in cases where America is not officially at war and where the very presence of U.S. troops is likely to raise eyebrows. For their part, African states’ readiness to deploy their own troops to the front lines has been critical to their continued ability to access development assistance and foreign aid.

The idea for a U.S.-trained, all-African military force was first proposed by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Referred to at the time as the African Crisis Response Force, the Clinton plan came in the wake of the U.S. military’s painful exit from Somalia in 1993, which precipitated a shift in U.S. strategy away from a boots-on-the-ground approach to military intervention. Instead, the U.S. sought to cultivate partnerships with African militaries that could be trained and equipped for security operations, all while protecting U.S. interests. In the words of Nigerian scholar Adekeye Adebajo, “Africans would do most of the dying, while the U.S. would do some of the spending to avoid being drawn into politically risky interventions.”

At the time, some of the continent’s most vocal leaders were circumspect. Presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Nelson Mandela of South Africa rejected the notion of such a force on the basis that Africans had not been consulted about the proposal. President Muammar Gaddafi of Libya saw the writing on the wall, presciently anticipating what would eventually become AFRICOM. At a 1999 summit of the Organization of African Unity (the predecessor of the African Union), Gaddafi instead proposed the creation of a continental army that would explicitly serve the purpose of protecting Africa from the meddling of external neocolonial powers.

In doing so, he rekindled an older proposal by Ghana’s anti-colonial leader and eventual president, Kwame Nkrumah, who in the 1960s called for the creation of an African Military High Command to protect African states in the face of interference from Western powers. Despite formal declarations of independence across the continent at the time, Nkrumah was mindful of the potential for new forms of colonialism to compromise African sovereignty, contributing to the rise of client states and of “exploitation without redress.” As he wrote in 1965: “For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight. This is what we are doing, and this is what we will go on doing until all foreign domination of our African homelands has been totally eliminated.”

Ultimately, neither Nkrumah’s nor Gaddafi’s visions came to fruition. In the early days of independence, many African leaders worried about the potential for such a force to challenge the sovereignty of their newly independent states, and many held differing viewpoints on the question of intervention during the crisis in the Congo, which became a battleground for influence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In the early 2000s, the African Union did establish its own security architecture, but in doing so, it abandoned the principle of noninterference long upheld by its predecessor, the Organization of African Unity. In an amendment to Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, the union now has the right to intervene in member states when there is a “serious threat to legitimate order” for the purpose of restoring peace and stability.

What explains the shift away from Nkrumah’s preoccupation with external (neocolonial) aggression to the African Union’s seemingly open-ended embrace of intervention in the name of protecting “legitimate order”? Perhaps the first and most obvious answer is that both Nkrumah and Gaddafi were removed from power, and Gaddafi was killed by NATO-backed Libyan forces.

In 1966, one year after Nkrumah wrote about the need for Africans to arm themselves in the struggle against ongoing foreign domination, he was deposed in a military coup orchestrated by the CIA. According to the U.S. State Department at the time, Nkrumah’s “overpowering desire to export his brand of nationalism unquestionably made Ghana one of the foremost practitioners of subversion in Africa.” These events sent a clear message to other African leaders, many of whom had assumed power just a few years prior.

The potential operationalization of an African Standby Force comes with an important set of questions, including whether such an entity can constitute a form of pan-African cooperation that is by and for Africans, or whether it functions as a cover and a tool for militarism and endless wars that serve imperial interests.

Despite the summit’s rhetorical emphasis on democracy and open societies, the U.S. continues to view the continent through the lens of threat and great power rivalry — particularly as it faces increasing competition from China, Russia, Turkey, and the Gulf states. Looking ahead, we can expect that AFRICOM will continue to rely heavily on its African partners to function as militarized extensions of U.S. power on the continent, even as it rehashes the myth that instability in the region remains a “local,” Africa-specific problem. The extent to which African leaders at the summit displayed their readiness to serve as alibis for this charade is cause for deep concern.

The post Empire by Invitation appeared first on The Intercept.

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A legion of horribles

In the Cormac McCarthy novel “Blood Meridian,” a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion. “We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,” he tells his men. As they ride, White notices dust clouds on the horizon. Through his spyglass, he sees a massive herd of cattle, mules, and horses being driven toward the company by what he takes for a band of stock thieves. They seem to pay his men no mind as the herd rumbles past. Then, suddenly, hundreds of mounted Comanche lancers and archers appear:

A legion of horribles … wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners … one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador.

I first read those lines 14 years ago, in a hostel bunk bed amid the wanderings of my early 20s. I was in Naples, where my great-grandfather had boarded a ship to America, and though faces on the streets looked eerily familiar, I felt only a tenuous connection to the city. The novel’s lines about a distant frontier, in contrast, instantly resonated, though I struggled to understand why. There was shocking clarity in the violence: The attackers butcher the Americans, “passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads.” The description of their garish attire, with its funhouse mockery of the would-be conquerors, left me with a lingering sense of vulnerability.

These lines resurfaced in my mind after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an event whose meaning I’ve found myself continuing to interrogate as we approach its two-year anniversary. At the start of 2021, I was married, with one small child and another on the way, and living in a brick-house suburb of Washington, D.C. I’d covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, then returned, in 2017, to report on the sort of militant-minded Americans who ended up storming Congress. I had traveled to pre-election meetings with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role that day, and I’d been at a previous “Stop the Steal” rally, in November 2020, watching pot-bellied Proud Boys march around like Catholic school kids in matching polo shirts. On the morning of January 6, however, I stayed home. I was sick of it all: the crowds, the Covid risk, the threats of violence. I’d seen my share of real war at the margins of the U.S. sphere of influence and couldn’t stand another day of listening to comfortable Americans talk about inflicting such violence at home. It wasn’t just them, though. It was also me. In the interludes between my trips around the country, contemplating America’s breakdown from the desk in my sunroom, I’d found I no longer understood what my role was supposed to be.

Then the riot commenced. The Capitol was breached. I thought, if this is something that will overturn the republic — if it’s a real revolution — then my path is clear again, and there will be time to get to the Capitol tonight, tomorrow, and probably for days.

I was right and wrong. The riot was over in a matter of hours. Congress reconvened to certify the election result that night. But I thought the attack had struck a deeper, psychological blow whose impact was hard to see clearly. I felt it in the reactions from friends and neighbors, in the hysteria in the news, and in my own unease. The answer seemed to lurk behind the nature of the freakout. Turning back to the passage from “Blood Meridian,” I reconsidered what was so unnerving about it and wondered if the rioters, perhaps without realizing it, had tapped into the same anxiety the scene had animated in me years earlier. It conjures a fear about the edge of empire that has always lurked in the American mind, in which the frontier is the place where the violence and suffering the nation has inflicted as the terms of its expansion and sustainment bend back on us, and we encounter our demons. There’s an air of reckoning as the legion descends on Captain White’s company. The first weapons they brandish against the Americans are “shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass.”

“They came dressed for chaos,” read the New York Times the day after the Capitol was attacked, “in red, white and blue face paint and star-spangled superhero outfits, in flag capes (American, yes, but also Confederate and Trumpian) and flag jackets and Donald Trump bobble hats. One man came as a patriotic duck; another as a bald eagle; another as a cross between a knight-errant and Captain America; another as Abraham Lincoln. They came in all sorts of camouflage, in animal pelts and flak jackets, in tactical gear.” Other writers noted the “seditionist frontiersmen” and “revolutionary cosplayers” and “Confederate revivalists.” The ghosts were rising up from across the American centuries. Solemn-eyed Christians with their wooden cross. The gallows with its noose. Militants dressed like our modern Forever War soldiers. Some of them, indeed, had been those soldiers, and here they were in their battle attire. A writer for The Atlantic described spending time among a group of protesters that included two men in camouflage and Kevlar vests, along with a woman in a full-body cat suit. He was confronted by a sense of mystery. The event, he wrote, was “not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics.” No — the meaning lay in the subliminal. What these people were describing were their nightmares about the edge of empire, come to life, and massing in the heart of Washington, D.C.

The legion advanced holding up a mirror, and I looked at my reflection. It clarified the unease that had been troubling me at my desk. If that side had the aspect of barbarians ready to sack the Capitol, then my side might be manning the imperial gates.

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Technophilia

Mosby describes himself as a Special Forces veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, though he is guarded about specifics. His friend’s question was rhetorical: Part of the job of a Green Beret is to operate in the chaos of broken countries. One thing that serving in or otherwise witnessing recent U.S. wars can also show you, though, is America’s own weakness, laid bare in the yawning gap between what it promised in those wars and what it was able to achieve. For more than a decade on “Mountain Guerrilla,” Mosby’s blog and now Patreon page, and in survivalist and tactical guides that people in militant and prepper circles discuss with reverence, he has laid out an apocalyptic understanding of the world centered on the idea of America’s decline and eventual collapse.

Two aspects of Mosby’s post are striking in relation to January 6. The first is his starting point: America is an empire. Prominent U.S. thinkers once wrestled with this idea, with Mark Twain and others making the Anti-Imperialist League a political force during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. These days, the concept often seems relegated to the Noam Chomsky-citing hard left or pockets of the far right, but a shift in perspective can sharpen the picture. “To an outsider, the fact that America is an empire is the most obvious fact of all,” the British journalist Henry Fairlie, who spent 25 years in the U.S., wrote during the Vietnam era. America emerged from a revolt against an imperialist power, giving its citizens an aversion to “the mere suggestion that they may themselves be an empire,” Fairlie noted. “Call it, then, by another name … but the fact will remain.”

The modern blend of America’s economic might, military alliances, and borderless campaigns of surveillance, drone attacks, and commando raids makes its version of empire look different from those that preceded it — and from the blunter attempts at power grabs in Cuba and the Philippines that mobilized Twain and his allies. Mosby, however, also subscribes to the idea that the country itself is a patchwork of far-flung places tied together by conquest. The distance from London to Rome, he notes, is less than from Denver or Austin to the White House. So the U.S. decline Mosby sees is imperial decline, both at home and abroad. He derides the idea that America’s technological advances and the comforts of its globalized economy will help it escape the fate of every empire that came before it. In fact, he believes that the excesses of contemporary U.S. capitalism will only speed that fate along. He titled his post about January 6 “The Hubris of Technophilia.”

Secondly, in Mosby’s view, Donald Trump existed outside the true power structure of this crumbling empire even when he controlled the presidency. The real authority lay somewhere else. This was the authority that revealed its weakness on January 6. It wasn’t the breach of the poorly guarded U.S. Capitol that told him this. (“I could give two shits about that, and in fact, was surprised that we didn’t see smoke billowing out the windows.”) He saw it in the agitation of the politicians and talking heads and the panicked talk about insurrection in the news. It was in the frenzy of a kicked beehive.

What you’re watching, right now, is the mechanisms of imperial power — the government, the legacy media, and the oligarchs, of social media and big business — lashing out ineffectually, in the throes of panic, because the collapse of the imperial hegemony just became readily apparent to even the willfully blind … They’re NOT in control, and at their core, they know it. They’re not in control in Afghanistan. They’re not in control in Iraq. They’re not in control in Syria. … Hell, they’re not even really in control in Washington, DC.

If you ask me, Trump embodies the worst of U.S. empire and is exactly the fallout that critics of its runaway capitalism, militarism, and nationalism have predicted. He campaigned on stealing oil and indiscriminately bombing ISIS territory, and on demonizing Muslims, who for 20 years have been the state-sponsored enemy, as well as by fearmongering over migrants at the southern border. It wasn’t just talk: Trump ramped up drone attacks and embraced secret wars and loosened airstrike rules designed to limit civilian casualties. Large corporations and defense contractors raked in profits during his presidency. I recognize in the January 6 movement the same alliance between a supposedly anti-establishment grassroots and the super-rich that I remember from the tea party. My goal, however, is to look in the mirror, and Mosby’s writing shows how the Democratic side of the political divide can also be portrayed as aligned with the centers of entrenched power. After January 6, many liberals looked to Big Tech for more censorship and to financial institutions for help blocking funding streams. They embraced the government agencies that had managed the war on terror and pushed them for domestic remedies, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived disinformation board and a new law to give the FBI more tools and funding to counter domestic extremism. Maybe some of this was justified, given the stakes, but one goal in psychological operations is to get your opponent to act like the enemy you want to fight.

Mosby’s prescriptions seem somewhat apolitical: He sees America’s collapse as unavoidable and advocates a retreat into austere survivalism. There are plenty of people on the right, however, who are keen to harness the January 6 crowd’s momentum to enact radical change. This includes an expanding constellation of anti-democratic thought that can draw on similar notions of empire and the modern right’s place outside its hierarchies. Thinkers in this space have posited that liberal authority is so ingrained that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy; this was the concept behind the former private equity executive Michael Anton’s 2016 case for Trump in his widely circulated essay “The Flight 93 Election,” which gave conservatives an ultimatum: “Charge the cockpit or you die.” Anton became a National Security Council official in the Trump administration and is now at the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank. Curtis Yarvin, a writer often cited as a favorite of Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, has also deployed the declining empire frame. He has called for an “American Caesar” to rescue the country from its liberal masters. “Certainly, our choice in the early 21st century — if we have a choice — is one of two fates: the fall of the Roman Republic, or the fall of the Roman Empire,” he wrote. “Don’t let anyone hate on you for preferring the former — or being willing to learn from it.”

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Freaks vs. squares

In “The Armies of the Night,” his book about the march, Norman Mailer described the spectacle. “They came walking up in all sizes,” he wrote, “perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheikhs, or in Park Avenue doormen’s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin.” He counted hundreds of hippies in Union blue and Confederate gray marching beside samurais, shepherds, Roman senators, “Martians and Moon-men and a knight unhorsed who stalked about in the weight of real armor.”

With this absurdist show of force, Mailer hoped the left had found the momentum to challenge not only the war in Vietnam but also what he called “the authority” behind the version of America that he called “technology land,” where the horrors of napalm, Agent Orange, and nuclear bombs were tied in some intrinsic way to all the stifling domestic corruptions.

Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority. … this new generation of the Left hated the authority, because the authority lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority … were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy.

The movement’s power, the book suggests, was born of a refusal to accept, at home, what America manifested overseas, and a determination not to lose sight of the immediacy of burned forests and dead civilians. It challenged the authority by refusing to play on its terms. This was the energy behind the idea of such a horde preparing to march, with no coherent plan, against the annihilating structure of the Pentagon, a building that encompasses 6.5 million square feet of office space and 7,500 windows. “[T]he aesthetic at last was in the politics,” Mailer wrote, rejoicing that “politics had again become mysterious.”

In the end, the marchers streamed across the Arlington Bridge and descended on the Pentagon, where some managed to break in and run amok for a while. Hundreds were arrested. The world seemed to spin on. Mailer felt, however, that a psychological blow had been dealt — because the event, he wrote, was one “that the authority could not comprehend.”

One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks.

The protesters, it seems to me, were trying to reach into the subliminal reserve of guilt and fear that Americans keep buried, and in doing so, they took on the role of McCarthy’s legion of horribles. One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks. The system was run and staffed by squares, policed by squares, and supported by squares, the unquestioning drones of empire. There was power in the ability to interrupt the programming, to jolt them with a sense of dislocation. It’s an ethos captured in miniature in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” when he recounts standing in the men’s room of a popular nightspot and spilling LSD powder onto his flannel sleeve. A stranger walks in and begins to suck the powder from Thompson’s arm: “A very gross tableau,” he writes, that makes him wonder if a “young stockbroker type” might walk in and see them. “Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it’ll ruin his life — forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”

During the protest at the Pentagon, the hippies held an exorcism, trying to levitate the building and drive out the demons within it. The new generation of the left, Mailer wrote, “believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution.” Now it’s the new right reaching for magic — black magic, maybe, but magic nonetheless. They believe in international conspiracies of pedophiles, in Satan worshippers, and Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. These are terrible, dangerous fantasies, yes, but they also contrast with a left whose anti-establishment impulses often seem to go corporate, like rock and roll and weed, and executives with hired shamans preaching psychedelic healing. One side believes in apocalypse and ivermectin horse paste, and God, and bleach. The other believes in grown-up generals and congressional committees, rules and norms, and the FBI.

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How to destroy a democracy

I breezed along with my shopping, until I thought I felt Stanley reach for me. Other key features of fascism, he writes, using Rush Limbaugh as a foil, are the undermining of “expertise” and attempts to create a climate in which “experts have been delegitimized.” Wait a minute, I thought, pulling out my earbuds. Which experts does he mean? (And is Stanley one of them?) Aside from calls to defend science and academia from right-wing onslaughts, he leaves the category mostly undefined. Limbaugh’s attacks on all sources of information that ran counter to his own hyperpartisan propaganda were transparent enough, and easy to disdain; this has also become part of the Trumpian playbook. At the same time, however, many among the sprawling class of elites and experts in America have used Trump’s specter to shield themselves from challenges to their authority that may well be justified. Whoever has been guiding the country through the three-plus decades of my lifetime, at least, hasn’t been doing a good job of it, and we clearly have more than just conservatives to blame. This is apparent in any statistical indicator that tracks the worsening of, say, climate change or economic inequality over time, the persistent discrimination faced by Black Americans, or their continued killing by our militarized police. However inadvertently, broad defenses of elites and experts support the status quo, while nurturing an increasingly dangerous American reverence for authority. Now more than ever, it seems, we should be leaning into the opposing tradition of vibrant skepticism as we seek to discern and constantly reevaluate which purported expertise is worthwhile and which we’d be better off dismissing.

The book dissects how problems from racism and inequality to inhumane treatment of immigrants have seeded the potential destruction of American democracy. It makes only passing mention, however, of an example of elite failure that’s essential to the discussion: the disaster of U.S. foreign policy. Nothing has bred hyper-nationalism like the post-9/11 wars, or inflamed a reactionary sense of cultural superiority, or fed the worship of violence and power, or eroded the rule of law, or indoctrinated people in a constant, searching fear of new threats and enemies, or encouraged them to turn, for relief, to industry, technology, and the security state. The wars and their knock-on effects, including surveillance and civilian casualties that continue to this day, have been supported by both political parties and sustained by a top-down culture of unreality based on encouraging people to look away. An edifice of official secrecy, staffed by experts and elites, has been built upon layers of classification, obfuscation, and denial that hide information we’d rather not see anyway, helping us avoid a full view of our own reflections.

Hannah Arendt, born in pre-war Germany, is widely considered one of the foremost scholars of that country’s descent into Hitlerism. She devoted a third of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which analyzed the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi and Soviet regimes, to imperialism. Tyranny deployed abroad, she noted, “could only destroy the political body of the nation-state,” and while imperialism alone didn’t spawn Hitler’s rise, it was essential to creating the right conditions. Arendt immigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and tracked the overseas adventurism that has defined the era of American dominance. In her 1971 essay on the release of the Pentagon Papers, “Lying in Politics,” she observed that the Vietnam War was the province not only of flag-waving nationalists but also of seemingly well-intentioned experts and bureaucrats, the so-called problem solvers who’d helped to support the war and lent it a sheen of respectability. “Self-deception is the danger par excellence,” she wrote. The experts ended up living in the same unreality they foisted on the public. For all their acumen, they became gears in a machine that was grinding forward unthinkingly: “One sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than ‘decision-makers’ had been let loose in Southeast Asia.”

These decision-makers were taking direction from Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who served as defense secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Some detractors saw the “problem solvers” and their technocratic counterparts across government as dangerous progressives. Some of the technocrats’ critics on the left, however, believed that, rather than truly changing the power structure, they were trying to alter it just enough to be comfortable in it — and that this applied more broadly to the Kennedy-Johnson coalition. In “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer wrote of his unease at a pre-march party at the home of an academic who was both against the war and, as Mailer saw it, one of the empire’s unwitting supporters.

If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame … [on] the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.

The enemies on the right were more obvious; here Mailer was concerned with the trickier battle within liberalism. He saw that you can’t start a revolution, which is what pulling down the edifices of empire would be, if the people on your side are so ingrained in the power structure that they can’t even see it.

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A Meandering Energy

Adams had been brought up in the militant movement, immersed in meetings and trainings hidden away in the surrounding pines. Then, recently, he’d broken from it and from his father as well, following a long process that he called “deprogramming,” during which he also changed his surname. All around were obscure and dusty books that had belonged to his father: “The Coming Battle,” by M. W. Walbert; “Firearms for Survival,” by Duncan Long; “Rawles on Retreats and Relocation,” by James Wesley Rawles; “Tracking Humans,” by David Diaz; “Boston’s Gun Bible,” by the pseudonymous Boston T. Party. Though Adams couldn’t find it, he was sure that “The Reluctant Partisan,” one of John Mosby’s books, was also buried somewhere in the clutter. The militant movement believes that it takes only a small vanguard to start the revolution, Adams told me, but its preparations for political violence have also been married to efforts to bring as many people as possible to its side. I found another type of book among the piles: “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” and “How to Win a Local Election: A Complete Step-By-Step Guide.” The Oath Keepers, in the end, were just one of many pieces that came together on January 6, but Rhodes had been tapping for years into the momentum that fueled it. He’d recognized that “a meandering energy” is on the loose in America, Adams said. “People want structure and they want to feel a part of things.”

“The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”

Maybe there’s no choice, at the moment, but to defend the system we have in hopes of staving off a much darker fate. That’s what Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest federation of labor unions, told me. He has been credited with helping to organize the liberal defense against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote, sounding the alarm for months ahead of time and then, when the coup attempt was on, playing a coordinating role in the response. That response involved mobilizing the grassroots left and institutional liberals alike — and yes, the retired security officials, tech and business executives, bureaucrats, experts, and elites who are part of the wealthy, educated demographic that increasingly votes Democratic. The larger effort to stop Trump from overturning the vote brought establishment Republicans and big corporations into the fold as well, Podhorzer noted; the AFL-CIO even released a joint letter with the Chamber of Commerce to support the election result. History has shown, he told me, that right-wing authoritarianism can only be defeated when all of civil society — including corporations and the center-right — is aligned against it: “The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”

This is probably true. It might even be heroic, in its own way. It also means manning the imperial gates. Our demons from the frontier are here, running rampant, and there’s no one left to turn to but the people who loosed them in the first place — to get in line with the squares. Nothing shows that a system has been victorious like the inability of even its opponents to imagine an alternative. I suffer from this fate. Even my critiques of U.S. empire, I often think, exist so comfortably within its confines as to make me just another part of it. It reminds me of a term I heard in countries I covered overseas: controlled opposition.

This was the dilemma that had been plaguing me over those long months of suburban comfort as January 6 approached. And it’s why, watching the chaos unfold at the Capitol, I felt, amid the dread, a hint of clarity, as if perhaps a fog were about to lift. If the coup happened, I’d be able to charge at last against the authority like the revolutionary I’d imagined I might be back when I was bouncing through hostels with a backpack full of books. The thought provided some comfort, but returning to the passage from McCarthy, I arrived at another set of questions. What if the battle between good and evil had already been settled in America? And if the latter had won, what would be the use in guarding the gates?

The protagonist in “Blood Meridian” is a nameless, wandering youth called “the kid,” who is traveling with Captain White’s company when it’s wiped out by the Comanches and survives by lying among the dead. Moving onward through the frontier’s netherworld, he falls in with a man who makes Captain White’s brand of violence seem quaint. The Judge is a towering figure, nearly seven feet tall, and apparently civilized; “this man of learning,” as he’s described, is well traveled and erudite, with an expansive knowledge of languages, history, science, and law. He also unleashes a machine-like violence capable of wiping out entire settlements of men, women, and children as they sleep. “It makes no difference what men think of war,” the Judge says. “War endures.”

Eventually, belatedly, the kid revolts against him. “You’re the one that’s crazy,” he says weakly. The book ends in a violent hug, with the kid trapped in the Judge’s arms, smothered “against his immense and terrible flesh.” When I first read this in Naples, it left me confused. Now, though, I can feel the familiar embrace of patrimony.

The post How Jan. 6 Brought Frontier Violence to the Heart of U.S. Power appeared first on The Intercept.

At the chop shop, Childs met with Abdul-Latif and his friend Walli Mujahidh, who had a mental illness, and showed them the weapons he’d acquired for their supposed attack. The guns and grenades had been disabled, and hidden FBI cameras captured Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh holding rifles, even though neither man knew how to use them. “He didn’t even understand how to work the breech,” Childs would later tell me, referring to Abdul-Latif’s inability to load the firearm.

Suddenly, FBI agents, dressed in tactical uniforms, tossed in a smoke grenade and charged toward the men; they handcuffed Childs as part of the show.

“When the feds rushed in, I knew it was Robert Childs,” Abdul-Latif later told me. “I knew he’d set us up.” As Abdul-Latif saw it, Childs had manipulated and betrayed him for money. The FBI, meanwhile, described Childs as valiant. “But for the courage of the cooperating witness, and the efforts of multiple agencies working long and intense hours, the subjects might have been able to carry out their brutal plan,” Laura Laughlin, then the FBI’s special agent-in-charge in Seattle, said in a 2011 press release. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer later described Childs as “the unlikely hero” of the bust.

After years of talking to both men and sorting through conflicting claims, I can finally explain the origins of this high-profile case that the FBI and the Justice Department have misrepresented to the public and the courts. The FBI hired a convicted sex offender as an informant, even as a rape kit with his DNA sat untested on a shelf. They paid him $90,000 to set up his friend and his friend’s mentally ill buddy in a terrorism plot concocted from nothing more than an over-the-top statement by Abdul-Latif, landing both Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh in prison. A decade later, Childs is in prison as well, serving a life sentence for the crime documented by the rape kit that the Seattle Police Department left untested for 13 years.

Last winter, with nothing left to lose, Childs contacted Abdul-Latif and me to come clean about the FBI terrorism sting he’d helped engineer.

“We’re Not Here By Accident”

I never expected to be caught in the middle of a strained relationship between two old friends convicted on terrorism and rape charges, respectively. It just happened, in the slowly discomforting way it can when you spend years researching a story.

In 2015, I flew to Key West to meet with Childs for the first time. He’d moved to Florida because his cover had been blown in Seattle. After the sting targeting Abdul-Latif, Childs kept working as a police informant. He grew his hair out into dreadlocks and, as part of a police surveillance operation, joined the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, a left-wing activist group whose members dress like clowns during protests.

Activists in Seattle soon linked him to Abdul-Latif’s case and posted pictures of Childs on social media, warning others that he worked for the FBI. I only knew that Childs had moved to Florida because he was arrested there following a complaint that he had rung up five transactions totaling more than $800 on a stolen credit card. Police in Key West investigating the complaint discovered that Childs had not registered as a sex offender in Florida and arrested him. Childs told the cops that “he was hiding from a previous case he worked with detectives in Seattle,” according to the police report.

Childs and I met at a pizzeria on Stock Island, just east of Key West. At the time, he was homeless and camping in a wooded area near the ocean. He wore an ankle monitor — the result of his charge for not registering as a sex offender — and had both ears pierced, a soul patch under his bottom lip, and his long, sun-bleached dreadlocks tied up in a knot. He’d go to a local Burger King nearly every day to charge his ankle monitor and use his phone to access the free internet.

When we talked then, he parroted the Justice Department’s official account of what had happened in Seattle: He’d gone to the police because Abdul-Latif had talked about a terrorist attack, and what he’d done to set up his friend was heroic. I asked him about one of the questions that has hung over Abdul-Latif’s case: Why did Childs and his handler, a Seattle detective assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, delete their text messages following Abdul-Latif’s arrest? Childs told me that he’d chosen to wipe his entire phone because he had pornography on the device that would have violated his release terms as a sex offender; he wasn’t trying to hide evidence from Abdul-Latif when he deleted his data, he told me, but rather evidence strictly related to himself. Childs also assured me that his police handler wouldn’t have deleted anything relevant to Abdul-Latif’s case.

At the time, Childs wasn’t happy with the FBI. He said that federal agents hadn’t lived up to their promises, including, he claimed, to expunge his criminal record that included sex crimes. “I have no trust for them,” he said. Still, he maintained that his work for the bureau was legitimate: He’d helped stop a would-be terrorist by ratting out his friend.

After our meeting, I continued to track Childs on Florida’s sex offender registry. Not long after we met in the Keys, he moved to Okeechobee, a small town in the southern part of the state named after the enormous freshwater lake it sits above. Okeechobee is an impoverished corner of Florida that few tourists or even locals visit — a good place to disappear. But Abdul-Latif had found Childs’s address there and wrote him a letter from prison, begging him to tell the truth about what had happened during the sting. “I wanted to come clean and confess,” Childs told me a few months ago. But, concerned about what could happen to him, he ignored the letter.

“I wanted to come clean and confess,” Childs told me. But, concerned about what could happen to him, he ignored Abdul-Latif’s letter.

Ultimately, even in Okeechobee, the world came looking for Childs. The rape kit of a 12-year-old girl — which had collected dust on a shelf in Seattle since 2006 — was tested in 2019. DNA from the rape kit, found on the victim’s underwear, was a match for Childs.

On February 21, 2019, the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office arrested Childs on a warrant from Washington state. During an interrogation, detectives showed Childs a picture of the victim and explained that his DNA matched the sample recovered from the rape kit.

“We’re not here by accident,” Detective Ted Van Deman told Childs. “Did you rape this young lady?”

“No,” Childs responded.

“No?”

“I did not,” Childs said.

Childs told the detectives that he believed the girl must have seen a picture of him in the news media and confused him with her rapist. He explained to detectives that his name and photo had been used in a TED Talk I had given about FBI stings in 2015. “There was an author who had me on TED Talks — not me personally, but his interpretation of everything that happened in the terror case,” Childs said. “My name publicly out there. My picture publicly out there.”

Childs was extradited from Florida to Washington state, where he was convicted at trial and, in January, sentenced to life in prison. He continues to maintain that he did not rape the girl.

In his prison cell, Childs sat down and wrote a letter to his onetime friend, incarcerated 1,000 miles away in a federal facility in southern California. The letter was a confession.

“Abdul-Latif may have had some hardline ideology and radical speech, but he was never in any place to be a terrorist,” Childs wrote. “If I had not been encouraged to ‘turn him in’ or threatened to keep him on course, he would not be in prison now and no attack would have ever been perpetrated by him. He’s in prison because I was too coward to tell the truth.”

In the letter, Childs also admitted that he’d wiped his phone back then not to delete pornography, but because it contained text messages between him and his handler in which he discussed his view that Abdul-Latif was no threat to anyone. Childs also explained that he was coming forward now, as he embarked on a life sentence, because he no longer feared the FBI. “I have tried to relay this information before,” Childs wrote in his letter, “but was always cut off and threatened with losing my freedom as well.”

Childs added: “The so-called plot to attack the [Military Entrance Processing Station] location was created by me, approved by my handler, and then fed to Abdul-Latif to make it look like he came up with it himself.”

His confession has reopened Abdul-Latif’s case. In March, a federal judge appointed a lawyer to investigate the claims and file an appeal on Abdul-Latif’s behalf.

The missing text messages, which Childs now claims he destroyed on orders from Samuel DeJesus, the Seattle detective working with the FBI, were central to Abdul-Latif’s case. Abdul-Latif had planned to question the government about why the texts had not been retained. But on the eve of a hearing about those messages, Abdul-Latif took a plea deal to avoid a possible life term in prison. U.S. District Judge James Robart called the government’s investigation “at best sloppy.” Had Childs’s information about the text messages been available then, Abdul-Latif now says, he wouldn’t have taken the plea.

Abdul-Latif and Childs cannot call each other, since they are both incarcerated and prisoners are only allowed to make outbound calls. So earlier this year, I became the middleman between these estranged friends, with Abdul-Latif and Childs both agreeing that our conversations would be the on the record.

“We’ll Just Kill Him Right Away”

Born in California as Joseph Anthony Davis, Abdul-Latif served a brief stint in the U.S. Navy. In his mid-20s, he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery for sticking up a convenience store with a toy gun. Abdul-Latif converted to Islam and settled in Seattle, where he met Childs at a local mosque.

Childs grew up in Indiana and, at 16, moved out West. In October 1994, Childs, then 18 years old, was reported to local police for raping a 14-year-old girl he’d met at an arcade. “It’ll be all right,” Childs allegedly told the girl as he assaulted her, according to the police report. He was convicted and spent six months in jail. In 1996, when he was 20, Childs met a 15-year-old girl at a Seattle mall. Childs and the girl fondled each other in a park, and the girl’s mother filed a police report; Childs pleaded guilty to child molestation and registered as a sex offender. In prison, Childs became a Muslim. “It made sense to me at the time,” Childs told me of his conversion.

He returned to Seattle, where he married, started a cleaning business, and attended a local mosque. On occasion, Childs hired Abdul-Latif to work shifts at his business.

Abdul-Latif would stare into the camera, offering the type of anti-American religious rants that seemed engineered to catch the attention of FBI counterterrorism agents.

In 2007, with his marriage falling apart, Childs decided he wanted to fight for Islam. He thought at the time that being a part of the mujahedeen was the “highest plane” available in life. So he sold his cleaning business to Abdul-Latif and flew to Turkey. Both Abdul-Latif and Childs would later claim that they were cheated in this transaction; as a result, the two men stopped communicating for a time.

But Childs never reached the “highest plane.” In Turkey, he befriended a German Christian missionary, Tilman Geske, who was murdered along with two Christian Turks in the office of a Bible publishing company on April 18, 2007. A note left behind read: “This should serve as a lesson to the enemies of our religion. We did it for our country.” The five murderers were Muslims who told a court that their victims were involved in “harmful activities” that dishonored Islam. Geske’s grisly murder shook Childs, and he abandoned his ambitions to fight for Islam.

In 2011, Childs returned to Seattle, where Abdul-Latif was still running the cleaning business. By this time, Abdul-Latif was married and had a small child, and he devoted his free time to making YouTube videos that promoted Islam, a form of proselytization known in Arabic as dawah. With his shaved head, unkempt, jet-black beard, and rectangular eyeglasses, Abdul-Latif would stare into the camera, offering the type of anti-American religious rants that seemed engineered to catch the attention of FBI counterterrorism agents. “Look what happened in Iraq, Muslims,” Abdul-Latif said in one video. “Weapons of mass destruction, they never found any. Now they’re trying to take the natural resources of the Muslims from that country. And instead of standing up and at least saying no, we just say, ‘OK, it’s all right. I got my job. I got my apartment.’ And that’s it. When a Muslim gets killed, it should affect us emotionally.” Abdul-Latif would often praise Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who was at the time a popular propagandist for Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. (Al-Awlaki was killed in a 2011 drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama.)

Abdul-Latif was recording dawah videos regularly and had just filed for bankruptcy protection in the hopes of cleaning up his finances when Childs returned to Seattle. The two ran into each other at the mosque where they had first met. Childs and Abdul-Latif hadn’t spoken in years, but that evening, they forgave each other for the business disagreement and Abdul-Latif invited Childs to dinner. “His wife was making fried chicken,” Childs remembered, “and I really liked her fried chicken.”

After dinner, Abdul-Latif and Childs walked outside and into the parking lot of Abdul-Latif’s apartment complex. Abdul-Latif saw Childs’s vehicle — an enormous, gas-guzzling 1980s-era Chevrolet Suburban. Abdul-Latif came up with a nickname for the vehicle on the spot: “The Tank.” “We could take this truck and just ram through the gates at Fort Lewis,” Childs remembered Abdul-Latif telling him that night. Fort Lewis, now known as Joint Base Lewis-McChord, is a large U.S. military installation in Tacoma, Washington.

According to the Justice Department, Childs, concerned about this comment, reported Abdul-Latif to the Seattle police. DeJesus, a local detective working in partnership with federal counterterrorism agents, brought in the FBI, and federal agents enlisted Childs as an informant. He joined more than 15,000 others, many of them criminals and conmen motivated by money. Childs was not just a convicted sex offender when the FBI signed him up; a rape kit on a nearby shelf would have proven that he had sexually assaulted the 12-year-old girl just a few years before.

Over the next few weeks, the FBI paid Childs tens of thousands of dollars to buddy up to Abdul-Latif and see if he would move from talk to action. Abdul-Latif and Childs eventually came up with the idea to attack Seattle’s Military Entrance Processing Station, or MEPS, where new enlistees would first report for duty. It was a soft target: a federal building with just one security guard in the lobby. “We’ll just kill him right away,” Abdul-Latif said of the guard, according to FBI recordings. Abdul-Latif and Childs recruited a third man, Mujahidh, a friend of Abdul-Latif’s in Los Angeles who had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a mental illness that can cause an unmooring from reality. Mujahidh, also known as Frederick Domingue Jr., traveled to Seattle by bus. Neither Abdul-Latif nor Mujahidh had firearms, so Childs offered to provide assault rifles, ammunition, and grenades — thousands of dollars’ worth of military-grade weaponry that Childs told Abdul-Latif he’d sell them for just $800. Abdul-Latif’s knowledge of guns was so limited that he had no idea he was getting the arms deal of the century.

On June 22, 2011, having been secretly recorded by the FBI discussing their plot, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh met Childs at the chop shop. They inspected the weapons. FBI agents charged into the building and cuffed them.

Such stings have become the FBI’s primary counterterrorism tool. Since 9/11, more than 350 accused terrorists with alleged links to international groups like the Islamic State or Al Qaeda have been caught up in terrorism stings, yielding a near perfect record of convictions for the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors filed terrorism charges against Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh, including counts of conspiracy to murder U.S. government employees and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. Mujahidh agreed to plead guilty within months of the indictment and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. “This defendant was a cold-hearted, enthusiastic partner in this murderous scheme,” then-U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan said in a statement at the time.

Of Abdul-Latif, who received an 18-year sentence, Durkan said: “He targeted young men and women solely because they wanted to serve our country. His goal: to inspire others with a message of hate.”

“I Can’t Do This Anymore”

I don’t recall when I started communicating with Abdul-Latif, but it had to have been at least eight years ago, after he’d pleaded guilty.

At the time, I was reporting on Russell Dennison, an American who joined ISIS in Syria. Abdul-Latif and Dennison had met online, and FBI records indicated that the bureau began surveilling Abdul-Latif following a single phone conversation with Dennison — months before Childs went to the FBI with his tip. Based on that, I knew the story the FBI and the Justice Department had told the public and the courts — that Childs had spurred the investigation of Abdul-Latif — was not true.

What’s more, records from the Seattle Police Department and the FBI suggested that a complicated series of events had preceded Childs’s recruitment as an informant. In a June 2011 report, DeJesus, the Seattle detective, wrote that another paid informant had introduced Childs to DeJesus. But the other informant’s relationship with the Seattle Police Department and the FBI wasn’t fully explained in the records. Abdul-Latif had never met this other informant. I had tried to figure out what role this mysterious man had played in the investigation of Abdul-Latif, but I always came up empty.

Abdul-Latif called me one afternoon last year, his voice somber. “I can’t do this anymore,” he told me, explaining that he couldn’t take the emotional ups and downs that came with the horizonal prospect that I might find something that could reopen his case. “I need to accept and be at peace with the fact that I will in prison for another few years.” (Abdul-Latif is scheduled to be released in October 2026.)

I respected Abdul-Latif’s position, and I’d reached a similar conclusion: I needed to accept that I wouldn’t get to the bottom of his case, at least not any time soon.

“I’ll keep in touch,” I told Abdul-Latif, which, if I’m being honest now, I said more out of politeness than sincerity.

Then late last year, months after Abdul-Latif had called me to say goodbye, I read about Childs’s rape conviction.

In July 2006, a 12-year-old girl had run away from home and traveled to Seattle. On the night of the city’s annual torchlight parade, the girl was out on the streets, asking people for help finding her mother. She then asked a man if she could use his cellphone. According to a statement she’d later give police, the man grabbed her by the neck, pulled her into a secluded area, and sexually assaulted her.

The victim’s rape kit sat on a shelf in Seattle until a $3 million grant from the Justice Department funded the examination of more than 6,500 rape kits in Washington state, some dating back as far as 1982. Until a new state law took effect in 2015, individual police officers investigating sexual assault cases in Washington had discretion to decide whether a rape kit should be tested, creating a backlog that stretched back several decades. Untested rape kits are a national problem, with more than 100,000 moldering on shelves.

The Justice Department grant funded the testing of the 12-year-old girl’s rape kit from 2006. The kit contained DNA belonging to Childs, who was 30 years old at the time of the crime.

A Seattle police detective recorded an interview with the victim in 2019, following the testing of the rape kit and the positive match for Childs. “I remember trying to fight him off a little bit,” she said, then softly wept.

“I Did Manipulate Him”

In the months after Childs wrote his letter, I spoke regularly to him and Abdul-Latif. Childs was in a Seattle detention facility and Abdul-Latif in a federal prison in southern California. Childs told me that his goal now is to help Abdul-Latif overturn his conviction, and he agreed not only to talk to me, but also to Abdul-Latif’s lawyers. “He wasn’t serious about it,” Childs told me of Abdul-Latif’s interest in terrorism. “He was just talking.”

Childs explained that after he returned to Seattle, he ran into another friend he’d met in prison following his child molestation conviction. Childs said he was envious of this person when they reconnected. “He had two cars at that time. He had a house he was renting. Never once did I ever see him go to work,” Childs said. “He was always available to just hang out, always hanging out, smoking weed, cigarettes, going out drinking. Just basically partying it up and never working.”

Childs asked his old prison friend how he afforded his lifestyle. The man told Childs that he was an informant for the Seattle police. He explained that cops will pay for information, Childs recalled. That’s when Childs told him what Abdul-Latif had said to him: “We could take this truck and just ram through the gates at Fort Lewis.”

“Even when I told him, I was like, ‘Dude, this guy is not serious. They’re gonna laugh at this,’” Childs recalled.

“Well, you make it sound believable,” Childs remembered his friend telling him. “You make it sound like you were afraid for your life.”

Childs’s friend was persuasive, appealing to his desire for quick cash. “He’s the one that actually convinced me to turn this into something that it wasn’t, because we could make money from it,” Childs said.

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The other informant brought Childs to the Seattle Police Department. They met with DeJesus, who took Childs to the FBI. “This is a career maker,” Childs recalled DeJesus saying of the case.

Seattle police records and text messages provided as evidence in Abdul-Latif’s case support what Childs is now saying. DeJesus wrote a police report explaining that another Seattle detective, who was overseeing Child’s friend’s work as an informant, introduced him to Childs. DeJesus recorded a statement from Childs and then turned over the recording to the FBI. Later, Childs’s friend texted Childs that his Seattle police handler gave him $1,000 for making the introduction. “Also, he’s going to try to get me some cigs tomorrow inshallah,” he wrote, referring to cigarettes and using an Arabic expression meaning “God willing.”

But, as my reporting on Russell Dennison, the American ISIS fighter, indicated, it wasn’t Childs who’d first brought Abdul-Latif to the FBI’s attention. Childs told me that FBI agents had told him that they’d been surveilling Abdul-Latif and had become frustrated that they couldn’t move the case forward. I was able to confirm independently that the FBI had even sent another informant to meet Abdul-Latif, but nothing came of the encounters. “They made a comment to me that they had been watching him for a while,” Childs recalled, “and now they can get him with my help.”

And they got him. FBI agents burst into the car chop shop, where Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were holding disabled rifles. “Get down!” the agent yelled. Another FBI agent tackled Childs. “I need you to struggle,” Childs remembers the agent telling him. So Childs put on a show, hoping Abdul-Latif wouldn’t realize that he’d set him up.

I asked Childs if, in that moment, he regretted what he’d done. “There’s regret,” he told me. “There’s fear that he’s going to know that I was behind it, which apparently he did.”

After the arrests, Childs said that DeJesus instructed him to wipe his phone to get rid of any text messages. “Make sure there is nothing on your phone that can hurt the case,” Childs said DeJesus told him.

“I took that as an order to wipe my phone before it was collected,” Childs said. “In order to protect everyone, I claimed that I had a bunch of porn on it that could have gotten me in trouble.”

In court filings, the Justice Department acknowledged that DeJesus deleted his text messages. It was DeJesus’s standard practice to delete text messages following an arrest, according to the government, and he did not remember that the FBI had asked him to preserve them.

“There was no terror plot. It didn’t exist. It was created by the FBI and, well, me.”

The FBI and the Seattle Police Department declined to comment on Childs’s confession. DeJesus has left the Seattle police and could not be reached.

Emily Langlie, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle, said the government “did not seek to obscure or minimize” the missing text messages during its prosecution of Abdul-Latif.

“As proven by hours of recordings, and as Mr. Abdul-Latif admitted under oath in his plea agreement, his plan was to storm a military processing center and massacre the unarmed recruits with automatic weapons,” Langlie said. “A fundamental reality of criminal investigations is that law enforcement does not get to choose its informants. Prosecutors would never have asked a jury to convict Mr. Abdul-Latif based on the word of Robert Childs. Instead, the United States built a case based on independent evidence, such as the hours of recordings from Mr. Abdul-Latif himself.”

Childs said he quickly blew through the tens of thousands of dollars he’d earned from the terrorism bust. He bought a boat, stereo equipment, drugs, and visits with sex workers. “It went fast,” he said of the money.

“I did manipulate him,” Childs told me, referring to Abdul-Latif. “There was no terror plot. It didn’t exist. It was created by the FBI and, well, me.”

Abdul-Latif’s new court-appointed lawyer is working to obtain a recorded statement from Childs. “I’m looking at the possibility of filing a motion based on newly discovered evidence — that recently Robert Childs has come forward and indicated that he entrapped Abdul-Latif into committing the crimes that he pled guilty to,” Gilbert Levy said in one of our conversations. Levy is poring over Abdul-Latif’s case to find evidence that might corroborate the new details from Childs, whom Levy described as “a recidivist sex offender and not necessarily the most credible witness that’s ever come down the pike.”

Abdul-Latif calls me regularly again now; he’s concerned that Childs will lose his nerve and refuse to provide a statement under oath. I’ve told him what Childs has consistently told me: that he wants to help Abdul-Latif and make amends for what he did.

I don’t know if Abdul-Latif will have his conviction overturned or his sentence vacated. I suspect neither is likely, just as it’s unlikely that any of the people involved in his case will face questions about their actions, or any sort of accountability, more than a decade later.

In the end, Abdul-Latif’s case did go down as a “career maker.” After his arrest, one of the FBI agents involved was promoted to a supervisor position and Childs’s police handler was named “detective of the year.”

As for the U.S. attorney whose office prosecuted the case? Jenny Durkan was elected the 56th mayor of Seattle, only to leave office amid controversy involving missing text messages of her own.

The post A Criminal Ratted Out His Friend to the FBI. Now He’s Trying to Make Amends. appeared first on The Intercept.

He invited me in through the kitchen, where his wife, who was pregnant with their fourth child, was baking traditional Afghan bread with flour from Aldi’s. The trip downtown to buy groceries was among the greatest challenges of Hayanuddin’s new life in Pittsburgh. It involved hauling heavy bags back home on foot and in multiple city buses, whose schedules were unknowable since he didn’t speak English and had not downloaded the relevant app.

“It is difficult to descend from a very strong position to a very weak position,” Hayanuddin told me. In Afghanistan, “we had value. It was our country, and we were making sense for that country. But now, even our generals and commanders, everyone is in the same position.”

In Afghanistan, it was impossible to talk at any length to members of the secretive commando forces known as the Zero Units. They hunted the Taliban in night raids and were widely accused of killing civilians, including children. But last September, Hayanuddin and his Zero Unit comrades were the beneficiaries of the most successful aspect of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan: the CIA’s rescue of its allied militias. Their arrival in the U.S. over the last year has cracked open one of the war’s blackest boxes.

My conversations with Hayanuddin and several other militia members yielded new details about the command structure, operations, and final days of shadowy units that were nominally overseen by the Afghan intelligence service but were in fact built, trained, and in many cases fully controlled by the CIA. Their fighters hold clues to many of the war’s mysteries, including how U.S. intelligence engineered and oversaw years of deadly night raids that contributed to the Taliban’s ultimate victory, and how a secret deal between longtime enemies may have hastened the lightning collapse of the Afghan security forces last August.

Celebrated as heroes by their American handlers and some Afghans who oppose the Taliban, militiamen like Hayanuddin were feared and detested by many rural Afghans, who bore the brunt of their harrowing raids. While hundreds of Zero Unit members and their closest relatives made it to the U.S., they left behind extended families who have suffered abuse, imprisonment, and death threats under the new government.

The CIA did not respond to detailed questions about its role in overseeing, evacuating, and resettling Zero Unit members and whether the agency would do more to help militiamen and their families left behind in Afghanistan. “The United States made a commitment to the people who worked for us that we would create a concrete pathway to U.S. citizenship for those who gave so much to assist us over the years,” an agency spokesperson told me in an email. “It will take time, but we never forget [our] partners and are committed to helping those who assisted us. We are continuing to work closely with the State Department and other US government agencies on this effort.”

“With regard to allegations of human rights abuses,” the email continued, “the U.S. takes these claims very seriously, and we take extraordinary measures, beyond the minimum legal requirements to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict and strengthen accountability for the actions of partners. A false narrative [exists] about these forces that has persisted over the years due to a systematic propaganda campaign by the Taliban.”

Hayanuddin said that he and his comrades took care to avoid harming bystanders during their raids, even using loudspeakers to warn women to stay inside or shelter in basements before the fighting began. “For me, it was like a holy war,” he said. “I was there to target bad guys.” But he also described lingering feelings of rage, guilt, and remorse, and connected his struggle in Pittsburgh to his past. At one point, he wondered aloud if he was being punished.

“Sometimes I can’t control my anger and my anxiety,” he told me. “My heart is so sad, like someone is squeezing it very hard. I don’t know why. Maybe because of what happened back home or what is happening here.”

Reversal of Fortune

I met Hayanuddin last spring, at an Afghan New Year’s celebration in a park in Pittsburgh, where we had both recently settled as refugees. I had worked for the New York Times in Kabul for five years and made many trips to the front lines to report on the Afghan security forces, including in the days before the Taliban captured the Afghan capital last August. I was evacuated with other Times staffers to Houston, where I lived in a hotel for several months before getting a job as a visual journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and moving north.

At first, Hayanuddin didn’t want to talk to me. But after several attempts, he grew more comfortable, in part because he thought he was talking about an episode of the war that was closed, and in part because we were both exiles from the same place, trying to start new lives in Pittsburgh while still longing for home.

Hayanuddin had served six years with a unit known as 03, fighting the Taliban across Afghanistan’s southern deserts from his base in a compound previously occupied by the one-eyed former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. U.S. special operators had commandeered the property when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001 and turned it into a redoubt for American and Afghan intelligence forces. With hundreds of other Zero Unit fighters, Hayanuddin crossed shifting front lines in the final days of the war to get to Kabul’s CIA-controlled Eagle Base. From there, he was airlifted to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he briefly worked security before being handed $8,000 in cash — half a year’s salary — and flown with his wife and three young children to Fort Dix.

At 37, with a seventh-grade education, Hayanuddin, along with his comrades, is facing a reversal of fortune that is humiliating, infuriating, and utterly intractable. After almost two decades as an American proxy — from guarding U.S. bases to killing Afghans in partnership with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency — he has landed, as a poor and vulnerable refugee, in a three-bedroom apartment with flowered curtains he had to harangue the resettlement agency to install in keeping with Pashtun culture, which dictates that a woman must be shielded from the eyes of passing strangers.

The Zero Units, also known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were born soon after the first U.S. military and intelligence operatives arrived in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Formed in 2002, they operated entirely under U.S. control until 2012, Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, told me in August from London, where he leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. “The government of Afghanistan had no interference in these units,” said Zia, who spent many years in senior roles in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, including as deputy director of the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which nominally oversaw the units in recent years.

The first of what would become the Zero Units operated in eastern Afghanistan, in a mountainous area along the Pakistani border where the Taliban and other militants often sought refuge between attacks on U.S., NATO, and Afghan government forces. That militia, known as the Khost Protection Force, or KPF, covered the southeastern region of the country. Later, the CIA created and trained at least three more units: 01, which operated in Kabul, Logar, and Wardak provinces in central Afghanistan; 02, based in Jalalabad, which fought in the east; and Hayanuddin’s unit, 03, based in Kandahar and fighting across the south.

In 2010, under pressure from then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. officials agreed to transfer oversight of the Zero Units to NDS “physically, but not technically,” Zia said. “We had the names and ranks of members of Zero Units,” he told me. “But their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

“Their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

As the Obama administration transitioned from combat operations to a counterterrorism and advisory mission in Afghanistan after 2011, the U.S. handed control of several Zero Units over to the Karzai government, Zia said. But the CIA retained control of other key units, including the Kabul-based 01; the KPF; and Hayanuddin’s 03.

The units targeted the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Al Qaeda, but they were not accountable to the Afghan government — not even to the president. In 2019, Afghanistan’s then-national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, responded to allegations of extrajudicial killings by 01 — including massacres of children in madrassas — by noting that the unit operated “in partnership with the CIA.”

Hayanuddin had a front-row seat to the shambolic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now he can describe what he saw and heard in the war’s final months. The Zero Units were built to work in tandem with U.S. air support, but in August 2020, a year before the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani collapsed, U.S. forces began to radically scale back their air support for his unit, Hayanuddin said.

“Our American advisers left our bases for Kabul, and the choppers that would wait in our base on the edge of Kandahar City left with them,” he recalled. “Our commanders would only report to Americans about our operations, and the Americans would just say, ‘Go ahead.’ We were not working as closely as we used to.”

When the Americans took away their planes, the Afghans’ missions grew much more treacherous. “The American surveillance aircraft would tell us how many people were inside a building and how many of them were armed, and what weapons they have,” Hayanuddin said. “But those details were not there anymore.”

With U.S. air support gone and the fledgling Afghan Air Force unable to provide comparable intelligence, more Zero Unit members got hurt. The planes that had once ferried them to field hospitals in minutes were gone too. In February 2020, when U.S. drones and other aircraft circled over their operations, one of Hayanuddin’s comrades, Akmal, was blown up by a roadside bomb. The Americans airlifted him to a military hospital and he survived, Hayanuddin said, though he lost both his legs. But eight months later, another unit member, Shahidullah, was shot twice in the abdomen. This time, there was no airlift, and Hayanuddin’s unit was stuck in enemy territory. Shahidullah died on the spot.

After President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the CIA gave the NDS a year’s budget for the Zero Units and said the agency would no longer support them, Zia told The Intercept from London. But the final Zero Units were not transferred to Afghan control, he said, until after Biden announced the full U.S. withdrawal in April 2021 and the last American forces and intelligence operatives began to leave.

“Like Committing Suicide”

The Zero Units were designed to capture and kill in targeted raids, not to fight on battlefields. They were widely known as among the most effective elite units in the Afghan security forces, and last summer, as the U.S. military pulled out and the Taliban advanced, many in the Ghani government and the Afghan military looked to them for salvation.

“I am not sure if our commanders got some money in bribes from provincial officials or the government in Kabul,” Hayanuddin said. “But they started turning a blind eye to our standards and sending us to several missions a day and making us suffer heavy casualties.”

Sometimes seven or eight unit members were killed each month, he said, an unprecedented rate for the elite unit. “Once, I remember that all our unit members started crying and protesting because of being overused. Our commanders never listened to that. They would still force us to go to operations all over the south.”

As casualties rose and the war intensified, the morale of Zero Unit members cratered, an Afghan doctor who fought for 02 told me. Like Hayanuddin, the doctor was evacuated last summer; he asked me not to use his name for fear of repercussions now that he and his family are in the United States.

When his commander would ask militia members to go on operations, the doctor told me, some would faint. They would say that “going to an operation is like committing suicide,” he recalled, “as there is no air support and not enough weapons and equipment.”

Rumors that U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar had yielded an agreement to essentially give Afghanistan to the Taliban didn’t help. “The Taliban would send tribal elders to different security forces and tell them that it was decided in Doha that the province where they are stationed should be handed over to the Taliban, so better you don’t fight and avoid the casualties,” the doctor said. “The security forces would accept that and give up fighting.”

The Afghan security forces couldn’t keep up with the losses. In May 2021 alone, more than 400 pro-government forces were killed. Afghans were no longer willing to join the security forces because the job had become too dangerous.

“We had very smart people in our unit,” Hayanuddin said. “I remember that on a single day, one of our guys, without proper equipment, cleared nearly 30 roadside bombs” in Maiwand District, a Taliban stronghold west of Kandahar. Fighters with 03 repeatedly forced the Taliban out of Kandahar’s Arghandab District in the spring of 2021, he said, but when the regular Afghan army and police took over, the Taliban surged back.

Both Hayanuddin and the doctor from 02 suspect that the Afghan security forces largely surrendered the south not because they were defeated on the battlefield but as part of a political deal. They were not alone in thinking this. In the summer of 2021, the Taliban took control of dozens of Afghan police outposts in the districts surrounding Kandahar.

“It was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

“The leadership of the Afghan security forces asked ground forces in many provinces across the country to stop fighting. We have seen videos on social media that soldiers were crying when they were told to leave their outposts and drop their weapons,” Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, a former Afghan deputy interior minister and military analyst, told me. “This means that it was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

Soldiers who insisted on fighting found their supply lines cut and didn’t get the support they needed, Yarmand said, adding that when Afghan forces in the northern province of Takhar wanted to stand their ground, they were given a choice: surrender to the Taliban or drive to the mountains of Panjshir, where the last forces resisting the Taliban were holed up.

Near Kandahar, Hayanuddin’s unit ran into police officers trying to flee. “They said their outpost was captured by the Taliban,” he recalled. “We took them with us, and there was no Taliban in their outpost. When we asked why, they said their tribal elder told them to leave the outpost to the Taliban. This is only one example, but it happened many times.”

In June 2021, 03 was deployed from one front line to another as district after district fell to the insurgents. By the end of that month, nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts were under Taliban control.

As the fighting intensified, other Afghan security forces pinned their hopes on the Zero Units. On August 4, 2021, I was with the Afghan National Police Counter Resistance Unit outside Sarposa Prison, one of the main front lines in Kandahar. The fighting picked up on one edge of the city just as the police machine gun stopped working. I asked Shafiqullah Kaliwal, a unit commander, what they were going to do.

“The 03 will come,” he told me, “and they will push back the Taliban to their original outposts.”

The next day, Kaliwal told me that 03 had indeed come to their rescue and forced the Taliban to retreat. But when the Zero Unit moved on, the Taliban quickly recaptured the territory.

Zia confirmed that the pressure on Zero Units was unsustainable. In the last four months of the war in Kandahar, Zia said, “the casualties of Zero Units were very high. It was not comparable to the past 20 years of war. The reason for that was that they were not used professionally.”

A Secret Deal

One of the many mysteries of the war’s final days was how the Zero Units managed to make their way through Taliban-held territory to Kabul, where they were evacuated to the United States and other countries. An apparent agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. helps explain their unlikely escape.

On August 11, 2021, one of the main government lines of defense in Kandahar City collapsed to the Taliban. Hayanuddin was on leave at the time, but the next day, he said, his comrades in 03 and other security forces drove to Kandahar Air Field, which by then was in Taliban territory. There, they spent two days waiting to be flown to Kabul.

On August 14, the Taliban captured Jalalabad City, the provincial capital of Nangarhar Province, where Hayanuddin was spending his leave with his family. Terrified, he and his younger brother, who had also served in 03, stayed up all night, trying to contact Hayanuddin’s commander for orders. When they finally reached the commander, he told them to get to Kabul. The next morning, they climbed into a taxi and set off on an anxious two-hour journey through territory now controlled by their enemies. If anyone identified them, they thought, they would be killed.

But the trip was far easier than they’d expected as, one after another, the Taliban fighters manning checkpoints let them pass. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Hayanuddin told me. “They were our enemy. We were intensively fighting just a day before the collapse, but now we were staying in their territory or driving through it. We thought we were taking a big risk, but now as I think about it, it seems the Taliban didn’t want to attack us as part of their deal with the U.S.”

It wasn’t just a few guys in taxis who managed to cross Taliban checkpoints with ease. On August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, the doctor from 02 told me that he drove from Jalalabad to Kabul with his fellow unit members in a convoy of hundreds of military vehicles packed with weapons and equipment. The doctor thought they would have to fight their way through the checkpoints, but each time, the Taliban soldiers called their commanders and waved him and the other Afghan militiamen through.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so, according to the doctor from 02 and two former Afghan intelligence officials, who asked not to be named because they feared repercussions from the Taliban for speaking to a journalist. The U.S. evacuation plan depended on Zero Unit members working security at the Kabul airport, and the Americans had told those fighters to get passports shortly before the republic collapsed, Zia, the former senior security official, said.

The CIA declined to comment. The Taliban did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Hayanuddin and his brother made it safely to Eagle Base, the Kabul headquarters of the CIA and 01, where they spent three nights. One by one, the Zero Units boarded Chinook helicopters and left the base for the Kabul airport: first 01, then 02, and then Hayanuddin’s unit, 03.

Hayanuddin spent five nights in the airport, providing security for the evacuation of thousands of desperate Afghans. In those days and later, Zero Unit members were accused of firing over the heads of crowds and beating Afghan civilians who were trying to leave. Hayanuddin denied mistreating people at the airport, but my own encounter with a Zero Unit fighter on August 19 suggests there is truth to the charges. As I made my way through crowds in front of the airport terminal, trying to reach my American colleague and the U.S. Marines, a member of the Zero Units stopped me. I explained who I was and where I was going, but the fighter ordered me to sit down. If I didn’t, he said, he would shoot me with dozens of bullets, and no one would question him.

At last, it was Hayanuddin’s turn to call his family to join him on a flight to the U.S., via Abu Dhabi and Germany. Like many Afghans, Hayanuddin was married to two women. He had moved one of his wives, who he asked me not to name, to Nangarhar with their three kids several months before the collapse, and one of his brothers managed to escort them to Kabul to meet Hayanuddin at the airport. But Hayanuddin’s other wife was still in his home province of Kunar with their four children when the republic fell.

“My first wife, who was in Kunar, couldn’t make it to Kabul,” he told me, “because there was no one to accompany her.”

Hayanuddin also left his parents and siblings behind, including the brother who had served alongside him in 03. The Americans refused to evacuate him, Hayanuddin said, because he had left the unit a year before the Taliban took control.

Thankful, but Angry

In Pittsburgh, Hayanuddin and several other Zero Unit members found work at a halal grocery. One of them was Khan Wali Momand, a former school principal who started working for 02 in Jalalabad as a security guard in 2017. Momand now lives with his wife and children in Section 8 housing in Duquesne, a Pittsburgh suburb. When I met him, he was unloading boxes; he has since gotten a different job at another local grocery store, which he prefers because it doesn’t involve as much heavy lifting.

Momand started working with 02 through his brother, Inayatullah, who he says served 16 years with the unit but left just days before the government collapsed because his wife was ill. Like Hayanuddin’s brother, Inayatullah was left behind when the Taliban took over, and he and Momand’s other relatives immediately became targets for retribution. Inayatullah went into hiding, and when I spoke to Momand this spring, he was consumed by grief and worry. “Every time I receive a call from home,” Momand told me, “I think it will be bad news.”

This spring, members of the Taliban kidnapped two of Momand’s teenage nephews and held them for five days in an attempt to force the family to hand over Inayatullah. The nephews were released after tribal elders in the area promised to help the Taliban find Inayatullah. He has applied for a Special Immigrant Visa to come to the United States, Momand said, but has not heard back.

“We were so loyal to Americans that we wouldn’t leave their bags behind in the battlefield, but now they are leaving behind my brother, who helped them for 16 years,” Momand told me. “It happened many times during missions with 02 that an American adviser or soldier would get shot, and we would risk our life to take them out of the battlefield. Look at our level of loyalty and their level of loyalty.”

Momand is deeply conflicted over his role in the war. When he began working with the Americans five years ago, he drew the enmity of the Taliban and many acquaintances. In his conservative village, he had a hard time defending his decision and explaining how helping the Americans would benefit his country. Now he wonders whether he made the right choice — whether it was worth it, given the price he and his family have paid. He’s an outsider in Duquesne and may never be able to go back to Afghanistan. Did he join 02 for the wrong reasons, he wonders, or was he used? Did he betray his country, his people, after all?

Momand said he is grateful to Biden. “He hasn’t left us to the Taliban. If I had been left behind in Afghanistan, my whole family and I would have been killed by now,” he said. “But there is no one in the U.S. to rescue me from the tough situation here.”

As our conversation drew to a close, Momand’s anger flared. He had told his story many times, he said, to workers from resettlement agencies and other relief organizations. “Everyone comes here and asks about my problems and the problems of my family, but I don’t see any outcome of telling these stories,” he said. “Do you enjoy hearing my painful life story?”

Only in the Darkness

At Hayanuddin’s house that rainy May morning, an oilcloth was spread over the living room carpet, and we sat around it while his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Simina, brought out loaves of hot fresh bread, eggs, warm yogurt, and a giant thermos of sweet, milky black tea.

As we ate, Hayanuddin kept an eye on his phone. At 9 a.m., an alarm sounded, and Simina brought him a pair of white athletic socks, a jacket, and an umbrella. Back in Afghanistan, his American advisers had stressed the need for punctuality, often arriving 15 minutes early for meetings with their Afghan counterparts. He feared that if he were late to work, he’d get fired. And he needed this job.

He took home about $1,600 a month after taxes, he told me. The resettlement agency was covering the first three months of rent on his apartment in Pittsburgh; after that, he’d have to spend $1,500 a month, nearly his entire paycheck, on rent and utilities. He was getting food stamps, but the family budget was tight.

His house was about five miles from the halal grocery, an easy 15-minute drive. But the bus ride, including a transfer downtown, could take more than an hour. On this day, he would work for nine hours, arriving home between 9 and 10 p.m. The family, including the children, would eat a late dinner together. After that, they’d call Afghanistan, so Hayanuddin and his wife could talk to their parents, and the parents could speak to their grandchildren.

It was his father, Hayanuddin says, who had convinced him to go to the U.S. last year. “If the Taliban come and they behead you in front of us or shoot you in the head in front of us, that would be a very big trauma for us for our whole life,” his father told him last August. “So if you want to spare us that pain, you should leave.”

He sometimes regrets it. “We didn’t voluntarily come here, and it is not easy here,” he told me. “That’s the everyday struggle. And then you have a family that is staring at you and hoping that you will fix everything.”

At 9:20 a.m., Hayanuddin pulled on a black jacket and headed out to the bus stop, a wooden pole with a metal sign at the edge of a busy road. He hunched his shoulders against the rain and took a drag on his Marlboro Red. The resettlement agency gave him transit cards, but when they ran out, he’d have to spend his own money on bus fare.

Back in Afghanistan, he drove heavy military vehicles over mountainous terrain wearing night vision goggles. But in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t get a driver’s license. The test was offered in Urdu and Arabic, but not Persian or Pashto, Afghanistan’s two main languages, and at the time, translators were not allowed. (Several months later, after the local Afghan community complained, the DMV added a test in Persian.)

“If I would stand in a bus stop in Afghanistan, I would just wave to a taxi and they would stop and take me to where I wanted to go,” he said. “There is no country as good as Afghanistan around the world, if only it were safe enough to live in.”

After 15 minutes, the bus arrived. Hayanuddin, thoroughly soaked, donned a surgical mask, climbed the steps, and settled into an empty seat. As the bus heaved along the twisting roads, heading downtown, he surveyed the other passengers.

“Only poor people like me are using the bus,” he noted.

Back at his apartment, he’d shown me a stack of military ID cards and commendations from the Americans he’d worked with, each signed by a different soldier or officer, praising his service and making promises they couldn’t keep.

“Your exemplary actions demonstrate your overall commitment to not only safeguard your Village, your District, and Province from those who inflict harm upon the innocent, but also to ensure a better future for all current and future Afghan citizens,” read one certificate, signed by “Master Sergeant Scott” and “Commander Josh” of Special Forces unit ODA 3115.

“His expertise, unfaltering dedication to duty and work ethic have far exceeded my expectations and he is an inspiration for all who work with him,” said another, marked QSF — for Qandahar Strike Force — National Security Unit 03 and dated March 2021. “Over the past 6 years, He has demonstrated his total loyalty to his unit. His service to the country is a shining example for all his fellows’ unit around him and he demonstrates an unfailing commitment to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.” It was signed by “Mac,” a U.S. adviser.

“Mr. Ayanudin will be a great asset to the SRF-03,” read a commendation from 2015, “and will make a significant contribution to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.”

What to make, now, of those papers, those words?

More than an hour after leaving his house, Hayanuddin disembarked on a desolate street corner and walked a block to the halal grocery, a sprawling brick warehouse complex with murals paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

Inside, he traded his jacket for a white apron and reappeared behind the meat counter, where he used a mechanized blade to slice chicken breasts.

The post The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes appeared first on The Intercept.

Ahmadi’s boss, Special Mission Wing Cmdr. Gen. Hamidullah Ziarmal, was ordering him and the other pilots to get to Hamid Karzai International Airport immediately. On any other day, Ahmadi wouldn’t have thought twice. After eight years in the Afghan Air Force, responding to a direct order from a superior officer was as natural as breathing.

But on that day — the day the Taliban streamed into the heart of Kabul and plunged the city into chaos — every move Ahmadi made seemed like a fateful choice between his family and his country.

He understood well what was being asked of him. If he followed the order, there was a good chance that he might never see his wife and 3-year-old daughter again. If he disobeyed, he could be considered absent without leave and insubordinate for failing to heed a direct command. Flouting the order to muster at the airport could also mean that millions of dollars’ worth of helicopters and airplanes paid for by U.S. taxpayers would fall into the hands of the Taliban. Either way, Ahmadi’s life might soon be at risk.

Shershah Ahmadi is not his real name. In exchange for speaking frankly to The Intercept, the former Afghan Air Force pilot asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he fears retaliation and potential complications to his visa status, and that of his family, in the United States.

Born and raised in Kabul, Ahmadi had enrolled in Afghanistan’s National Military Academy in 2008, when he was 17, at a time when the Taliban’s hold on territory was mostly confined to the south and east of the country. Thirteen years later, as they returned to power, he was one of dozens of Afghan pilots whose decisions would have consequences for Afghanistan’s security, as well as that of other countries in the region and the U.S.

Today, more than a quarter of the former Afghan Air Force fleet is in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and the status of the aircraft has become a critical sticking point in a three-way diplomatic dispute between the Taliban regime and its northern neighbors. The decision many Afghan pilots made to fly military aircraft across the country’s northern borders last August has effectively blocked any near-term chance that the Taliban can fully secure the country’s rough and mountainous terrain. But the status of the Afghan air fleet is far from resolved, and Taliban leaders have said that they are determined to reconstitute the country’s military.

Maj. Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, said that he and Afghan Air Force commanders were left with few options after former President Ashraf Ghani surreptitiously fled the country last August. In an interview with The Intercept last month, Zia explained that only the Air Force’s Special Mission Wing remained relatively intact. The SMW, established in the summer of 2012, had at least 18 Mi-17 helicopters and five UH-60 Black Hawks; the fleet also included 16 PC-12 single-engine fixed-wing cargo planes, providing Afghan forces with assault, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. “The president had fled, and the defense minister was escaping,” Zia said. “The chain of command no longer existed among the forces.”

Zia, who also served as Afghanistan’s acting minister of defense from March to June 2021, now leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. He told The Intercept that he, Ziarmal, and Afghan Air Force Cmdr. Gen. Fahim Ramin ordered Ahmadi and the other Afghan pilots to fly the country’s aircraft across the border to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan last August.

“I made the decision based on two main reasons,” Zia said. “To save the lives of the pilots who had fought the Taliban and who were left alone — this was the least I could do for my colleagues as a veteran Army officer. And to keep the Air Force fleet from falling into the hands of the Taliban. Imagine if the Taliban had gotten those aircraft — how they would have been used against the people resisting them today in Andarab, Panjshir, and other parts of the country.”

Zia’s account, which was backed up by interviews with three Afghan Air Force pilots and two former Afghan security officials, suggests that the United States, which had invested billions in the Afghan Air Force over more than a decade, had no plan in place to prevent the Taliban from gaining control of the aircraft, highly trained pilots, and other support staff if the republic collapsed. A team of U.S. military personnel hastily located and destroyed dozens of aircraft in the Kabul airport two days after the country fell to the Taliban.

In response to questions for this story, a Pentagon spokesperson said that the U.S. military planned to back the Afghan security forces it had built. “Senior U.S. officials repeatedly informed the Ghani government and [Afghan security forces] that the U.S. intended to continue to provide critical support to the Afghan Air Force, including salaries, maintenance, logistics, pilot training, likely through contracting and from outside of Afghanistan,” Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick, the Pentagon’s Afghanistan spokesperson, told The Intercept in an email.

The U.S. “continued to fly missions in support” of Afghan operations “into early August” of last year, Lodewick added, but he did not say what happened between early August and the middle of that month, when the Taliban took control of Kabul — a critical period in the war. Former Afghan security officials and pilots told The Intercept that U.S. air support had stopped by the time the Taliban were advancing toward Kabul. Even experts working for the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted that by mid-August of last year, “U.S. forces had withdrawn; even ‘over-the-horizon’ U.S. air support had ceased — and the Afghan Air Force (AAF), a crucial part of a security force that the United States had spent two decades and $90 billion building and supporting, was nowhere in evidence.”

Lodewick, however, doubled down on the Biden administration’s refrain that Afghans’ “lack of a will to fight” led to their defeat by the Taliban.

“They had the people. They had the equipment. They had the training. They had the support,” Lodewick wrote. “Long-term commitments such as these, however, can only accomplish so much if beneficiary forces are not willing to stand and fight. One needs only to look at the current situation in Ukraine for an example of what an equipped, trained and resilient force is truly capable of achieving.”

Still reeling from the swift turn of events in Kabul, Ahmadi had reached a terrifying crossroads. There in the market bazaar in Foroshgah, the world clanged noisily around him. Cars honked. Shopkeepers slammed their windows and locked their doors. Police and soldiers surreptitiously slipped out of their uniforms while civilians whizzed by shouting into their cellphones. Time was running faster than Ahmadi’s thoughts. He had to decide to return to his family or follow the orders of a military that was crumbling by the hour.

Afghan Boots, Foreign Wings

Ahmadi’s dilemma was not a new one. Afghanistan’s military history is replete with stories about pilots who either helped would-be rulers secure power in Kabul or spirited them to safety when their political strategies failed. King Amanullah Khan first established the Afghan Air Force in 1921 with aircraft donated by the Soviet Union, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

In the decade following the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Afghan fleet grew to 500 aircraft, all Soviet-made. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, infighting between mujahideen factions backed by the United States destroyed most of the planes and helicopters. But some of the aircraft survived. When the Taliban took power the first time around in 1996, they did so with the help of about two dozen Soviet-made Mi-21 helicopter gunships that they had captured during battles with forces loyal to the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and the government of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

But then, as now, the aircraft quickly fell into disrepair; the Taliban’s pariah status meant that they could not import parts or rely on the highly skilled labor and expertise of foreign military advisers to maintain the air fleet. Then, as now, Termez International Airport in neighboring Uzbekistan briefly served as a way station for Afghan pilots who flew over the border when the Taliban seized control of Kabul. In at least one case after the Taliban took the capital in 1996, the Uzbek government turned over an aircraft to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan Uzbek warlord and leader of one of the most notorious jihadist factions of the 1980s and ’90s. The Taliban still had the upper hand, albeit with a small air force, including about 20 Soviet-made fighter jets.

In the first 10 years after U.S. troops swooped into the country following Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, American and NATO jet fighters, helicopters, and drones dominated the Afghan skies. Yet it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that the United States began to substantially invest in building the Afghan Air Force.

Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, was a vocal advocate for building the new Afghan military along the lines of NATO nations. His obsession with American-made F-16 jet fighters was a regular talking point whenever he met with Pentagon officials. It was an expensive proposition: Even under the best circumstances, the cost of operating the Lockheed Martin-made F-16 Falcon would be about $8,000 an hour, according to at least one estimate.

Beyond the financial barriers, there was the practical challenge of setting up a permanent U.S. training and equipment mission. It wasn’t until 2005, four years after U.S. and allied Afghan forces routed the Taliban, that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the establishment of a dedicated command structure for the U.S.-led mission to train and equip Afghan security forces. But that entity did not turn to building up the Afghan Air Force until two years later.

There were other problems as well. In Washington, a major political transition was underway between the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who sent thousands of American troops surging into Afghanistan in a renewed attempt to pacify it. It was only in 2009, as resurgent Taliban forces swept from their southern redoubts ever closer to Afghanistan’s heartland around Kabul, that Afghan pilots could begin providing air support to the country’s ground troops — and then only with help from American military advisers.

Corruption affected everything from fleet maintenance to fuel suppliers, flight performance, and capacity-building. For instance, Afghan officials often awarded training slots based on patronage and family relations, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR.

Another challenge was a string of “green-on-blue” attacks in which Afghan soldiers attacked their U.S. and NATO counterparts. A turning point came in April 2011, when an Afghan Air Force pilot fatally shot nine Americans at the air base command headquarters in Kabul. An inquiry led by the U.S Air Force Office of Special Investigations indicated that some American military advisers on base at the time believed that the shooter, Col. Ahmed Gul, had been secretly recruited by the Taliban to infiltrate the Air Force.

The massacre of the American advisers to the Afghan Air Force was one of the deadliest of its kind. It changed the way the Pentagon provided air support to Afghan forces, former Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat, the last commander of the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command, told The Intercept.

“Before 2008, the U.S. Army had quite casual rules of engagement with the Afghan Army. At that time, we did not have the green-on-blue attacks, and the risk for the U.S. and Afghan soldiers working together was very limited,” Sadat, who now lives in the U.K. and runs a security firm, recalled in an interview in July. “It was after 2008 that the green-on-blue matter increased, and the partnership between the U.S. and Afghan officers became difficult due to the huge risk.”

While some Afghan military officials lobbied for a NATO-style air regiment, others argued that sticking with Warsaw Pact equipment was more pragmatic. In the end, the Pentagon split the difference, despite concerns about the costs and risks of relying on foreign suppliers like Russia and Ukraine.

In 2013, the U.S. said it would pay $572 million to Rosoboronexport, the export wing of Russia’s state-owned arms company, Rostec, for 30 Russian-built Mi-17 military helicopters. But the Pentagon canceled the deal after a furor erupted in Congress over the purchase of Russian aircraft at a time when the U.S. was pressing Russia to stop supplying Syria with weapons. After the U.S. sanctioned Russia over its annexation of Crimea and military incursion in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Pentagon stopped supplying Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters to Kabul altogether.

In 2016, the Obama administration ordered a halt to all dealings with Russian arms manufacturers, including Rostec. A year later, the Pentagon began transitioning the Afghan Air Force from Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters to the U.S.-made Black Hawk attack helicopter. It was a jarring change for most Afghan Air Force pilots, who had decades of experience flying and fixing Russian aircraft. Black Hawks were notoriously difficult to maintain and couldn’t operate as well at high altitudes.

The U.S. ban on Russian weaponry and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, meanwhile, also made it next to impossible for the Afghan Air Force to repair and maintain its remaining Russian-made aircraft. Russia objected to the scheduled overhaul of the Mi-17s by Ukrainian companies, calling the deal “illegal.” Russian companies also accused Motor Sich and Aviakon, the two Ukrainian firms contracted by the U.S. to repair the Afghan aircraft, of poor oversight and of endangering the lives of American and Afghan soldiers.

This was the story of the Afghan Air Force under the Americans: Suspicion, mistrust, start, stop, start again, and reset the strategy. By July 2021, according to a May SIGAR report, the Afghan Air Force had 131 usable aircraft and another 31 in various states of disrepair.

Abandoned and Afraid

In January 2021, eight months before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, SIGAR warned the Defense Department in a classified report that the Afghan Air Force would collapse without continued U.S. training and maintenance.

The report came as Afghan security forces sustained increasing casualties amid an aggressive Taliban offensive. Battlefield medical evacuation missions that had been critical to the Afghan military’s continued capabilities grew far more challenging. A year after the Taliban takeover, interviews with more than a dozen former Afghan military and government officials and Western diplomats confirm what many Afghan pilots like Ahmadi already knew: The Afghan Air Force was struggling to stay alive in those final weeks and was wholly unprepared to hold the line against the Taliban when President Joe Biden decided to move forward with the Doha agreement that his predecessor Donald Trump had negotiated.

By July 2021, a month before the Taliban surged into Kabul, one in five Afghan aircraft were out of service, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were grounded with no plan by the Afghan or U.S. governments to fix them, according to a senior Afghan Army officer interviewed by SIGAR. As the Taliban advanced in the summer of 2021, most of the 17,000 support contractors were withdrawn from the country.

“The system wouldn’t have collapsed if the logistical support that was promised by the U.S. military continued.”

“The system wouldn’t have collapsed if the logistical support that was promised by the U.S. military continued,” Sadat told The Intercept. “For instance, when the first province fell to the Taliban, in the entire [Afghan Air Force] there was only one laser-guided missile.” (Lodewick, the Pentagon spokesperson, declined to comment on supply levels without “knowing the specific airframe or munition being referenced … nor a specific date window” but said that the Afghan Air Force “had a significant number [of] aerial munitions in its inventory,” including “a small number of GBU-58 laser-guided bombs which afforded the AAF precision strike capabilities from their A-29 aircraft.”)

The pace of the Taliban advance surprised many Afghan pilots interviewed for this story, including Ahmadi. The Afghan Air Force’s three major airfields in the western city of Herat, the southern city of Kandahar, and the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif fell like dominoes to the Taliban on August 12, 13, and 14, respectively, leaving some Afghan Air Force pilots and staff scrambling to get to Kabul, while others flew their aircraft to neighboring Uzbekistan.

“In the last year preceding the Taliban takeover, the military turned into defense mode and only in the last few weeks were allowed to launch attacks,” Ahmadi recalled. “By that time, the Taliban had already made major territorial advancements.”

Choosing Flight

On August 15, 2021, the situation grew more tense by the hour as rumors spread about the Taliban’s advance into the capital. Ahmadi, convinced by the growing chaos around him and the urging of his commanders, turned and started running toward the airport.

He was one of dozens who heeded the order to quickly muster at the Afghan Air Force’s operational headquarters at the main airport in Kabul. Once there, at around 11 a.m., he found a number of his colleagues in uniform, standing near their aircraft.

A few hours later, news broke that Ghani and his aides had flown out of the country. At the Air Force headquarters, panic set in. Ghani’s departure meant the end of everything. Days after his escape, on August 18, Ghani posted a video on his Facebook page in which he said that he’d left the country to avoid bloodshed. The former Afghan president, who is now in the United Arab Emirates, stands accused of taking millions of dollars in cash, though a recent report by SIGAR indicates that Ghani and his entourage may have taken only around $500,000 with them.

Ahmadi looked around at his fellow pilots as they absorbed the news that the country’s commander in chief, the man who by law held their fate and that of 38 million Afghans in his hands, had abandoned his post. In an instant, all their years of hard work seemed to evaporate.

Ahmadi picked up his phone to call his wife, an engineer and civil servant. He tried to keep his voice calm as he told her that he did not know where he would end up or whether he would see her and their daughter again anytime soon. His wife had burned all of Ahmadi’s military service documents and his uniform and buried his service weapons in their backyard garden. Ahmadi could not stop thinking about what would happen if the Taliban came knocking on the door of their family home in Kabul after he had flown over the border, leaving his wife and daughter behind.

Ahmadi boarded a PC-12 surveillance plane with eight other Afghan Air Force staff. His boss, Ziarmal, and Zia, the former chief of Army staff, ordered Ahmadi to fly to Uzbekistan, where Ghani and other senior officials of his government had landed only hours earlier. The U.S. military controlled the Kabul airport at the time, meaning that American air traffic controllers would have been aware of the Afghan pilots’ flight routings.

But Uzbek officials on the ground, overwhelmed by an influx of hundreds of Afghan military personnel, refused to grant Ahmadi entry to Termez International Airport, he said. The government of Uzbekistan did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Ahmadi was forced to turn back to Kabul and refuel before preparing to fly out again near midnight on August 15. By then the Taliban had consolidated control over most of the Afghan capital, but following a tenuous deal struck with U.S. officials in Doha, they had largely stayed outside the airport.

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Telling Afghanistan’s Stories — in Their Own Words

Ahmadi thought about how at least seven of his colleagues had reportedly been killed after Taliban squads hunted them down in their homes. That’s when he made up his mind to go to Tajikistan. He contacted Tajik authorities, asking if he could land; they said yes.

Ahmadi felt a rush of relief when he touched down hours later at Bokhtar International Airport in southern Tajikistan with eight staff members of the Afghan Air Force onboard. Nearly 143 Afghan pilots and Air Force personnel, who flew in on three planes and two helicopters, reportedly landed at Bokhtar in the early hours of August 16. As Ahmadi disembarked from his plane, he thought that the worst was over. But the feeling was short-lived. Once the Afghan pilots were on the ground, Tajik authorities confiscated their mobile phones and other belongings and transferred them to a dormitory at Naser Khosrow University.

Ahmadi said that Tajik officials soon came to him with a demand: Join the “resistance forces,” a group of armed men, including some members of the former Afghan Army, who were fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s northern Panjshir province near the Tajik border under the command of Ahmad Massoud. The son of the legendary mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought the Soviets and the Taliban before he was assassinated by Al Qaeda in 2001, the younger Massoud had openly called for the U.S. and NATO to arm his fighters, known as the National Resistance Front, or NRF. But there weren’t many takers among U.S. officials, and some Afghan pilots were equally skeptical about joining the resistance.

Exhausted and disillusioned, Ahmadi and most of his colleagues could not imagine getting into another war and returning to the hell they had just fled. Suddenly, the Tajik government’s warm reception for the Afghan pilots turned chilly. After refusing to fight for the resistance forces, Ahmadi and his fellow pilots were transferred to a sanitarium on the outskirts of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where they had to go down to a nearby river for drinking water. Tajik authorities had seized their cellphones, meaning that they had no way to contact their families back home. Ahmadi’s story lines up with similar reports published in the days and weeks after the U.S. withdrawal.

The Tajik government did not respond to requests for comment, but Zia, the former chief of Army staff, denies that the Afghan pilots in Tajikistan were pressured into joining the NRF. Most of the aircraft flown into Tajikistan were fixed-wing planes like Ahmadi’s, Zia told The Intercept, and would have been useless in mountainous Panjshir province, where there were few suitable landing zones. “Pushing the pilots to join the resistance forces was not demanded by the Tajik government nor by the resistance leadership,” Zia said, adding that a number of pilots in Tajikistan aspired to join the resistance forces and had talked about it with their colleagues.

The only thing that kept Ahmadi sane during his days in Tajikistan were surreptitious calls to his wife on a cellphone that one of the pilots had somehow managed to hide from the Tajik authorities. Eventually, the pilots used the phone to call their old U.S. military advisers and ask for help in securing their release and safe passage out of Tajikistan. Ahmadi and his colleagues were ultimately evacuated and flown to the UAE with help from officials at the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, he said. Three months later, in April, Ahmadi was allowed to emigrate to the U.S.

A Double Betrayal

In the days leading up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, videos and photos of the Taliban flying U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters cropped up on social media. At the time, the Taliban claimed to have captured more than 100 Russian-made combat helicopters. But the makeup of the Taliban’s air fleet remains unclear. Taliban representatives did not respond to requests for comment from The Intercept. Without a fully functioning air force, the Taliban cannot suppress ongoing resistance in the north or fend off what the White House calls “over-the-horizon” attacks, like the drone strike that killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in late July.

While there is always a chance that Pakistan, Iran, China, or even Russia might consider helping the Taliban replace the aircraft that Afghan pilots flew out of the country last year, doing so would not be without risks. Since the United States has sanctioned most of the Taliban’s key leaders, any move by another country to materially assist the current Afghan government would raise the prospect of additional U.S. sanctions on the Taliban’s suppliers.

In the months since Ahmadi settled in the United States, the Taliban have continued to fixate on rebuilding the Afghan Air Force, calling on former Afghan pilots to return to service, promising that they would be granted amnesty. But those guarantees ring hollow to Ahmadi and many of his fellow pilots. Since the Taliban’s declaration of general amnesty for Afghan security forces, hundreds of former government officials and Afghan soldiers have been forcibly disappeared and assassinated, according to Human Rights Watch.

Meanwhile, an estimated 4,300 former Afghan Air Force staff, including 33 pilots, have joined the Taliban. Some of those pilots have since been captured by National Resistance Front forces. In a video taped by the NRF and posted on YouTube in June, one Afghan pilot said that he was captured by the group while on a mission to provide Taliban forces with tents and other supplies. The pilot also said that he had served the Afghan Air Force for 33 years irrespective of the ruling political regime. More recently, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility for an assault on Taliban vehicles in Herat and an IED attack in Kabul that killed two Taliban military pilots.

Ahmadi and the pilots who helped keep Afghan aircraft out of the Taliban’s hands are now grappling with a double betrayal: Let down by their Western allies after years of joint warfare, they sacrificed the safety of their families for a government that abandoned them.

Today Ahmadi lives in New Jersey, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with an Afghan Air Force colleague. A federal program for refugees covers his rent, utilities, some transportation, and other costs for up to eight months, but Ahmadi is desperate to supplement his income.

“I have a family who I haven’t been able to send a penny to since I left Afghanistan,” he told The Intercept. “I hope that when people and authorities in the U.S. read this story, they understand what we are going through and they will hopefully help me reunite with my family.”

He spends his days searching Google for aviation jobs — flight attendant, flight operations, ground crew — and filling out applications. Having lost the career he spent his life building, he hopes to fly again someday. While he’s grateful to be in the United States, he remains concerned about his wife and daughter, now 4. They have moved twice since Ahmadi left to ensure their safety.

“My daughter no longer speaks to her father on the phone as easily,” Ahmadi’s wife told The Intercept. “It’s as if she doesn’t recognize him anymore.”

The post When the Taliban Took Kabul, an Afghan Pilot Had to Choose Between His Family and His Country appeared first on The Intercept.

The Misanthropic Division’s violent, hate-filled Telegram channel was the first to announce Bleriot’s death, one day earlier, on June 3. The post said that he died on June 1 in Kharkiv and included a photo in which the thin and bearded Bleriot wears a T-shirt that says “Misanthropic Division” across the front.

In 2018, the Los Angeles Times described the Misanthropic Division as “one of many neo-Nazi groups that have mushroomed throughout Ukraine in recent years.” In 2020, the Daily Beast characterized it as “the militant foreign volunteer wing of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.” The Guardian, in 2014, also said that the Misanthropic Division “is linked to the Azov battalion.” There are few other mentions of it in the news archive.

Bleriot was a “man who fought bolshevism and antifascism all his life,” according to the Telegram post, a “brother-in-arms,” who died defending Europe and Ukraine from “Asiatic hordes.” Among members of the group chat, Bleriot has become a martyr, a fallen comrade to be mourned and celebrated. One meme shows a Black Sun wheel — an icon of Nazi occultism — behind his smiling face.

Bleriot was from Bayeux, a town in the north of France. In an interview with an Argentinian reporter, uploaded to Reddit on March 3, he identifies himself as a Norman, says that he is “ready to kill Russians,” and “ready to die.” He adds that he left behind two children at home, and starts to cry. Bleriot’s family could not be reached for comment. Efforts to reach French authorities for comment on whether Bleriot was known to them were also unsuccessful.

A spokesperson for the Azov Battalion, which began around 2014 as a far-right street gang and has since evolved into a professional special operations regiment of the Ukrainian army, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Bleriot and the Misanthropic Division. But back in April, I met with Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov movement, at their base in Kyiv. I had not heard of the Misanthropic Division then, but I did ask Biletsky about foreign fighters. “We have volunteers from different countries,” he told me. “We’ve had Europeans, Japanese, people from the Middle East.” He also mentioned Belarusian, Georgian, Russian, Croat, and British volunteers. He pointed out that some of them had been Jews. However, “I can assure you that there are no Americans,” he said. “Not even western Europeans for that matter,” he added, slightly contradicting himself.

The Azov base, in the semi-industrial outskirts of Kyiv, was in an abandoned Soviet factory compound. Inside the main building, a yellow flag with Azov’s notorious Wolfsangel symbol in the center hung from the rafters. In two places, there were Black Sun clocks on the walls; such sun wheels, or Sonnenrads, also found on the floor of Heinrich Himmler’s castle in Germany, are widely used by contemporary adherents of Nazi ideology to signal their Aryan supremacist beliefs. Azov apologists say that they are merely indigenous Ukrainian symbols that must be understood in an Eastern European context. In any case, the sun wheels, backlit by blue neon, certainly lent the Azov base a neo-Nazi aesthetic. There were soldiers in full battle gear walking around, looking as squared-away and intimidating as any in Ukraine, and two women who worked as secretaries. The ground floor was full of new recruits, exclusively young white men, speaking Ukrainian and Russian.

Since Azov formed about eight years ago, it has attracted relentless controversy for its quasi-fascist ideology, unapologetically espoused by Biletsky, and alleged abuses against the few minority groups that exist in Ukraine, including the Roma. There is plenty of photographic evidence of Azov fighters displaying Nazi symbols on the battlefield (often with the intent to troll Russia). Azov has tried to clean up its image in recent years and present itself as depoliticized, and it is now an official component of the Ukrainian military, not an independent militia. But it has far more autonomy than any other regiment of the army. It presents itself as an elite corps and has attained an extraordinary degree of prestige and admiration in the eyes of ordinary Ukrainians for its stalwart defense of Mariupol, its home base, which finally fell to the Russians on May 20, following a dramatic, three-month-long siege. Although many hundreds of Azov soldiers were taken prisoner, many more young Ukrainian men have signed up to replace them.

“Azov is growing,” Maksym Zhorin, the commander of an Azov special operations unit in Kyiv, told me in April. “Our emphasis is on the future.” He added, “It might sound weird, but the actions of the Russian federation have been beneficial for us.”

As I noted in a recent piece for Harper’s, when I left the base, I saw a small group of men hanging around outside the gate, and guessed from their appearance (paramilitary attire, neck tattoos, ball caps) that they were foreign volunteers. With several Azov soldiers standing next to my translator and me as we waited for a taxi, I didn’t think it wise to approach them, but I overheard them speaking English. The one phrase I caught distinctly, over the idling engine of an armored vehicle, was “foreign legion.” Also, who knows who was responsible for it, but “WHITE POWER” was spray-painted on the kiosk right in front of us, alongside the driveway — in English, no less.

Bleriot’s death, the possible existence of more extremists like him among the ranks of Ukraine’s foreign fighters, and the rise of Azov as an internal military power should not be taken as representative of Ukraine’s society, government, and armed forces as a whole. Russian propaganda would have people believe that Ukraine and its military are full of neo-Nazis and completely under the sway of radical Russophobes. These falsehoods evaporate as soon as you set foot in the country. Ukraine does have a notably vigorous and aggressive ultranationalist sector, but even Azov, the most powerful and influential far-right force, remains a fringe movement. Ukraine is one of the biggest countries in Europe and contains multitudes. Its president is Jewish, a former TV comedian. Before Russia invaded, issues like corruption and economic stagnation were much bigger problems in the lives of ordinary people than the specter of roving gangs of fascist youths. If the Russians were really worried about neo-Nazi, ultranationalist, and white-supremacist militants, they would look in their own country, where such movements flourish as much as, if not more than, in Ukraine.

Likewise, Bleriot should not be taken as representative of the Ukrainian Army’s International Legion. Amid the chaos of the first two months of the war, most of the foreigners who flocked to Ukraine to fight were turned away and went home. The International Legion only accepted those with substantial military experience, mostly from the U.S. and U.K. Bleriot, who told an Argentinian interviewer that he had served one year in the French army, would have barely made the cut. There’s little doubt that he claimed the Misanthropic Division’s neo-Nazi ideology, as articulated in spaces like its Telegram channel, but such extremists, isolated and small in number, also find their way into the U.S. military on a regular basis.

As for the Misanthropic Division, it’s hard to tell how real it is, and how sizable. The extent of its actual association with the Azov Battalion is also unclear. Take Bleriot, for example. There’s no indication that he was with any Azov unit when he died in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, far from Azov’s main areas of operation in the south. It may be that the Misanthropic Division is not a real-world unit with a leader and a chain of command so much as a twisted military clique that anyone online can claim.

Images readily available on the internet show young men from the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, and elsewhere displaying the group’s piratical-looking flag, often in conjunction with other hate symbols, and it’s possible to find photos and videos of Ukrainian soldiers, who appear to be engaged in actual combat, sporting its various badges, patches, and T-shirts. It could be a cohesive military unit made up of foreign volunteers, sheltered under the wing of the Azov Battalion, but I can find no convincing evidence, at the moment, that it is anything more than a toxic Telegram meme popularized by Azov’s most black-pilled fanboys, only a few of whom may really be serving in the unit.

The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers.

The real question, when it comes to Ukraine’s foreign legion and some of the more distasteful characters that its international call-to-arms has attracted, is how much of a threat they pose to their countries of origin. The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers. Radical miscreants from all over the world who subscribe to the blood-and-soil ideology of neo-Nazi subcultures like the Misanthropic Division have a very real opportunity to travel to Ukraine, get military training, and participate in intense armed conflict against a technologically advanced enemy. If they survive, their combat experience could give them the confidence and ability to carry out acts of political violence in their home countries. This is clearly cause for concern at a time when incidents of hate crimes and domestic terrorism are on the rise.

In the same Facebook post of June 4 that announced Bleriot’s death, the International Legion also disclosed the death of Björn Benjamin Clavis, a German of unknown age. The photo of him shows a man who looks about 30 with buzzed hair in the uniform of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force. On the back of his right hand is an unmistakable tattoo of an Iron Cross, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as a “commonly-used hate symbol” favored by “neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

It’s possible that Clavis got the tattoo for innocuous reasons. It’s not that uncommon a symbol. The logo of the Independent Truck skateboard company, for example, looks a lot like an Iron Cross. So does the badge given out for marksmanship in the U.S. Army. However, the ADL’s analysis suggests that nonracist display of the Iron Cross mostly takes place in the United States. In Germany, where Clavis was from, it is very much associated with the Third Reich.

The post Foreign Fighters in Ukraine Could Be a Time Bomb for Their Home Countries appeared first on The Intercept.

Last fall, Dawlat developed severe vomiting and diarrhea. Finally, at midnight on December 1, Naji brought her to Al-Sabeen hospital in Sanaa. In the malnutrition ward, the tiny girl curled up on her right side with her knees bent as nurses hooked her to an IV delivering a rehydration solution. The moment she came out of the coma, she wriggled, cried, and grunted: “I’m starving.” She weighed 44 pounds, as much as a normal 5-year-old.

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, backed by the United States, have waged a relentless war against their impoverished neighbor Yemen in a bid to reinstate the pro-Saudi government toppled by a popular uprising. The unrest gave way to an armed rebellion led by the Houthis, which Riyadh accuses of being an Iranian proxy group. The United Nations has described Yemen as the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe. The World Food Program estimates that half of all the country’s children under 5, about 2.3 million kids, are at risk of acute malnutrition, with 400,000 at risk of dying if they don’t receive treatment, according to a spokesperson for the organization who asked not to be named because even the U.N. fears the consequences of criticizing Saudi Arabia.

Since President Barack Obama, successive American administrations have given Saudi Arabia crucial support to sustain its war in Yemen. Joe Biden promised to change that. On the campaign trail, he vowed to stop the conflict and end “Donald Trump’s ‘blank check’ for Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses at home and abroad.”

“This war has to end,” Biden said in his first address as president. Noting that the conflict had “created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe,” he pledged to halt all American support for “offensive operations” in Yemen, including relevant arms sales. Progressives welcomed the announcement, and the new administration basked in the glow of positive press coverage. However, just over a year later, Yemen’s humanitarian crisis is worse by many accounts than when Trump was president.

In the last year, Saudi Arabia tightened a devastating fuel blockade that Riyadh has long used as a war tactic. As Biden was entering the White House, commercial fuel imports to Yemen ground to a halt, with no fuel entering Yemen’s Hodeidah port for 52 days from January 28 to March 21, 2021, according to a report from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “This is an alarming development, considering that more than half of Yemen’s commercial fuel imports had been coming through Al Hodeidah in recent years,” the report noted, referring to the port, which is administered by the Houthi-dominated government and through which 70 percent of Yemen’s imports enter the country. The agency called the shutoff “a precedent not seen since the beginning of the conflict in 2015.”

On February 4, 2021, Biden appointed Tim Lenderking as a special envoy to Yemen. Soon afterward, Secretary of State Antony Blinken removed the Houthis from a terror list his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, had issued in his final days, which the United Nations and many aid groups had warned would severely impact the roughly 24 million Yemenis who live in Houthi-held territory. The Biden administration made clear that lifting the designation was mainly to “alleviate or at least not worsen the suffering of the Yemeni civilians who live under Houthi control.”

It didn’t work out that way. In a field visit to Yemen in March of last year, World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley sounded the alarm, saying that the dire effects of the fuel shortage included widespread power outages at hospitals. “And now, to add to all their misery, the innocent people of Yemen have to deal with a fuel blockade,” he said. “The people of Yemen deserve our help. That blockade must be lifted, as a humanitarian act. Otherwise millions more will spiral into crisis.”

Later that month, the Houthis rejected a partial ceasefire proposal offered by Saudi Arabia, asking instead for a complete halt to the blockade and the air campaign.

The intervening months brought no relief. Food prices rose in Houthi-controlled areas, according to Famine Early Warning Systems, a food security warning system created by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Goods imports through the Houthi-held north of Yemen must undergo a lengthy, U.N.-administered inspection process known as the United Nations Verification and Inspection Mechanism to check shipments for possible arms smuggling. But even after the UNVIM clears food and fuel shipments, the Saudi-led coalition controls whether and when these goods can reach Yemen. Sanaa-based Yemen Petroleum Company, which buys fuel for both the private sector and public use, says it incurs charges of $20,000 per day for delays in clearance caused by the Saudi-led coalition, which it passes on to consumers.

In 2020, such charges totaled more than $91 million, said Essam al-Mutawakil, a YPC spokesperson. Last year the charges were lower, nearly $54 million, which signals a sharp drop in the amount of fuel coming into the country, al-Mutawakil said. “Trump was an explicit and clear enemy who after all would permit entry of fuel products,” al-Mutawakil told The Intercept in a phone interview. “Biden’s administration is lying and depends on a publicity stunt.”

Lenderking didn’t respond to The Intercept’s request to be interviewed for this story. A State Department spokesperson said in December that the U.S. had raised the blockade issue with Yemen’s Saudi-backed government in exile, noting “progress” in fuel imports cleared by the Yemeni government. There was a “surge in fuel imports through southern ports, much of which ends up in Northern Yemen. However, much more is needed,” the spokesperson said. Both the State Department and Lenderking have toed the Saudi line that fuel is being confiscated by the Houthis for use in their war effort. “A more durable solution is needed that will encourage more fuel ships to come to Hodeidah and address Houthi price manipulation, stockpiling, and profiteering on the black market of fuel prices,” the State Department spokesperson said.

But U.N. figures suggest that the notion of Houthi interference is largely a red herring. Fuel imports through the Hodeidah port from January to October 2021 declined by 70 percent compared with the same period in 2020, according to a November World Food Program update. Fuel imports allowed in by Saudi Arabia per month average 45,000 metric tons, less than one-tenth of the country’s pre-conflict needs, which the World Bank has estimated at 544,000 metric tons.

Biden’s insistence on reaching a broader resolution before addressing the fuel shortage looks increasingly like a fig leaf for his administration’s support for Saudi Arabia. 

Meanwhile, Biden’s insistence on reaching a broader resolution to the conflict instead of first addressing the fuel shortage looks increasingly like a fig leaf for his administration’s support for Saudi Arabia and its allies. Shortly after he was appointed, Lenderking said that ending the blockade wouldn’t work if done on its own, but only as part of a broader truce followed by negotiations between the warring parties, a much more complicated and difficult task. “In fact, as long as the war continues, the humanitarian crisis will continue to get worse,” Lenderking told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee last April. “There are no quick fixes. Only through a durable end to the conflict can we begin to reverse this crisis.”

Progressives in Congress pushed for a different approach. Rep. Ro Khanna, along with 78 other House members, called on Biden to end the blockade “independently of negotiations,” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren demanded that “Saudi Arabia immediately and unconditionally stop the use of blockade tactics.” Khanna described Biden’s promise to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen as historic but said “the job isn’t done,” noting continued U.S. support for Saudi Arabia. “Ending this support is key to both ending U.S. complicity in the war and using the best leverage we have to push the Saudis to lift the blockade on Yemen that is pushing countless Yemenis closer to starvation,” Khanna told The Intercept last fall.

Since December, the Saudi-led coalition has escalated air attacks on Yemen’s capital after a long lull, targeting residential areas and Sanaa International Airport, which is under Houthi control, and destroying mechanics’ shops and key bridges; another coalition strike landed near a detention facility for prisoners of war, which Saudi Arabia later misidentified as a drone manufacturing plant. Coalition strikes hit the airport’s customs department, a Yemen Airways hangar, a Covid-19 quarantine building, and an aviation training institute. On January 18, two Saudi strikes hit houses north of Sanaa, killing 14 and wounding eight, nearly half of whom were women and children. The attack came in apparent retaliation for Houthi attacks on UAE oil facilities and airports in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

On the night of January 21 in Saada province, coalition airstrikes struck a remand prison housing over 1,000 people, including African migrants, killing 91 and wounding 236. The U.N. and other aid groups denounced the attack and called for an investigation. The Saudi coalition’s spokesperson said that the facility wasn’t on the no-target list, blaming the Houthis for failing to notify aid groups that coordinate the locations of such sites. The coalition has, however, targeted a number of detention facilities despite their being on the no-target list. Blinken, while noting that the strike was “of great concern for the United States,” stopped short of directly condemning it, seeming to equate it with a “Houthi attack on civilians in Abu Dhabi that also resulted in several casualties.”

Since March 2015, the Saudi coalition has targeted detention facilities across Yemen, killing 417 prisoners and wounding 484.

Since March 2015, the Saudi coalition has targeted detention facilities across Yemen, killing 417 prisoners and wounding 484, according to the Legal Center for Rights and Development, a Sanaa-based rights group that documents coalition casualties and has identified weapons fragments from U.S. and British arms manufacturers. Among the dead detainees were 144 Saudi-allied prisoners of war, most of whom had been defending Saudi Arabia’s border areas with Yemen, according to LCRD data shared with The Intercept. The International Committee of the Red Cross noted that it had visited one of the prisons before it was targeted in a 2019 air attack, meaning that the coalition was already aware of the facility’s coordinates and should have avoided hitting it.

The coalition claimed that the airport and Hodeidah port are launching pads for missile and drone attacks against the kingdom. Coalition spokesperson Turki al-Maliki justified bombing the Sanaa airport, saying that the Houthis have misused its special status under international humanitarian law as civilian infrastructure and that the strikes were lawful. Yemen’s aviation authority, however, denounced the coalition’s accusation as false, saying that Saudi Arabia sought to hinder the operations of aid agencies, which are the only entities using the airport. After the collapse of peace talks in August 2016, the coalition banned commercial flights from using the airport. In November 2017, the coalition bombed the airport’s navigation system.

As for the Hodeidah port, through which the vast majority of Yemen’s imports enter the country, the coalition said that it was being used to stockpile and assemble “Iranian” ballistic missiles. In January, al-Maliki held a press conference at which he showed what he claimed was “exclusive” footage of purported missiles inside a hangar at the port. There was no audio, and al-Maliki said he could not disclose the exact location where the video had been shot. It was later revealed that the footage was from a 2009 American movie and that the location al-Maliki refused to disclose appeared to be in Iraq.

The scandal went viral across social media, and al-Maliki later acknowledged the error, saying the clip had been “passed to us by mistake by some of [our] sources.” He called it a “marginal mistake” and said it did not negate the fact that the port and other civilian areas were being used by the Houthis for military purposes. In a field visit, the U.N. team in charge of monitoring the Hodeidah ports noted that they are “a crucial lifeline for millions of Yemeni people.”

The fuel shortage, meanwhile, reached a horrifying level this winter as the coalition further tightened its blockade. Long lines of cars have queued at official fuel stations across northern Yemen, and on March 1, drone footage showed a line of cars more than 2.2 miles long at the main YPC station in Sanaa. Each vehicle is only allowed five gallons at a cost of $4 per gallon at one of two YPC-run stations, and can only refuel every four days until the stations run out. The other stations, which get their fuel from the south, charge $7 per gallon. Black market fuel, which had largely vanished in recent months, is back, selling at $13 per gallon. The price of black market cooking gas, which most taxi drivers use, has also jumped from $4 to $8 per gallon since January, but there has been none to buy for the last six months, forcing drivers to rely on black market fuel. Beginning March 3, the cost of bus fare reached its highest rate since the war started, reflecting the rising costs of cooking gas.

YPC distributes household cooking gas for $2 a gallon, about a dollar more than it cost late last year. On March 1, the UNVIM issued a clearance certificate to a ship called Caesar, carrying 32,000 metric tons of fuel, to dock at the port in Hodeidah. But as in so many other cases, the Saudi-led coalition has stopped and held the Caesar in the Gulf of Aden, as shown by MarineTraffic, an online tracking service. The clearance certificate the UNVIM issued March 1 estimated that Caesar would arrive at its destination March 2. Yemenis are still waiting.

The Biden administration has been eager to condemn Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are in retaliation for the blockade and often result in no casualties. When Biden was asked in January if he would consider a UAE request that the U.S. redesignate the Houthis as a terror group, he said the move was “under consideration.”

On January 24, the Houthis fired two missiles at Al Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi, where about 2,000 U.S. troops and civilians are stationed. The U.S. military repelled the attacks with a missile defense system and there were no casualties. In response, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that he would send the USS Cole to “conduct a joint patrol with the UAE Navy and a port call to Abu Dhabi” and deploy fighter jets “to assist the UAE against the current threat and as a clear signal that the United States stands with the UAE as a long-standing strategic partner.”

Biden had noted that ending the war in Yemen would require “the two parties to be involved to do it. And it’s going to be very difficult.” Brett McGurk, Biden’s point person on the Middle East, went further in a January 27 event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment: “It takes two to get to a ceasefire and end the war. And right now, the onus is on the Houthis.”

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the Saudi blockade of Yemen the most “offensive action” the Saudis engage in.

“The blockade is an act of war against the Yemeni people and is directly responsible for the massive humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, especially the malnutrition of children,” said Riedel, who served as a CIA analyst and adviser on Middle East issues to four U.S. presidents until his retirement in 2006. Biden has “broken his promise to make peace in Yemen a top priority,” he said, adding that the blockade “should be investigated as a war crime.”

“The Saudis are bogged down in an expensive quagmire,” Riedel told The Intercept. “The Congress needs to step in and cut off all military assistance to Riyadh.”

Until that happens, more Yemenis will be pushed closer to famine. Acute malnutrition has increased by 284 percent among children and by 374 percent among pregnant women since October 2020, according to U.N. figures.

Last month, the World Food Program’s Beasley was back in Yemen, and noted that “it is worse than anyone can possibly imagine.”

“Yemen has come full circle since 2018 when we had to fight our way back from the brink of famine, but the risk today is more real than ever,” he said at the end of a two-day visit to the Sanaa, Aden, and Amran governorates. “And just when you think it can’t get any worse, the world wakes up to a conflict in Ukraine that is likely to cause economic deterioration around the world, especially for countries like Yemen, dependent on wheat imports from Ukraine and Russia. Prices will go up, compounding an already terrible situation.”

Fakiha Naji, Dawlat’s mother, says the loss of livelihood and rising food prices are “strangling” her daughter and the rest of the family. They subsist on yogurt and beans and usually skip dinner. When there’s no food, she said, “we can do nothing but wait.”

The post As U.S. Focuses on Ukraine, Yemen Starves appeared first on The Intercept.

“These alleged extremists undertook a plot to kidnap a sitting governor,” FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Josh P. Hauxhurst said in a statement. “Whenever extremists move into the realm of actually planning violent acts, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force stands ready to identify, disrupt, and dismantle their operations, preventing them from following through on those plans.”

In addition to those charged federally, eight other members of the Wolverine Watchmen were arrested on state charges related to the plot. The arrests made national news, in part because a group of right-wing extremists plotting to kidnap a high-profile Democrat fit with the prevailing media narrative at the time that President Donald Trump was fomenting violence as part of his reelection campaign. The announcement of the kidnapping plan even knocked a hurricane’s landfall out of the top spot on CBS Evening News.

But the circumstances of the case and the megaphone the Justice Department used to publicize it were familiar. As with the prosecutions of more than 350 international terrorism defendants caught in post-9/11 FBI terrorism stings, in which agents or informants provide encouragement and weapons for criminal plots, questions of entrapment quickly emerged in the Wolverine Watchmen case. The FBI had used at least a dozen informants and several undercover agents to build the case. One of the group’s key members, known as “Big Dan,” was an FBI informant. Another, an apparent explosives expert whose role was critical to the alleged kidnapping plan, was in fact an FBI undercover agent.

“There’s nothing wrong with using confidential sources to help facilitate or move along an investigation, but it becomes really dicey when, in a case like this one, there are nearly as many informants as there are defendants,” Michael Sherwin, the former deputy attorney general for national security during the Trump administration, told The Intercept. “That’s a huge red flag, making you wonder if this is one of those cases that are manufactured to increase stats.”

Sherwin, a career federal prosecutor, also served as the acting U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia during the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden administration. Because Sherwin had prosecuted a Chinese businesswoman who trespassed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his arrival in Washington under Attorney General Bill Barr was initially viewed by some as further evidence of a politicized Justice Department. Sherwin approved of providing internal FBI records to lawyers representing former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was charged with making false statements to the FBI. In a controversial move, the Justice Department then sought to dismiss the case against Flynn.

Despite his role in controversial and high-profile cases, however, Sherwin wasn’t seen by everyone as a political henchman. The Miami Herald’s editorial board, whose members were familiar with Sherwin’s long career as federal prosecutor in Florida, suggested that President Joe Biden retain Sherwin at the Justice Department. And when Biden asked 56 Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys to step down, Sherwin wasn’t among them.

Sherwin was the top federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia during the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and he went on to lead what became the largest criminal investigation in American history, giving him a unique perspective on how the government is responding to domestic extremists and how politics and public pressure have shaped that response.

“January 6 was significant,” he said. “Were there dangerous actors there? Yes. Were there other just garden-variety criminals who got arrested? Of course. But the thing I think people are losing sight of is that this is nothing new. Going back to Ruby Ridge, going back to Waco, going back to Oklahoma City, going back to the militia groups in Michigan and Arizona — this is something that has existed for decades.”

Sherwin took the national stage in March 2021, when he gave an interview to “60 Minutes” in which he said he believed that in the cases of some Capitol rioters, the facts of their alleged crimes could support charges of sedition, a rarely filed and serious criminal offense. (His prediction came true nearly a year later, when federal prosecutors charged Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and 10 others with seditious conspiracy.) Although the Justice Department had given Sherwin permission to speak about the January 6 investigation at news conferences, they had not authorized him to speak to “60 Minutes,” and a U.S. District Court judge overseeing one of the January 6 cases complained that Sherwin’s “60 Minutes” interview had “the potential to affect the jury pool and the rights of these defendants.” The Justice Department launched an internal probe of Sherwin for violating Justice Department media protocols. The probe’s results have never been released. Sherwin later resigned from the Justice Department to take a position in private practice, a move he says he had previously been planning.

Having witnessed firsthand how the Justice Department was changing its approach to domestic extremist cases, Sherwin questions whether highly publicized FBI stings might exaggerate the threat in the same way that similar stings produced hundreds of Islamist terrorism cases and helped inflate the perceived danger of international terrorism inside the United States. The Michigan sting involving the plot to kidnap Whitmer is emblematic of his concern. “This case is a disaster,” Sherwin said.

Jury selection in the federal trial of the Wolverine Watchmen began this week. Defense lawyers have signaled that they will argue that their clients were entrapped, and while entrapment defenses have rarely succeeded in international terrorism sting cases, the Justice Department appears concerned. Prosecutors cut a plea deal on the eve of the trial with one defendant, Kaleb Franks, in exchange for his testimony that he was not entrapped by government agents.

“The key to the government’s plan was to turn general discontent with Gov. Whitmer’s COVID-19 restrictions into a crime that could be prosecuted,” defense lawyers wrote in a joint motion. “The government picked what it knew would be a sensational charge: conspiracy to kidnap the governor. When the government was faced with evidence showing that the defendants had no interest in a kidnapping plot, it refused to accept failure and continued to push its plan.”

During the first two decades after 9/11, undercover terrorism stings became common, allowing the FBI to nab would-be terrorists and justify billions of dollars in counterterrorism funding but also leading to potentially illegal mass surveillance of Muslims and accusations of entrapment.

Now, as the Justice Department creates a new domestic terrorism unit and the FBI reorients to combat a perceived growing threat from domestic extremists, the Wolverine Watchmen case suggests that federal agents may rely on the same sting tactics that helped overstate the risk of Islamist terrorism to investigate potential domestic extremists.

Extremists Among Us

The conflict between right-wing extremism and federal law enforcement isn’t new in America. Nearly four decades before the creation of the FBI, the agency’s predecessor, known as the Bureau of Investigation, received authority to investigate the Ku Klux Klan and prosecute its members in federal court. More recently, the Oklahoma City bombing; the standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho; and investigations of militia groups shaped federal law enforcement agencies’ response to domestic extremists.

But after the 9/11 attacks, Congress expanded anti-terrorism laws and powers and the Bush administration reorganized the FBI into an agency focused primarily on counterterrorism, with the threat of Islamist extremism the paramount concern. The Justice Department formed an entirely new branch, the National Security Division, which was initially so consumed by the threat of international terrorist groups that domestic extremism investigations did not fall under its purview. Even after domestic terrorism became part of the National Security Division’s mandate, a double standard defined the first two decades after 9/11: Islamist extremists involved in bombing plots were always charged under anti-terrorism laws, such as using weapons of mass destruction and providing material support to terrorists, while domestic extremists engaged in similar crimes usually faced lesser explosives charges.

This double standard had the effect of playing up the threat from Islamist extremists, as the Justice Department issued press releases touting these terrorism charges and media coverage followed dutifully, while downplaying the threat of domestic extremists, whose prosecutions were often not announced with the same fanfare, if they were announced at all. Trump’s call as a presidential candidate for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” tapped into the Islamophobic hysteria that the Justice Department had helped create over 15 years of high-profile terrorism prosecutions.

Violence from individual Trump supporters, inspired by the candidate who went on to become president, began to alter that narrative even as the Justice Department remained hesitant to bring terrorism charges against right-wing actors. When Emily Claire Hari (who was convicted under the name Michael) led a group of people inspired by Trump-related conspiracy theories to bomb a mosque in Minnesota and try to a bomb women’s clinic in Illinois, the Justice Department didn’t bring terrorism-related charges.

Still, the Hari case was one of several during Trump’s presidency that raised questions about potential violence by his supporters. Inside the FBI, some agents eventually described these threats as “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists.” In the fall of 2018, a strip club DJ in Florida named Cesar Sayoc started mailing bombs to current and former Democratic Party officials and news organizations, among others. Sayoc drove a white van whose windows were covered in stickers that praised Trump and denigrated media organizations and Democratic Party politicians. His arrest made international news: a perfect vision of the feared Trump supporter as terrorist.

Sherwin, who had come to Miami in 2007 as a federal prosecutor after serving as a Navy intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, was by then a top national security prosecutor in the Justice Department. He was the lead prosecutor who tracked, captured, and interrogated Sayoc in South Florida. In line with the Justice Department’s practices at the time, Sherwin charged Sayoc with explosives violations and making threats. But the case, under withering media scrutiny that included live helicopter coverage of the FBI investigation, quickly became a political football inside the Justice Department. Sayoc was extradited to New York, where several of his bombs had been sent, in a move that Sherwin saw as the Justice Department making decisions in response to public and political pressure.

“Cesar Sayoc sent a litany of mail bombs to a lot of high-profile individuals and the media,” Sherwin said. “Those bombs were all constructed in South Florida. They were all mailed from South Florida. He was detained and arrested in South Florida. The case ends up in New York because of politics, because it got a lot of headlines, because people at Main Justice at the time hooked up different people in the Southern District [of New York] with bringing the case there.”

In Manhattan, prosecutors took the step, then uncommon in prosecutions of domestic extremists, of filing weapons of mass destruction charges against Sayoc — terrorism charges that required approval from the Justice Department’s National Security Division. This treatment was more in line with the way the Justice Department had handled bombing cases involving Islamist extremists. In U.S. law, weapons of mass destruction are defined so broadly that they could include any sort of crude improvised explosive device, making the law’s application subject to political will. (Notably, the charges in the Michigan sting case include conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.)

“It goes back to feeding the beast — allowing people to get headlines and funding.”

“Cesar Sayoc was making real devices,” Sherwin said. “They were extremely low-wattage devices he learned to make on the internet with firecracker residue. They were devices my 18-year-old son could have made watching YouTube. They were active, but they weren’t constructed properly. I think they would have taken off a finger, but they wouldn’t have killed anyone. Is that a weapon of mass destruction? Look, I don’t want to fence with the definition of WMD under the U.S. criminal code, but I think sometimes labels are overextended on individuals, and it goes back to feeding the beast — allowing people to get headlines and funding. Sometimes, if a case straddles on just a regular criminal case and maybe — maybe — it has a breadcrumb of a domestic terrorism case, it’s thrown over the line and called a domestic terrorism case, because it makes the numbers look better. It justifies money and spending on Joint Terrorism Task Forces and everything else.”

That’s what happened in some international terrorism prosecutions during the two decades after 9/11, Sherwin said. The Justice Department has charged more than 80 defendants in international terrorism cases with using or conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. In some of these cases, the bombs were just as crude and infective as Sayoc’s.

Although domestic terrorism is defined in U.S. law, the Justice Department and the FBI have been unclear about what constitutes a domestic terrorism case and how many cases are open at any given time. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, The Intercept obtained a 60-page domestic terrorism case list, from 2018, from the National Security Division. While heavily redacted, the list shows that the Justice Department had broken down domestic terrorism offenses into what prosecutors termed “affiliations,” including abortion extremism, anarchist extremism, animal rights extremism, Black separatist extremism, environmental extremism, and militia extremism.

While the list included some defendants whose crimes could be considered terrorism — such as Glendon Scott Crawford, who was arrested following an FBI sting in which he tried to build a radiological “death ray” to kill Muslims — it also included individuals whose terrorism label appeared questionable, such as a college student who sent an empty threat and a Native American activist who fired a handgun while resisting arrest during a protest.

In recent testimony before Congress, the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, has thrown out large numbers to describe the FBI’s domestic terrorism case load. In 2017, he told Congress that there were “about 1,000 open domestic terrorism investigations.” Three years later, he claimed that number had risen to 2,000. Six months after offering that number, Wray told Congress that the FBI was handling “around 2,700 investigations.”

Having seen how politics shaped the Sayoc prosecution and how numbers drive policy and funding in Washington, Sherwin views Wray’s numbers skeptically, since the FBI is under political pressure to show a muscled response to domestic extremism. “So of course, you pump up those numbers,” Sherwin said. “Maybe it’s 100 full field investigations, but you pump up that number to 2,000, even if it’s just the opening of a preliminary assessment on one 17-year-old in his basement in Ohio.”

The Whitmer Plot

Pete Musico wasn’t hiding his contempt for Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who’d been elected just two years after Great Lake State voters helped send Trump to the White House.

A white man in his early 40s with a long beard and short-cropped hair, Musico aired his rough-edged political views in the oversharing way people seem to favor nowadays — through hastily recorded videos mostly from the driver’s seat of his car and then uploaded to YouTube. So what if the camera angles were unflattering, the picture jerky, and the background noise distracting? Musico had something to say.

“We all carry guns. We all got guns,” he declared in one video. “There will be a civil war in this country.”

Musico’s platform wasn’t exactly big. His videos rarely garnered more than 100 views, and some got fewer than 10. His YouTube account had started innocently, with a short video of his 13-year-old daughter dancing with her mother. But after Trump took office in 2017, Musico began recording video rants about the “deep state,” immigration, taxes, and gun control. He fashioned himself as a citizen journalist and claimed that he’d tried to secure an interview with Whitmer. “As soon as I get the interview with her, we’re going to go live … OK?” Musico told his audience from the driver’s seat of his car.

But Musico wasn’t the only one making videos during this period. The FBI was filming too.

Musico and his son-in-law, Joseph Morrison, had started the Wolverine Watchmen. They recruited people through Facebook and invited them to tactical trainings on land around Morrison’s home, about 30 miles west of Ann Arbor. Some of those who attended were FBI informants.

The training sessions evolved into talk of violent anti-government plots, some allegedly proposed by a man named Adam Fox, a then-37-year-old with a scraggly beard and a paunch. The talk of these plots took on urgency and detail during training trips to Ohio and Wisconsin, which were secretly paid for by the FBI. The Wolverine Watchmen discussed a proposal to “black bag,” or kidnap, politicians, though a few members of the group initially thought the idea couldn’t work. As alternatives, they discussed planting explosives at police stations or storming the state Capitol in Lansing with a 200-man force equipped with machine guns and sniper rifles. But Fox still allegedly pushed for the “black bag,” and the plan was very specific: They’d kidnap Whitmer, whom Fox referred to as “this tyrant bitch,” and then try her for treason in their very own kangaroo court. “Snatch and grab, man,” Fox told some members of the group. “Grab the fuckin’ governor. Just grab the bitch, because at that point, we do that, dude — it’s over.”

In the summer of 2020, after Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” in response to pandemic restrictions and protests erupted in the state, about a dozen members of the Wolverine Watchmen began surveilling Whitmer’s vacation home. They came up with an audacious plan: Bomb the lead car in the governor’s security detail, kidnap her, and then use explosives to destroy a nearby bridge, cutting off any police officers trying to mount a rescue. But the group’s ability to pull off this “Rambo”-style plan was questionable, even to the Wolverine Watchmen themselves. Fox, whom the government would later describe as the group’s ringleader, had so much trouble remembering the street number of Whitmer’s vacation home that the others called him “Captain Autism.” (Fox has claimed that he was often high on marijuana during this time.)

Lawyers for Fox and his co-defendants have argued that there would not have been a plot to kidnap Whitmer were it not for the FBI’s financing and encouragement through its use of undercover agents and at a least a dozen paid informants.

And so, as the trial of the Wolverine Watchmen begins, a federal jury in Michigan will grapple with a question that has been a staple of similar cases involving alleged supporters of ISIS or Al Qaeda: Was this threat real or manufactured by the FBI?

The post Echoes of FBI Entrapment Haunt Failed Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer appeared first on The Intercept.

The one-year anniversary of January 6 was approaching. That was the day Rhodes, spurred by Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election, had led his members to the U.S. Capitol, warning of the potential for civil war and hoping that the then-president would act to stop the transfer of power. Perhaps he’d even call for assistance from Rhodes himself, along with other members of the wider militant movement that Rhodes had spent so many years helping to grow, shape, and drive closer to the new conservative mainstream. Instead, Trump had given a speech to propel the “Stop the Steal” masses toward the Capitol, then returned to the White House to watch events unfold on TV, while Rhodes had stood amid the crowd outside the Capitol in a black cowboy hat as two columns of his members pushed in with the rioters. Seventeen people with alleged links to the Oath Keepers had since been arrested, and Rhodes had spent the year as “Person One” in the sprawling FBI investigation into what happened that day.

“On January 6, [Trump] told all his followers, you know, now we are going to march on the Capitol, and I’ll be with you. And he just ghosted. Didn’t show up at his own party.”

Rhodes maintained that he’d given no order for his members to enter the Capitol. FBI agents had interviewed him and seized his phone; they’d even seized the phone of the Oath Keepers’ chief counsel, wielding a search warrant that said they were investigating sedition. The Oath Keepers had been de-platformed by tech companies and cut loose by credit card processors such as PayPal and Stripe, leaving Rhodes to post a note on the group’s website asking members to send their dues by check and listing a mailing address. He said he took no comfort from the fact that he was still free, adding that he’d heard FBI agents were out interviewing Oath Keepers around the country. He noted that around three dozen January 6 suspects were being held without bail and referred to news reports that said some were being kept in 23-hour isolation: “Just imagine they whisk you away tomorrow, come and get you in a midnight raid. They accuse you of being an insurgent, and they just toss you in jail for nine months with no bail.” I asked if he’d been imagining that fate for himself. “I signed on for this, and this is part of the ride,” he replied. “This is what it means to be a political dissident in modern America.”

It struck me that the more aggressively Rhodes was targeted in an effort to hold accountable those who sought to overturn the 2020 election, the more it reinforced, for him, the alternate reality in which he already resided. The same might apply to many of the protesters who’d descended on the Capitol and to other Americans who supported their cause. In that parallel reality, the movement that crystallized on January 6 is fighting for freedom against an encroaching tyranny. They are the ones challenging the real authority in this country, while liberals and their allies man the imperial gates. And Rhodes, rather than being an agent of entrenched power, is a potential revolutionary. His view is rooted in his reading of American history and idolization of the founding generation; one difference between Rhodes and many conservatives who’ve lately adopted this mindset is that he’s had it for a very long time. Since well before he became famous as a militant leader, his writing has been populated by specters of the gulag, of political arrests and secret police. These are extreme visions, but a stolen election would be a step down that path.

Sitting in the hotel room, Rhodes spoke of Trump’s betrayal: “On January 6, he told all his followers, you know, now we are going to march on the Capitol, and I’ll be with you. And he just ghosted. Didn’t show up at his own party.” Trump, he continued, had then left his supporters to face the investigation on their own, offering no financial or legal support to the people it targeted: “It’s like we don’t exist.” To Trump and the other big players in the “Stop the Steal” movement, he said, the Oath Keepers were “nothing. Cannon fodder.”

Yet Rhodes remained as convinced as ever by the lie Trump had spread about the stolen election — so convinced, in fact, that he could only interpret the other side’s insistence on calling it a lie as more proof of what he was up against, the deafening power of the establishment machine that had been mobilized. He refused to entertain the possibility that he could be wrong about this central fact. I thought of this when Rhodes was arrested a week later, charged with seditious conspiracy, and I saw the courtroom sketch of him standing before a judge, shackled, in prison greens and a surgical mask, entering his plea of not guilty. It would be this alternate reality itself, one inhabited by millions of Americans, that went on trial. And I wondered if anything, even the convictions of Rhodes and the other January 6 defendants, could shake people from it. The authorities, Rhodes had told me, “can browbeat people all they want, and label people terrorists, or whatever they’re going to do. They can lock a bunch of us up. It’s not going to help their credibility. It’s going to keep eroding it.”

Before the election, Rhodes told me a story. It was the summer of 2020, and I’d spent the previous few days traveling with him through the South as he spoke at militant meetings and encouraged people to get ready for resistance. He saw the enemy advancing on myriad fronts in those fevered months: the antifa insurgency, deep-state liberals for whom pandemic restrictions were just cover for a power grab, the propagandist organs of the mainstream media, and, behind it all, the conspirators plotting to rig the upcoming vote. If you asked him or the people in his orbit to sum up the threat, though, there was always one word: tyranny.

We were at a main street pub in a town in the Virginia range of the Appalachians. It had taken months to convince him to meet me; he’s wary of journalists and was especially so in my case, partly because I’d told him that I was writing a story based on a leaked database of his members. He also noted that I’d covered the Islamic State overseas and seemed worried that I’d portray the Oath Keepers as a domestic equivalent. In fact, my reporting on the Oath Keepers was driven by the same goal that had animated my work in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine: I wanted to understand what was pushing people toward violence and what, if anything, could be done to reverse it.

At the pub, after Rhodes put in for his standard paleo order and a glass of wine, he relaxed a bit. He was going through a divorce and dealing with the stress from running his organization, and eventually he’d gotten into meditation. He was chasing the Zen mindset, and one day he decided to attend a Buddhist retreat at a sangha in Montana. He felt out of place at first, he admitted, sitting there with all those liberals, and perhaps he felt branded by the “We the People” tattoo on his forearm or his eyepatch. But everyone was told to leave their identities at the door — to remain on a first-name basis and avoid all talk of work or family.

Near the end of the retreat, after a lesson on the need to love everyone, even one’s enemies, a woman spoke up, saying she couldn’t find love for Trump. Think of him as a child, the retreat leader replied. Think of what his father must have been like. Find empathy for little Trump. Build from there. “Then he said something else,” Rhodes continued. “He’s like, ‘And something else to think about is that everything you see on TV is fake.’”

I raised my eyebrows. Rhodes kept going, explaining how the teacher had implored his students to tune out the false world of division behind their screens. “He said the real world is you, your family, your neighbors,” Rhodes said. “And he’s right.”

Look, I said, eventually. No matter what happens in November, Trump, if he loses, will say the election was stolen. What are you going to do? He paused for a bit. Then he said, sounding sincere, and maybe even worried: “I don’t know.”

After the election, Rhodes posted a pair of open letters on the Oath Keepers website, laying out a plan. In the first, published in mid-December 2020, he seemed at once enraged, believing Trump’s claims about the steal, and unsure why the president wasn’t doing more about it. He called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, overturn the vote, and federalize the National Guard. Trump should also declassify the nation’s secrets, Rhodes added, so the traitors in positions of power could be identified. And he should call up irregulars like the Oath Keepers as “the militia” to help put down the unrest these moves were bound to spark.

The second letter, published ahead of the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, repeated those calls and painted Congress’s vote to certify the Electoral College results as Trump’s last chance to act. Rhodes called on Trump to deploy the National Guard to administer a new election using only paper ballots cast in person by citizens with government-issued IDs. Teams of Oath Keepers, Rhodes wrote, would be at the rally on a dual mission: to work protection details for keynote speakers while standing ready to help the president if called upon. “We will also have well-armed and equipped [quick reaction force] teams on standby, outside DC,” he wrote in a follow-up post, “in the event of a worst-case scenario, where the President calls us up as part of the militia to assist him inside DC.” When I read all this at the time, something beneath the inflammatory rhetoric struck me: Rhodes, who received his law degree in 2004, was asking the president for legal cover.

According to the Department of Justice indictment that was unsealed after his arrest, the Oath Keepers made significant preparations for the plans Rhodes had spelled out: arranging trainings in paramilitary tactics, coordinating travel to Washington, D.C., and stashing arsenals in nearby Virginia for potential use by the “quick reaction” teams. One member allegedly tried to secure boats that could get the teams and weapons across the Potomac River more quickly. Rhodes, meanwhile, bought more than $20,000 worth of guns, ammunition, and equipment such as a scope, a bipod, and night-vision devices, the indictment claims, while sharing advice from a purported Serbian activist explaining how, after that country’s former president stole an election in 2000, pro-democracy protesters descended on its capital, stormed its parliament, and brought down the regime.

During the protest on January 6, Rhodes was photographed standing with his fellow Oath Keepers outside the Capitol wearing a black scarf and his black cowboy hat. The indictment doesn’t accuse his members of bringing firearms to the Capitol; instead, it alleges, they brought knives, batons, body armor, and other tactical gear, along with an 82-pound German shepherd named Warrior. Videos shot during the riot show two columns of Oath Keepers pushing their way into the Capitol via different entrances; according to the indictment, members of one of these columns tried to help the rioters break into the Senate chamber until they were repelled by chemical spray, then embarked on an unsuccessful hunt for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rhodes spoke by phone with the leader of this column shortly before those Oath Keepers entered the building, according to the indictment, which provides no details about what Rhodes said. Last week, the leader of the second column, 34-year-old Army veteran Joshua James, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and agreed to “cooperate fully” with the investigation; he said he’d entered the Capitol to disrupt certification of the Electoral College vote and had taken part in a plan “developed by Rhodes … to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.” James added that after he’d left the Capitol, Rhodes told him that he was “glad James and others had gone inside.”

Prosecutors have not provided evidence that Rhodes gave an order to enter the building. Instead, the indictment against him contains more general messages that he allegedly sent his members during the unrest, calling rioters “pissed off patriots” and noting that “the founding generation stormed the governor’s mansion in MA and tarred and feathered his tax collectors. And they seized and dumped tea in the water. They didn’t fire on them, but they street fought. Next comes our ‘Lexington.’ It’s coming.”

In the days that followed, the indictment alleges, Rhodes went on another buying spree: $6,000 for gun sights, mounts, and various supplies on January 10; $1,500 for scopes, magazines, and other items on January 11; $7,000 for ammunition, duffel bags, a gun light, and more on January 12; $1,000 for firearms parts on January 13; and $2,000 for ammo and equipment, including holsters and gun mounts, between January 14 and 19.

Not long afterward, in February 2021, I traveled to Dallas and called Rhodes over an encrypted app. After some argument, he agreed to let me join him for dinner at a crowded steakhouse. He insisted that our conversation be off the record, the only time over more than a dozen interviews that he made that request. He said some things, however, that he repeated on the record later, including a denial that he’d taken part in a conspiracy. In the end, he said, the Oath Keepers’ mission on January 6 hadn’t extended beyond serving as protective details for Trump ally Roger Stone and other “Stop the Steal” VIPs. Going into the Capitol, he added, had not been part of the plan; those who did so had gotten carried away in the riot. In subsequent meetings, he would paint the FBI investigation as political persecution and claim that it would uncover no evidence that he’d planned or directed the incursion. He’d also predict that prosecutors would coerce Oath Keepers into providing false testimony and “cook up” charges against him.

Rhodes is the central figure in the modern militant movement, for which the Oath Keepers have served as an ideological vanguard and grassroots recruiting machine, their reach extending from rank-and-file conservatives to serving soldiers and police. He once worked for Ron Paul, the libertarian former congressman, and has long challenged the traditional Republican establishment; in 2013, the Oath Keepers took out a billboard at the Pentagon subway station that praised the whistleblower Edward Snowden. The move was controversial among members, however, and the group’s proximity to the tea party, along with its focus on recruiting people with law enforcement and military backgrounds, have always suggested that rather than being opposed to the excesses of state power, as they claimed, the Oath Keepers might be an extension of it. The starting point for what Rhodes preaches is in the organization’s name: that members of the police and military swear oaths to defend the Constitution against all enemies and any patriotic American can do the same. The Oath Keepers, in Rhodes’s portrayal, could encourage active members of the security services to refuse unconstitutional orders; if necessary, they could also fight. The salient question, then, becomes who gets to determine the enemy. For Rhodes, a hard-line suspicion of gun control — blocking access to weapons is essential, he says, to any authoritarian push — flows into a more general demonization of liberals. He has championed the idea of a conservative “warrior class” uniting gun owners with members of the military and law enforcement communities; a belief that armed force is a valid option in American politics; and a view of politics as a struggle beyond democracy, between freedom and tyranny.

Rhodes is the central figure in the modern militant movement, for which the Oath Keepers have served as an ideological vanguard and grassroots recruiting machine.

Despite his profile, however, Rhodes could never have mustered so large a crowd even of his own members in Washington, let alone the hundreds of others who stormed the Capitol. The draw was Trump and his stolen election claims. At the steakhouse, I began to notice in Rhodes a sense of disillusionment with Trump, whom the militant crowd had treated as a standard-bearer — a president who embraced and fed their worldview and made them feel for the first time that they had a true ally in the Oval Office. Some of the Oath Keepers who’d been arrested so far were being represented by public defenders, while the former president was off giving speeches and fundraising, not for them, but for himself. Trump, Rhodes would note later, had failed to even issue pardons for January 6 suspects on his way out of office.

Yet I also thought that Rhodes couldn’t feel entirely out of place in the glare of the FBI investigation. He’d suspected since the 1990s that the government was out to get Americans of his mindset and in the subsequent “war on terror” had observed the development of the tools and narratives that he believed the government might one day employ against people like him. Now his political opponents were calling him a terrorist as former security officials with mainstream media contracts shared their counterinsurgency insights on TV. Federal agents had taken his men from their houses. And one day the knock might come at last to his own door.

Tasha Adams met Rhodes in 1991 in a working-class suburb of Las Vegas. She was an 18-year-old ballroom dance instructor and he was a 25-year-old Army veteran working as a valet. Rhodes was taking lessons at her studio, which was in a strip mall; on their first date, he took her to see the Hoover Dam. When she visited his apartment, she told me recently, he showed her his Steyr Aug automatic rifle, which she thought looked like a space gun. They both saw themselves as outsiders. For Adams, this was rooted in her devout and insular Mormon upbringing. Rhodes’s father was a white Marine veteran, Adams recalled, adding that Rhodes had been raised mainly by his mother, who came from a family of Mexican migrant laborers. He would visit these relatives during summers as a kid; he later wrote, in a 2008 blog post, that he was “quite proud” of his Hispanic heritage. He touted family lore that his maternal grandfather had fought alongside the Mexican Revolution hero Pancho Villa.

Rhodes joined the Army right after high school. His military career was cut short after three years, however; while training as a paratrooper, as Rhodes tells it, his chute got tangled in a cluster of tall trees during a risky night jump, and he fell to the ground, fracturing his spine. He was medically retired. Adams recalls Rhodes as a young man determined to find his place, with a budding libertarian worldview informed by gun shops and Ayn Rand and a passion for politics and history that made her dream he might be a teacher one day.

Adams and Rhodes married in 1994 and went on to have six children together. She filed for divorce in 2018. In a petition for an order of protection submitted days later, she alleged threatening behavior and accused Rhodes of once grabbing their teenage daughter by the neck. The petition wasn’t granted, and Rhodes has denied the allegations.

“He saw himself as a figure in history.”

Even early in their relationship, Adams told me, there was another side to Rhodes, which became more pronounced after he lost his eye and almost his life by dropping a loaded handgun, causing it to accidentally discharge. On the one hand, he was making his way through school, starting with classes at a community college, then moving on to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he graduated summa cum laude, and ultimately landing at Yale. A talented sculptor, he once created statues inspired by “Liberty Leading the People,” the Eugene Delacroix painting commemorating the second French Revolution. On the other hand, his self-perception as an outsider seemed to have contributed to a chip on his shoulder while inflaming his paranoia. When he was just a student with a part-time job at a gun store and a National Rifle Association membership, Adams told me, Rhodes suspected that he might be on government watchlists. Such fears eventually became intertwined with his politics. A Constitutional “originalist,” he thought that the country had drifted dangerously far from the Founding Fathers’ vision and that America risked passing a point of no return into tyranny. Rhodes, Adams said, believed that there would be another revolution one day and that he’d be a part of it: “He saw himself as a figure in history.”

The 1993 massacre in Waco, Texas, which began with a siege by federal authorities in February of that year, was foundational to his worldview. In it, Rhodes, like many in his section of the political right, saw his vision of a tyrannical government coming to life. On one side were the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI, and a newly inaugurated Democratic administration. On the other, barricaded in their compound, were members of a hard-line Christian sect called the Branch Davidians and their guns. It started with a tip from an ATF informant about an arms cache. It ended, two months later, in a thundering fire ignited during an FBI-ATF raid. The Branch Davidians were burned so badly that the exact number of dead is unsettled; more than 70 people were killed, including children. Many pro-gun conservatives with a fixation on early American history found it hard not to dwell on the date: April 19. It was the 218-year anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, when the first shot of the Revolutionary War was fired as British redcoats marched into the stronghold of the colonial militias on an order to seize their weapons.

Two years later, on April 19, 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as an act of vengeance over Waco, killing 168 people. McVeigh was a racist who’d once sold copies of “The Turner Diaries,” a white supremacist manifesto disguised as a novel, and had ties to white supremacist paramilitaries. He’d also reportedly attended a meeting of a more mainstream militia in the self-styled “Patriot” movement that was surging at the time, and in the years after his attack, membership in these militias dipped as they faced increased scrutiny. In “Up in Arms,” a history of right-wing militancy in the U.S., journalist John Temple argues that the 200-plus militia groups of the time shared a belief that “Americans were losing control over their own government to globalist forces” but diverged on the issue of race. “A stubborn element of bigotry was embedded in some Patriot organizations, while other groups and leaders specifically renounced racism and anti-Semitism,” Temple writes. McVeigh showed that even when militia members tried to distance themselves from the movement’s racist element, they couldn’t escape it.

When Rhodes created the Oath Keepers, he wrote bylaws prohibiting racial and religious discrimination. “It’s a reaction to what I know is out there. I know there are actual racists that would like to worm their way in,” he once told me. “Bubba the fucking KKK guy, I wouldn’t be OK with him. He can go fuck off.” The Oath Keepers have attracted nonwhite members while still remaining disproportionately white; their grievances have overlapped at times with those of racists, even as members profess disdain for white supremacy. These same dynamics would eventually play out within Trumpism.

Rhodes portrayed Waco as a pivotal moment when the establishment’s true nature was unmasked and an indelible sign that his segment of the right existed outside the country’s true power structure. In the mid-2000s, in a post in an obscure online forum where he was a regular, Rhodes noted that some of Waco’s victims were Hispanic and Black. “But they were political and religious undesirables who dared to own guns and quote the Constitution (the audacity!) and that was enough for the Clinton regime, who thus treated them like sub-humans and unleashed the Goose-stepping American Gestapo on them,” he wrote. “When the state turns on political enemies or political and/or religious sub-groups it feels ‘safe’ to attack, the State is truly colorblind.” He added, sticking to his libertarian credo of the time: “A lefty regime will tyrannize anyone of any color that does not toe the line, just like a Right(schtag!) regime will.”

After September 11, the war on terror intensified these fears. At Yale, as a 38-year-old law student, Rhodes won a prize for a paper criticizing the George W. Bush administration’s “unlawful enemy combatant” doctrine, which allowed the suspension of habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects, even if they were U.S. citizens. He did not see the broad war-making, surveillance, and detention powers that the government was acquiring as the exclusive province of conservatives; he thought they were just as likely to be embraced by liberals one day and turned against people like him.

In a blog post announcing the formation of the Oath Keepers in early 2009, he said that conservatives had spent the last eight years “expanding the de facto power of the Executive branch to obscene and absurd levels. Those powers are now in the hands of President Barack Obama.” He added, in a subsequent post, that the idea of treating right-wing militias as “the equivalent of foreign enemies in wartime” had been proposed after the Oklahoma City bombing by legal scholars, who argued that all suspected terrorists should be tried by military tribunals. The enemy combatant doctrine, Rhodes continued, had since established that the laws of war could apply to U.S. citizens. “Once that line was crossed,” he wrote, “nothing but raw politics stops that power from being used on you.”

As the Oath Keepers gained steam online, Rhodes began to plan an in-person event to mark its official founding. On April 19, 2009, he appeared before a crowd of newly minted members on Lexington Green in Massachusetts. Standing at a microphone in a baggy suit and tie, he led them in a recitation of the oath that soldiers and police officers swear: “I will support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

I next saw Rhodes in June 2021, six months after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. On a sunny afternoon, he drove north on a Texas highway in a white SUV. The Oath Keepers had started as a viral sensation on his old blog and then in the social media age racked up hundreds of thousands of followers across various Facebook pages and on Twitter. All of that was gone, deleted when those platforms banned the Oath Keepers and other militant groups before the 2020 election. He could still bring his message out himself, though, as long as he was free. “Since January 6, I’ve been preoccupied with all of our guys getting arrested,” he told me. “I miss this. This is what I do — go out and do events and talk to people.”

For all the internet buzz around the Oath Keepers over the years and all the headlines Rhodes had generated, he considered the grassroots element of his outreach essential. Watching him speak at rallies and meetings, then linger long after they were done, I’d noticed that he had a retail politician’s compulsion to make every last connection and an ideologue’s drive to make a convert in every conversation. He’d spent the last 13 years working the crowds at militant gatherings large and small, giving speeches on the self-styled “patriot” and “liberty” circuits, manning tables at tea party rallies, and encouraging his members to do the same. His push to grow the Oath Keepers had an obvious financial element — being a member required little to no vetting or participation, just signing up and paying what is now a $50 annual fee — and disgruntled former associates had complained for years about the way Rhodes lived off the organization. There was also a part of him that seemed to care not at all who signed up for the Oath Keepers and who didn’t so long as his ideas reached them. “My primary function is to advise people,” he said as he drove. “Hey, here’s what you should be doing in your local community. Here’s how you can become stronger. Here’s what you can do to unite the warrior class of America.”

That evening’s gathering had been arranged by an Oath Keeper who hoped to start a new chapter in Wichita Falls, a city of about 100,000 near the Texas border with Oklahoma. He was a veteran with good connections in the community and with the local Republican Party. One person like this was worth more than a mass of online followers — you only had to give him the ideas and some guidance, Rhodes explained, and leave him to his own momentum.

When Rhodes entered the Army, he’d hoped to join the Special Forces, one of the most revered units in the U.S. military. These elite troops are considered a “force multiplier” when they operate among the rank and file and also venture out on high-value missions. In Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, meanwhile, they’ve embedded with U.S.-aligned local forces, arming and training them and often fighting alongside them. The Oath Keepers, Rhodes told me as we sat in the SUV, have “a Special Forces mission.” I recalled that the Oath Keepers had pushed through the masses at the Capitol in a tactical formation called a “stack,” hands on one another’s shoulders. Though this isn’t a very sophisticated technique, prosecutors alleged that it helped them maneuver through the crowd and some media accounts suggested that it made them more effective than other rioters.

“You no longer have a representative form of government. The election in November was stolen.”

This aspect of the Oath Keepers, however, will also factor into Rhodes’s defense. During a bail hearing in January, one of his attorneys, Phillip Linder, got an FBI agent to acknowledge that the Oath Keepers had brought no illegal firearms into the Capitol and that the FBI had no information to suggest that any of Rhodes’s firearms purchases had been unlawful. In a subsequent filing, Linder and a co-counsel argued that the Oath Keepers who’d entered the Capitol did so after learning that people were hurt and needed help. They used the stack formation, the attorneys wrote, because they “were composed of ex-military, law enforcement and EMS personnel. Their training teaches them the best ways to enter an unknown and/or hostile situation.” Members of one stack, the lawyers continued, referencing unreleased photo and video, then “provided security and escort to overwhelmed Capitol police officers.” Some Oath Keepers and police officers, the attorneys wrote, “were interacting in a cordial and social manner.”

Rhodes was ultimately denied bail and is set to stand trial in July; if convicted, he could be sentenced to more than two decades in prison. (A trial for Oath Keepers charged with lesser offenses was initially scheduled to begin, incredibly, on April 19.) In an interview, Linder told me that a key element of Rhodes’s defense will be “to educate the public in general about who the Oath Keepers really are,” saying the defense would emphasize that “a large part of their work over the years has been charitable in nature.” He mentioned the group’s relief efforts after disasters such as Hurricane Harvey and cast its protection of conservative VIPs and rallygoers in a similar light. He added, of Rhodes’s preparations with the quick reaction teams: “He was waiting to see if the president was going to call them up, and the president never did, so he left. Plain and simple.”

The Special Forces also focus on another aspect of unconventional warfare: the so-called battle for hearts and minds. Whatever the truth of his involvement on January 6, Rhodes has worked for years to bring the ideas of right-wing militancy closer to the center of American conservatism by making that militancy more accessible and helping it reach a wider audience. He contributed to lowering the barrier for entry at a time when the Republican Party, beginning with the tea party, was already shifting toward an embrace of the far right. In the past, joining a militant group typically meant linking up with a specific outfit in a specific place, going to meetings and trainings. With the Oath Keepers, you could do all that if you wanted to, but you could also be a passive member, browsing the forums, paying your low annual dues, and receiving the mailings. Or you didn’t have to join at all. You could just pick up pieces of the ideology — maybe you caught Rhodes in one of his old Facebook posts, or one of his dozens of appearances on InfoWars with Alex Jones, or at a speech he gave at one of those small events with names like “Liberty on Tap,” or at an anti-lockdown rally.

In Wichita Falls, Rhodes pulled into the parking lot of a Walmart and walked inside to buy a whiteboard. An hour later, he was standing in a conference room inside a glistening Harley-Davidson dealership, addressing a few dozen people. Some were skeptical at first. As he spoke, though, they listened intently, at times nodding in unison in their folding chairs. His goal, he said, wasn’t to get them to join the Oath Keepers: “My actual goal is to share what I know about how to organize and strengthen your community.” He drew a pyramid on the whiteboard and started asking questions. What are the fundamental building blocks of a community? Family first — he wrote it at the base of the pyramid — and on top of that come your neighbors, along with their families. He kept asking questions, scribbling as he went. Next come the people in your church, the people in your town, the people in your county. The line for nation seemed very far from those immediate connections, tucked into the pyramid’s peak. It reminded me of the message Rhodes had heard from the retreat leader at the sangha: The people around you were most important. What he was telling these people to do for their community was to arm themselves and organize. This, he said, was part of the genius of what the Founding Fathers had envisioned: “When all of you in the town and the county are the militia, how could anyone violate your rights?”

“We’re walking the same path that they did,” he said, speaking again of the founding generation. “You no longer have a representative form of government. The election in November was stolen.”

One of the most notorious speeches Rhodes ever gave was in May 2015, a month before Trump launched his presidential campaign. At a small event in a pub in Arizona, Rhodes said that John McCain should be “hung from the neck until dead.” He was talking, he likes to note, with a twinkle of mischief in his eye, about forcing the late senator to face his own machine. The context of his remark was McCain’s support for the expansion of the security state throughout the war on terror. (Rhodes had also not forgiven McCain for defeating his political hero, Ron Paul, in the 2008 contest for the Republican presidential nomination.) The longer quote from Rhodes’s speech, which refers to the unlawful enemy combatant doctrine he’d written about at Yale, is that McCain “would deny you the right to trial [by] jury, but we will give him a trial [by] jury, and then after we convict him, he should be hung by the neck until dead.”

While Rhodes may have opposed the constitutional overreach of the war on terror, however, he embraced other aspects of it. He trafficked in overhyped fears about Islamist terrorism in the United States. He warned of a supposed creep of Shariah law into American cities and of the alleged threat of infiltration across the southern border, organizing Oath Keeper patrols to search for undocumented migrants. He sent teams to patrol social justice demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, warning of looting and rioting. And he tied these fears into an overarching vision of a subversive left inherently opposed to the pro-soldier, pro-cop brand of patriotism he was promoting. These views previewed Trumpism and then became part of it — a marriage captured in photos of Rhodes sitting in the front row at a 2019 Trump rally wearing a black-and-gold Oath Keepers baseball cap. Eventually, like Trump and many Republicans, Rhodes was painting Black Lives Matter activists as Marxists, an enemy domestic and foreign at once. In the summer of 2020, he called antifascist and left-wing protesters insurgents and potential terrorists and declared, as many influential conservatives did, that the Trump administration should deploy troops to stop them.

The January 6 movement may have failed to overturn the election, but it is growing, and perhaps in ways its originators never could have imagined.

Each side of America’s political and cultural divide, in the end, retains a significant grasp on the levers of power and is rushing to deploy whatever power it can against the other. It feels impossible to separate this dynamic from the perpetual enmity and moral and legal unmooring that the post-9/11 era has wrought. In his book “Reign of Terror,” the journalist Spencer Ackerman describes the war on terror as “an early red pill” for American society, “releasing an omnidirectional, violent nihilism that viewed itself as the only rational, sophisticated, honorable, and even civilized option.” It engendered a culture, he writes, “of manufactured outrage,” and power worship in disguise: “obedience to authority that convinced itself it was transgressive.”

The January 6 movement is not a challenge to authority; it’s a competing version of it. And although it may have failed to overturn the election, it is growing, and perhaps in ways its originators never imagined. One recent poll found that 47 million Americans believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and 21 million support the idea of removing him from office by force. Several Republicans in Congress have echoed the language of revolution and political violence, and in a resolution last month, the Republican National Committee deemed the House investigation into what happened on January 6 a “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Trump has recently signaled that if he runs in 2024, support for the January 6 movement will be central to his campaign, while also floating the idea of pardons for those who’ve been arrested. The Republican Party is replacing or marginalizing officials across the country who resisted Trump’s efforts to invalidate the vote, and Republican legislatures have advanced laws giving themselves more power to throw out ballots and even to appoint their own electors.

During my visit in June, I put it to Rhodes that if he’d gotten his wish on January 6, he would have become his own worst fear: not a defender against a tyrannical government, but its agent. The kinds of things he had been asking for — calling up irregular forces, canceling elections and organizing new ones — were things that happened in authoritarian regimes, I said.

“Well, that’s what we just had!” he shot back, saying that America was under an authoritarian regime now and had been since the election. “They stole it!”

I reminded him of the message from the sangha. What if Trump was lying about the election? What if that was part of the fake?

He glanced toward the ceiling, as if he were considering this. Then he looked at me again and smiled. “No,” he said. “You’re not pulling the wool over my eyes, man. I’m sorry. Not happening.”

Scenes from inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Photos: Christopher Lee

The night before the one-year anniversary of January 6, I met Rhodes and the Oath Keepers’ chief counsel, a former assistant district attorney named Kellye SoRelle, at a barbecue restaurant outside Dallas. The meal was tense as the pair debated how Rhodes should respond to a congressional subpoena and he fielded calls from lieutenants anxious to know his next move. (Eventually, from jail, Rhodes testified for several hours before the House January 6 committee.) To Rhodes, the would-be revolutionary, his opponents were showing themselves as the enemy he’d always wanted them to be. He saw Big Tech, Wall Street, and even pharmaceutical companies, thanks to Covid-19 vaccines, working in concert with liberals and federal authorities. Many of the war on terror’s Republican standard-bearers — Liz Cheney, the Bush family — had joined them.

At the same time, he admitted that the Oath Keepers had been weakened by the crackdowns. The organization risked withering under the FBI investigation, with its social media presence erased and its fundraising restricted. Rhodes had hoped that January 6 would mark the start of a new struggle in America, and perhaps it had, but for him, it may have also been an ending. It seemed unlikely, meanwhile, that he or anyone else could say for sure where the movement was going. He vowed never again to support Trump and seemed comforted that the former president had recently been booed at one of his own events, thanks to his backing for vaccines. It wasn’t just Trump who’d abandoned Rhodes, though: The Oath Keepers had received no help from any major players on the right, he’d told me earlier in the trip, not even the VIPs they’d been guarding on January 6 and at prior “Stop the Steal” rallies. “What I would tell the guys, if I could go back in time, is that they don’t give a shit about you,” he said. “So let’s not put ourselves at risk.”

As the dinner wore on, he became more distracted by his phone calls and eventually left the table. Thirty minutes later, SoRelle and I stepped outside and found him sitting in his truck under the console light with his phone on speaker, isolated in the blackness of the parking lot. Maybe the revolution didn’t need him anymore, I thought. Maybe it didn’t need anyone at all.

The post Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Has Made His Worst Fears Come True appeared first on The Intercept.

The last ISIS fighters had finally been corralled in March 2019 in a small village called Baghuz, between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border. ISIS made its last stand there, the fighters mixed together with family members and civilians trapped by the conflict as the U.S.-led coalition pummeled the village from the air.

“It’s hard to imagine how anybody can survive,” said CBS News reporter Charlie D’Agata, who watched airstrikes from the ground near Baghuz in March 2019.

In an investigation published last weekend, the New York Times told the story of one those assaults. On March 18, 2019, the U.S. Air Force dropped a 500-pound bomb, followed by two 2,000-pound explosives, on a crowd of women and children near the river in Baghuz.

“Who dropped that?” a Defense Department analyst monitoring a drone typed in a secure chat, according to the Times story.

“We just dropped on 50 women and children,” another analyst responded.

The Times described the airstrike as “one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State.” It came to light only after investigations, including by the independent inspector general and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, had been blocked or buried. 

But this bombing of women and children was not a tragic accident in an otherwise controlled and closely monitored aerial campaign. The bombing was in fact one of the final strikes in a monthslong string of attacks that killed scores of civilians. I know this because I was in touch almost daily with an American who lived through these bombings until he was killed by an airstrike in Baghuz, likely just before the bombing the Times described.

Russell Dennison, who was among the first Americans to join ISIS as a fighter, secretly sent me more than 30 hours of recordings from August 2018 to February 2019. Dennison’s later recordings captured the roar of airstrikes he and his small family witnessed, and Dennison regularly sent me photographs of the aftermath. I tell Dennison’s story, including his descriptions of the U.S.-led coalition’s bombing campaign, in “American ISIS,” an eight-episode Audible Original documentary podcast released in July from The Intercept and Topic Studios.

While the specific bombing the Times described shows that Defense Department officials knew that they’d killed civilians and then made efforts to keep the bombing from public scrutiny, it was clear at the time that the coalition’s campaign was not sparing civilians. “But these bombings were not well covered by the international media at the time,” said Chris Woods, director of the London-based Airwars, which tracks civilian harm in war zones in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The U.S.-led coalition disclosed earlier this year that it estimated at least 1,417 civilians had been killed in airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, though Airwars estimates that number could be more than 13,000.

Syria’s Deir el-Zour province, where Baghuz is located, is a remote part of the world, and ISIS’s control on the ground and the coalition bombs dropping from the air made access to the area nearly impossible for journalists and international monitors. As a result, the full extent of civilian death in the area may never be known.

Dennison may have been the only witness on the ground in Deir el-Zour who documented the bombing campaign in real time. He sent me recordings and pictures following each night’s attacks. What he described and photographed over months in Deir el-Zour suggested that the U.S.-led coalition must have been aware that civilians were perishing in large numbers.

As Dennison recorded one message to me during the bombing campaign, the deafening sounds of an exploding bomb consumed the audio. A few seconds later, Dennison can be heard, speaking into his phone.

“You hear this?” he said me. “You see, this is major American airstrikes.”

“They Were All Killed”

Dennison was a red-bearded, white convert to Islam who crossed into Syria in 2012. He joined ISIS shortly after the group split from Al Qaeda and its previous affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front. Fighting under one of ISIS’s best-known commanders, Abu Yahya al-Iraqi, Dennison helped establish the so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

After a sniper’s bullet to the leg hobbled him, Dennison moved to Raqqa, as the city attracted foreign fighters from around the world. In Raqqa, Dennison married a Syrian woman, with whom he had two daughters. In late 2017, Raqqa fell to the U.S.-led coalition, and Dennison and his wife and children followed other ISIS fighters and their families to Deir el-Zour. During a lull in the bombing campaign through much of 2018, Dennison worked for a secret ISIS unit — first revealed in “American ISIS” — that intercepted communications from militaries operating in the region. Dennison’s job was to listen to the Americans. But by December 2018, Dennison and his family were on the run again, shuffling back and forth between villages in Deir el-Zour as the coalition airstrikes intensified.

That month, Dennison told me that the coalition had intentionally bombed a hospital in Al Shafah. The bombing, according to Dennison, was similar to the one described by the Times: an initial strike followed by two more bombings. “The Americans destroyed this hospital, and they killed everybody inside it,” Dennison told me. “The second floor was full of women nurses who were responsible for the whole hospital, and they were all killed.”

At the time, the Defense Department confirmed to me that this hospital had been bombed, claiming that ISIS fighters were using the area as a staging ground. Dennison also told me that he’d seen hospitals bombed in two other villages, Sousa and Hajin, though the Defense Department would neither confirm nor deny that information at the time. (Rules of war established by the Geneva Conventions require civilian hospitals to be protected from targeting, but those same rules require the opposing force to separate civilian hospitals from military activity.)

In January 2019, as The Intercept reported at the time, the Defense Department abruptly stopped issuing detailed “strike releases” — periodic reports, which had been released since the start of the campaign against ISIS, that provided detailed information about specific bombings. They did so even as coalition bombings in Deir el-Zour increased.

As Dennison and his family moved from village to village, they shared space with other ISIS fighters and their families. In one village, he and his wife and daughters roomed with three other families. That was part of the coalition’s challenge in eastern Syria: ISIS wasn’t a traditional army. Many of the group’s fighters were married and had children, and their families traveled with them. Syrians unrelated to ISIS fighters were packed into the villages as well, leaving no delineation between combatants and civilians. Bombing ISIS fighters in Deir el-Zour meant bombing civilians. So-called collateral damage was guaranteed.

Bombing ISIS fighters in Deir el-Zour meant bombing civilians. So-called collateral damage was guaranteed.

In late 2018, Dennison and his family were trapped in Al Kashmah, a village north of Baghuz, as coalition airstrikes and artillery rained down. The recordings Dennison sent me from the night of December 31, 2018, New Year’s Eve, were filled with the sounds of bombings nearby. “There’s some crazy airstrikes tonight,” Dennison said. “So I hope that me and my family, we live through this night, you know. But this is our life.”

Dennison sent me photos of the destruction from Al Kashmah. The village had been leveled, with large buildings flattened to rubble in the sand. He and his family then headed south, but as the bombings continued, Dennison decided in January to put his wife and children on a bus headed out of ISIS-controlled Syria and to a displaced persons camp run by Kurdish forces.

One early morning, as Dennison and his family prepared to walk through the cold to a waiting bus in Sousa, the coalition bombed the village’s nearby roundabout, Dennison told me. “We could hear the debris and the shrapnel and the rocks and stones fly everywhere,” he recalled. “We were only about 200 meters from this circle.” Although the Defense Department had stopped issuing detailed strike releases by this time, it did acknowledge 645 strikes in Syria around the time of the attack Dennison said he witnessed in Sousa.

Dennison and his family walked past the roundabout to the bus, their weakly charged flashlight cutting through the darkness. As they passed, Dennison could hear a young boy screaming for help. He’d been buried beneath rubble following the airstrike.

Dennison later sent me a photo of the roundabout in Sousa. The buildings surrounding it had been destroyed, leaving piles of concrete, shorn support beams, and a large crater in the ground.

“Resurgence of a New Adversary”

The U.S.-led coalition knew that its bombing and artillery campaign in Deir el-Zour was killing civilians. In February 2019, around the same time that Dennison heard the boy screaming from beneath the rubble, a senior French officer wrote an article in a French military journal criticizing the coalition’s tactics.

Col. François-Régis Legrier, who had been in charge of French artillery in the region, wrote that the coalition relied too heavily on bombings and artillery because the U.S., British, and French militaries were not willing to put soldiers on the ground. “This refusal raises a question: why have an army that we don’t dare use?” Legrier asked in his article.

“Why have an army that we don’t dare use?”

The bombardment of the packed villages resulted in significant civilian casualties, Legrier alleged. “We have massively destroyed the infrastructure and given the population a disgusting image of what may be a Western-style liberation leaving behind the seeds of an imminent resurgence of a new adversary.”

Dennison never knew of Legrier or his article, but he told me something similar. He said that he likely wouldn’t survive and that ISIS might fail, but the children who lived through the bombing campaign would remember who was responsible. “People would be saddened to see the reality of what the U.S. is doing in the name of America and Western democratic freedoms and these other types of values,” Dennison told me.

My last communication with Dennison was in February 2019. He was trapped in Baghuz, the fighting all around him. In his final message to me, he described seeing a bus filled with women and children bombed as it tried to leave ISIS-controlled territory. “They don’t put two per seat. These people pack on everywhere in the Middle East, as many as they can,” Russell said. “So we’re talking 50 to 60 people.”

The women and children on the bus were trying to escape, Dennison told me. The ISIS caliphate was about to collapse under the coalition airstrikes. “This bus was targeted by U.S. warplanes and killed everybody inside, and I personally I saw this myself,” Dennison said.

I could not independently verify Dennison’s account of the bus being bombed, and for that reason, I did not include it in “American ISIS.” But Dennison’s story was similar to the bombing in Baghuz that the Times investigated.

Dennison died in an airstrike in Baghuz not long after sending me that recording about the bus. I don’t know exactly when he died, but it was likely in late February or early March, just before the U.S. dropped a bomb on a crowd of 50 women and children in Baghuz and an analyst monitoring the drone footage posed an urgent question: “Who dropped that?”

Correction: November 29, 2021
This article has been adjusted to clarify that the Pentagon has acknowledged at least 1,417 civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria, while Airwars estimates that the number of deaths could be more than 13,000.

The post The U.S.-Led Bombings That Ended the ISIS “Caliphate” Killed Scores of Civilians appeared first on The Intercept.

That’s what Tareena Shakil, the first British woman to be prosecuted and convicted for joining the Islamic State, tells filmmaker Abigail Carr in Shakil’s first interview since a British jury convicted her of joining ISIS and encouraging terrorism in 2016. Shakil’s interview was part of “Tareena: Return from ISIS,” a one-hour film that aired Sunday in the United Kingdom on ITV’s current affairs program “Exposure.”

I’d been waiting a long time to hear Shakil tell her story. I spent much of the last three years working on a podcast about the man to whom Shakil was briefly married during her time in Syria: Russell Dennison, an American convert to Islam who joined ISIS as a fighter. Dennison is the subject of “American ISIS,” an eight-part Audible Original documentary podcast released in July from The Intercept and Topic Studios. Dennison secretly communicated with me for months from ISIS-controlled Syria, sending more than 30 hours of recordings about his life and his time with ISIS, until he died in an airstrike in eastern Syria as the so-called caliphate was collapsing.

Dennison was remarkably candid in his recordings, but there was one subject he was reluctant to discuss in detail: his first wife in Syria. Dennison had been shot in the leg during an ISIS battle, leaving him with a pronounced limp. The injury prevented him from being an effective fighter, so in 2014 he settled down in Raqqa and visited a matchmaker in a house filled with dozens of single women waiting to be married. Dennison wanted a Syrian wife, but the ISIS matchmaker preferred to arrange marriages between foreign men and foreign women. He suggested to Dennison a young British woman who’d come to Syria with her 1-year-old son.

“We sit down. I talked to her maybe 15 minutes,” Dennison told me, in a story that’s described in the sixth episode of the podcast. “After that, the person says, ‘I’m busy. You have to go.’ He takes you outside. He asks you, ‘What’s it gonna be? Yes or no?’ Just like that. You see the woman’s face for maybe 10 seconds. You talk to her maybe 20 minutes, and then they ask you if you want to marry. You don’t know who this woman is, where she is from, what her background is — you don’t know anything. So I did this interview twice, and then we just accepted to get married.”

But Dennison told me the marriage didn’t last. “This girl, she just rushed into coming to Syria. When she came, she missed her mother, and she wanted to go back to Britain,” he explained. “And you know, some of these sisters, they do that — they talk to men online. They get excited. They see these Islamic State videos, and they just leave everything, and then they come, they see there’s bombings, there’s killing, there’s war, and they can never go back. So this woman ended up returning back to Britain. There’s nothing else really to say about her.”

Dennison, who later married a Syrian woman and had two daughters with her, never told me the name of his previous wife. After his death, I met with one of his family members in the United States. She asked me not to use her name since she didn’t want to be associated publicly with Dennison. She said the FBI had interviewed her, and agents told her the name of Dennison’s first wife in Syria: Tareena Shakil. Through additional reporting, I was able to confirm that information.

Shakil wasn’t a little-known woman who’d quietly gone to Syria and returned to the U.K. without fanfare. She had become one of the world’s best-known ISIS brides, and now she’s talking for the first time.

Journey to ISIS

Early in “Tareena: Return from ISIS,” Shakil and her social worker, Mike Jervis, are in an apartment in Birmingham, England. Shakil’s dark brown hair is long and uncovered, and she’s wearing a black shirt that exposes her neck and collarbones. Jervis shows Shakil a photograph of her, taken in Syria, wearing a burqa and posing next to an AK-47 assault rifle. It was an image that had been printed in newspapers and splashed across screens throughout the United Kingdom.

“So who was that woman?” Jervis asks Shakil.

“Right there, that is someone who’s just lost her way in life, found a very wrong, like, wrong path, and is someone who just needs help,” Shakil answers.

This appears to be the reason Shakil cooperated with the British filmmakers — to make the case to Britons that she’s now a different person from the one who joined ISIS and posed for that photograph. But Shakil still isn’t willing to take full responsibility for what happened. When the filmmakers confront her with conflicting information, she deflects or provides disappointingly vague answers.

Shakil explains that her journey to ISIS started as a result of her first husband, a conservative Muslim who expected her to dress modestly and refrain from using social media. “It wasn’t a particularly happy marriage,” Shakil says.

Shortly after their son’s birth, Shakil’s husband traveled to Yemen. He allegedly threatened to stay there, marry another woman, and establish a new life. Shakil started communicating on Facebook with a handsome Portuguese man named Fábio Poças, who was an ISIS fighter in Syria. “Yeah, he was attractive,” Shakil admits. Within weeks of meeting Poças online, Shakil posted an ISIS flag on her Twitter and Facebook profiles. She then traveled with her toddler son to Turkey. After arriving at a city near the Syrian border, she called a phone number Poças had given her. A van took her and her son to a deserted patch of land along the border. She was told to run to a white truck waiting on the Syrian side. “That was the first time that I’d seen, in real life, the black flag,” Shakil remembers.

Shakil admits that before crossing into Syria, she was aware of ISIS’s brutality and the group’s propaganda videos showing the beheadings of American journalists and British aid workers. “It’s not something I’m happy about now, looking back,” she explains. “But at the time, the only thing I can say is that, you know, I was far from the best version of myself at that time.”

In Syria, Shakil texted her family and told them that she’d joined ISIS. Her family went to the police. Soon Shakil’s picture was on the front page of The Sun, a British tabloid. “The Only Way Is ISIS,” a large headline read. Overnight, Shakil had become infamous.

Shakil has long maintained — and argued at her criminal trial — that she did not go to Syria expecting to join ISIS or marry a fighter. But evidence uncovered by British investigators suggests otherwise. Among the material she read before leaving for Syria was a blog written by a Scottish ISIS bride who described how single women arriving in Syria would be expected to marry jihadis.

In Raqqa, Shakil told the filmmakers, she was taken to a house for single women that was run by a Saudi couple. “I’m here until I get married,” Shakil wrote in a text message to a family member in England. “I had a meeting yesterday with an American, so we will see.”

An “Arrangement”

In another text message to a relative in England, Shakil described the American she’d met through the Saudi matchmaker. “He walks with a limp,” she told the relative at the time.

In the recordings he sent to me, Dennison described how ISIS officials provided him and Shakil with a new apartment after they married. Although Shakil did not admit at trial or in her interview with ITV that she lived with Dennison, she sent text messages from Syria in December 2014 that suggested she did.

“I have my own house now,” she wrote in one message.

“I’m so happy now,” she texted in another message. “My new house is lovely.”

When I was reporting “American ISIS,” I contacted Shakil. She declined to talk to me due to parole terms at the time that prohibited her from speaking to journalists. (Shakil served three years in prison and three years of parole.) I provided photographs of Dennison to someone who could show them to Shakil. That person confirmed that Dennison was the American Shakil described in her text messages from Syria and confirmed a detail only Shakil could have known: that Dennison, who had a long red beard, was dying his beard black when she knew him in Raqqa.

From that confirmation, I revealed in “American ISIS” that Shakil had been married to Dennison. In her trial, and in a previous interview she did with the ITV filmmakers in 2018, Shakil suggested that she had never married or lived with an ISIS fighter in Raqqa and did not name Dennison. The ITV filmmakers contacted me in September, and I told them what Dennison had said about his relationship with Shakil and how I’d confirmed that Shakil was Dennison’s first wife in Syria.

The filmmakers then asked Shakil about Dennison and my reporting.

“The only thing that I will say — I don’t want to go into too much — but I will say … I know who this guy is,” Shakil told the filmmakers, referring to Dennison. “There was an arrangement in place. And I don’t want to say anything more than that. But what I will say is that a lot of things that may have happened in Syria were not of my own choice or were not things that I wanted to do. And there’s many things that happened that were not what I wanted to have happened.”

Shakil was only in ISIS-controlled Syria for a few months, and she now says that everything she did there was in an effort to stay alive. She told the filmmakers she escaped Syria by taking a bus with her son out of Raqqa, then a taxi to a spot close to the border, where she ran, with her son in her arms, to Turkish soldiers on the other side. “You need to help me,” she told the soldiers.

The post British Wife of American ISIS Fighter Russell Dennison Dodges Questions About Union appeared first on The Intercept.

But in the hectic, violent weeks between the Taliban victory and the U.S. military withdrawal, fighters belonging to a Zero unit known as 01 — and other linked militias known collectively as National Strike Units, or NSUs — helped the Americans secure Hamid Karzai International Airport. Firing warning shots day and night, 01 fighters sought to corral and search crowds of Afghans and foreigners trying to enter the airport to board evacuation flights, much as Taliban fighters struggled to maintain control at other airport entrances around the same time.

One evening in late August, an Afghan 01 commander whose fighters were guarding the airport’s northwestern gate asked an Intercept journalist taking photographs to identify himself to the fighter’s American handler. The handler, who was wearing a baseball cap and had a pistol strapped to his waist, suggested that if the journalist wanted to leave on an evacuation flight, he should do so immediately. Soon, the man said, he’d be evacuating “my guys,” referring to the 01 fighters. After that, the gate would be closed for good. The American then turned to the 01 commander and explained the value placed on a free press by citizens of the country to which he and his fighters would soon be flown.

The CIA prioritized the evacuation of Zero unit members from Afghanistan, flying out as many as 7,000 of the former commandos and their relatives even as thousands of vulnerable former U.S. government and military employees, human rights activists, and aid workers were left behind. NSU commandos refused to allow a former U.S. government interpreter through the airport gates unless she gave them $5,000 each for herself, her husband, and their three children, Al Jazeera reported. The woman, who said she and her relatives were beaten by NSU members at the airport, could not afford the bribe. Two former members of a different U.S.-trained military unit, the Afghan National Army’s KKA, or Afghan Special Unit, told The Intercept from a safe house in Kabul that no formal effort was made to evacuate them and that unit members who were able to board flights did so through personal connections. The two former members themselves had been turned away by 01 militiamen after approaching the airport’s northwestern gate. Since then, they said, at least four KKA members have been tracked down by Taliban fighters and killed.

The CIA’s ability to evacuate its allies appears to have far outstripped that of other U.S. government entities and signals its pivotal role in the war. The agency evacuated as many as 20,000 Afghan “partners” and their relatives, the Washington Post reported, nearly one-third of the 60,000 Afghans the U.S. has taken in overall. The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

Most coverage of the CIA’s efforts has been laudatory. But the Zero units were known for deadly night raids that killed an untold number of civilians across Afghanistan. The Intercept documented 10 raids conducted by 01 in Wardak Province, southwest of Kabul, in which at least 51 civilians, including children, were killed — many at close range, in execution-style assaults. Most 01 missions were led by a small number of CIA “advisers,” as their Afghan fighters knew them, or U.S. special forces borrowed from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command.

“The U.S. should not be offering safe haven to those who committed war crimes or serious human rights abuses,” said Patricia Gossman, associate director for the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, who wrote a report on the units’ abuses. “In Afghanistan, these forces were never held accountable for their actions, which included summary executions and other abuses. The U.S. and any other countries resettling members of these units should screen arrivals and investigate any for their possible involvement in human rights violations.”

Most of the Zero unit members were flown to Qatar, where CIA paramilitary officers worked to get their former Afghan colleagues sent to the U.S., according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge of the operation. The former Afghan commandos are being housed on U.S. military bases, including two in Virginia and New Jersey, and at Ramstein Air Base in Germany while they await resettlement, according to the former senior U.S. official, two former senior Afghan intelligence officials, and a former commando from a different Afghan unit who was evacuated to the same U.S. base as some Zero unit members. Another small group of Zero unit members is in the United Arab Emirates, but they are expected to come to the U.S. within weeks, one of the former Afghan officials told The Intercept. Both former Afghan officials said they have spoken with relatives who previously belonged to the Zero units and are now in the United States.

Once known within the U.S. government as the Mohawks, Zero units started as an irregular commando force controlled by the CIA. The intelligence agency trained the teams to serve as guerrilla fighters out of small U.S. outposts, mainly in the north and east of the country, near the Pakistan border. Much of the original purpose of the program was to enable the CIA to conduct cross-border raids into Pakistan, a politically fraught and rarely approved activity for U.S. personnel.

The Zero units allowed the U.S. to conduct deniable operations and avoid accountability and were similar in some respects to the CIA’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War. For that program, the agency created Provincial Reconnaissance Units comprised mostly of South Vietnamese guerrillas led by American commanders. Like the Afghan Zero units, the PRUs gathered intelligence and assassinated suspected Viet Cong.

In 2010, the Afghan government signed an agreement with the CIA to turn the NSUs into a joint program with Afghanistan’s former intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, according to the two former senior Afghan officials, who were involved in the arrangement. While the missions would be jointly run, the units continued to be funded exclusively by the U.S. government, the two former Afghan officials told The Intercept. The change allowed the CIA to claim plausible deniability against accusations of human rights abuses or war crimes.

But in 2019, Afghanistan’s most senior defense official, then-Afghan national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib, told The Intercept that 01 was controlled by the CIA. “Quite frankly, I’m not fully aware … of how they work,” he said at the time. “We’ve asked for clarification on how these operations happen, who are involved, what are the structures of this. When they were set up, why are they not in Afghan control?”

Just after President Joe Biden took office in January, the CIA gave the NDS one year’s budget and said the agency would no longer support Zero units or continue funding them, one of the former Afghan intelligence officials told The Intercept.

Eagle Base, the sprawling CIA and 01 compound on a hillside northeast of Kabul, used to be off-limits to all but America’s closest allies.

From the highway, passersby could see a shooting range cut into the side of the hill and a narrow road snaking up to a cluster of beige structures. Less visible was the complex of helicopter hangars, ammunition depots, and barracks as well as the former CIA black site known as the Salt Pit, where interrogations and torture were carried out in the earliest years of the war.

Perimeter security was extreme, even by Afghanistan’s standards. A ditch ringed an earthen wall 6 feet high. Next came concertina wire, faded red bollards linked by steel cables, and a 10-foot mud and concrete wall topped with more concertina wire, with elevated guard posts every 300 feet. Floodlights illuminated the entire circumference at night.

Before 2019, 01 fighters left Eagle Base in vehicle convoys for nighttime missions. That changed when convoys on two Wardak missions were ambushed, according to a former NDS counterterrorism officer who used to accompany 01 on raids in the province. Thereafter, almost all 01 missions were flown into Wardak aboard American Chinook helicopters. Residents living near Eagle Base told The Intercept in 2019 that they heard the distinct thwap of the dual-rotor helicopters several times a week, departing early in the evening and returning before dawn. Otherwise, 01 fighters were rarely seen.

But the Taliban knew who occupied Eagle Base. On July 25, 2019, a suicide car bomb targeted CIA officers traveling in unmarked Toyota Land Cruisers arriving at the gate, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said in an interview that year. Local residents confirmed that a bombing took place against white Land Cruisers at the compound gate that day. The incident attracted little media attention. A spokesperson from Resolute Support, the now-defunct U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, told The Intercept that he was unaware of any foreign military casualties in Kabul that day. The CIA declined to comment.

Taliban fighters have occupied the expansive facility since parts of it were destroyed by fire and explosives in the final days of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August. In early September, a week after the last U.S. military aircraft had departed Kabul, Taliban fighters clad in a darker version of fatigues with the same tiger-stripe pattern worn by 01 escorted journalists through the ruins of Eagle Base, leading them through areas they said had been cleared of land mines and booby traps left by the Americans and their Afghan partners.

The fighters were from the Taliban’s “Badr” 313 Brigade, an elite commando unit named for the Battle of Badr 1,400 years ago, when the Prophet Mohammad is said to have overcome enemy forces with just 313 men. They were led by an English-speaking Taliban member in his 40s wearing traditional clothes, sunglasses, and a surgical mask.

Nearly two weeks earlier, at dusk on August 26, a suicide attack at the airport and subsequent gunfire had killed about 170, including 13 U.S. service members. Kabul residents were on edge. When another huge explosion was heard across the city before midnight, many feared that there had been a second deadly attack. But that explosion was a controlled detonation, one of several that destroyed ammunition depots, armories, and vehicles as well as various facilities inside Eagle Base that the CIA didn’t want to leave for the Taliban once the agency finally abandoned it. Brian Castner, Amnesty International’s senior crisis adviser for arms and military operations and a former U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer, said The Intercept’s photos from the site suggested “a very hasty and messy withdrawal.”

Constellations of bullets, mortars, and grenades littered the charred foundations of ammunition depots destroyed by fire. In the burned-out shell of what appeared to be an armory, the barrels of Kalashnikovs, belt-fed PKM and DShK machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and mortar tubes lay in piles like pick-up sticks.

Inside a dormitory building, the Zero units’ trademark tiger-stripe uniforms hung from hooks and littered the floor. In a steel locker, amid the discarded packaging of tactical gadgets and passport photos of a young family, a military patch in the shape of a pentagon read “The Shield & Swords of Afg, NSU (01).”

The post The CIA’s Afghan Proxies, Accused of War Crimes, Will Get a Fresh Start in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.