Private Emails Reveal
ex-Clinton Aide’s Secret Spy Network
Jeff Gerth, ProPublica, and Sam Biddle,
GawkerMarch 27,
2015 "ICH"
- "Raw
Story" - Starting
weeks before Islamic militants attacked the
U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya,
longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney
Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered
by a secret network that included a former
CIA clandestine service officer, according
to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account.
The emails, which were
posted on the internet in 2013, also
show that Blumenthal and another close
Clinton associate discussed contracting with
a retired Army special operations commander
to put operatives on the ground near the
Libya-Tunisia border while Libya’s civil war
raged in 2011.
Blumenthal’s emails to
Clinton, which were directed to her private
email account, include at least a dozen
detailed reports on events on the
deteriorating political and security climate
in Libya as well as events in other nations.
They came to light after a hacker broke into
Blumenthal’s account and have taken on new
significance in light of the disclosure that
she conducted State Department and personal
business exclusively over an email server
that she controlled and kept secret from
State Department officials and which only
recently was discovered by congressional
investigators.
The contents of that
account are now being sought by a
congressional inquiry into the Benghazi
attacks. Clinton has handed over more than
30,000 pages of her emails to the State
Department, after unilaterally deciding
which ones involved government business; the
State Department has so far handed almost
900 pages of those over to the committee. A
Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica
(which are collaborating on this story) that
she has turned over all the emails
Blumenthal sent to Clinton.
The dispatches from
Blumenthal to Clinton’s private email
address were posted online after
Blumenthal’s account was hacked in 2013 by
Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went
by the name Guccifer. Lazar also broke into
accounts belonging to George W. Bush’s
sister, Colin Powell, and others. He’s now
serving a seven-year sentence in his home
country and was charged in a U.S. indictment
last year.
The contents of the memos,
which
have recently become the subject of
speculation in the right-wing media,
raise new questions about how Clinton used
her private email account and whether she
tapped into an undisclosed back channel for
information on Libya’s crisis and other
foreign policy matters.
Blumenthal, a New Yorker
staff writer in the 1990s, became a top aide
to President Bill Clinton and worked closely
with Hillary Clinton during the fallout from
the Whitewater investigation into the
Clinton family. She tried to hire him when
she joined President Obama’s cabinet in
2009, but White House Chief of Staff Rahm
Emanuel
reportedly nixed the idea on the grounds
Blumenthal was a divisive figure whose
attacks on Obama during the Democratic
primary had poisoned his relationship with
the new administration.
It’s unclear who tasked
Blumenthal, known for his fierce loyalty to
the Clintons, with preparing detailed
intelligence briefs. It’s also not known who
was paying him, or where the operation got
its money. The memos were marked
“confidential” and relied in many cases on
“sensitive” sources in the Libyan opposition
and Western intelligence and security
services. Other reports focused on Egypt,
Germany, and Turkey.
Indeed, though they were
sent under Blumenthal’s name, the reports
appear to have been gathered and prepared by
Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the
CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who left
the agency in 2005. Since then, he has
established a consulting firm called Tyler
Drumheller, LLC. He has also been affiliated
with a firm called DMC Worldwide, which he
co-founded with Washington, D.C., attorney
Danny Murray and former general counsel to
the U.S. Capitol Police John Caulfield.
DMC Worldwide’s now-defunct website
describes it at as offering “innovative
security and intelligence solutions to
global risks in a changing world.”
In one exchange in March
2013, Blumenthal emailed Drumheller,
“Thanks. Can you send Libya report.”
Drumheller replied, “Here it is, pls do not
share it with Cody. I don’t want moin
speculating on sources. It is on the Maghreb
and Libya.” Cody is Cody Shearer, a longtime
Clinton family operative—his brother was an
ambassador under Bill Clinton and his
now-deceased sister is married to Clinton
State Department official Strobe Talbott—who
was in close contact with Blumenthal. While
it’s not entirely clear from the documents,
“Moin” may refer to the nickname of Mohamed
Mansour El Kikhia, a member of the Kikhia
family, a prominent Libyan clan with ties to
the Libyan National Transition Council. (An
email address in Blumenthal’s address book,
which was also leaked, was
associated with his Facebook page.)
There’s no indication in
Blumenthal’s emails whether Clinton read or
replied to them before she left State on
February 1, 2013, but he was clearly part of
a select group with knowledge of the private
clintonemail.com address, which was unknown
to the public until
Gawker published it this year.
They do suggest that she interacted with
Blumenthal using the account after she
stepped down. “H: got your message a few
days ago,” reads the subject line of one
email from Blumenthal to Clinton on February
8, 2013; “H: fyi, will continue to send
relevant intel,” reads another.
The memos cover a wide
array of subjects in extreme detail, from
German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s
conversations with her finance minister
about French president Francois
Hollande–marked “THIS INFORMATION COMES FROM
AN EXTREMELY SENSITIVE SOURCE”—to the
composition of the newly elected South
Korean president’s transition team. At least
10 of the memos deal in whole or in part
with internal Libyan politics and the
government’s fight against militants,
including the status of the Libyan oil
industry and the prospects for Western
companies to participate.
One memo was sent on
August 23, 2012, less than three weeks
before Islamic militants stormed the
diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. It cites “an
extremely sensitive source” who highlighted
a string of bombings and kidnappings of
foreign diplomats and aid workers in
Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, suggesting
they were the work of people loyal to late
Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi.
While the memo doesn’t
rise to the level of a warning about the
safety of U.S. diplomats, it portrays a
deteriorating security climate. Clinton
noted a few days after the Benghazi attack,
which left four dead and 10 people injured,
that U.S. intelligence officials didn’t have
advance knowledge of the threat.
On September 12, 2012, the
day after the Benghazi attack, Blumenthal
sent a memo that cited a “sensitive source”
saying that the interim Libyan president,
Mohammed Yussef el Magariaf, was told by a
senior security officer that the assault was
inspired by an anti-Muslim video made in the
U.S., as well as by allegations from
Magariaf’s political opponents that he had
CIA ties.
Blumenthal followed up the
next day with an email titled “Re: More
Magariaf private reax.” It said Libyan
security officials believed an Islamist
radical group called the Ansa al Sharia
brigade had prepared the attack a month in
advance and “took advantage of the cover”
provided by the demonstrations against the
video.
An October 25, 2012 memo
says that Magariaf and the Libyan army chief
of staff agree that the “situation in the
country is becoming increasingly dangerous
and unmanageable” and “far worse” than
Western leaders realize.
Blumenthal’s email
warnings, of course, followed a year of
Libyan hawkishness on the part of Clinton.
In February of 2011, she told the UN Human
Rights Council in Geneva that "it is time
for Gaddafi to go.” The next month, after
having described Russian reluctance over
military intervention as “despicable,”
Clinton met with rebel leaders in Paris and
drummed up support for a no-fly zone while
in Cairo. On March 17, 2011, the UN Security
Council voted to back Libyan rebels against
Gaddafi.
It’s this buildup, which
Clinton still proudly recalled in her 2014
memoir, that Blumenthal
appears to join in on 2011. In addition to
the intel memos, his emails also disclose
that he and his associates worked to help
the Libyan opposition, and even plotted to
insert operatives on the ground using a
private contractor.
A May 14, 2011 email
exchange between Blumenthal and Shearer
shows that they were negotiating with
Drumheller to contract with someone referred
to as “Grange” and “the general” to place
send four operatives on a week-long mission
to Tunis, Tunisia, and “to the border and
back.” Tunisia borders Libya and Algeria.
“Sid, you are doing great
work on this,” Drumheller wrote to
Blumenthal. “It is going to be around
$60,000, coverting r/t business class
airfare to Tunis, travel in country to the
border and back, and other expenses for 7–10
days for 4 guys.”
After Blumenthal forwarded
that note to Shearer, he wrote back
questioning the cost of the operation. “Sid,
do you think the general has to send four
guys. He told us three guys yesterday, a
translator and two other guys. I understand
the difficulty of the mission and realize
that K will be repaid but I am going to need
an itemized budget for these guys.”
“The general” and “Grange”
appear to refer to David L. Grange, a major
general in the Army who ran a secret
Pentagon special operations unit before
retiring in 1999. Grange subsequently
founded
Osprey Global Solutions, a consulting
firm and government contractor that offers
logistics, intelligence, security training,
armament sales, and other services. The
Osprey Foundation, which is a nonprofit arm
of Osprey Global Solutions, is listed as one
of the State Department’s “global partners”
in a
2014 report from the Office of Global
Partnerships.’
Among the documents in the
cache released by Lazar is an August 24,
2011, memorandum of understanding between
Osprey Global Solutions and the Libyan
National Transition Council—the entity that
took control in the wake of Qadaffi’s
execution—agreeing that Osprey will contract
with the NTC to “assist in the resumption of
access to its assets and operations in
country” and train Libyan forces in
intelligence, weaponry, and “rule-of-land
warfare.” The document refers to meetings
held in Amman, Jordan between
representatives of Osprey and a Mohammad
Kikhia, who represented the National
Transition Council.
Five months later,
according to a document in the leak, Grange
wrote on Osprey Global letterhead to
Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro,
introducing Osprey as a contractor eager to
provide humanitarian and other assistance in
Libya. “We are keen to support the people of
Libya under the sponsorship of the Ministry
of Finance and the Libyan Stock Exchange,”
Grange wrote. Shapiro is a longtime Clinton
loyalist; he served on her Senate staff as
foreign policy advisor.
Another document in the
cache, titled “Letter_for_Moin,” is an
appeal from Drumheller to then-Libyan Prime
Minister Ali Zeidan offering the services of
Tyler Drumheller LLC, “to develop a program
that will provide discreet confidential
information allowing the appropriate
entities in Libya to address any regional
and international challenges.”
The “K” who was, according
to Shearer’s email, to be “repaid” for his
role in the Tunisia operation appears to be
someone named
Khalifa al Sherif, who sent Blumenthal
several emails containing up-to-the-minute
information on the civil war in Libya, and
appears to have been cited as a source in
several of the reports.
Contacted by ProPublica
and Gawker, Drumheller’s attorney and
business partner Danny Murray confirmed that
Drumheller “worked” with Blumenthal and was
aware of the hacked emails, but declined to
comment further.
Shearer said only that
"the FBI is involved and told me not to
talk. There is a massive investigation of
the hack and all the resulting information.”
The FBI didn’t immediately respond to a
request for comment.
Blumenthal, Grange, and
Kikhia all did not respond to repeated
attempts to reach them. Nick Merrill, a
spokesman for Clinton had no comment on
Blumenthal’s activities with Drumheller.
Whatever Blumenthal,
Shearer, Drumheller, and Grange were up to
in 2011, 2012, and 2013 on Clinton’s behalf,
it appears that she could have used the
help: According to State Department
personnel directories, in 2011 and 2012—the
height of the Libya crisis—State didn’t have
a Libyan desk officer, and the entire Near
Eastern Magreb Bureau, which which covers
Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya, had
just two staffers. Today, State has three
Libyan desk officers and 11 people in the
Near Eastern Magreb Bureau.
Reached for comment, a
State Department public affairs official who
would only speak on background declined to
address questions about Blumenthal’s
relationship to Clinton, whether she was
aware of the intelligence network, and who
if anyone was paying Blumenthal. Asked about
the Tunisia-Libya mission, the official
replied, “There was a trip with the
secretary in October of 2011, but there was
also a congressional delegation in April,
2011. There were media reports about both of
these at the time." Neither trip involved
travelling via Tunis.
See also
Gowdy: Clinton wiped
email server clean, deleted all emails:
Hillary Rodham Clinton wiped her email
server "clean," permanently deleting all
emails from it, the Republican chairman of a
House committee investigating the 2012
Benghazi attacks said Friday.