Reuters recently published new reporting on the story of one of the worst U.S. intelligence failures in decades. From approximately 2010 to 2013, dozens of CIA informants in China, Iran, and elsewhere were rounded up and executed, jailed, or flipped to double agents. In Iran and China, almost the entirety of the CIA’s network in two of its top-priority countries are reported to have been exposed.
Some in the U.S. government seemed to try to pin much of the blame on a betrayal by CIA officer Jerry Lee, who was later prosecuted and pleaded guilty to spying on behalf of the Chinese government. But Lee’s alleged espionage could not account for all the sources blown.
In a series of articles published by the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Yahoo! News, another explanation emerged: an astonishing laxity of source protection at the CIA itself. The reporting outlined several lapses in basic tradecraft (which included sending new recruits to meet at locations known to be under close foreign surveillance), but most catastrophic was the (not so) secret communications system the CIA used with these sources. Even if there had not been a mole, it seems hard to believe that the slapdash system could have long evaded the sophisticated counter-intelligence capabilities of the Chinese and Iranian governments.
Essentially, the CIA had set up a system to embed a messaging function hidden in the search box of hundreds of cheaply produced fake websites. The word “hidden” should be used loosely here — the new Reuters reporting found more than three hundred of the sites and showed that a cursory look at their publicly available HTML source code revealed labels such as “message,” “compose,” and “password.” And because the agency purchased the domain names in bulk, the websites were assigned sequential IP addresses — making it almost trivially easy to identify the whole network once a few were discovered.
In other words, simply entering the correct operators into a Google search might have led to dozens of informants rounded up and executed. This level of sloppiness is deeply shocking and inexcusable for a spy service with the resources and expertise available to the CIA. But there are additional layers of hypocrisy and bitter irony that have been less discussed.
This episode coincided with the Department of Justice ramping up its war on whistleblowers. The government used “sources and methods” as a cudgel in these unprecedented Espionage Act prosecutions: they claimed to assign the gravest weight to the protection of sources — so much so that no concern of public interest, no matter how great, could ever be weighed against the secrecy. But those sources were treated as utterly disposable: the agency couldn’t even be bothered to obscure the HTML on its communications system.
In a pattern common to the intelligence community’s most catastrophic self-owns, no one seems to have yet been held accountable. Well, except one person. As you may have guessed, there was a whistleblower. In 2008, a CIA contractor named John Reidy started sounding the alarm through internal channels that these grave flaws in the system were a ticking time bomb. Reidy was fired in retaliation, and his complaint to the Inspector General went uninvestigated until well after dozens of informants had already been jailed or killed. As Reidy tried to fight the retaliation, the government even prohibited him from telling his own attorney anything about the nature of his disclosures.
At the same time when the CIA’s carelessness was burning its own assets, it became fashionable for the critics of whistleblowers who went public to condemn them for not sticking to “internal channels.” Those channels didn’t do much for John Reidy, or for the scores of intelligence sources he tried to save.
The cruel irony would surely not be lost on former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who became a whistleblower when he discussed the CIA’s torture program in a media interview at a time when the CIA was still denying it. Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison after pleading guilty to inadvertently confirming the name of one CIA officer to a journalist — even though the journalist never published the name.
Again, it’s worth stating clearly: it was not the leaks of conscientious whistleblowers that caused the sky to fall, but the intelligence community’s own chronic mismanagement, virtually guaranteed by the very secrecy it always claims to need to protect those sources.
William Neuheisel is a human rights and civil liberties advocate with the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program at ExposeFacts, which has represented Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, and other whistleblowers criminally investigated or charged under the Espionage Act.
Top photo credit: President Donald Trump speaks with members of the media at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on Sunday, September 7, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
President Donald Trump told reporters outside a Washington restaurant Tuesday evening that he is deeply displeased with Israel’s bombardment of Qatar, a close U.S. partner in the Persian Gulf that, at Washington’s request, has hosted Hamas’s political leadership since 2012.
“I am not thrilled about it. I am not thrilled about the whole situation,” Trump said, denying that Israel had given him advance notice. “I was very unhappy about it, very unhappy about every aspect of it,” he continued. “We’ve got to get the hostages back. But I was very unhappy with the way that went down.”
Trump may indeed be upset, but the Israeli Prime Minister is casting him in the same light as Biden: issuing indignant statements over Israeli actions that blatantly undermine U.S. interests, actions that almost certainly could not have occurred without Washington’s tacit consent, while offering no hint that Israel will face consequences for allegedly defying the United States.
To make matters worse, Qatar’s foreign minister revealed that Washington’s so-called warning came not before the Israeli strike, but only after Doha was already under fire.
“The attack happened at 3:46,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Jassim Al Thani said. “The first call we had from an American official was at 3:56 — which is 10 minutes after the attack.”
Whether Washington knew of Israel’s war plans, colluded in them, or whether Trump is truthful in claiming ignorance, the outcome is the same: Israel has dealt a severe blow to American credibility.
What value does an American security umbrella—or even the hosting of a U.S. base—hold if the United States either conspires in an attack against you, or proves unwilling or unable to prevent one?
That is the question now confronting every U.S. partner in the Persian Gulf, all of whom have staked their survival on American protection. Given how Washington has stripped away every meaningful constraint on Israel since October 7, 2023, their leaders should have known this day was inevitable.
Personally, I do not believe the United States should extend security guarantees — implicit or explicit — to any state in the Middle East. The region is no longer vital to U.S. interests, and America is already dangerously overextended. Existing commitments should be reassessed and, where necessary, rolled back. But this must be done deliberately and on Washington’s terms — not sabotaged by Israel — because the point of the exercise goal is to strengthen the credibility of America’s essential commitments, not to erode U.S. credibility across the board.
Adding insult to injury, Israel has undercut not only the credibility of America’s security guarantees but also its diplomatic standing. This marks the second time this year that Israel has exploited the cover of U.S.-led diplomacy to launch unlawful military action — the first being its strike on Iran in the midst of nuclear talks in June.
Israel may see clear advantages in eroding the credibility of American diplomacy. An America unable to negotiate is an America forced to follow Israel’s lead into reckless military adventures that run counter to U.S. interests. For Washington, this is nothing short of disastrous.
The question now is how Trump will respond. If his claim is true — that he neither received a heads-up nor colluded with Israel — then expressions of displeasure are meaningless unless paired with real consequences for Israel’s repeated sabotage of U.S. interests.
Since late May, Trump has capitulated to Netanyahu on virtually every front — from Iran to Gaza to Lebanon — consistently at America’s expense. This humiliating deference has only emboldened Netanyahu, making him ever more dismissive of Trump and U.S. priorities, culminating in the brazen strike on Doha.
Perhaps this episode will force Trump to recognize the folly of outsourcing American policy in the Middle East to Israel. Only he has the power to reverse course.
Top image credit: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, President of Ukraine, Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, and Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, emerge from St. Mary's Palace for a press conference as part of the Coalition of the Willing meeting in Kiev, May 10 2025, Kay Nietfeld/dpa via Reuters Connect
After last week’s meeting of the “coalition of the willing” in Paris, 26 countries have supposedly agreed to contribute — in some fashion — to a military force that would be deployed on Ukrainian soil after hostilities have concluded.
Three weeks prior, at the Anchorage leaders’ summit press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that Ukraine’s security should be ensured as part of any negotiated settlement. But Russian officials have continued to reiterate that this cannot take the form of Western combat forces stationed in Ukraine. In the wake of last week’s meeting, Putin has upped the ante by declaring that any such troops would be legitimate targets for the Russian military.
The question remains why European leaders persist with plans that, if implemented, risk putting them directly at war with the world’s largest nuclear power. The answer appears concerning.
One possibility is the credibility of Russian pronouncements. Putin engaged in nuclear signalling earlier in this war — most notably when the full-scale invasion was launched and again after facing military setbacks in the autumn of 2022. Although such signals may have succeeded in deterring the West from intervening directly in the war, the perception that Western countries could transgress supposed Russian red lines without incurring a nuclear response may have diminished the deterrent power of subsequent threats.
Another is the West’s longstanding normative approach to questions of security in Europe since the end of the Cold War. This view, expressed just days ago by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, insists that Moscow can have no veto over Kyiv’s sovereign right to accept foreign troops on its soil. The right of states to choose their own security arrangements freely, a principle outlined in the Charter of Paris that marked the de facto end of the Cold War, is often cited in support of this worldview.
Of course, the citing of principles at one another did little to stop Russia from taking matters into its own hands in February 2022. Previous efforts to deny Russia a veto on principle, such as the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit at which Ukraine and Georgia were invited to join the alliance, foreshadowed Russia’s invasion of Georgia just months later. Staunch defenders of the “right to choose” also conveniently ignore the principle of indivisible security, also found in the Paris Charter, asserting that no state should take measures to increase its own security at the expense of another state’s security. They also de-emphasize the fact that Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership is primarily a matter for existing NATO members, and not Kyiv, to decide.
These considerations aside, what is the strategic thinking behind the European approach?
Despite proposals to the contrary by some, any reassurance force would only be deployed to Ukraine after the war has ended. So unless plans currently under consideration are meant to be a mere opening salvo in negotiations with Moscow, insisting that a Western military presence on Ukrainian soil will emerge as soon as a ceasefire takes hold provides Russia with every incentive to continue fighting to prevent such an outcome from materializing. Therefore, continued insistence that such a force will take shape in the face of repeated Russian objections suggests that European calls for a ceasefire are not entirely genuine.
Indeed, European leaders did not voice their support for ending the war before Donald Trump assumed office — they only began doing so once Trump had cajoled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into calling for a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, leaving them with little option but to fall in line given Europe’s heavy dependence on the U.S. for its security. (Since Russia will never accept an unconditional ceasefire before its political objectives have been met, calling for one also serves the tactical purpose of painting Moscow — not altogether unfairly, of course — as the main obstacle to peace.)
With these facts in mind, European calls for a ceasefire appear to be rooted not in conviction but rather convenience. The real purpose of the coalition’s ongoing plans for a postwar troop deployment to Ukraine may be to sabotage the possibility of successfully negotiating an end to the war. This would fit with other aspects of the current European approach, for example threatening more sanctions against Russia but not putting forward any realistic offer of sanctions relief as an incentive.
This conclusion should not be surprising. Although Ukraine may be gradually losing on the battlefield, today’s European elite largely believes that a “bad deal” to end the war would be worse than the war continuing.
Perhaps Europeans believe that Ukraine will be able to hold the line long enough for Russian casualties to mount and the Russian economy to melt. Or perhaps they fear the perceived loss of status that may flow from a climbdown and compromise peace with Russia. More cynically, even if Russia breaks through Ukrainian lines, this could strengthen European unity and finally get European publics on board for higher defense spending — and Moscow will not be able to rule a restive Ukraine in any event.
European leaders should think twice before doubling down on this logic. The recently announced memorandum of understanding on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, if implemented, could consolidate Russia’s pivot to China over the long term by shipping gas from Western Siberia which might otherwise have been destined for European markets. Besides the risks of military escalation, a prolonged war and the attendant rupture in economic relations between Russia and the rest of Europe could breed strategic consequences that are not yet set in stone — and would best be avoided.
Russia will be an adversary of the collective West for the foreseeable future. But succeeding in a multipolar world requires creating the strategic space to engage with all power poles at least to some degree. A world of rigid blocs need not be a self-fulfilling prophecy — and would undermine the survival of a “rules-based international order” to a much greater extent than deferring disagreements over Ukraine’s territorial integrity and beginning the arduous task of rebuilding a shared sense of security in Europe.
keep readingShow less
Top photo credit: The Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, is standing third from the left in the front row, alongside the Minister of Culture of Qatar, Abdulrahman bin Hamad bin Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, who is at the center, and the Minister of Culture, Sports and Youth of Oman, Sayyid Theyazin bin Haitham Al Said, who is second from the right in Doha, Qatar, on May 9, 2024. (Photo by Noushad Thekkayil/NurPhoto)
On Tuesday, Israel bombed Doha, killing at least five Hamas staffers and a member of Qatari security. Israeli officials initially claimed the US green-lit the operation, despite Qatar hosting the largest U.S. military in the region.
The White House has since contradicted that version of events, saying the White House was given notice “just before” the bombing and claiming the strike was an “unfortunate" attack that "could serve as an opportunity for peace.”
The fallout from the bombing is still unclear, but the U.S. decision to merely chalk up Israel’s attack on a major non-NATO ally to an “unfortunate” attack should at least put to rest one persistent myth: that the Qatar lobby holds more sway over the U.S. than the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.
The “Qatar lobby” is oftentimes invoked as an epithet by pro-Israel hawks to explain away why Americans are suddenly skeptical about Washington's support for Israel. In an August interview, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Qatar has “spent billions on American universities, vilifying, vilifying Israel, vilifying Jews, and also, frankly, vilifying the United States.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently blamed Qatar for what he claimed was an increase in antisemitism among the American conservative commentariat. They “spent billions on American universities, vilifying, vilifying Israel, vilifying Jews, and also, frankly, vilifying the United States…and all that was left to accumulate primarily in academia, you know, and from there, it sort of distributes itself elsewhere,” Netanyahu argued.
In this, Netanyahu was parroting a trope spread by pro-Israel — and some Israeli government funded — organizations that shifts the blame for nationwide pro-Palestine protests away from the Israeli military’s civilian slaughter and forced starvation in Gaza to Qatar, which allegedly has pushed U.S. college students down a path of raging antisemitism.
The problem with this story is that, while Qatar has spent billions of dollars on American universities, nearly all of that money has gone to American universities within Qatar. In fact, more than 90% of Qatar’s more than $6 billion in higher education funding has explicitly been earmarked to fund higher education in Qatar, where American college students are a distinct minority at schools overwhelmingly filled with Qatari’s and expats living in the country.
Undeterred by this simple fact, Netanyahu and pro-Israel groups have continued to spread the tale that Qatar’s higher education spending is driving students on U.S. college campuses down an antisemitic road. Perhaps no organization has done this more often than the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism (ISGAP). The institute’s scholars have repeatedly testified to Congress about Qatari funding causing antisemitism, despite ampleevidence that their research on this topic is, at best, flawed.
Just as importantly, the organization has not publicly disclosed that it had been funded by the Israeli government as recently as 2020.
This exemplifies the inherent contradiction of Qatar’s influence in America: While the Middle East monarchy does have enormous influence in America its alleged omnipresence is often wildly exaggerated by Qatar’s critics.
Nick Cleveland-Stout and I sought to demystify Qatar’s influence in America in our just-released Quincy Institute brief, “Qatar’s Influence in America.” We found that in just eight years — after being nearly invaded by then rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — Qatar has transformed from something of an afterthought in the influence game to one of the biggest players around.
Just consider the highlights of this massive operation that we document in the brief:
Qatar currently has more than two dozen Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) registered lobbying and public relations firms working for them.
Scores of revolving door all-stars have been lobbying for the Qatari’s, headlined by former representatives Tom Davis (R-Va.), Jim Moran (D-Va.), Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.).
No country’s lobbyists report more in-person meetings with policymakers than Qatar.
Qatar is the third most generous foreign donor to think tanks in the U.S.
Multiple Trump administration officials have previously worked for Qatar, including Lee Zeldin, the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency and Kash Patel the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Patel’s boss–Attorney General Pam Bondi–was a registered foreign agent for Qatar until 2021.
Trump’s family and companies have also inked billions of dollars in deals with the Qatari’s. And, of course, Qatar gifted the President a luxury jumbo-jet dubbed “the Palace in the Sky.”
At the same time, Qatar has been doing a lot of things that are quite beneficial for U.S. interests, most notably serving as a mediator for conflicts around the world, including in Afghanistan, Congo, Darfur, Lebanon, Yemen, and, of course, Gaza. All of this led The Guardian to dub Qatar “The global capital of diplomacy.” Our analysis of all FARA reported political activities conducted by Qatar’s lobbyists since the Israel-Gaza war began revealed that Qatar’s lobbyists spend much of their time touting Qatar’s mediator prowess and sending a clear, yet unspoken, message: while Israel is dragging the U.S. into wars, Qatar is trying to end them.
For instance, a one-pager distributed to media contacts by GRV Strategies, on behalf of Qatar, states that “Over the past year, Qatar has worked tirelessly with the United States, Egypt, and other international partners to de-escalate the crisis in Gaza, mediating between Israel and Hamas to try to end the bloodshed, ensure humanitarian aid reaches innocent Palestinian civilians, and secure the release of hostages.” Another Qatari firm, Lumen8 Advisors, facilitated Qatar’s Prime Minister appearing on Tucker Carlson in a segment entitled, “War With Iran? The Prime Minister of Qatar Is Being Attacked in the Media for Wanting to Stop It.”
Carlson was far from the first conservative commentator Qatar’s lobbyists and public relations firms have courted. As early as 2017, Qatar’s agents have been targeting MAGA influencers, with one of the architects of Qatar’s influencer campaign explaining to the Wall Street Journal that, “We want to create a campaign where we are getting into his [Trump’s] head as much as possible.” This is at least partially why Netanyahu’s disdain for Qatari influence overlaps with his aggressive attacks on any conservative that doesn’t recommend unflinching U.S. support for Israel.
Despite Netanyahu and pro-Israel groups’ attacks, however, more and more conservatives are publicly speaking out against Israel’s war on Gaza and questioning how Israel fits into the “America First” mantra. Just last week, for example, at a National Conservatism Conference panel, Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative, argued, “Why are these our wars? Why are Israel's endless problems America's liabilities?...Why should we accept America First — asterisk Israel? And the answer is, we shouldn't.”
Yet, while there’s currently significant alignment between U.S. interests and Qatar’s interests — namely peace and stability (i.e. not letting Israel pull the U.S. into wars) — this isn’t cause for ignoring Qatar’s influence in the U.S. As we write in the brief, “Qatar’s unprecedented access to and influence of Trump, at the very least, presents a risk of the President putting personal gain over national gain when it comes to Qatar.” While their efforts did not help stave off an attack from the more influential Israel, that is no reason not to keep a watchful eye on Qatari influence in America.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.