BREAKING: CIA Reveals that Researcher, Grandson of Former IMF Official, was Intelligence Target
Agency claims file is classified, refuses to confirm existence of documents
The Central Intelligence Agency, in an August 21 response to a Privacy Act (PA) request I filed on May 12, confirmed that it maintains a classified file on me.
“If a classified association between you and the CIA were to exist, records revealing such a relationship would be properly classified and require continued safeguards against unauthorized disclosure,” the Agency wrote in its denial letter to my request for the documents in my file.
The language - a classified association and a relationship - is evocative of the response the Agency provided in reply to the request for Jay Reid’s file. As always, the devil is in the details. In this case, the relationship is one-sided, like the relationship one has with the person at the IRS who processes their annual tax return.
Although the Agency’s response was officially a denial, it contains important disclosures, the ramifications of which only become clear upon a full break-down of the legal citations.
What is the Privacy Act?
On its website, the CIA includes the following description of the Privacy Act:
Enacted in 1974, the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552a, provides US citizens or permanent resident aliens (PRAs) with a right of access to information concerning themselves that is maintained by any agency in the Executive Branch of the federal government…
The Agency then states that:
Information on you must be retrievable from its PA systems of record by your name, a number such as a social security number, or some other personal identifier. It should be noted that the PA does not apply to information about you in records filed under other subjects, such as organizations and events, unless they are retrievable by your name or other personal identifier.
The section in bold is very important. Here, the Agency reveals that information gleaned from a PA will almost always come directly from a person’s individual file.
Additionally, the CIA explains what information can be withheld:
The PA allows the Agency to exempt certain records from disclosure. Exempt in their entirety are polygraph records. Exempt in part are those portions of records that contain classified information, information concerning intelligence sources and methods, or information about other persons.
The sentence in bold states that any part of a person’s file that contains classified information or that would reveal sources, methods, or names of other people, can be withheld in part. This means that under normal circumstances, the CIA would be required to disclose the documents in my file to me sans redactions for exempt portions.
But instead of doing that, the CIA said that the entire file is classified.
Clearly, there is something more afoot.
Denial citations
As is customary, the Agency included a litany of citations in support of its denial of my PA request.
The first citation, Section 3.6(a) of Executive Order 13526, as amended, matches the one used to justify the refusal to confirm or deny the existence of documents that would reveal an unacknowledged or classified association with Jay Reid.
(a) An agency may refuse to confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of requested records whenever the fact of their existence or nonexistence is itself classified under this order or its predecessors.
There are seven specific PA exemptions, and two apply in my case:
Exemption (j)(1): information concerning polygraph records, sources and methods to gather intelligence -- including the facilities, organization, functions, names, officials’ titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency -- and documents or information provided by foreign governments.
Exemption (k)(1): classified information under an Executive Order in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.
The bit about foreign governments, I suspect, is very important.
FOIA exemptions (b)(a) and (b)(3) are duplicative, referring to foreign policy or national security and protecting sources and methods, respectively. However, (b)(3) can also relate to protecting the names of CIA employees.
The final citations list the relevant statutes, which enumerate the responsibilities of the director of national intelligence to keep certain pieces of information secret, a role previously fulfilled by the director of central intelligence.
A hypothesis
Summing things up, the CIA maintains a file on me, most likely as an individual, separate and away from any event or action that was the subject of surveillance and surreptitiously included me.
My file is classified not due to the content, which could be released subject to appropriate redactions, but because of where the information came from and the way in which it was gathered.
I will note that the Agency’s charter precludes domestic spying on Americans, but that has not prevented the Agency from doing just that on many prior occasions, dating back decades.
However, my hypothesis is that the intelligence gathering on me has been farmed out to one of the other Five Eyes intelligence services. I will likely write more about the Five Eyes in the future, but for now the key thing to know is that the alliance was formed at the beginning of the Cold War and includes the following Anglo-Saxon nations:
United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Australia
New Zealand
That there could be some sort of classified Five Eyes operation to spy on certain Americans would not surprise me.
Overall, this finding yields two questions:
Why did I become an intelligence target?
Am I still an intelligence target?
I did live in Russia for most of my twenties, and I was surveilled by one of the Russian intelligence services during my time at Moscow State University (it was obvious, though never threatening).
Unfortunately, the Agency’s denial appears to stand on solid legal footing, so filing an appeal would likely be a fruitless venture.
The main takeaway is that since I know that I have the CIA’s attention, like any good researcher, I will have to be on the look-out for trip wires, or pieces of information that could prompt reprisals more consequential than those I have already experienced, and will soon document in this newsletter.