It’s one thing for foreign spies to penetrate our country and our government, but it’s quite different when we seem to be inviting them in and even paying their expenses. Three stories along these lines caught my attention. The first says the FBI is investigating more than a hundred military members and contractors with something or other to do with “radical Islam.” As Investor’s Business Daily sums it up:
Of the 100-plus probes, at least a dozen have advanced to full-blown investigations, which means agents have enough evidence to believe that a dozen Muslim soldiers are plotting major attacks against the military. The rest are preliminary investigations of suspect Muslim traitors in the ranks who have radicalized to the point of posing a serious threat.
A serious problem, in short. Remember that these people are all paid by the US military.
Second, the estimable Tarek Fatah asks rhetorically why the State Department issued a visa to a known Egyptian member of an Islamist terrorist group, Hani Nour Eldin, of the infamous Gamaa Islamiya. Writing in the Toronto Sun, he notes:
While the Obama Administration maintained the Egyptian delegation was in the U.S. to seek ways of future cooperation between the two countries, it was revealed Eldin met with Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough and asked him for the transfer the “Blind Sheik” Abdel-Rahman to an Egyptian prison.
By U.S. law, Eldin should have been denied a visa to enter the country.
Actually, the answer to Tarek’s rhetorical question isn’t hard to find, as I confirmed when, after dozens of failed efforts, I managed to establish contact via my trusty ouija board with the spirit of the late James Jesus Angleton, once upon a time the head of CIA Counterintelligence. He–or the raspy voice that I get in answer to my questions–is one of the great experts on espionage in this or any other world, and when I quoted him Tarek’s question, he got snarky.
JJA: “Hah! Need you ask? They certainly know who he is, and they gave him a visa because they wanted to talk to him. And they did.”
ML: “But they could have talked to him in Cairo, they didn’t have to violate their own regs, did they? I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?”
JJA: “Not so much, as the kids say these days,” (how would he know? I asked myself) “they don’t embarrass very easily. But then, they don’t get asked the difficult questions.”
ML: “OK, I’ll take that bait. Like what difficult questions?”
JJA: “Like how many Iranian/Hezbollah/Islamic Jihad/Venezuelan/Bolivian/Nicaraguan persons have set up shop in the United States? And, how many members and sympathizers of the Moslem Brotherhood are now working in the executive branch? And, what sort of counterintelligence program is being carried out to protect us against penetration by terrorist organizations and states that sponsor them?”
ML: “Well we know the FBI has those investigations running, don’t we?”
JJA: “Yes, we do, thanks to the press, once again. Very thoughtful of them to alert our enemies…”
ML: “Do you worry about really high-level penetrations? I mean, maybe somebody who works in the White House, for example, or high up in the Pentagon? In W’s second term, I got called by a character in the office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who asked me to meet with some guys from the Muslim Brotherhood. That gave me pause…”
JJA: “It doesn’t have to be a high-level penetration to be really dangerous. Someone who handles encryption, for example, is an ideal target for enemy intelligence agencies. I always worried about that a lot, as I worried about security on our borders.”
ML: “Ah, thanks for reminding me. There’s a third story, about the Cultural Attache at the Iranian Embassy up in Canada. This guy, Hamid Mohammadi, gave an interview to a Farsi-language tv station in the course of which he:
urged all Iranian-Canadians to “resist being melted into the dominant Canadian culture” to aspire to “occupy high-level key positions” and said the embassy plans to extend its reach by offering “cultural programs” to Iranian immigrants and their descendants, who can then “be of service to our beloved Iran.”
That’s worrisome, isn’t it?
JJA: “Sure, but it’s incitement, not espionage, although appeals of this sort might motivate potential agents to contact the Embassy.”
ML: “So what should we do?”
JJA: “Vote wisely in November.”
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