Page 46 - bne_August 2020_20200810

46 I Eastern Europe bne August 2020
The NYT reported on July 3 on a US intelligence memo that admits there is no concrete evidence that Russian security services offered to pay bounties for the killing of US soldiers by Afghani fighters
US intelligence memo admits there is “no evidence” of Russian payment of bounties to Afghans for killing US soldiers
killings of coalition troops, including Americans.”
However, intelligence officials interviewed by the NYT stressed that "the government lacks direct evidence of what the criminal network leaders and GRU officials said at face-to-face meetings, so it cannot say with any greater certainty that Russia specifically offered bounties in return for killings of Western soldiers,” the paper wrote.
Moreover, even this damning testimony from the detainees was called into question by the memo, as the intelligence sources said the National Security Agency "did not have surveillance that confirmed what the captured detainees told interrogators about bounties,” according to the NYT interlocutors.
The agency did intercept data of financial transactions that provide circumstantial support for the detainee’s account,
"but the agency does not have explicit evidence that the money was bounty payments,” the NYT piece concluded in the last paragraph of the story.
Despite the fact that the memo in question and the report expressly conclude that the agency had no evidence that money was paid as bounties, that admission was consigned to the very end of the piece. The lead of the article claimed the exact opposite, albeit couched in speculative terms.
“A memo produced in recent days by the office of the nation’s top intelligence official acknowledged that the CIA and top counterterrorism officials have assessed that Russia appears to have offered bounties to kill American and coalition troops in Afghanistan, but emphasised uncertainties and gaps in evidence, according to three officials,” the article began.
The headline of the article can also be questioned, as it suggests that the memo “seeks to foster doubts”, when all the memo says, as reported by the NYT, is actually foster doubts about the veracity of the earlier bounty payment reports by concluding explicitly that the agency has no concrete evidence for the payments
Ben Aris in Berlin
The New York Times reported on June 3 that a CIA memo admits that intelligence agencies have “no evidence” that payments made by the Russian foreign military intelligence GRU to Afghan fighters were bounties for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan.
The memo goes on to admit that it has “circumstantial evidence” of payments made to fighters, but they are fringe groups fighting in Afghanistan and not official representatives of the Taliban.
A NYT story entitled “New Administration Memo Seeks to Foster Doubts About Suspected Russian Bounties” published on July 3 and buried on page 19 of the paper, reported on a memo that said that the “CIA and the National Counterterrorism Centre had assessed with medium confidence
– meaning creditably sources and plausible, but falling short of near certainty – that a unit of the Russian
www.bne.eu
military service, known as the GRU, offered the bounties,” according to two of the officials briefed on its contents, the paper reported.
The memo reportedly lays out the latest assessment by US intelligence on what
is known about the bounty story that caused a storm of comment following
its publication and sparked a political scandal after revelations that Trump was “not briefed” on the bounty killings and had “failed to act.”
The memo goes on to say that US intelligence had reports of GRU members meeting with leaders of
“a Taliban-linked criminal network” and that “money was transferred from a GRU account to the network.”
“After lower-level members of that network were captured, they told interrogators that the Russians were paying bounties to encourage the