Last week WikiLeaks released a smoking gun of a document which revealed that US spy agencies closely monitored, and even sought to covertly intervene in France’s 2012 presidential election.
The leaked document is not some State Department cable traffic chatter, nor is it merely the contents of some intelligence bureaucrat’s email – it’s an intelligence directive for a high level operation, which even contained orders for human intelligence gathering (HUMINT). According to the WikiLeaks press release:
All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA’s human (“HUMINT”) and electronic (“SIGINT”) spies in the seven months leading up to France’s 2012 presidential election.
Media on our CIA scoop:
French? Front page news for top three papers
Russian? "Nuclear bomb shell"
US? "standard intelligence-gathering"— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) February 17, 2017
Usually we hear about such illegal and high level espionage decades after the fact. To have a publicly available leaked intel document in which the operational directives are spelled out, and which involved human spying and human assets, is extremely rare (even in the world of WikiLeaks and Snowden).
But you wouldn’t know any of this following US media. The story headlined across Europe, especially in France, but didn’t survive the weekend in the US. The New York Times and Washington Post both did their best to downplay the revelations. Take for example the Post’s brief write-up, which essentially dismissed it as a non-story:
Although WikiLeaks’ publication of a purportedly secret CIA document was striking, the orders seemed to represent standard intelligence-gathering.
If CIA and NSA interference in democratic elections is “standard” then it’s past time to abolish both agencies.
