Spies

[May 10, 2007] Humanitarian International Services Group, or HISG, won special praise from [President GW Bush] for having demonstrated how a private charity could step in quickly in response to a crisis. “In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” read Hiramine’s citation, “HISG’s team launched a private sector operation center in Houston that mobilized over 1,500 volunteers into the disaster zone within one month after the hurricane.”

But as the evangelical Christian Hiramine crossed the stage to shake hands with President Bush and receive his award, he was hiding a key fact from those in attendance: He was a Pentagon spy whose NGO was funded through a highly classified Defense Department program.

[...]

The secret Pentagon program, which dates back to December 2004, continued well into the Obama presidency. It was the brainchild of a senior Defense Department intelligence official of the Bush administration, Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin.

  The Intercept

You remember Jerry Boykin.

[October 16, 2003 -- Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin,]13-year veteran of the Army's top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan."

Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

  LA Times

Back to The Intercept article:

Hiramine’s NGO, by offering humanitarian aid to the country’s desperate population, was able to go where others could not.

[...]

Few, if any, of the rest of the organization’s staff and volunteers had any knowledge about its role as a Pentagon front, according to former HISG employees and former military officials.

[...]

Before it was finally dismantled in 2013, Hiramine’s organization received millions in funding from the Pentagon through a complex web of organizations designed to mask the origin of the cash.

[...]

The use of HISG for espionage was “beyond the pale” of what the U.S. government should be allowed to do, said Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, an association of nearly 200 American NGOs. The practice of using humanitarian workers as spies “violates international principles” and puts legitimate aid and development workers at risk, he argued.

Not only that, but it can undermine and create a backlash that harms legitimate aid benefits to the people they are supposed to be helping.

Just before reading this article, I had been listening to an NPR segment about how polio has been virtually eradicated from the planet. The remaining area where it still exists, they told me, is the "restive" border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They informed me that the evil Taliban had been preventing vaccination efforts and even killed medical personnel who were there to carry out the program. The NPR reporters did not, however, inform me why the Taliban in that region did so. Why did they leave that part out?

July 9, 2012   In Pakistan, where polio has never been eliminated, the C.I.A.’s decision to send a vaccination team into the Bin Laden compound to gather information and DNA samples clearly hurt the national polio drive. The question is: How badly?

After the ruse by Dr. Shakil Afridi was revealed by a British newspaper a year ago, angry villagers, especially in the lawless tribal areas on the Afghan border, chased off legitimate vaccinators, accusing them of being spies.

And then, late last month, Taliban commanders in two districts banned polio vaccination teams, saying they could not operate until the United States ended its drone strikes. One cited Dr. Afridi, who is serving a 33-year sentence imposed by a tribal court, as an example of how the C.I.A. could use the campaign to cover espionage.

  NYT

Back to The Intercept:

The Taliban claimed the vaccination program was part of a Western intelligence plot. Cases of polio, which has been eradicated in almost every country in the world, have spiked in Pakistan in recent years.

ASIDE FROM HIRAMINE and possibly other top executives, those who worked for HISG were never aware they were involved in a Pentagon intelligence program, or that Hiramine was working for the U.S. government, according to two former military officials.

“They were never witting,” said the former senior Pentagon official. “That was the point.”

  The Inercept

Government dupes. Hated for their freedoms, no doubt.

In 2012, now-retired Adm. William McRaven, the commander of the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid, shut down the North Korea spying program.

“McRaven told us he shut it down because he was nervous about the flap if it ever got out that the Pentagon had used a bunch of evangelicals and missionaries as spies,” said one former military officer, adding that if the program had produced better intelligence McRaven would have considered keeping it up and running. McRaven did not respond to a request for comment.

[...]

“If these people had been caught and tried and executed in downtown Pyongyang you’d really understand the risk,” said Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer who spent more than 20 years conducting espionage operations.

And they'd have been really surprised themselves. And honestly claiming not to be spies. See how that works?

“The reward is almost zero given the risk because using NGOs — especially unwitting [ones] — produces very weak intelligence,” said [...] Baer.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.