{"id":12241,"date":"2018-05-26T18:53:12","date_gmt":"2018-05-26T18:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=12241"},"modified":"2018-05-27T18:59:53","modified_gmt":"2018-05-27T18:59:53","slug":"informants-arent-spies-theyre-essential-fbi-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/informants-arent-spies-theyre-essential-fbi-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Informants aren’t spies \u2013 they’re essential FBI tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Douglas M. Charles<\/a>, Pennsylvania State University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

President Donald Trump tweeted<\/a> this week that he would order the Department of Justice to investigate whether the FBI, under President Barack Obama, had \u201cinfiltrated or surveilled\u201d his presidential campaign \u201cfor political purposes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Trump was referring to the FBI\u2019s use of an informant to gather information in its probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. <\/p>\n

The president described this informant as a \u201cspy\u201d who was \u201cplaced\u201d<\/a> in his campaign. Trump also framed the entire episode employing a Watergate suffix, calling it \u201cspygate.\u201d He has claimed it could be \u201cone of the biggest political scandals in history<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an FBI historian<\/a>, I believe an examination of how the FBI has handled and used informants in the past will shed light on this current controversy.<\/p>\n

Informants get the information<\/h2>\n

Informants \u2014 an informal term for what the FBI really calls Confidential Human Sources<\/a> \u2014 are, and always have been, one of the most basic sources of information in FBI and police investigations. As sources of information they are what counterintelligence professionals sometimes call \u201cassets,\u201d not spies.<\/p>\n

The FBI does not \u201cplace\u201d or insert informants<\/a>, as it would do with undercover FBI agents. Informants are people who are already in a position to know or learn information and who willingly cooperate with the FBI. Most often, informants cooperate because they\u2019re concerned with something they\u2019ve seen or heard.<\/p>\n

In writing my book \u201cHoover\u2019s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI\u2019s “Sex Deviates\u201d Program,\u201c<\/a> I uncovered the identities<\/a> of many FBI informants. Sometimes, they seek out the FBI and offer their services to an FBI agent handler out of concern for what they\u2019ve seen. Such was the case with Dr. Alfred Gross<\/a>, who had previously worked with the FBI and who in 1952 regarded a gay civil rights group he met as threatening because he viewed them as mentally ill. <\/p>\n

Others became informants because they were strong anti-communists during the Cold War, like Warren Scarberry<\/a>, an informant I uncovered who believed he saw in the Mattachine Society of Washington the work of Communists. He called and visited the FBI about this. <\/p>\n

Still others acted out of a personal sense of patriotism or were criminal conspirators<\/a> looking for a deal with prosecutors. Informants run the spectrum of motivations, from selfless to selfish.<\/p>\n

A well-placed informant<\/h2>\n

In President Trump\u2019s self-described “spygate,\u201d the FBI\u2019s informant was a retired international affairs professor at Cambridge University named Stefan Halper<\/a>. Halper had established GOP connections. He worked variously for Republican presidents including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He was also a man who long served the U.S. intelligence community as a source. <\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n Stefan Halper has been identified as the informant who helped the FBI\u2019s Russia investigation.<\/span>
\n Wikipedia<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s unsurprising, then, the FBI used Halper in its counterintelligence probe. Most significantly, he happened to have been in a unique position where he had connections to Trump campaign officials<\/a> who all had different types of Russian contacts. These included Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis and Trump foreign policy advisers Michael Flynn, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. <\/p>\n

Today\u2019s FBI does not practice political espionage at the behest of presidents or anyone else, and informants are not part of anything like that. There are investigative guidelines and congressional oversight mechanisms to prevent it. That was not always true: During the tenure of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (1924-1972), the FBI conducted unchecked political surveillance<\/a> operations. The Hoover FBI also used informants in these efforts to monitor, for example, FDR\u2019s foreign policy critics<\/a>, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.<\/a>, student radicals and the anti-war movement<\/a>, and to keep tabs on the LGBT community<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hoover\u2019s abuses forced reforms<\/h2>\n

Hoover\u2019s actions were violations of Americans\u2019 civil liberties and the trust placed in law enforcement. Precisely because of these Hoover-era abuses, special investigative regulations were put into place about the use of informants<\/a> in the 1970s. <\/p>\n

If an FBI probe is particularly sensitive and potentially involves \u201ca greater risk to civil liberties<\/a>,\u201d then FBI agents are required to seek higher levels of authorization for their use. In the Hoover era, there was little to no oversight in the use of informants, let alone more intrusive investigative techniques. Today\u2019s FBI is not the Hoover FBI.<\/p>\n

Yet even during the Hoover years, informants were key to more standard FBI national security investigations. <\/p>\n

The FBI captured Russian spy Rudolf Abel<\/a> \u2014 who was portrayed in the 2015 Tom Hanks film \u201cBridge of Spies\u201d \u2014 because an FBI informant<\/a> within Abel\u2019s circle, named Reino Haynaham, talked. In 1965, the FBI quickly apprehended the murderers of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in Alabama because it had a paid informant<\/a> within the Ku Klux Klan, Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n The FBI captured Russian spy Rudolf Abel with the help of an informant.<\/span>
\n Wikimedia<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is no surprise, then, that FBI officials used a confidential human source in its counterintelligence probe about Russian election meddling. <\/p>\n

The informant was in a position to gather information early in the FBI investigation. That basic information undoubtedly was then further developed and enhanced with more traditional documented sources, as is evidenced by the fact that both Michael Flynn<\/a> and George Papadopoulos<\/a> pleaded guilty and are now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.<\/p>\n

\"TheWhat we see in today\u2019s example is less about spying than a glimpse into how FBI national security investigations operate and unfold \u2013 and how they can sometimes be politicized.<\/p>\n

Douglas M. Charles<\/a>, Associate Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas M. Charles, Pennsylvania State University President Donald Trump tweeted this week that he would order the Department of Justice to investigate whether the FBI, under President Barack Obama, had \u201cinfiltrated or surveilled\u201d his presidential campaign \u201cfor political purposes.\u201d Trump was referring to the FBI\u2019s use of an informant to gather information in its probe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":12242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[479,2375,1749,2887],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12241"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12243,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12241\/revisions\/12243"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}