TBR News February 4, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. February 4, 2017: “As a joke, I recently passed the names of three of my top ‘inside information sources’ to a stupid professional  informer (are there any other kind?) who tried to convince me they were trustworthy.

The names?

Mike Hunt, Jack Mehoff and Ben Dova.

Written the names sound passible but not if spoken.

Years ago, I also passed the name of a top foreign intelligence agent operating in San Francisco to a snitch after first asking them if they worked for the government.

Once they said they did not, I informed them the highly dangerous spy’s name was Harry Brunser. Of course there was a rush to find him and several alphabet agencies were frantically searching for Brunser.

What they did not know when they started their hunt is that in San Francisco street slang, a Brunser is an anus.

Human or other animal, such as a Doberman or a sheep.

Eventually, the snoopers found this out (after some months of being quietly laughed at) and were very upset.

With me for making fools out of them.

I submit that I am innocent; that God beat me to it.

I also once let it slip out that a major inside information British source for me were the ‘notorious Minge family’ located in Pound Hill, Crawley, England.

The American Embassy in London (the FBI are always the ‘legates’ on the staff and the CIA agents are always ‘USIA’) was swift to react and the legates then rushed down to Scotland Yard to seek information on the evil British Minges.

They found out very quickly that in British slang, a ‘minge’ is the hair surrounding a  woman’s private parts.

Washed or unwashed.

More embarrassment.

I can laugh but they can’t.

They have no sense of humor, but they are protecting us.

Most likely from themselves.”

 Descending into Darkness: The Making of a Wartime President

By Brian Harring

www.amazon.com  kindle ebooks $3.99

 “THE HARRING REPORT IS ANOTHER ‘DEEP THROAT’”

 

Published for the first time ever, Descending Into Darkness shows the actual, as opposed to the propaganda, background to the upheavals in the Middle East and the reasons for the 9/11 attacks. It also includes the complete, as contrasted with the false, official (at the time this book went to press) DoD listings of U.S. Military casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Also in Prelude to Disaster:

• Events leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom
• War in Iraq – Russian Military Intelligence Reports & Assessment [March 17-April 8, 2003]
• The “Nazi” Neocons – Who are they?
• The Secret Downing Street Memo – Setting the Stage for 9/11
• Israeli Espionage Against the United States

 

Table of Contents

 

• The Coming Clash With Iran
• Ukraine Sabotages Trump’s Russia Detente

• The Zipper Documents and the Assassination of Kennedy- Part 7
• BuzzFeed sued over its publication of uncorroborated Trump dossier
• California Moves to Become a Sanctuary State as Texas Takes a Hard Line
• Prepared for attack! Hezbollah waits for the moment

• Not ‘Lone Wolves’ After All: How ISIS Guides Plots by Remote Control

The Coming Clash With Iran

February 3, 2017

by Patrick J. Buchanan,

AntiWar

When Gen. Michael Flynn marched into the White House Briefing Room to declare that “we are officially putting Iran on notice,” he drew a red line for President Trump. In tweeting the threat, Trump agreed.

His credibility is now on the line.

And what triggered this virtual ultimatum?

Iran-backed Houthi rebels, said Flynn, attacked a Saudi warship and Tehran tested a missile, undermining “security, prosperity, and stability throughout the Middle East,” placing “American lives at risk.”

But how so?

The Saudis have been bombing the Houthi rebels and ravaging their country, Yemen, for two years. Are the Saudis entitled to immunity from retaliation in wars that they start?

Where is the evidence Iran had a role in the Red Sea attack on the Saudi ship? And why would President Trump make this war his war?

As for the Iranian missile test, a 2015 U.N. resolution “called upon” Iran not to test nuclear-capable missiles. It did not forbid Iran from testing conventional missiles, which Tehran insists this was.

Is the United States making new demands on Iran not written into the nuclear treaty or international law – to provoke a confrontation?

Did Flynn coordinate with our allies about this warning of possible military action against Iran? Is NATO obligated to join any action we might take?

Or are we going to carry out any retaliation alone, as our NATO allies observe, while the Israelis, Gulf Arabs, Saudis and the Beltway War Party, which wishes to be rid of Trump, cheer him on?

Bibi Netanyahu hailed Flynn’s statement, calling Iran’s missile test a flagrant violation of the U.N. resolution and declaring, “Iranian aggression must not go unanswered.” By whom, besides us?

The Saudi king spoke with Trump Sunday. Did he persuade the president to get America more engaged against Iran?

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker is among those delighted with the White House warning:

“No longer will Iran be given a pass for its repeated ballistic missile violations, continued support of terrorism, human rights abuses and other hostile activities that threaten international peace and security.”

The problem with making a threat public – Iran is “on notice” – is that it makes it almost impossible for Iran, or Trump, to back away.

Tehran seems almost obliged to defy it, especially the demand that it cease testing conventional missiles for its own defense.

This U.S. threat will surely strengthen those Iranians opposed to the nuclear deal and who wish to see its architects, President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, thrown out in this year’s elections.

If Rex Tillerson is not to become a wartime secretary of state like Colin Powell or Dean Rusk, he is going to have to speak to the Iranians, not with defiant declarations, but in a diplomatic dialogue.

Tillerson, of course, is on record as saying the Chinese should be blocked from visiting the half-dozen fortified islets they have built on rocks and reefs in the South China Sea.

A prediction: The Chinese will not be departing from their islands, and the Iranians will defy the U.S. threat against testing their missiles.

Wednesday’s White House statement makes a collision with Iran almost unavoidable, and a war with Iran quite possible.

Why did Trump and Flynn feel the need to do this now?

There is an awful lot already on the foreign policy plate of the new president after only two weeks, as pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine are firing artillery again, and North Korea’s nuclear missile threat, which, unlike Iran’s, is real, has yet to be addressed.

High among the reasons that many supported Trump was his understanding that George W. Bush blundered horribly in launching an unprovoked and unnecessary war on Iraq.

Along with the 15-year war in Afghanistan and our wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen, our 21st-century U.S. Mideast wars have cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of dead. And they have produced a harvest of hatred of America that was exploited by al-Qaida and ISIS to recruit jihadists to murder and massacre Westerners.

Osama’s bin Laden’s greatest achievement was not to bring down the twin towers and kill 3,000 Americans, but to goad America into plunging headlong into the Middle East, a reckless and ruinous adventure that ended her post-Cold War global primacy.

Unlike the other candidates, Trump seemed to recognize this.

It was thought he would disengage us from these wars, not rattle a saber at an Iran that is three times the size of Iraq and has as its primary weapons supplier and partner Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

When Barack Obama drew his red line against Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war, and Assad appeared to cross it, Obama discovered that his countrymen wanted no part of the war that his military action might bring on.

President Obama backed down – in humiliation.

Neither the Ayatollah Khamenei nor Trump appears to be in a mood to back away, especially now that the president has made the threat public.

Ukraine Sabotages Trump’s Russia Detente

A Ukrainian military offensive into rebel-held eastern Ukraine is giving Washington’s war hawks an excuse to demand President Trump escalate tensions with Russia, negating his hopes for détente

February 1, 2017

by Jonathon Marshall

consortiumnews

Less than two weeks into office, President Trump faces one of the first big tests of his non-confrontational policy toward Russia. As new fighting erupts in Eastern Ukraine, the Kiev regime and its U.S. supporters are predictably demanding a showdown with Vladimir Putin.

Initial evidence suggests, however, that the latest flare-up in this nearly three-year-old conflict was precipitated by Kiev, possibly in the hope of forcing just such a confrontation between Washington and Moscow. It’s looking more and more like a rerun of a disastrous stunt pulled by the government of Georgia in 2008, which triggered a clash with Russia with the expectation that the George W. Bush administration would come to its rescue and bring Georgia into the NATO alliance.

After months of relative quiet, the fighting in Ukraine erupted on Jan. 28 around the city of Avdiivka, a now-decrepit industrial center. Eight pro-government fighters and five separatists apparently died in the first two days of hostilities. Meanwhile, residents of the city are struggling to survive heavy shelling and sub-zero weather with no heating.

Perennial critics of Russia were quick to blame Moscow for the renewed bloodshed. “We call on Russia to stop the violence (and), honor the cease-fire,” declared a State Department official.

The Washington Post’s reliably neo-conservative editorial page suggested that Russia felt liberated to unleash rocket and artillery barrages after Putin spoke with Trump by phone, with the goal of wrecking a meeting between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The Russian onslaught “look(s) a lot like a test of whether the new president will yield to pressure from Moscow,” the Post declared, as if this were Czechoslovakia, 1938, all over again.

Poroshenko was quick to take advantage of the clash by asking, rhetorically, “Who would dare talk about lifting the sanctions in such circumstances?” Just last month, Austria’s foreign minister called for an easing of sanctions on Russia in return for “any positive development” in Ukraine. President Trump has been noncommittal about sanctions in the face of full-throated demands by congressional hawks in both parties to keep them in place.

Who’s to Blame?

The jury is still out on who provoked the latest violence, but Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, established by the U.S. government to broadcast propaganda during the height of the Cold War, reported Monday:

“Frustrated by the stalemate in this 33-month war of attrition, concerned that Western support is waning, and sensing that U.S. President Donald Trump could cut Kyiv out of any peace negotiations as he tries to improve fraught relations with Moscow, Ukrainian forces anxious to show their newfound strength have gone on what many here are calling a ‘creeping offensive.’

“Observers say the Ukrainians appear to be trying to create new facts on the ground . . . In doing so, the pro-Kyiv troops have sparked bloody clashes with their enemy, which has reportedly made advances of its own — or tried to — in recent weeks.”

A senior member of Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine warned, “The direct result of forward moves is escalation in tension, which often turns to violence.” How right he was.

It’s hard to see what Putin gains from new fighting, at a time when Trump faces an army of skeptics at home for his go-easy-on-Russia strategy. Poroshenko has everything to gain, on the other hand, by pressing Americans and West Europeans to reaffirm their support for his government, which took power after a 2014 coup that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych, who was strongly supported in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

The Georgia Playbook

The situation is reminiscent of the August 2008 conflict between Russia and its neighbor on the Black Sea, Georgia. A bloody clash between the two countries’ armed forces in the tiny enclave of South Ossetia prompted a blast of militant rhetoric from American hawks.

Vice President Richard Cheney declared, “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” Richard Holbrooke, who would become a senior adviser to the future President Obama, said, “Moscow’s behavior poses a direct challenge to European and international order.”

It may have been significant that the Georgian president’s paid U.S. lobbyist was also presidential candidate John McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser. As one analyst commented at the time, “McCain’s swift and belligerent response to the Soviet actions in Georgia has bolstered his shaky standing with the right-wing of the Republican Party. . . . Since the crisis erupted, McCain has focused like a laser on Georgia, to great effect. According to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released on August 19 he has gained four points on Obama since their last poll in mid-July and leads his rival by a two to one margin as the candidate best qualified to deal with Russia.”

Yet when the smoke settled, it turned out that Georgia, not Russia, had started the war by launching an artillery barrage against South Ossetia’s capital city. It was a ploy by Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili to drag the West into supporting his campaign to take over the enclave.

The independent International Crisis Group had warned in 2007 that Georgia’s risky strategy of provoking “frequent security incidents could degenerate into greater violence.”

A year later, following the brief war with Russia, an ICG investigation reported authoritatively that it began with a “disastrous miscalculation by Georgian leadership,” who “launched a large-scale military offensive” into the Russian-occupied enclave, killing dozens of civilians and causing severe damage to South Ossetia’s capital from artillery barrages.

The report also criticized “Russia’s disproportionate counter-attack,” which it deemed a response to “the decade-long eastward expansion of the NATO alliance” and other grievances.

Putting blame aside, the ICG report observed that “The Russia-Georgia conflict has transformed the contemporary geopolitical world, with large consequences for peace and security in Europe and beyond.” Indeed, it marked one of the greatest setbacks in post-Cold War relations between Moscow and the West until the 2014 Ukraine crisis.

If the 2017 Ukraine crisis gets out of hand, the consequences for peace and security may be just as great or greater. It will be informative to see whether President Trump and his national security team get the straight facts before capitulating to the interventionists who want to see U.S.-Russian relations remained strained and volatile.

The Zipper Documents and the Assassination of Kennedy- Part 7

February 4, 2017

by Gregory Douglas

The Alternative Theory

 Aftermath

The chapter “The Official Cover Up” already addresses briefly what happened after the actual assassination. The ZIPPER Document contains more interesting pieces of information that make it understandable how the cover up was implemented and why it could be so successful.

There is, of course, the most important fact: that the FBI itself, which was in charge of all investigations, was a participant in the assassination. The FBI gave James Jesus Angleton, the main plotter, complete control of the evidence:

“10. Following the removal of the President, the new President, who had been fully briefed prior to the act, agreed ‘in the interest of national concerns’ to appoint a special Commission chaired by the Chief Justice, for the purpose of ‘setting public concerns to rest.’ Mr. Angleton was in complete control of all evidence presented to this Committee and worked closely in conjunction with Mr. Sullivan of the FBI to ensure that nothing was brought before the Committee that it did not wish to acknowledge.”

It is also interesting that Gerald Ford, who became President of the United States of America in 1974, helped FBI Director J. E. Hoover, and it is hard to believe that by so doing, he did not know that he actively participated in the cover-up of the putsch:

“16. Representative Ford, R, of Michigan, a member of the Commission, is working closely with Director Hoover and reports all incoming information directly to him.”

The CIA’s many supporters within the media did their best to hide and distort the truth:

“17. Full cooperation with friendly media sources has ensured that the public attention has been drawn to Oswald as the sole killer. […]

32. In the matter of the public perception of the Dallas action, extensive use has been made of Agency connections with major American media organs, i.e., the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times is strongly supporting the Commission and its findings and we are assured that they will continue to do so. The same attitude has been clearly and strongly expressed by the Post.”

A very interesting effect on U.S. foreign policy had the fact that the French Intelligence Services, due to their informants in the Unione Corse, had knowledge about the real assassins of JFK and threatened the United States if they would not make certain concessions:

“25. Also, the [French President] General [Charles] DeGaulle stated that he was aware through French intelligence reports, that the assassins of the President were French citizens. The knowledge of the French government at the highest level that some kind of high level political assassination was apparently passed on to the U.S. Embassy in Paris but there is no record of any of these warnings having been passed on to Washington. If, in fact, these warnings were passed, there was obviously no heed paid to them.

26. Because it is viewed as vital that the French become involved in NATO and to assuage the concerns of the General, guarantees were given both by the [U.S.] President and the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence…] that the United States would actively support French commercial interests in French Indo China in return for French cooperation with NATO. There were extensive French rubber plantations in Vietnam as well as significant off-shore oil deposits.
27. The General was reassured repeatedly on these points and is now apparently in agreement with U.S. aims in South East Asia. He made several remarks about the trade in opium in that area being extremely lucrative and stated that he had his own problems with narcotics traffic in the Mediterranean area. With increasing American military involvement in Vietnam and Laos, the increase in opium smuggling was highly significant and has not stopped to this day. It is a published fact that much of the movement of raw opium from the so-called Golden Triangle was effected by the CIA and its Air America private airforce.
28. It is not believed, and electronic surveillance of the President’s lines of communication while in the United States does not support, the possibility that he might have actual knowledge of any American involvement, or projected involvement, in this sensitive area.
29. Both the Agency and the President feel that the French President has ‘fired a shot across our bows’ but that these issues have now become resolved. The President feels, however, that the French will have to be watched carefully in the future and that if American interests become established in French Indo China, we had best consider our own interests at that time.”

Considering that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had been more than eager to start a war against Cuba, it might not be surprising that they were quite open to the French “request” for help in French Indo China, which could be more appropriately called “blackmailing America into war.” In fact, the Tonkin incident in 1965, which triggered America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, reads like an implementation of what the U.S. Army had unsuccessfully planned only a few years earlier for Cuba, as James Bamford correctly noticed.

The CIA’s statement about “American involvement” in the “trade in opium” in Indochina, and its assertion that “much of the movement of raw opium […] was effected by the CIA and its Air America private airforce”, is a topic that will be dealt with in a subsequent book, offering much more secret documentation on the U.S. government as one of the major drug traffickers of the world.

The Crowley Papers

In 1994, the author published the first of his series on the papers of Heinrich Müller, once Chief of the German Gestapo. The first work appeared in Germany and was subsequently printed in English in 1995 by Bender Publishing. When these appeared, there was considerable official, but very private, concern expressed in CIA circles due to the inflammatory issues raised.

The author was then contacted by Dr. William Corson of Potomac, Maryland, regarding the name of the CIA official who interrogated Müller in Switzerland in 1948. Corson, an intelligence specialist and published author, informed the writer that the unidentified interrogator was one James Speyer Kronthal,  CIA station chief in Bern, Switzerland in 1948.

Subsequent to the publication of the first book, the author rapidly developed his friendship with Robert Crowley. Crowley, a courtly and extremely well-informed man who had formerly held a very high position in the CIA, proved to be more than cooperative and informative regarding the CIA’s use of Müller. Crowley stated to the author and to others in Washington that he was the man who had worked with Müller when the former Gestapo chief arrived in Washington in 1948.

More than once, Crowley informed the author that various official American agencies had been in touch with him regarding the author and his works, attempting to discover whatever they could to discredit the thesis that Müller had been in the employ of the CIA. Crowley put the author in touch with former CIA officials who were well aware of Müller’s American employment. However, since none of these retirees would either admit or deny the Müller employment, this action was more in the way of annoying his former colleagues, on Crowley’s part, than in supplying sources for the writer.

Robert Crowley was a very intelligent, courteous, and generous person and the author used to speak with him over the telephone at least twice a week. Crowley was in retirement and none of his old associates bothered to contact him. As a man who once wielded considerable power, his retirement plunged him into a lonely void. Eventually, he became more and more confidential in his anecdotes to the author, whom he felt was both a sympathetic listener and fellow-historian.

Finally, in 1996, Crowley was asked by his concerned family to undergo exploratory lung surgery. Cancer was suspected, since Crowley was a heavy cigarette smoker. Before he went into the hospital, Crowley became very depressed. He was, he said, an old man and might well die on the operating table. In the years preceding this operation, a reflective Crowley had often expressed his desire to help others understand the many historical events that he was party to. For these reasons, he told the author, he would send to him a number of papers from his personal files.

Other material from Crowley’s files covered a number of CIA clandestine operations, both national and international, from 1948 through 1982. For instance, among papers in the Crowley archives there is, aside from the explosive signed report concerning the underlying facts of the assassination of President John Kennedy, other material on such controversial issues as Operation Phoenix, the MK-ULTRA program, Operations Condor and Applepie, and even an in-house budget for the 1996-97 fiscal years. Details of these operations will be published in subsequent books.

The papers sent to the author were embargoed by Crowley. They were not to be used or attributed during his lifetime. When he died in October of 2000, the embargo was lifted.

The CIA (and in fact the government itself), may well find the publication of a selection of Robert Crowley’s large personal files a disaster, but the American public, who pays their salaries, might have a different view.

During the author’s relationship with Crowley, the former CIA official began to express extreme annoyance with his former colleagues at Langley. The focus of his anger was directed at their ouster of his good friend, James Angleton, once head of CIA Counterintelligence.

Crowley felt that Angleton was a “great patriot” who had been forced out of his position by younger men who saw in Angleton’s constant searches for moles in the CIA a disruptive and non-productive nuisance. Angleton had been correct in his assumptions, and at least one Russian agent, Aldrich Ames, was discovered after Angleton’s death, when it was too late for an apology.

When defending Angleton’s actions, Crowley began to speak of the Kennedy assassination and why it had proved to be necessary. Because the author was obviously skeptical, Crowley, defending his position, began to send papers to support his thesis that Kennedy had been practicing treason and endangering the American public by his reckless and ill-informed ventures into brinkmanship.

The basis for this work was found in the two large boxes of files the author received in 1996. By releasing these documents and others, Crowley placed himself squarely in the middle of the conspiracy, but in his eyes, at least, he felt that he and his fellow plotters and assassins were entirely justified in their actions.

Whether they were so justified is a matter for the reader to determine upon careful reflection.

Morals and ethics are excellent norms but hardly effective motivating factors in any intelligence community

Envoy

In matters as prolix and entangled as the Kennedy assassination, there can never be an actual closure. There can, however, be a final word on the subject and the clearest one can be found in John Jacob Nutter’s excellent study, The CIA’s Black Ops: Covert Action, Foreign Policy, and Democracy.  The author lists a number of the more important delinquencies of the Central Intelligence Agency and it cannot be improved upon:

“–spying on Americans for their political beliefs;

–opening the mail of Americans not suspected of any crime;

–harassing and disrupting legal American political groups simply for their dissenting views;

–testing neurochemical and biological agents (such as LSD) and toxins on American citizens without their consent or knowledge, covering up these activities, and destroying evidence of them;

–engaging in secret wars with neither the consent nor knowledge of Congress;

–engaging in acts of war or acts that created a high probability of war without the consent or knowledge of Congress;

–purposely concealing these acts or intentionally misleading members of the government who have a right to know about such activities;

–employing the policies and resources of intelligence agencies to further the goals of private corporations and political groups;

–subverting democratic processes and sponsoring the functional equivalents of coups d’etat in friendly and allied countries;

–creating private, off-the-books intelligence and operations organizations in deliberate attempts to evade U.S. law;

–negotiating with terrorists and paying ransom for hostages; and

–arming insurgent and terrorist organizations with modern weapons in spite of their anti-American positions.”

BuzzFeed sued over its publication of uncorroborated Trump dossier

February 3, 2017

by Kevin G. Hall, David Goldstein and Greg Gordon

Mcclatchy

WASHINGTON — A Russian-tied tech firm named in a controversial dossier containing uncorroborated allegations about President Donald Trump and the hacking of Democratic National Committee email accounts announced late Friday that it has filed defamation suits against the online news site BuzzFeed, its editor in chief and a former British intelligence agent.

The lawsuits were brought by XBT Holdings, a Cyprus-based company owned by Russian tech magnate Aleksej Gubarev

Lawyers for his firm filed complaints Friday in London against the former spy and his company, and against BuzzFeed and its editor in chief, Ben Smith, in Broward County Circuit Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where XBT’s subsidiary Webzilla is headquartered.

“The dossier included libelous, unverified and untrue allegations regarding XBT, Webzilla and Gubarev. The lawsuits seek yet undetermined compensation for the damages suffered by XBT, Webzilla and Gubarev as the result of the publication of the dossier,” a statement said.

New York-based BuzzFeed Inc., which published the dossier in full on Jan. 10, wasn’t alone. Former spy Christopher Steele and his company Orbis Business Intelligence in London were named as defendants in the London suit.

In a statement to McClatchy, BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenthal said Friday night, “We have redacted Mr. Gubarev’s name from the published dossier, and apologize for including it.”

Steele is a former British intelligence agent who conducted opposition research on behalf of Trump’s political opponents from both major U.S. parties. The dossier, which was shared privately with reporters, lawmakers and law enforcement, exploded into the national debate after FBI director James Comey presented it to President Barack Obama and then President-elect Donald Trump.

Among other things, the document alleged, without corroboration, that the Trump campaign had worked with the Kremlin on penetrating Democratic National Committee computers. The dossier alleges XBT’s involvement and names Gubarev, saying he cooperated with Russian spy agencies under duress.

“We were shocked to see our good name wrongly included and published in this unsubstantiated report. We are confident that the courts will review the evidence of our non-involvement and provide fair and reasonable compensation from the perpetrators of this outrageous allegation,” the company statement said.

Shortly after the dossier became public, McClatchy interviewed Gubarev, a venture capitalist whose many companies include web-hosting services, network solutions and data storage. He denied any involvement and surmised that a competitor might have sought to embarrass him.

The dossier said XBT and affiliates “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.”

The British lawsuit against Steele and Orbis Business Intelligence Limited charges that they “deliberately and without consent” claimed that the plaintiffs had hacked into the emails of the Democratic Party, “and had used such unlawful access to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and alter files and programs.”

Gubarev operates at least 40,000 servers across the globe and said he would have received real-time information if there had been hacking or illicit activity tied to his businesses. There is no evidence of that, he said, adding that neither the FBI nor any other U.S. authority has contacted him.

The dossier suggested that several Trump campaign aides were aware of the Russian hacking scheme, allegations that Trump dismissed as “garbage.”

The Florida lawsuit says that neither defendant – BuzzFeed or Ben Smith – had contacted the plaintiffs to determine whether the allegations had “any basis in fact.” Nor have they since, it alleges.

Moreover, the suit claims that even as BuzzFeed and Smith published the information, which they acknowledged at the time contained unverified information, “they knew, without a doubt, that at least certain portions of the dossier were untrue.”

It quotes from the BuzzFeed story, which said the dossier “is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors.”

The suit says the story has been viewed more than 5.9 million times.

It also says that Gubarev, “who is married with three young children” and is not a public figure, “has found his personal and professional reputation in tatters,” his wife has been harassed online and his family’s security has been “compromised.”

Steele, a well-regarded former British spy with strong knowledge of Russia, reportedly went into hiding after the dossier’s contents became public. Investigators and the global media have since pursued details in the dossier, which included salacious allegations involving Trump’s activities in Russia that the dossier suggested had been recorded by Russian authorities.

Adding to the mystery surrounding the document, some European reports suggest that a possible source of information in the dossier, Oleg Erovinkin, a former top officer of the Soviet KGB and its Russian successor, the FSB, was mysteriously found dead in his car in Moscow on Dec. 26.

McClatchy reported late last month that the FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election. That collective probe includes whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided Trump, two people familiar with the matter said.

The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

Among the items being looked at, said the people familiar with the probe, is how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win election.

At least nine news organizations, including McClatchy, possessed copies of the dossier, electing not to publish its contents until their reporters could check the validity of its allegations.

But on Jan. 10, CNN disclosed that U.S. intelligence officials had informed Trump of the dossier when they’d briefed him on the findings of a U.S. intelligence community report that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the hacks in an effort to help Trump’s campaign.

A short time later, BuzzFeed posted the entire 35-page document, redacting the name of one individual and saying it did not know whether the statements attributed to Steele’s intelligence sources were accurate.

At a news conference the next day, Trump suggested that U.S. officials might have released the dossier and thanked news organizations that had not published it. He assailed CNN and called BuzzFeed “a failing pile of garbage.”

“I think they’re going to suffer the consequences,” he said.

BuzzFeed also drew criticism from some media figures. Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote: “It’s a bad idea, and always has been, to publish unverified smears.”

BuzzFeed editor Smith defended the publication in a column, saying CNN’s news story on the document made it too newsworthy to not publish.

“That halfway position ran contrary to how we think of our compact with our audience: You trust us to give you the full story; we trust you to reckon with a messy, sometimes uncertain reality,” he wrote.

California Moves to Become a Sanctuary State as Texas Takes a Hard Line

February 3, 2017

by Ali Winston

The Intercept

A week after President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting immigrants prompted nationwide protests and global condemnation, California lawmakers took the first steps in advancing measures that would bar the state’s police and sheriffs from enforcing federal immigration law. Legislative hearings Tuesday had the tone of a state ready to go head to head with Washington, with repeated references to California’s size, economic clout, and large immigrant population. Lawmakers also went out of their way to highlight studies linking sanctuary policies to decreased crime.

The actions were a radical change from California’s recent history. In 1994, voters approved Proposition 187, which attempted to deny state services to undocumented immigrants before being struck down by the courts. A generation later, Kevin De León, the son of undocumented immigrants and leader of the California Senate, authored SB 54, which bars state law enforcement from working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify or detain people for deportation. The bill does not prevent ICE from enforcing immigration law in California or honoring judicial warrants.

“Trump’s remarks and the political climate around immigration makes Pete look like a choir boy compared to what we see today,” De Leon said, referencing former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed Prop 187 during his 1994 re-election campaign.

SB 54 passed through the Public Safety Committee on Tuesday with a 5-2 vote. State Sens. Jeff Stone and Joel Anderson, both Southern California Republicans, opposed the bill over concerns it would prohibit police and sheriffs from cooperating with federal agencies to investigate organized crime.

“I’m concerned that you’re basically making California a de facto sanctuary state,” Stone told De Leon during the hearing. “I’m also concerned about the promise of this president to take away significant federal money that this state needs and depends on,” he said, referring to Trump’s executive order threatening to cut funding from local governments that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

A separate bill intended to counter Trump’s call for a national Muslim registry was unanimously passed by California’s Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. The measure, SB 31, would prevent state law enforcement from participating in the creation of any database or registry of individuals according to their religion, national origin, or ethnicity.

Sen. Ricardo Lara, the author of the proposal, likened Trump’s recent ban on travelers and immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries to the deportation of hundreds of thousands bracero migrant workers in the 1950s under Operation Wetback and the Chinese Exclusion Act. “Friday’s executive order was a return to those shameful and deplorable acts of our past,” Lara said.

A third bill that advanced out of the Judiciary Committee, SB 6, would create a state-funded legal defense program for undocumented immigrants in deportation proceedings. The program would not cover individuals with violent felony convictions on their record.

West Coast cities have also started to push back against Trump’s order punishing sanctuary cities. On Tuesday, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued the federal government on the grounds that the 10th Amendment bars Washington from withholding money from states in response to policy disagreements.

While elements of the national law enforcement lobby, like the Fraternal Order of Police and the union representing ICE and Border Patrol agents, have come out in strong support of Trump’s immigration agenda, California law enforcement associations appeared split on whether to openly defy the federal initiatives.

Cory Salzillo, a lobbyist for the California State Sheriffs’ Association, voiced opposition to De Leon’s proposal. “We are concerned that SB 54 limits communication and cooperation with our law enforcement partners,” Salzillo said.

Sheriffs and police across the state collaborate with ICE agents through federal-local initiatives like Joint Terrorism Task Forces and the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force. Losing access to federal resources, money, and prosecutors for organized crime and trafficking cases is a major concern for state law enforcement.

According to De Leon, however, his legislation would not jeopardize these collaborations. “We want to make sure that we do not curtail any type of activities,” De Leon stated. “That being said, we don’t have to use local state tax dollars to do the job of federal immigration authorities.”

Another major police lobby, the California Police Chiefs Association, has not yet taken a stance on SB 54 or SB 31. “We do agree that local law enforcement does not want to be put in the position of enforcing immigration law,” said Jeffrey Feldman, a lobbyist with the police association.

The Senate committee hearings also included overt talk of defying unlawful or unconstitutional initiatives emitting from the beltway. Sen. Nancy Skinner, the chair of the Public Safety Committee, made one of the most forceful statements regarding the nature of Trump’s actions on immigration. “We are making it clear that the state of California will not be complicit with authoritarian policies,” Skinner said.

California’s actions stand in stark contrast to developments in Texas this week, where Gov. Greg Abbott made good on his threat to withhold money from Travis County, where newly elected Sheriff Sally Hernandez issued a policy on Inauguration Day limiting her deputies from cooperating with ICE agents, except in cases of some violent felonies. On Wednesday, the governor’s office canceled state grants to Travis County totally about $1.5 million.

On Thursday, Texas legislators took up a bill to ban sanctuary policies in the state. The law, SB 4, brought forth by Sen. Charles Perry, would strip state funding from local governments that either passed a sanctuary policy or refused to fully cooperate with immigration detainers, requests from ICE to local law enforcement to turn over immigrants in custody for possible deportation.

Defiance of SB 4 would allow the state attorney general to file civil suits against the local government entity that could result in hefty fines. “When we take on a law that says we are not going to allow detention, not going to allow the boots on the ground to inquire about status, that’s a sanctuary city,” Perry said during Thursday’s Senate State Affairs Committee hearing on the bill. “It’s a false argument to say that communities are safer when they allow laws to be broken.”

According to testimony at the hearing, only the Travis County sheriff has refused to fully honor all ICE holds. Texas law enforcement declined less than 1 percent of all ICE holds in 2014 and 2015, according to data analyzed by the Texas Tribune.

SB 4 faced significant pushback from several Latino legislators. Sen. Jose Rodriguez, the former El Paso County district attorney, pointed out the potential loss of state money for drug courts, anti-recidivism programs, victim compensation funds, and other social service programs that reduce crime. “It seems to me the height of irony that this bill could cut off funds that make our communities safer,” Rodriguez said.

San Antonio Police Chief William McManus also testified against SB 4 on the grounds that it would overload his officers and harm his department’s relationship with the city’s large Latino community. “This bill usurps the authority of police departments — we don’t have the capacity to enforce immigration law as well as the penal code,” McManus said.

More than 600 people signed up to testify before the Senate State Affairs Committee Thursday, including many who identified themselves as undocumented. Early on Friday morning, after 16 hours of testimony, overwhelmingly in opposition to the anti-sanctuary measure, the committee voted 7-2 to advance the bill.

Prepared for attack! Hezbollah waits for the moment

February 2, 2017

by Oberst Paul Hübener (translated from the German by Eric Mahlmann)

Hezbollah today has many hundreds of rocket launching bunkers as well as command and supply bunkers in place throughout all of southern Lebanon and is increasing its system on a daily basis.  It is conservatively estimated that these systems have nearly 2000 rocket launching sites and about 800-900 weapon caches as of late December of 2016.

………..

Spare rockets and support equipment are known to be housed in local residences as well as in protected bunker complexes.

In some known areas, short and long range rockets are secured in these bunkers which have sophisticated elevator systems designed to raise rockets to the surface launching devices.

Also, many short range rockets are able to be launched from specially constructed trucks.

Most of these launching sites have permanent crews housed adjacent to the launch positions and are able, on received commands, to fire rockets either singly, for larger long range missiles or in bulk for shorter range missiles.

………

Israel is able to target an identified launch site almost immediately after launches have occurred, however they are completely unable to direct a counter attack on the site before it is abandoned. In short, the Israeli IDF cannot prevent a devastating blanket missile attack and its aerial counterattacks would be fruitless.

Most of the higher level Hezbollah bunkers are very well-defended, have blast doors and are buried at such a level as to prevent any kind of successful aerial or artillery attacks.

…………

Many of the concrete and buried bunkers contain sufficient food and living space to permit occupancy for many weeks without any kind of a resupply.

Some of Hezbollah’s concrete tunnels are thousands of meters long.

A number of these larger command bunker systems were designed, and built, by Chinese experts, supplied by Iran.

………

Because Hezbollah’s fortified sites and underground facilities are resistant to airstrikes, the only way the IDF can neutralize them would be by a military ground action but Hezbollah has protective ground defense systems developed that can easily turn aside or neutralize ground actions.

Massive buried minefields, hidden tank traps and many booby-trapped areas would wreak havoc on any IDF armored or armored infantry attacks.

……….

Israel is known to have strongly solicited the United States to launch heavy bombing raids against southern Lebanese possible targets and to follow up  these attacks by the use of American ground troops.

………..

There is no question whatsoever that Hezbollah will launch a massive missile attack on all parts of Israel but no one outside of their highest command positions know for certain when this attack will be launched.

……..

Russia, who has supplied many missiles and directional equipment to Hezbollah via Iran and Syria, has attempted many times, in vain, to be told of such an attack in advance so they can evacuate diplomatic personnel and their families. ……

(to be continued)

Not ‘Lone Wolves’ After All: How ISIS Guides Plots by Remote Control

February 4, 2017

by Rukmini Callimachi

The New York Times

HYDERABAD, India — When the Islamic State identified a promising young recruit willing to carry out an attack in one of India’s major tech hubs, the group made sure to arrange everything down to the bullets he needed to kill victims.

For 17 months, terrorist operatives guided the recruit, a young engineer named Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, through every step of what they planned to be the Islamic State’s first strike on Indian soil.

They vetted each new member of the cell as Mr. Yazdani recruited helpers. They taught him how to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group and securely send the statement.

And from Syria, investigators believe, the group’s virtual plotters organized for the delivery of weapons as well as the precursor chemicals used to make explosives, directing the Indian men to hidden pickup spots.

Until just moments before the arrest of the Indian cell, here last June, the Islamic State’s cyberplanners kept in near-constant touch with the men, according to the interrogation records of three of the eight suspects obtained by The New York Times.

As officials around the world have faced a confusing barrage of attacks dedicated to the Islamic State, cases like Mr. Yazdani’s offer troubling examples of what counterterrorism experts are calling enabled or remote-controlled attacks: violence conceived and guided by operatives in areas controlled by the Islamic State whose only connection to the would-be attacker is the internet.

In the most basic enabled attacks, Islamic State handlers acted as confidants and coaches, coaxing recruits to embrace violence. In the Hyderabad plot, among the most involved found so far, the terrorist group reached deep into a country with strict gun laws in order to arrange for pistols and ammunition to be left in a bag swinging from the branches of a tree.

For the most part, the operatives who are conceiving and guiding such attacks are doing so from behind a wall of anonymity. When the Hyderabad plotters were arrested last summer, they could not so much as confirm the nationalities of their interlocutors in the Islamic State, let alone describe what they looked like. Because the recruits are instructed to use encrypted messaging applications, the guiding role played by the terrorist group often remains obscured.

As a result, any remotely guided plots in Europe, Asia and the United States in recent years, including the attack on a community center in Garland, Tex., were initially labeled the work of “lone wolves,” with no operational ties to the Islamic State, and only later was direct communication with the group discovered.

While the trail of many of these plots led back to planners living in Syria, the very nature of the group’s method of remote plotting means there is little dependence on its maintaining a safe haven there or in Iraq. And visa restrictions and airport security mean little to attackers who strike where they live and no longer have to travel abroad for training.

Close examination of both successful and unsuccessful plots carried out in the Islamic State’s name over the past three years indicates that such enabled attacks are making up a growing share of the operations of the group, which is also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh.

“They are virtual coaches who are providing guidance and encouragement throughout the process — from radicalization to recruitment into a specific plot,” said Nathaniel Barr, a terrorism analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, who along with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross wrote one of the first articles discussing the virtual plotters.

“If you look at the communications between the attackers and the virtual plotters, you will see that there is a direct line of communication to the point where they are egging them on minutes, even seconds, before the individual carries out an attack.”

Detailing this kind of plot direction has become a critical focus of counterterrorism officials in the United States and Europe, as they try to track terror planners who pose a lasting threat and to unravel the criminal networks that the group uses as middlemen to facilitate attacks.

Mr. Yazdani’s case presents one of the most detailed accounts to date of how the Islamic State is exporting terrorism virtually. This style of attack has allowed the terrorist group’s reach to stretch into countries as disparate as France and Malaysia, Germany and Indonesia, Bangladesh and Australia. And plots have been discovered in multiple locations in the United States, including in Columbus, Ohio, the suburbs of Washington and upstate New York.

“I fear this is the future of ISIS,” said Bridget Moreng, an analyst whose research on the virtual plotters was recently published in Foreign Affairs.

A Diverse Portfolio

Until roughly a year ago, Islamic State recruiters aggressively pushed the message that going to Syria was a spiritual obligation. They described the physical journey as a “hijrah,” the Arabic word used to refer to the Prophet Muhammad’s pilgrimage, imbuing the act with religious meaning.

The recruiters hid within an ocean of 2.3 billion live social media accounts, flooding the internet with romanticized videos of life inside the caliphate, as well as brutal execution videos, using them as clickbait to lure potential recruits.

One of the Islamic State’s most influential recruiters and virtual plotters was known by the nom de guerre Abu Issa al-Amriki, and his Twitter profile instructed newcomers to contact him via the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Among those who sought him out, asking for instructions on how to reach Syria, was Mr. Yazdani, who had convinced himself that it was his religious duty to move his family to the caliphate.

By 2015, Amriki was one of close to a dozen cyberplanners based in Syria or Iraq who were already actively recruiting volunteers abroad, according to a tally based on investigation records from North America, Europe and Asia.

Initially, they made little effort to hide, posting grandiose threats against the West on their public social media feeds. They were sometimes discounted as mere cheerleaders for the terrorist group.

But by the late spring of 2015, they were considered enough of a threat that both American and British intelligence began tracking their movements, methodically targeting them with airstrikes and killing several since then.

Among them was Amriki himself, who was killed along with his wife on April 22, 2016, when a bomb flattened their apartment in Al Bab, Syria. The Pentagon press secretary, Peter Cook, identified him as a Sudanese citizen also known as Abu Sa’ad al-Sudani, and described him as one of the Islamic State’s “external attack planners” who “actively sought to harm Western interests.”

The Department of Defense’s account showed, moreover, that the handler had been involved in far more than just the Hyderabad case, planning attacks on three continents.

At the same time that he was recruiting Mr. Yazdani, Amriki was grooming attackers in Canada and Britain, as well as at least three other young men in suburbs across America, according to court records. They included a former member of the Army National Guard living in Virginia; a warehouse worker from Columbus; and Emanuel L. Lutchman, a 25-year-old in Rochester.

Looking for ways to get to Syria, Mr. Lutchman reached out to Amriki on Dec. 25, 2015, asking what it was like to live inside territory controlled by the group. “Dream come true,” Amriki responded, before telling the young man that the Syrian border had been closed, according to the criminal complaint.

Instead, the handler suggested that Mr. Lutchman carry out an attack right at home on New Year’s Eve — less than a week after their first exchange. Plan an “operation” and kill “1000000s of kuffar,” Amriki instructed him, using a derogatory Arabic word meaning infidel. Over the course of several chats via the Telegram service, they planned how Mr. Lutchman would attack a bar serving craft beer to celebrate the holiday, prosecutors say.

The two men discussed recruiting three other “brothers” to take part. They stayed in contact as Mr. Lutchman went to Walmart, where he spent $40 on two ski masks, two knives, a machete, zip-ties, duct tape and latex gloves. He planned to abduct one of the bar’s customers and videotape himself killing the victim, prosecutors say.

And they exchanged a flurry of messages, as the 25-year-old began to voice doubts and the handler assumed the role of therapist, patiently listening and reassuring him.

Mr. Lutchman was arrested at his home the day before his planned attack on Merchants Grill in Rochester, outed by the accomplice he had recruited, who turned out to be an informant for the F.B.I.

At the time of his arrest, Mr. Lutchman had been communicating with the handler for a total of five days. It appears he never heard his handler’s voice, or saw so much as photograph of him, according to the court filings.

By late 2015, travel to Syria had become treacherous. Intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic were getting better at identifying aspiring jihadists, arresting dozens as they prepared to board flights for Istanbul in hopes of crossing into Syria. At first, Islamic State operatives instructed recruits to throw off law enforcement by taking more indirect routes. They also began urging followers to head to other Islamic State colonies, including in Libya.

That was what law enforcement officials said a young man from Columbus, Aaron T. Daniels, was trying to do in November, when he was arrested while trying to board a United Airlines flight to Houston, from where he would travel to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, before continuing toward Libya.

No longer describing the journey to Syria as a spiritual necessity, the Islamic State announced last year that those who could not reach the caliphate should attack at home.

“If the tyrants have closed in your faces the door of hijrah, then open in their face the door of jihad,” the group’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, said in an audio message released in May.

Local Assets

At the time Amriki was killed last April, he had been exchanging messages with Mr. Yazdani in India for more than a year, patiently offering encouragement as his recruit tried and failed to get a visa first to Greece, and then to Turkey in an effort to reach Syria.

One of eight children, Mr. Yazdani, who is now 30, grew up in a cramped apartment in the slum of Aman Nagar B, in a narrow alley that smells of sewage in Hyderabad’s Old City. He beat the odds, earning an engineering degree and landing a job as a quality inspector in Saudi Arabia for nearly four years, before returning to India.

While abroad, he began watching the Islamic State’s online propaganda, and soon he became consumed by a desire to leave it all for the caliphate.

“Since then, I was inclined to join Islamic State and work for the cause of religion,” Mr. Yazdani told investigators from India’s National Investigation Agency, according to the record of his interrogation, which was obtained by The New York Times and was first reported by NDTV, a New Delhi-based television company.

He logged into Twitter and searched the hashtags #ISIS and #Khilafa, the terrorist group’s preferred spelling of caliphate. In a few keystrokes, he made contact with Amriki.

“I created a Telegram ID,” Mr. Yazdani told investigators, “and sought his guidance to reach Syria.”

After months of frustrating and failed attempts to help Mr. Yazdani get a visa, Amriki’s directions changed course: “He asked me to work for I.S. by staying in India itself.”

It was a period in which the Islamic State was refining the way it exports terror, increasingly relying on cyberplanners with local knowledge. Just before his death, Amriki handed off Mr. Yazdani to a different handler, known only by his Telegram screen name, “WindsofVictory.” His identity has not yet been confirmed by Indian officials, though they believe he is Indian because he spoke fluent Hindi.

The new handler guided the eight-member cell as it took shape, exchanging messages with Mr. Yazdani as the engineer recruited his family members and friends. They named themselves “Jund-ul-Khilafa-Fi-Bilad-Hind,” the Army of the Caliphate in India, according to the interrogation records, which misspelled part of the Arabic name.

At the end of May, Mr. Yazdani received a message telling him to go to the Nanded Airport, about 200 miles away. He and an accomplice, Habeeb Mohammed, 31, drove all night. After they reached the airport the next morning, the handler told them to head to the Railway Division Office. Near that office, he said, they would see a plastic bag hanging from a tree, according to the transcripts of the men’s interrogations.

“It was informed by the handler that opposite to DRM office, there are two trees and on one of the trees there would be a white color polythene sheet (used for wrapping fragile articles),” Mr. Mohammed told investigators. “We spotted the place, and I, first on the pretext of urinating, went to check for the consignment.”

When they opened the bag, they found two pistols and 20 bullets, according to their account to law enforcement. It was one of at least four drops that the handler set up for them.

Because the pistols were rusted, they say the handler instructed them to travel to the railway station in the city of Ajmer, about 600 miles to the north. This time they were told to bring 65,000 rupees — around $1,000 — and leave it near the railway track sealed in a plastic bag, which would be picked up and used as payment for weapons.

Because the communication always had to go through the handler, the members of the Hyderabad cell never directly interacted with the arms seller. When they were arrested, they could not provide any clues as to who had left the contraband, Indian investigators said.

The Hindi-speaking handler guiding the men in Hyderabad also insisted on using a kaleidoscope of encrypted messaging applications, with Mr. Yazdani instructed to hop between apps so that even if one message history was discovered and cracked, it would reveal only a portion of their handiwork.

As soon as Mr. Yazdani indicated he was willing to undertake an attack, the handler instructed him to download ChatSecure, a messaging app to be used when they spoke by phone. When he used his laptop, he was told to contact the handler via Pidgin, another encrypted tool. He was told to create an account with Tutanota, a secure email service. And the handler taught Mr. Yazdani how to use the Tails operating system, which is contained on a USB stick and allows a user to boot up a computer from the external device and use it without leaving a trace on the hard drive.

Once that system was in place, the handler told Mr. Yazdani to prepare a handwritten oath of allegiance, known as a “bayah,” to the Islamic State’s leader.

It was signed by the members of the cell using their noms de guerre, and then Mr. Yazdani was told to scan it to his laptop, using Tails to obscure the operation. Next, he was told to upload the image to www.gulf-up.com, which allows users to upload files and produces a URL that can be shared with a third party. The link to the URL was to be sent via the secure email.

By methodically working through URLs archived on the website, The Times was able to find the image of the one-page handwritten document containing the Indian men’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State. The file was uploaded around the time that Mr. Yazdani told investigators he had done so, and the document matched his description of the wording he had disclosed to the authorities. Until they were alerted to its existence, Indian investigators were not aware that the document was still archived on the website, they said.

The men’s families have denied that they played any role in a terrorist plot, and accuse the authorities of planting evidence against them.

One Indian investigator, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters, said officials were able to crack the full extent of the case only because Mr. Yazdani and his accomplices confessed during interrogation, divulging the passwords to their accounts after their arrests last summer.

Global Reach

Though the Hyderabad case is among the most detailed in showing how Syria-based handlers directly facilitated terrorist attacks abroad, it is neither the first, nor the only one. Investigation documents from Europe show that a growing share of attacks bear signs of contact with the Islamic State’s stronghold, even though the attacker was initially described as acting alone.

The first time that officials in Europe described an attack as having been “télécommandé,” or remote-controlled, was in the spring of 2015 after a young information technology student named Sid Ahmed Ghlam tried to open fire on a church in the Paris suburb of Villejuif. Instead, he shot himself in the leg.

When the police searched his car, they found his Lenovo laptop containing a series of messages showing how he, too, had been guided by a pair of handlers who provided both the weapons and the getaway car, according to hundreds of pages of police and intelligence records obtained by The Times.

“OK, brother, now pay attention,” one of the messages begins, instructing the then-23-year-old to head to the suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, where he would find the automatic weapons in a bag left in a locked car parked near a sandwich shop. “Search among the cars that are parked there near the big road and look for a Renault Mégane,” the message said. “Look at the front right tire — you’ll find the keys placed on top.”

The handler then instructed him to store the weapons in another car in a parking garage 10 miles away, a precaution in case his apartment was searched.

Later, French investigators said they had found that Mr. Ghlam’s handlers were French citizens who had traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State. They, in turn, tapped their criminal network back in France in order to arrange the logistics of Mr. Ghlam’s plot.

Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said the handlers were essentially “quarterbacking” the attack: “They’re from there, so they can essentially tell someone, ‘O.K., go 10 yards and go this way.”

Wiretaps, interrogation records and transcripts of chats recovered on suspects’ phones and laptops show that this level of guidance has occurred all over the world.

In Germany, a man who set off a bomb outside a concert and a teenager who assaulted train passengers with an ax were both chatting with handlers until minutes before their respective attacks. The teenager’s handler urged him to use a car instead of an ax — “The damage would be much greater,” the handler advised — but the young man said he did not have a driving permit. “I want to enter paradise tonight,” the teenager said, according to a transcript obtained by a German newspaper.

In northern France, a pair of attackers who had been guided by an Islamic State cybercoach slit the throat of an 85-year-old priest. The pair had not known each other, and according to the investigative file, the handler introduced them, organizing for them to meet days before the attack. Intelligence records obtained by the Times reveal that the same handler in Syria also guided a group of young women who tried to blow up a car in front of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.

And investigations into attacks in Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh reveal that the recruits were directly communicating with Islamic State handlers who molded the plots as they took shape and helped arrange logistics, in some cases wiring money.

In several, a pattern has emerged: The attacker initially tries to reach Syria, but is either blocked by the authorities in the home country or else turned back from the border. Under the instructions of a handler in Syria or Iraq, the person then begins planning an attack at home.

Law enforcement officials describe that sequence of events in one of the most recent foiled attacks in France, where a group of people are accused of plotting to hit the popular Christmas market in the city of Strasbourg, having been given the GPS coordinates of a location to pick up weapons. At least one of the five men arrested so far had been turned back from Turkey, French prosecutors said.

Weak Links

While a reliance on local amateurs has allowed the Islamic State to announce that it can stage terrorism around the world, it has also led to many failed attacks.

Instead of opening fire on a church, Mr. Ghlam shot himself in the leg. Instead of laying waste to a music festival this past summer, the Islamic State recruit in Germany detonated his bomb prematurely, killing only himself.

The same thing happened the day before the end of Ramadan on July 2 inside a police compound in Indonesia, where another remotely guided attacker hit the switch on his crudely assembled suicide vest.

“He didn’t even knock over the flowerpot on the ledge next to where he blew himself up,” said Sidney Jones, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict.

Indonesian officials say that the suicide bomber had been incited to attack by Bahrun Naim, a 33-year-old Indonesian man who is now one of the Islamic State’s most prolific cyberplanners, operating from the group’s capital in Raqqa, Syria.

Initially, Mr. Naim wired money to families in Indonesia to pay for travel to Syria, officials said. Later, the bank transfers he sent were to be used to buy the chemicals needed to build explosives, according to the interrogation records of his recruits.

In just over a year, the young men he guided attempted at least six attacks, targeting a police post, a Buddhist temple and a church, as well as foreigners visiting the country. In November, a college dropout who was being guided by Mr. Naim was arrested as he prepared to attack the Malaysian Embassy. In his home, the police recovered a quantity of explosives that could have resulted in a blast twice as powerful as the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed 202 people, the police spokesman told local news media.

Yet nearly all of the plots attributed to Mr. Naim have failed. And it was human error that finally led to the arrest of Amriki’s followers in Hyderabad.

The plot began to unravel in June after the men were instructed to collect a 10-kilogram bag of ammonium nitrate left beside a canal next to mile marker No. 9 on the Vijayawada Highway.

They returned to Mr. Mohammed’s home to begin preparing a bomb, but could not figure out how to replicate the steps in the instructional YouTube video sent to them by the handler. “We could not succeed in making powder, as it became jellylike paste,” Mr. Yazdani lamented, according to the transcript of his interrogation.

They tried using a tea strainer. They tried heating it longer. They began talking on their cellphones about their efforts to “cook the rice.”

By then, the police were wiretapping their calls and suspected that all the food talk was a crude attempt at misdirection. Early on June 29, the police banged on the door of Mr. Mohammed’s home.

In his bedroom, they found the half-cooked explosive in his refrigerator.

Reporting was contributed by Suhasini Raj from Hyderabad and New Delhi, Runa Sandvik from New York, and Eric Schmitt and Adam Goldman from Washington.