TUESDAY, JULY 13, 2010


KLMNO THE FED PAGE Freshman lawmaker goes against GOP grain on war


IN SESSION Perry Bacon Jr.


Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) wanted reassurance. The lawmaker had criticized the surge of 30,000 troops President Obama authorized, saying that the United States does not have a clear policy or exit strategy. But he had not yet cast a vote against war funding. He knew such a move would


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isolate him in the Republican Party; most GOP lawmakers strongly support the war effort even as they rail against almost everything else Obama has done. And Chaffetz is no moderate: He won his seat in 2008 running to the right of the conservative incumbent, has called for cutting federal employees’ pay since taking office and has openly discussed a “tea party”-style challenge to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R) in 2012. On the eve of the vote,


Chaffetz called families of the three men from his district who have died in Afghanistan since he was elected and told them he was considering opposing the funding. “This was one of the toughest


s the House neared a vote this month on funding for the war in Afghanistan,


These seven House Republicans joined 93 Democrats in calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. OPPOSING THE AFGHAN WAR


Afghanistan is what has worked in Afghanistan: Let the Afghans pay the price. Let them do their fighting.” For now, those views, if not


Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) Rep. Duncan Hunter (Calif.) Rep. Walter B. Jones (N.C.)


isolated, are firmly in the minority in the GOP. When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele recently cast doubts on the war effort, leading party figures such as Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Richard B. Cheney and founder of a conservative foreign policy organization, and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol called for him to resign. The chairman quickly retracted the comments. A June Washington Post-ABC


Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (Calif.) Rep. John Campbell (Calif.)


“It may be slow, but if we continue to have votes like this, I think you will see a lot of Republicans shift


to this point of view.” —Rep. Jason Chaffetz


Rep. Timothy V. Johnson (Ill.)


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Don’t expect Russian ‘illegals’ to go away


WALTER PINCUS Fine Print


SVR, has planted over the years in the United States? And will the SVR press the reset button with the Obama administration and not send additional “illegals” to this country? In a background briefing for


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reporters on Thursday, a senior administration official familiar with the Justice Department’s assessment of the situation described how the 10 who were arrested as “sleeper agents” had been under investigation for years. The official added: “We have effectively shut down the illegal program here.”


Other sources in the


law enforcement and intelligence


communities do not share that view,


although, of course, they will not say so publicly. As one former senior


intelligence official put it, “How would we know?” The Russians have used “illegals” in their espionage activities since the October 1917 revolution. As the FBI put it in the June 27


wo questions: Have we caught all the “illegals” that Russia’s security service, the


Although many people seem to play down what the 10 appeared to have accomplished, Holder said, “The potential for what they might have done was, I think, a serious thing.” He added: “They actually did make contact with certain people and did obtain certain information from people who were unwitting in their interaction with these people.” Take, for example, Cynthia


Murphy, the woman from Montclair, N.J., who worked for a Manhattan tax-advice firm, Morea Financial Services. One of the firm’s clients was New York financier Alan Patricof, a major supporter of former president Bill Clinton and a friend of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. In a Feb. 3, 2009, electronic


As an “illegal,” Cynthia Murphy was tasked to get certain information.


complaint, “illegals” are provided false identities and documents, obtain citizenship or legal resident permits of target countries, and “pursue degrees at target-country universities, obtain employment, and join relevant professional associations.” They “work to hide all connections between themselves and Russia, even as they act at the direction and under the control of the SVR.” Gathering data on people who can later be recruited as spies is a primary goal, instead of stealing secrets themselves. In the trade, they are called spotters. On Sunday, Attorney General


Eric Holder said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Russia considered the 10, all now back in Moscow, “very important to their intelligence-gathering activities.”


message to Moscow Center, Murphy reported that she had “several work-related meetings” with a New York financier who was an active political fundraiser and “a personal friend of [current Cabinet member whose name was omitted],” according to the original indictment. In return, Moscow Center tasked Murphy before “Obama’s trip to Moscow” to find information on the U.S. strategic arms treaty, Afghanistan and Iran’s nuclear program. There is no indication she picked up any information from Patricof. Instead of shutting


down Russia’s illegals program in the United States, Holder said, “we have broken up a pretty substantial network.”


The best public indication of the


extent of Moscow’s efforts comes from the late Sergei Tretyakov, the former Russian intelligence officer who under the guise of a press officer at the U.N. Mission ran espionage operations in New York City from 1995 to 2000. He served the last three of those years as a double agent for the FBI until he defected to the United States. As Tretyakov told author Pete Earley in the book “Comrade J,” at one time he had more than 60 SVR officers working inside the United Nations and more than 160 contacts made up of illegals, outright spies, and other people who knowingly or unknowingly could supply information useful to Russia.


One thing remains certain in the wake of the illegals case: The


FBI will continue daily surveillance of the activities of Russian officials who travel between Moscow’s U.N. Mission and consular office in New York City and its embassy in Washington. As last month’s spy indictments showed, these were the officials who regularly passed funds or exchanged encrypted computer messages with the illegals. The best example: The FBI


affidavit in the initial spy indictment said that “Russian Government Official #2” was in May 2004 a second secretary at Moscow’s U.N. Mission. That month, at a Long Island Rail Road train station outside New York City, he was videotaped exchanging an orange bag containing money with Christopher Metsos, the defendant who jumped bail after being arrested in Cyprus. Hours after getting the orange bag, Metsos met with Richard Murphy at a Long Island restaurant. He passed a package to Murphy and discussed, in a conversation the FBI recorded, Murphy’s “cut.” Just over six years later, on June


5, 2010, the FBI said that same “Russian Government Official #2” drove the car with a Russian diplomatic license plate that appeared in the parking lot of a District restaurant. The official reportedly made computer contact with Mikhail Semenko, another of the “illegals,” who was inside the restaurant. What will the Russians do now?


In a C-SPAN interview two years ago, Tretyakov said that when the Cold War was over, the United States asked Russia to stop the KGB’s covert propaganda activities that portrayed Washington in foreign media as carrying out terrible activities, such as saying the United States was spreading HIV in Africa. In response, Tretyakov said, the


KGB closed down “Department A,” which ran those activities, but then established the MS program, which did the same thing. “Nothing changed,” he said. The U.S. answer may have come


on PBS’s “NewsHour” last week. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told Jim Lehrer that the arrest of the 10 illegals, their guilty pleas and the prisoner exchange last week “sends a clear signal to, not only Russia, but other countries that will attempt this, that we are on to them.” pincusw@washpost.com


votes I’ve had in Congress,” Chaffetz said. “So I asked their opinion. And to a T, they all agreed with me.” So Chaffetz joined a tiny bloc in Congress: Republicans opposed to the Afghan war. Chaffetz, 43, voted for a measure that would bar the administration from funding anything other than withdrawals and another that would require Obama to present a plan by April for the “safe, orderly and expeditious redeployment of U.S. troops.” Only nine House Republicans backed either measure. “It may be slow, but if we continue to have votes like this, I think you will see a lot of Republicans shift to this point


of view,” Chaffetz said. “When you have people like George Will [opposed to the war], I’m not an isolated incident.” The House eventually passed the funding measure, and the Senate is likely to do the same in the coming weeks. But in a show of frustration, Democrats insisted on holding votes on two antiwar resolutions before authorizing the $33 billion in funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. Both measures failed, as expected, but 153 Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), supported having a withdrawal plan by April. Most Republicans not only voted against the resolutions but also attacked them as


setting up an artificial timetable that would weaken the military’s hand. But an eclectic mix of Republicans joined the Democrats. Some of them, such as Reps. Ron Paul (Tex.) and Walter B. Jones (N.C.), have long criticized the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others, such as Chaffetz, are newer to the position. “I can state emphatically that if we continue our present strategy in Afghanistan, we will not succeed, and America will eventually be weakened by loss of lives and the expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), another war opponent. “What works in


News poll found that 48 percent of Democrats thought the United States was losing the war in Afghanistan and 66 percent didn’t think it was worth continuing to fight. But 60 percent of Republicans said the nation was winning and almost two-thirds said the battle was worth fighting. “I think there has long been a


view among Republicans that we want to favorably resolve the situation in Afghanistan, and I think that’s very much still in place,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster. Most of the Republicans concerned about the war are longtime lawmakers such as Paul, who can easily hold their House seats and are unlikely to seek higher offices. (Paul could wage another presidential campaign but would be a considerable underdog.) But Chaffetz said he thinks his stand on Afghanistan could help his political future. “Nobody wants to be seen as


cut and run, but I think this is a good conservative position,” he said. “I think it is what the majority of my district and what the state of Utah wants to see happen.”


baconp@washpost.com


White House criticizes NASA head on remarks


Discussing outreach to Muslims not in job purview, official says


Reuters White House spokesman Rob-


ert Gibbs said Monday that NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. was wrong to say that reaching out to the Muslim world was a top priority of the U.S. space agency. Bolden raised eyebrows in the space community and outrage among conservative pundits by telling al-Jazeera television re- cently that President Barack Oba- ma had instructed him to work for better outreach with the Mus- lim world. He said Obama told him that one of his top priorities was to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineer- ing.” Improving relations with the


Muslim world was a top foreign policy priority for Obama upon taking office last year, and he de- livered a major speech on the top- ic in Cairo in June 2009. Last week, the White House sought to clarify Bolden’s com- ment, saying Obama wanted NASA to engage with the world’s best scientists and engineers from countries such as Russia, Ja- pan, Israel and many Muslim- majority countries. That failed to end the contro-


versy. Gibbs was asked at his daily


news briefing why Bolden had made the comment. “I don’t think — that was not his task, and that’s not the task of NASA,” Gibbs said.


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