Major Nidal Hasan
Nidal Malik Hasan is an American convicted of fatally shooting 13 people and injuring more than 30 others in the Fort Hood mass shooting on November 5, 2009. Hasan was a United States Army Medical Corps psychiatrist who admitted to the shootings at his court-martial in August 2013 before he was sentenced to death. Hasan is incarcerated at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas awaiting execution.
This is another case where giant red flags were flying, but as is often the case, political correctness afforded Hasan the ability to stay in the military. He had never deployed, he did not have battle experience or PTSD.
On August 28, 2014, his attorney said Hasan had written a letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (head of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS). In the letter, Hasan requested to be made a citizen of the Islamic State and included his signature and the abbreviation SoA (Soldier of Allah).
Anwar al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki was an American and Yemeni imam and Islamic lecturer. He was known as a recruiter for ISIS and was very adept in social media. With a blog, a Facebook page, the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire, and many YouTube videos, al-Awlaki was described by Saudi news station Al Arabiya as the “Bin Laden of the Internet.”
As an imam of a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia (2001–02), al-Awlaki spoke with and preached to three of the 9/11 hijackers, who were al-Qaeda members. In 2001, he presided at the funeral of the mother of Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who later e-mailed him extensively in 2008–09 before the Fort Hood shootings.
In April 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama authorized the killing of al-Awlaki. He was the first US citizen on a list of people whom the Central Intelligence Agency were authorized to kill because of terrorist activities. The U.S. deployed a drone and killed al-Awlaki on September 30, 2011 in Yemen.
John Anthony Walker Jr
Walker began spying for the Soviets in 1968, when, distraught over his financial difficulties, he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., sold a top secret document (a radio cipher card) for several thousand dollars, a low price to sell one’s country out for.
Shortly after Walker gave information to the Soviets, the North Koreans captured the USS Pueblo. It has been speculated the Soviets wanted more information about the intelligence activities of the USS Pueblo and directed the North Koreans to seize the ship allowing them to verify the intelligence supplied by Walker.
After Walker’s arrest in 1985, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said the Soviet Union had made significant gains in naval warfare attributable to Walker’s spying. Weinberger stated that the information Walker gave Moscow allowed the Soviets access to weapons and sensor data, naval tactics, terrorist threats, and surface, submarine, and airborne training, readiness and tactics.
Walker was incarcerated for life at FCC Butner, in the low security portion. Walker died on August 28, 2014, while still in prison. We aren’t sorry.
Jane Fonda aka “Hanoi Jane”
Jane Fonda visited Vietnam, traveling to Hanoi in July 1972 to witness firsthand the bombing damage to the dikes. After touring and photographing dike systems in North Vietnam, she said the United States had been intentionally targeting the dike system along the Red River.
Fonda made radio broadcasts on Hanoi Radio throughout her two-week tour, commenting on her visits to villages, hospitals, schools, and factories damaged in the war and denouncing U.S. military policy in Vietnam.
My brother, a career Air Force NCO with multiple tours in Vietnam during the war told me years ago he remembered Jane Fonda’s broadcasts. To put it mildly, he was not impressed.
Fonda has defended her decision to travel to North Vietnam and her radio broadcasts. During the course of her visit, Fonda visited American prisoners of war (POWs), and brought back messages from them to their families. When stories of torture of returning POWs were later being publicized by the Nixon administration, Fonda called the returning POWs “hypocrites and liars and pawns”, adding about the prisoners she visited, “These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed.” She said, “I’m quite sure that there were incidents of torture, but the pilots who were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that’s a lie.”
In 2000 Fonda said, “I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft carrier, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless.”
Maybe so but I am not buying it. She will always be “Hanoi Jane” and a traitor to me.
Richard Miller
On October 3, 1984, Miller was arrested with Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov, Russian immigrants who had moved to Los Angeles in 1973 to seek refuge, but who actually accessed agents of the Soviet KGB. Miller was alleged to have provided classified documents, including an FBI Counterintelligence manual, to the Ogorodnikovs after demanding $50,000 in gold and $15,000 cash in return.
Miller was a mediocre agent at best. He was described as disheveled and unsophisticated. Other agents often asked why Miller was allowed to stay at the FBI. He, at least on the surface, was not the picture of a professional FBI agent.
That portrait of Miller was more than surface deep. He took three-hour “lunches” at the 7-Elevens near his Los Angeles office, gorging himself on stolen candy bars while reading comic books. He cheated his own uncle by selling a muscle-relaxant device he’d patented, skimmed cash from Bureau coffers and ran auto-registration checks and searched FBI criminal indexes for a local private investigator at $500 per search. He was adulterous and shady in every way and even found himself excommunicated from the Latter Day Saints church.
Everything about his behavior, work product and moral choices should have alerted the FBI they had a bad apple. They missed it.
On October 9, 1990, Miller was convicted on all counts of espionage for the second time and on February 4, 1991 was sentenced to 20 years in Federal prison.
Edward Lee Howard
Howard was hired by the CIA in 1980 and was later joined by his wife, Mary, where they were both trained in intelligence and counter-intelligence methods. Shortly after the end of their training, and before going on their first assignment, a routine polygraph test indicated that he had lied about past drug use. He was fired by the CIA in 1983 shortly before he was to report to the CIA’s station at the American embassy in Moscow.
I remember seeing these wanted posters in the local post office back in the mid-80s. It didn’t say who he was, but if you read the poster you got a pretty good idea. I can remember telling my wife, “ This guy has got to be a spook.”
Howard died on July 12, 2002, at his Russian dacha, reportedly from a broken neck after a fall in his home. Too bad.
Ronald Pelton
Not wanting to leave any agency out of the mix, we come to Ronald William Pelton who worked for the NSA.
Ronald William Pelton (born November 18, 1941) was a National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst who was convicted in 1986 of spying for and selling secrets to the Soviet Union. One operation he compromised was Operation Ivy Bells.
What is interesting about Pelton is it appears he did not become a spy until after he left government service. As we have seen in several cases, money was the issue, and Pelton wanted it.
He told his son he wanted to buy the family a big farm. He told a business associate he was planning a major contribution to his church. He promised his mistress a yacht, a house in Georgetown and a trip to Rome.
Even though Pelton tried to present the picture of a major international money broker, he actually never made more the 21k a year working at a landscaping company, that was until he started selling secrets to the KGB
Pelton contacted the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. on January 14, 1980, and arranged for a meeting at the embassy. The FBI had surveillance on the embassy and had tapped the phone. Therefore, it anticipated the arrival of the caller but was unable to observe him in time to determine his identity. He was debriefed by KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko and disclosed Operation Ivy Bells, an NSA and United States Navy program to surreptitiously wiretap undersea cables to monitor Soviet military communications and track Soviet submarines.
On trips to Vienna in 1980 and 1983, Pelton stayed at the residence of the Soviet Ambassador to Austria and underwent debriefing sessions that sometimes lasted eight hours a day with KGB officer Anatoly Slavnov. Even though Pelton had left the NSA, he may have continued to be valuable to the Soviets as an intelligence consultant, helping them interpret data picked up from other sources. Pelton had no classified documents to offer but relied on his memory to provide information. He was paid about $37,000 by the Soviets.
