I Triggered Another Federal Investigation

The Army’s keystone cops are on the case

Army Criminal Investigation Division agent | Department of Defense

The California National Guard cut off soldier access to vital military information because of what I reported on Tuesday, sources tell me. Basic mission briefings and threat information were cut off, soldiers unable to log into their unclassified portal.

Not only was the portal cut off, but soldiers have been called together for “OPSEC” meetings (operational security) and been told that the Army Criminal Investigation Division, better known as “CID,” is investigating the leak.

My report detailed the Guard’s Operation Excalibur in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park. The article revealed “unclassified” documents leaked to me showing how uncoordinated and ridiculous the mission was in support of ICE and other homeland security brownshirts.

Brownshirts, of course, is not the right word. Many in the military who are on the ground in Los Angeles think that ICE and others from homeland security dressing up in Army green and using armored vehicles on the streets of an American city undermines the reputation of the armed forces. At least in the field, they don’t want to be part of any Trump crusade, and are hesitant about being mixed in theatrical shows of force, which the MacArthur Park operation was. 

That the LA deployment is mere theater was the most embarrassing disclosure in the leak. For the higher ups, and for the Washington set focused on “optics,” such revelations of buffoonery and ineptitude erode the picture that many have of a national security state that is sober-minded and rules-bound. I particularly was delighted by the ridiculous characterization of MacArthur Park as a “HIGH” threat level and an “area of historic lawlessness”; and of assigning federal agencies codenames like “Dr. Pepper,” “Pepsi,” and “R/C” (the off-brand Coke). 

My personal favorite I didn’t even include in the article, a separate California National Guard CONOPS plan directing soldiers to debrief with someone codenamed “Cthulhu Six,” a reference to HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror novel (lol).

Copy of leaked CONOPS

Far from the imperial stormtroopers they’re depicted as in the mainstream press, these guys are dorks. And somewhere up the chain of command, one of the higher-level dorks has ordered a leak investigation, sources tell me. 

The Pentagon, the national security state’s largest bureaucracy, transmits orders in a process that resembles a game of telephone, getting passed down along the chain subordinate to subordinate. The garbled culmination of this particular order takes the form of a member of the Army Criminal Investigative Division, who in response to my story informed the California National Guard that they would be “pulling IP addresses from phones and personal wifi,” a brigade commander said.

To give you a sense of how seriously this was taken, I’m told that Guardsmen have been cracking wise about the existence of such a thing called a VPN, one laughing at the notion of how much internet porn investigators would be going through otherwise.

Now a plucky Army CID investigator will be in LA through Monday to brief the Guardsmen on the transcendent importance of operational security and how they’d be monitoring IP addresses.

“It’s a performative measure so they can tell their DC bosses that they are ‘doing something,’” an Army source told me. 

One indisputable effect all of this has had is to impede communication. In an attempt to keep the Guard mission close to the chest, only leadership is being briefed.

“Battalions are pushing back, as echelons aren’t supposed to be skipped like that,” a source said.

I guess it’s fitting that a deployment whose very mission is theater — or “show of presence” as the briefing said — would involve a theater of investigation.

All of this reminds me of a story my editor (Bill Arkin, whose name appears at the bottom of these posts) once told me about his own military leak investigation. Except his was actually classified — it was top secret, in fact — and as a result was far more serious, precipitating what is likely the largest military leak investigation in U.S. history.

In June of 2002, Bill disclosed in the LA Times the Bush administration’s top secret war planning for Iraq, codenamed “Polo Step.” The Pentagon wouldn’t invade until the next year, in March of 2003; so needless to say, there was a shitstorm. General Tommy Franks in his memoir says that in response to the disclosure, he demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld polygraph everyone in his office as well as in the Joint Chiefs. As Bill learned, this resulted in an extraordinary undertaking in which over 1,000 military people, civilians, and contractors were interviewed and polygraphed. Thankfully, they never found his source.

As one of Bill’s sources later recounted, when a member of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was interrogating him, he kept asking who Bill might be in contact with, and the source suggested that maybe the investigators should look at then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who had been dean of the Johns Hopkins graduate school while Bill wrote some monographs for them

“How do you spell that name?” the investigator inquired, clearly unfamiliar with who Wolfowitz even was.

It’s theater all the way down.

— Edited by William M. Arkin