The French Take a Turn Blaming Assad for Khan Sheikhoun: Expect More False-Flag Attacks

The White House failed. Now it's France's turn. As reported by John Irish of Reuters, "French intelligence says Assad forces carried out sarin attack," the argument basically remains the same: "Trust us. Khan Sheikhoun was hit with sarin bombs dropped by Syrian warplanes." The rhetorical French flourish is to identify hexamine as an element found in the sarin sample that somehow uniquely identifies the Syrian government as the perpetrator of the attack:

The six-page French document - drawn up by France's military and foreign intelligence services and seen by said it reached its conclusion based on samples they had obtained from the impact strike on the ground and a blood sample from a victim.

"We know, from a certain source, that the process of fabrication of the samples taken is typical of the method developed in Syrian laboratories," Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters after presenting the findings to the cabinet.

"This method is the signature of the regime and it is what enables us to establish the responsibility of the attack. We know because we kept samples from previous attacks that we were able to use for comparison."

Among the elements found in the samples were hexamine, a hallmark of sarin produced by the Syrian government, according to the report.

It said the findings matched the results of samples obtained by French intelligence, including an unexploded grenade, from an attack in Saraqib on April 29, 2013, which Western powers have accused the Assad government of carrying out.

"This production process is developed by Syria's Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) for the regime," the report said.

The United States on Monday blacklisted 271 employees belonging to the agency.

Syria agreed in September 2013 to destroy its entire chemical weapons program under a deal negotiated with the United States and Russia after hundreds of people were killed in a sarin gas attack in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus.

The report said that based on its assessments, there were "serious doubts on the accuracy, completeness and sincerity of the dismantlement of Syria's chemical arsenal."

There are of course holes aplenty in this. Where is proof of the chain of custody showing the sample came from the purported Khan Sheikhoun impact crater? Otherwise, we are once again being asked to take on faith that an intelligence agency that seeks to subvert a sovereign state is in this instance acting in an objective, impartial manner.

Also, none of the by now well-circulated Postol analysis is engaged with in the slightest -- that the sarin was not distributed by a missile dropped from a plane but a device detonated on the ground; that the alleged impact crater could not have been the site for the sarin dispersal because after-incident photos showed bare-faced rescue workers handling dead birds. If sarin had been present these men would have died.

The importance of the French intelligence report is the last paragraph above, the one in red. The soil is being tilled for another false-flag sarin attack. The argument is that despite what the OPCW said, Syria still retains a sarin stockpile, and it will use it until the West bombs it out of existence.

Once Again: "Whose Sarin?"

In preparation for the release later today of a National Security Council (NSC) document that purportedly is to offer proof of the Syrian government's responsibility for the chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun, it would be a good idea to consult rick Sterling's "How Media Bias Fuels Syrian Escalation," which appeared yesterday on the Consortium News website.

In terms of a concise, drink-it-all-in-at-once synopsis of chemical weapons as a casus belli in Syria, I don't think I've read any better:

But the real story behind the deaths in Khan Sheikhoun remains uncertain, with U.S. intelligence apparently still trying to unravel the mystery and with some logic pointing to the armed opposition as the perpetrators, not the Syrian government.

There are four basic theories about what happened:

-The dominant Western narrative is that the Syrian “regime” dropped illegal chemical weapons on civilians because it is simply barbaric or alternatively because it was celebrating its impunity following the Trump administration’s announcement that it was no longer seeking Assad’s ouster.

-Then, there’s the possibility of an accidental release of chemicals because an airstrike by the Syrian military hit an Al Qaeda weapons depot where chemical weapons were stored, rupturing the containers and causing the poison gas to spread over the area. The Russian Ministry of Defense says militants had a weapons production factory including chemical weapon ingredients.

-Another theory is that the deaths were part of a psychological operation in which the kidnapped civilians from Khattab and possibly others were killed or poisoned in a staged event prompted by the growing desperation of Al Qaeda and other rebel groups, especially after the late March announcement that the U.S. was no longer seeking Assad’s removal.

-There is also the possibility that an outside power, angered by the Trump administration’s announcement, assisted in the psychological operation by delivering the poison gas that was used on the town.

Despite Trump’s hasty decision to blame and punish the Assad government, U.S. intelligence analysts are reportedly still reviewing the evidence, which includes overhead surveillance of the area. However, because the President has already acted, whatever the CIA concludes – if it contradicts Trump – may remain secret for the indefinite future.

Still, there are facts, history and circumstantial reasons that would lead one to believe that it is far more likely the armed opposition is responsible than the government.

(1) The incident and publicity help the opposition and hurt the government.

Crime investigations usually begin with the question: Who has a motive? In this case, it’s strikingly clear that the armed opposition and their supporters benefited from this event. They have used the story to further demonize the Assad government and renew calls for the U.S. and “the world” to intervene. 

Not only did the incident cause the Trump administration to reverse its recently announced reversal of Obama’s “Assad must go” mantra, but the deaths came as the Syrian government is making steady advances in many parts of the country. The government had no reason to use chemical weapons even if it still had any after surrendering its stockpiles of such weapons in 2014. Indeed, the government had every reason NOT to use chemical weapons, knowing very well the armed opposition’s propaganda capabilities and access to the major Western media.

It is also relevant to consider timing. In this case, the events in Khan Sheikhoun occurred the day before an important conference on Syria was to be held in Brussels. The conference titled “Supporting the future of Syria and the region” has been effectively sidetracked by news about the chemical weapons attack and the Syrian government being blamed.

(2) Extremists were likely responsible for the August 2013 chemical weapon attack in Damascus.

Western supporters of the armed opposition were quick to blame the Syrian government for the chemical attack in Ghouta on Aug. 21, 2013. However, subsequent investigations by the most credible investigative journalists and researchers concluded the Syrian government was probably NOT responsible. Seymour Hersh and Robert Parry concluded the attack was most likely carried out by militants with support from Turkish intelligence.

The in-depth examination titled WhoGhouta concluded “The only plausible scenario that fits the evidence is an attack by opposition forces.” An MIT study made a detailed trajectory analysis and concluded that the sarin-carrying missile could not have been fired from government territory. The study challenged the unsubstantiated claims made in the U.S. “government assessment” white paper, which almost led President Obama to launch a military strike against Syrian government forces. “Faulty intelligence could have led to an unjustified US military action,” the MIT study said.

(3) Armed opposition groups have a history of staging incidents

From the start, the Syrian conflict has included an information war. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton boasted of “training for more than a thousand activists, students and independent journalists,” a program that amounted to an invitation for the armed opposition to sell its case to the West via propaganda on social media, including heartrending tales focused on suffering children and heroic stories of selfless “moderate” rebels and the even more selfless White Helmets “rescue workers.”

In December 2012, NBC journalist Richard Engel was reportedly kidnapped and abused by “shabiha” supporters of the Syrian government. Engel and his film crew were “liberated” by Free Syrian Army rebels after a gunfight with the supposedly pro-Assad kidnappers. In reality, the entire episode from kidnapping to rescue was a hoax designed to demonize Assad’s supporters and glorify the “rebels.” The true story emerged years later after the actual events were leaked. When it was going to be made public, Engel finally admitted the truth.

The world also now knows that the real kidnappers of Western journalists have been the jihadist rebels, who have decapitated hostages including Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

(4) Supporters of the armed opposition have a history of fabricating stories to demonize the Syrian government.

In February 2014, it was announced that a defecting Syrian military photographer, who was anonymous but code-named “Caesar,” had 55,000 photos documenting the torture and murder of 11,000 innocent Syrian civilians. This news received sensational media attention with live interviews on CNN and front-page coverage throughout the Western world. The news relied on the judgment of legal prosecutors who “verified” the story and produced a “Caesar Report,” released the day before the start of Geneva peace negotiations. It effectively disrupted the talks and facilitated the “rebels” refusal to negotiate and walk away.

In reality, the “verification” and report was commissioned by the government of Qatar, which has been a major funder of the armed opposition. Since then it has been discovered that nearly half the 55,000 photos show the opposite of what was claimed: they show dead Syrian soldiers and victims of explosions NOT tortured civilians, just one of the findings of fraud in this sensational story. [A concise expose of “Caesar” is here.]

Ghouta Redux and the Coming Western Invasion of Libya

There is little reason to expect that the "cessation of hostilities" in Syria, agreed to by the United States and Russia, which is to go into effect on Saturday, will be anymore successful than the Munich agreement of the week before last. The main reason is that both ceasefires are based on the fiction that there is a clear dividing line between the U.S./Saudi-backed forces on the one hand and those of Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra on the other. The U.S.-Russian truce applies to neither Nusra nor ISIS; hence, the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian and Iranian allies can bomb both Salafist groups. And that is where the problem lies: U.S./Saudi forces are largely indistinguishable from Nusra on the battlefield. So while Russia and Syria can interpret bombing Nusra as in compliance with the truce, the Saudis and their neocon backers in the U.S. will cry foul. In other words, nothing will have changed.

There is an interesting story in today's paper by Celestine Bohlen, "A Turning Point for Syrian War, and U.S. Credibility." French foreign minister Laurent Faubius, having recently resigned his post, is blaming Obama for destroying the Pax Americana global order by failing to bomb Damascus to smithereens following the false flag Ghouta sarin attack of August 2013. Fabius blames everything that followed -- Russia's annexation of Crimea, the rise of ISIS, the refugee crisis in Europe -- on Obama's fecklessness.

This keening over the lost opportunity of Ghouta is nothing new. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the national security power elite when Obama decided to go to Congress to get authorization to illegally bomb Syria, a political exigency for the Noble laureate who owed his presidency to not having supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But Ghouta has recently reappeared as the key moment that destroyed the status quo, and it is hardening into settled opinion. As Bohlen explains,

Charges of American “passivity” have been a common theme of late at international conferences, where diplomats, foreign policy analysts and journalists play what the French newspaper Le Monde called the “blame game” for the catastrophic situation in Syria. 

For his part, Mr. Fabius, a former prime minister who left the Foreign Ministry to head the French Constitutional Council, hasn’t hesitated to point the finger at various targets. He has accused Mr. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria of “brutality,” Iran and Russia of “complicity,” and the United States of “ambiguity.” 

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s perceived lack of follow-through in Syria is oft-repeated in Paris; what’s new is that a former foreign minister, among others, is calling the United States’ decision in 2013 a world-changing event. 

François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank based in London, compared the moment to the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, an event seen in hindsight as helping to set the stage for World War I. 

Similarly, Mr. Obama’s reversal in 2013 “is one of those turning points in history where you see the power shift,” Mr. Heisbourg said in an interview. 

By refusing to enforce the red line, Mr. Obama did “enormous, perhaps irretrievable” damage to American credibility, Mr. Heisbourg said. 

“He did it because he didn’t want to do the strikes,” Mr. Heisbourg added. “He was caught in flagrante committing a supreme act of fecklessness.” 

According to both Mr. Heisbourg and, it seems, Mr. Fabius, there were global consequences to Mr. Obama’s inaction, most notably in Russia’s annexation of Crimea the following year, even though Moscow in its public rhetoric continues to accuse Washington of throwing its weight around in an imperial manner. 

Mr. Heisbourg said the “fecklessness” of 2013 had been recognized and interpreted in numerous capitals, not just Paris, as a low point for American power and influence.

“This is not just about the irritated French,” he said. “It goes much deeper.”

“The next U.S. president is going to have to demonstrate early on — in circumstances that he or she would have preferred to avoid — that this was an Obama moment, not an America moment,” he said. 

Although Mr. Fabius expressed regret that “the world didn’t follow France’s position” and punish Mr. Assad for using chemical weapons, others are unconvinced that intervention would have changed the course of the Syrian civil war. In fact, it has been noted in the press that Mr. Fabius’s parting shot at the United States may have been an attempt to deflect criticism of France’s own diplomatic failures in the region. 

Western intervention in Libya, led by France and Britain, has created only greater instability there, while the war in Yemen, waged by Middle Eastern proxies with no overt Western involvement, continues unabated, suggesting no easy answers anywhere in the region.

First, the mainstream press, following the six-month period when the issue of who was actually responsible for the sarin attack was hotly debated, a debate that was won by The London Review of Books when it published Seymour Hersh's "Whose Sarin?" -- evidence points to Nusra not the Syrian government -- blithely went about its business as a broadsheet for Western intelligence services and kept repeating the now-debunked claim that Assad was to blame for the chemical attack.

Next, there is no doubt, as the red-bold quote above makes clear, that the next U.S. president is going to have to atone for Obama's "passivity" by committing to yet another war theater. This will be Libya. Moves are already being made. Read Eric Schmitt's frontpager from yesterday, "U.S. Scrambles to Contain Growing ISIS Threat in Libya." Afghanistan is a lost cause. Russia is in Syria; so the U.S. can't throw down there. Iraq is a charnel house and a massive re-invasion would be politically unpopular in the homeland. Libya is ready-made; plus, it has huge oil reserves. Hillary will take us there for sure, as would Trump, and probably even Sanders. Perpetual war is here to stay. The new dispensation should be called Bellum Americana.

Cable News Bloodlust

Away from the Internet since Saturday, I relied on a steady diet of cable news for my information. My mother, who is a resident of an assisted living facility, usually has her television tuned to CNN, but she bounces regularly to MSNBC and Fox, as well as the local PBS affiliate. So I got what I think is fairly representative sampling.

And I don't know why I was shocked but I was. The obscene war lust and crass propaganda was appalling. First off, there is a complete acceptance, absent any caveats that the assessment is being provided by intelligence agencies that assured us that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, that the Syrian government is the perpetrator of the chemical weapons attack two weeks ago. No exploration of the possibility that the rebels might have launched such an attack despite the fact that there is ample reporting saying as much. No discussion of why John Kerry is always getting out in front of the UN chemical weapons investigation team, first by falsely claiming that their efforts to collect samples in East Ghouta was a waste of time because of Syrian Arab Army shelling, and then by saying that hair and blood samples from first responders to the Ghouta attack tested positive for signatures of sarin, even though a signature of sarin is very different from sarin exposure itself (see yesterday's excellent "Moon of Alabama" post for a discussion of this).

But worst of all are the crude appeals for violence on behalf of children being victimized by the brute Assad. Ann Curry provides the most excessive, ludicrous example of this. It's a rhetorical specialty of the humanitarian bombers: We have to blow up children to save the children. While Curry discussed her harrowing visit to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan she shared a split screen with rotating still images of refugee children. It was like watching a SPCA commercial.

There were a few bright spots. CNN interviewed Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Florida) a couple of times and each time he absolutely destroyed -- completely silenced -- the talking-head warhawks. To paraphrase: "It's a civil war. Sending in cruise missiles is not going to enhance our credibility or send a message to Iran or save any children. It's going to cost a billion dollars -- money that should be spent here at home -- and not do anything but make things worse." Congresswoman Janice Hahn was also excellent. To paraphrase: "When I attended Labor Day picnics and parades people kept coming up to me saying, 'Whatever you do, don't send us into another war.' "

In addition to being absent from the Internet, I was also away from the New York Times for Sunday and Monday. Dipping back in today, it's apparent to me that going to Congress with a blank-check Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) Obama is looking to make a much larger strike than he has been calling for in public. There is no doubt that what is being contemplated by the elites who run the show is an open-ended military engagement that will likely last for a generation or two. Take down Syria, mop up Hezbollah, go after Iran. It's hard to understand where they see the support in the general populous for this Battle of Armageddon. There is certainly support among the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Israeli Likudniks. But among your average Democrat and Republican? No, absolutely not. It's baffling. Are elites that out of touch? Apparently.

The problem we have as citizens of this country is that we have no effective institutions to communicate our will. Congress is bought and so are the ever-shrinking unions. We can vote the bums out but it's usually too little and too late. And when new representatives get to D.C. -- what Nader called "corporate occupied territory" -- it's hard for them not to be quickly compromised.

There's still a possibility that enough Tea Party Republicans and Progressive Democrats -- fearful for their own survival -- will ban together and block the AUMF in the House. That's our best bet. It might seem fruitless, but practice some civic faith and take time to either write or call your Senators and Congressional Representative.

Doubts About Sarin Gas + Nasrallah Tamping Down Discord

The rationale for flooding the Middle East with weapons is provided in a story this morning by Lesley Wroughton and Amena Bakr reporting for Reuters from Doha where officials from 11 nations met to plan more bloodshed for Syria:

Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, whose country has been one of the most open backers of the anti-Assad rebels, said that supplying them with weapons was the only way to resolve the conflict. 

"Force is necessary to achieve justice. And the provision of weapons is the only way to achieve peace in Syria's case," Sheikh Hamad told ministers at the start of the talks.

"We cannot wait due to disagreement among Security Council members over finding a solution to the problem," he said. He also called on Lebanon's government to halt intervention by Lebanese factions in the neighboring conflict.

When in doubt use force. The rationale is anti-rational. The rule of law is tossed out in favor of the law of the jungle. Might equals right. We all know how this ends. It's not going to be pretty. But leaders in the West and the Gulf Arab monarchies must feel they will be insulated from the catastrophic results of their decisions.

C.J. Chivers, along with Eric Scmitt and Mark Mazzetti, has a frontpage story that outlines how the Libyan weapons pipeline to the rebels works. Arms once stockpiled by Qaddafi are transported from Libya by Qatari military cargo plane to Turkey where they cross the border into Syria. The Central Intelligence Agency provides logistical support. This has been the primary pipeline up until now. But since the United States announced last week its intention to begin providing military aid, the floodgates are already begin to crank open. Saudi Arabia promptly shipped antitank guns to rebels fighting in Aleppo.

Let's not forget that this deluge of weaponry into an unstable environment was justified by the Obama administration based on U.S. intelligence that Syrian government forces used sarin gas. Colum Lynch and Joby Warrick reported yesterday in the Washington Post that such claims are unsupportable:

Jean Pascal Zanders, who until recently was a research fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, said he has scoured the Internet for photographs, video and news reports documenting alleged nerve agent attacks in Syria. What he has seen has made him a skeptic. 

Few of the photographs, Zanders said, have borne the trademark symptoms of a chemical weapons attack. In a paper he presented last week to the E.U. Non-Proliferation Consortium, he compared photographs documenting Iraq's 1998 chemical weapons attack against Kurds in the town of Halabja. 

The Halabja victims appeared to have died instantaneously from chemical agents, he said, and their bodies showed tell-tale signs of exposure to sarin: blue lips and fingertips caused by suffocation and a pink hue brought on by excessive sweating and high blood pressure. "No press reports from Syria refer to those descriptions, which is one of the reasons why I am skeptical about those reports," he said. 

Zanders said the problem with the U.S., British and French evidence is that it cannot be tested by independent scientists. Some of the published reports of chemical weapons use "make certain alarm bells ring," he said, but it is impossible to reach a definitive conclusion on the basis of what governments have put forward. "We don't have the barest of information. There is not even a fact sheet documenting the samples," he said. "This is an immensely political process, and there is no way of challenging the findings."

Anne Barnard has a good story today about Hermel, the Shiite Bekaa Valley town in Lebanon that has suffered since Hezbollah stepped up its defense of Syria. An interesting item that Barnard reveals is that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been working actively to tamp down sectarian strife. Keep that in mind the next time you read about a state-supported Sunni cleric issuing a fatwa for jihad against Syria.

On the other hand, some followers chafe when the party urges restraint and reconciliation and forbids them to attack rebels and their supporters in the Lebanese Sunni village of Arsal across the valley. In the past week, the son of a Sunni leader from Arsal was killed near Hermel, and four Shiites were killed near Arsal, including two from the powerful Jaafari tribe.

Mohammed Jaafar, a tribe member, said that the family was refraining from traditional revenge killings at Hezbollah’s request — for now. 

“We won’t stay silent over our sons’ blood,” he said. 

Even though Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, forbade celebratory gunfire in a recent speech, as the funeral procession passed on Wednesday, relatives of the dead fighter honored him with barrages of gunfire. Asked why, the Hezbollah supporter said it was impossible to contain people’s emotions — and, eventually their demands. 

“I told Sayyed Hassan myself, there is a point at which we can’t control the people,” he said. “If we could, then people from Arsal wouldn’t have been killed, nor the Jaafari people.” 

After the funeral, he awaited a meeting with a sheik from Arsal, part of a flurry of talks that aims to keep tensions low. Hezbollah, according to multiple Hermel residents and Sunnis visiting from Syria who do not support the uprising, has worked behind the scenes to keep Sunnis safe in Shiite-majority villages on both sides of the border, once even paying compensation to Shiites who wanted to take revenge on antigovernment Sunnis they said destroyed their homes. 

But the Hezbollah supporter said he believed the rebels had not reciprocated. “That’s what hurts,” he said.

The United States continues to foment discord. You reap what you sow. Isn't that what the Good Book says?

Obama's Ultimate Test

The ultimate test of the Obama presidency will be the decision he makes on Syria. Michael Gordon and Mark Landler report this morning in "Rebels’ Losses in Syria Complicate Options for U.S. Aid" that the administration is engaged in a heightened debate about providing military support now that rebel forces are in free fall.

I say Syria is the ultimate test because Obama's support is at root based on a belief held by voters that he is anti-war. It was his anti-war stance, the fact that he spoke out against going to war in Iraq when he was a state legislator in Illinois, that gave him the edge over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. And though his stimulus package during the financial meltdown was too small and his health-care overhaul was a massive expansion of a failed status quo, he did pull all the troops out of Iraq.

For Obama to send heavy weapons to the rebels or use the U.S. air force to attack Syria would undercut the source of his appeal with the electorate. Polls show there is no support for military intervention in Syria. But there is clearly support in the State Department, based on a reading of Landler and Gordon's story, for expanding U.S. involvement.

The problem with the State Department's hawkish position is that it doesn't acknowledge that military aid in order to be effective has to eventually end up in battle. And who is dominant on the ground for the opposition? Wahhabi fighters, foreign mercenary religious zealots -- the very enemy we have reconfigured our society to confront since 9/11. This is from Kareem Fahim and Hania Mourtada's story today, "Syrian Teenager’s Public Death Reveals Growing Anger as Civil War Continues":

The condemnations were a measure of the growing anger at the small but assertive cadre of extremists who have joined the rebel ranks, and whose hard-line beliefs have unsettled even pious Syrians. Their influence is being felt in mosques, in schools and in committees and courts intended to enforce a strict version of Islamic law. Disgust with the radicals has peaked in recent months after reports of summary executions, including of government soldiers and men accused of crimes and then punished. 

Last month, antigovernment activists in Aleppo were beaten and detained by armed guards of the city’s Shariah committee, after the activists tried to raise the flag of the Syrian revolution. 

One of them, Seif Azzam, said the Islamists threatened two of his friends by saying they were “infidels who should be killed for the sake of God.” The two were eventually released. 

“The Shariah committee’s behavior is completely identical to that of air force intelligence,” said Mr. Azzam, referring to the most feared government intelligence agency. “We are revolting against Assad’s regime, and the Shariah committee at the same time,” he said. 

The identities and affiliations of the three men remained a mystery. Muhammad’s mother said she thought that two of them were possibly foreigners, but that the third was Syrian. His father, who spoke in a separate video interview, was less sure. “Are they Afghans? I don’t know. There are a lot of battalions nowadays, how can we know?”

That the State Department is actually considering putting heavy weapons into this situation is insanity; it speaks of how absolutely disconnected government is from the basic aspirations of people -- peace, employment, safety. The other thing that goes unmentioned in Landler and Gordon's account of hawkish thinking in the State Department is the lack of acknowledgement that opinion within in Syria has significantly shifted towards Assad. Religiously-motivated murders like that of 14-year-old coffee vendor Muhammad al-Qatta are the reason why the Syrian government enjoys majority support among its Sunni population. If we in the United States go to war with Syria we will be doing so in violation of international law. We will be going to war with the secular-minded people of Syria on behalf of Sunni extremists, a truly upside-down world.

Kareem Fahim also has a detailed story today, "Still More Questions Than Answers on Nerve Gas in Syria," about the various allegations of sarin gas use by the Assad government. After reading the story one is left with the distinct impression of shadow craft by competing intelligence agencies.