A strategic communications firm founded by a long-time former Hillary Clinton staffer has quietly become a major force behind a variety of American and Israeli military and intelligence firms.

Following this publication’s reporting on the Manhattan-based facial recognition firm Clearview AI providing “high-value targeting” to Green Berets and supporting the Colombian National Police through the U.S. State Department’s ‘drugs and thugs’ bureau, the author was messaged on the end-to-end encrypted messaging platform Signal by former Clinton State Department staffer Ali Rubin.1

“Hey Jack — Ali Rubin here. I work with Clearview and would love to connect,” read the message on June 17. Subsequent exchanges to set up a background conversation with a senior executive of Clearview confirmed that the approach was through Velocity Partners, a public relations firm Rubin co-founded in 2023 with fellow Axios alumna Kate Meissner. (A third co-founder, Andrea Riccio, departed in January to launch her own firm.)

Velocity Partners publicly discloses Clearview AI and a variety of other military and intelligence firms on its homepage, including: the billion-dollar cyber warfare startup Twenty Technologies, the Palantir-backed military tech startups Valinor Enterprises and Northslope Technologies, and the Israeli weaponized drone company Heven AeroTech.2

Recent court filings spotted by Biometric Update and the independent journalist Daniel Boguslaw revealed that Clearview AI’s $3,750,000 contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division helped power the Trump administration’s political crackdown on 15 Minnesota-based immigrant rights activists.

The June indictment of the activists revealed that HSI’s Special Operations Group (SOG) had thoroughly infiltrated the in-person meetings and Signal group chats of Minnesota activists using tens of undercover agents, further seizing the financial records of affiliated groups and labor unions under the longstanding counter-terrorism authority of the PATRIOT Act and the newer National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7).

The second Trump administration’s overt targeting of left-wing political movements through NSPM-7 was first reported by the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, though a coalition of conservative-leaning nonprofits this week filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Minnesota defendants, stating that the Trump administration has “weaponized NSPM-7 to surveil core First Amendment activity—infiltrating meetings, monitoring encrypted chats, and secretly seizing years of financial records from unions and nonprofits.”

Internal HSI investigation documents published as part of the lawsuit demonstrated how an ICE officer named Guy Gino used a seed photograph of defendant Isaac Sant to purportedly uncover his history of political activity, including through photographs published by civil rights organizations and within videos published to Google’s YouTube. One such instance involved a purported interaction with Sant 15 minutes into a documentary of the April 2015 protests in Baltimore in response to the police killing of Freddie Gray, with the video published just two months after Google issued a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI.

When Clearview AI was reached for comment through Velocity Partners regarding its role in a domestic counter-terrorism investigation deemed to be a political prosecution by even some right-wing groups, the firm doubled down on the legality of its work.

Clearview refused to confirm or deny whether HSI’s usage of its facial recognition was through the roughly $3.8 million contract which is set to end next week. But the company repeatedly asserted that the majority of its work with ICE HSI was to counter the exploitation of children, and that the usage of Clearview AI by the Trump administration to target American political activists is through legal mechanisms with strict logs of searches.

(Five days after publication of this article, it became public record that HSI on September 1 renewed its contract with Clearview AI for an additional year, obligating an additional $3,937,500 to the company.)

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Updated on September 2 2026 to note the renewal of Clearview AI’s ICE HSI contract.

A conservative-leaning group of nonprofits on Wednesday intervened in the Trump administration’s ongoing prosecution of a network of 15 activists who opposed the unprecedented Operation Metro Surge series of immigration raids across Minnesota which began late last year. The legal petitioners are led by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), with support provided by the libertarian Cato Institute and The Society for the Rule of Law, which was founded by former Republican officials.

The trio of nonprofits described their amicus brief in defense of a loose network spanning major labor unions and grassroots anarchist and left-wing political movements as “out of concern over the weaponization of federal law enforcement authority to target perceived political opposition to the current presidential administration’s policies.”

[PROPOSED] BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND EXPRESSION, THE SOCIETY FOR THE RULE OF LAW AND DEMOCRACY, & THE CATO INSTITUTE IN SUPPORT OF DEFENDANTS’ MOTION FOR DISCOVERY

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Document 234 of USA v. Isaac Sant et al., filed on August 25, 2026.

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Several members of the activist network have helped predict immigration raids by actively monitoring the movements of ICE officers, a practice often referred to as “commuting.” Prosecutors allege that such behavior was a criminal conspiracy to disrupt U.S. federal immigration officers through a coalition known as Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN).

The FIRE coalition’s brief further notes that much of the evidence against the activist network was gathered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the authority of President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which the petitioners describe as treating “left-wing political viewpoints as indicia of terrorism.” The administration “weaponized NSPM-7 to surveil core First Amendment activity—infiltrating meetings, monitoring encrypted chats, and secretly seizing years of financial records from unions and nonprofits,” continued the brief.

The massive surveillance program, conducted by the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) branch of ICE through Operations Puppet Master and Whipple Shield, targeted labor union and nonprofit financial records through subpoenas while simultaneously sending tens of undercover agents into activist events to photograph license plates and worm their way into encrypted group chats, typically on the Signal platform. (Targets for subpoenas included PayPal/Venmo, Stripe, the Federal Reserve’s FedWire system, Clearing House Payments Company LLC, and the cloud computing platform Fly.io.)

Public court filings from the prosecution include references to HSI undercover agents with identifiers including 137, 142, 5022, 9087, 9759, 9766, 9833/9883, and 9843. HSI Special Operations Group (SOG) Special Agent Jason Prasnikar and his partner Marco Salterelli were further revealed in Document 212 to have used hard hats and safety vests as cover for collecting license plates of activists near St. John’s Church in St. Paul Minnesota on the evening of April 14.

Internal HSI documents further reveal that on February 22, 20 HSI SOG agents were “tasked with surveilling a de-arrest tactics training at Loring Park, Minneapolis Minnesota,” though the event was said to have been cancelled due to weather. Seven HSI undercover agents were also reported to have monitored an event near 24th St. in Minneapolis on January 14.

Exhibits

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Document 231 of USA v. Isaac Sant et al., filed on August 25, 2026.

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Exhibits

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Document 217 of USA v. Isaac Sant et al., filed on August 14, 2026.

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DEFENDANT’S MOTION FOR DISCOVERY UNDER RULE 16 AND BRADY/GIGLIO

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Document 212 of USA v. Isaac Sant et al., filed on August 13, 2026.

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(The names of at least 18 other SOG special agents are included in public filings for the same case, working under acting group supervisor Josh Schottenfeld. The documents further name at least 40 further HSI special agents, as well as Technical Enforcement Officer Christopher Leonard’s support for street camera surveillance of the activist network.)

A document filed by the defense two weeks ago further demonstrated how an HSI officer named Guy Gino on January 26 leveraged the facial recognition platform of the Manhattan-based company Clearview AI to dredge up purported past political activity of the first named defendant, Isaac Sant. Public contracting records show that Clearview has received $3,750,000 in payments as part of a two-year contract with HSI which ends next week.

The first of many search results purports to have identified Sant in a photo published by the D.C.-based nonprofit Defending Rights & Dissent in July 2018, following the U.S. Justice Department dismissing charges against 38 protestors of Trump’s first inauguration. Another search result purported to identify Sant as appearing 15 minutes into a documentary on the April 2015 wave of protests in Baltimore after the killing of the 25-year-old African-American Freddie Gray.

Clearview AI’s software is simultaneously being licensed to the parent organization of U.S. Army Special Forces as part of “high-value targeting” of foreign targets through platforms such as social media.

And, as first revealed by this publication, HSI last year temporarily reactivated its license of the Graphite platform from the Israeli spyware firm Paragon Solutions, following Paragon’s acquisition by American capital and development of a close relationship with both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

The connection between U.S. counter-terrorism programs and NSPM-7 investigations into domestic left-wing political movements has been most explicit in the realm of financial investigations. The U.S. treasury secretary and former hedge fund manager Scott Bessent stated at a U.S. State Department summit in July that, “Through our Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and [IRS Criminal Investigation], we have spent decades developing the world’s most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities.”

“And now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home,” added Bessent.

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“High value target apprehension, clandestine lab raids, VIP protection, tactical planning,” read a summary of a public job posting on a special operations forum last month, recruiting current and former American special operations forces and tactical police to “design and deliver advanced tactical training to Mexican law enforcement and special operations units.” “Based in Mexico City with travel to operational sites, including stays on Mexican LE/military bases,” continued the pitch from SGI Global, a Virginia-based contractor founded in 2008 by two former DEA operations chiefs.

Notwithstanding the focus on “clandestine” special operations, the job ad was through an operational arm of the U.S. State Department informally known as the ‘drugs and thugs’ bureau, but formally known as the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). The listed program manager for the ad, David Kraus, did not respond to a request for comment, but public contracting records show that SGI Global is currently executing a two-year, $10.5 million support contract for INL in Mexico City, as part of a broader four-year initiative.

Following the revelation that two CIA officers were killed in Mexico in April while dressed in the uniform of the Chihuahua State Investigative Agency, CNN in May reported an escalation of clandestine CIA-assisted counter-narcotics operations inside of Mexico, including targeted assassinations against cartel members. One day later, another Virginia contractor began executing an INL delivery order to provide roughly $230,000 in night vision goggles to “Mexico’s elite Navy special forces unit (UNOPES).”

(INL this month also advertised its intent to noncompetitively award the Tennessee-based wiretapping technology company PenLink with a contract to set up a wiretapping room for the Mexican government.)

Formally established as the Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM) during the Carter administration, with a mission of reducing the flow of foreign narcotics into the United States, the organization grew out of the Nixon administration’s War on Drugs. Perhaps the most controversial leader of Nixon’s predecessor to the INM was the White House ‘plumber’ Egil M. Krogh, who served as a director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control (CCINC).

Operating with a roughly $1.4 billion yearly budget which has historically paid out billions of dollars each to the private military contractor DynCorp and its airlift competitor AAR Corp, INL also operates the U.S. State Department’s private international air wing of more than 200 aircraft, including Black Hawk helicopters, Dash 8 planes, and drones. The primary mission of the air wing is drug crop eradication and narcotics interdiction, most famously in relation to the “Plan Colombia” coca-eradication campaign, though public contracting documents have revealed secondary focuses on tasks such as “pipeline security, border patrol, and other security activities.”

More recent activity in this vein include a market research notice last month for 150 M2 heavy machine guns which INL hopes to supply to the Ukrainian government “to provide direct support to the mobile firing teams against airborne threats.”

Perhaps the most contentious INL activity arose from its central role alongside the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center and Latin America Division in the Peruvian Air Force mistakenly killing the American Baptist missionary Veronica Bowers and her newly adopted infant daughter Charity with a .30-cal machine gun on April 20, 2001, resulting in a roughly two-year pause in the so-called Air Bridge Denial Program.

Though the U.S. support for lethal takedowns of civilian aircraft in the Andes region was only possible as a result of a decision made by President Clinton on June 21, 1994, responsibility has also been assigned to Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who served as deputy chief of the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center until October 1995, when he took charge of the Latin America Division.

A memoir published last year by Clinton-era INL South America Division chief Ralph M. Buck recounted both his role in getting legal sign-off for the Air Bridge Denial Program from an assistant U.S. attorney general and the usage of “machine guns on [INL] helicopters to fire back” at armed coca producers.

Clinton’s rebranding of the CIA’s Counternarcotics Center as the Crime and Narcotics Center in 1994 further loosely coincided with the June 1994 expansion of the mandate of the Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM) into organized crime in Europe; financial analysis and anti-money laundering became the unifying theme for INM’s rebranding the next year as the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Matters (INL). (INL’s major aviation contractors, DynCorp and AAR, have nevertheless paid tens of millions of dollars in fines for bribing government officials and inflating costs.)

The obituary for INL air wing founder John A. McLaughlin – who caused a stir around the time of his 2003 retirement by arguing for the Justice Department to absorb the INL air wing – further noted that his organization “was tasked in 1999 to stand up an assault helicopter battalion within the Colombian Army.” According to the same obituary, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, McLaughlin was in 2002 “tasked to stand up a border security operation on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,” which was further described as “a joint host nation/USG aviation program to stop the flow of illegal arms, drugs, and personnel crossing freely between the two countries.”

"We don't differentiate between contractors, Foreign Service, Civil Service and Department of Defense services," stated McLaughlin in an interview for the January 2001 edition of the U.S. State Department’s magazine, adding that, "We promote and enjoy the 'One Team, One Fight' concept."

Prior to former CIA LAD division chief Rodriguez’s rise to operations chief in late 2004, where he infamously ordered the destruction of video evidence of CIA torture at a black site in Thailand, Rodriguez led the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) for a roughly 30-month period beginning in 2002. Rodriguez’s covert activity again collided with INL through the CTC’s rendition flight program, which was at least partially managed by DynCorp under cover as a U.S. State Department aviation program.

Widely reported court filings first noticed by the nonprofit Reprieve revealed that DynCorp had subcontracted rendition flights to the New York-based luxury flight company Richmond Aviation circa 2002 through 2003, using letters nominally signed by State Department administrative assistant Terry A. Hogan. According to one note provided to Richmond, the rendition flights were “global support for U.S. embassies worldwide.”

It appears to have gone largely unnoticed that DynCorp’s cover for the rendition flights was similar to a real multi-billion dollar program. At the time of its execution of rendition flights using INL cover, DynCorp was fulfilling a roughly 12-year “Worldwide Aviation Support Services” (WASS) contract with INL which issued its first child award by August 2000.

According to an unsuccessful lawsuit DynCorp filed against the U.S. Government in 2016 in relation to its loss of the multi-billion dollar WASS contract to the airlift company AAR Corp., 70 of the 87 names of fallen INL employees and contractors listed on INL’s Memorial Wall as of its June 2014 dedication were DynCorp personnel, and 18 were “Killed-in-Action on the WASS program.”

DynCorp further entrenched its relationship with the CIA in late 2018, hiring former counterintelligence chief Mark E. Kelton as a senior vice president. After the company was acquired by the Chantilly-based Amentum Services in 2020, Amentum likewise hired former CIA operations chief David Marlowe as a vice president in late 2023.

Between Amentum’s acquisition of DynCorp and hiring of Marlowe, the company in late 2021 began acquiring the Fallschurch-based Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE), resulting in Amentum Global Services taking over an ongoing, roughly 8.5-year, $341 million contract with INL to supply helicopter and fixed-wing support services to the Colombian National Police (CNP).

One such INL Black Hawk was destroyed in what was reported to be a drone attack in the Antioquia region of Colombia on August 21, 2025, killing 13 CNP officers. INL also announced its intent to provide the controversial facial recognition platform Clearview AI to the CNP’s Directorate of Protection and Special Services (DIPRO) in June, as first reported by this publication. And perhaps the largest INL grant payout the last year has been to the Williamsburg-based National Center for State Courts, which received an additional $10 million last month for supporting the INL section of U.S. Embassy Bogotá.

INL’s law enforcement mandate also resulted in a potentially $2.8 million “gold traceability” contract with to the Florida-based Global Venture Consulting late last month, in support of the INL sections of the U.S. embassies in Suriname and Guyana. The award follows an $800,000 INL grant to the Brazilian branch of Transparency International last year to “combat illegal gold trafficking in the Amazon” and years of providing millions of dollars in funding to investigative journalism organizations such as InSight Crime, The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

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INL contracts have also followed the rise of the U.S. Government’s Haiti Gang Suppression Force (GSF), which has operated in loose coalition with the Haitian government’s tasking of Erik Prince’s private military contractor Vectus Global to conduct lethal drone strikes, which have been criticized for killing civilians. INL began acquiring AI detection platforms produced by the Lehi-based Converus in March as part of a surge to hire thousands of members of the Haitian National Police. This month, INL further began solicitations for freight forwarding in support of the GSF, including for “ammunition” and “aircraft parts.”

The McLean-based Strategic Capacity Group – co-led by former 1st Special Forces Group commander Russell D. Howard – has also received nearly $7 million in grants between May and July to support the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) and the El Salvador branch of INL’s International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) network. (The first ILEA branch opened in 1994 in Budapest and is led by the FBI.)

In addition to the Operation Southern Spear campaign of U.S. military strikes on fishing vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean which began on September 2, 2025, the CIA was reported by The Washington Post on Thursday to be behind an additional campaign of drone attacks on Ecuadorean fishing vessels near the Galápagos Islands. Victims described attacks from armed quadcopters followed by being “taken aboard a nearby ship, hooded and cuffed by armed men, and transported to El Salvador,” in the words of The Post.

An American Cessna Citation Longitude aircraft with callsign “FENIX 701” which was identified by The Post as likely providing surveillance support to the boat strikes was further reported by the independent journalist Seth Hettena to have the registration number N883EE.

The analogous surveillance role of a jointly American and Peruvian-crewed Cessna Citation in the fateful April 20, 2001 shootdown of the Bowers family was detailed in an August 2, 2001 report published by INL in collaboration with the CIA, complete with a diagram of the Citation’s position relative to the Peruvian Air Force A-37 interceptor.

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In response to a $45 million fine from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in early 2023, the Cayman Islands-based cryptocurrency exchange platform Nexo Capital ended its operations in the United States until February of this year.

“The company’s official U.S. relaunch is being executed in partnership with regulated partners, providing a U.S.-compliant framework for the company’s investment and credit product offerings,” declared Nexo Capital in a February 16 press release. The “digital asset trading infrastructure” for the relaunch was further named as Bakkt, a former subsidiary of the owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) which was nearly acquired by the Trump Media and Technology Group in late 2024, leading to a major rise and subsequent fall of Bakkt’s stock.

Co-founded in 2018 by the former Bulgarian parliament member Antoni Trenchev, Nexo Capital on Monday registered that it has begun lobbying the U.S. federal government through a Trump-aligned former CIA chief of station in Venezuela, Enrique A. de la Torre. (The registration has not been previously reported.)

Bakkt’s former CEO, former U.S. Sen. Kelly L. Loeffler, is the spouse of NYSE chairman Jeffrey Sprecher and has served as President Trump’s Small Business Administration chief since February 2025. More than $200 million of President Trump’s $2.2 billion in income last year was derived from his holdings in the controversial cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial, whose stakeholders are intimately intertwined with the President’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

(The Wall Street Journal further reported last month that the CIA in 2023 assigned its senior operations officer Jonathan “Jonny” Gannon as Abu Dhabi station chief, with a central mission of monitoring the China ties of the state-affiliated technology investment firm Group 42, which has played a major role in both World Liberty Financial and in Trump’s “Stargate” artificial intelligence initiative.)

De la Torre’s firm leading the lobbying campaign for Nexo, Tower Strategy, quickly strengthened its Venezuela bona fides through recruiting James B. Story, a former U.S. ambassador to the country, as a strategic advisor. Tower’s original batch of clients were further transferred from de la Torre’s previous position at Continental Strategy, which was founded by former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States Carlos Trujillo. (The New Yorker characterized Trujillo, who has maintained close relations with U.S. secretary of state Marco A. Rubio, as “a top Latino strategist for Trump.”)

Monday’s registration further names the Tower Strategy staffer and former Chuck Grassley (R-IA) aide Cesar Dager as supporting the lobbying campaign.

Nexo Capital co-founder Antoni Trenchev’s home country of Bulgaria has played an outsized role in the second Trump administration’s activities in the Middle East, as personified by former Bulgarian defense and foreign minister Nickolay Mladenov serving as the High Representative for Gaza in Trump’s Board of Peace.

Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araqchi further recently warned his Bulgarian counterpart, Velislava Petrova-Chamova, that the U.S. Air Force’s usage of Bulgaria’s Bezmer Air Base as part of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli air war against Iran constitutes an act of aggression by Bulgaria.

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A striking poll published earlier this month by the D.C.-based Pew Research Center, regarding an apparently seismic shift in global public sentiment away from the United States and towards China, took center stage on Thursday as part of an initial hearing on three nominations before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Moments earlier, Sen. Shaheen had similarly displayed an infographic from a poll published by the European Council on Foreign Relations, which claimed to confirm “the collapse in European faith in the US,” concluding that, “Only 11% of respondents now consider [the US] an ally, down from 16% half a year ago and 22% in November 2024. Meanwhile fully 25% see it as either a rival or an adversary.”

“How do we reverse that, and how will you as the head of [the U.S. Agency for Global Media] reinforce the factual nature of the differences between the United States and our adversaries, like Iran, like China, like Russia?” asked ranking member Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) of Sarah B. Rogers, the current U.S. under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs and nominee to additionally become chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. “Because that is not coming through now as part of your role at the State Department,” continued Sen. Shaheen.

As a result of the bipartisan dismantling of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) during the Clinton administration, America’s primary overt information warfare arm was divided up into two major components: international broadcasting was spun off in the form of a newly independent agency which renamed to the U.S. Agency for Global Media during the first Trump administration, while direct strategic communication from U.S. foreign service officials and cultural exchanges such as the Fulbright Program were centralized into a newly formed Office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.1

Leadership of the two branches has remained mostly separate since the 1999 split, though the former Roll Call editor-in-chief and co-owner James K. Glassman led the George W. Bush administration’s incarnation of USAGM — then known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors — for roughly one year before transitioning to under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs under Condoleezza Rice for roughly six months.

The former National Rifle Association (NRA) counsel Sarah B. Rogers was sworn in as President Trump’s head of the second of these two components on October 10, 2025 and was nominated to simultaneously lead USAGM on March 12, but has yet to be confirmed into the position. More than one member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed concerns during Thursday’s hearing that confirming Rogers could damage worldwide perception of the editorial independence of USAGM’s flagship media arms, such as Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

(Though left unmentioned during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, much of the international concern regarding the editorial credibility of RFE/RL originates from its covert management and financing by the Central Intelligence Agency for roughly its first 20 years of operation, with oversight ending in 1972 under RFE president William P. Durkee III,2 who had previously helped oversee the radio stations as part of the leadership of the CIA’s International Organizations Division (IOD).3)

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) questioned Rogers about former acting USAGM chief Kari Lake attributing the shutdown of RFE’s Hungarian language service Szabad Europa to its reports having “undermined President Trump's foreign policy by opposing the duly elected Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban.”

“So, undermining the elected government of an allied country is not something that I would expect to do, I think that would be pretty extraordinary,” stated under secretary Rogers.

“That does sound like you’re saying that a grantee who is critical of an allied government would lose funding. That is the opposite of free speech,” replied Sen. Murphy.

“Well, this speech isn’t free, it’s being paid for by the taxpayer to support American foreign policy,” answered Rogers.

The potential merger of the former constituents of the U.S. Information Agency under Rogers was perhaps most fervently supported by Sen. William Hagerty IV (R-TN), who served as President Trump’s first-term ambassador to Japan for nearly two years.

“I think you have a unique opportunity to actually align this organization with the other role that you perform, which is our under secretary for public diplomacy,” stated Sen. Hagerty, before adding that, “I’ve been in the field, I’ve been an ambassador, and I’ve actually seen what our communications can do and should do, and where they fail.”

“This sounds to me, as a business person for my whole career, as an opportunity for alignment,” continued Sen. Hagerty.

Under secretary Rogers largely agreed with Hagerty’s suggestion that USAGM should serve as a tool of U.S. State Department policy priorities, and emphasized that such a realignment could be accomplished through high-level editorial policy rather than the dictation of particular headlines. “In terms of alignment, we hear a lot of concern from minority [the Democratic Party] about this firewall — and I don’t want to be micromanaging the editorial copyrighting or bylines of any of these outlets, but these [USAGM] grantees are asking for strategic guidance on broad foreign policy objectives, which is what I’m supposed to provide, and I look forward to providing it,” stated Rogers.

Rogers added that USAGM employees “are reporters who risk their lives to get truthful information to their countrymen in places like Iran.” “And they know they are working indirectly for the United States,” Rogers continued. “These grantees want our guidance and we’re happy to give it. And I think we can do that without the kind of editorial micro-management that I think minority is afraid of.”

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The U.S. State Department’s counter-narcoterrorism branch is dipping its toes into full-fledged military activity under its new director, F. Cartwright Weiland, a former speechwriter for former U.S. secretary of state and CIA director Michael R. Pompeo.

A recent procurement notice published by the U.S. government’s award management site SAM.gov disclosed that Weiland’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) is in the process of donating 150 M2 heavy machine guns to the Government of Ukraine, “to provide direct support to the mobile firing teams against airborne threats.” The solicitation further details that the machine guns are planned to be equipped with MGS-M3X optics for “rapid targeting.”

The State Department’s solicitation for the automatic weapons has taken place simultaneous to what the has been recently described as ‘stalled’ peace negotiations to end a war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

During a July 15 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Weiland suggested that INL “could set up forward operating bases in the hard-to-reach territories,” which he further stated “would be logistics centers where the CNP [Colombian National Police] would keep equipment and technology and so forth that would facilitate their operations.”

A solicitation published on Wednesday shows that INL is now seeking 40 foot containers for a “military camp” in Colombia.

According to Weiland, the counter-narcotics battle in Colombia is personal. In his written remarks for the foreign affairs committee hearing, Weiland recalled that, “Eleven months ago, Colombian narcoterrorists attacked a U.S.-titled INL helicopter during a coca eradication operation in Antioquia.” (The Chantilly-based contractor Amentum Services has received more than $300 million from INL as part of maintaining the fleet of aircraft for the Colombian National Police.)

After noting the 13 Colombian National Police officers killed as a result of the August 21, 2025 improvised explosives attack in the Bajo Cauca region of Colombia, Weiland wrote that, “it hit home for me because earlier that summer, I had flown into the same area, on another INL bird, to observe [coca] eradication.”

As previously revealed by this publication, INL in June advertised its procurement of the controversial facial recognition platform of Clearview AI in support of the Directorate of Protection and Special Services (DIPRO) of the Colombian National Police.

INL further published solicitations on Tuesday and Wednesday for supplying the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency (PMSA), a branch of the Pakistan Navy, with both fast response boats and drones. As noted in both solicitations, “Since 2002, INL's Afghanistan/Pakistan Program Office (INL/AP), through its in-country presence at U.S. Embassy Islamabad, has managed several programs to build the capacity of the Government of Pakistan's law enforcement and border security personnel.”

Beyond its supply of heavy weapons and drones to allied military and law enforcement agencies, INL has traditionally played a central role in supporting Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) bilateral partnerships, including for wiretapping investigation targets.

On a more strategic level, INL has also played a major role in supporting American investigative journalism, including a $982,000 grant to the Washington, D.C.-based outlet InSight Crime, which specializes in analysis of Latin America. INL likewise awarded $2.3 million to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) between 2022 and 2025, as part of strengthening investigative reporting in the European Union islands of Cyprus and Malta, roughly 14 years after the organization was founded using a $1.7 million grant originating from INL.

INL was also revealed by this publication to have provided an $800,000 grant to the World Bank-affiliated anti-corruption organization Transparency International’s Brazil branch in October 2025, “to combat illegal gold-trafficking in the Amazon.” INL further granted Transparency International $3 million in 2022 as part of hosting the International Anti-Corruption Conference.

Other prominent investigative grantees of INL have included the Palantir-powered think tank Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) and the Latin America-focused outlet Connectas.

The common theme in the reporting of INL-funded news outlets is highlighting violations of unilateral American sanctions, which play a central role in American foreign policy.

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The American federal agency charged with preventing market manipulation is in the process of acquiring artificial intelligence-powered agents for monitoring cellphone locations, social media posts, and credit header data, according to newly public software subscription renewal documents.

The proposed contract renewal comes roughly five years after Babel Street’s similar sale of cellphone location-tracking datasets to the sanctions enforcement arm of the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), as uncovered by this author through a Freedom of Information request. OFAC last week became a central component of the second Trump administration’s overt repurposing of surveillance capabilities initially granted for combating al Qaeda towards crushing left-wing political movements both at home and abroad.

“Through our Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and [IRS Criminal Investigation], we have spent decades developing the world’s most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities,” stated U.S. treasury secretary and former Soros Fund Management chief investment officer Scott Bessent on July 16. “And now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home,” added Bessent.

“The [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission] requires a cloud-based software solution that provides real-time data aggregation, analytics, and risk intelligence capabilities in support of its mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation,” stated a high-level summary of a software subscription renewal published to the award management site SAM.gov on Wednesday, with offers due by August 5, 2026. The proposed start date of the renewed access is August 14, one day after the end of a $1.4 million, five-year contract between Babel Street and the SEC which began on August 9, 2021.

An attached (partly redacted) price list for the renewing product licenses from the Reston-based data broker Babel Street contains explicit references to the company’s most controversial product: the cellphone location-tracking platform Locate X, which has historically gathered precise GPS locations of the personal cellphones of unsuspecting civilians around the world through backroom deals with application developers.

One of the lead executives overseeing Locate X has been the former CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) senior targeting officer Patrick Butler, who subsequently became the founder and CEO of the In-Q-Tel-backed link-analysis company PATHAR/Dunami, which was acquired by Babel Street in June 2020, leading Butler to rise to an executive vice president at Babel.

(Relationships between Babel Street and former high-level CIA executives are plentiful: the former CIA chief operating officer Maura Burns also joined the advisory board of Babel after retiring from the spy agency last year; former CIA chief data scientist Barbara N. Stevens was also announced as an advisor to Babel in February 2024, and a former chief operating officer for the CIA’s hacking arm, Dare King, was an executive vice president at Babel circa 2018 to 2019.)

Each of the yearly software license packages up for renewal with the SEC — an initial base year and nine optional years — includes two licenses to Babel Street’s “Locate X Premium” data package, with part number TPD-LXP-001, ten licenses for “Babel Street Insights Platform,” one license for “US Credit Header and US Criminal Records Search,” and the rights to conduct 12,000 calls to the “Identity API.”

Babel Street Price List

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The (partly redacted) price list for Babel Street's software licenses with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as of a July 22, 2026 software renewal solicitation.

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Yet another attachment to Wednesday’s software renewal solicitation provides an overview of Babel Street’s extension of its surveillance products to leverage artificial intelligence agents. One of the four listed “salient characteristics” for the SEC’s renewal of its Babel Street licenses was “Agentic AI-Driven Workflows,” which was said to include AI agents which “can independently conduct complex, multi-step threat investigations, discover supply chain vulnerabilities, and perform digital telemetry.” Babel’s AI agents were further claimed to have the ability “to bypass the safety filters found on general-purpose consumer AI models, [which] lets analysts explicitly query and summarize malicious material, extremist communications, and raw digital exhaust.”

According to the same document, Babel Street specializes in “defense-sector threat hunting which is currently being used at the SEC.”

Brand Name or Equal (BNoE) Template

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The "Brand Name or Equal (BNoE) Template" for the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's proposed renewal of its software licenses with the Reston-based data brokerage Babel Street, describing AI agents as a central feature.

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A research paper published in August 2024, which received press coverage from POLITICO, expressed concerns that SEC investigators could have their movements surveilled and investigations unmasked through cellphone location-tracking data. But now it seems that the investigators are themselves leveraging the same data.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s primary point of contact for the software renewal, Paul LaFranchise, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Updated on July 18, 2026.

A nominally Kyiv-based network of artificial intelligence-powered websites conducting a cyber extortion scheme against public figures has rebooted with better technology under the guise of a regulatory support organization hosted at Investigations.org. Despite prominently advertising its willingness to forward its received tips to interested law enforcement agencies around the world, the website for the nominally Jerusalem-headquartered Investigations.org is largely fraudulent, including through the listing of a fake Dutch legal entity and a voluminous masthead of non-existent journalists, editors, and fact-checkers.

All-Source Intelligence discovered the new platform as a result of their dossier on the former CIA Paris chief of station and convicted unregistered foreign agent Dale B. Bendler beginning to appear in Google searches for Bendler, heavily citing several of this publication’s articles on the conviction and sentencing.

The previous iteration of the network — which operated websites including FinanceScam.com, IntelligenceLine.com, and CriticalIntel.com — was fined $800,000 by a U.S. federal court in the Northern District of Illinois in October 2025, further resulting in the legal seizure of the domains. According to the successful legal complaint by one of the scheme’s victims, Anthony Pellegrino of the Oakbrook Terrace-based Goldstone Financial Group, the FinanceScam.com network further set up the targeted domain GoldstoneFinancialGroupReview.com and a similar YouTube channel as part of a pressure campaign culminating in the solicitation of payment for removal of the critical information through a “Citizen Advocacy Program” previously hosted by Intelligence Line.

As of February 2025, Intelligence Line publicly listed four members of its nominally Ukraine-based staff: Dmytro Kovalenko (“Senior Staff Writer”), Vitaliy Zhukov (“Investigative Journalist”), Olena Savchenko (“Forensic Analyst”), and Nadiya Korolenko (“Project Associate”).

The connection between the FinanceScam.com network and Investigations.org was discovered by All-Source Intelligence as a result of the latter’s AI-generated dossier on the UAE-based entrepreneur Satish Sanpal citing itself, while the dossier on the Kazakhstani businessman Yerkin Tatishev analogously cited the defunct IntelligenceLine.com. A cache of the website for Intelligence Line captured by The Wayback Machine platform of the San Francisco-based nonprofit The Internet Archive further displays an identical list of alleged media platform endorsements as the homepage of Investigations.org, in addition to a strong similarity in site content and organizational structure.

IntelligenceLine.com likewise listed a non-existent legal entity in its privacy policy, an alleged Cook Islands-based company named Critical Intel Network LLC.

Investigations.org confirmed several facts to All-Source Intelligence, including that: Investigations.org has blocked its domain from appearing in The Wayback Machine (“Yes. We requested that Investigations.org not be archived by the Wayback Machine”), that the organization’s advertised Dutch legal entity Investigations.org Foundation is not real (“You’re correct that the website still reflects an earlier plan”), and that Investigations.org’s published masthead, including its nominal editor-in-chief “Eleanor Hart,” consists of fake names (“Authors will also have the option to replace a pseudonym with their real identity”).

Despite candid admissions as to these irregularities, the organization went silent when asked about its previous incarnation as IntelligenceLine.com and the $800,000 extortion judgement against the organization by a U.S. district court.

After publication of this article, the anonymous representative of Investigations.org attributed its shared list of media endorsement organizations with IntelligenceLine.com to “a media band we took from brandpush.co who we have hired for our campaign.” The representative further pointed to an article on FinanceScam.com published by Investigations.org, which notes that it “stops short of describing the operation as extortion or fraud in any legal sense,” claiming in contradiction to Goldstone Financial Group LLC v. FinanceScam.com that “there is no primary-source proof that any paid-removal solicitation was ever sent” to a target.

(The slogan for Intelligence Line was, ironically, “The Line Between Truth and Deception.”)

According to an anonymous representative of Investigations.org, the organization’s secrecy is in response to the October 16, 2017 car-bombing and murder of the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. “Google Daphne Caruana Galizia,” stated the Investigations.org representative, through the end-to-end encrypted messaging platform Signal.

When All-Source Intelligence corresponded with Investigations.org regarding their platform listing a headquarters in a technology park in northern Jerusalem which also houses the Israel Police Technology Center, the same anonymous representative claimed that the location was chosen for legal reasons. “In May/June, we were subjected to a sophisticated attack on our infrastructure. We traced it to Israel,” stated the anonymous representative, adding that, “So an address there [in Israel] allows us to have an option for legal process’s [sic] if we decide to, in future.”

The anonymous representative of Investigations.org responded to a request for their name by stating, “We never take Gods [sic] name in vain 😉.”

The representative was willing to state that they were, “in the tech team, as a blockchain architect and analyst.” And when pressed regarding their country of residence, they replied, “I’m based in Bangalore, India, and frequent to Dubai every alternate month … Happy to reveal that.”

The same representative told All-Source Intelligence that a legal representative would respond to the publication through their true identity if a formal request was submitted through the ‘legal’ option of the platform’s contact page. Despite submitting such a request through the necessary-but-initially-broken sign-up procedure, All-Source Intelligence has not received a response to the legal inquiry, either through the contact form or by email.

The investigative website was more forthcoming about its advertised support for law enforcement agencies around the world, anonymously responding to inquiries on the subject through two different channels.

When asked about the Investigations.org law enforcement portal’s claim that the organization will provide police with anonymized access to its received tips upon request, the organization stated by Signal that, “Not for every LEO [Law Enforcement Officer], and certainly not to assist a fascist regime.”

An apparently separate representative of the Investigations.org platform emailed All-Source Intelligence a statement regarding the law enforcement portal that, “Many offshore scams continue operating because international cooperation can be extremely slow,” adding that, “In many cases, Interpol may wait months for an MLAT [Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty] request or Letter Rogatory to work its way through different jurisdictions before any meaningful action can be taken.”

Interested readers are also free to request that Investigations.org produce dossiers on their targets of interest, subject to a $1200, non-refundable payment through Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD Coin, or Tether.

“Whatever you decide to write, we hope we're judged by the quality of our reporting, the topics we choose to investigate, and the ideas we're trying to bring to investigative journalism,” stated Investigations.org by email.

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Despite spending more than 30 years in the CIA, including as assistant director for Korea, John Finbarr Fleming is best known for his subsequent corporate gigs.

From early 2024 through the beginning of this year, Fleming was head of the American branch of the Israeli spyware manufacturer Paragon Solutions, whose controversial phone intrusion software Graphite has been leveraged by both the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The latter contract received widespread attention as a result of being placed on hold for counterintelligence reasons by the Biden administration, only to be reactivated by the second Trump administration after being acquired by the American private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, which merged Paragon Solutions into the Chantilly-based spyware firm REDLattice.

As of May of this year, Fleming is now the chief strategy and compliance officer of the American branch of the South Korean weapons manufacturer LIG Defense & Aerospace, which acquired a 60% stake of the controversial Philadelphia-based militarized robotics company Ghost Robotics in mid-2024 for roughly $240 million.

“John brings more than three decades of national security, intelligence, Korea-focused, and defense-sector experience to LIG Defense U.S.,” stated the May 19 press release, before adding that Fleming “previously served with the Central Intelligence Agency for 31 years, retiring as Assistant Director for Korea.” (The press release was also coupled with a photograph of Fleming standing in front of a CIA flag.)

The relationship between the two countries was at least temporarily complicated by the FBI’s 2024 indictment of the former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry, who is also the wife of Washington Post columnist Max Boot, for allegedly acting as a paid agent of South Korea’s foreign intelligence service. (In response, South Korea debated the need for an analogue of America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).)

Fleming explained his motivation for joining LIG by pointing to an early April report that the company’s Cheongung-II air-defense system had been leveraged by the United Arab Emirates to intercept “29 out of 30” Iranian aerial targets. Fleming also modified his biography on the professional social network LinkedIn to state that, “I am looking forward to the challenge of helping to integrate LIG into the U.S. defense industrial base.”

The exclusive reseller relationship between LIG’s Ghost Robotics and the Israeli weaponized drone manufacturer RoboTiCan has perhaps been the most controversial activity of the company. In December 2023, RobotTiCan promoted Israel’s Channel 13 characterizing the two companies partnering to combat Hamas with the headline, “A robot in the Hamas tunnels: the electric dog that can neutralize charges and shoot.”

RoboTiCan further advertised its cage-protected Rooster drones as being equippable with up to 300 grams of explosives and demonstrated their flight through a run-down building with visible “Free Palestine” graffiti.

(Ghost Robotics removed public references to its relationship with RoboTiCan from its website following reports from this publication.)

Fleming is separately maintaining a direct relationship to an Israeli AI surveillance platform known as Tangos, which he described last week as “the premier autonomous investigative platform in the business” run by “My friend and Tangos CEO, Eyal Azoulay,” a former Israeli special operations soldier.

“Happy to be associated with the Tangos Team!” wrote Fleming, in reference to the newly launched financial intelligence and sanctions-enforcement company which advertises its staff as being drawn from organizations including: the CIA, U.S. Central Command, the U.S. Treasury, and the Washington, D.C.-based think-tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Ghost Robotics declined a request for comment.

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The $1.2 trillion-valued San Francisco-based artificial intelligence giant Anthropic is again publicly contracting with the second Trump administration, according to a newly public summary of a $1 delivery order between the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Reston-based technology seller Carahsoft Technology Corp.

Actioned on July 8 with a start date of July 6, the official summary of the 85-day contract is “Anthropic Claude for Government Federal - FedRAMP High Compliant AI Cloud Service Subscription for FY26-Pilot,” in reference to a classification within the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) suitable for sensitive but unclassified information. The new delivery order effectively recreates a previously cancelled pilot program which was initiated on February 23 and cancelled on March 11, under FCC administrator Brendan Carr.

One week prior to the first pilot program’s cancellation, Carr told CNBC that Anthropic had “made mistakes” in its dealings with the Pentagon, in which the company demanded assurances that the U.S. military would not use its products for either mass domestic surveillance or killing without human approval. President Trump responded in late February by demanding that all U.S. Government agencies “immediately cease” all usage of Anthropic’s products, with a six-month carveout granted to the Pentagon.

What became an effective marketing campaign for Anthropic began as a revelation that the company’s products had supported the Trump administration’s rendition of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in early January.

Claude was also one of the large language models leveraged, as part of Palantir’s Maven Smart System targeting software, to conduct what was reported to be more than 2,000 strikes on Iran in a 96-hour period beginning in late February. Controversy has centered on the U.S. military’s February 28 missile strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, which killed more than 100 Iranian children.

Anthropic’s status as a U.S. federal contractor was officially reactivated on June 12, following reporting from Financial Times the previous week that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was beginning to leverage Anthropic’s Mythos cybersecurity product for conducting cyber attacks. According to FT, Anthropic “installed about half a dozen staff within the NSA as so-called forward-deployed engineers to guide the use of the technology and customise models for specific applications.”

The Australian Signals Directorate, Australia’s rough analogue of the NSA, has further publicly disclosed two small contracts with Anthropic for training services and software licenses since May.

As exclusively reported by this publication, Anthropic’s relationship with the CIA and Australia’s Office of National Intelligence dates back to at least November 2023, in close collaboration with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s think-tank Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Schmidt was one of the earliest investors in Anthropic, and Google itself has considered investing up to $40 billion.

In recent months Anthropic hired the former head of the Pentagon’s think-tank, James H. Baker, as a “strategist-in-residence” and appointed the technology executive Teresa Carlson, who helped launched Amazon Web Services’ Bahrain branch in 2019, as its new head of public sector.

(Disclosure: Carlson’s husband, C5 Capital CEO Andre Pienaar, hired the prominent defamation firm Clare Locke to threaten the author of this article with a lawsuit for referencing his previous involvement in a major Pentagon cloud procurement scandal.)

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Updated on 8 July 2026 to reference the Spartan Ranch Tactical Training Center.

The Mooresville-based private military contractor which last year operated controversial vehicle inspection checkpoints and food distribution sites concentrated in the southern region of Gaza has opened what it describes as “a 287-acre live-fire complex” on the east coast of North Carolina.

Reachable through a roughly 12-minute drive west from the small town of Maysville, UG Group’s Swamp Tactical Training Center has advertised itself as hosting the “largest shoot house on the East Coast” and as located “right outside of Camp Lejeune.” The property is a rebranding of a location previously operated by UG Group executives Jameson Govoni and William Cipriani under the name Spartan Ranch Tactical Training Center.

Participants in the facility’s inaugural shooting competition on May 30, known as the Swamp Gauntlet, included a bevy of representatives from regional companies, including the Robbins-based pistol producer OA Defense and the Aberdeen-based suppressor manufacturer Deadline Defense.

The social media account of The Swamp, whose imagery is styled after the comic book character Swamp Thing, promoted a participant’s call to “check out the Ukraine simulator at the Swamp in May,” which was described as involving the MOD 1 rifle from Pennsylvania-based Geissele Automatics and the 9CT submachine gun produced by South Carolina-based PTR Industries.

The infamous private military contractor Blackwater similarly drew its name from the color of the water of the Great Dismal Swamp located near Moyock, North Carolina, which is a roughly three-hour drive northeast of The UG Group’s Swamp Tactical Training Center.

Founded by former Green Berets as an offshoot of a special operations-branded counter-trafficking nonprofit known as Sentinel Foundation, UG Solutions became the boots-on-the-ground for the second Trump administration’s partnership with the Israeli government in an effort to sideline the United Nations. Following the October 10 ceasefire agreement between the Israeli military and Hamas, UG’s lead partner in the US-Israeli aid effort, known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), announced the end of its operations in late November.

(Another highlight reel promoted by The Swamp demonstrated a visitor firing a variety of weapons throughout the facility, while wearing a UG Solutions shirt and Sentinel Foundation hat. The seemingly AI-generated metal soundtrack included the chorus, “American soil, American soul. Taking back every piece they stole.”)

UG soon began lobbying the White House and Pentagon through Micah T. Ketchel, a recent senior advisor to current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Michael G. Waltz whose transition to the influential lobbying firm Ballard Partners was announced two days after the codification of the Trump administration’s ‘pay-to-play’ Board of Peace coalition.

UG Solutions has recently rebranded its website and, despite the sustained international criticism of its ‘militarized’ aid distribution into Gaza, a flyer published by UG in June described the company as “the photo negative of malign private military models” and “A PMC for Change.” UG also advertises providing the services of its former elite soldiers to “UHNW,” meaning Ultra-High-Net-Worth individuals.

The company has also published several hints as to the scope of its work beyond Gaza, claiming in the June capabilities statement to “bring order to chaotic theaters like Gaza, Africa, and Haiti.” And a still-active job posting for a communications instructor to deploy into Sub-Saharan Africa in January or February claims that the role would require “Coordinat[ing] with Civil Affairs/PSYOP for […] community information operations and training acceptance."

Civil Affairs and psychological operations battalions are frequently referred to as the ‘step-children’ of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, with both the general public and the U.S. Army itself having a much deeper understanding of the roles and responsibilities of U.S. Army Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets.

Formally grouped together as components of the U.S. Army’s 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) — which recently purchased licenses to the facial recognition product Clearview AI — the 95th Civil Affairs Battalion and the 4th and 8th Psychological Operations Groups are frequent partners with their siblings in the Green Berets on campaigns to win hearts and minds.

The civil affairs staff are generally tasked with direct engagements with local populations, behaving as a uniformed analogue of USAID that makes no secret of its goal of trading acts of kindness for actionable intelligence on military objectives and political sensitivities. Such intelligence is then handed to psychological operations teams to craft the equivalent of political campaigns against their adversaries, backed up by military force.

UG’s explicit reference to coordination with “Civil Affairs/PSYOP” adds weight to previous interpretations of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as a privatized civil affairs operation whose driving goal was the delegitimization of Hamas.

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The Virginia Beach-based commercial intelligence firm Octaris Technologies was the intermediary for a previously announced sale in March of five licenses of the internationally banned American facial recognition firm Clearview AI to the parent organization of the Green Berets, according to a newly public procurement summary.

“Without Clearview AI, DoD cannot rapidly analyze vast amounts of facial data, which makes it challenging to identify high-value targets with the required rate of accuracy needed for 1st Special Forces Group [sic],” stated a March justification for limiting competition for the contract.1

The official U.S. federal procurement database revealed on Tuesday that Octaris was the recipient of a $78,750 purchase order on March 17 with the Fayetteville-based Fort Bragg and its tenant unit, 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), which is best known as the parent organization of U.S. Army Special Forces, widely known as the Green Berets.2 The contract comes roughly one year after a $75,000 purchase order directly between 1st Special Forces Command and Clearview AI and, as recently revealed by this publication, the U.S. State Department is currently in the process of purchasing Clearview AI licenses for a special services unit (DIPRO) of the Colombian National Police.

(Clearview AI licenses have also been purchased by U.S. Government agencies through the special operations-affiliated firm NexTech Solutions, which maintains a secured and palatial facility just north of the Dale Mabry entrance of MacDill Air Force Base, which the author recently visited.)

Octaris is led by chief executive Christopher J. Blake, who served as an intelligence officer in the elite Tactical Development Squadron 3 (TACDEVRON 3) of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six for more than a year prior to becoming director of intelligence and information warfare at the Navy Expeditionary Warfighting Development Center (EXWDC) in Virginia Beach circa early 2020 to late 2021.

Octaris’s first institutional investor, the Huntington Beach-based Leonid Capital Partners, pitched the company in late April as “founded in 2024 by eight co-founders with more than 200 years of combined experience across the Navy, SOCOM, CIA, and NSA.” Octaris’s website further advertises the company’s central service as leveraging “proprietary data holdings, publicly available information (PAI), and commercially available information (CAI) to provide precise, actionable insights.”

Octaris’s largest public contract with the Pentagon was a $1.2 million agreement in late August to provide roughly 18 months of access to the company’s flagship platform, SOFOS, which the procurement summary described as an “AI-enabled real time environment [for] understanding and entity resolution for the DoD.” Thanks to the contract taking the form of a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award, a more revelatory summary of the agreement is separately published at sbir.gov:

Octaris, and our development partner Adelphi Data, have joined together to develop SOFOS, a granular level environmental understanding and entity resolution platform, for CDAO [Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office]. SOFOS leverages unique identifiers and attributes of publicly available and commercially available data to develop and deliver insights into patterns and trends in a given operating environment as well as develop associations, activities, and indications related to selected entity activity (e.g., people, places, things, and activity) of interest to the Department of Defense (DoD). SOFOS specializes in automatically and intuitively ‘connecting the dots’ across disparate datasets, with a focus on individual and organizational patterns, trends, associations, and actions as related to a given location(s), function(s), and desired end state(s) of the DoD.

The partnership between Octaris and Adelphi to supply the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) with the SOFOS commercial intelligence platform does not appear to be elsewhere publicly documented, and neither of the two firms immediately responded to requests for comment.

The McLean-based Adelphi Data is similarly transparent about the firm’s relationship to U.S. intelligence agencies, stating that the company “is built by a team with deep experience across national security, intelligence operations, and large-scale data infrastructure.” Adelphi’s chief executive, Kartik Chopra, publicly discloses his past work as an intelligence officer in an unnamed branch of the “U.S. Intelligence Community” from mid-2015 to mid-2020. Adelphi also prominently advertises a former head of the CIA’s domestic operations, Ralph F. Goff, as an advisor.

Adelphi maintains significantly closer ties to the commercial advertising technology world than Octaris, thanks to former LiveRamp chief executive Travis May serving as a co-founder and board member. Mr. Chopra also recently reshared a video interview with Goff published last month by Auren Hoffman, the founder of controversial phone-tracking firm SafeGraph and a fellow former chief executive of LiveRamp who was also a board member of May’s health information technology company, Datavant.

(LiveRamp was reported to have sold its cellphone location-tracking business to the location intelligence firm Cuebiq in 2019.)

Two of the founding partners of Octaris’s first institutional investor, Leonid Capital Partners, in mid-2022 further joined the board of the private investigations firm Justice Solutions Group, whose OnTrial private intelligence platform sells location-centric analysis of “the digital and physical footprint” of targets, summarized as “Where they’ve been. What they’ve posted. Who they’re connected to.” Beyond the bold slogan of “Every footprint, fully mapped,” OnTrial advertises the ability to provide several categories of “pattern of life” geolocational information, including “Home, work, and frequented locations” as well as “unknown associations.”

Octaris, Leonid Capital Partners, and Adelphi Data did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding whether their firms have collaborated with OnTrial.

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Corrected on June 16, 2026 at 4:40 p.m. ET to note that the Tampa location of NexTech Solutions is not the company’s headquarters.

A controversial Manhattan-based facial recognition tool banned by Canada and several European nations is in the process of being purchased for the Directorate of Protection and Special Services (DIPRO) of the Colombian National Police, according to an active notice of intent published by the international law enforcement arm of the U.S. State Department. A partial statement of work included within the procurement notice disclosed the title of “Clearview for DIPRO units.”

The controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI is currently led by chief executive Amos Kyler, who served as the company’s head of engineering and then chief technology officer until a few months after the resignation of the company’s co-founder and long-time figurehead Hoan Ton-That in early 2025. Though the Republican-aligned executives Hal Lambert and Richard Schwartz were reported to have initially jointly replaced Ton-That as co-CEOs, Kyler was publicly advertising his role as CEO of Clearview AI by November 2025.

Clearview AI’s nascent launch into Colombia and other Latin American countries was documented within a leaked December 2021 pitch deck whose contents were first reported by The Washington Post. Though the initial rollout emphasized the Reston-based airport biometrics company Securiport as the primary channel partner for deployment in Latin America, TIME magazine reported in mid-2024 on what it described as, “a recent trial of a facial-recognition tool given to a group of Latin American law-enforcement officials, investigators, and prosecutors by the American company Clearview AI.”

The U.S. State Department could not be immediately reached for comment through the official point of contact, a contracting specialist with the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) based at U.S. Embassy Bogota.

An organizational chart published by DIPRO details several branches with highly varied focuses for protection, ranging from children and adolescents to diplomats and a broader focus on counter-intelligence.

The U.S. State Department’s INL branch is one of the least publicly understood arms of U.S. statecraft. In addition to serving as the interface between the U.S. president and foreign law enforcement agencies, INL operates a narcotics reward program which has hosted bounties on U.S. targets such as former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who was captured alongside his wife Cilia Flores in a raid executed by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Delta Force in January.

Last month INL further signed an ongoing $230,000 contract to provide night-vision goggles to “Mexico’s elite Navy Special Forces Unit (UNOPES).” (The Jerusalem branch of INL also funded the Jordan-based and Delta Force-affiliated King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) during the Obama administration.)

INL is also nearing the end of a more than eight-year contract supplying the Colombian National Police with aviation services in support of a “fleet of fixed wing [aircraft] and helicopter[s]” which has so far obligated more than $62 million to the intermediary company, Amentum Services. Though Amentum is not a household name, the company has recruited senior officials into middle-tier positions, including by hiring former CIA operations chief Dave Marlowe in late 2023 as a liaison with customers.

The predecessor to INL, the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control (CCINC), was a close partner of both the DEA and the CIA in the 1970s, including in chartering the CIA-affiliated airline Evergreen International as part of opium eradication efforts in Mexico.

The Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM) was established by the U.S. State Department in 1978 with a focus on reducing drug trafficking into the United States from Latin America. During the height of Colombia’s Cali Cartel in 1995, the bureau expanded its focus to combating narco-terrorism and extended its name to the unwieldy Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).

One of Clearview AI’s longest-standing advisors, the former U.S. counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, happens to have been a participant in his capacity as a senior director on the U.S. National Security Council in an October 1995 press conference on operations against the Cali Cartel led by the bureau’s then-director, Ambassador Robert S. Gelbard.

INL subsequently expanded its remit beyond combating narco-terrorism into funding anti-corruption investigative journalism, with perhaps its most impactful action being the allocation of the $1.7 million founding grant for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) in mid-2008, routed through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The D.C.-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) has also disclosed receiving more than $2 million from Biden’s INL, while Trump’s INL provided the Brazilian branch of Transparency International with $800,000 to combat illegal gold-trafficking in the Amazon.

The Biden administration’s INL likewise provided a $3 million grant to the main secretariat of Transparency International in 2022 to host the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC), with U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan serving as a flagship speaker.

Much of INL’s funding for investigative journalism has been bipartisan. After the first Trump administration’s INL allocated $1.5 million to the Republican Party’s branch of the U.S. Congress-controlled National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to “increase the capacity of investigative journalists to uncover corruption and illicit finance,” $88,000 of the funding was directed to the investigative outlet Connectas during the first two years of the Biden administration to support work in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, particularly in Panama.

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Updated on June 10, 2026.

Updated at 11 p.m. ET on May 5, 2026.

The Lehi, Utah-based artificial intelligence lie detection company Converus Inc. has been a magnet for controversy since the 2014 release of its flagship product, EyeDetect, with the headline of a 2018 investigation by WIRED magazine describing Converus as “forging a dystopian future.” The company’s largest federal customer, the narcotics and law enforcement affairs arm of the U.S. State Department, nevertheless signed a potentially $2.3 million contract in March for “EyeDetect equipment and training” to be used at U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince, by way of the Reston-based technology reseller Horizon Global Partners.

A public job posting from the Alexandria-based special operations contractor Culmen International on Friday provided further information, stating that it was, “seeking a Vetting Specialist / EyeDetect Administrator to support the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) in Haiti,” with deployments lasting roughly 30 days as part of a “surge” model. “This position is a critical component of the Enhanced Vetting program for the Haitian National Police (HNP),” continued the posting, adding that the assessments were “part of a multilayered vetting process, working alongside certified polygraph examiners.”

Steven Frazer, the newly appointed CEO of Converus, spoke to All-Source Intelligence from Haiti, stating that, “They are looking to hire 5,000 police officers this year.” “There is such a gang and drug and crime problem, they’re looking for anything to be able to weed people out so that they’re not hiring the wrong people,” continued Frazer, who previously worked at the coaching company FranklinCovey for roughly 23 years, prior to joining Converus as chief marketing officer and chief operating officer in December.

When asked if the Converus tests were being performed from the Haitian National Police headquarters in Port-au-Prince, Frazer replied:

“Yes and no. Yes it is here in Port-au-Prince, that’s true. But I will say bluntly and straight-out, the gangs burned it down last year. And so what they’ve done now is they have temporary quarters where they brought in containers — shipping containers that they retrofitted for immediate use — and they put these together in a sort of a conglomerate while they are securing the area in order to build another building.”

(The online news agency Le Quotidien 509 reported a fire at the West I Departmental Directorate of the Haitian National Police in Port-au-Prince in March.)

“We’re at the top of the funnel, and [a traditional] polygraph is at the end of the funnel,” stated Frazer, adding that, “EyeDetect by itself has an 88% accuracy, and a polygraph, a traditional polygraph, depending upon the person administrating it, has anywhere from a 40% to a 70% accuracy rate, which is why it is not accepted in the court system generally.” “But you put them together and it has a 99% accuracy rate, because it’s like two witnesses of the same thing.” (The 99% figure is mathematically overoptimistic: even with the upper-end 70% accuracy assumption for a polygraph and assumption of independence between the polygraph and EyeDetect, one would expect 3.6% of measurements to be inaccurate across both tests.)

Frazer told All-Source Intelligence that about 15 Converus EyeDetect stations had been acquired for the lie-detection tests, with each test expected to take roughly 30-40 minutes.

“[The Haitian National Police] want to hire about 5,000, they said there are between two and three hundred applicants for every one position that they open, so they are willing — and that is their choice — they say, ‘We are willing to accept 88% accuracy, because there is always somebody else in line right behind them.’” stated Frazer. “In the U.S., we don’t have that luxury.”

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Despite not being a household name, INL wields immense influence as the State Department’s primary arm for countering narcotics trafficking and broader transnational crime. Descended from President Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control (CCINC), which was led in 1973 by the infamous White House “plumber” Egil M. Krogh, Colombia’s Cali Cartel helped justify INL’s expansion into combating narco-terrorism during the Clinton administration.

(INL also provided, by way of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the initial $1.7 million in 2008 for what became perhaps the world’s largest investigative journalism organization.)

INL’s arm within U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince, the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS), has a long history of support for the Haitian National Police (HNP), which were established in 1995 after the U.S.-led Operation Uphold Democracy temporarily returned Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. A leaked cable from the embassy — attributed to deputy chief of mission Thomas C. Tighe on August 13, 2009 — explained the particular need for vetting within the HNP’s counter-narcotics unit (BLTS), stating that, “The only way to possibly make a dent in [the drug] trade is to expand the BLTS with vetted officers and base them on the Southern and Northern coasts as well as in the capital.” “Suspected drug traffickers already serve in Parliament, enjoying immunity from prosecution,” added the cable, elsewhere stating that, “corruption entends [sic] into the prosecutors and judges offices as well.”

(President Reagan’s attempt at supporting counter-narcotics in Haiti through the CIA had previously failed: “Having created the Haitian intelligence service, the agency failed to insure that several million dollars spent training and equipping the service from 1986 to 1991 was actually used in the war on drugs,” reported The New York Times in 1993, in reference to the disbanded Haitian National Intelligence Service (SIN), which was succeeded by the National Intelligence Agency in late 2020 and the National Security Agency in April 2025.)

When asked if counter-narcotics was a priority of the police hiring, Frazer stated that, “The drugs are way, way down.” “The U.S. is worse with drugs than they are here,” Frazer continued.

“Gangs [are] without a doubt the number one issue,” stated Frazer. “Everybody pretty much is involved with gangs because gangs own entire neighborhoods,” he continued, adding that, "when I say ‘owned,’ it’s like Gangs of New York type things, not in God Father type ways, but there are street gangs and you have to pay your fee for protection from gangs in your area.”

U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince’s narcotics section has also helped train the HNP in collaboration with the Colombian National Police, including through what its website described as a “24-person counter-drug/counter-kidnap class,” and which contemporary reporting from the online outlet Haiti Libre dated as occurring in 2010. (A $648,760 contract between INL and Converus for use in Colombia was initiated towards the end of the Biden administration, briefly halted through a January 31, 2025 stop-work order, then restarted on March 13, 2025.)

WIRED noted in its 2018 investigation of Converus that the company had performed its first field test in Colombia, screening potential employees for an airline, but decided not to publish the results due to low accuracy on “less well-educated applicants.” Converus chief scientist John Kircher told the magazine that, “Although the data were limited, the [test] appeared to work well when we tested well-educated people who had applied to work for an airline, but the [test] was ineffective when we tested less well-educated applicants for security companies.”

The company has publicly advertised lie detection accuracy within the 86-88% range for years and has pitched its product to journalists and lobbying targets at intelligence agencies alike, by attempting to guess which of eight numbers — from 2 to 9 — that a skeptic has secretly chosen. (WIRED reported that their initial test failed, due to choosing the out-of-bounds number 1, but that EyeDetect successfully guessed the correct number in a second trial.)

Ancestry.com and ‘extreme vetting’

Much of the initial financial backing for Converus came from an investment firm led by Michael Wolfgramm, the former chief technology officer of Ancestry.com, whose headquarters is just a 10-minute drive northwest of Converus. Todd Mickelson, Frazer’s long-running predecessor as CEO of Converus, had also been recruited out of his previous job as director of product marketing at Ancestry.

Despite recruiting former acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner Jayson P. Ahern as an advisor in 2017, Converus appears to have failed in its reported push for the first Trump administration to leverage its AI lie detection for “extreme vetting.” (The company similarly recruited “TED talk superstar Pamela Meyer,” the spouse of Atlantic Council chief executive Frederick Kempe, earlier the same year.)

During the opening months of the current Trump administration, Converus attempted to ride the fervor from the centi-billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) through a campaign named #Save29B, which promised that mass adoption of its lie detectors would save the U.S. Government $29 billion per year — with $9 billion from immigration screening and at least $2.5 billion from preventing the next Edward Snowden.

Converus has apparently failed to land direct public contracts with the U.S. federal government since initiating its #Save29B campaign in April 2025, according to U.S. procurement databases, and the State Department’s March contract for “EyeDetect equipment and training” through Horizon Global Partners to support the vetting of the Haitian National Police appears to be the sole exception.

Frazer was quick to speak of Converus’s contracts with governments around the world but did not clarify which.

Roughly four months after the start of the Converus #Save29B campaign, Culmen International acquired both the San Franciso-based gig-work intelligence collection firm Premise Data and its covertly acquired subsidiary, the Austin-based information warfare contractor Madison Springfield Inc. The CEO of Madison Springfield, Timothy J. Riesen, resigned from the company on New Year’s Eve and is currently suing his former employer for cutting off funds for his legal defense for a lawsuit initiated by his former British business partners, who ran a shell company out of the United Arab Emirates named International Advisory Services as part of covertly monitoring Middle East targets for U.S. Special Operations Command, including the now-contested Strait of Hormuz.

Culmen International did not respond to a request for comment.

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A previously unreported disclosure from a Tallahassee-based lobbying firm closely affiliated with the Trump administration reveals that the North Carolina-based mercenary firm UG Solutions LLC leveraged a recent senior advisor to current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz as a lobbyist during the first three months of this year.

The international news agency Reuters exclusively reported on February 11 — in the center of the lobbying period in question — that UG Solutions was “in talks with the Trump administration’s Board of Peace about its next role in the [Gaza] enclave.” UG Solutions was widely criticized last year for the activities of its armed employees at the aid distribution sites run by the now-defunct Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, as intermediated by the logistics firm Safe Reach Solutions run by former CIA covert action chief Philip F. Reilly.

Micah T. Ketchel’s transition from a senior advisor to Ambassador Waltz into a partner in the D.C. office of Ballard Partners was announced on November 19, two days after UN Security Council Resolution 2803 codified the existence of the Board of Peace. (The D.C. office was opened in 2017 by Susan Wiles, President Trump’s current chief of staff.)

Ambassador Waltz provided testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month that, “In November, under American leadership, the Council resoundingly endorsed that framework, welcomed the Board of Peace, and established the basis for an International Stabilization Force, a Palestinian governing body, and a World Bank-managed reconstruction fund financed largely by regional partners.”

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, the founder of The Atlantic Council’s Realign for Palestine project, stated to an Israel-affiliated investment group during a private webinar late last year that, “Who is going to reengage Hamas? Let’s be honest, at this point, it’s either going to be the Israelis, or it’s going to be a mercenary force.” “People don’t like to use that word, fine, a private military contract army that is the spearhead of the International Stabilization Force,” continued Alkhatib.

Alkhatib’s remarks have not previously been reported.

Waltz was reassigned into his current role as Ambassador to the United Nations after being ousted from his role as President Trump’s national security advisor after causing one of the first major scandals in the administration by adding Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg into a sensitive group chat with other members of the administration on the encrypted messaging platform Signal.

Ketchel had served as chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Waltz (R-FL) for six years prior to the start of the second Trump administration but was only two months into his new role as a senior advisor to cabinet member Waltz when the scandal broke.

Ketchel is now helping to broker a mercenary force to serve as the muscle behind Waltz’s ongoing diplomatic work.

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Timothy J. Riesen, a recent CEO of the Austin-based information warfare contractor Madison Springfield Inc. (MSI), sued his former company this month due to an end to financial support from MSI in an ongoing, heated legal dispute with the British founders of a UAE-based covert intelligence collection firm, International Advisory Services (IAS).

The previous partnership between MSI and IAS — which centered around IAS conducting “dodgy” information collection work in the Middle East on behalf of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) without disclosing an American hand — was revealed by this publication to have involved nearly a decade of covert intelligence contracts within Iranian cities, including monitoring of the now-contested Strait of Hormuz in response to a March 2021 trade agreement between Iran and China. (The U.S. federal judge handling the dispute between Riesen and IAS in February retroactively sealed a table of codenames of contracts with USSOCOM in response to exclusive reporting from this publication.)

Legal filings further revealed that in July 2022, shortly after MSI’s then-secretive acquisition by the San Francisco-based gig-work information collection company Premise Data, the company had discussed the price for their “researchers” to escalate beyond observation, referring to a “break stuff price.”

Timothy J. Riesen's April 7 complaint against MSI in the Western District of Texas

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This month’s suit from Riesen against MSI, filed in the Western District of Texas on April 6, is at least the ninth legal action involving the downfall of Premise Data, ranging from the company’s 2019 lawsuit against the alleged whistleblower Alex Pompe to the company’s bankruptcy declaration in January and myriad offshoot lawsuits. (The law firm which represented Premise in its suit against Pompe, Grellas Shah, in October filed suit against Premise in Santa Clara County for lack of payment from the case.)

IAS founders Alexis Everington and Richard White — both former employees of the now-defunct British information operations firm SCL Group — sued Riesen in October 2023 in the Middle District of Florida after concluding that the $1 million which they each received from the MSI sale to Premise in May 2022 was insufficient. Former MSI president Ingrid de la Fuente soon after sued MSI through a now-withdrawn, but still sealed, False Claims Act suit in the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that the MSI’s roughly $4.5 million BEOWULF intelligence collection contract in Iran had improperly billed USSOCOM for the company’s subcontracts with IAS.

Former Premise Data CEO Maury Blackman — who was fired from the company in late 2023 after this publication revealed his sealed arrest for felony domestic violence — unsuccessfully sued the author for $25 million after Premise’s then-general counsel, Jeffrey C. Tung, hired the private investigation firm Whitestar Group to attempt to unmask this publication’s sources.

(Former U.S. Army Ranger Regiment commander Christopher S. Vanek was likewise let go from his government contracting role at Premise shortly after Blackman’s firing, resulting in him suing Premise for alleged fraud, age discrimination, and unpaid wages in May of last year, similarly revealing codenames of USSOCOM contracts in his lawsuit.)

Riesen claims in his newly filed suit against MSI — following his sealed lawsuit against Premise Data in Delaware last year — that, “MSI’s corporate parent, Premise Data Corporation (“Premise”), through its General Counsel (Jeff Tung) and CEO (Maury Blackman), approved Premise’s payment to MSI and MSI’s payment to Riesen of the attorneys’ fees and costs associated with the dispute with Everington and White.”

The April 7th filing from Riesen further states that, following Riesen’s December 31, 2025 resignation from MSI, “Culmen assumed control of MSI’s operations,” adding that, “MSI now refuses to continue advancement payments to Riesen.”

The lawsuit between Riesen and his former British partners is scheduled to go to trial in June, and Riesen argued in his complaint that the end to MSI’s support for his legal defense means that he “stands to owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in short order, or else, Riesen will be deprived of a defense on the eve of trial for an action brought against him as an officer and director of MSI.”

All-Source Intelligence looks forward to covering the trial in person in Tampa.

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The primary overseas political action arm of the U.S. Government, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), on Tuesday withdrew its March motion for a preliminary injunction against the second Trump administration for what the organization had originally described as “the Executive Branch’s unlawful impoundment of funds that Congress appropriated for the National Endowment for Democracy.”

Funding for NED was originally guaranteed from the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in the Reagan administration’s 1983 National Endowment for Democracy Act, with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) taking charge following the post-Cold War dissolution of USIA under Clinton in 1999, with the bulk of its activities consolidated under a newly appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy. NED’s co-founding and initial oversight by the recently former CIA chief of covert action Walter Raymond Jr. is a matter of archival history and was obliquely acknowledged in the organization’s own 20th anniversary message, but NED’s original close relationship with CIA political action programs remains largely obscured from public consciousness.

The heart of the recent funding dispute between NED and the current administration is contained in a March 16 letter from current Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers, which requested confirmation of NED’s compliance with § 4414(b) of the NED Act — “The Endowment shall consult with the Department of State on any overseas program funded by the Endowment prior to the commencement of the activities of that program.” — as well as with the § 4413(a) ban on domestic partisan activity. Perhaps the central focus of the February 24 House Appropriations Oversight Committee hearing on NED was the organization’s previous funding for the British think-tank Global Disinformation Index, which adopted highly politicized perspectives on which news stories were potentially a product of Russian disinformation.

The Rogers letter also requested “A list of grant recipients and activities that NED intends to fund with federal fiscal year 2026 funds,” which follows NED having rolled back its founding commitment to transparent overseas political activity last year, through the enactment of a “duty of care” policy justifying a transition to dark money. U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) similarly demanded access to a list of NED’s foreign grant recipients in the February 24 hearing, but his office did not return repeated requests for comment regarding whether the public deserves access to the same list.

According to NED’s Tuesday filing, “On Monday, March 30, the Endowment received into its bank account” a portion of the $315 million allocated to the organization for fiscal year 2026. The lawsuit has received surprisingly little media coverage, despite NED’s central and often overt role in the preparatory political and communications work for the U.S. Government’s overthrow of targeted government leaders, including in Venezuela and Iran.

PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR A PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

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The National Endowment for Democracy's March 9, 2026 motion for a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration for access to its fiscal year 2026 funding. The motion was subsequently withdrawn on March 31, after a portion of FY 2026 funding landed in NED's bank account.

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DEFENDANTS’ OPPOSITION TO PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR A PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

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The Trump administration's March 16, 2026 response to NED's March 9, 2026 motion for a preliminary injunction. The administration argued that NED was potentially in violation of section 4414 of the NED Act, including regarding partisan politics and consultation with the State Department.

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Letter from Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers

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The letter from Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers attached as exhibit 1 to the Trump administration's March 16, 2026 opposition to NED's request for a temporary injunction.

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JOINT STATUS REPORT AND PLAINTIFF’S MOTION TO WITHDRAW PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR A PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

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The National Endowment for Democracy's March 31, 2026 request to withdraw its March 9, 2026 motion for a preliminary injunction against the second Trump administration for blockage of Congressionally appropriated funds.

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“The Endowment is committed to engaging and continuing to consult the Executive Branch and Congress on our work. This is especially relevant in dynamic environments which are priorities for policymakers, such as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba,” stated NED chief executive Damon M. Wilson in a March 9 declaration, before adding that funding cuts would mean that a “resource center with tools and expertise that reaches hundreds of thousands of Iranians each year would have to be shuttered.”

As reported by The Grayzone in the immediate aftermath of Wilson’s public testimony to the House Appropriations Oversight Committee on February 24, U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) cut off Wilson’s statement that NED “began supporting the deployment [and] operation of about 200 Starlinks early on” in Iran, stating that, “You know what, I’m going to interrupt you – we’d better not talk about it.”

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The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s largest public payout from the U.S. federal government has effectively gone unnoticed despite coming from the cyberwarfare branch of the Pentagon previously led by board member Paul M. Nakasone in his joint capacity as director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

OpenAI’s contract with U.S. Cyber Command was active at the time of the company’s March 2 press release regarding domestic surveillance, which stated that, “The Department [of War] also affirmed that our services will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies like the NSA.”

Two previously unreported, but privately ethically disclosed, artificial subawards to OpenAI also remain published in official U.S. Government procurement databases following their injection by the cybersecurity researcher Ronald Lovelace (‘Cloudy_Day’), whom the Department of Energy has publicly credited as someone who has “responsibly disclosed valid vulnerabilities.” Lovelace’s previous methodology involved finding an exploit in a Department of Energy portal which allowed him to send emails tagged as from an official energy.gov address.

“I’ve called for a full audit of the entire procurement system,” Lovelace told All-Source Intelligence, noting that the injected $1 subawards could just have easily been for any amount. “Anybody malicious, they would mask it, it would be to a small tribal community or a small church,” Lovelace further stated, noting that he reported his findings to the Office of the Inspector General of the General Services Administration in the middle of last year.

The only human-generated discussion of OpenAI’s $3.5 million contract providing “AI platform training” to U.S. Cyber Command appears to have been published on Microsoft’s professional networking platform LinkedIn by the New York City-based procurement analysis company Procure.FYI, which lamented one week ago that:

Most of the conversation about OpenAI and Anthropic's government work focuses on the political drama. The supply chain risk designation. The Pentagon showdown. The dueling blog posts.

The contract’s payout has been roughly 75% larger than the $2 million obligated as part of the “frontier AI” contract OpenAI signed with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO) in mid-June, despite widespread claims of its $200 million value.

U.S. Cyber Command was quickly revealed to have conducted preparatory cyberattacks against Iranian communications infrastructure as one of the ‘first movers’ for the joint American and Israeli war of aggression against Iran which began on February 28, known as Operation Epic Fury. U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) on Monday called for a bipartisan investigation into the U.S. military’s mass killing of young Iranian children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab through a “deadly Tomahawk missile strike.”

The U.S. military targeting system for Epic Fury has operated on the Maven Smart System run by the Miami-based enterprise data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, whose ever-controversial co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel was a founding donor to OpenAI. But Large Language Model support for Maven during Epic Fury was instead provided by OpenAI’s fellow San Francisco-based competitor, Anthropic, and a detailed analysis of the technology stack was reported by The Guardian on Thursday, citing CNN’s conclusion that the Defense Intelligence Agency’s outdated classification of the elementary school as a military target was at least partly to blame for the atrocity.

Media attention has heavily focused on the Trump administration’s contested declaration of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk following the company’s insistence on contractual assurances preventing its software from being used for either domestic mass surveillance — especially under the auspices of data-broker-enabled Commercially Available Intelligence (CAI) — or for autonomous killing. But the Financial Times reported on March 20 that Anthropic’s yearly revenue projection had “shot from $9bn at the end of 2025 to $19bn earlier this month, according to an investor,” indicating that the company’s feud with the Trump administration and provision of infrastructure support for the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and ongoing bombing of Iran has not imposed a financial burden.

The intense attention paid by the Nebraska-based wiretapping technology company PenLink to training its customers on how to gain access to Google Search histories of investigatory targets further suggests that commercial Large Language Model usage by platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude will become similarly central to police and intelligence agency interception. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declared on February 26 that, “We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions.”

As first revealed by this publication, Anthropic has collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Australian Office of National Intelligence since at least late 2023 and hired former Palantir employee Steve Sloss as the company’s point person for pitching U.S. intelligence agencies, including for military targeting.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment regarding its ethical boundaries for U.S. wiretap requests against non-Americans or on whether the company took steps to mitigate real-or-perceived conflict of interest regarding recruitment of former U.S. Cyber Command chief Paul Nakasone prior to landing a $3.5 million contract with U.S. Cyber Command.

The crumbling public transparency for Other Transaction Agreements

The lack of public reporting on OpenAI’s contract with U.S. Cyber Command is at least partly due to the arcane rules governing publication of a category of financial awards heavily favored for the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence work, known as Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs), which are exempt from disclosure on USASpending.gov due to residing outside of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). Further notable OTAs have included OpenAI and its competitor Anthropic’s “frontier AI” awards with the Pentagon and Microsoft’s ill-fated $22 billion ceiling augmented reality goggles effort, known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS).

The Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation (FPDS-NG) hosted at FPDS.gov was the primary public disclosure mechanism for more than $100 billion in military artificial intelligence contracts until the current Trump administration quickly began phasing out anonymous access to its content — as first reported by this publication — with the main website beginning its redirection to SAM.gov in late February.

Contrary to public reporting of the complete shutdown of FPDS, the back-end API has continued functioning as of publication, and the General Services Administration’s Office of the Inspector General ceased responding to the author’s inquiries on the new Sam.gov system’s requirement of a Login.gov account and newly imposed significant throttles on API access last month. The GSA OIG further did not respond to a recent request for comment regarding the Cloudy_Day subaward injection exploit.

The injection of artificial subawards into official U.S. procurement databases is not without precedent. Several years ago the author discovered a clearly fraudulent listing on USASpending.gov of a supposed $1 billion subaward from Palantir Technologies to itself, with a subaward description naming a homeless shelter and the contributor of the fake data, who confirmed their role to the author when reached by phone, as well as their past role as a contracting officer. (The spurious subaward was later removed from the official database.)

“All of our financial grant money is at risk,” stated the cybersecurity researcher Ronald Lovelace.

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When the investigative journalist Bob Woodward in early October 1986 exposed the Reagan administration having recently planted disinformation in The Wall Street Journal regarding Libya’s alleged terrorist activities under the eccentric Col. Muammar Gaddafi, it was a major scandal, albeit eclipsed the next month by widespread revelation of the Iran-Contra arms deals. Woodward’s reporting had nevertheless disrupted a major inter-agency counter-terrorism public diplomacy program designed to mix overt and covert activities under the auspices of the National Security Council (NSC).

An ongoing lawsuit between British and American information warfare contractors in the Tampa division of the Middle District of Florida has similarly revealed the covert back-end of ostensibly overt political information gathering across Libya in the aftermath of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s overthrow of Gaddafi’s government in 2011. Previous reporting from this publication regarding the lawsuit’s disclosure of the target countries and years of operation associated with myriad codenames for “stovepiped” classified foreign intelligence collection programs through networks of paid-but-unwitting researchers on behalf of American and British customers — such as U.S. Special Operations Command paying the contractors roughly $4.5 million for a BEOWULF intelligence collection program across at least 10 Iranian cities between August 2019 and September 2020 — led to Judge John L. Badalamenti retroactively sealing four document sections on February 2.

Everington and White v. Riesen - Document 136

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"PLAINTIFFS, ALEX EVERINGTON’S AND RICHARD WHITE’S RESPONSE TO DEFENDANT’S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT" - March 9, 2026

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The British spies, former Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) employees Alexis Everington and Richard White, were tasked through their United Arab Emirates-based shell company, named International Advisory Services (IAS), by Megan Doherty in her capacity as acting country director for Libya at the National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI). Doherty published at least three NDI reports building upon focus groups in Libya led by IAS — in December 2011, May 2012, and December 2012 — each noting that the work was “made possible through funding from the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) under award No. S-NEAPI-II-CA-342.”

MEPI was launched by secretary of state Colin Powell in 2002 as a means of improving public diplomacy in the Middle East, under the leadership of then-vice president Dick Cheney’s daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, who later spent six years as a Republican U.S. Representative for Wyoming. At the time of the first MEPI-funded research report based upon work commissioned to the covert intelligence collection firm IAS, MEPI’s director was Tamara Cofman Wittes, who was announced as president of NDI in January 2024.

25 years after revelation of the planted Wall Street Journal article, at about 8:30 a.m. on October 20, 2011, a French Mirage fighter jet operating within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) coalition had conducted an airstrike on a group of 11 vehicles in Gaddafi’s convoy, near the city of Sirte off of Libya’s northern coast. As a result of the strike, which occurred seven months into a military campaign initiated by President Obama on March 18, Gaddafi was captured and then brutally murdered by rebel forces aligned with Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC), leading to the New York City-based nonprofit Human Rights Watch concluding one year later that, “As [Gaddafi] was being led onto the main road, a militiaman stabbed him in his anus with what appears to have been a bayonet, causing another rapidly bleeding wound.”

A circa June 2013 resume for Mr. Everington was included on the 19th page of the second exhibit within document 136 of the lawsuit on March 9, advertising his work through IAS on a “fifteen month project in [Libya] creating and managing the Media and Communications Committee (MCC) for the National Transitional Council (NTC) during and after the revolution,” including “generating and critiquing IO [Information Operations] products for dissemination across the internet, via leaflet and on the radio.” The same bullet point in Everington’s resume stated that he had supported “several rounds of research and ongoing consultancy for National Democratic Institute and USAID,” apparently referencing the focus groups tasked by Ms. Doherty in 2011 and 2012.

Everington was previously reported by this publication to have conducted strategic communications trainings in Libya through the women’s rights organization Karama in 2012. What became IAS’s operation as a cut-out for the Austin, Texas-based information warfare contractor Madison Springfield, Inc. (MSI) run by Timothy Riesen had been initiated in 2011 as an analogous offshoot of the relationship between Everington and Riesen’s collaboration in the Middle East through SCL and Archimedes Global, respectively. (This earlier collaboration was reported in 2018 by The Grayzone to have proposed the usage of journalistic cover to gather information in Yemen in 2009 through “Project Titania,” with the story published in the aftermath of widespread reporting on SCL’s more infamous subsidiary, Cambridge Analytica.)

One decade after IAS’s work with NDI in Libya, their American sister company MSI was covertly acquired by the San Francisco-based gig-work information collection company Premise Data, which has since filed for bankruptcy and sold both MSI and its government services division to the Alexandria-based special operations contractor Culmen International. A newly public email from Riesen to Everington on February 22, 2022 — roughly three months prior to the completion of the sale to Premise — described Premise’s intention to “offload any of their dodgier work onto us so as to keep the Premise brand pristine for their commercial clients,” adding that Premise was considering merging a company underneath MSI which “just does mobile-phone tracking.”

Following her work with Everington’s IAS in Libya, Ms. Doherty held high-level national security and development positions in Democratic administrations, transitioning from NDI into the State Department in mid-2013 and becoming a director for North Africa on President Obama’s NSC, under national security advisor Susan Rice, for roughly one year. Doherty was subsequently a deputy assistant administrator for the Middle East and multilateral affairs components of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under President Biden and, according to her LinkedIn profile, became director of the Washington liaison office of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) in December.

NDI and its parent organization, the U.S. Congress-controlled NED, have insisted for decades that they have no relationship with U.S. intelligence organizations, despite their construction by the recently former CIA covert action chief Walter Raymond Jr., beginning in 1983, as ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization’ analogues of the German stiftung system. The NSC had produced classified summaries for both the German Social Democratic Party’s Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Christian Democratic Union’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung as part of the planning for NED within Reagan’s broader “Project Democracy” initiative.

While Raymond’s 1978 to 1982 tenure as chief of the CIA International Activities Division’s Covert Action Staff (IAD/CAS) — later renamed the Special Activities Center — and his oversight of the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy through his role on Reagan’s NSC are documented at length in the declassified records in his boxes at the Reagan Presidential Library, much of the pathbreaking reporting was published by Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, eliciting a lawyerly objection from Raymond in The Washington Post in October 1988. (NED’s then-chairman and president, Vin Weber and Carl Gershman, publicly acknowledged Raymond as a co-founder in their 20th anniversary message on November 6, 2003.)

Raymond rightly objected to being described as directed by the CIA after his initial June 1982 to April 1983 period of being dual-hatted with CIA and the NSC, replacing the CIA’s former South Korea station chief Donald P. Gregg. Raymond was largely tasking CIA officers who would previously have been his reports, as made clear by a declassified November 28, 1986 memo from Raymond to Joseph R. DeTrani in his final days as chief of the Political-Psychological Staff of the International Activities Division (IAD/PPS) prior to becoming director of the Office of Technical Services (OTS) in December 1986, with David Baad reportedly arriving as his replacement. (DeTrani had been preceded in his PPS leadership by David D. Gries, with whom Raymond also corresponded on November 28, 1984.)

When the author attempted to arrange a visit to NED’s archive at the Library of Congress — which contains a component on “National Security Classified Information, 1983-1986” — the current maintainer, Sherri Shue, noted that the archive was closed to public access. In response to a question regarding whether the closure related to NED’s end to transparency regarding its foreign grantees last year, under a new “duty of care” policy, one past maintainer of the archive, Ryan Reft, stated by email that:

“They’ve been closed for awhile now. To make a long story short, and I believe it relates to the point you raised and it’s largely just my opinion, NED has concerned [sic] about foreign intelligence agents targeting folks from the collection for pro-democratic movements. NED did take requests for a period, and those folks are grandfathered in, but they shuttered requests a little under a decade ago.”

Declassified records show that less than four months prior to Woodward’s 1986 article, former CIA covert action chief Walter Raymond Jr. had on June 12, 1986 forwarded a secret report from former U.S. Ambassador David Charles Miller Jr. to national security advisor John M. Poindexter which proposed methods to counter allegations of American “decadence, imperialism, exploitation, Zionism, and so on.” A section entitled “The American Public and Leadership” noted the “need to maintain the broad public support for the President’s recent initiatives, translate that into specific legislative objectives as required, and develop mechanisms to maintain the support for a sustained effort.”

The organization of the new effort was described in an attached memo to secretary of state George P. Shultz to be modeled after “the Otto Reich empire,” a reference to the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean (S/LPD) black propaganda program led by Ambassador Reich from 1983 to 1986 to build support for the Nicaraguan Contra forces. Ambassador Miller argued that, “The covert side must be completely separated from the overt public diplomacy efforts,” adding that, “For a wide range of reasons, including security, philosophic incompatibility, somewhat different objectives, and protection of credibility, covert support activity should be managed out of the CIA with close informal links to the overt side.”

Such “close informal links” between U.S. intelligence and the components of NED have been myriad since its 1983 construction, including Ambassador Sally Shelton-Colby having married former CIA director William E. Colby in November 1984 and subsequently served as treasurer of NED and a board member of NDI. NDI founding president J. Brian Atwood and current NDI vice chair Harriet C. Babbitt were also board members of the Council for a Community of Democracies (CCD) in 2002, at a time when former CIA covert action chief Walt Raymond was still president.

The CCD was itself dedicated to supporting the Community of Democracies initiative which had been launched in late 1999 by secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright, with former acting U.S. Information Agency director Penn Kemble as her special representative. Albright subsequently became chair of NDI, and NED named its Penn Kemble Forum after her representative.

NED founding chair John Richardson, Jr., a former president of CCD and Radio Free Europe, had likewise been recruited into his first job after Harvard Law School — at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell — thanks to his father’s co-trusteeship with soon-to-be CIA director Allen Dulles of Dulles’s mistress, Mary Bancroft. Richardson subsequently received advice in late 1956 from then-CIA director Dulles regarding a bazooka-transportation scheme for Hungarian revolutionaries which he had been connected to through the International Rescue Committee. Richardson also told his interviewer at the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) of having been pulled into an earlier “irresponsible” push to turn Eastern European refugees into a guerrilla warfare force, stating that, “at Sullivan and Cromwell a fellow by the name of Karl Harr, who was later a NSC, National Security Council — they didn’t call it that then — in the Eisenhower Administration, got me involved in an idea-a crazy idea; even crazier that dropping bazookas-of developing a sort of guerrilla force with refugees in Europe,” adding that it was, “really nutty.”

Fellow CCD vice president Mark Palmer, one of the central authors of Reagan’s 1982 Westminster speech announcing his democratic initiative, had “worked closely” on covert action programs with the CIA’s then-head of Soviet propaganda, Richard Malzahn, during his own tenure as Reagan’s deputy assistant secretary of state for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, according to an authoritative 2020 book on Reagan’s covert action programs in Poland. Former deputy CIA director Frank Carlucci was also a NED board member as of 2002.

One can also find employees moving between NDI and the CIA in both directions: the researcher Lindsay Wright ended her tenure as an executive assistant at NDI in August 2010 and became a CIA targeting officer in July 2011, according to her LinkedIn profile, while, in the other direction, former CIA counterintelligence analyst Peter Mattis became a senior advisor for global democratic resilience at NDI circa April to October 2021, prior to spending roughly two years as director of intelligence at former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s national security think-tank, the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).

The plausible deniability of NED’s informal relationships with U.S. intelligence has nevertheless held for more than forty years, despite the organization’s transition into ‘dark money’ funding last year, with the entire progressive ‘Squad’ — with the exception of Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), who did not participate — voting on January 14 to preserve funding for the organization. Criticism of NED from the U.S. Congress, which authorized its creation through the 1983 NED Act — with funding later shifting from the U.S. Information Agency to the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor — almost entirely originated from the Republican Party during a February 24 oversight hearing, especially in regards to NED’s past funding of the London-based Global Disinformation Index. Such partisan criticism resulted in NED’s ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration for access to its fiscal year 2026 funding, leading to NED president Damon Wilson submitting a declaration regarding potential negative impacts to his organization’s overseas activities on March 9.

Though Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) demanded a copy of NED’s foreign grantee list so that he could evaluate their performance, his office refused to comment after several phone calls regarding whether investigative journalists and taxpayers deserved access to the same list.

The National Democratic Institute (NDI) and its parent organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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