It Depends on What Your Definition of ‘Spy’ Is

That’s reinforced in the opening sentence of the story, which proclaims President Donald Trump “accused the F.B.I. on Friday, without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign …” The Times makes it clear that Trump is wrong to claim that there was “at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president.” Not because there was no “FBI representative” engaging with the campaign, but because “No evidence has emerged that the informant acted improperly…or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal.”

The Times also offers a lecture on the necessity of keeping the names of secret FBI informants secret—even those who are already known to anyone who cares. “The New York Times has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety.” Plenty of other outlets have named the FBI’s informant, together with the identifying information that he is an American professor who teaches at Cambridge University in England. The Times confirms who the man is through their extensive description of him as “an American academic who teaches in Britain.” He’s said to be “well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.” What? We had just been hearing about an FBI informant: Has the Times just effectively outed a C.I.A. source? Whether or not, all that identifying detail renders rather coy the Times’s assertion that their decision not to name the professor is a matter of the safety, not just of the FBI’s source, but of the American people.

Over at the Washington Post, they have essentially the same story, no doubt from many of the same sources. They too refuse to speak the professor’s name. The Post makes it clear that the desire to keep the informant’s name out of the papers is being driven by the FBI: The paper says it “is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.”

The Post, like the Times, is at pains to avoid the s-word. The “professor was more than an academic interested in American politics,” the Post writes, “he was a longtime U.S. intelligence source.” It was “at some point in 2016, he began working as a secret informant for the FBI” in its Russia investigation. So let’s be clear: Professor…oops I almost said his name…The professor in question was a “secret informant for the FBI,” but not, I repeat, not a spy.

That said, it does get tricky maintaining the bureaucratic euphemisms. The Washington Post confirms what had been reported in March by the Daily Caller—that Professor X reached out to an unsuspecting junior Trump campaign gofer: “He offered to pay [George] Papadopoulos $3,000 to write a paper about the oil fields off the coast of Turkey, Israel and Cyprus, ‘a topic on which you are a recognized expert.’”

What could that possibly have to do with Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election? The Post has the obvious and correct answer: Professor X was making nice, buttering up the gofer with some non-illegitimate cash, establishing a relationship to be exploited later. Here’s how the Post puts it: “It is a long-standing practice of intelligence operatives to try to develop a source by first offering the target money for innocuous research or writing.”

So now, Professor X isn’t just “a longtime U.S. intelligence source” nor merely a “secret informant for the FBI,” he’s an “intelligence operative” in the business of developing sources. Doesn’t that sound rather like another word for the peculiar profession that shall not be named? One might note that in Vanity Fair’s big bio article on “ex-spy Christopher Steele,” published in March of last year, the dossier author is interchangeably described as an “ex-spy” and a “former intelligence operative.” But it would never do to suggest that in acting the way an “intelligence operative” acts, Professor X was engaged in spying.

And though no spy, of course, Professor X was no slouch when it came to tradecraft. As first reported by the Daily Caller and now confirmed by both the Post and the Times, Professor X not only invited Papadopoulos to the U.K. and paid George’s way, he made sure that the Trump campaign adviser was met for drinks in London by a “young woman” presented as Professor X’s “assistant.”

For all the various seductions, Professor X doesn’t appear to have gotten very far. He seems to have been rather in a rush to ask Papadopoulos what he knew about Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails. “Mr. Papadopoulos replied that he had no insight into the Russian campaign,” the Times reports. At which point the professor’s haste got the better of him: Papadopoulos’ “response clearly annoyed the informant, who tried to press Mr. Papadopoulos about what he might know about the Russian effort …” When that didn’t work, Professor X’s young female friend gave it a try: “The assistant also raised the subject of Russia and the Clinton emails during a separate conversation over drinks with Mr. Papadopoulos, and again he denied he knew anything about Russian attempts to disrupt the election.” The scandal may prove to be how little the FBI got for however much Professor X was paid.

Is this an outrage, as the president has tweeted? If the spying—yes, I said it, because that’s what it was, in any normal use of the word—turned up a conspiracy between Team Trump and the Kremlin, the enormity of the president’s offense will make any question of how the evidence was collected fade away. But if no such conspiracy is uncovered, efforts to spy on the campaign will appear to be a gross abuse of the FBI’s investigative powers.

Could it be that the insistence that a spy not be called a spy is born of a concern that there might not be proof to be had of the sort of conspiracy that would make Americans accept the spying as justified?