The Intercept reports: “U.S. Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage.”

KIM SCIPES, kscipes at pnc.edu
Associate professor of sociology at Purdue University North Central in Indiana, Scipes is author of AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? and editor of the forthcoming Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization.

Scipes said today: “This Pentagon program to utilize Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) — known mostly in the U.S. as ‘non-profit organizations’ — for intelligence operations is extremely stupid, reckless, and dangerous. They jeopardize the health and well-being of any person working in an NGO, and especially any American. Additionally, this damage is all the more insane since NGOs provide help to people that no government or corporation can provide, so using NGOs for intelligence purposes is undermining the various organizations that are helping people on the ground. A project such as this also demonstrates the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the wasting of billions of dollars spent yearly on them: if all the ‘spy vs. spy’ stuff that the intelligence agencies have at their disposal cannot get the intelligence the government says it needs, then let’s disband these so-called ‘intelligence’ operations and use the money to help people.”

In 2014, Scipes was featured on an Institute for Public Accuracy news release, “Is the Cuba Twitter Story Part of Broader Pattern?” about a program the AP described this way: “Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through ‘non-controversial content’: news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize ‘smart mobs’ …”