In recent weeks, President Joe Biden’s campaign has faltered as his physical decline has become too obvious for Democrats and the media to ignore. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt by the narrowest of margins, emerging bloodied yet defiant.
Americans aren't the only ones transfixed by this unique political drama. Spies from all over the world are watching the campaign closely too. Everybody wants to know who the next president will be and what that means for them. Almost 180 countries maintain an embassy in Washington, D.C., and most of them contain spies, usually masquerading as diplomats. Sometimes, there are a lot of spies. In Russia’s case, at least one-third of their diplomats are really intelligence officers, and their oversized embassy is perched on a hill overlooking the White House, three miles away.
What are all these spies doing to try and figure out what's coming in November?
A lot of different things.
They’ll be working the diplomatic-media-political cocktail circuit, schmoozing Congressional staffers, journalists, and other diplomats. They'll be attending think-tank events, always on the prowl for possible recruits who might possess information about the inner workings of the capital. They'll be looking to cultivate those perceived as close to Trump, Biden, and their respective inner circles.
Then there’s technical espionage. Many countries possess the ability to collect signals intelligence around D.C., such as phone calls, texts, emails, and group chats, which are critical sources of inside knowledge that won’t appear in any newspapers. If White House staffers are complaining to friends on the phone or online about work, sharing anecdotes about what they've seen or overheard or what they've heard colleagues saying that they've seen or overheard, somebody uninvited may be listening in. In truth, all unencrypted U.S. government communications are assumed to be compromised.
It's not just our enemies who are spying on our presidential race. The top counterintelligence threats in D.C. come from Russia, China, and Cuba (Iran has a tough time due to their lack of an embassy), but friends such as Israel are always spying too. Allies also want to know what’s happening behind the scenes with Biden and Trump. There are no friendly foreign intelligence services, per the venerable spy mantra (although the Anglosphere’s “Five Eyes” partners constitute a broad exception). Even close allies are attempting to steal inside information all around D.C.
Since multiple intelligence agencies are spying on the White House nonstop, recruiting agents, and reading “private” communications, some intelligence services knew about Biden’s age-related health problems years ago. A senior spy from a friendly country recently told me that his agency knew in the first year of Biden’s presidency, only months after his inauguration, that the president wasn’t capable of working in a full-time manner. If one spy service knew, we should assume that many others did. The massive cover-up orchestrated by the White House and Democrats, in collusion with their media wing, succeeded only in deceiving Americans for over three years. Democrat disinformation about Biden’s condition didn’t fool the intelligence professionals.
As for Trump, with the former president's odds of victory in November rising, he again makes a key target for intelligence collection. In 2016, connections between the Trump campaign and Moscow, for instance, through Paul Manafort (who had long-standing ties with Russia), were the subject of much media speculation. But Russia was hardly the only country whose spies were trying to get close to the election. The same holds true today.
It’s a safe bet that the Republican National Convention, which just concluded in Milwaukee, had foreign spies from many countries working the event. They were likely buying drinks for staffers, slinging gossip to get some in return, and perhaps even installing bugs and wiretaps as discreetly as possible. The same will happen in Chicago when the Democrats hold their convention in a few weeks.
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Based on experience, it should be assumed that both the Biden and Trump campaigns have been penetrated by multiple foreign intelligence services. That friendly foreign diplomat or journalist who likes to hang around at campaign events, always willing to listen to staffer complaints and buy a round of drinks or appetizers, may not be who he or she pretends to be. Intelligence officers know that many staffers from either Biden or Trump's campaign will become government employees in January. Those soon-to-be friends in the White House and across the executive branch might be very useful sources of U.S. policy information.
The big question now is whether Biden will remain the Democratic nominee on the ballot. So far, Biden is standing fast. But foreign spies from numerous countries will likely know Biden’s fate before America does.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer
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