Hired psychologists devised "enhanced interrogation techniques” to break prisoners
Given the intense media coverage over Charlottesville, a recent small headlinelargely escaped notice, but it could have a major impact on how Americans come to terms with the excesses that developed from the “global war on terror.” For the first time, several individuals closely associated with the CIA torture program were about to become answerable...
Read MoreWashington might be sending too many spies, making them more vulnerable
The Central Intelligence Agency, established through the National Security Act of 1947, was primarily intended to be a centralized clearinghouse for information to prevent another Pearl Harbor-style attack on the United States. Be that as it may, the initiation of what would eventually be termed the Cold War soon after led to the rapid expansion...
Read MoreWhy sources and methods matter more than the material itself
Intelligence agencies and senior government officials tend to use a lot of jargon. Laced with acronyms, this language sometimes does not translate very well into journalese when it hits the media. For example, I experienced a sense of disorientation two weeks ago over the word “sensitive” as used by several senators, Sally Yates, and James...
Read MoreCIA employees are not staging a coup against Donald Trump
It would never occur to ordinary CIA officers that derailing a presidency might be a desirable thing to do. The rumor of some kind of coup in the making is the creation of a media that is looking for a story and trying to bash Donald Trump at the same time. To be sure, there...
Read MoreFact, fiction, or speculation?
Yesterday, BuzzFeed published a 35-page dossier containing allegations that Russian operatives worked to identify and develop compromising personal and financial information about Donald Trump. Allegedly, this is the full document from which a two-page synopsis was drawn and provided to Trump and President Obama as an appendix to a report about Russian interference in the...
Read MoreWhat to expect from his new director
The midnight oil is burning over at the Central Intelligence Agency as senior managers consider options relating to how to play new president Donald Trump and new director Mike Pompeo, neither of whom possesses any serious understanding either of intelligence operations or of how to lead 20,000 often difficult-to-manage employees. With the exception of the...
Read MoreThere is a long tradition of trusting candidates with classified information
Providing intelligence briefings to presidential candidates is a practice that goes back more than sixty years to the administration of Harry Truman. The briefings are a courtesy and have no basis in law but they are intended to level the playing field somewhat so that an incumbent would not necessarily have an advantage over an...
Read MoreIntelligence agencies have struggled to be worthy of their name
A little more than one year ago Director John Brennan announced a shake-up at CIA that would, inter alia, enhance the eroded capabilities of the Clandestine Service. An earlier move to appoint paramilitary officer Gregory Vogel as deputy director for the agency’s spies signaled to the bureaucracy that shooting and droning had replaced espionage as...
Read MoreShould NSA listen in when a foreign government seeks to shape America's foreign policy?
The Wall Street Journal story revealing that the Barack Obama administration used the National Security Agency (NSA) to listen to phone calls made by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides is being spun in a number of different directions depending on one’s political proclivities. Sen. Rand Paul told Fox News that he...
Read MoreAn all-star cast teams up to spin their enhanced interrogation regime
Back in the days when I was a spy there were certain things that one just did not dwell upon. Everyone who worked in the field knew that there were episodes that it would be best not to recall, either because they were embarrassing, possibly unsavory, or even, more rarely, wildly successful though at a...
Read MoreWorking closely together encourages tunnel vision and groupthink.
Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan has convened a panel to consider Agency reorganization. The central issue is whether CIA analysts should be more operationally integrated with Clandestine Service officers, but reform might also include creating new staffs operating independently of the geographical divisions that have traditionally run the spies. China, might, for example, become...
Read MoreIncoming intel committee chair Richard Burr will end any hope of holding out of control spy agencies accountable
The wheels up party is a venerable CIA tradition, normally celebrated at overseas stations when a particularly incompetent Chief of Station or a hostile ambassador was in the process of permanently leaving post. The drinking would begin at a time estimated to coincide with the moment when the dearly departed’s aircraft lifted off from the...
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David Copperfield is a CIA Contractor?
The crisis involving the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a Godsend to politicians, which is probably why the threat actually posed by the group is being hyped as it is while the White House and Pentagon continue to change the meaning of commonly used English expressions to enable the attacking of just...
Read MoreIntelligence pros are far more skeptical of government claims than their bosses let on
That the United States’ intention to confront Russia over Ukraine, a place where it has no real interests, borders on the incomprehensible has been clearly demonstrated by both Scott McConnell and Daniel Larison. University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer has also described in some detail how the dangerous confrontation is largely the fault of Washington...
Read MoreAmerica's high-tech spies aren't equipped to penetrate low-tech terrorist organizations
The inability of the United States government to anticipate the ISIS offensive that has succeeded in taking control of a large part of Iraq is already being referred toas an “intelligence failure.” To be sure, Washington has unparalleled technical capabilities to track money movements and to obtain information from the airwaves. It is adept at...
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It's Always Illegal and Often Immoral
It is being reported that the attempt by Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan to steer the CIA away from paramilitary action and back towards conventional spying and analysis is not going well. Media coverage of the problem is depicting it as being partly driven by bureaucratic obstacles associated with budgeting and allocation of personnel,...
Read MoreGovernment bureaucracies, like many private sector businesses, are initially created in response to a perceived need either to do something or provide a service. The Department of Defense in its current incarnation rose out of the developing Cold War in the post-Second World War environment, while the CIA was created to prevent a second Pearl...
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A Quality That is Sometimes Hard to Find
I recently had lunch with an old friend who described how a fellow army officer had, back in April 2008, attended a mandatory all hands meeting at the National Defense University in Washington. The purpose of the meeting, which was held in the university’s largest auditorium, was to promote a book written by noted neocon...
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How do you say that in Arabic?
How do you process 1.7 billion pieces of information in a day? You can’t, so if you are the National Security Agency (NSA) you screen through it insofar as you are able to do so using computers with sophisticated algorithms to identify key words and then store it somewhere so you can always check back...
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The “unitary executive” crowd that came to the fore under George W. Bush argue basically that because the government does something it is therefore ipso facto legal. It is not a new concept though one heard only intermittently in the United States where constitutional checks and balances were long the Gospel prior to 9/11. Ironically,...
Read MoreU.S. covert human intelligence has specialized in failure
“Intelligence failure” is the get out of jail free card for the political class. If one can plausibly cite an inability of the intelligence community to provide accurate information in a timely fashion, it is possible to walk away from any disastrous policy with only minimal political damage. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is a...
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The White House is pushing hard to keep a significant number of American soldiers in Afghanistan contrary to President Barack Obama’s earlier pledge to have then all out by the end of 2014. As the United States President has demonstrated himself to be a habitual liar that failure to connect promises made in 2008 with...
Read MoreFear of officers "going native" keeps our intelligence agencies ill-informed about Somalia, Syria, and other hotspots.
When the British ran an empire they did it the right way, if one is into imperial management. They created an entire bureaucracy, the Colonial Service, which was manned by officers who were expected to go out to foreign posts for extended periods, to learn the local language, and to acquire an understanding of the...
Read MoreAfghanistan's problems can't be solved by bribing President Karzai
The New York Times is reporting that the CIA has been paying Afghan President Hamid Karzai millions of dollars every month. The money, which Karzai has acknowledged and described as an “easy source of petty cash,” does not go directly to the president but instead is delivered in bundles of $100 notes via bags or...
Read MoreSpies aren't apt to be philanderers---even if there are plenty of both at the Agency.
A former colleague from Istanbul has written an intriguing piece for the New Republic called "Spy Sex: Inside the Randy Culture of the CIA." Reuel Marc Gerecht, who served with the Agency in Turkey and France before finding a more satisfying perch targeting Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, makes the claim that as CIA...
Read MoreJohn Brennan knows there's more to intelligence than drones.
We have lately witnessed two cabinet-level confirmation hearings by the Senate in which little or nothing was asked that actually might enlighten us as to how the State and Defense Departments might be transformed over the next four years. John Kerry was tossed softballs, while Chuck Hagel was hammered over his reported detachment from Israel...
Read MoreA report on the post-Petraeus CIA and jihadist "refugees" in Turkey.
There was considerable pushback at the Central Intelligence Agency following the resignation of David Petraeus. Former military officers are generally disliked at CIA, but Petraeus made all the right moves by arriving at Langley without a staff and with a professed willingness to learn. Then he went ahead and pulled together a team that favored...
Read MoreIt is being reported that recently rusticated CIA Director David Petraeus annoyed his Agency subordinates through his requiring staff to hand him bottles of water at “precise intervals” when he was jogging and also demanding fresh sliced pineapple be made “available during business trips before bedtime.” As I recall when Ronald Reagan's Director of Central...
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