Tag: CIA

An Israeli Civil War?

In my research daily I some times come across reports that are not common in the MSM….some are not accurate while others are hidden gems….

This is a report supposedly from the CIA on the social fabric of Israel…

Israel is at risk of civil war or state collapse, a classified CIA assessment warns, as years of genocide in Gaza and war in Lebanon and Iran deepen political, economic, and social fractures within the country.

The August report, titled “Fracture From Within,” was compiled by experts in the CIA’s Red Cell, according to two U.S. sources who described the contents of the report to Drop Site News. The Red Cell, which is the unit responsible for providing “alternative analysis” within the agency, produced the assessment through a combination of open source information and U.S. intelligence. The assessment appears to refer only to Israel’s Jewish citizens and does not consider its Palestinian citizens, who make up approximately 20% of Israel’s population and who live under various forms of discrimination that Amnesty International and other human rights groups have labelled as part of a broader system of apartheid. The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

CIA experts pointed to a volatile mix of pressures converging ahead of Israel’s elections on October 27: economic crisis and soaring military spending; heavily armed veterans returning from prolonged combat, many carrying serious psychological trauma; growing fury over ultra-Orthodox men who are exempt from military service; escalating settler violence in the occupied West Bank; and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fighting to hold onto power and igniting a constitutional crisis.

The CIA’s “red teams” are tasked with developing analysis and ideas that challenge prevailing assumptions and expose groupthink or blind spots that can take hold within the intelligence apparatus. “The writers of this are Israel experts,” a source in the intelligence community noted, “this isn’t a fantastical what if—with the upcoming election and the fissures in Israel we should take seriously their conclusion that Israel is one spark away from real internal conflict.”

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/cia-report-israel-civil-war-collapse

My thought:   About damn time!

It is a fascinating report….most of us have been wondering how BiBi will be taken from office….this could be an indication of the pulse of the Israeli public.

Is it possible that Israel will collapse thanks to the action of BiBi and his gang of Thugs?

What are your feelings about this report?

NOTE:

I want to be honest with my readers….I have had no dealings with this website before and wanted to be sure that it was not some sort of conspiracy thing to get social media all a tither….and this is what I found….

…

the world desperately needs hard-hitting journalism to inform the public and keep the powerful in check, establishment and corporate media outlets are failing.

That’s why Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Nausicaa Renner started Drop Site News, a non-aligned, investigative news organization dedicated to exposing the crimes of the powerful—particularly in overt and secret conflicts where the U.S. government is playing a key role.

Drop Site News launched in July 2024 with the goal of being a high-energy, trusted source for influential investigative reports that the mainstream and corporate media won’t touch across the political spectrum. We publish major scoops on the news cycle — and we also deliver the biggest international stories you’ve never even read about.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/about

My research has shown me that it is a legit site that is non-aligned (so to speak) and for that reason I shall be visiting often.  Please check it out for yourself and make a decision.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Shameful Experimentation

Time for some history….(this is where you can tune out if so desired)….

Most of us old farts remember the horrific medical experimentation done by the likes of Mengele, Eichmann, Himmler, et al.,…these quacks used prisoners as guinea pigs….and they were condemned by the rest of the world as purveyors of genocide.

The sad part is the younger generation cannot seem to come up with one prison camp name…..

In 2025, 48% of Americans ages 18-29 could not name a single concentration or death camp, according to a survey by the nonprofit Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which works to secure compensation and restitution for Holocaust survivors.

Another 53% of surveyed Americans said that they had encountered Holocaust “denial or distortion while on social media.”

Given their ages, approximately 70% of living Holocaust survivors will likely die by 2035. As they do, more and more people will never hear firsthand experiences about the atrocities Nazis perpetuated during the genocide of European Jews.

My research shows that Holocaust education and awareness, though, doesn’t always follow a linear path.

How sad is that?   6 million dead and no one can be bothered to remember them.  But I guess you gotta be old to remember this shit.

The US and others were just as guilty of unethical experiments like Tuskegee Syphilis Trials, the UK’s Porton Down Chemical Trials, and others were also involved…..

Research involving human subjects is littered with a history of scandal that often shapes people’s views of the ethics of research. Often the earliest cited case is English physician Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, where he injected an eight-year-old child with the pus taken from a cowpox infection and then deliberately exposed her to an infected carrier of smallpox.

Although Jenner’s experiment was, fortunately, successful, the method of exposing a child to a deadly disease in this way would undoubtedly nowadays be seen as unacceptable. Perhaps the most notorious cases of unethical research were revealed during the Nuremberg trials concerning Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. This “research” included involuntary sterilisation, inducing hypothermia, and exposing subjects to diseases such as tuberculosis.

There are also examples of government-run research that took advantage of the vulnerability of the subjects to ensure their participation and which resulted in the subjects experiencing severe harms, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis trials or the UK-run Porton Down chemical experiments in which 11,000 military personnel were exposed to mustard and nerve gas between 1939 and 1989.

https://theconversation.com/human-experiments-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-39876

But one of the most horrendous experiments was done by the CIA, the MKULTRA….

MKUltra[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in altering human behavior.[1] The term MKUltra is a CIA cryptonym: “MK” is an arbitrary prefix standing for the Office of Technical Service and “Ultra” is an arbitrary word out of a dictionary used to name this project. The program has been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an example of the CIA’s abuse of power, with critics highlighting its disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.[2]

Project MKUltra began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects’ mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects’ consent. Additionally, other methods beyond chemical compounds were used, including electroshocks,[3] hypnosis,[4][5] sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.[6][7]

Project MKUltra was preceded by Project Artichoke.[8][9] It was organized through the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories.[10] The program engaged in illegal activities,[11][12][13] including the use of U.S. and Canadian citizens as unwitting test subjects.[11]: 74 [14][15][16] MKUltra’s scope was broad, with activities carried out under the guise of research at more than 80 institutions aside from the military, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.[17] The CIA operated using front organizations, although some top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA’s involvement.[11]

Project MKUltra was revealed to the public in 1975 by the Church Committee (named after Senator Frank Church) of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford‘s United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission). Investigative efforts were hampered by CIA director Richard Helms‘s order that all MKUltra files be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the small number of documents that survived Helms’s order.[18] In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings.[11][19] Some surviving information about MKUltra was declassified in 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra

Read this if you are not familiar with the tactics of the CIA and how they manipulated American citizens with horrific experiments.

Do not condemn anyone until you see what the CIA is capable of doing….

Korean prisoners of war in the 1950s were subjected to early MK-ULTRA experiments while in American custody, according to recently declassified CIA documents which confirm these experiments for the first time.

The only reporting that previously referenced Koreans being used as guinea pigs for these experiments was journalist John Marks’s landmark 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Using CIA documents, Marks traced the now-infamous MK-ULTRA project to its start, when it was known as Project Bluebird. In the book, Marks describes how, in October 1950, 25 unnamed North Korean POWs were chosen as the first test subjects to receive “advanced” interrogation techniques, with the overt goal of “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

CIA Ran MK-ULTRA Experiments on Prisoners of War in U.S. Custody, Declassified Docs Confirm

I wish I could say that this type of human abuse has been eliminated but I bet that it still goes on and under tight secrecy……use Iraq as an example.

Before you set about condemning the nazis just look around the US has been no better.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The CIA’s Drug Trade

It seems the CIA just canno0t keep its fingers out of the drug trade….now they are involved in the opium production…..

The US is deploying aggressive—and very public—methods these days in its war on international drugs. It’s a sharp contrast to a secret tactic used years ago in Afghanistan that the Washington Post is revealing for the first time. It seems the CIA secretly dropped modified seeds on poppy fields between 2004 and 2015, with the goal of making the resulting heroin less potent. The covert operation, run by the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center, was so secretive that many senior officials in the Pentagon and State Department were unaware it existed.

And did it work? The best answer seems to be, kind of. “There was a sense that it worked, but maybe over time, it worked less well,” one former US official familiar with the program tells the newspaper. It was also expensive to run, a big factor in why it ended—”the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” is how the official puts it. Still, he calls it “an example of creative, out-of-the-box thinking by the agency. … It was dealing with a problem in a non-kinetic, nonmilitary way.”

Throughout the broader US-led counter-narcotics campaign, American agencies disagreed on the best strategy, with proposals ranging from aerial herbicide spraying to buying up the Afghan crop for pharmaceutical use. The CIA’s secret seed operation took place amid these debates, but official assessments ultimately concluded that no US or allied effort led to lasting reductions in Afghan poppy cultivation or opium production. Read the full story, which notes that the seeds were not believed to have been modified genetically. Instead, they were selectively bred to be less heroin-friendly.

Is this one of their famous ‘cover stories’?

The agency’s history tells a different story…..they have not always been part of the War on Drugs…..they actually were involved in the distribution to help pay for their covert operations.

I am not convinced that they are not part of the opium trade.

How about you?  Does this give one confidence that the CIA is acting in a way that will help the war on drugs?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Oops We Are Doing It Again

The news is not so good surrounding the events unfolding in Venezuela….Donny has ordered the nuking of another boat….you know those small boats that are loaded to the stacks with drugs?

Our Lord High magistrate has also ordered the CIA into action in Venezuela…..(that sound all too familiar)….

The Trump administration has authorized the CIA to take covert action inside Venezuela, including lethal operations, The New York Times reported on Wednesday, as the administration’s push toward regime change heats up.

President Trump later confirmed that he authorized the covert action and said the US was considering attacks on Venezuelan territory. “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he said.

US officials told the Times that the authority allows the CIA to take action against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro or his government, either unilaterally or in conjunction with the US military. The report said it is not known whether the CIA is currently planning operations inside Venezuela or if the authority will be used for future plans.

The US military has been drawing up plans to launch strikes on Venezuelan territory and potentially capture strategic ports and airfields, actions that would almost certainly lead to a full-blown war. The US military campaign in the region has so far involved a buildup of warships and about 10,000 US troops in the Caribbean and strikes on five boats that the US has claimed, without providing evidence, were running drugs.

While combating drug trafficking is the pretext for the US military operations, US officials have made clear that the real goal is regime change. Officials are hoping that Maduro steps down voluntarily or that someone in his inner circle turns on him due to the $50 million US bounty on his head, and the deluge of leaks and reports about potential US military action is likely part of the pressure.

(antiwar.com)

This did not work so well in Southeast Asia….but what the Hell let’s give it a go again.

As an added incentive to instill fear in Venezuela…..the butt in control has ordered B-52 flights…..

In less than a week, President Donald Trump has threatened to attack Venezuela using ground troops, confirmed ongoing covert operations inside the country, and ordered bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons to fly in circles off its coast in what appears to be an unprecedented show of force intended to pressure the Venezuelan president to step down.

On Thursday, the U.S. launched what appears to be the sixth lethal boat strike against an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea this year. A U.S. official, who confirmed the account first reported by Reuters, said there were survivors among the crew.

The White House has defended the extraordinary military operations as necessary to stem the tide of illicit drugs coming to the U.S.

“President Trump believes that Nicholas Maduro is an illegitimate president, leading an illegitimate regime that has been trapped in drugs,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/52s-fly-off-coast-venezuela-show-force-trump/story

Ah bullies and their toys.

After Donny’s and Hogsbreath’s little strut upon the stage in front of our generals one has shown so spine and packed it in….

The head of the US Southern Command, whose job includes overseeing military operations in the area where the Pentagon has been carrying out fatal strikes on what the Trump administration describes as drug-running boats, announced Thursday that he’s leaving the position. Adm. Alvin Holsey has been in the job, which usually is a three-year assignment, less than a year. Neither he nor Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mentioned any disagreements, but the New York Times reports that Holsey had raised concerns about the attacks near Venezuela and the US military buildup in the region.

In a statement on social media, Hegseth thanked Holsey “for his more than 37 years of distinguished service to our nation as he plans to retire.” The admiral posted on the command’s Facebook page it’s “been an honor to serve our nation, the American people and support and defend our Constitution for over 37 years,” per the AP. His retirement takes effect on Dec. 12, per the Hill. Southcom oversees all US military operations in Central America and South America. A Pentagon official said Thursday that about a force of about 10,000 is supporting the counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean.

Legal experts and members of Congress have questioned the administration’s authority to use lethal force against suspected drug traffickers without congressional authorization. The four-star admiral’s departure is another in a series of high-profile firings or resignations of senior military leaders, many of them women or people of color, during Hegseth’s tenure. Congressional Democrats were critical after the latest announcement. “Prior to Trump, I can’t think of a combatant commander who left his or her post early, ever,” said Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Bully for him for showing some guts and cajones.

This whole Venezuela debacle is going to come back and bite us in the ass.

And all the we as citizens can do is sit and watch this preening peacock of a leader strut around and thump his chest like some oversexed primate.

Is this our fate for now?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Bay Of Pigs

I had intended to post this on the anniversary of the attack….but life got in the way as it has often done and it got pushed back and almost forgotten.

As this month comes to a close I would like to reach back in history and write about the US led invasion of Cuba in April of 1961….the invasion force was rather small in the beginning because the US had ruled out using US  troops….A full-scale invasion would have incurred huge US casualties: 40-50,000 according to Department of Defense estimates. There was also public opinion to be considered. Since the introduction of the ‘good neighbor’ policy, US armed intervention was of potential political harm and had been formally ruled out under such commitments as the Charter of the Organization of American States. The US had made political capital during 1956 out of Soviet armed intervention in Hungary and the British-French-Israeli action in Suez. Any involvement in Cuba must be subject to ‘plausible deniability’, with the White House especially untainted by any knowledge or involvement.

Instead the powers decided to use a small force of 1400 men….

The first part of the plan was to destroy Castro’s tiny air force, making it impossible for his military to resist the invaders. On April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in a squadron of American B-26 bombers, painted to look like stolen Cuban planes, and conducted a strike against Cuban airfields.

However, it turned out that Castro and his advisers knew about the raid and had moved his planes out of harm’s way. Frustrated, Kennedy began to suspect that the plan the CIA had promised would be “both clandestine and successful” might in fact be “too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful.”

Such requirements left Pluto in operational limbo. In the first place, air cover was deemed essential for the invading force to secure the beach-heads; yet control of the skies could not be achieved by the rebels alone. To solve this problem the original landing-site was changed from a point close to the Escambray mountains (good guerrilla territory) to the Bay of Pigs, more difficult terrain for an amphibious operation. Three main groups of rebels existed: insurgents in Cuba killing and sabotaging, but ignored by the CIA; the invasion forces being trained by the CIA mainly in Guatemala, but also within the United States; and the anti-Castro leadership, which divided into two antagonistic groups: the original Batistianos and those who began as Fidelistas, but lost faith in the revolution. The most influential of this disparate trio was the divided leadership, but precisely because of these divisions, their susceptibility to leaks and the unsavory backgrounds of many, such men were cut out of CIA decision-making.

read on….

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/bay-pigs-invasion

This would be invasion lasted about 24 hours before it broke down and was Kennedy’s first international failure.

For more reading this is an excellent account….

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56808455

And the US has been interfering in international situations ever since.

You would think we could learn from that mistake….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Closing Thought–12Apr22

Did the CIA experiment on orphans?

A new report indicates that it is a possibility that they did……some say to perfect torture techniques….

An extraordinary Danish Radio report exposed how scores of children in Denmark, many of them orphans, were subject to CIA-funded experiments for at least two decades.

The purpose of these activities remains unknown, as authorities continue to actively suppress the truth of what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The startling exposé is based on the work of documentarian Per Wennick, who was one of 311 participants in the mysterious trials. The children never learned the objective of the tortuous assessments to which they were exposed, even after they ended.

Such trials are in conflict with the Nuremberg Code, which enforces the vital requirement of obtaining consent from human subjects in all medical research.

According to Wennick, when he was 11 years old, he was asked at an authoritarian orphanage in Copenhagen if he wanted to try something “fun” at the local municipal hospital. It was vaguely described as an examination of how children “feel”. Believing it would be a welcome diversion, he acquiesced and even received a small sum for his participation.

Wennick went on to undergo a series of regular tests, which included being forced to listen to recordings on headphones of loud noises, screams, and statements intended to scare him. Staff strapped him to a chair while electrodes were placed on his arms, legs, and chest, measuring his heart rate, temperature, and sweat levels.

These experiments continued until 1973, when Wennick was 24-years-old. However, a decade later, while in a hospital due to a skin complaint, he learned his visit—in fact, his every contact with healthcare services— was reported to the Danish Psychological Institute for reasons never made clear to him.

Fast forward to 2018. While at a film festival in the United States, he saw the documentary “Three Identical Strangers,” which tells the story of triplets deliberately separated at birth and offered up for adoption to families of differing socioeconomic backgrounds, in a covert and highly unethical scientific “nature versus nurture” study.

https://thedissenter.org/cia-funded-experiments-on-danish-orphans-for-decades/

Would that surprise you if true?

Keep in mind the experiments that the CIA conducted using LSD and the tests on blacks…..and oh so much more.

This is disgraceful but we will just turn as blind eye and claim “national security” (the refuge of the corrupt)…..

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Where’s The Outrage?

Let’s step back from Ukraine for awhile and take up another issue that has lost in the media……

Remember when it was revealed that the NSA was collected mega data on US citizens?

There was endless rants and posts about the affront to our rights to privacy…..and yet the newest report of a massive data collection of US citizens is gone by with few writing of the outrage…..

The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.

According to a declassified report released yesterday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA’s surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people’s privacy. To start, the CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence community instituted after revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013. The newly declassified CIA data collection program is carried out in conjunction with Executive Order 12333 and is therefore subject to even less oversight than the woefully under-supervised NSA surveillance programs subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The whos, whats, whys, and hows of this semi-disclosed CIA program are still unknown, and the public deserves the right to know exactly what damage has been done. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich are already pressing for the release of even more information. In a partially-redacted letter sent to the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director on April 13, 2021, the senators have called for the public release of the full report about the CIA’s surveillance, which remains classified. The senators’ letter also demands answers about how the agency collects the data, what data is being collected, and the rules governing its storage and retention.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/we-need-answers-about-cias-mass-surveillance

Once again the American people show a disturbing indifference to the world around them….as long as their little pathetic sphere is blue skies and unicorns then they could care damn less at the loss of rights.

Collectively the American people could be filed away in the ‘Can’t Fix Stupid’ collection.

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

CIA And Drugs

I do not know if Americans know of the CIA involvement in the drug trade….if they truly cared then why is this still going on.

This post was inspired by an article I read about the CIA involvement in the drug trade in Afghanistan (you remember than country right?)……..

This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

“From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s,” Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of “Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press,” alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/06/25/geopolitics-profit-and-poppies-how-the-cia-turned-afghanistan-into-a-failed-narco-state/

After reading this article….my first response is….DUH!

Of course the CIA is involved in drug trafficking….and has been since the 1970s……

Seriously!

But here is a look at the trade and CIA participation….

In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s “contra” army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The Mercury News‘ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of “hits” a day.

While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine. The CIA’s drug network, wrote Webb, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world.” Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.

https://ips-dc.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/

Should not the government cease this involvement…..and what happened to this expensive War on Drugs?

When will the people realize just how dick deep the CIA is in the drug trade?

Here is an unique idea…..stop bitching about drugs and get off your ass and put a stop to the US involvement…..

Just a thought

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Watch This Blog!

Biden’s CIA

I would like to leave behind now the moronic action of 06 January and return to the scrutiny of Biden’s Cabinet picks.

He has made his choice to lead the spy agency, the CIA…..

President-elect Joe Biden announced Monday he has chosen veteran diplomat William Burns to be his CIA director. A former ambassador to Russia and Jordan, Burns, 64, had a 33-year career at the State Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents. He rose through the ranks of the diplomatic corps to become deputy secretary of state before retiring in 2014 to run the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. Amid tumult in the State Department after President Trump took office in 2017, Burns held his tongue until last year when he began writing highly critical pieces of the Trump administration’s policies in Foreign Affairs and other publications, reports the AP. Burns has been a staunch advocate of rebuilding and restructuring the foreign service, positions Biden has aligned himself with.

In an opinion piece on the pick for the Washington Post, David Ignatius frames the choice: “What’s likely to have appealed to Biden … is [Burns’] reputation as a nonpartisan figure who served in hard places—Russia and the Middle East—and over the years developed close relationships with the countries that are the CIA’s key liaison partners. His biggest challenge will be dealing with a quirky, cliquey CIA culture that is often resistant to change. CIA operatives have been masterful over the years at bending new directors to their priorities.” And from Biden himself: “Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure. The American people will sleep soundly with him as our next CIA director.”

There you have the fluff piece on the new nominee….a person I am not convinced is the best choice to run the agency…..because he will eventually be consumed by the culture.

In nominating former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to be CIA director, President-elect Joe Biden has chosen a highly experienced diplomat to lead a hydra-headed agency.

But, if past is precedent, the highest hydras who head calcified fiefdoms at CIA can be expected to resist any real control from the top. They are more likely to try to co-opt top management or make end runs around it. This is not new.

Most senior CIA operations officers, in particular, have never been comfortable with meaningful supervision, lest it lead to reining them in or impinging on their ample budgets. With secrecy always in play (including strict application of the “need-to-know” principle), Burns will need a good deputy – preferably a strong outsider – to avoid being blind-sided – or diddled.

Burns lacks proven experience managing organizations as large and variegated as the agency, so the jury is out on whether he will be able to do it.

Can William Burns Change the CIA?

All in all….it will be “same as it ever was”…..

Watch This Blog!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Looking For a New Job?

In these dark days of the pandemic there are many looking for new employment….well there is a new website to help those find and apply for gainful employment….

Wanted: Spies from all backgrounds and walks of life.

Striving to further diversify its ranks, the CIA launched a new website Monday to find top-tier candidates who will bring a broader range of life experiences to the nation’s premier intelligence agency

The days of all American spies being white male graduates from Ivy League schools are long gone. The CIA director is a woman and women head all five of the agency’s branches, including the directorates of science and technology, operations and digital innovation.

But while the CIA has been diversifying for years, intelligence agencies still lag the federal workforce in minority representation. With thousands of job applicants annually, the CIA wants to do more to ensure its workforce reflects national demographics.

The revamped website has links for browsing CIA jobs complete with starting salaries and requirements, sections on working at the agency, and a streamlined application process.

“We’ve come a long way since I applied by simply mailing a letter marked ‘CIA, Washington, D.C.,’” said CIA Director Gina Haspel, who joined the agency in 1985. She said in a statement that she hopes the new website piques the interest of talented Americans and gives them a sense of the “dynamic environment that awaits them here.”

Haspel has made recruitment a priority since she became the first female director in May 2018. Since then, the CIA has started advertising on streaming services, launched an Instagram account and an online “onion site,” a feature that makes both the information provider and the person accessing information more difficult to trace.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/01/05/cias-new-recruitment-website-aims-diversify-spy-agency.html

If you always wanted to be a James Bond then here is your chance to become a member of an age old profession.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”