Parts 1-3 made the case of what political hacks the Intelligence Community (IC) signatories of the Hunter Biden Laptop Russia Information Operations hoax allegation letter were and the concomitant potential they had to taint the IC gene pool over their decades of service. Part 4 expands on that thought with specific examples and begins to answer the question of what this portends for the future.
Consider that an administration gets to make all manner of nominations and appointments-some ~1400 senior civilian positions in the Pentagon, the leadership of DHS-which has over 240K employees, sometimes a near complete turnover of nominative positions in the DOJ-which has some 115K lawyers, while the heads of the major agencies, like FBI and NSA have 35K people and the IC-all 17 agencies-have well over several hundred thousand people in aggregate and probably 5 times as many contractors.
The point of this detail is leaders like these nifty 50 hire and influence folks like Farkas, who likely still does not think she did anything wrong in the whole sordid affair where she had to be forced to admit under oath that she lied on national television. Her leadership and supervisors probably influenced her views regarding DJT, and much like many who bought the Russia Hoax hook, line, and sinker-but did something about it-nobody has been held accountable in this whole rotten stinking affair.
DJT is a business savvy, smart, energetic man who is not allergic to burning the midnight oil working. If I had two minutes of his time, I would have talked to him about cleaning house in the government down through the agencies, particularly in the IC and the Pentagon-including the military. I believe he was flummoxed and almost in denial at the notion and idea that he could not count on military leaders to be Patriotic and support his America-first agenda.
We saw the tangible results of the influence of leaders on their subordinates like our misguided 50 in the constant and inappropriate leaks out of the Trump WH-particularly early-on when a new administration was getting its legs under it. Anything stand out about this happy group picture??? Just a bunch of folks looking to help with a smooth transition…Somewhat reminiscent of these popular survival shows where there is no honesty among thieves…
When President Biden and his cabinet get updates and insights via the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) and the IC products that comprise those updates-the judgement of the IC analysts are on display-but moreso of those leaders at the top of the proverbial pyramid-who often decide the subjects, the topics, the narrative themes that are emphasized. This is not just a POTUS focused effort, as there were at one point some ~250 senior administration executive personnel who consumed intel reporting both in the PDB proper and what we call in the business “outside the book”-intel of interest that doesn’t quite make the cut for POTUS and executive committee or council viewing. But may be of interest to a particular cabinet member on energy, crop yields-myriad topics-as well as special topics and products prepared for trips, travel and engagements with foreign countries/leaders.
The major criterion that used to govern the selection of individuals who filled these positions was judgement. You can go a long way on intellect, political savvy, connections, political contributions, sycophantism, but in the final analysis when you are the person in the chair next to POTUS and the process is underway to make a monumental decision-like a go/no-go on the Osama Bin Laden raid-that is not the time to have somebody sitting there who has questionable judgement.
This letter reeks and screams from the mountaintop of poor judgement. This “crew” who signed their reputation away agreeing to this letter, willingly acknowledges they had no facts or evidence-or experience-or first-hand knowledge-but it didn’t stop them from creating and touting a conspiracy theory with not a shred-no scintilla-totally unverified-based on nothing-probability 1% or less likely, pure pull it out of your butt theory, with no corroboration whatsoever-a totally fact-free opinion-based self-soilage effort (I’m tempted to add more.)
What in the final analysis was the benefit of all that experience accrued by our failed fifty over the Farkas situation? The total 180 degree opposite professional conduct and judgement we have a right to demand and expect from our intel folks and what we should expect from these former IC leaders. The joke about opinions during a briefing on the civilian side-particularly the PDB-is “if I want it, I will ask for it-and nothing in here better be based on something subjective or opinion unless it is caveated as such.” In the military it was much clearer cut-we were fond of saying “if I want or need your opinion or thoughts, I will squeeze them out of your head.”
These briefings and the people who provide them are responsible to deliver the best judgments of the community, including alternatives or contrarian views. This letter isn’t just offered by way of a contrarian view or some noble alternative viewpoint to consider: it reads like the who’s who of Orange Man Bad-fever IC Twitcher and Fakebook ranters of the last 6 years screaming “I may be a political hack, but Orange Man is Bad.”
Politicized intel is dangerous, poisonous and paralyzing. There is no precedent for offering opinions while acknowledging you have nothing to base it on-no information supporting it-nothing! We saw this with the rush to judgement January 2017 Russian Election Interference Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and again with the 2020 Election Report ICA where the release was delayed because-la de da-CIA China analysts withheld or watered-down judgements because they did not want to provide leverage or political fodder to the President of the United States (yea, that happened.)
There wasn’t an outcry to out these analysts-suspend their clearances-slap them around a bit to find out what the hell they were thinking and who they think they work for-and slap them around some more just because it was a good time for it! Somehow these analysts felt empowered to withhold that information from the President-as opposing Trump in any way by this point was “empowering” and must have been supported by supervisors and leadership.
Maybe some are sitting there thinking there was a chance the supervisors did not know what the analysts had information-wise and what should and should not go in such a report? When was the last time you walked out to your squad or platoon or company-or the family car-and drove away not noticing somebody was missing-like a Home Alone scenario: very unlikely. When an ICA is under community coordination-a real ICA, not a sub-set of the community in a rush to judgement, 30-day sprint focused on singing for supper with the politicians-particularly one destined to become a political hot potato-the line supervisors earn their pay polishing the turd-whatever the message might be.
Remember when analysts similarly did this to Obama because they believed he was pursuing policies favorable to Iran at the cost of Israel-so they stopped reporting on Israel readiness and aircraft ramp status? How does that sound-of course, instead of being political or just stupid, that would have been racist! But is this the way it works now going forward? Does congress not get reports on the Taliban anymore because they will make Biden and Austin-the whole administration-look bad? The administration seems particularly good at and have already adopted this technique. Look at the video from DHS testimony-like the poster child for putting the “use” in “less.”
Where does that end up?
This trend of politically charged and motivated CIA products is not a recent issue. The 1995 CIA ICA on Ballistic Missile Threats to the US was what we call a real “turd buster.” Cranky democrats (are there other kinds) smarting from 8 years of Reagan’s National Missile Defense-so-called Star Wars program-were itching to get their meat hooks into the residue of those dollars in the wake of the fall of the wall, and the topic du jour of a peace dividend from the fall of the Soviet Union. This was code for military budget cuts repurposed for social giveaways to secure votes. The ICA delivered in every way imaginable, reducing the potential threat to just five already nuclear capable countries-but not considering a number of issues germane to proliferation, such as a country incentivized to procure rather than develop an organic capability.
Representative Curt Weldon (Pa) was incensed over what he termed the “political nature of the key judgements” that he believed failed to consider a number of reasonable and plausible alternatives that would have been unfavorable to the conclusions, thereby undermining democrat objectives. This resulted in the “Gates Panel” headed by former CIA Director Robert Gates, who found no politicization of judgement, but some relatively minor procedural issues. This did not satisfy Weldon and subsequently led to the Rumsfeld Commission that spent a lot more time and came to different judgements. A story for a different day, but this is where Dr. Stephen Camborne first surfaced to national attention as one of the commission leaders that would ultimately lead to him joining the government and eventually becoming the first USDI.
The bottom line in all this is politically motivated leaders can be problematic in government-yet we are arguably based on just such a system of rewards and political cronies where donors are often rewarded with key positions in new administrations: it is somewhat of a swampy tradition that has been going on forever. Do you believe that HRC associates contributed to FBI Andrew McCabe’s wife for her Virginia political race because she was such a good candidate or out of the goodness of their hearts? Otay!
There was somewhat of a delay-that almost backfired-in the securing of Weiner’s laptop that was reported by the Southern District of New York 28 September 2016 to the FBI because it contained over 100K HRC emails. Now it is a long way from NYC to Virginia, but it took the FBI until 28 October 2016 or so to secure the laptop and for Comey to announce it to congress-which happened shortly after McCabe recused himself. The delays in securing the laptop may or may not have been McCabe’s doing, but the slow walk of the issue resulted in it bumping right up into the election.
For anybody who hasn’t experienced this up close and personal-specifically the bureaucratic sycophant as leader, in position because of some contribution, relationship, or knowing somebody (who knows somebody,) I was the analytic lead for a cross-agency group working assessments that had been asked to brief one of the new DASDs or DUSDs under Rumsfeld after 9-11. The US government-Central Command and the Pentagon-was mounting what would grow into a huge effort to eliminate the already burgeoning surge of improvised explosive devices (IED) in Iraq, also becoming a disturbing trend in Afghanistan. There was an informal organization already working that would become the Counter-IED Task Force, and the Pentagon was running what would later be known as the Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Task Force led by a LTG (3-star flag officer like LTG William G “Gerry” Boykin, LTG Raymond Palumbo, etc.) We had barely gotten through the briefing introduction when the DASD/DUSD (she) suddenly went into lecture mode that this was “a DoD project that had nothing to do with the information and intelligence objectives and everything to do with getting information to POTUS before the CIA”…I can tell you that was not an objective we had considered…
The interesting part of that project was it involved something called the “Sonoma Sensor,” a megapixel optical camera that had been made available to government by former Lawrence Livermore associates of Dr. Cambone-what a coincidence… There were options to install two and potentially up to four optical framing camera systems for vertical sensing-which means you obviously must fly straight over the target-but the system collected something like eighteen GBs per mission and had to be post-processed using significant processing power to stitch the two or four systems together in space and time. A team we had working it once spent nearly 10 hours interpreting a small amount of images (for like a 7 minute segment of coverage (this article covers a topic I am very familiar with-the Army OV-1D MOHAWK-you have to read a bit to get to the parts about the “MOHAWK Stare” concept that employed the Sonoma Sensor-two quick asides-one is this story fails to provide the important context that the reason the Army moth balled the MOHAWK was the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System-JSTARS-was undergoing operational testing at Fort Huachuca in 1990 or so-interest was somewhat lukewarm for years in the Pentagon (USAF) because the Moving Target Indicator (MTI) output produced somewhat limited information-not intelligence-and much like the A-10 Warthog, the AC-130 gunships, the Airborne Command, Control and Communications (ABCCC) among other platforms-these were Army focused missions of the “non-sexy” program variety that the USAF has had on their “programs to kill” list and actively tried to for decades-you will almost never see a USAF pilot doing the “whirly hands-talking thingie, animated banter” in the club and see one of these flight patches on their uniforms. In somewhat of a last ditch effort to market and sell the platform, JSTARS was mobilized for a demonstration stint in Europe prior to deploying for the Gulf War. Based on proven military-armor formation-target cueing-(the Iraq Highway of Death,) JSTARS officially entered the USAF inventory and the Army stood down its MOHAWK fleet shortly thereafter. But-much like some of the variants of the C-47-particularly the reconnaissance variant RB-47 that NASA has loaned for a variety of service and NRO applications over the years–the Army had programmed to refurbish the engines on the fleet of what was now the OV-1F model, and the Army is nothing if not dogmatic on program execution, so these birds were retired with an average of less than ~100 hours on very capable airframes-the MOHAWK is “charitably” described as a “bug-eyed, small stature but strong framed girl”-I never realized how small an aircraft it is until we had some A-10s RON-they dwarfed the Hawks. And the second item is (I didn’t forget) the Army learned another valuable lesson on why we have a saying of “DTTFAF” (“Don’t Trust the Flipping Air Force,”) as JSTARS entered the inventory as a “Battle Management, Command, Control and Communications (BMC3), vice an Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance asset. So it was not necessarily available-for instance-to take over the Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance Mission the MOHAWK performed in Korea-which typically called for some ~40 missions a month. Later-when the Airborne Warning and Control System-AWACS-was removed from the Iraq area of responsibility since Obama declared endex, JSTARS picked up the slack providing JTIDS network extension (timing control & networking-TCN) flying orbits-tracks-optimized for BMC3 and not ISR-we soon lost momentum on our forensic intelligence and so-called Activity Based Intelligence efforts-that consume these data sets to work patterns of analysis- and started to see pipeline disruptions, more IED problems, Syrian cross border activity problems, etc.: I made a long story long here, but the MOHAWK Stare portion of the project we later killed off-it was not a good use of tens of millions of dollars-there was no viable broadcast or terrestrial way to exfiltrate the surveillance in support of timely analysis-and there were no dedicated analysts just waiting around for such a large amount of data like Lucy working chocolates on the conveyer belt…)
Back to my real story-this is the type of influence these type leaders have and how and where this type of confused leadership leads, and this is why we should be concerned about how many tens of thousands of Farkas’ these IC leaders spawned over the years like so many Manchurian Candidates or Stepford clones.
Precedents are called-well-precedents for a reason. You can deride, dismiss and pshaw all you want about this being overblown, cause, really, how conspiratorial does this sound? But explain Farkas and these China analysts some other way-at that point it was the hatred motivation against the BAD Orange Man, but what about tomorrow? What happens when the next enemy of the globalist, leftist, deep state swamp club wins the presidency?
Heaven forbid a Ted Cruz or Devin Nunes should neck out of the pack and assume the office. They may be more politically savvy and wise to the black arts of the swamp, but even Trump-who was none of those-but had been around the block, dealt with the mob, construction unions-NYC, New Jersey Nevada government and foreign government leadership for years-but he vastly underestimated the depth, cunning and lack of moral and ethical compass wielded by the swamp-even the military folks he thought he could intuitively trust in an America first agenda.
This was not a new trend-particularly from the CIA-as we will see in a minute-nor for the FBI reference setting up LTG (USA, Ret) Michael Flynn.
18 March 2022
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