The Khashoggi affair has rattled the Washington-Riyadh-Tel Aviv axis and swept the story of the two Russian GRU agents accused of poisoning a Putin critic off the home pages of the planet.
The global news cycle, while capacious can only handle one story about a pro-Trump autocrat seeking to assassinate a critic in a foreign country in any 24 hours period. We’ll get back you Mr. Skripal!
DSD doubts the unfortunate departure of Kashoggi’s will disrupt Trump’s campaign to confront Iran but its aftershocks are intriguing. For example, somebody very high up in national security apparatus is showing super-classified information to Washington Post reporters.
Philip Rucker , Carol D. Leonnig and Anne Gearan reported Sunday night that
conversations intercepted by U.S. intelligence, officials in Saudi Arabia earlier discussed plans to lure Khashoggi back to his native Saudi Arabia and detain him.
Those would be conversations picked up by NSA intercepts or by CIA penetration of the consulate in Istanbul. Either way, someone was talking about super secret stuff that you could jail for sharing with unauthorized persons. So why is this leak tolerated?
Perhaps because, as the same story reported, Jared Kushner “was not briefed about the plot before Khashoggi’s disappearance, according to two people familiar with his knowledge of the matter.”
One of those two people, you can be sure, was Kushner or someone very close to him. The president’s son in law wants the liberal Post to be very sure he was not briefed ahead of time about the Saudi plan to “rendition” Khashoggi.
Which makes you wonder: Maybe somebody else was briefed.
