As more details leak about why the CIA believes Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of a critic, the agency finds itself increasingly isolated within the Trump administration. The White House talking point, repeated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to CNN over the weekend, is that “there’s no direct evidence linking [the crown prince]...
Author: Jefferson Morley (Jefferson Morley)
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RIP George H.W. Bush: The Prudent Statesman as Ruthless Spy
Among his many accomplishments in life, the late George H. W. Bush was a secret intelligence professional. The statesman, who will lie in state in the Capitol through Wednesday, was a covert operator par excellence. As the first and only CIA director to ever occupy the White House, Bush could be called America’s most successful...
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Influence Operation: ACLU Sues for Records of the CIA’s Haspel Nomination Campaign
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the CIA for records pertaining to the Agency’s campaign to support Gina Haspel’s nomination as director of the agency. The Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed Thursday, seeks records related to “Haspel’s potential conflict of interest in serving as the classification authority over information about her own role in...
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Draft Indictment Points to Julian Assange as an Agent of Collusion
Let’s reserve judgment on the Guardian’s intriguing but thinly sourced story that Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The role of the Ecuadorian intelligence service and spy agencies in the story is key but unclear. But all that is rather beside the point. The case that Assange was an agent in...
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Hear No Evil: White House Barred Haspel from Senate Briefing on Saudi Arabia
President Trump didn’t want CIA director Gina Haspel to brief U.S. Senators on the agency’s assessment of the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. “We were told during this briefing that it was the direction of the White House that she not attend,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters after the briefing. “I cannot recall a briefing...