Just as the U.S. armed forces are stepping out of Afghanistian, the CIA is stepping in. CIA director Gina Haspel visited the Central Asian country where the U.S. forces have been fighting for 18 years. Her mission: maintaining or even expanding the U.S. intelligence presence there. Haspel met with Afghan government officials including President Ashraf...
Category: Gina Haspel
Post
Post
Behind Bolsonaro’s Meeting With CIA Director Gina Haspel
Not every head of state who visits Washington gets to meet with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, did. From a wire report: Bolsonaro also met with CIA director Gina Haspel at the spy agency’s headquarters in Virginia to convey the importance he places on “fighting...
Post
Coats and Haspel: Trump Is ‘Engaged and Knowledgable’
You know those days at the office when you have to coddle your boss’s ego just because you’d like to keep your job? Gina Haspel and Dan Coats had that kind of day. They know the boss is cranky. Last month Trump rubbished Haspel’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee as “lame.” He griped about...
Post
Why Trump Is Going After Dan Coats, Not Gina Haspel
Dan Coats, Director of the Office National Intelligence, is a low-key man in hot water, says The Washington Post. Coats got his start in Washington politics as a congressman from Indiana. In the 1980s he was sometimes confused with Dan Quayle, his fellow Hoosier in the House. Quayle was better looking than Coats but a much...
Post
Trump’s Feud With the Intelligence Community Deepens
The dis-integration of the Trump administration continues. The long-integrated intelligence operations of the White House and the national security agencies are now out of sync. The normal governmental process by which the national security agencies present timely intelligence and policy options to a president who chooses among them is not functioning. “The system is broken,”...