Tag: John Brennan

Ted Belman of Israpundit posted a series of articles he stipulates was sent to him by “MIL-OPS INTELLIGENCE”. It seemed to me at least one theme of the combined articles was that America’s Intelligence Community shares an affinity with the American Left. The first article I found particularly disturbing was about former CIA Director John Brennan (a one-time CPUSA voter [perhaps at least a closet member] and rumored convert to Islam). That article shows Brennan to be an imbecile or an egregious traitor. Two extremes I do realize – you decide.

 

JRH 3/6/19

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A peek inside Military Intelligence Ops.

 

Posted by Ted Belman

March 5, 2019

Israpundit

 

This is a collection of articles which were, today supplied to me by MIL-OPS INTELLIGENCE who follow Israpundit daily. I am not sure how to describe them but they consists of senior military Intelligence specialists who continue to follow events in the Middle East. They are regular readers of israpundit Daily Digest and often circulate my posts.

 

All of the materials, below are unclassified.

 

These articles are:

1) examples of some of the robust exchanges that go on within the US intelligence community;

2) the personal opinions of the authors;

3) are distributed  for discussion.

4) None of the articles represent the official view of  any agency of the United States government.

 

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MIL-OPS INTELLIGENCE Friday, March 1, 2019

 

PENETRATIONS OF US INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES BY HOSTILE SPY SERVICES DURING  JOHN BRENNAN’S CIA DIRECTORSHIP CRIPPLE US OPERATIONS WITHIN CHINA, IRAN, RUSSIA LEBANON During John Brennan’s directorship of the CIA, many brave foreign nationals who risk their lives inside extremely brutal regimes to provide the United States with essential information have been detected, imprisoned,  tortured and executed. Public examples:

 

1.     The loss of all recruited agents in China  [Between 20 and 30 of  the US   recruited agents in China were killed or imprisoned.] Media sources blamed the loss on a former CIA officer, Jerry Chung Shin Lee, who was arrested in January 2018 and is suspected of passing along their names to China

 

2.     In  May 2011 , according to Iranian state media,  30 people were arrested as CIA spies and 42 others were suspected of involvement with U.S. intelligence. Insiders attribute this failure to information that  was  provided to Iran by Monica Witt, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer (and later an intelligence contractor) who defected to Iran 1n 2013 [where she is immune from any US criminal prosecution.]

 

Ms. Witt worked at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations from 2003-08 and then as a contractor, running an ultra secret Special Access Program, or SAP, until August 2010. The program gave her access to details about counterintelligence operations, true names of recruited agents, and identities of U.S. intelligence operatives in charge of recruiting foreign agents. Ms. Witt left the contractor in August 2010 for unspecified reasons.

 

Witt  provided Iran  with the details of a secret communications system American handlers use to talk to their recruited agents. Other texts reveal she “told all” to an Iranian ambassador in Central Asia. As she boarded the plane, she texted her handler: “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home.” The FBI’s assistant director for national security, stated that Witt became an “ideological” defector after converting to Islam. Her actions, he added, inflicted “serious damage to national security.”

 

The FBI fumbled the case in 2012 by warning Ms. Witt she might be targeted for recruitment by Iranian intelligence. A trained counterspy, she knew that the tip-off meant she was under investigation and surveillance. It likely set in motion her flight to Iran a year later.

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Wednesday, February 13, 2019

 

SHOULD WASHINGTON HEED INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENTS ABOUT NORTH KOREA?

by Peter Huessy   February 11, 2019

 

Pictured: U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un shake hands at their first summit in Singapore, on June 12, 2018. (Image source: White House/Wikimedia Commons)

 

United States intelligence chiefs told Congress on January 29 that Pyongyang is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons in any deal with Washington. This assessment was made a month ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s February 27-28 second summit — to be held in Vietnam — with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the purpose of which is to make strides in achieving the very denuclearization that FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats consider improbable.

 

One would have thought that if these intelligence chiefs disagreed with Trump’s efforts to reach a deal with North Korea, they would have presented an alternative. They might have explained what a deal with Pyongyang is liable to do to America’s relations with Japan and South Korea. They might have provided a future scenario for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which North Korea signed in 1968, then violated and withdrew from in 2003.

 

Trump might, however, actually be acting sensibly. During a speech on January 31 at Stanford University, the U.S. special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, said that when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Kim in Pyongyang in October 2018, Kim committed for the first time to dismantling and destroying his plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities.

 

Although the media has been highlighting the disagreement between Trump and the U.S. intelligence community as though it is a huge scandal, such disputes have occurred in the past.

 

The most notable example was President Gerald Ford’s Team B project, launched in May 1976, to challenge the conventional intelligence community assessments of the Soviet threat. George H.W. Bush, who was director of the CIA at the time, had approved the project, which enlisted a group of foreign policy and security professionals who strongly disagreed with the policy of détente. Team B was convinced that the Soviet Union was spending 40% of its GDP on defense, as opposed to the 5% projected by the U.S. intelligence community.

 

After Team B released its report, the CIA conceded that Soviet defense spending was probably higher than it had thought, but nevertheless pushed for détente, a policy Ford supported, as well as for peaceful coexistence between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

 

Ronald Reagan’s 1976 Republican Party primary campaign against Ford focused on this very issue, with Reagan taking a much harsher view of the Soviet Union and the battle against communism. As Reagan predicted, détente led not to peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, but to Soviet expansion. Still, Reagan lost the Republican primary to Ford, and Ford lost the presidential race to Jimmy Carter.

 

Upon assuming the presidency in 1980, Reagan reversed most of the policies of the previous decades, and went against the consensus of a majority of the U.S. intelligence community.

 

Reagan turned out, of course, to be right, while the conventional wisdom of economists and intellectuals, such as John Kenneth Galbraith — who considered communism to be superior to capitalism because it supposedly made better use of “manpower” — was revealed to be spectacularly wrong.

 

Another key fight between the administration in Washington and its intelligence community took place at the outset of Reagan’s presidency, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the Soviet Union of “training, funding and equipping” international terrorists. Reagan backed up Haig on this assessment — much to the chagrin of the intelligence community, which held a different view.

 

Yet, as former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates — who headed the CIA under President George H.W. Bush — revealed in his 1996 book, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, Haig and Reagan were not only correct; the extent to which the Soviets supported terrorism was even greater than they had thought.

 

In spite of the fact that Reagan ultimately won the Cold War – and the Soviet Union subsequently fell – his policies and extraordinary global achievements were partially discarded by the failures and laziness of the U.S. intelligence community. Starting in 1993, the US cut back excessively its military defenses. The US also failed to help Russia secure the Duma’s ratification of the 1993 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), signed by Yeltsin and Bush but not ratified by the Senate. And the US allowed China both militarily and non-militarily to run rampant.

 

Almost worse, the intelligence community failed to recognize the rise of Islamic terrorism in Iran and elsewhere, which would culminate in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

 

These failures are not surprising, given the history of American intelligence assessments. In early 1950, for example, President Harry Truman was told by his intelligence chiefs that there would not be a North Korean invasion of South Korea. They reached this conclusion based on the assumption that North Korea could only invade South Korea with the help of the Soviet Union, and there appeared to be no sign of such assistance.

 

In June 1950, however, North Korea invaded South Korea, and an unprepared United States lost over 35,000 soldiers in the Korean War.

 

Whether Trump is able, through a combination of toughness and street-smarts, to succeed where others have failed with North Korea remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the U.S. intelligence community often has a terrible track record where threat assessments are concerned. Alarmingly, it would not be surprising they were wrong again today.

 

Dr. Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense consulting firm he founded in 1981, as well as Director of Strategic Deterrent Studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. He was also for 20 years, the senior defense consultant at the National Defense University Foundation.

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Thursday, February 7, 2019

 

VALARIE JARRETT, OBAMA and the IRAN DEAL

 

We have been  tracking Valerie Jarrett from the time that  Jarrett  worked for Mayor Richard Joseph Daley’s Housing Authority where she functioned  as his personal bagman for donations from builders, architects, developers, etc. Subsequent to that Jarrett went into public housing development as a private developer.  Her group received generous  government funding. However, their  work was so shoddy that it had to be torn down.

 

We closely followed Jarrett’s  early involvement with Michelle Obama whom she employed in Chicago city government and then later Jarrett  hired  Michelle as a $300,000 a year VP for University of Chicago Hospital.   Jarrett was  the original discoverer  of Barak [sic] Obama  as a potential  political candidate  and  Jarrett raised significant funding for Obama  from the Muslim community.

 

Other participants in Valerie Jarrett’s Muslim brotherhood in group included Rashid Khalidi and Robert Malley.  A glimpse into the thinking of these key individuals was provided by the tape of the farewell banquet for Rashid Khalidi where the participants, including Barack Obama, participated in the  toast: “death to Israel”.  [Although the wording of the toast was clear on the tapes and  Obama is shown actively participating, it is impossible ,without further analysis of the acoustics and other  local factors, to determine whether the microphones  that clearly picked up the text of the toast were actually  tuned and located in a position where the reception was clear, but the acoustics of the room may have muffled the actual text…. and Obama’s claim that he never heard the wording might be, In fact, correct.]

 

During the Obama  presidential years Valerie Jarrett was a key  presidential assistant and Obama advisor at the  White House.  Although Pres. Obama promised the Jewish community that he would not in any way engage Robert Malley in anything to do with the Middle East, Obama later  not only  hired Robert Malley for the National Security Council staff, he actually placed  O’Malley in charge of the entire National Security Council Middle East effort.

Meanwhile,  Rashid Khalidi was a very frequent visitor to the White House  [presidential visitor logs].

 

For six months to a year prior to  the JCPOA  [Iran  deal] negotiations, Jarrett spent full time in Iran in  close discussions with the Iranian clerical leadership relating to not only the nuclear deal but also establishing Iranian leadership in the Middle East.   It was the content of these discussions that served as the directions for the US delegation. This was noted by Amir Hossein Motaghi when he  defected and publicly complained that Secretary of State Kerry and Wendy Sherman were  more enthusiastic  in supporting the maximum Iranian position than was the Iranian delegation.

 

Valerie Jarrett is now a full- time resident in the Obama post-president home [compound] in Washington DC with the announced function of  continuing Obama’s programs and legacies [which hopefully do not include  “death to Israel”].

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Tuesday, January 8, 2019

 

ERDO?AN + Rep.  SCHIFF +NY TIMES + WASH POST JOIN TO DEMOLISH CURRENT SAUDI – ISRAEL COUNTER IRAN WORKING RELATIONSHIP 

 

Top intelligence sources revealed the concerted joint efforts by Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, and US leftists [Washington Post, New York Times, representative Adam Schiff, etc. ] to disrupt the current Saudi Arabian – Israeli working relationship to  forestall Iran’s  aggresive [sic] drive  to dominate the Middle East.

 

Question:
Is the murder of Jamal Khashoggi [K] a brilliant plot by Eerdo?an to in one swoop become a more favored US ally than Saudi Arabia, restore fundamentalist government to Saudi Arabia by eliminating Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman [MBS] and at the same time disrupting/destroying the US-Saudi-Israeli confluence which is the major obstacle to Iranian dominance of the Middle East?

 

Some factors for consideration:

 

Turkish tapes. Saudi Arabia was aware of the surveillance of their embassy in Turkey. Was the on the record on camera murder of K  engineered by fundamentalist enemies of  MBS    within the Saudi royal family/government?

 

If the purpose was to kill K, then a 15 man team was far too obvious for the mission. Further, a sniper operating at a distance from the embassy on a day other than K’s  visit would have easily accomplished the mission

 

If the mission was similar to other Saudi mission, to kidnap K, then his death might have been from natural causes, or  accidental, or part of a plot to embarrass  and entrap MBS.

 

Examination of K.s father’s political affiliation and business dealings show that he was deeply involved the most Islamic elements of Islam and the most” conservative” elements of the Saudi royal family/government.

 

Examination of  K’s  previous affiliationss [sic] show that he was deeply involved with the most Islamic elements of Islam and the most “conservative” elements of the Saudi royal family/government

 

Here  is today’s Washington Post’s assault on Saudi Arabia and on MBS

 

Saudi Arabia’s trial for Khashoggi’s murder is a travesty. Congress must insist on justice.

If the United States is to uphold its values by insisting on justice in the Khashoggi case, Congress must take the lead.

 

By Washington Post Editorial Board

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Tuesday, December 25, 2018

 

RUSSIA’S 2016 DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN

 

Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign targeted both pro-Trump and pro-Hillary supporters.

 

Russia spent just $6,000 in the last six weeks of the 2016 election on ads.

 

Russia spent only $4,600 on Google ads in the 2016 campaign.

 

The Russian influence in the 2016 election was minimal.

 

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

 

IS ADAM SCHIFF THE RUSSIAN MOLE? [Blog Editor: In an admittedly only a cursory search, this LINK is the only source close to Belman’s submitted articles.]

 

First, the Soviet Union and now the Russian government has sought to disrupt the American political process. Currently, they are succeeding beyond their wildest imagination thanks to representative Adam Schiff, a prominent leader of the let’s lynch Trump movement. Now that” Russian collusion” is fading as a possible pretext, Mr. Schiff must dream up some other ways to justify his committee’s fishing in these waters. His new patter also has to shed a semi-credible back glow on his earlier role as chief flogger of now-defunct Russian conspiracy theories.

 

 

Interpreting the Trump Meteor

 

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Wall Street Journal   12-18-18

 

His survival fight may at least buy time for a few important lessons to sink in.

 

Recall that we started down today’s investigatory whirlpool as a direct result of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ seizing on Russia as an excuse for their loss to a president whom many considered a joke. Now poor Adam Schiff, incoming head of the House Intelligence Committee, is trying to catch up with the new Democratic theme: Mr. Trump’s real sin is not Russian collusion after all. It’s his tawdry but well-known business and personal life.

 

Not only must Mr. Schiff dream up some way to justify his committee’s fishing in these waters. His new patter also has to shed a semi-credible backglow on his earlier role as chief flogger of now-defunct Russian conspiracy theories.

 

Sadly, he would have benefited from an aide whispering in his ear when he was making his pitch to a New Yorker writer. “What should concern us most,” he explained to the magazine, “is anything can have a continuing impact on the foreign policy and national-security policy of the United States, and, if the Russians were laundering money for the Trump Organization, that would be totally compromising.”

 

Huh? For the Russians to be laundering money for him, Mr. Trump would need a large source of under-the-table cash from somewhere (his NBC show?). What the confused Mr. Schiff presumably means is that Mr. Trump was laundering money for Russians—i.e., selling them condos. Never mind that the entire Western financial system also participated in this business opportunity. Now it will be one more legal jeopardy in the swirl of investigations around the White House.

 

Still, the media will have to work hard to flap away the odor of selective prosecution. Mr. Trump was already an unusually heavily scrutinized figure. Now he’s attracting the kind of subatomic legal scrutiny reserved only for presidents of the opposite party when the press is inveterately hostile too. Example: the New York Times re-auditing his family’s heavily audited tax returns to find a welter of abuses that somehow escaped the IRS and New York tax department.

 

You can argue whether this is fair or wise, but that’s our system, and a U.S. political party was poorly advised to nominate somebody with Mr. Trump’s baggage in the first place.

 

This column has long maintained that a high-level Russian criminal conspiracy is the one thing investigators won’t find when loosed on Mr. Trump’s colorful business and personal history. I especially have to laugh over the somber and knowing suggestions that the Russians have “dirt” on Mr. Trump. Every third-tier swimsuit model and ex-Playmate from here to Las Vegas probably has dirt on Mr. Trump.

 

Michael Cohen’s reported admission that the Trump Organization was pursuing Russian opportunities well into 2016 campaign is a smoking gun, all right, but not of Russian collusion. Why did Mr. Trump run for president in the first place? To become more famous, to add gaudy luster to his brand. He had no expectation of winning. Of course he used the campaign spotlight to market himself for deals in which others would pay to use his name.

 

Winning was his big mistake, a colossal if propitious miscalculation. Nobody would care about Stormy Daniels if he weren’t president. His decades-long pursuit of a Trump Tower in Moscow would be a non-story. Nobody would be raking him over the emoluments coals for owning a hotel in Washington.

 

Unfortunately, it will also occur to Mr. Trump now that his best move is to cling to the White House at all costs. That’s because under Justice Department guidelines he can expect not to be indicted as long as he remains in office. I wonder if his Torquemadas have taken this into account.

 

The moment is turning weird. Even President Obama stepped forward to tidy up the scene by claiming that the inconvenient Trump boom is really the Obama boom. By all lights, the media should have treated this as laughable. Had a Republican leg of lamb been victorious on election night 2016, markets would have priced upward on the news that the Obama agenda was finished. Investors aren’t clairvoyant but they respond to unexpected information. And seldom in history have circumstances conspired to give so clear a verdict on an outgoing administration.

 

When it’s all over, this will be one lesson worth holding on to. Mr. Trump’s personal fight for survival is likely to dominate our politics for the foreseeable future. And yet if anything justified his election in the first place, it was the wake-up call from 63 million voters to America’s leadership class. Alas, it’s hard to listen to people like James Comey and Mr. Obama himself and not see our political system trying hard to expel Mr. Trump so it can go back to doing exactly what it was doing before he was elected.

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Some Editing (much left untouched) by Blog Editor John R. Houk.

 

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