How Dumb is the CIA?

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How Dumb is the CIA? With the hydrogen bomb test by North Korea, it should be recalled the CIA was dumb enough to be responsible for North Korea acquiring nukes.

Reorganized Murder Incorporated

According to a Washington Post article, John Brennan has set out to restructure the CIA’s longstanding model:

“At issue is a basic structure that has been in place since the agency’s inception, with employees divided by function among four major directorates. The best known are the National Clandestine Service, which sends case officers overseas on spying missions and carries out covert operations, and the Directorate of Intelligence, which employs thousands of analysts whose main job is to provide insight on global developments to President Obama and other policymakers. Others include a directorate focused on science and technology, and a fourth handles logistics for operations abroad”

The article has some disingenuous elements indicating this is a deliberate disinformation provided to the Washington Post as to the ‘why’…

“Former officials said Brennan’s interest in organizational change is driven in part by frustration with the struggle to strengthen U.S. intelligence on the crisis in Syria, which has morphed from a civil war to an incubator for terrorist groups”

…because the Syria circumstance is not a failure of intelligence but quite clearly a failure of policy.

Brennan’s goal…

“But the idea being explored by Brennan would go beyond such changes, rebuilding its sprawling bureaucracy around a model that relies on “centers” that combine analysts, operators, scientists and support staff. The agency has for years employed that approach on its most daunting assignments, including efforts to slow the spread of narcotics, illicit weapons and nuclear arms”

…is cover story, pure and simple. In fact the CIA is a major global player, not in slowing the spread of illicit weapons and narcotics, because actually the CIA is up to its neck in international narcotics and weapons trafficking. Nuclear weapons is a legitimate concern, considering it was the CIA had let a nuclear genie out of the bottle (more on that later) or, rather let’s hope not a subliminal psychological preparation of the public for a looming false-flag attack.

Now, there are some real management pros and cons, mostly cons in this proposal, unless you happen to favor the most criminalized divisions of the CIA, that is the National Clandestine Service and the Science & Technology directorates.

When the new hybridized ‘centers’ are created, there is a typical trade-off and a second, very real, Faustian trade-off. You increase security based on the ‘cellular’ principle by isolating the proposed different regional centers from each other. This can be justified from a point of counter-espionage, if one center is penetrated, the other centers are isolated from the penetration. The typical trade-off is, shared expertise and genius is isolated from one center to the next and overall quality is consequently eroded.  Let’s say John, in the Eastern Europe department, has a nagging feeling about the information he’s developing and he can’t walk down the hall to ask Jane in the South Asia department to look for some anomaly he is missing and the result is, John is sucked into a false-flag information operation that Jane would have spotted. Another problem can be separate cells at cross purposes, unknowingly getting in each others way, where the various proposed regions will inevitably overlap in a globalized world. This almost certainly will require another layer of bureaucracy, resulting in increased inefficiency from a practical standpoint and less efficient oversight in an ever growing, already gargantuan, intelligence apparatus.

The Faustian trade-off is, the proposed ‘cellularizing’ increases the security of any criminal elements operating within the CIA (there are plenty of those) and enhances the criminal elements operational capabilities.

Where in the existing model, any dubious requests that might raise red flags within the agency, for instance a clandestine operations directorate (hypothetical) request for a nuclear ‘trigger’ mechanism from the science and technology directorate, any such request would have a much better chance of going unnoticed in the proposed cellularized regional model.

At the more mundane level of criminal narcotics trafficking, gun-running, and kidnap, torture & murder programs we already know go on, breaking the directorates down into regional cells makes a lot of sense and here is why:

Within each region, there will be ‘teams’ where operations are underway. These teams will be sub-cells of regional cells. Now, when you can assign mad scientist ‘Dexter’ to a team that includes intelligence analyst ‘Ray’, gun-running, narcotics trafficking & renditions pilot ‘Joseph’, and kidnap coordinator ‘Sabrina’, you’ve created a mini CIA within the CIA, with all the bases covered; science & technology, intelligence, logistics and operatives. Give opportunity to cook these ideas up to personalities like Michael Hayden, Stephen Kappes and Michael Morrell (according to the Washington Post article)…

“In addition to Hayden, the [planning] group has met with other former high-ranking CIA officials including former acting director Michael Morell and former deputy director Stephen Kappes. Both declined requests for comment”

…and you have a reorganized dream scenario for Murder Incorporated, with new horizons and associated opportunities to run amok. Just what we do NOT need to hand over to America’s professional psychopath killers. Here’s a bit of preceding history:

The CIA, by its own officials admissions and subsequently uncovered documents and exposed acts, set out on a road of torture and murder with ‘disappearing’ people. Nearly all of the information pitched to the public by media, both mainstream and alternative media, has been limited to renditions to torture but that is only one half, or perhaps less, of what has actually gone on with CIA sanctioned renditions. Let’s have a look at the rest of the story, assassinations (other than by drone) and renditions with the intent to kill and ‘disappear’ the targeted persons.

We begin with noting the investigation in Britain of the CIA’s rendition of Binyam Mohamed, which turned up a MI6 manual instruction to British intelligence officers not to become involved with any CIA rendition where the objective was to kill the target. In the MI6 manual chapter produced for the British court, it is clear the manual instruction’s overall context is intended to keep the British officers clean of and British jurisdiction clear of (and by extension, Her Majesty’s government) certain specified crimes in relation to CIA actions in violation of international law:

“Is it clear that detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation?”

It would appear the British are not squeamish about cooperating with CIA in relation to deliveries to torture, rather they are of the ‘if we didn’t see it, it didn’t happen’ philosophy. Where it appears they had drawn a line is in relation to ‘disappearing’ people to die. This inference can be drawn following the preceding MI6 manual language, because everything else in the chapter produced from the MI6 manual for the court is about what the officers would be required to report under British obligations to humanitarian law, if observed; all known CIA renditions practices such as hooding, beating and ‘torture’ (read water-boarding) in relation to any agencies MI6 works in ‘liaison’ with (read CIA.)

With the MI6 manual providing the first hard documentary evidence from allied intelligence there is a concern over renditions to ‘disappear’ people, specifying killing in context of working with the Americans, it follows the Americans involved with renditions should be given a strict scrutiny in regards not only to torture, this is already well documented, but renditions as interim step to targeted killings or ‘disappearing’ kidnapped people.

Who is Cofer Black?

Cofer Black was in charge of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center immediately preceding and for a year or so, post 9/11. The Counter-Terrorism Center or ‘CTC’, established during Reagan’s tenure, is an interesting entity, in that it is more or less the model Brennan wishes to emulate in his reorganizing the CIA. The CTC is also interesting because it was the vehicle utilized to organize the CIA’s renditions program and set up ‘black site’ jails (under Cofer Black.) Cofer Black is interesting because when he left the CIA’s CTC in 2002, he subsequently headed the Office of Counter-Terorism at the Department of State. This office at State would clearly be an overlapping extension of the CIA’s CTC, recalling the Department of State and the CIA are Siamese twins. This is particularly interesting in relation to then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s fingerprints all over the 2003 Abu Omar rendition for which 26 CIA operatives were charged with crimes in Italy. Italian defendant Nicolò Pollari, head of Italian military intelligence at the time of Abu Omar’s rendition, had attempted to get Rice’s testimony, maintaining she was in charge of the renditions program. Prima facie, it would appear from 2001 through 2004, Cofer Black and Condoleezza Rice were partnered at the apex of the renditions program.

Portrait of a killer (Cofer Black)

Who is Cofer Black? A thumbnail sketch:

Born 1950, Stamford, CT

High school at Canterbury prep school, college at University of Southern California

Master’s of International Relations, USC, 1974.

Joined CIA clandestine service in 1974, served 6 foreign tours, mostly in Africa.

CIA station chief in Khartoum, Sudan, 1993-94, when bin Laden was there.

Director of CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center (CTC), 1999-2001

After 9/11, “led the hunt” for Osama bin Laden, including at Tora Bora.

State Department ambassador-at-large for Counterterrorism, 2002-04

Vice-chairman, Blackwater USA, 2005-2008

Principal, 2006-present, of the Prince Group’s Total Intelligence Solutions, a Blackwater spin-    off providing services to “bring CIA-style intelligence services to Fortune 500” companies.

Advised Romney presidential campaign on national security issues.

Following on taking undue credit for capturing Carlos the Jackel, after French intelligence had tracked the terrorist down, Cofer Black let Bin Laden get away TWICE, and, when heading the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, Black was a party to refusing information sharing with the FBI on the al-Qaida cell the USA alleges is responsible for 9/11.

Cofer Black moved on to Blackwater following his renditions career in concert with with Condoleezza Rice. In the preceding year (2004) Blackwater had become an extension of the CIA with outsourced contracts for extra-judicial assassinations placed under the direction of Enrique Prado, a known narcotics cartel contract killer. There is no way Rice, and particularly Cofer Black, could convincingly deny they did not know this. The CIA murder contract with Blackwater continued until 2009, or four years of Cofer Black’s career with Blackwater through 2008 (+1 year.) The program was reported cancelled in 2009 when Leon Panetta freaked out and got cold feet on discovering the program existed (with past instructions from Dick Cheney Congress was not to be informed.) This was followed by a litany of CIA denials the program was ever more than a ‘power-point’ presentation. This despite at least two former special forces employees of Blackwater insisting the program was operational, one of them an admitted ‘trigger-man.’

A footnote on Cofer Black’s previous clandestine CIA career focused in Africa would be, his personal interest in operational support for the racist regimes in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa, when combating Black liberation movements, i.e. CIA ‘dirty war’ efforts in Africa.

Who is Steve Kappes?

With Cofer Black moved over to private sector contract killing for CIA, we move on to Steven Kappes’ leadership and a bit wider view of just what sort of personalities constitute the renditions to murders for CIA.

Steve Kappes (left)

Suddenly we have a third director of renditions in what seems to be a case of ‘too many chefs spoil the broth’ during the period of 2001 through 2004. If Cofer Black engineered the rapidly expanded renditions program for Bush, Cheney & Co, (noting CIA renditions had pre-existed these morons coming to power), and Condoleezza took a hands on interest in oversight (related to targeting), Stephen Kappes, as director of operations gets the ‘whipping boy’ position of responsible for ordering specific renditions to proceed. Except in the case of rendition to murder operations that can be laid at the door of the White House, no one will ever be punished.

In a New York Times article, reporter Mark Mazzetti gets on his knees to perform political fellatio on the man who made what has to be the biggest CIA screw-up in history, yes, even outdoing Cofer Black standing back and allowing 9/11 to proceed (something that will never be explained ‘officially’.) But first, let’s look at what Stephen Kappes is capable of doing competently:

Kappes great coup of history was to convince Gaddafi Libya could give up its nuclear program, and save face for the USA by taking responsibility for what almost certainly had been George H.W. Bush’s CIA false-flag downing of the airline over Lockerbie the FBI clearly framed Libya for, in return for ‘normalization’ of relations and we’d be off Gaddafi’s back, for ‘awhile’ (the fine print Gaddafi did not read.) Gaddafi accepts renditions prisoners from the CIA, as proof of fealty, and is allowed into the ‘club’ and can pitch his tent on the lawn at Élysée palace:

Ok, so any conniving 12 year old could accomplish the same .. ‘Give me $1,500 and your Get Out Of Jail Free card and I’ll hand over Pennsylvania Avenue and let you land on Park Place rent free for the next three throws of the (in this case, loaded) dice. What Gaddafi failed to realize is, how dumb it would be to make any deal with the very same people who’d blown up the plane over Lockerbie and pinned the blame on him.

Before we go into why Stephen Kappes very seriously, for personal reasons, needed to get Gaddafi to give up Libya’s nuclear program, let’s have a quick look at the ONE professional experience where he was actually good at what he did; essentially a ‘drum major’

“Mr. Kappes, a Cincinnati native, joined the C.I.A. in 1981 after five years in the Marine Corps, where he once commanded a platoon of the Marines’ legendary “silent drill team” in Washington that performs a tightly scripted rifle ceremony before thousands of spectators each year”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgFJJ77w2nA

Kappes taste for pornography

Stephen Kappes world class screw-up, out-doing the CIA’s professed ‘non-role’ in preventing the 9/11 attacks (yes, even out-doing Cofer Black’s refusing information to the FBI on the very cell the USA alleges is responsible for the attacks, prior to 9/11)…

“Kappes, who had known about Dr. Khan’s [atomic bomb] black market machinations, nevertheless did nothing to stop him”

…was to run a nuclear proliferation ‘sting’ operation that saw viable bomb designs (blueprints) get into the hands of not only the Libyans, but also Iran, North Korea and incredibly, into the hands of unknown amounts of persons yet unknown:

“Among the files confiscated from the Tinners, Collins and Frantz say, were elements of a Chinese design for a nuclear weapon that had been scanned and could therefore have been copied and disseminated around the world.

“Investigators from the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also identified possible elements of designs for two other more sophisticated Pakistani nuclear weapons among the materials they were allowed to see.

“In addition to the discovery of more than 300 schematics for two types of Pakistani atomic weapons in the Tinners’ possession, hard drives belonging to the family were found in Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa, showing that classified information useful in making bombs had traveled the globe”

The CIA solution to Kappes’ botched sting operation?

“A Swiss investigator who worked on the Khan case was quoted by the authors as saying that Washington had wanted the evidence collected in raids on the Tinners’ home and offices, including computer files, hard drives, disks and documents, to be destroyed in order to “hide their own stupidity””

Well, it should come as no surprise, the preceding would be the outcome of putting a Marine Corps ‘drum major’ in  charge of the CIA’s clandestine operations division. It follows, it can hardly come as a surprise at how stupidly the renditions program had been pursued.

One more Stephen Kappes screw-up and we’ll move on:

“In 1988–89, when Kappes was deputy chief of Frankfurt station, he was responsible for penetrating Iran’s virulently anti-US theocracy and its nascent nuclear program. By 1989, “virtually the entire US intelligence apparatus in Iran had been detected and successfully disrupted by the Iranians,” according to a little-noticed account corroborated in general terms by former US officials and other sources.

“This may be exaggerated, but there was little denying the scale of the CIA’s humiliation,” Mahan Abedin, director of research at the London-based Centre for the Study of Terrorism, was quoted as saying in 2007…”

By 2004, when it was becoming clear the Milan operation (Abu Omar rendition) had been a complete fiasco, the dinosaurs in the Oval Office realized Murder Incorporated needed brought into line with more efficient model, getting caught was not an attractive option. Out goes George Tenent and enters Porter Goss as Director of CIA, and with that change, we say bye-bye to Stephen Kappes (for the moment) and hello to Jose Rodriquez of Latin America’s ‘dirty wars’ fame.

Porter Goss is a former CIA Latin America operative turned politician. Prior to this we’d had ‘old world’ operatives running operations, people whose so-called ‘expertise’ was in Africa, the Middle & Near East and South Asia. Now the world will get the filthy end of the stick from the Latin America division, the people most experienced with pursuing ‘dirty wars.’ This change didn’t make the CIA any smarter, only meaner. These are people who enjoy torturing people. And then killing them. And then making the bodies vanish. Except when LOTS of bodies are left out in public view as a ‘message.’