Is CIA Headquarters Still In Friendly Hands?

Something astounding happened recently. Steve Witkoff called out CIA for providing him and Jared Kushner with completely faulty intelligence regarding Hamas and the negotiations to end the fighting in Gaza. And he did it on air on 60 Minutes.

That’s pretty breathtaking. These are negotiations at the very highest level. The President himself is directly involved. Witkoff and Kushner are the President’s personal envoys. For CIA to get the intel picture completely wrong is a monumental failure and leads immediately to the next, and most important question: Why? Why was CIA so wide of the mark with its analysis?

Two possibilities present themselves immediately. Either CIA’s intelligence was just that bad, or people in CIA and likely the broader Intelligence Community (IC) were deliberately feeding the President’s top men bad intel.

I suspect both things are true.

CIA, under Brennan and his cronies, was gutted and neutered. Its pace of operations slowed to a crawl. True operators, men and women with experience and demonstrated competence, were pushed aside. The top positions in the Agency went to people who had never run ops but were “politically correct”. The Director of Operations, the person who is supposed to run ops worldwide, was effectively made subordinate to a Chief Operating Officer who was not an operative, knew nothing of the business, and focused primarily on DEI and groupthink.

As a consequence, today’s CIA quite frankly has little or no insight into the inner workings of groups like Hamas. That would require risk. That would require moxie. That would require leaving Northern Virginia and talking to foreigners.

Much easier then to simply take whatever intel the Israelis pass you on the subject and base your analysis on that. If the Israelis are telling the truth and have solid sources, you may be OK temporarily. If the Israelis, the guys who did not see a Hamas offensive building on the other side of a wall a couple of years ago, have bad intel, then we do too. Most alarming of all, of course, if the Israelis decide to lie to us for political reasons, we will not know it. We will be led around by the nose and steered in the wrong direction.

But, I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think something else, and potentially even more troubling, is going on as well. I think people within the IC are deliberately feeding the President and his key people bad intelligence. And, just as bad, they are refusing to pass on certain information to the policy makers in this administration.

In short, there remain people within the IC who oppose this President and his appointees and are using intelligence as a weapon to frustrate President Trump’s political objectives. They want him to fail. They don’t care about the consequences for American national security. They want to inflict political damage because they are laser-focused on putting a Democrat in the White House in 2028 who will guarantee the continued existence of the Deep State and prevent the American people from regaining control over the vast federal bureaucracy.

CIA is, relatively speaking, a small part of the giant IC, but it is a case in point. There have been no significant firings at CIA since Trump sat down in the White House for the second time. There has been no real reorganization. No meaningful change of any kind has actually occurred.

Director Ratcliffe sits atop an organization that remains structured largely as John Brennan wanted and run by people who made rank and climbed the ladder under either Brennan or his surrogate, Gina Haspel. All of the people who thought it was appropriate to designate “crying spaces” where employees could retreat to compose themselves when Trump won in 2016 are still there. All the folks who looked the other way when the attack on the CIA base in Benghazi was blamed on a peaceful demonstration that got out of hand are still there. All the individuals who sat and watched while a slow-motion coup against Donald Trump went on year after year are still there, just in much more senior positions now.

Those men and women, who opted long ago to act in the interest of the Deep State, not the American people, have not suddenly gone dormant or changed their spots. They are at work every day doing what they can to frustrate this President and prevent him from doing the people’s business. They will continue to do so until decisive action is taken, people are fired, the organization is retooled, and somebody who means business takes the helm on the 7^th floor.

Many years ago, a legendary Chief of Station in CIA sent a one-line cable to Headquarters in Langley. It said simply, “Please confirm Headquarters in friendly hands.” It was intended to be a sarcastic response to what the Chief perceived as a particularly stupid message disapproving what he considered to be a worthwhile and well-crafted operation. It was understood as such.

The sad truth is that today, such a message might not be simple sarcasm. It might be based in reality, and the only honest response would be, “ No, Headquarters is no longer in friendly hands.”