WAYNE’S WORLD: Long-time readers of The Dead Drop will remember items from 2015 about Wayne Simmons who earned a decade-long stint as a talking head on Fox News after fashioning himself as a former CIA operative and terrorism expert. Turns out, Simmons posturing was completely fake and he was eventually put on trial, convicted and sentenced to 33 months in prison. (He is now out.) If you’ve ever wondered how someone could get away with a con like going on national TV and pretending to be a CIA vet for years – have we got the podcast for you. There is a six-part podcast called Impostors: The Spy which tells you more than you ever wanted to know about Simmons. Spoiler alert: he STILL claims to have been an off-the-books operative who was shabbily treated by his former employer. The two-minute trailer is here. The podcast includes the voices of the FBI agent who helped put him away and several (real) former CIA officers. Some of the Agency officers use aliases – but we recognized a few familiar voices.
CIA PIPELINE TO NEW JERSEY: Governor Phil Murphy of the Garden State has announced the appointment of former CIA officer Laurie R. Doran as the acting director of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness. In the position, she will oversee local counterterrorism and cybersecurity work. That post-government gig alone might not merit Dead Drop mention – but what put this over the top for us was the fact that Doran is the third straight CIA veteran to hold the job.
“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62
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