Dead Drop: September 13

NOVEL IDEA: Over the past several years, The Dead Drop, has written on numerous occasions about the exploits of Amaryllis Fox, a colorful former CIA officer (now married to RFK III.) Now, her new book Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA is a great novel, we’re told.  Unfortunately, the book it’s billed as non-fiction, but according to former officers we spoke with, there are a lot of scenes that seem highly-unrealistic. Advance readers will tell you the book is beautifully written but full of stuff that is either (a) unlikely or (b) unlikely to have been cleared by the CIA.  An early review posted on Amazon.com says she “writes about how, in the most high-stakes meeting imaginable, with a terrorist cell ready to unleash a nuclear bomb, the presence of clove oil in her backpack ending up being the prop that turned the tide.” But despite having an obligation to do so, Fox did not secure clearance by the CIA’s Publication Review Board to publish the book.  What is unclear is what, if anything, the CIA is going to do about it.  A national security lawyer in D.C. tweeted about it, calling the case a “GUARANTEED WIN by CIA”, and bragging about how many similar cases he’s handled.  It must have been good business because he announced in a following tweet that Fox had hired him to represent her.  One school of thought is that by going after Fox legally, the CIA will only help her sell more books. But in the past, the government has aggressively taken on authors who skipped their required PRB commitments. An author who called himself “Ishmael Jones,” for example, was ordered by the courts to forfeit all proceeds from his book The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture.  If Fox is somehow given a pass, however, other former intelligence community authors are likely to ask themselves: “Why should I submit my books in the future?” As of now, the book is still scheduled to come out October 15.

IT WAS CRAZY, JUST ASK MY LAWYERS: Former CIA officer Joshua Schulte is in the Federal lockup in New York facing charges of having leaked what is called the Vault7 files to Wikileaks.  He also faces separate charges for trying to leak additional classified information from jail.  In his defense, Schulte recently petitioned the court to appoint new lawyers to represent him so that his current lawyers can testify about his mindset when he was allegedly sending classified info from the hoosegow.