Dead Drop: September 14

WE’RE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER: Back when John Brennan was CIA director and made a lot of minds of clandestine service officers explode by saying  “We don’t steal secrets.”  (His successor, Mike Pompeo went out of his way to insist the Agency DOES steal secrets.) Well, if Bob Woodward’s new book “Fear” is to be believed, President-elect Donald Trump doubled down on Brennan’s comments.  According to the book, at a Trump Tower meeting in late 2016, DNI James Clapper told Trump about a U.S. intelligence source in Russia who was endangered and that the CIA planned to “exfiltrate” that person to another country. Woodward says Trump replied that “I don’t believe in human sources” adding “These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country.” Worth noting – this particular person was said to have betrayed Russia at the behest of the United States. Trump’s comment reportedly came at the same meeting where he first learned about the now-infamous dossier and “pee tape.”

FEAR ITSELF: In case you are among the handful of Americans who haven’t gotten a copy of Woodward’s “Fear,” the Dead Drop got a copy and did a quick scan for you.  Among the other intelligence and national security nuggets (not already exhaustively covered by the mainstream media or mentioned above) here are a couple other items of interest:  CTPT: Woodward says the CIA has, for years, run a 3,000-man top secret covert army in Afghanistan called Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. As previously reported in The Cipher Brief and elsewhere, controversial contractor Erik Prince wanted to privatize the war effort – an option that did not go far because of the optics of Prince and others making massive profits on the war.  The President, according to Woodward, grew tired of listening to people like his National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster opine about the war – and demanded that he bring in “some enlisted guys, some real fighters” to tell him what was going on in Afghanistan.  Following a lunch with three soldiers and an airman who had served in country, Trump summed up their views for Steve Bannon: “Unanimous. We’ve got to figure out how to get the f*#k out of there. Totally corrupt. The people are not worth fighting for . . . NATO does nothing. They’re a hindrance. Don’t let anybody tell you how great they are. It’s all bullshit.”