IF THE DNI CALLS, GET HIS (OR HER) NAME: We are old enough to remember when The Dead Drop was commenting on the remarkable game of musical chairs being played among the Defense Department’s top leadership. That was two weeks ago. Then the Intelligence Community said: “Hold my beer.” Over the weekend, the President tweeted that DNI Dan Coats would be stepping down and that he intended to nominate relatively unknown member of Congress John Ratcliffe to fill his shoes. Trump added to the mystery by saying he would soon announce who would be acting DNI after Coats departs on August 15. Normally, common sense (and perhaps the law) would have suggested that the Principal Deputy DNI, Sue Gordon, would fill that role while waiting for Senate confirmation of the president’s pick but we do not live in normal times. There are rumors floating around that the president plans to temporarily replace Coats with Peter Hoekstra, who is a former chairman of the House intelligence committee (a committee Ratcliffe has served on for seven months.) Hoekstra is currently U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands which would make his temporary DNI assignment a rough commute. Then came word that Ratcliffe’s somewhat thin résumé might have been embellished. And then President Trump told reporters that he liked Dan Coats but his DNI was somewhat confused and that he was nominating Ratcliffe to square away the IC because the intelligence agencies had “run amok”. No doubt Ratcliffe will call on his experience as mayor of Heath, Texas (pop. 8000) to corral the fractious 100,000+ members of the IC.
NUNES PAL GETS CT JOB AT NSC: The Daily Beast reports that a former staffer for then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, Kash Patel, has recently become the Senior Director of the Counterterrorism Directorate at the National Security Council. Patel gained some limited fame in early 2018 when he was dispatched to London to try to meet with dossier author Christopher Steele. He was reportedly the author of a memo accusing law enforcement officials of having bias against Donald Trump. The memo played a role in Nunes’ eventual decision to recuse himself from HPSCI investigations into the Russian election meddling matter. Oddly, according to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson for the NSC (not usually a clandestine organization) declined to comment on Patel’s latest appointment.
NOW, HE TELLS US: Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was in the U.S. last week and was pressed by Fox News about why his country won’t release Dr. Shakeel Afridi who has been jailed since 2011 on charges of having helped the U.S. locate Osama bin Laden. "This is a very emotive issue, because Shakeel Afridi in Pakistan is considered a spy," he told Fox host Bret Baier. Khan then claimed (for the first time that we know of) that the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, was responsible for giving the CIA “the initial location through the phone connection.” It is not clear what Khan was talking about but there is no doubt Pakistan was unaware of the raid on Abbottabad and they claim to have been in the dark about the fact that the al-Qaeda leader was hiding in their midst. Khan suggested that Pakistan might be willing to swap Afridi in exchange for Aafia Siddiqui, a neuroscientist who was sentenced to 86 years in prison in Manhattan in 2010 for “attempted murder and assault of U.S. nationals and U.S. officers and employees in Afghanistan.”
SECURITY AS STRONG AS THE WEAKEST LINK(ED-IN): America’s adversaries have been getting a lot of attention with reports that they are developing hard-to-defeat hypersonic weapons systems. It is a pretty good guess that the U.S. is not standing idly by but is developing its own super missiles that would go way faster than the speed of sound. In fact, DOD has acknowledged seven development projects. But according to Aviation Week, a DoD weapons expert may have spilled the beans on two additional programs – through his LinkedIn profile. Greg Sullivan’s profile provided a list of hypersonic programs he has worked on including two that were new to AvWeek: “HACM” and “HCCW.” So, they asked Air Force public affairs what the hack those acronyms mean. They didn’t get an answer but shortly after asking the question both references were deleted from Sullivan’s LinkedIn page.
MCAFEE GOES VIRAL: Anti-virus and cryptocurrency pioneer and fugitive from justice John McAfee has graced the pages of The Dead Drop a couple times before with word of his efforts to escape arrest and his tales that the CIA and IRS are trying to kidnap him. Now Putin-propaganda outfit “RT” has done a story about McAfee saying he has recently been released from confinement in the Dominican Republic. McAfee, who is wanted for murder among other things, says the CIA tried to “collect” him in the DR but failed. He posted some photos of himself and his heavily-armed wife posing with weapons aboard his boat.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting/weird stuff we discovered:
CODE DEAD: The viewing public likes TV series about courtroom drama. And they like shows about the military. So, they’d really love a program about military court action, right? Not so much. At least the way the concept was executed by CBS in their just-cancelled series “The Code.” The spiking of the show after just one season was celebrated by the Military Times which summed up what was wrong with the show with this paragraph: “Shaggy, out-of-regulation haircuts, incorrectly ordered ribbon stacks that blossomed new rows from one episode to the next, nonsensical military court proceedings, Marines referred to as “soldiers,” uniform violations, uniform violations, and worst of all, more uniform violations.”
JACK OF THE JUNGLE: Amazon Prime is preparing season two of their series: “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” starring John Krasinski. The series will reportedly feature Ryan confronting “the forces in power in a dangerous, declining democratic regime in South America…” investigating “a potentially suspicious shipment of illegals arms in the Venezuelan jungle.” The trailer can be seen here. We can’t wait.
HONG KONG AGENT PROVOCATUER WAS BOURNE YESTERDAY: According to India Today, a pro-Beijing leader in Hong Kong has alerted the public that a “CIA agent” is running around stirring up demonstrations there. Ray Kwong went so far as to post a photo of the troublemaker –and that is where Kwong went wrong. The mug shot he posted is of Matt Damon from his role as Jason Bourne. Oops.
AGENCY FLIPS SCRIPT: An online publication called Shadowproof (which says it exists to expose systemic abuses of power) has a story out breathlessly headlined:“Documents: CIA Successfully pressured Michael Bay to change Benghazi movie.” It seems someone FOIA’d internal agency emails regarding filmmaker Michael Bay’s request for support on his movie “13 Hours” about the attacks on State Department outposts in Libya in 2012. The documents purport to show that Agency executive director Meroe Park initially told CIA public affairs reps to “stand down” on providing any support but eventually ok’d Bay and members of his team visiting Langley to discuss the script. The CIA apparently managed to convince Bay to remove some sensitive items in the script “most of which he agreed to change.” The documents don’t reveal exactly what Bay changed – and there is no evidence that the Agency “pressured” the director. In the end, the Agency trashed it anyway. CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani was quoted as saying: “No one will mistake this movie for a documentary. It’s a distortion of the events and people who served in Benghazi that night. It’s shameful that, in order to highlight the heroism of some, those responsible for the movie felt the need to denigrate the courage of other Americans who served in harm’s way.”
TOP GUN – TAKE TWO: In last week’s Dead Drop we mentioned the forthcoming much-anticipated Top Gun movie and some of the speculation about how the hero, Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, could still be flying combat aircraft and not have made it past the rank of captain. Someone has doctored the official trailer for the film to offer a possible explanation of one of life’s mysteries – Maverick’s stunted career.
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING: Got any tips for your friendly neighborhood Dead Drop? Shoot us a note at TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
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