THE SECRETARY OF TRUMP: The latest issue of The New Yorker includes a lengthy profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It is full of stuff we bet you didn’t know about the former Kansas congressman and CIA Director – and stuff we bet Pompeo is hoping that the President doesn’t remember. In the winter of 2016, Pompeo was campaigning for Marco Rubio for president and told an audience that Donald Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.” The Secretary has apparently changed his mind and he and the president have become BFFs. The New Yorker article by Susan Glasser quotes an unnamed former official as saying Pompeo is “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.” And an unnamed former ambassador very un-diplomatically said of Pompeo: “He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” Ouch.
POMPEO PRESS: There seems to be a lot of news about the Secretary of State floating around. The State-focused blog Diplopundit summarized some of the reporting about whether Pompeo might resign to run for the Senate from Kansas as a possible stepping stone for a run for the White House in 2024.
BOOS FOR BREW CREW: In last week’s Dead Drop we told you about the Russians making vodka called “Atomik” from crops grown in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The product might have offended a few people, but a Texas-based company said: “hold my beer.” Well, actually, “buy my beer.” The Manhattan Project Beer Company is producing a range of brews named after post-WWII atomic tests. The names range from “Bikini Atoll” to “Half-Life” and the ever-popular “Hoppenheimer” According to the Pacific Daily News, residents of the Marshall Islands, where people suffered health effects from nuclear testing, are not amused. The brewer tried to put a happy face on the subject saying that their Bikini Atoll “was not created to mock or trivialize the nuclear testing that took place in the Marshall Islands” but rather was “creating awareness of the wider impact and implications” of the research programs. Apparently, they didn’t get the reaction they anticipated. The brewer said they have received “significant harassment and death threats” as a result of their beer name.
DEALING WITH SNARK ATTACKS: The periodical PR Week posted a story this week about how the CIA’s social media folks handle trolls. They reportedly get a lot of them. "People will blame us for the weather being bad on a certain day or trouble with their spouse or bad traffic," according to Christine Sweeney, the Agency’s social media lead. "A couple times last month, Instagram went down and we got a bunch of messages accusing us of doing it." Some of the troll jibes are ignored but others provide opportunities to set the record straight on commonly held misperceptions.
DEALING WITH SURVEILLANCE: Do you ever get the feeling that you are being followed? If so, you might want to buy a Tesla and equip it with a surveillance tool called “Surveillance Detection Scout.” According to Electrek, a publication devoted to electric vehicles, some geek invented a hack which allows you to use Tesla’s cameras and computer to tell you if you are being followed in real time. It takes Tesla’s existing video feeds and Sentry Mode features and uses license plate and facial detection to determine if someone nefarious is on your trail. You can watch a video demonstration of the feature here. The guy who figured out how to make the app function must be really smart – although not smart enough to record clear audio as he describes his product.
DEALING WITH A SECRET: Here’s a little something we read in JJ Green’s Inside the SCIF newsletter. A Chinese official may have inadvertently confirmed one of Chinese intelligence’s deepest secrets. Twitter and Facebook on Monday removed hundreds of fake accounts, determined to be utilized by the Chinese government to sow political discord during the Hong Kong protests, marking the first time the social media giants had identified Beijing directly for spearheading such an operation. Beijing pushed back forcefully and if you look carefully, they exposed a piece of frightening, but not surprising intelligence about their plan attack the U.S. Geng Shuang, a government spokesman said the accounts were not the work of government disinformation teams but Chinese students and others living overseas who "of course have the right to express their point of view." That little nugget – according to Green - is precisely the issue U.S. and intelligence agencies around the world worry about — loyal Chinese citizens who are either bound by Chinese intelligence to collect information and report back and/or are de facto sleeper intelligence agents instructed to go to war if Beijing ends up in a conflict.
PHOTO OP: Last week, the first known photo in years of Jeffrey Epstein’s gal pal, Ghislaine Maxwell surfaced not in front of the late pedophile’s New York mansion but at an LA “In-and-Out Burger” establishment. The picture was said to be the work of someone who just happened to notice Maxwell and asked if she was who they thought she was. Shortly thereafter, the shot was seen ‘round the world…included the nugget that Maxwell was reading The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. The book, published 18 years ago, immediately zoomed to the top of Amazon.com’s sales list. But the Daily Mail (using forensic techniques that would make our pals at Bellingcat proud) discovered that the photo was almost certainly staged and, in some aspects, photoshopped. Three questions: Why? What message was she sending with The Book of Honor? And how can we get Maxwell to be photographed reading The Cipher Brief?
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
WAKANDA II: The 2018 film Black Panther earned $1.3 billion at the box office and a best picture nomination – so it is a pretty good bet there is going to be a “Black Panther II.” Actor Martin Freeman, who played CIA “agent” Everett Ross in the original, kind of, sort of confirmed the sequel when talking to reporters recently. “As far as I know, I will be [returning],” Freeman said. “As far as I know, I will be in another Black Panther. That’s my understanding. As to when that will happen, I don’t know.” Well, that clears things up.
INSTINCT FAILURE: CBS has announced the cancellation of its series “Instinct” after two seasons. Frankly, we had never heard of it – but apparently it was about a former CIA operative “who is pulled out of his normal life as a professor and writer in order to help NYPD in their effort to stop a serial killer on the loose.” Hopefully, they got the killer before the series was cancelled.
AGENT KING: Elvis has come back into the building — in animated form, at least. Netflix has announced it has ordered “an adult animated show called Agent King” in which Elvis Presley “is inducted into a secret government spy program to help battle dark forces that threaten the country he loves – all while holding down his day job as the most famous rock’n’roll star on the planet.” No doubt this news has the suspicious minds animated and the bad guys all shook up.
“FLORIDA WOMAN” Quirky stories in the media often start with “Florida man” (does something odd.) But here is one that provides equal opportunity for a female Floridian. A 32-year-old woman was recently arrested for burglarizing a house in Bradenton. She told the cops that she “works for the Special Victims Unit of the CIA and that Donald Trump is her handler.” Seems legit. But then she added that her parents are Bill and Hillary Clinton AND John F. Kennedy (the latter she says, despite fake news reports, is still alive.) Now that CBS has a hole in its schedule maybe someone should pitch: “CIA SVU.”
“FLORIDA PASTOR”: OK, he currently lives in Ohio but televangelist Frank Amedia was in Florida recently telling an audience that God showed him a vision of the White House having been bugged. “What I saw was that the entire residence, the Oval Office, and the areas of the residence of the president are bugged,” Amedia said. “And it’s bugged by the CIA and the FBI and the dark ops and I said, ‘They’re in a conspiracy to make sure that this topples.’ And I said that the Lord showed that it is even in the paint on the sides of the walls. I said that, ‘The Lord says not to trust the CIA, not to trust the FBI, nor to trust government surveillance to get it. Bring in an outside source, either bring in the Israelis or some outside source that you can trust and debug it, clean it, and don’t move.”
HAS ANYTHING BUGGED YOU LATELY? Do you have any news nuggets yearning to breathe free? Send them like a heat seeking missile to the Dead Drop at TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
