Dead Drop: July 15

LET ME BE THE FIRST TO WISH YOU HAPPY BIRTHDAY:  Last week’s Dead Drop led with an item about an imminent visit by President Biden to CIA headquarters to be among the first to celebrate the Agency’s 75^th birthday. The visit happened and Biden praised the CIA as the “bedrock of our national security.”  He also thanked the “incredible work of our intelligence professionals” for enabling the US to alert the world to Putin’s plans to attack Ukraine. Oddly, the visit did not make much of a splash with the mainstream media.  Perhaps in part due to the assassination of Japan’s Shinzo Abe dominating the news that afternoon, the visit was under reported.  For several days, we couldn’t even find a mention of Biden’s visit on the Agency’s own social media accounts. They got around to posting something about it on Facebook about three days after the event. We were able to confirm by checking the CIA’s Tweet account that the President’s visit was a bit early. The account says at the top: “Born September 18, 1947.”   The White House released the full text of the remarks.

BIG FAT MISTAKE: In the July 1 edition of The Dead Drop we relayed a story that appeared in the DailyMail.com (and a number of other tabloid newspapers) including the New York Post about a morbidly obese, 67-year-old, Russian general (supposedly named “Pavel”)  who had reportedly been recalled to lead the fight in Afghanistan. Some European journalists did a very deep dive on matter, analyzing the photo to a fair thee well and determining that the giant general was in fact a former member of the Border Guard (part of the FSB) and not currently a member of the Army. In other words, the story was kind of a hoax. Check out the detailed analysis here. Turns out the portly Pavel is really 58-year-old Ivan Ivanovich Turchin. So far, the newspapers which first made a splash with the story have not apologized.  But here at The Dead Drop we would like to go on the record as saying we regret having thought that the Russian army had enough rations to feed the chunky chap.