CAN’T WE ALL GET ALONG? The Dead Drop is old enough to remember when conservative politicians and media were the biggest defenders of the national defense establishment. But those days are gone (for the moment at least.) Last week, Tucker Carlson, whose show on Fox News consistently scores enormous ratings, is worked up about perceived “wokeness” so he called the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, “a pig” and “stupid.” Milley’s offense, apparently, was not condemning the curricula for an elective course at the U.S. Military Academy. This did not go down well with a lot of people. For example, Cipher Brief Expert, retired Navy Admiral Jim Stavridis tweeted that he would bet on his friend Milley (a Princeton grad and former varsity hockey player) in a bar fight or IQ test with any of his recent critics. A number of veterans, including Cipher Brief Expert General Michael Hayden expressed unhappiness on learning that the insurance company favored by a vast majority of military personnel, USAA, is a regular advertiser on Carlson’s show. USAA is faced with a dilemma – pull their ads and please Carlson’s critics – or keep them because there are undoubtedly a large number of vets who are Carlson fans. The company reportedly has been telling those who question them that they reach their members by advertising on “a variety of channels.” Anti “stupid pig” and pro, we guess. For our money – USAA has some explaining to do. By which we mean their ubiquitous advertising slogan: “What you’re made of, we’re made for.” What does that mean, exactly? It’s one of those things that seems to make sense – until you think about it.
TUCKER: NSA IS WATCHING ME: Taking on General Milley apparently wasn’t enough, so Tucker Carlson earlier this week, accused the National Security Agency of spying on him. He said on Monday that a ‘whistleblower’ within the US government told him that the NSA was monitoring his “…electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.” Carlson said he has filed a FOIA request with the government – so we feel confident that - that should get to the bottom of it (in ten or fifteen years.) NSA took the highly unusual step though, of responding to the charge saying “This allegation is untrue. Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air.” They added that NSA has a foreign intelligence mission and cannot legally target a U.S. citizen without a court order that explicitly authorized the targeting. Carlson isn’t buying it, however, calling NSA’s statement “infuriatingly dishonest.” Is it TV ratings season? Asking for a friend.
WOKE WORK: Don’t tell Carlson – but the Department of Defense’s Inspector General’s office is looking to hire a senior official work on “Diversity Inclusion and Extremism in the Military.” The job is described as a Senior Executive Service position paying in the range of $161-199K a year. Among the responsibilities: “…oversight related to diversity and inclusion in the Department of Defense (DoD) and the prevention of and response to supremacist, extremist, and criminal gang activity of a member of the Armed Forces.” We can guess who won’t be applying for that job.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFENDERS: No political party or influencer has the market cornered on dumb stuff. To illustrate that point, this week former Democratic Congresswoman (and Green Party presidential candidate) Cynthia McKinney pinned something atop her twitter account showing the jigsaw puzzle-like image of the burning Twin Towers with the words “The Final Piece of the Puzzle….Zionists did it.” Twitter eventually took down the post. Guess they thought it was dumb, too.
THIS MEANS WAR! Last week, we mentioned the odd doings in the Black Sea where Russian aircraft did (or did not) fire warning shots in the direction of a Royal Navy warship. We’re indebted to veteran Russia watcher Julia Davis for pointing out that a few days later, a Russian lawmaker appeared on State TV proclaiming that the Motherland’s SU-24 attack aircraft carry special electronic warfare gear that, if fired, would cause British sailors to go prematurely gray and, what is worse, drain all of their cellphone batteries. (Head scratch.)
BOOK BEAT: Here are three upcoming books to keep an eye on. Former CIA Counterterrorist Center chief of operations Ric Prado has written a memoir titled, Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior, to be published next March 1 by St. Martin’s Press. The advance publicity for the book describes it as a… “harrowing memoir of life in the shadowy world of assassins, terrorists, spies and revolutionaries. Black Ops is a testament to the courage, creativity and dedication of the Agency’s Special Activities Group and its elite shadow warriors.” Coming this fall is a book called “A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: The Strange Case of Maria Butina, the Russian Spy Who Wasn’t, and the Men Who Fought for Her Freedom.” Written by one of Butina’s lawyers, Alfred Carry. The book has some heavy lifting ahead if it hopes to convince Americans that Butina was an innocent bystander. That’s a lawyer’s job. Oh, wait…. The publisher is Skyhorse – which also has a book coming out this month asking, ‘Who Really Killed Nicole?’ written by none other than O.J. Simpson’s former manager (cause he would be the one to know…). Perhaps Skyhorse specializes in unlikely defense books. Another book you might get a bang out of is the forthcoming ‘Atoms and Ashes’ by Serhii Plokhy. Said to be the history of a half-century of nuclear catastrophes, this book looks at incidents at Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima. The book’s aim reportedly is to “explore the risks of nuclear power for both military and peaceful purposes and examining how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances. The book is being published by Norton – but the countdown clock has yet to tell us when it’s being released.
DING ON OUR DONG STORY: Last week’s Dead Drop mentioned stories swirling around about the possible defection of Dong Jingwei, the Chinese vice minister of State Security. As we mentioned in the piece – rumors of Dong’s defection turned out to be incorrect. But also incorrect was when we attributed the original story to The Daily Beast when it appeared first in a Spy Talk article by Matthew Brazil and Jeff Stein. A further defect in our defector story was the notion that U.S. officials called the authors to tell them that their story was incorrect – when in fact the original story made clear that some experts doubted it from the start. The U.S. official was simply advising the reporters that the rumors were wrong – not their story. We regret not getting all that right in the first place.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
CYBER NONSENSE: Doug Logan, the CEO of “Cyber Ninjas,” the firm conducting an audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County, AZ, is reportedly involved in a new movie called “The Deep Rig” which asserts that the CIA was somehow involved in spreading “disinformation” about the election. According to the Washington Examiner, the film’s director, Roger Richards, previously produced a film which asserted that aliens (the kind from outer space) were behind the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. Exactly what election disinformation the CIA was allegedly spreading is unclear – but the article says that at least 2,500 virtual viewers paid $45 a ticket to watch “The Deep Rig”.
THE BUS STOPS HERE: Pity the poor chap in the U.K. who misplaced 50 pages of “officially sensitive” documents – which were reportedly discovered in a rain-soaked heap behind a bus stop in Kent last week. While not super highly classified – some were marked “Secret UK Eyes Only,” so they are not the sort of things a bloke would want to leave lying about. The BBC reported that the documents included “highly sensitive recommendations” for the U.K.’s military footprint in Afghanistan following the U.S. pullout. (We’re guessing that footprint will be awfully small.) The documents were also said to address British officials’ thinking about sending warships into contested waters off Crimea – and why they didn’t want to appear “..scared/running away” from the Russians. The person who misplaced the documents has reportedly turned him or herself in to authorities. We’re betting the experience was enough to turn their hair prematurely gray and drain their cell phone battery without resorting to an SU-24.
SAVE A TRIP TO THE BUS STOP: Take your news tips for The Dead Drop and email them to us at TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
