Each week, we bring our readers tidbits of gossip from the world of national security and intelligence. The Dead Drop is a source of fun and intriguing news you may have missed.
HOME ALONE: CIA Director Gina Haspel was confirmed by the Senate on May 17th. Because she had been nominated for the job two months prior to that, most Agency watchers we talked to at the time expected that fairly quickly after she was sworn in, someone would be named deputy director – and there might be other senior positions shifted around. But now, more than a month after the President attended her Langley swearing in – Haspel’s old deputy chair remains empty. What’s the hang up? No one will tell us, leaving opportunities for Dead Drop speculation to thrive. The deputy position does not require Senate confirmation, so the job could be filled with the stroke of a pen. One guess we have heard about the deputy drought is that a struggle is going on among various factions within the administration to install one of their supporters in the job. The Washington Post reported in early June that Joe Hagin, deputy chief of staff at the White House, and the man credited with pulling together the President’s Singapore summit, had his eye on the Agency job. Hagin is widely respected around DC and is a rare official who arrived in the Trump administration with plenty of White House experience. Hagin has worked for every Republican president since Ronald Reagan. But on Monday of this week BuzzFeed rolled out a story citing five unnamed sources claiming that when Hagin was out of government – he ran a consulting firm that did work for a wealthy Libyan client who was hoping to “run an international treasure hunt” trying to recover billions of dollars stolen by Muammar Qaddafi. And if that wasn’t enough – Buzzfeed says the Libyan was involved in a “celebrity sex cult.” Sounds to us like someone may be dropping a dime on Hagin. Whatever the case, word came out on Tuesday the 19th that Hagin will be stepping down in early July. In a statement, President Trump called him a “huge asset” to his administration – but there was no mention of any other post. The Cipher Brief checked in with Agency sources who said it could be a few more weeks before there are any announcements on filling senior CIA positions.
WOLFE CASH: In last week’s Dead Drop we shared some details about the arrest of former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer Jim Wolfe for allegedly lying to the FBI about some close and continuing contact with some members of the news media. Shortly after the Dead Drop was published, the Washington Examiner noticed that a “GoFundMe Page” had been set up on Wolfe’s behalf with a goal of raising $500,000 for his legal defense. The Examiner’s Paul Bedard noted that after a couple days – Wolfe was only $498,310 short of his goal. In other words – there weren’t a lot of people rushing to aid the former aide. Six days after that initial report, a grand total of an additional $325 has flooded in. Wolfe’s former secret girlfriend, Ali Watkins, may not need a GoFundMe for her own defense, since the Justice Department said in a court filing on Tuesday that they don’t plan to subpoena journalists in the Wolfe case. Watkins reportedly departed on “previously planned vacation” from her New York Times job last week – just as her newspaper opened a review of her “work history.”
BORDERLINE CRAZY: The administration’s now-abandoned policy of separating children from their parents caught illegally crossing the southern border could be considered a success – if the goal was to minimize the amount of time pundits could spend focusing on the Mueller investigation. It seems all available energy and scrutiny has been devoted to the 1-800-KAGES-4-KIDS campaign. The policy forged a powerful and unlikely group of people in opposition – ranging from all of the living former (and current) first ladies, liberal Democrats (of course) but also conservative Republicans like Congressman Will Hurd, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and national security officials like former NSA and CIA Director, General Mike Hayden who created quite some controversy by tweeting out a picture of the Birkenau Nazi concentration camp with the message: “Other governments have separated mothers and children.” The administration’s message to its critics seemed to be: if you don’t like all these children being ripped from their families – pay for the President’s border wall. The message reminded us of the cover of a National Lampoon from 1973 which showed a dog with a gun pointing at it. The headline was: “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.” The satirical magazine went out of business twenty years ago.
A MOLE WITH NINE LIVES: There is a new book out by a guy who now calls himself “Aimen Dean” titled: “Nine Lives: My time as the West’s top spy inside al-Qaeda.” “Dean” is a pseudonym for a Saudi national who says he joined al Qaeda as a teenager and became an expert bombmaker. But, he says, he became disillusioned with the terror group and became a mole for British Intelligence in 1999. According to NBCNEWS.COM, Dean claims that his cover was blown in a 2007 book by journalist Ron Suskind called “The One Percent Doctrine.” Following the disclosures in the book, Dean had to quickly go into hiding to avoid being killed by his al Qaeda cohorts. In interviews, Dean blames associates of then-Vice President Richard Cheney for leaking identifying information about him to Suskind, the recipient of an earlier Pulitzer-Prize for reporting. No one is likely to own up to such a leak today, of course. Suskind’s books have been the source of considerable controversy. A book he wrote in 2008 called “The Way of the World,” provoked a rare book review from the CIA calling many of his claims fiction. Another book, “Confidence Men,” written about the Obama administration in 2011 sparked a story in Slate titled “Don’t Believe Ron Suskind” and pointed out numerous factual errors. But if “Nine Lives” is to be believed, he might have gotten something right in “The One Percent Doctrine” – and in doing so may have terminated a productive intelligence source.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
- The Perfect Weapon: New York Times National Security Correspondent David E. Sanger is sharing what he thinks about the cyber threat in his new book titled 'The Perfect Weapon'. Though it's only been out a few days, its being well-received in the Intelligence Community. Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA turned academic, writes in The New York Times that Sanger "stays firmly grounded in real events, including communication systems getting hacked and servers being disabled. He avoids the tendency, all too common in futuristic discussions of cyber issues, to spin out elaborate and scary hypothetical scenarios."
- The Atlantic Lands Big Fish: The Atlantic announced on June 14th that it has hired Vernon Loeb to be its politics editor. Loeb is currently managing editor of the Houston Chronicle. He has previously held senior roles at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Loeb covered intelligence and national security for the Post around the Millennium and established a record of productivity and reliability according to several former government officials with whom we talked. At The Atlantic, Loeb is expected to double the size of the publication’s political reporting team covering Congress, the White House and national security.
- A Hollywood project the CIA will probably like: According to Variety, filmmaker Ridley Scott has hired scriptwriter Dave Collard to write the screenplay for “Neither Confirm Nor Deny,” a movie based on David Sharp’s book “The CIA’s Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-Armed Soviet Sub.”
- A Hollywood project the CIA will probably not like: Deadline Hollywood reports that casting continues for Vice Studio’s forthcoming drama “The Torture Report.” Maura Tierney has been given the role of “an intense, driven, somewhat vengeful counterterrorism expert determined to get behind any program that promises to get the intel that will stop another attack from happening” in the days immediately following 9/11.
- A book Sputnik News doesn’t like: The Putin-powered Sputnik News site recently carried an opinion piece saying that former CIA Director General Mike Hayden’s new book “The Assault on Intelligence” is a “manifesto against Trump.” The piece quotes an Israeli political analyst named Avigdor Eskin saying it's not about Trump waging a "war" against U.S. intelligence but claims that what Hayden is really concerned about is the ongoing Trump-driven elite change in Washington, when one "team" is being replaced with another.
- For the Birds? About a week ago, the folks at Muckrock.com posted a grainy photo of a birdhouse labeled “Building 12 ½.” The image was once classified – and was cleared for public viewing back in 2001. Muckrock asked why the CIA would classify a birdhouse in the first place and invited readers to take a guess by answering via Twitter or other means. When last we checked, there were no responses – which seems to show a remarkable lack of imagination.
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING: Got any tips for your friendly neighborhood Dead Drop? Shoot us a note at TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
