FINALLY FILLING SEATS: There were a couple high-power personnel announcements in the Intelligence Community this week. DNI Avril Haines welcomed Dr. Adele Merritt as the IC Chief Information Officer. Merritt has worked at NSA, DOE, NSC and in the private sector at a non-profit “focused on advancing cybersecurity, innovation and collaboration through partnerships with industry, academia, and government.” Michael Waschull has been acting IC CIO for over a year and will stay on as deputy. And the White House announced the President’s intent to nominate Kate Heinzelman to be General Counsel of the CIA. She currently serves as Chief Counselor in the Office of the Attorney General. In the past, she worked as an Associate Counsel to the President, an Assistant to the AG for National Security in DOJ and on the staff of the DNI. Oh, and she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and for Judge Merrick Garland when he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals. The CIA GC job requires Senate confirmation and has been vacant for quite a while.
WELL, NOT MUCH ELSE HAS WORKED: The Daily Star says Russia is preparing to deploy “robo-balls” in their attack on Ukraine. The devices are said to look like the BB-8 droid from Star Wars and have previously been deployed in Syria. The formal name for them is “Sphera.” The baseball-sized units are said to have four video cameras giving them a 360-degree view and microphones that can pick up sound and send it to operatives “up to 50 meters away” (which doesn’t sound that far away to us.) There is some video from four years ago, of Sphera in action. If Vlad’s lads have really good arms, perhaps they can toss robo-balls ahead of themselves and find out why their military convoy has been stuck for a couple weeks.
PUTIN, CALL YOUR AGENT: On Tuesday, the Department of Justice charged that Elena Branson, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen, was illegally acting as an agent on behalf of Moscow. According to the complaint, she failed to register as required under FARA (the “Foreign Agents Registration Act.”) For more than a decade, DOJ says she coordinated an “I Love Russia” campaign in the U.S. aimed at “promoting Russian history and culture” to American youth. DOJ alleges that at some point, she even personally communicated with Putin. We are not sure how much she was paid – but Putin might have been reaching out to ask for his money back.
PROBABLY A COINCIDENCE: Last week, Mikhail Watford, 66, a Ukrainian-born oil and gas tycoon, was found hanged in the garage of his U.K. mansion. The Daily Mail says a neighbor claims that Watford had shared with her his worry that he was on Vladimir Putin’s hit list. Watford was a friend of Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky who was found hanged at his estate in the U.K. in 2013. Apparently, being a billionaire can be deadly. Despite the neighbor’s comments, The Daily Mail (at the end of their story) says that local authorities are conducting an investigation “…but it is not believed there are any suspicious circumstances.”
APPARENTLY CRIME DOESN’T PAY: The Dead Drop told you back in mid-November about Matthew Marshall, a Whitefish, Montana, man who pleaded guilty to defrauding someone out of $2.3 million by getting him to donate money to fake “off-the-books” rescue missions for the CIA. A week later, we relayed press reports alleging that the person who was defrauded was Michael Goguen, a Silicon Valley billionaire with what some might call a colorful reputation of his own. Well, now a Federal District Court in Montana has sentenced Marshall to six years in prison and ordered him to make restitution to his victim and pay the federal government for back taxes he never paid on the money he scammed. We can understand the tax challenge. What line do you use on your IRS 1040 form for ‘off-the-books CIA rescue missions’ income? Additional details about the case are in the Flathead Beacon newspaper which, even if they were not interesting, we would want to mention because the “Flathead Beacon” is such a cool name. Fortunately, some of those additional details are noteworthy – for example, to impress his victim, officials say Marshall used a smartphone app called “Burner” to send bogus emails and texts to himself pretending they were coming from famed former CIA counterterrorism official Cofer Black.
DAMN THE INNOCULATIONS, NO SPEED AHEAD: The U.S. Navy is at war – with a U.S. federal judge in Florida. And so far, it’s a standoff. It seems that the commanding officer of an unnamed Norfolk, VA-based guided missile destroyer has refused to get COVID inoculations as required by DoD. And he may have risked exposing a large number of shipmates when he was himself infected. The Navy says it has lost confidence in his judgment and wants to relieve him from command. But Judge Steven Merryday said: “All stop.” The tricky part is that the ship is scheduled to deploy overseas shortly, and the judge’s order means that it cannot do so – since Merryday has ordered that the Navy do nothing to adversely impact the naysaying captain. Two years ago, Captain Brett Crozier lost his command of USS Theodore Roosevelt for wanting to protect his sailors from COVID. Now this guy is (for the moment) keeping his command for being willing to expose his crew to it. Well, at least there is nothing going on in the world that might require a forward deployed guided missile destroyer.
CON MAN AND COMPANY WOMAN: ABC has ordered a pilot of a one hour drama called “The Company You Keep” about a con man who falls in love with a CIA operative. (Get it, “Company”?) The show would star Milo Ventimiglia who was in This is Us. The official summary of the show is interesting: “A night of passion leads to love between con man Charlie (Ventimiglia) and undercover CIA officer Emma, who are unknowingly on a collision course professionally. While Charlie ramps up the ‘family business’ so he can get out for good, Emma’s closing in on the vengeful criminal who holds Charlie’s family debts in-hand — forcing them to reckon with the lies they’ve told so they can save themselves and their families from disastrous consequences.”
PINE ON PRIME: Coming in April, on Prime Video is a film called “All the Old Knives” starring Chris Pine as a CIA operative. The plot: “When the CIA discovers one of its agents (sic) leaked information that cost more than 100 people their lives, veteran operative Henry Pelham is assigned to root out the mole from among his former officemates at the agency’s Vienna station. His investigation takes him from Austria to England to California, where he is reunited with his one-time colleague and ex-lover Celia Harrison. The pair are forced to blur the lines between profession and passion in this riveting tale of global espionage, moral ambiguity, and deadly betrayal.” Here is the trailer.
IPCRESS RE-FILED: The 1965 espionage movie, “The Ipcress File” was based on a 1962 novel by Len Deighton. Now, Britain-based ITV is turning it into a six-part series for television. Set in cold-war Berlin, it involves Joe Cole playing Harry Palmer, a former British Army sergeant, who gets sprung from prison to help British Intelligence find a missing British nuclear scientist. The TV version will include Ashley Thomas playing a CIA “agent” Paul Maddox – a character who was not in the motion picture with Sir Michael Caine – but was in the original book. No word yet on when and where the series will air in the U.S. It debuts later this month in the UK.
BET HE'D LIKE A DO-OVER ON THIS ONE: Back on Christmas Eve, The Dead Drop kinda mocked former CIA officer and TV writer, Joe Weisberg for penning an OP-ED for The Washington Post titled: "The Cold War is over. Why do we still treat Russia like the Evil Empire?" At the time we said: "Because they do bad things?" Yeah. We'll stand by our take.
POCKET LITTER: Dead Droplets and bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
SURE HOPE THEY MONETIZED IT: A website called Tweaktown.com reminds us that in 2014, Vladimir Putin claimed the internet was a “CIA Project.”
YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONES YOU LOVE: Remember Maria Butina, the woman who was deported from the U.S. in 2019, after being convicted of conspiring to infiltrate various organizations on behalf of Mother Russia? Well, not long after returning to her homeland, she was elected to the Duma. Butina was interviewed on BBC Radio this week and doubled down on her stupid claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a neo-Nazi – and then for good measure – Butina suggested that all those images you see of bombed out Ukrainian cities, hospitals, etc…are the result of Zelenskyy’s forces attacking their own people. Where would she get the idea that a country would bring harm to its own people? Oh wait….
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