James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence (Viking, 2018), 432 pages, $17.99, ISBN-13: 978-0525558644.
There was a time when I thought James Clapper was one of the top five flag officers among the sixty-five or so that I had worked with over 40 years.
I’ve known Clapper since 1994 and it is with distress that I conclude his judgment was diminished in 2007 when he became the first professional Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI),[1] following Stephen Cambone, a political appointee himself with mixed talents.[2]
Between the two of them, they turned defense intelligence into a spending cesspool biased toward technical collection and mass data storage, fully in line with what one author calls “Grand Theft Pentagon.[3]”
Clapper’s tenure as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) can be summed up quite simply: one trillion dollars spent, to no good end. There is no question about Clapper’s being respected and trusted by his own professionals. Nor is there any question as to Clapper’s competence as an administrator. What is at question is the veracity of his book – and its utility to the public – when it includes twenty separate assertions that according to all available open source evidence, are lies.[4]
In fairness to Clapper, there are three pre-existing conditions that made it much easier for him to “go along” and much more difficult for him to actually sound the alarm and insist on reform – as Amy Zegart has documented so ably, the secret intelligence system is so corrupt and dysfunctional that it can only be fixed with a Presidential mandate – “fix big or don’t fix at all.”[5] Clapper went along to get along. The pre-existing conditions are:
01 Strategic: Pay to Play. The standard kick-back for both Senators and Representatives is 5%.[6] They get this amount as donations to their Political Action Committees (PAC) in return for keeping the money moving and growing regardless of need or outcome. Bill Binney has provided recurring testimony on the National Security Agency (NSA) as a case in point: they are not focused on creating Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) that will put down traitors and criminals including pedophiles as well as white collar criminals looting the public treasury; rather they are there to “keep the money moving”[7] to which I would add “and growing.” That is why NSA “leaders” killed the internally-devised and very inexpensive Thin Thread program[8] and instead spent billions on the extremely expensive externally-devised (contractor) approach – a total failure –by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).[9] NSA got to spend more money without actually improving, and Members of Congress were richly rewarded by SAIC and other contractors for authorizing and appropriating funds not at all related to the public interest.
02 Operational: Budget-Building. Chuck Spinney calls this the plans/reality mismatch,[10] but in the absence of an intelligence community (IC) actually capable of evaluating all threats, programs, and costs (true cost economics), and given the corruption of both past Presidents and past Congresses all too willing to borrow ever-increasing amounts of money (which is unconstitutional) for ever-decreasing capabilities, what this really is an alternative to competition for promotion – instead of fighting for promotion within a closed system where you are either promoted or retired (or fired), the game is to build the budget, hire more people, and create for yourself endless promotional opportunities. As Bob Gates himself has pointed out, no one in Washington gets fired for incompetence[11]. They do get promoted if they can build their budget and hire more incompetents. Expensive solutions that require more hiring and more spending, whether they work or not, are the preferred objective for any aspiring chain of command seeking to promote itself without having to compete for otherwise limited jobs.
03 Tactical & Technical: Cult of Secrecy & Covert Operations. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read on page 159 of Clapper’s book the following sentence:
I always cautioned the president and secretaries that intelligence work was about acquiring and assessing foreign secrets, not predicting events or reading minds.
This is a blatant misrepresentation of the craft of intelligence. Intelligence is about decision-support – the outputs, most of which can be unclassified – not about secret collection, processing, and analysis, a tiny fraction of the totality of threat, policy, and cost information.[12] Intelligence is also, as my colleague Bill Binney has reminded me, about predicting “intentions and capabilities.” I agree with Bill when he concludes that Clapper went along with the prevailing pathologies (as did Mike Hayden) and misdirected secret intelligence toward excessive spending on technical collection and mass storage while neglecting human collection, processing, analysis, and actually producing useful decision-support.[13]
What is really at issue here is not Clapper’s intelligence and integrity – both are adequate but insufficient to the challenges he faced – but rather that secret intelligence as it is now mis-managed is very expensive (both profitable and wasteful) and totally lacking in accountability. It is a private playpen, at taxpayer expense, for an extremely incestuous (relatively small) group of senior executives (government employees), contracting executives (generally former government employees), and their bankers. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), for which I have been the primary proponent since 1988, is very inexpensive and can answer almost all questions for all levels of government decision-making, while generally eradicating corruption and waste with transparent overt counterintelligence.[14]
Clapper – and his book – are the ultimate manifestation of a secret intelligence system that thrives on grand theft, mass murder, & legalized lies while absolutely rejecting with malice and knowledge of falsity, the value of OSINT – and machine-assisted meta-analytics – precisely because they are not an expensive enough “solution” and even worse, would call into question 70% or more of what we waste money on now[15]
The Back Story
I started the OSINT revolution in 1988 within the halls of government, in 1992 in the public domain after four years of being blown off by colleagues obsessed with secret sources and methods and not willing to listen to reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which I was proud to work for as a clandestine operations officer for nine years, has fought to marginalize me from day one. They were furious when Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) Admiral Bill Studeman, USN, agreed to speak at my first conference on Open Source Solutions in 1992, and ordered them to attend. CIA retaliated by ordering the Marine Corps to forbid me from every running another OSINT conference again, at which point I resigned from my position as the second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps Intelligence to pursue a policy revolution in the public interest – I have trained over 7,500 officers across 66+ countries, only to see all of them repressed by their own intelligence agencies being bribed and mis-directed by CIA and NSA to ignore the clear potential of OSINT.[16]
In 2000, with the recommendations of the Aspin-Brown Commission firmly in mind,[17] an Open Source Agency (OSA) was approved by the leadership of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) with an Initial Operating Capability (IOC) of $125M toward a Full Operational Capability (FOC) budget of $2 billion, precisely as recommended by The Challenge of Global Coverage study in the 1990’s.[18] Sadly the leadership changed and we lost our earliest chance to transform modern intelligence.
For thirty years CIA has successfully handicapped both US and foreign OSINT, insisting that OSINT is only about “media monitoring” now including social media monitoring, and that it must be “passive.[19]” CIA refuses to allow Active OSINT[20], which is the organized, persistent, and broad harnessing of distributed overt human experts in all languages – the people who know the 90% that is not in English, not online, and not accessible by the rather retarded – by choice – secret world. From China to Denmark to Zimbabwe, there has been a decisive shift away from the CIA position in the past two years, and I believe the craft of intelligence is about to see a massive multinational transformation, which makes Clapper’s failure as USDI and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) all the more tragic.
In 2007 when Clapper was first feeling his way into mega-management, he appointed Colonel Vincent Stewart, USMC (today Lieutenant General and Deputy Director of the US Cyber Command) to study OSINT, and to then Colonel Stewart’s credit, he reached out to me and I gave him every possible support. He told me later that in the course of his investigations, he had never in his entire career seen more lying, cheating, and backstabbing than he encountered from secret intelligence professionals on this topic (OSINT) that they clearly saw as a budget-buster. He too, however, found that he needed to “go along” and OSINT was never properly championed by USDI.[21]
I now realize – this is my speculative interpretation – that in 2007-2009 USDI Clapper saw OSINT the same way that Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet saw it when he commissioned the study in 1997, The Challenge of Global Coverage,[22] in which my former boss Boyd Sutton concluded after exhaustive investigation, that we needed to spend $2 billion a year (in contrast to $80 billion a year or so on secret sources and methods) on OSINT. The number was devised by Keith Hall, then Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and previously Director of the Budget Staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) in a very simple fashion: 200 countries and topics not covered by secret intelligence, times $10 million a year for a range of offline and online monitoring and international (not just US) Subject Matter Experts (SME) focused on each of the 200 topics, thus providing a “safety net” or baseline capability. As Boyd told me, when he delivered these findings to George in 1997, George said “I am locking this study up, we will speak of it no more.” Boyd’s interpretation, and my own, was that George was distressed by the fact that the study not only did not justify a massive increase in secret spending, but it actually opened to door to taking the US IC toward 100% satisfaction of all US Government (USG) decision-support needs at a tiny fraction of the cost of what we are spending on secret sources and methods that provide “at best” 4% of what a major commander needs (and nothing for everyone else)[23].
I tried one more time, in 2010, this time with the assistance of Joe Markowitz, the former Director of the Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), which was itself gutted in the 1990’s by then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management (DDCI/CM) Joan Dempsey, herself an intimate of Clapper’s at the time, who refused to create a community-wide OSINT program equivalent to the community-wide programs for the other disciplines. Although OMB senior staff again agreed with Joe and I that there was a need for an OSA at $2 billion a year, OMB’s approval was contingent on a Cabinet Department asking for it, and Clapper had refused to entertain our leadership and staff briefings in 2009.[24] I have the impression that CIA has very successfully blocked my approaches to each of a secession of Secretaries of State, all of whom would have benefited enormously from this capability.
William Binney’s[25] experience with Thin Thread – an inexpensive elegant way to find the needles in the digital haystack – mirrors my own with OSINT, which is an inexpensive elegant way to do global coverage and achieve 100% decision-support capability at the strategic, operational or policy, tactical, and technical (acquisition) levels. Clapper, Hayden, all of the so-called leaders of the US IC have not only focused on spending as much money as possible as foolishly as possible, but they have discarded the Constitution and the ethical obligations associated with the oaths of office. Below is Bill’s summary of the situation[26], which I take to be a signal (pun intended) failure by Clapper and Hayden particularly.
As I summed it up for the Intelligence Policy Committee in the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, drawing on Snowden’s materials, mass surveillance is very bad for five reasons:
First, mass acquisition of everyone’s data (emails, texts, calls) creates an omni-powerful central government that achieves Stasi-like, Gestapo-like, Stalinist-like, capabilities.Second, mass acquisition makes the analysts dysfunctional – we are not doing the meta-data pattern analysis and anomaly detection but are instead burying the analysts with noise, which is why they can no longer achieve any sort of early warning on anything. We have lost the ability and the human skills necessary to predict “intentions and capabilities.”Third, mass acquisition has turned the US IC – NSA particularly – into forensics agencies (basically a law enforcement job).
Fourth, mass acquisition has been weaponized for political purposes, with US IC agencies (as well as allied agencies such as GCHQ[27] ) using their capabilities for political advantage.
Fifth, mass acquisition is extremely expensive in its demands for data storage with its attendant energy and water consumption levels, and is doomed.
Put most simply, whatever modest achievements Clapper may claim since the mid-1990’s when he took over the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP) as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), his career suffers from two tangible sucking chest wounds:
01 He failed to leverage OSINT and remained stuck at 4% performance after spending a trillion dollars.
02 He allowed NSA under Hayden to destroy Thin Thread and both machine-assisted meta-analytics and human analysis, and instead embark on a massive unconstitutional very expensive and ultimately doomed attempt to spy on everyone digitally, particularly and illegally including all US citizens.
Review of the Book
There were three aspects of the book that I found useful.
First, I was glad to read Clapper’s history and learn that he was doubly-blessed. His father was a founding Colonel in the Air Force SIGINT service; and he was selected as an aide to a flag officer early on. In combination it is clear that Clapper – whose intellect and integrity I admired in the early 1990’s – climbed quickly with those two assists, and later in life, as a trusted water-carrier to neo-conservative Bob Gates.
Second, the chapter “Consumed by Money” is worthy of inclusion in mid-career courses, and also noteworthy for observing that we are spending 20-25% of our total secret intelligence budget on Information Technology (IT) – but in a very significant omission, Clapper neglects to point out that for all that money, we process less than 1% of what we collect[28], and simply do not have the “tools for thinking” that CIA itself identified as necessary in 1985-1989.[29]
Third, the chapter “Snowden” is in my own view both a study in denial and a study in hypocrisy – but I acknowledge that people I respect feel very strongly to the contrary[30]. I am particularly galled by Clapper’s praise for Mike Hayden, who is richly deserving of being recalled to active duty for court martial – this is a man who violated the Constitution twice, first in engaging in warrantless wiretapping and mass surveillance at NSA[31], and then in fully embracing rendition and torture and then drone assassinations with a 98% collateral damage ratio, at CIA[32]. The idea that Snowden’s leaks are a threat to national security when compared to NSA’s 100,000 interception points across America and its many back-doors inserted into Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, and other products with the active complicity of the leaders of those companies (in gross violation of all their fiduciary responsibilities) is for me absurd[33].
The book falls short on multiple fronts. Sadly, it fails to actually outline lessons learned and a vision for an effective USG intelligence function capable of answering decision-support needs across all functions and levels of government. This book does not remotely approach the substance of my own writings[34], or the three hundred books on intelligence by others that I have respectfully reviewed[35]. There is exactly one good idea in this book, on page 139, where Clapper, via his ghost writer, articulates the need for a separate consolidated intelligence authorization and appropriation, eliminating the fragmentation, duplication, and mismanagement of the individual intelligence elements within each Cabinet Department. I agree.
I searched in vain for learned information about where the various intelligence disciplines from Human Intelligence (HUMINT) to Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), to Measurements and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT) or the various functional domains from analysis to counterintelligence to processing, might be improved. I note with pointed dismay that then Major General Vince Stewart, USMC, Director of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who once championed OSINT within USDI, is mentioned only once in this book, and I put that down to Vince having the balls to publicly suggest that DIA today is irrelevant[36]. Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, USA, Vince’s predecessor, agreed with my own appraisal in 2014 of DIA as totally dysfunctional[37]. OSINT is of course not mentioned in this book.
At a political level, this is a book of lies that not only refuses to acknowledge the multiple false flag operations (I ran a false flag operation for the CIA) used to start wars of profit on the basis of lies, it also continues to retell many lies Clapper told while serving as DNI, the two most important lies being that NSA does not spy on US citizens (it actually collects every email and every phone call of every US citizen with those of Members of Congress being the highest priority); and that the Russians hacked the election[38]. Clapper’s vitriolic hatred for our President Donald Trump is clearly captured in the following quote on page 399:
We have elected someone as president of the United States whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage, to generate financial benefit to himself and his family, and in so doing, to demean the values this country has traditionally stood for. He has set a new low bar for ethics and morality. He has caused damage to our societal and political fabric that will be difficult and will require time to repair. And close to my heart, he has besmirched the Intelligence Community and the FBI – pillars of our country – and deliberately incited many Americans to lose faith and confidence in them.
These are insulting words, malicious words, presumably with knowledge of falsity, and they also violate the standing order against disrespect for the President by any serving or retired member of the Armed Forces.
Among the many misrepresentations that Clapper and his ghost-writer integrate into his book are these, all part of the official narrative, and all known to be and documented to be lies:[39]
● 9/11 [40]
● Assange in Sweden [41]
● Benghazi [42]
● Bin Laden Raid [43]
● Boston Bombing [44]
● David Petraeus Firing [45]
● Gulf of Tonkin [46]
● Hillary Clinton is a Saint [47]
● Intelligence Community Fails Because of Others [48]
● Intelligence Community Has Ethics [49]
● Intelligence Community is Apolitical (No Witch-hunt) [50]
● Intelligence Community Speaks Truth to Power [51]
● Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction [52]
● ISIS/ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria / Levant) [53]
● North Korea Unwilling to Denuclearize [54]
● NSA Not Spying on US Citizens (or Members of Congress) [55]
● President Donald Trump is Disgrace to America [56]
● Russians Penetrated Democratic National Committee (DNC) Computers [57]
● Russians “Hacked” the Election [58]
● Syrian Use of Chemical Weapons[59]
● Assange in Sweden [41]
● Benghazi [42]
● Bin Laden Raid [43]
● Boston Bombing [44]
● David Petraeus Firing [45]
● Gulf of Tonkin [46]
● Hillary Clinton is a Saint [47]
● Intelligence Community Fails Because of Others [48]
● Intelligence Community Has Ethics [49]
● Intelligence Community is Apolitical (No Witch-hunt) [50]
● Intelligence Community Speaks Truth to Power [51]
● Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction [52]
● ISIS/ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria / Levant) [53]
● North Korea Unwilling to Denuclearize [54]
● NSA Not Spying on US Citizens (or Members of Congress) [55]
● President Donald Trump is Disgrace to America [56]
● Russians Penetrated Democratic National Committee (DNC) Computers [57]
● Russians “Hacked” the Election [58]
● Syrian Use of Chemical Weapons[59]
The two most significant omissions in this book – apart from its lacking substantive value in relation to reforming and transforming the craft of intelligence to enable evidence-based governance in the public interest – are counterintelligence, and OSINT. Other than repeating the fabricated narrative about the Russians as the “main enemy” (the Cold War line in cyber-clothing) Clapper ignores what one author calls “Friendly Spies” among whom Zionist Israel clearly stands out.[60]
I strongly suspect that Clapper is fully aware that the pedophilia entrapment and blackmail operations of suspected Mossad officers Jeffrey Epstein[61] and Ghislaine Maxwell are being carried out with the complicity of the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Zionists are also the primary force behind computer penetrations on Capitol Hill, such as those carried out by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her Pakistani “patsies” on behalf of the Mossad.[62]
I strongly suspect that one reason Clapper does not address counterintelligence in this book – the traitors among us – is because he is well aware that Israel – Zionist Israel – is America’s greatest enemy when it comes to the subversion of the US economy, the USG, and US society (e.g. via Hollywood and its culture of pedophilia long promoted by Disney and the likes of Shirley Temple)[63], but Zionist Israel and the Zionist secret police and lead censors in the US, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are the “trusted flaggers” for #GoogleGestapo, controlled across the board by the Zionists on behalf of the Deep State, with the primary mission right now of digitally assassinating conservative voices and subverting the Presidency of Donald Trump.[64]
His deliberate omission of OSINT is to be expected and is a minor footnote within his larger epitaph.
He ends his career with a whimper as the consummate bureaucrat unable to produce a truly great book.
Epilogue
After completing my endnotes I conclude that Clapper – however much he might be respected by those he has worked with – has betrayed the intelligence profession and the Republic. Together with John Brennan, Mike Hayden, and George Tenet, he represents – whether intentionally or unwittingly – the profound loss of intelligence and integrity and imagination within the US secret intelligence community.[65]
IMAGE Credit: Collage and original Benghazi graphic created by Robert David Steele.
Notes
[1]Editors, “Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence,” Wikipedia, undated, accessed 13 June 2018.
[2]Cambone had one bright shining moment in 2004 when he articulated a need for universal coverage by intelligence, at the neighborhood level of granularity, and appeared to grasp that this could only be accomplished with Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Stephen Cambone, “Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Speech to the Security Affairs Support Association (SAS) on Need for Universal Coverage at the Neighborhood Level of Granularity,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 22 January 2004. Other than that he spent his time as a wonk and water carrier for neo-conservatives, with a strong belief that tactical nuclear weapons were both necessary and utilizable. Editors, “Stephen Cambone,” Wikipedia, undated, accessed 13 June 2018.
[3]Jeffrey St. Clair, GRAND THEFT PENTAGON: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror(Common Courage Press, 2005). A summary review is free online.
[4]There is an important difference between asserting that something is a lie, and asserting that the person conveying that information is a liar. Absent an investigation with the power to compel sworn testimony and a polygraph examination, we cannot know if Clapper is repeating these lies because he believes them, or if he is willfully lying himself. When I refer to Clapper’s telling a lie, this distinction is very much in mind. I will leave it to others to decide if Clapper is a serial liar by intent; here is one article on that point: Jonathan Turley, “James Clapper’s perjury, and why DC made men don’t get charged for lying to Congress,” USA Today, 19 January 2018.
[5]Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, 1999). A summary review isfree online. My life’s work on intelligence reform is easily accessible at http://robertdavidsteele.com. Bill Binney and I have agreed that we can eliminate 70% of all of the secret intelligence agencies, and consolidate the 30% worth saving from each as new directorates in a revitalized Central (Classified) Intelligence Agency balanced by an Open Source Agency (OSA) in the Executive Office of the Presidency (EOP) and hence not subject to repression or manipulation by the secret world. The DNI can be eliminated, and the National Intelligence Council (NIC) moved to the EOP, perhaps occupying the White House space now being wasted on the worthless fake news mainstream media press corps, or made the senior element reporting to the Deputy Director of OMB for Management. The time has come to fix big and that means transforming national intelligence to the point that it can ably and inexpensively address all threats, all policies, all costs, all the time for all possible consumers down to desk officer and front line leader (military and police). Preliminary recommendations including public education and election reform pre-requisites are at Robert Steele, “Trump 2.0: Build the Base, Go Long (25 Years),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 12 March 2018, and Robert Steele, For the President of the United States of America Donald Trump: Subject: Eradicating Fake News and False Intelligence with an Open Source Agency That Also Supports Defense, Diplomacy, Development, & Commerce (D3C) Innovation to Stabilize World. Earth Intelligence Network, 2017.
[6]As told to me by a former Director of the Budget Staff, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).
[7]I first heard Bill Binney, who is now a monthly luncheon friend, make this point at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in New York City in 2010. Binney is to NSA as I am to CIA – if President Trump ever wants to “fix big” we know how to melt down 70% of the IC (with a soft landing for all who are dismissed including contractors), and consolidate the remaining 30% into a revitalized CIA complemented by an Open Source Agency (OSA).
[8]William Binney, “Thin Thread – Signals Intelligence within the Rule of Law,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 3 March 2018, integrating full text of Diane Rourk, “Thin Thread,” White Paper, May 2002.
[9]Editors, “Trailblazer Project,” Wikipedia, undated, accessed 13 June 2018.
[10]Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch (Westview Press, 1985). A summary review is free online. See also Chuck Spinney, “Defense Dependency?” TIME, 13 November 2012 in which he summarizes his views on how government specification cost plus engineering pioneered by the US military has totally destroyed the intellectual and moral integrity of engineers across all commercial sectors.
[11]Bob Gates, “Why Bureaucracies So Often Fail Us,” ABC News, 29 January 2017, excerpt from A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service (Vintage, 2017). I have ordered the book. It is possible that Gates, like Robert McNamara and Bill Colby, has grown and reformed himself in his post-service years. His new book is potentially important if it matches the excerpt in quality. His book, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 1997) was quite extraordinary from a policy relations points of view, less so from the craft of intelligence standpoint since Gates has always been a policy wonk rather than an all-source intelligence professional. Still, that was the standard I was expecting for Clapper’s book that Clapper and his ghost-writer have failed to meet. A summary review of From the Shadows is free online.
[12]Intelligence has never been properly defined within the US IC. To its credit, CIA understands this, see for instance Michael Warner, “Wanted: A Definition of Intelligence – Understanding Our Craft,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 46 No. 3, 2002, which concludes, erroneously, that Intelligence is secret, state activity to understand or influence foreign entities. No, it is not. Apart from the matter of needing to eradicate covert operations including false flag operations and regime change operations, intelligence done right is about decision-support. The process of intelligence is one that starts with a requirement, moves on to all-source collection, then multi-media processing and multi-lingual analytics, and finally toward presentation to a decision-maker of facts, estimates, known gaps, and speculative links. Most of what the US IC does is classified information; there is very little “intelligence” being produced. My own chapter, “The Evolving Craft of Intelligence,” in Robert Dover, Michael Goodman, and Claudia Hillebrand (eds.). RoutledgeCompanion to Intelligence Studies, Oxford, UK: Routledge, July 31, 2013 explicitly addresses the three eras of the craft, from secret war to strategic analytics to collective intelligence. The US IC is 30 years behind the times precisely because they have sought to marginalize all those seeking to reform them, including Commandant of the Marine Corps Al Gray, whose article I ghost-wrote, see “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990’s,” American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1989-1990, pp. 37-41. That was my first public article ever. It was followed in quick succession by “Intelligence in the 1990’s: Recasting National Security in a Changing World,”American Intelligence Journal, Summer/Fall 1990, pp. 29-36 and “Applying the ‘New Paradigm’: How to Avoid Strategic Intelligence Failures in the Future,” American Intelligence Journal, Autumn 1991, pp. 43-46. I was invited to help develop the National Security Act of 1992, a story told in “The National Security Act of 1992,” American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1992, pp. 32-37. That reform effort was derailed by Senator John Warner (R-VA) who refused to place at risk a single job in Virginia even if the reforms would achieve savings and radically increase the value of intelligence to the Republic. All of my publications can be seen free online.
[13]William Binney to Robert Steele, personal communication (electronic mail), 13 June 2018.
[14]Supra Note 8. Thin Thread is now ethically and legally available from Pretty Good Knowledge, a Dutch company based in Amsterdam and founded by William Binney and Kirk Wiebe with Dutch partners. When applied to banking and other transactions as available to the USG both within and outside the secret world, it immediately reveals patterns and anomalies associated with overpayments, duplicate payments, erroneous payments, and outright collusion among Members of Congress and those who are looting the public purse.
[15]It is now legal to propagandize (lie to) the US public, at the same time that the Department of Justice claims the right to lie to anyone, including the Supreme Court, when asserting national security privilege. I have written books,chapters, and articles about the urgent need for intelligence reform (and more recently, about world peace and prosperity). My reviews of three hundred non-fiction books about the pathologies of secret intelligence as now practiced are free online. To understand the clash between secret and open intelligence cultures, see Robert Steele, “Modern History of Public Intelligence and the Opposition,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 25 June 2004, also available as a downloadable document.
[16]Cf. “OSINT Historic Contributions Directory,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 10 July 2011.
[17]Robert Steele, “Foreign Liaison and Intelligence Reform: Still in Denial,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 20/1 Spring 2007, pp. 167-174, citing Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1 March 1996. They found US IC capabilities in the OSINT arena to be “severely deficient” and recommended that this be a top priority for additional funding and a top priority for DCI (then George Tenet) attention.
[18]The Deputy Director of OMB approved it over dinner and then moved on to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) before the program decision could be locked down. Personal communications (face to face) with a most senior OMB civil servant in 2000. See also Boyd Sutton, “The Challenge of Global Coverage,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 18 July 1997; and Boyd Sutton, “Global Coverage, Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 24 December 2006. More recently – this is still the most catastrophic failure in the US IC, Boyd Sutton, “Open Source and the World Brain,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 31 March 2014. A story about the Burundi exercise, in which Robert Steele soundly defeated the entire US IC with six phone calls, is provided by Noah Shachtman, “How to Restore Spies Credibility: Go Open Source,” WIRED, 14 December 2007.
[19]Online information is roughly 1% of what can be known from a combination of offline analog information and human knowledge accessed directly on a person to person basis. CIA’s obsession with forbidding the exploitation of overt human sources because that somehow diminishes their “ownership” of HUMINT for which they are the primary proponent, is criminally insane. Any Director of CIA who fails to properly exploit all human sources, overt as well as covert, should be fired for ignorance and incompetence. Cf. Robert Steele, Human Intelligence: All Humans, All Minds, All the Time, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College Press, 3 June 2010.
[20]Cf. Robert Steele, “Royal Danish Defence College: Lecture by Robert Steele on Open Source Intelligence Done Right,” Copenhagen, Denmark: Royal Danish Defence College, April 18, 2016. OFFICIAL VIDEO 59 Minutes; and “Robert Steele on OSINT – Why and How,” Copenhagen, Denmark: Government of Denmark, April 18-20, 2016, as commissioned and presented to military, police, and national services. BRIEFING. The original monograph is Robert. The New Craft of Intelligence: Achieving Asymmetric Advantage in the Face of Nontraditional Threats,Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Press, 1 February 2002; the original book is Robert Steele, The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen’s Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption, Open Source Solutions, Inc., 2002.
[21]From 2005-2008 there was an Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Open Source, because Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) was making a fuss during his tenure from 2001-2007. The combination of the individual appointed (a former enlisted man without the global contacts and knowledge needed to properly champion OSINT), CIA’s continued opposition to OSINT, and Congressman Simmon’s loss of the 2006 election assured the demise of OSINT as a contender for serious attention. Although I was interviewed for the 9/11 Commission and its report includes a recommended Open Source Agency on pages 23 and 423, that recommendation was ignored by all DNIs from that date forward. Robert Steele, “Graphic: 9-11 Commission Open Source Agency,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 1 January 2010, citing 9-11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 26 July 2004. As found on Page 23 in the Summary and Page 413 within Chapter 13, “How to Do It? A Different Way of Organizing the Government.”
[22]Boyd Sutton, “The Challenge of Global Coverage,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 18 July 1997; and Boyd Sutton, “Global Coverage, Looking Backward, Looking Forward,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 24 December 2006. More recently – this is still the most catastrophic failure in the US IC, Boyd Sutton, “Open Source and the World Brain,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 31 March 2014.
[23]General Tony Zinni, USMC, then Commanding General US Central Command (USCENTCOM), engaged in two wars and twelve joint task force actions, is on record at stating that he received, “at best,” 4% of what he needed to know from the US IC. Editors, “Graphic: Tony Zinni on 4% ‘At Best’,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 7 December 2010. It merits comment that the Aspin-Brown Commission, after receiving my testimony and commissioning a competition between myself and the entire US IC on the topic of Burundi, concluded that we were right and in its report directed that OSINT be a top priority for funding and a top priority for the DCI. Tenet, preoccupied with his Gold War on Russia and his preparation for supporting Dick Cheney’s 9/11, ignored the Commission findings and recommendations. Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence(GPO, 1997); Fred Burks, “Black Eagle Trust Fund,” WantToKnow.Info, 3 June 2011; and 9/11 @ Phi Beta Iota.
[24]Prior to meeting with senior OMB staff we tried to secure Clapper’s interest with two briefings, one for the leadership and one for the staff. Robert Steele and Joe Markowitz, “DoD OSINT Leadership and Staff Briefings,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 10 September 2009.
[25]William Binney, the former NSA Technical Leader and later Technical Director for Military and Geopolitical Analysis & Reporting (6,000 people), reported NSA to the Inspectors General of both the Department of Justice (DoJ) and Department of Defense (DoD) for being far outside the rule of law and corrupt to boot. The FBI was brought in to intimidate him (including pointing a gun at his head while he was in the shower – and he is a double amputee) but soon found that there was so much legal back-stopping that they could not repress that they gave up their unjustified harassment campaign. He continues to be mis-represented by the mass media and #GoogleGestapo (including Wikipedia) as a “fringe” voice, when in fact his is one of the most authentic, inclusive, and truthful voices available to the President and Congress and the public on this vital topic.
[26]William Binney to Robert Steele, personal communication (electronic mail), 14 June 2018.
[27]GCHQ is the British counterpart to NSA, Government Communications Headquarters.
[28]The 1% number is actually consistent with the low standards in the private sector, where less than 1% of the “big data” in hand is analyzed. Yoda, “Mary Meeker’s Internet Report 2014 — Explosion in Hand-Helds and Data — Less Than 1% of Data Analyzed,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 29 May 2014. He also fails to mention – and may not even be aware of – the looming specter of Amazon, funded by the US taxpayer, which is now cross-correlating across intelligence, military, homeland security, and law enforcement data entrusted to them, to create the ultimate police state cloud, one that includes exquisite live streaming analysis and facial Rekognition. He appears unaware of the fact that Amazon is going to destroy all those who rely on Amazon cloud and infrastructure services to serve the USG, and end up being the “sole source” provider when they are all priced out of the Amazon cloud and Amazon, “with a rectal grin,” becomes the only choice. Amazon is very likely collaborating with the Zionists and making everything Amazon touches available in Tel Aviv, never mind client restrictions. Learn more at Arnold Amazon @ Phi Beta Iota.
[29]Diane Webb et al, CATALYST: Computer-Aided Tools for the Analysis of Science & Technology, Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency Office of Scientific and Weapons Research, October 1989. See also Robert Steele, “Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation – The Four Requirements Documents,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 31 January 2010. The Marine Corps won the Joint National Intelligence Development Staff (JNIDS) competition in 1989 as I recall, only to have the win over-turned by the Admiral in charge of JNIDS who was reported to me years after that fact to have said “We are a Navy shop, we will do a Navy problem.” No one on his staff had the integrity to at least tell me so I could spin up the Commandant of the Marine Corps, or more dangerously, to point out to the Admiral that he was in charge of a joint national shop, not a Navy shop. Such unethical decisions are made by careerists every single day and that is a major part of why the US IC is pathologically dysfunctional and not worth what we are paying for it. Today, decades after the requirements for “tools for thinking” were clearly articulated; decades after the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group (AIPASG) of which I was founding member, surveyed the entire US IC on these needs, we still do not have meta-analytics or desktop analytics. Amazon is developing in some scary directions and could end up hijacking the USG data function if wiser ethical leadership is not forthcoming. This is probably the single largest threat to the future of the Trump Administration, and one that has not been briefed to the President. For my own recent thoughts on where we need to go see the varied works linked at Robert Steele, ”Core Works for Those New to My Work,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 4 March 2018. On the Amazon threat to US data integrity, see Arnold Amazon @ Phi Beta Iota. A formal briefing with intimate details is available from Stephen E. Arnold.
[30]Several of my former CIA operations course (1979) classmates are spread across the USG in very senior positions, and I consult them when I write, particularly when I write critically on national security and national intelligence issues. The prevailing consensus among those still serving is that Snowden materially degraded the ability of NSA to be effective, while also violating every oath and commitment he ever made regarding his duty to keep secret that with which he was entrusted. As much as I abhor any violation of any oath, I cannot ignore the fact that Mike Hayden’s warrantless wiretapping along with his rejection of Thin Thread, and his embrace of rendition and torture as well as drone assassination at CIA, are the greater threats from a presidential and public perspective. Snowden, like Daniel Ellsberg, appears to have served a greater good. In brief, the pervasiveness of secrecy across both the government and in the private sector today (e.g. financial fraud, #GoogleGestapo), and the crimes against the public that this secrecy makes possible, strongly mitigate and recommend the value of what Snowden did in directing public attention to the pathologies of a national security state that is completely unaccountable to the Courts, Congress, or the public – a national security state that is now known to have targeted the Trump campaign with between 7 and 10 human informants, while collaborating with GCHQ against presidential candidate Trump, all under the personal direction of then President Barack Obama. The crimes – and the motivations – simply cannot be compared. Cf. Editors, “Edward Snowden,” Wikipedia, undated, accessed 16 June 2018, and Ewen MacAskill and Alex Hern, “INTERVIEW Edward Snowden: “The people are still powerless, but now they’re aware,” The Guardian, 4 June 2018. The latter reference cites Sir David Omand crediting Snowden with hastening attention toward a sounder and more transparent legal framework. Shortly I will be reviewing David Omand and Mark PhythianPrincipled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2018). I was, as is generally the case, a quarter century ahead of the pack with my own Robert Steele. “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & Intelligence,” Whole Earth Review, Fall 1992, pp. 74-79 and my companion statement to Silicon Valley, Robert Steele, “God, Man, & Information: Comments to Interval In-House,” Palo Alto, CA: Interval, 9 March 1993, at the invitation of Rob Tow. The best book today on truth (which is inherently ethical) is John Caputo, Truth: Philosophy in Transit(Penguin Global, 2014).
[31]As Director of NSA Hayden violated the Constitution and the law with impunity. He was clearly told by his senior officers that the war clause did not apply. Cf. Bill Binney, “Ed Loomis Jr. Letter to TIME on ‘The Spy Masters’ by Massimo Calabresi,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 9 June 2018.
[32]Robert Steele, “Book Reviews: Rebuttal — Lies Presented as Truth; BROKEN – The Truth as Fiction,” Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 18, Number 2, 2016, pp. 163-166; and Robert Steele, “Review Essay: UNHINGED: drone assassination – American suicide,” Intelligence and National Security, 33/1, March 2017, pp. 145-150.
[33]I wrote the first warning letter to the White House on cyber-vulnerabilities, and was shocked in later years to learn that instead of protecting US commercial communications and computing capabilities as the White House asked NSA to do in 1994, it instead inserted backdoors with the complicity of the CEOs, for its own convenience, actually making it easier for others to hack into cyber-systems. Robert Steele, with James Anderson, William Caelli, and Winn Schwartau, “Correspondence, Sounding the Alarm on Cyber Security,” McLean, VA: Open Source Solutions, Inc., August 23, 1994.
[34]My first two books, each with a Foreword by a past or serving Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Senator David Boren (D-OK) and Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) remain classics – and are never cited – there appears to be an absolute ban on anyone citing anything I have ever written, and all of the camp followers are compliant with that ban. Robert Steele, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World, Open Source Solutions, Inc., 2001; and Robert Steele, The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen’s Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption, Open Source Solutions, Inc., 2002. See all my publications free online.
[35]Robert Steele, “Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Government Secret Intelligence,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 24 August 2011 updated 20 July 2015.
[36]Stew Magnuson, “DIA Chief Fears Agency Becoming Irrelevant,” National Defense, 7 June 2017.
[37]Robert Steele, “On Defense Intelligence: Seven Strikes,” CounterPunch, July 2, 2014.
[38]I and 30 others – including President Barack Obama until he received his instructions from the Deep State to the contrary – decisively refuted the Russian narrative created by Brennan and supported by Clapper. Cf. Robert Steele, “The Soft Coup Collapses – Blackmail Revealed – What Next? CIA was bluffing, produced no evidence – Russians did not “hack” the election. Is this the beginning of the end of the Deep State in the USA? Can Trump clean house & wage peace? (Trump Revolution 06),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 9 January 2017 also on Amazon Kindle; and Robert Steele, “US IC Allegations Against Russians Are Crap — Our Own Traitors, Not the Russians, Are the Real Enemy, Fake Evidence & Fake News – UPDATE 22,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 30 December 2016. The CIA report on Russian “hacking” is all about Russian Today, a relatively mediocre overt media operation. On page A-13 the CIA report states that CIA’s conclusions are not based on evidence. The Russians did not “hack” anything of significance; the only person who “hacked” the election was Hillary Clinton, who stole thirteen primaries from Bernie Sanders with electronic voting machine fraud. Cf. Mongoose, “Hillary Clinton Electoral Fraud Confirmed by Stanford University — Bernie Sanders Won…” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 7 August 2016.
[39]I am choosing to not include the case of Manning or the case of MH-17 allegedly being shot down by the Russians rather than being a false flag, but both of these are also, in my view based on open sources I have read, being mis-represented by this book. It is a truly sorry situation when the capstone book by America’s recently retired top intelligence officer appears to be completely divorced from reality. On these two instances, see Manning @ Phi Beta Iota and MH-17 @ Phi Beta Iota.
[40]9/11 was planned by the Zionists from 1988. They had to wait for ZioCon Dick Cheney to become Vice President with a well-intentioned but easily manipulable President, to pull it off. Thirteen countries warned us months in advance, in each instance Dick Cheney swore them to secrecy and then promptly declared, months in advance, a national counterterrorism exercise for “the day” such that he could control everything. The dogs were removed two weeks in advance and not allowed to return. The Federal Emergency and Management Agency (FEMA) command and control center was set up the night before on the piers of NYC. Zionist companies spent a year in advance of 9/11 deepening the channel so the crime scene could be destroyed and exported as quickly as possible (this is a general indicator of all false flags, note how each club or school mass casualty event is promptly followed by the demolition of the crime scene). As best we can tell the three towers in NYC were brought down by controlled demolitions, with the airplanes simulated by drones and of course nothing at all hit WTC 7. The Pentagon was hit by a missile and the FBI has been covering everything up from day one. Robert Mueller, as Director of the FBI appointed coincident with 9/11, spent every moment from the day of his appointment covering up for Dick Cheney. Cf. 9/11 @ Phi Beta Iota and more generally, False Flag @ Phi Beta Iota.
[41]Assange had consensual sex with two adult groupies and all charges have since been dropped. The irresponsible depiction of Assange in this book is defamatory and malicious. Cf. Assange @ Phi Beta Iota.
[42]The chapter on Benghazi is a cover-up. It tells a superficial tale that avoids the core truths: that Libya was sold to the French by Hillary Clinton in return for contributions to the Clinton Foundation – the French were angry about not getting a better oil deal from Libya – while the US stole Libya’s gold deposits; that we had SEVEN HOURS in which to save Ambassador Stevens (who may well have been covering up CIA supply lines in to rebels in Syria to include surface to air missiles) – both Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta failed to act when alerted SEVEN HOURS prior to the death of Ambassador Stevens, even though the US had ample assets within 1-2 hours of the danger zone. The book naturally does not address all of the evils that CIA was fostering in the region, specifically including regime change in Syria. See especially Berto Jongman, “Benghazi – Leon Panetta Lied, Clinton Refused Pentagon Offer of Timely Help,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 18 October 2016; Berto Jongman, “Brennan, Clapper, Hillary & 400 SAMs from Benghazi to Al Qaeda,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 13 August 2013; and Robert Steele, “Graphic: Benghazi Fiasco Master Post with Links to All Posts, Map of DoD Assets Ordered to “Stand Down,” + RECAP Updated 11 May 13,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 4 November 2012. A number of additional posts by varied substantive experts can be accessed via Benghazi @ Phi Beta Iota.
[43]Bin Laden died in 2001, inclusive of a published obituary. The CIA rolled out multiple Bin Ladens over time, seeking to keep the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) alive as a budget-building exercise. The final Bin Laden was a patsy offered up by the Pakistani military to Leon Panetta as a theatrical exercise to assure the re-election of President Barack Obama. US Special Forces personnel died to help re-elect Barack Obama. Cf. Robert Steele, “Bin Laden Show 00: Taliban Offer Pre-9/11 and Post-9/11, US Rejection,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 10 May 2012. The latter comment has been confirmed by a Pakistani military officer speaking to a trusted journalist.
[44]The Boston Bombing was the first city-wide FEMA exercise to test the ability of the police to lock down an entire city and do warrantless door-to-door searches for alleged terrorists. The internal FEMA briefing is a matter of public record. Cf. Aaron Dykes, “Homeland Security Admits Boston Drill Eerily Similar to Marathon Bombing,”TruthStreamMedia, 11 June 2013. The use of crisis actors, including the double amputee who managed to not bleed at all while being ceremoniously run for many minutes before all the cameras, is now a standard feature of most false flag operations. Cf. Boston Bombing @ Phi Beta Iota and Crisis Actor @ Phi Beta Iota.
[45]David Petraeus was fired because John Brennan wanted his job and had the power to force the issue. While Petraeus was nominally indiscreet with his biographer and lover, then Reserve Major Paula Broadwell (since retired with a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel rescinded) had Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearances, and both the affair and the sharing of classified information were known prior to the nomination and confirmation of Petraeus as Director of the CIA. His firing was a hit job, plain and simple, to accommodate John Brennan’s ambition. Clapper knew this and chose not to protect Petraeus, a confirmed Director who merited every possible consideration once confirmed. Clapper appears to have accommodated Brennan in a political assassination.
[46]It is clearly established that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened as was claimed to justify the start of the war on Viet-Nam. It is now known that the war on Viet-Nam was planned by the military-industrial complex to use up our existing military stocks so we would have to buy it all over again. The CIA desk officer for Viet-Nam knew that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist not a communist, and that Viet-Nam hates China and would never be a Chinese domino. It bears mention that President Lyndon Baines Johnson was a traitor through and through – in addition to his approving and covering up the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and taking us to war against Viet-Nam on the basis of lies, he also provided the North Vietnamese with a complete list of air targets one day in advance via the Swiss Embassy – day after day after day – such that they could relocate their air defenses and shoot down more of our aviators flying into harm’s way not knowing their targets were known to the nominal enemy in advance.Cf. Gulf of Tonkin @ Phi Beta Iota.
[47]Hillary Clinton is in my view, based on all the open source evidence I have seen, easily indictable in four major areas. Cf. Robert Steele, “Certified Letter to James Comey – Pedophilia, Electoral Fraud, Treason, Charity Fraud – UPDATE 5,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 5 November 2016.
[48]Clapper’s final chapter blames instability on everyone else, seemingly oblivious to the fact that is the USA that has been responsible for virtual colonialism as a proxy of the British Empire, for unilateral militarism, and for predatory capitalism. His final chapter is divorced from reality. Cf. Robert Steele, “Rigging Elections – and Worse! The Americans Rigged Our Election, Bribed Our Government, Stole Our Gold, Killed Our Men, Raped Our Women, and Poisoned our Air, Water, and Earth – and You Want to Blame Something on the Russians?” American Herald Tribune, 10 March 2018; for an understanding of all of the preconditions of revolution that exist in the USA today because of the Deep State and Shadow Government, see Robert Steele, “Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 16 August 2011.
[49]Supra Notes 31-33. Clapper overstates both the ethics of the US IC, and the efficacy of the US IC. Supra Note 23: All one needs to understand about his failure as DNI can be found in (General) Tony Zinni’s indictment of the US IC: it provided 4% “at best” of what one single combatant commander needed (to which I would add, and nothing for everyone else). See also Robert Steele, “Intelligence for the President–AND Everyone Else,” CounterPunch, March 1, 2009 and Robert Steele, “On Defense Intelligence: Seven Strikes,” CounterPunch, July 2, 2014.
[50]Supra Note 4. Together with Clapper’s lies about the Russians hacking the election, this stands out as the lie that is most directly refuted by evidence published since the book was written by Clapper’s ghost-writer and published, presumably with Clapper’s approval of its content in detail. Cf. Mary Fanning and Alan Jones, “Whistleblower Tapes: Trump Wiretapped “A Zillion Times” By ‘The Hammer,’ Brennan’s and Clapper’s Secret Computer System,” The American Report, 17 March 2017; Yoda, “Deep Throat II “Fat Boy” aka “Cambridge Zero” Stefan Halper Outed as FBI’s “Penetration” of Trump Campaign UPDATE 2 Gone Missing,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 21 May 2018; Norie Huddle, “Daniel Lazare on RussiaGate — Trump Right, Media Wrong, FBI/DOJ Criminal (To Which We Would Add, DNI and D/CIA Also Criminal),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 24 May 2018; Owl, “Not One But SEVEN to TEN Spies Against Trump from Corrupt DOJ/FBI,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 25 May 2018; and Mongoose, “Obama White House Coordinated the John Brennan False Flag Attack on Trump Campaign — British Were Totally Complicit in This Act of Treason,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 3 June 2018.
[51]This is just absolute crap. Rule 1 in Washington is “lie to the President if you can get away with it,” and this is what the US IC does every single day, to include pretending that its clandestine operations are producing unique unilateral secret human intelligence when in fact the CIA is totally reliant on hand-outs from counterpart foreign intelligence organizations that lie to CIA with impunity while CIA is too incompetent to be able to sort the lies from the truth. Cf. Morton Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Brookings, 1974); a summary review isfree online; and Robert Steele, “Foreign Liaison and Intelligence Reform: Still in Denial,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 20/1 167-174, Fall 2007. NSA is also severely vulnerable to deception, for one example applicable to both Libya and Syria, see Mongoose, “How Israel Fakes Out NSA with Signal Rocks that Simulate Syrian Army Transmissions About Sarin Gas UPDATE 2 NSA Incompetence,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 14 April 2017.
[52]Supra Note 4. On pages 97-100 Clapper presents as fact a series of lies about Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and recounts his role in supporting the lies told by then Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations (UN), lies that Powell’s assistant, retired Colonel Larry Wilkerson, has amply documented (not only that they were lies but that Powell suspected the were lies). Cf. Charles Lewis, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity (PublicAffairs, 2014), a summary review is free online; and Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq (TarcherPerigee, 2003), a summary review is free online.
[53]Clapper omits mention of the role of the US and Saudi Arabia in the creation of ISIS/ISIL, the role of the CIA – with Hillary Clinton’s direct approval – in training and equipping ISIS/ISIL. He exaggerates ISIS/ISIL accomplishments (other than a few towns the so-called caliphate consisted of largely unoccupied desert), neglects to mention the Barcelona Agreements and related bribes to European leaders to allow unlimited Muslim migration into Europe, furthers the narrative of San Bernardino – a false flag event with two dead patsies – as an ISIS/ISIL strike, and seems unwilling to acknowledge that Russia was effective against ISIS/ISIL for the right reasons, while we were ineffective for the wrong reasons – the Saudi bribed Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to obtain US approval for Saudi atrocities against Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, with substantial funding from the US taxpayer to boot. It is with real dismay that I see Clapper, on page 257, explicitly in denial about the fact that it was the US and the Obama Administration, and its indictable Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and before her Secretary of State John Kerry, and a series of CIA directors among whom John Brennan is the most deserving of deep investigation (followed by George Tenet) who destabilized the world or were complicit in the destabilizing of the world – and the processing of Afghan opium by Pakistani military allies. I put this book down simply appalled that the authors would have the temerity to call our President a liar when in fact it is the leadership of the US intelligence community that is in the business of lying to presidents, to Congress, and to the public, without regard to their oaths of office or the public interest. The literature on ISIS as a US/Saudi creation with broad engagement by Zionist Israel, is broad and deep. Here are just a few of the many sources that contradict Clapper’s facile assertions on this topic: Nafeez Ahmed, “How the West Created the Islamic State (ISIS) — Jordan Hosts the Command Center — Chalabi and NeoCons Ride Again…,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 14 September 2014; Berto Jongman, “CIA Contractor – We Fabricated ISIS,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 17 February 2015; Wesley Clark: “ISIS Funded by Our Closest Allies,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 2 March 2015; Mike Flynn, “US Helped Create ISIS,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 11 August 2015; Wayne Madsen, “More Evidence ISIS is a US Creature,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 28 May 2016; Berto Jongman, “CIA Case Officer on ISIS & Terrorism as Fraudulent Stories Designed to Foster War for Profit,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 2 August 2016; Chuck Spinney, “Andrew Cockburn on US Complicity in Saudi Genocide Across Yemen (Let’s Add to Saudi Funding of Clinton-CIA Creation of ISIS to Take Down Syria for Saudi Pipeline…),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 13 August 2016; Mongoose, “Who Started ISIS? USA?,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 27 August 2016; Wayne Madsen, “Yes, The USA Created ISIS…Along With….,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 10 September 2016; Berto Jongman, “Hillary Clinton Proven Traitor — the Killer Email Showing She Helped Create ISIS in Partnership with Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 13 October 2016; Berto Jongman, “Julian Assange – CIA (and Saudi Arabia) Created Islam Terrorism,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 1 December 2016; Owl, “Merkel Plans War with Russia — Enabling ISIS, Creating Army, Who Assassinated NATO’s Head Auditor?” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 26 December 2016; Tyler Durden, “Erdogan Says He Has ‘Confirmed Evidence’ the US Supports ISIS,” ZeroHedge, 28 December 2016; Tyler Durden, “Journalist Interrogated, Fired for Story Linking CIA to ‘Diplomatic’ Flights to Arm Syrian Rebels,” Russia Insider, 29 August 2017; Steve W., “IDF-Linked Think Tank Admits Israel, ISIS are Allies in Confronting Iran in Syria,” Galactic Connection, 2 December 2017; Brian Castner, “Exclusive: Tracing ISIS’ Weapons Supply Chain – Back to the US,” WIRED, 12 December 2017.
[54]Not only did Colin Powell succeed in getting North Korea to agree to all US terms only to have Dick Cheney derail that agreement by adding more onerous terms, but it has been long established by Ambassador Robert L. Gallucci, among others, that North Korea has always had denuclearization on the table. Today we have the reality that the US IC and DoD are still denying: North Korea has agreed to unification and denuclearization continent on US demilitarization of South Korea. All parties have agreed. The Zionists and the US military-industrial complex are frantically trying to derail this epic peace agreement. Cf. Colin Powell, My American Journey (Ballentine, 2003), a summary review is free online; Editors, “Agreement on meaning of denuclearization is win for Trump: Gallucci,”Yonhap News Agency, 5 June 2018; Robert Steele, “Is Zionism Over? From Korea to Syria to the Latest #GoogleGestapo Purge, President Donald Trump’s Divorce from Zionism Appears Increasingly Possible,” American Herald Tribune, March 4, 2018; Robert Steele, “Koreas Unite, Denuclearize: Middle East Next – after a Global Financial Re-Set – Ideas for Iran,” Russian International Affairs Council, May 2, 2018.
[55]Cf. NSA Spying Congress @ Phi Beta Iota. The FBI pioneered spying on US citizens with COINTELPRO at the same time that the CIA (as well as NASA) have pioneered mind-control experiments with their in-house Nazis. Cf.Mind Control @ Phi Beta Iota and two books in particular: Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips, TRANCE: Formation of America (Reality Marketing, 2005); a summary review is free online; and Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins, The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century (Progressive Press, 2008); a summary review is free online. Over time both CIA and NSA have advanced spying on Congress toward the end of blackmailing Members to protect budgets and avoid accountability. The Mossad, not the Russians, are the top foreign threat and the top blackmailer of Congress using pedophilia entrapments such as have been devised by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, both arguably Mossad officers funded by a Zionist billionaire to subvert the US Government. The latter two are not in jail because their pedophilia entrapment operations appear to have been coordinated with and are now protected by the CIA and the FBI. Cf. Epstein @ Phi Beta Iota and Pedophilia @ Phi Beta Iota.
[56]The entire book is a hit job on our legitimately elected president, and conveys the same narrative as that of Mike Hayden’s book, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies (Penguin, 2018), a summary review of which has been published as Robert Steele, “The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies – Book Review,” American Herald Tribune, June 5, 2018. To her credit, Hayden’s earlier book, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (Penguin, 2017), was quickly challenged by Vice Chairman Dianne Feinstein, “Factual Errors and Other Problems in ‘Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror,’ by Michael V. Hayden,” Staff Summary, March 2016, 38 pp. For my own impressions of the President based on reviewing three books (never mind all the great stuff he is doing on the economic, legal, peace, and trade fronts) see Robert Steele, “Book Reviews and Commentary: Unhinged — Donald Trump, His Family, His Appointees, and Everyone Else by Robert David Steele,” San Francisco Review of Books, January 13, 2018. See also the Trump Revolution Series, both free online and at Amazon Kindle, and my vision for the future of the Trump presidency, Robert Steele, “Trump 2.0: Build the Base, Go Long (25 Years),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 12 March 2018.
[57]Supra Note 38. The DNC refused to allow the FBI to actually examine its computers. The lies about Russian hacking started with a third party and have never been documented, at the same time that Julian Assange and Ambassador Craig Murray have stated most emphatically that they received all their leaks from an insider (probably Seth Rich). Clapper appears to be in absolute and persistent betrayal of multiple oaths of office on this one.
[58]Supra Note 38.
[59]On page 238 he asserts that the Syrians used chemical weapons – later he mentions Sarin gas specifically. This is simply not true but as with the false IC reports on Iraq having WMD – part of the 935 lies documented by Charles Lewis in TruthOut and later a book (Supra Note 4) that were used to justify that five trillion dollar war for the banks and the profit of the military-industrial complex – Clapper was the leading figure in communicating this lie to the President about a false flag attack that was later repeated a second time. In both cases it was the rebels faking a Sarin gas attack, no Sarin gas was used, and the US IC was probably complicit in the Zionist-inspired propaganda narrative, with former D/CIA John Brennan appearing to have played a major role in orchestrating instances. Robert Steele, “War in the Middle East [in February 2018]… A strategic survey of possibilities, winners, losers… (Trump Revolution 19),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 19 November 2017; Robert Steele, “False Flag Attack: Ex-CIA Officer Unravels Idlib Chemical Incident,” Sputnik News, 21 April 2017; Robert Steele, “The Syrian Missile Attack — Theatrics & House Cleaning? False Flag Attack Organized by McCain, Brennan, McMaster, Funded by Saudi Arabia and Israel? (Trump Revolution 10),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 11 April 2017; Adam Larson, “Analysis of evidence contradicts allegations on Syrian gas attacks,” The Indicter, April 2017; Robert Parry, “NYT Retreats on 2013 Syria – Sarin Claims,” ConsortiumNews.com, 6 April 2017; Alex Newman, “Was Chemical Attack in Syria a ‘false Flag’ to Trigger U.S. War?” The New American, 7 April 2017; Robert Parry, “Trump’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Moment,”ConsortiumNews.com, 7 April 2017; Editors, “America Illegally Bombs Syria Under False Pretexts. Links for Critical Thinking,” In Gaza and Beyond, 7 April 2017; Jan Oberg, “TFF Live: US bombing Syria – How could they be so sure?” Transnational Foundation, 7 April 2017; Matt Agorist, “Top Journalist Says Hillary Approved Sending Sarin to Rebels Used to Frame Assad, Start Syrian War,” The Free Thought Project, 2 May 2016; Owl, “Syrian False-Flag Gas Attacks Evidence Crucifies Saudi Arabia,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 28 August 2013. In passing, note these two stories: Tyler Durden, “Caught on Camera: Israel Targets Civilians With A Chemical Weapon Drone,”ZeroHedge, 24 March 2018; and Mongoose, “How Israel Fakes Out NSA with Signal Rocks that Simulate Syrian Army Transmissions About Sarin Gas UPDATE 2 NSA Incompetence,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 14 April 2017.
[60]Peter Schweizer, Friendly Spies: How America’s Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets(Atlantic Monthly, 1993). A summary review is free online .The reality is that the Russians (and everyone else) monitored, penetrated, and stole information while also managing overt media influence campaigns, but they did not “hack” (change the outcome) of the election. The power of Zionist Israel in the USA is both legal and covert. It has since the 1940’s enjoyed a protected status from the US IC (for example, James Angleton covered for Israel and made its theft and smuggling of nuclear materials from the USA possible, something President Kennedy was seeking to stop), but has excelled at bribery and blackmail as well as very focused campaigns to convert US evangelicals into Christian Zionists, and to “own” most Members of Congress and many members of state legislatures and city councils. Cf. James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press, 2006), a summary review is free online; Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby (Chicago Review Press, 2003), a summary review is free online; see also John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008).
[61]Cf. various posts and links accessible via Epstein # Phi Beta Iota.
[62]Cf. various posts and links accessible via Awan @ Phi Beta Iota. The Zionists realized in the 1980’s that penetrating US communications and computing was going to be a critical element in their continuing to subvert the US economy, US government, and US society. Cf. Martin Dillon and Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul (Carroll & Graf, 2002). A summary review is free online. I believe that today the communications and computers of the White House, Congress, the NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as law enforcement jurisdictions at the state and local level, are completely compromised by Zionist software and hardware penetrations.
[63]My various articles, including several on the Zionist threat, are easily found online; I single out three here: Robert Steele, “Eradicating Zionism with Truth – A Plan for Peace and Prosperity for All,” American Herald Tribune, May 6, 2018.Robert Steele, “Zionism in America – Steven Strikes & Counting…,” Veterans Today, 14 December 2017; Robert Steele, “How The Deep State Controls Social Media and Digitally Assassinates Critics: #GoogleGestapo – Censorship & Crowd-Stalking Made Easy,” American Herald Tribune, November 7, 2017. On Zionism, pedophilia, and Hollywood see Robert Steele, “Zion in Shiksa-Land – Harvey Weinstein First Major Jewish Pedophilia Domino in the USA (Trump Revolution 16),” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 20 October 2017, also available as anAmazon Kindle. I believe that a second Trump term will see the denuclearization of Israel as well as Iran and Saudi Arabia and force the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to register as agents of a foreign power and lose their non-profit status. In my view, the health and wealth of America the Beautiful will be vastly improved if we can sharply reduce both the size of the federal government and the new norm of pervasive secrecy, while eradicating the Zionist threat. On secrecy see this superb summary: Amy Baker Benjamin, “The Many Faces of Secrecy,” William & Mary Policy Review, 8.2, 2017 and see also the many references accessible via Secrecy @ Phi Beta Iota.
[64]Supra note 63. See also #GoogleGestapo @ Phi Beta Iota and Deep State @ Phi Beta Iota.
[65]I asked various professionals to critically examine this review in draft. Several improvements were made. The most compelling explicatory commentary on how the US IC went so wrong – apart from budget-building – was received from a retired Chief Warrant Officer (U. S. Army) who is a world class clandestine HUMINT specialist with experience across multiple wars from Viet-Nam to Afghanistan:
He is part of the overall problem that has befuddled the intelligence community since Vietnam….during that period the clearance level of most intel folks was no higher than collateral (secret). If you worked in three areas, clandestine HUMINT (not what HUMINT is normally thought of, but rather deep penetration), Imagery, and SIGINT, you had a much higher level (SCI) in order to protect sources and methods. For the Army, we had 06’s coming out of Vietnam who found they did not have access to these highly restricted sources and felt they were being cheated (although most didn’t understand what any of these disciplines actually did or the value of the information they provided). These guys put together a push to bring into “mainstream” intelligence these three areas and in doing so accomplished exactly what always happens when combining different groups…..things always slide to the lowest level, i.e. we became emasculated in our ability to perform). Regular guys felt they could do just as well as the highly trained folks who were actually doing the work. This was furthered by guys like Hayden, Clapper, etcetera so they could march their way to flag level. None were able to explain the value of these disciplines nor understand the actual work required. This destroyed the value of these (then) ultra-sensitive and occasionally spectacularly useful collection disciplines and began to reduce their integrity. Enter the idea of OSINT, they were about to shown to be emperors without clothes if OSINT was able to show its value. Their argument that ALL intelligence folks needed to have TS/SCI level access would be found to be built on a house of cards. None of them could allow that to happen. OSINT would have been the foundational and transformational player had the “leadership” not become over infatuated with clearance levels (evident by the fact that none of them can explain what that really means and why it should apply to everything) and demanding access to ALL sources and methods. The integrity of most senior level officers (04 and above) is seriously lacking…….so, yes, Clapper is a liar, and he is not alone…. Just some random thoughts and rumbling….
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Holy smokes, Steele is an iron man.
First he suffers through Clapper's book (use your imagination), and then writes a review with 65 (sixty five) footnotes!
Steele, you have my respect, but the time you gave to Clapper could have been put to better use.
Thank you for your post. This is excellent information. It is amazing and wonderful to visit your site.
sas certified advanced analytics professional