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Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has established the Director’s Initiative’s Group (DIG), a task force to investigate weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency. Gabbard’s best ally for that task passed away in 2021 but left behind strategic guidance for the nation moving forward.
The Italian-born Angelo Codevilla, a Rutgers and Notre Dame alum, served in the US Navy as an intelligence officer both at sea and in the Fleet Intelligence Center, with continued service in the Naval Reserve. Codevilla also served as intelligence analyst at the Bureau for Intelligence and Research in the U.S. Foreign Service, and joined the staff of Sen. Malcolm Wallop on the Senate Intelligence Committee. In 1992 Codevilla authored Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century. Two decades into that new century, the author showed his grasp of the problem America now faces:
America’s Intelligence agencies are the deep state’s deepest part, and the most immediate threat to representative government. They are also not very good at what they are supposed to be doing. Protecting the Republic from them requires refocusing them on their proper jobs.
Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield. (emphases added)
That is from “Abolish FISA, Reform FBI and Break Up CIA,” published in February, 2020. That year, Obama CIA boss John Brennan published Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad, a confessional of sorts. Brennan, who believes that Islamic jihad is a spiritual quest unrelated to terrorism, describes the CIA’s failure to stop 9/11, confirming Codevilla’s view that the CIA is “not very good at what it is supposed to be doing.” Brennan’s priority of enemies “at home,” and his relentless recycling of the Russia hoax, confirms that the CIA is part and parcel of the Democratic Party, operating in secrecy and violation of the law.
The clearest of all laws concerning U.S. intelligence is Section is Section 798, 18 U.S. Code, regarding the transmission of classified information to unauthorized persons. This is a “simple liability law,” notes Codevilla, “motivation, context, identity, matter not at all. You violate it, you are guilty and are punished accordingly.” The “senior intelligence officials,” in the Russia hoax are John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. They have not been prosecuted because “the offenders are big people, in the permanent government and in the Democratic Party,” contended Codevilla in a May 2019 column headlined “Why are Clapper and Brennan Not in Jail?”
In 2023, former CIA analyst John Gentry published, Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump has Long-Term Consequences. That confirmed Codevilla’s view that the agency was part of the Democratic Party and the most immediate threat to representative government. His remedy was to break up the CIA and prosecute CIA bosses who broke the law. Compare the response from a CIA veteran Codevilla respected.
Sent to Italy in 1943, James Jesus Angleton took over counterintelligence for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, which he joined at the outset in 1947. In 1954, the agency made him head of counterintelligence, a critical function in the so-called “cold war,” which Angleton viewed as part of a continuum.
“During World War II, when we were in counterintelligence working against the Germans, we began to bump into the Soviets right and left working against us,” Angleton told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. “We did not create a cold war or have a paranoid attitude. They taught us. They did it by kidnapping people, by murdering people, by shooting down our aircraft as they did over Yugoslavia and not giving up the bodies until Truman gave them an ultimatum and we had the 10th Mountain Division about to go in, which probably would have been a good thing.”
Angleton covered similar themes in a June 6, 1975 session of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence, marked “Top Secret” but released with deletions in 1998. As Angleton explained, Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn revealed key details of KGB operations and contended that the CIA had been penetrated. As Edward Jay Epstein explained in Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA, this plant could tell the Soviets how the CIA was interpreting information from defectors. The FBI disagreed about the identity of the Soviet plant, and for Angleton that was bad news.
“We are living in a dream world here in terms of the Soviets, and time is short,” Angleton told the Senate committee. The FBI “is only a shadow of what it once was. And so there isn’t any real internal security protection.” These troubles prompted Sen. Howard Baker to ask about the nation’s counterintelligence capabilities.
“Very very poor,” Angleton said. “I think it is very conservative but it has put us back 20 years.” Sen. Baker wanted to know how Angleton would rehabilitate the CIA.
“My feeling is that the agency has to go through the purgatory, these fires that no man would put out,” Angleton said. “My view is, the bigger the fires the better. So my view is, let it all come out, and let people take the consequences.” Nothing of the kind took place, and the “dream world in terms of the Soviets,” would soon be confirmed.
Presidents receive daily briefings from the CIA and in an Oct. 6, 1976 debate, President Gerald Ford told the nation “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” which the captive peoples doubtless found surprising. Ford lost to Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter, who put Admiral Stansfield Turner in charge of the CIA. In 1980 the CIA hired John Brennan, who in 1976 voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union.
Brennan, who never should have got in the door, rose through the ranks at lightning speed and in 2013 composite character president Obama made John Brennan CIA director. The Gus Hall voter backed the Russia hoax and with James Clapper signed the letter charging that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, which all signatories knew was false. That helped put Joe Biden in the White House where, by vote of the people, Donald Trump now resides.
On January 20, in an order titled, “Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Governmental Information,” President Trump lifted the security clearances of, among 49 others, John Brennan. Angelo Codevilla had been on to him from the start.
“In America, the Soviets worked less through the Communist Party than they did in Europe,” Codevilla wrote in 2019. “Here, they simply seduced and influenced people at the top of our society. . . prominent persons in the Democratic Party, academia, media, and intelligence services.” Future Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and CIA director John Brennan “were Communists more or less openly” and it showed.
John Ratcliffe now heads the CIA and Tulsi Gabbard now deploys a task force to investigate the intel community. DIG should take Codevilla’s advice and break up the woke, partisan CIA, just for starters. In the spirit James Angleton, the time has come to stoke those purgatory fires, the bigger the fires the better. Let it all come out and let people take the consequences – people like John Brennan and James Clapper. Gabbard’s DIG should find out:
What does the CIA know about the Communist Frank Marshall Davis? He was the Stalinist, on the FBI’s security index, who showed up in Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, who picked Brennan for CIA director.
Who made the decision to hire Brennan? Was he the only voter for a Communist Party candidate the CIA ever hired? If not, who are the others and what positions did they hold? Where are they now?
President Trump is declassifying files on the JFK assassination. What does the CIA know about the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump? Remember, the FBI is responsible for counterintelligence and FBI director Christopher Wray contended that Trump had been hit by “shrapnel,” not one of the eight bullets fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks. How did a 20-year-old with no tactical experience avoid the Secret Service and gain such an ideal shooting position?
Is John Brennan’s belief that the Islamic jihad is a spiritual quest official CIA policy? Were any CIA officials dismissed, disciplined or demoted over failure to prevent 9/11? And so on, for as long as it takes.
Brennan and Clapper have not been prosecuted, so bring in Pam Bondi with all the resources of the DOJ. And remember, as Angelo Codevilla said, the partisan intel agencies represent “the most immediate threat to representative government.” The people will be watching.
