Opinion
By Sigrid Weidenweber
02-17-24
What is a good spy? The essence, the intrinsic nature of a good spy has been the same through thousands of years. Whether the person, yes, there were very good female spies, collects data inside their own country or abroad, the innate requirements of the art of spy craft are the same. Good spies have a high tolerance for danger, ambiguity, high intelligence, and perfect instincts to react in tough spots while meandering through tough scenarios.
Those, recruiting such people, are psychologists par excellence, for they must detect the above requirements in people they want to bring to their cause. Most of all, as Charles S. Faddis, ex-operations CIA operations officer tells, they must evoke enough trust in the recruits “that you can keep them alive,” while they do their job. They also must possess a power of persuasion that will convince the recruit to join the operation.
For the longest time, the CIA performed exceedingly well. That is, until 9/11. We had no warning. And if we did, information was bandied about in the CIA organization and not credited with veracity. It took the U.S. ten years until we finally eliminated Osama Bin Laden. That tells us that we had almost no one working inside Al Qaeda all this time. Even working against religious fanatics, we should have done better.
Furthermore, during the Covid-19 the CIA could provide no information to clarify the origin of the outbreak. Did we not have even one Chinese national in the gain-of function research labs in China to enlighten us on what the enemy was creating to kill Americans.
So, what happened to the old CIA, the one that got things done? Charles S. Faddis, whose outstanding accomplishments I will cite later, describes it thus.
CIA recruits no longer focus on the key psychological traits critical to success in the world of spying. They look at academic degrees, existing levels of language proficiency, and increasingly at things like skin color and sexual orientation. Training has been softened and is increasingly formbook in nature. We act as if this is no longer an arcane craft to be practiced by a select group of unique people.
That, however, is not the only problem. The most egregious flaw in the CIA is that it has become a political arm of any democratic government. It was an acting organ for the dirty work of the Obama/Clinton government as much as it is now for the Biden outfit. I must remind you at this juncture of the Libyan Benghazi debacle, where our ambassador to Libya, visiting the Department of State, was killed with unfortunate others. Militant militias, well- armed and trained, with armored vehicles, assaulted the compound and Washington was bombarded with cries for help—Obama sent no military relief force. Neither did Hilary—Secretary of State, who then circulated the lie that a peaceful protest had gotten out of hand. The acting director of the CIA took the blame for the claims, obviously erroneous, of a peaceful demonstration. The question remains till today why did the CIA have no clue that such a violent assault was planned by our enemy? But it speaks volumes that the CIA director had provided cover for Obama/Clinton by interjecting himself into the scathing uproar that followed the fallacious narrative.
Do you remember Crossfire Hurricane, a venture done with our British allies? Turned bad also. Then there came Hunter Biden’s laptop that almost ruined Biden’s run for the Whitehouse? The CIA, with the signatures of fifty former CIA officers, among them Mike Morell and John Brennan, labelled the laptop a fabrication of disinformation, saving the bacon for Biden.
These are only a few things that come immediately to mind when evaluating the objectivity, no, the trustworthiness of this organization. It seems it lost its way and is far from the original mission statement. It is now nothing more than another cog in the wheel to grind out power for the elites.
If one wants to know more about the CIA and its present political pursuits, for that I recommend the books and lectures of Charles S. Faddis. Charles S. Faddis served for 20 years as an operations officer in the CIA, including as department chief at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and as chief of station in the Middle East. I recommend his books Willful Neglect: the dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security and Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Born in Germany in 1941, Sigrid Weidenweber remembers the horrific aftermath of Fascism. At the end of the war, she found herself living under Communism. Both of these totalitarian regimes left indelible marks on her psyche. She developed a healthy distrust of governments usurping too many powers in order to control people supposedly for their own good. MORE
Her Books
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
