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The CIA Blames Incompetence for Losing Dozens of Agents but Is That the Real Story?

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story that was frightening in a couple of aspects. First, it reported that the C.I.A. had sent a top-secret cable to all stations warning them that “troubling” numbers of agents and informants were being rounded up by our opponents and either executed or flipped into double agents.

The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.

The cable highlighted the struggle the spy agency is having as it works to recruit spies around the world in difficult operating environments. In recent years, adversarial intelligence services in countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan have been hunting down the C.I.A.’s sources and in some cases turning them into double agents.

Acknowledging that recruiting spies is a high-risk business, the cable raised issues that have plagued the agency in recent years, including poor tradecraft; being too trusting of sources; underestimating foreign intelligence agencies, and moving too quickly to recruit informants while not paying enough attention to potential counterintelligence risks — a problem the cable called placing “mission over security.”

The large number of compromised informants in recent years also demonstrated the growing prowess of other countries in employing innovations like biometric scans, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and hacking tools to track the movements of C.I.A. officers in order to discover their sources.

While the C.I.A. has many ways to collect intelligence for its analysts to craft into briefings for policymakers, networks of trusted human informants around the world remain the centerpiece of its efforts, the kind of intelligence that the agency is supposed to be the best in the world at collecting and analyzing.

Ominously for a story focusing on sloppy handling of secret information, the existence of the cable and its contents only stayed hidden for a few days.

It has been widely reported that the C.I.A.’s covert networks in Communist China have been largely rolled up. Back in May 2017, the C.I.A. admitted that it had lost at least 18 agents inside of China. The operative word there is “admitted,” as the known body count quickly ballooned to at least three dozen. There was a brief spasm of counterintelligence work on our side (see Former C.I.A. Agent Busted for Passing Secrets to China and Arrested C.I.A. Officer Possessed Names of Covert Agents and Sit Down for This One — Former C.I.A. Officer Arrested as Chinese Spy: You’ll Never Guess Who Hired Him) and then things went back to normal, see While Eric Swalwell Was Sleeping With a Chinese Spy Adam Schiff Put Him in Charge of C.I.A. Oversight.

At the same time that Chinese assets were roaming free inside the C.I.A., the C.I.A. ignored the compromise of a communications system that it wished rather than knew or even believed to be secure and that cost at least 30 agents their lives. Yesterday, my colleague Jennifer Van Laar posted on the curious correlation between the loss of most of our covert operatives inside China and Hunter Biden’s bromance with Taiwanese businessman and suspected ChiCom agent Michael Lin. Biden and Lin became business associates, and Lin flew with Biden of Air Force 2. Read Are Hunter Biden’s China Travels With Michael Lin Related to the Loss of 30 C.I.A. Assets? for more details.

While the article blames sloppy tradecraft and complacency for the losses, the losses occur in several countries, one of which is our “ally” Pakistan, smells more like the standard practice of blaming middle management or the sales force for mistakes brought on by the top brass.

The C.I.A. was up to its ears in the attempted coup against President Trump. From 2016 until early 2021 was much more fixated on sabotaging President Trump and stymying investigations than it was on intelligence. To say that the C.I.A. has been more focused on being woke than on competence is no exaggeration.

It is not too much to presume that some of the exotic personnel choices they’ve made have caught up with them.

This article comes on the heels of the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan and involves lost assets in China, Iran, and Pakistan. It also stands to reason that these losses may have been tied to information compromised during the August 27 evacuation of the C.I.A. station in Kabul. When read in the context of this cable, a couple of recent articles seem to be part of a damage control effort.

This effort by the C.I.A.’s in-house stenographer at the Washington Post is simply not believable.

According to this, about half of all the U.S. citizens and Afghan SIV holders rescued were done so through the good offices of the C.I.A. If you want to believe that, go right ahead.

A story in today’s New York Post, C.I.A. admits too many informants are being killed in top secret memo to spies around the world as former staff reveal Iran and China executed networks of U.S. spies after agency’s classified communications system was breached, also reeks of damage control. The compromised communications system and two well-known turncoats are highlighted as though they were relevant. To make things flakier, there is zero evidence that the defector, USAF Tech Sergeant Monica Elfriede Witt, had anything to do with any compromise of personnel as she defected in 2012, and she doesn’t seem to have been cleared for programs that managed covert assets.

The top-secret cable leaking to the press so quickly also smells like it may have been a planned disclosure.

My guess is that this is the tip of the iceberg and that we are functionally blind on the Human Intelligence side of the house in China and in Southwest Asia.

WaPo Tries Hiding Stylebook Update on 'Pregnant Individuals,' Forgets the Internet Is Forever

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What with so many other mainstream media outlets, Democrat politicos, and left-wing groups (but I repeat myself) updating their rule and stylebooks (and massively bloated federal spending proposals) to reflect their warped belief that it’s “exclusionary” to use gender-specific terms to refer to women (like her, she, etc.), it was only a matter of time before the wokesters at the Washington Post caught up with them.

Last Friday, their Instagram guy Travis Lyles excitedly tweeted out the announcement that the paper “officially updated its stylebook guidance on how we reference pregnancy and pregnant individuals in our writing to be more inclusive” and included with it the “applause” emoji as well as a screengrab of the updated guidance.

“While biology dictates who can become pregnant, it does not always reflect gender identity. If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary,” the guidance read.

“However,” they noted, “we must take care that our efforts to be more inclusive do not come at the expense of other marginalized groups, such as women, and add to a feeling of exclusion.”

Context was then provided to give further guidance as to when they felt it was appropriate to use the term “pregnant women” versus “pregnant individuals.”

“If you are dealing with a situation in which you know the people identify as women, then you can appropriately use the phrase pregnant woman or pregnant women,” they advised.

On the other hand, they claimed other situations merited the use of more supposedly inclusive terms to reflect that “transgender men and people who are nonbinary can also become pregnant.”

“If a shorter phrase is needed,” they suggested, “especially in headlines, the phrase pregnant individuals may be used (or even pregnant people if space is really tight), but we should be careful about it becoming the de facto usage because it can come across as exclusionary towards women, who are already marginalized …”

I’d like to be able to include the original tweet Lyles sent out, but I can’t because it’s been deleted for some odd reason, presumably because the Washington Post wanted to keep this information on the down-low because democracy dies in darkness and stuff. Unfortunately for him and his employer, the Internet is forever. Here’s the archived version and a screengrab of it is below:

It’s amusing in a bit of a perverse way that the paper thinks they can have it both ways on this. On one hand, they don’t want to seem like they are excluding women on stories about pregnancy but on the other, they advocate doing that very thing by absurdly arguing that men can get pregnant, too, and saying those notations should be reflected in their “reporting.”

No, men cannot get pregnant. Even if one identifies as a transgender man, that person was born with the equipment necessary to get pregnant and carry a baby to term. It’s not just insulting to women to suggest otherwise, it’s an insult to the intelligence of everyone who knows better and refuses to bow down to the radical redefining of gender terminology.

Women are not “bodies with vaginas.” They are not “theys” or “theirs.” They are not simply “menstruating people.”

Women are women, and a growing number of them on the right and left are fighting back against what effectively will be an erasure of who they are and their hard-fought-for rights as we know them if this nonsense continues.

The Washington Post can try to have their cake and eat it, too, on this one, but it won’t work. The tide is slowly changing on this issue, in my opinion, as even women who normally don’t get involved much in political arguments aren’t sitting on the sidelines anymore because they understand what’s at stake not just for current generations but future generations of women as well if they don’t speak up now.

Flashback: L.A. Times Editorial Telling Women to Get Over Seeing Men’s Genitalia in Locker Rooms Is Something Else

Gutowski Destroyed Washington Post Gun Control Editorial

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There are certain publications one really doesn’t expect to remain unbiased on the subject of gun control. By that I mean pretty much none of the major ones are capable of keeping their biases in check, though most still pretend they do. Which is why it’s funny how their editorials almost universally take an anti-Second Amendment slant but we should trust that they’re unbiased.

Speaking of editorials, though, the Washington Post ran an anti-gun screed they classified as an editorial.

It was destroyed by The Reload’s founder, Stephen Gutowski.

Anyway, the publication’s editorial board said it’s time to tackle guns, but The Reload’s Stephen Gutowski was waiting there in the tall grass and ripped apart the entire piece.

Here’s what WaPo wrote about the issue:

The ravages of guns extend beyond those whose deaths are tallied in the annual FBI report. There are the families who must struggle with senseless loss, those who are injured by gunfire and those who witnessed the horror.

The Post’s John Woodrow Cox wrote a searing portrait of a D.C., girl who was the victim of an accidental shooting in May 2020. My’onna Hinton was 4 years old when a 7-year-old relative got hold of a gun left unsecured by a negligent owner. The boy thought it was a toy, squeezed the trigger and shot My’onna through the neck. My’onna is now in a wheelchair, her life forever changed. As is that of her mother and the little boy who said, “I didn’t know it was real … I didn’t mean to do it.”

Instead of putting in place sensible gun control — such as bans on assault weapons, universal background checks, safe-secure laws with stiff consequences — Congress has remained gridlocked. Meanwhile, Republican-led states have enacted laws — such as the one that went into effect in July in Tennessee that allows most adults to carry, openly or concealed, a handgun without a permit. The rising and spreading murder statistics should raise the alarm that it’s time to stop despairing over the damage done by guns and do something about it.

Gutowski didn’t even hit the pages of his newsletter for this one. He just took it straight to Twitter.

Duuuude, how did I miss this?

That’s what I get for not being on Twitter that much this week.

Gutowski is absolutely correct in his dismantling of the Post‘s editorial. The District of Columbia already has many of those already in place and they did nothing to stop the tragic shooting of a little girl. Trying to say that such a failure is evidence that we need such laws on a national level would be akin to saying…I’m sorry, I lack the brain damage necessary to find an analogy so fundamentally stupid as to work here.

However, I’m not surprised by the Post‘s editorial board.

Gun control fans have tried using countless tragedies to muddy the waters in the Second Amendment debate for years. This is nothing new.

Nor is it particularly new to completely botch the attempt. After all, we routinely have people calling for assault weapon bans in the midst of a mass shooting, only to find out the killer used a handgun. That’s usually about the same time they’re demanding universal background checks, swearing it would stop such incidents, before finding out the killer passed a background check prior to purchasing the weapon he used.

The Post‘s attempt is nothing new, it’s just more hamfisted than usual, and Gutowski lowering the boom was really a thing of beauty.

Honestly, after that one, they might want to consider using their next editorial to talk about keeping their stupid opinions to themselves.

WaPo: Rising Murder Rates Means It's Time For Gun Control

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Of course, they were calling for the same gun control laws when the nation’s homicide rate was steadily declining for years, but they’d prefer you not remember that. With the FBI reporting the biggest one-year spike in homicides since they started keeping track, and since that spike coincides with the biggest one-year increase in gun sales since the start of the NICS system two decades ago, the editors at the Washington Post know that it’s easy, however dishonest, to equate correlation with causation.

The FBI’s annual tabulation of crime data, released on Monday, showed that killings in the United States increased nearly 30 percent last year, the largest annual increase on record. An additional 4,901 people were killed in 2020 compared with 2019, bringing the total to 21,500.Many factors are at play — including an unprecedented pandemic that caused economic and mental stress — but what is most striking is the undeniable role played by guns. Gun homicides accounted for more than two of every three killings; few parts of the country have been spared. In 1990, crime analyst Jeff Asher told the New York Times, New York City and Los Angeles accounted for 13.8 percent of U.S. murders, compared with only 3.8 percent in 2020; a Post analysis of shootings in the first five months of this year found an increase in shooting deaths in suburban and rural areas with experts noting a dramatic increase in gun purchases.

Actually, research has shown that the rise in homicides and shootings cannot be attributed to an increase in gun sales, but the Post‘s editors have no reason to point that out to their readers since it completely undercuts their argument. It’s true that it’s not just New York and Los Angeles experiencing a crime surge, but even the paper’s own data shows that, despite the protests by the editors, big cities have seen a much larger increase than the suburbs and rural areas.

In fact, rural areas, where gun ownership is most common, had an almost imperceptible rise in “gun deaths” since the surge in violent crime began last summer. If guns were the problem, wouldn’t the problem be most acute in the places with most guns?

Apparently that obvious question never crossed the minds of the WaPo editors, who instead repeat their stale demands for more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms while never once mentioning the individuals who are actually responsible for the increase shootings and murders.

Instead of putting in place sensible gun control — such as bans on assault weapons, universal background checks, safe secure laws with stiff consequences — Congress has remained gridlocked. Meanwhile, Republican-led states have enacted laws — such as the one that went into effect in July in Tennessee that allows most adults to carry, openly or concealed, a handgun without a permit. The rising and spreading murder statistics should raise the alarm that it’s time to stop despairing over the damage done by guns and do something about it.

The Washington Post‘s idea of doing something is creating new crimes out of the right to keep and bear arms. I’ve got a better idea: let’s actually focus on the guys who are committing these violent crimes rather than turn millions of legal gun owners into non-violent offenders. That not only means violence prevention efforts, but improving clearance rates for homicides and non-fatal shootings. A big reason why crime is up right now is because more offenders are getting away with it. In Chicago and many other cities the clearance rate for non-fatal shootings is less than 20%, and in some cases it’s even lower.

And once arrests are made we need to ensure that there are actual consequences, not a slap on the wrist and a couple of years of probation. We need to also have a serious conversation about juvenile justice, given that we’re seeing a growing number of young offenders committing some heinous crimes, and in many cases they’re already well known to the court system. The purpose of juvenile justice is supposedly rehabilitation, and in many states the system is failing miserably.

We should be doing more to address violent crime, but that doesn’t mean going after the right to keep and bear arms; a right, by the way, that millions of Americans have embraced for the first time in their lives over the past couple of years. These new gun owners are not the drivers of “gun violence,” but in the myopic eyes of the Washington Post editors, they and other responsible gun owners are clearly the biggest menace to society.

WaPo Editors Ignore Realities Of Chipman's Defeat

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If there was any doubt that the demise of David Chipman’s nomination as permanent director of the ATF has gun control activists in a rage, look no further than the editorial pages of the Washington Post, where the editors uncorked a torrent of misinformation and vitriol aimed at those it believes responsible for Chipman’s defeat; the “the gun lobbyists who attacked the nominee, showing how morally off-kilter, yet enduringly powerful, the lobby remains.”

To be fair, the paper’s editors also try to shame red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin and Angus King (an independent who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate), saying they “lacked the courage” to stand up to “the gun lobby.” The problem with that argument is that according to a poll conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a majority of respondents in both Maine and West Virginia were opposed to Chipman’s nomination. It wasn’t cowardice that led to Manchin and King rejecting Chipman, but a desire to not stray too far from the wishes of voters. In fact, who’s to say that it wasn’t an act of political courage for these Democrats to reject Chipman, knowing that the national party and its erstwhile allies in the media were going to slam them for their decision?

The Post editorial absurdly ignores the reporting of The Reload’s Stephen Gutowski, which revealed several allegations of racial impropriety on the part of Chipman, including a comment he made about the number of Black agents on a promotions list. Instead, the paper claims that “with a weak substantive case against Mr. Chipman, his critics objected most strongly to his attitude.”

He has emphasized that people who buy guns for protection might put themselves in more danger if they do not store them safely and seek proper training, advising new gun owners to “hide it behind the cans of tuna and beef jerky that you’ve stored in the cabinet.” He explained that a disturbing number of people have bought AR-15 rifles for “the same reason Americans might want a muscle car or enjoy a muscle car: It’s American-made, it has outsized power.” He attacked the National Rifle Association for its lobbying against measures that would make the country’s gun-saturated society safer. These and other comments, his opponents argued, revealed contempt for gun owners — even though Mr. Chipman himself owns a gun.

It should not be disqualifying for a public servant to acknowledge the realities of gun violence in the United States, which is unique among advanced nations in tolerating such carnage. Nor should wanting to take popular, small steps toward curbing the flow of guns that serve no legitimate civilian purpose.

While Chipman’s alleged racist remarks certainly didn’t help his cause, what ultimately doomed his nomination was the fact that he’s worked as a paid gun control lobbyist for most of the past decade (at least when he wasn’t hawking a product that’s alleged to lead to overpolicing in minority neighborhoods) and displayed an outright hostility towards gun owners. Take Chipman’s snarky comment about hiding their guns behind the “cans of tuna and beef jerky.” The Washington Post seems to think that was actual advice, as opposed to sarcastic scoffing at the millions of Americans who purchased a firearm for the first time in their lives last year.

As for the Post‘s assertion that Chipman can’t really be anti-gun because he’s a gun owner himself, I’d like to introduce the editors to a concept called “hypocrisy.” Who cares if Chipman owns a gun? It’s the fact that he wants to criminalize millions of other gun owners by declaring their lawfully-purchased firearms to be illegal or restricted items that’s more important.

Chipman wasn’t disqualified because he “acknowledged the realities of gun violence in the United States.” He was disqualified because he blames legal gun owners and the firearms industry for the actions of criminals, because of his longtime advocacy on behalf of the gun control lobby, and because of the concerns within the ATF itself over the political  weaponizing of the agency if he’d been confirmed. The Washington Post editors may be hot and bothered by the gun control lobby’s defeat, but the fact that they still can’t come clean about Chipman’s baggage and disqualifying factors speaks volumes about what an awful idea it was to nominate him in the first place.