https://www.frontpagemag.com/collaborator-intelligence-agency/
It has now emerged that Gina Haspel, director of the CIA from 2018-2021, was aware of the October, 2020 letter from 51 “intelligence community” officials charging that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” The signatories included three former CIA directors –Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan, plus acting CIA directors John McLaughlin and Mike Morel. A full 41 signers were from the CIA – some still on contract to the agency at the time. In 2022, many of the signatories refused comment on the letter or ducked the question.
Asked in early June if he would retract his signature, former director of national intelligence James Clapper said “no.” In the recent debate with Donald Trump, Joe Biden claimed that the laptop was a “Russian plant,” which he too knows is false.
As these events revealed, American intelligence officials are willing to deploy their spycraft on the domestic scene for partisan purposes. This failure goes back to events 50 years ago, as explained by Edward Jay Epstein who, before he passed away at 88 in January, reprised many of his books and articles in Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe.
Epstein’s Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA broke new ground but was released in 1989 when the Soviet empire was breaking apart. The book landed in remainder bins, because readers thought the invisible war was over. It wasn’t, and Deception remains more relevant than ever.
Epstein’s primary source was James Jesus Angleton, who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA. In the style of a fly fisherman, Angleton liked to play Soviet defectors Anatoli Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko for all they were worth. Angleton needed to know if he Soviets’ deception loop included persons inside the CIA who could tell how the other side was interpreting the operations. CIA bosses were unwilling to believe they could be penetrated and in 1974, amid charges that the CIA was spying on Americans, Angleton was fired. For Epstein, this effectively turned the CIA inside out.