Neutering the CIA might be taken as a reference to the CIA’s failure to stop the events of 9/11, but as the subtitle clarifies, this is about Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences. That is of great interest, coming from a CIA man.
John A. Gentry started as a CIA analyst in 1986, took “another job” with the CIA soon after and left the agency in 1990. Gentry “rejoined” the IC (Intelligence Community) in other capacities, and at the MITRE Corporation worked for the intelligence policy office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Beginning in 2010, Gentry taught at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s training center before joining the National Intelligence University, which he left in 2015. In his long experience, Gentry “taught students from virtually all IC agencies and interacted regularly with many other intelligence personnel from several agencies.”
Gentry knows that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the CIA, was “riddled with Soviet agents.” He knows that the fledgling CIA stocked up on East Coast liberals, with nary a conservative or Republican in sight. The author also knows that in current times, as this recruiting video confirms, the CIA is another woke bureaucracy.
According to Gentry the key player was Obama, whose “focus was domestic and his motive clearly was political.” His chief ally was John Brennan, CIA boss from 2013 to 2017. Brennan “embraced diversity policies strenuously and institutionalized policy changes that shifted collective worldviews in ways that achieved Obama’s goals while also fostering an organizational culture that opposed Trump vigorously.”
In his address at the 2004 Democratic convention, Obama proclaimed “There’ not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America,” with reference to a “single American family.” Contrast that with conditions at the National Security Agency (NSA) by 2019:
AA, African American; AAPI, Asian-American Pacific Islander; AIAN, American Indian Alaska Native: AV, American Veteran; ESL, English as a Second Language; HLAT, Hispanic/Latino; NG, Next Gen; PRIDE, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Allies; PWD, People with Disabilities, and W for Woman. As Gentry notes, the NSA workforce was balkanized “to a considerably less extent than CIA’s.”
In his last year in office, Obama proposed creating MENA for Middle East and North Africa, mainly Muslim countries. “Another group for IC to balkanize the workforce,” explains Gentry, who recalls that “Obama’s views on Islam altered the way IC viewed Islamic terrorism directed against the United States.”
The composite character president, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, refused to link Islam with terrorism, even with groups such as al Qaeda. According to David Muller, a retired Naval intelligence officer who worked at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), that was like discussing WWII and the Holocaust without reference to Nazi ideology and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
According to Gentry, the NCTC “closely mimicked Obama White House language on terrorism.” The agency was managed by “M. Javed A,” charged with oversight of the counterterrorism operations of all federal agencies. The Muslim “expressed pleasure at how he had excised Islam from training courses at the FBI, where he previously worked, and said he intended to do the same in the ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and IC generally.”
The leftist-woke-Islamophilia axis produced a culture geared to wage jihad against Trump. Gentry provides a blow-by-blow account, with a full cast of characters and explanation of the rules. For example, civilian intelligence officers are “not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice to obey lawful orders.” Maybe they should be.
Gentry calls for a halt on “partisan political messaging,” and the selective leaking of information. Lifelong security clearances are to be avoided and “former” IC people who are “active partisans” should not have “continuing roles in supervising or advising intelligence elements.” Good ideas, but as of now “the major task of reforming US intelligence remains undone.”
That means the woke, partisan CIA is more inept than in 2001, when it failed to stop a small band of Islamic jihadists from pulling off the worst attack on the United States since December 7, 1941. With millions of unvetted illegals streaming across the border, an attack of greater magnitude becomes more likely.
Back in 1976, John Brennan voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA. That vote, Gentry contends, was “consistent with the general political orientation Brennan demonstrated in later life.” On the other hand, Gentry shows little curiosity about Obama’s beloved Frank Marshall Davis, the black Communist who devoted most of his life to an all-white Soviet dictatorship. Gentry is no Vasiliy Mitrokhin, but he left some keys by the front door.
Neutering the CIA is dedicated “to the many fine people of the Central Intelligence Agency,” which vetted the book and “approved its text without change.” According to Gentry, the IC forces that triggered the attack on Trump, “remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.” Renewed IC activism also “seems likely if even a traditional Republican again becomes president.” (emphases added) As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.