President Donald Trump is threatening to take away the security clearances of a number of former senior intelligence and security officers who have been extremely critical of him. Most Americans were unaware that any ex-officials continued to hold clearances after they retired and the controversy has inevitably raised the question why that should be so. Unfortunately, there…

U.S. authorities have identified a suspect in last year’s “Vault 7” leaks of CIA hacking and electronic surveillance tools used in foreign espionage operations, reports the Washington Post. The Vault 7 release – a series of 24 documents which began to publish on March 7, 2017 – reveal that the CIA had a wide variety of tools to…

Gina Haspel, current Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and nominee to lead the agency, is facing a wave of resistance from civil liberties advocates, Senators, and physicians who say her connection to past torture programs make her unfit to head the CIA. Haspel was involved in CIA “black site” prisons in Thailand and other foreign…

Greg Jaffe at the Washington Post reports that Trump has reversed an Obama-era push to get the Central Intelligence Agency out of the business of assassinating people with drone strikes (Obama had tried to shift most such operations to the Department of Defense). In the course of reviewing video of a drone strike, Trump noticed that…

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity SUBJECT: Request to Withdraw Nomination of Gina Haspel EXECUTIVE SUMMARY With respect, we veteran intelligence officers from CIA and other agencies urge you to withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. From what is already known of her leading role in CIA torture 16 years ago,…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Gina Haspel’s colleagues describe her as a seasoned veteran who would lead the CIA with integrity. Human rights advocates see her as someone who supervised torture at a secret prison. President Donald Trump’s pick to be the next — and first female — director of the clandestine agency has conflicting public reputations. If…

Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA’s covert “Operation Merlin,” who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the…

Opinion — Now that I have been nominated again – this time by author Paul Craig Roberts – to be CIA director, I am preparing to hit the ground running. This time around, on the off-chance I do get the nod, I have taken the time to prepare the agenda for my first few days as CIA…

A former Central Bureau of Investigation (CIA) operative has confirmed the U.S agency has been meddling in the elections and internal political affairs of other countries since its inception in 1947. “The United States absolutely has carried out such election influence operations historically,” said Steven L. Hall, a CIA operative who retired from the U.S. agency in…

Back in 1991, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the general consensus of the intelligence community was that America needed a strong Russia. Russians bore the weight of dismantling the Soviet Union and an internally strong and stable Russia was considered the biggest stable democratic government in the hemisphere. A strong Russia provides stability…