[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

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.

The agency cut back on human counterintelligence and relied more on technical means of information gathering. One architect of that policy was Jimmy Carter’s CIA boss Stansfield Turner, who recruited new agents by running ads in newspapers:

There aren’t many of you. One in a thousand, maybe. You’re a bright, self-reliant, self-motivated person we need to help us gather information and put together a meaningful picture of what is happening in the world. You can rely on your wits, your initiative and your skills. And in return enjoy recognition, positions of responsibility, life in foreign places, plus knowing that you belong to a small, very special group of people doing a vital meaningful job in the face of challenges and possible hardship. . .

And so on. The ads caught the attention of John Brennan, who duly sent off a resume and in 1980 got an interview. Asked if he ever worked for a foreign government or for an organization dedicated to the subversion or overthrowing of the U.S. government, Brennan admitted that as a Fordham University student in 1976 he voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Instead of showing Brennan the door, the CIA hired him. The changes would soon become apparent.

As Brennan explains in Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad, the Arabic speaker served a tour of duty in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the early1980s. In the late 1990s “Al-Qa’ida carried out devastating attacks on U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi,  Kenya.” Whatever duties Brennan performed had not enabled the CIA to prevent these deadly attacks, a foretaste of what was to come. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Brennan was meeting with CIA senior executive staff:

At the very end of the meeting, the head of CIA’s Operations Center opened the conference room and announced that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. He had no further details on whether the aircraft was large or small, and it was unclear at that moment whether it was a tragic accident or the intentional targeting of the iconic twin towers. The staff meeting ended abruptly and we all headed back to our offices with an uneasy feeling about what we had heard and what we might soon find out.

In other words, they had no clue what was coming. The “best experts in the world on al-Qa’ida,” failed to stop the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor in 1941, the very type of attack the CIA was created to prevent. The Gus Hall voter explains the failure.

According to Brennan, jihad is “a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” and as he contends, “I was trying to make the point that ‘violence’ and ‘jihad’ were not necessarily synonymous, which ran counter to the view of most Americans.” An agency that believes jihad is a holy endeavor is not going to stop any jihadist attack.

Brennan is a big fan of Barack Obama, who believes that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” In 2009, when “soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan murdered 14 Americans at Fort Hood, Obama called it “workplace violence,” not terrorism or even gun violence. In 2013, Obama’s pick for CIA director was John Brennan, who believes that jihad is holy and non-violent,  but there was more to him.

The Gus Hall voter supported Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba’s Communist regime, with no demand for democratic reforms or basic human rights. Brennan regards Cuba’s intelligence service as “quite competent” and praises their officers as “impressive and highly professional.” The American seeks to “explore intelligence cooperation and information sharing with the Cubans on terrorism, narcotics smuggling and human trafficking.”

The Gus Hall voter tipped it off in his subtitle about his fight against America’s enemies “at home” before those “abroad.” Brennan endlessly repeats the Russia hoax, that Putin intervened in the 2016 election to hinder Hillary Clinton and “enhance the electoral prospects of Donald Trump.” Four years later, Brennan and a host of CIA bosses sign a letter charging that Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, which he knows to be false.

“I have seen the contents of that laptop and retain a copy to this day,” explains former CIA operations officer Charles S. Faddis, author of Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. “I can assure you it was immediately obvious in looking at the laptop’s contents that it was real and that it suggested strongly that Joe Biden himself was compromised by a number of foreign actors—chief among them the Chinese Communist Party.” Those were the people Biden said were “not bad folks,” and not even competition for America.

Faddis describes Brennan’s real profession as “a Democratic political hack” and according to former CIA analyst John Gentry, Brennan’s vote for Gus Hall was “was consistent with the general political orientation Brennan demonstrated in later life.” In Neutering the CIA: Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences, Gentry shows how Brennan downplayed Islamist jihadism and transformed the spy agency into a woke, partisan bureaucracy. That’s why the CIA remains “available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.”

Deception author Edward Jay Epstein was right that 50 years ago the CIA was turned inside out. The changes could have a lot to do with what happens on November 5 and beyond.