The CIA’s operations abroad are usually shrouded in secrecy, but President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had authorized the spy agency to take unspecified action in Venezuela, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgement from a commander in chief.
“Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?” a reporter asked Trump at the White House.
“I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump said. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America.”
The second reason, the president said, was narcotics trafficking.
“And the other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela,” Trump said.
The president’s highly unusual remarks about his orders to the CIA came only hours after The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had authorized the CIA to carry out covert, lethal action in Venezuela.
The CIA declined to comment on the report.
Asked if the Central Intelligence Agency had authority to “take out” the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, Trump said: “Oh, I don’t want to answer a question like that. That’s a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?”
“I think Venezuela is feeling heat,” he added. “But I think a lot of other countries are feeling heat too.”
In a post on social media on Tuesday, Trump said the U.S. military had carried out a strike on another boat in the Caribbean which he claimed was smuggling narcotics to the United States. It was the fifth such strike since early September.
NBC News has previously reported that U.S. military officials are drawing up options to target drug traffickers inside Venezuela.
The suspects in the foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concerts in Vienna earlier this month wanted to kill “tens of thousands” of the artist’s fans, CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said Wednesday at a security conference in Maryland.
“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including, I am sure, many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said, according to The Associated Press. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”
Swift’s Vienna concerts, which would have begun on Aug. 8, were canceled by the events’ organizers, Barracuda Music, when they were informed of the foiled plot by Austrian authorities.
Fans of singer Taylor Swift gather in Vienna, Austria, on August 8, 2024, after concerts were canceled at the last minute.
ROLAND SCHLAGER/APA/AFP/Getty
The move left tens of thousands of Swift’s fans, many of whom had traveled to Vienna from elsewhere in the country or abroad specifically to see a show, devastated.
“I won’t be able to see Taylor again with these resale prices so I am pretty devastated,” one social media user named Caroline said shortly after the shows were canceled. “This was supposed to be my ‘you beat cancer’ trip so losing it hurts.”
Another social media user named Sarah wrote that she had been “waiting to see taylor in my home country since i was 9 years old, i’m now 25… to have all this taken away by some men being so fueled by hatred for no reason at all makes me so beyond angry i can’t put it into words.”
The main suspect in the alleged plot, along with a 17-year-old, were taken into custody on Aug. 6, the day before the cancelations were announced. Austrian officials said the primary suspect, who they have not named due to Austrian privacy laws, was inspired by ISIS. They said he had planned to attack outside the stadium with knives or explosives.
A third suspect, who was 18 years old, was arrested on Aug. 8.
At the security conference Wednesday, CIA Deputy Director Cohen praised the CIA’s work, saying counterterrorism “successes” often go unheralded, according to the AP.
“I can tell you within my agency, and I’m sure in others, there were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley,” he said, referring to the location of the CIA headquarters in Virginia. “And not just the Swifties in my workforce.”
Happy Independence Day! Where’s the potato salad and the ribs?
July 2, 1776 was the day that the Continental Congress actually voted for independence. John Adams noted that July 2 would be remembered in the annals of American history. 248 years later, the United States Supreme Court extended sweeping powers to the executive branch in a way that would make King George III blush.
The Supreme Court in TRUMP vs. United States, the high court granted the executive branch “absolute” presidential immunity for “his core constitutional powers.” Additionally, the president “enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does if official.” The six conservatives voted for and the three liberal-minded justices dissented.
In layman’s terms, the executive branch has a greater level of immunity than police officers. Police officers can be charged with murder. However, the President is cloaked by the separation of powers as outlined in Article II of the United States Constitution, according to the Supreme Court decision.
So, what does that mean for the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump? It means he can fulfill his promise of being a dictator on ‘day one.’
One historical figure compares to Trump in this moment
Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger meets with President Mobutu of Zaire in his Pentagon office in 1983.
In 1960, Mobutu Sese Seko was the second in command in the Congolese Army. In November 1965, Mobutu led two successful coups, with the backing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). And in 1971, Mobutu Sese Seko consolidated power unto himself. He launched a ‘national authenticity’ program in Congo, previously known as the Democratic Republic of Zaire. He rid his country of all colonial influence and re-established a national identity.
In a speech in Dakar, Mobutu described his plan as, “an experience drawn from the anarchy caused by the plurality of political parties and by the ascendancy of imported ideologies, spread through empty slogans. We have had to wipe the slate clean of all previously existing parties.”
Essentially, Mobutu Sese Seko established a unitarian government. He had the backing of Chairman Mao and the support from Apartheid South Africa. He was a major cult of personality, an overseer of a bereft kleptocracy, while his government was full of corruption. His friends, family members, and benefactors ran government agencies. Mobutu embodied big man rule. What he said was law.
During his thirty-two year rule, Mobutu plundered nearly $5 billion of his country’s wealth and resources. He would take himself shopping in Paris, fly the famed Concorde supersonic jet, and entertain the world’s best and brightest. Meanwhile, his country was crumbling. The paved roads his country had in the sixties, devolved into bush in less than twenty years. In the mid-1990s, the AIDS epidemic and famine ravaged his nation. In a country that did not have clean drinking water, affordable medical infrastructure, and lacked security, the disease brought the country and Mobutu to its collective knees. According to UNAIDS, an estimated 410,000 Congolese children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS.
Mobutu’s government fell in 1997 when he was forced into exile. He was suffering from prostate cancer and he died from his illness on September 7, 1997.
Mobutu and Donald Trump love what the government could do for them. Both men had an insatiable desire for power and established autocracies. And both men were willing to destroy the economic prospects of their countries in the name of putting their pursuits first.
Project 2025 is happening right now
Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, said this on national television:
“The reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”
Project 2025 will destroy women’s rights, civil rights, voting rights, plus LGBTQ+ rights and protections. It will slice and dice environmental protections and regulations. And it does not stop there. The Family Research Council is leading a new initiative called the “Platform Integrity Project.” It calls on the public to pressure the Republican Party to adopting a hardline anti-abortion, anti-LGBT stance ahead of the election.
Donald Trump, after the Supreme Court handed immunity over to him, amplified calls for mass violence directed at his enemies. He also “ReTruthed” a post using the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.” Trump’s MAGA movement believes African-Americans, women, and ethnic minorities, will “replace” White people in society.
This goes on while the corporate and mainstream media continue to shake their hands and whine about how President Biden is too old to be president. And yes, the corporate and mainstream media is still whining over the President’s poor debate performance. Why? They need a two-horse race in order to drive ratings and ad sales while ignoring what will be the most nakedly obvious power grab in the history of western civilization.
What’s Next?
Here is the good news: The choice will be yours on November 5, 2024. It may be the last chance for Americans to exercise that right at the ballot box.
A team of students (above) prepares their robot to enter the competition. Photo by Laura Nwogu/The Atlanta Voice
In partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE)hosted a battlebots competition at the John Hope Envision Center on Friday. The competition marked the final event of the CIA Robotics Academy’s week-long day camp where a cohort of 23 rising seventh-ninth grade students used hands-on skills to learn how to build, test and refine robots. The academy was also hosted in partnership with the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative and the Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education, which granted participants tours of the AUC campuses.
“The CIA supports STEAM education to prepare students to enter into careers that will require them to demonstrate their ability to problem solve, to critically think, to have self exploration and to continue to persevere. The students have done all four this week,” said Manon Fleming, project manager for ORISE.
Working in teams of two or three, students only had one week to design, building and programing their robots in preparation for the showcase.
ORISE project manager Manon Fleming (center) talks with CIA Robotics Academy students Madison Williams (left) and I’vion Pattman (right) about their favorite parts of the academy. Photo by Laura Nwogu/The Atlanta Voice
They battled it out in a bracket-style competition that featured robots with various mechanisms from claws to scoops to conveyor bolts. In simplest tems, the object of the competition was to win as many points as possible by directing the robots they designed to score balls in different baskets.
Students got to showcase the science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) skills they’d learned throughout the week and use teamwork to navigate the playing field for the competition.
“My favorite part of the CIA Robotics Academy this week was probably learning and experiencing how fundamental directions can be, especially when it comes to building robotics and knowing what steps to go first and probably learning more about the HBCU colleges,” said I’vion Pattman, one of the student participants of the academy.
At the end of the competition, the students received certificates for completing the CIA Robotics Academy. Fleming said she hopes to reach and interest more parents and teachers to encourage students to join next year’s cohorts when applications open.
1986-1989 – Ames is stationed in Rome and continues to pass information to Soviet agents. He is paid approximately $1.8 million during this period.
Late 1980s – The CIA and FBI learn that a number of Russian double agents have been arrested and some executed.
May 1993 – The FBI begins investigating Ames, with both physical and electronic surveillance.
February 21, 1994 – Ames and his wife, Rosario, are arrested in Arlington, Virginia, by the FBI, accused of spying for the Soviet Union and later, Russia. It is estimated that Ames has received approximately $2.5 million from Russia and the Soviet Union for his years of spying.
April 28, 1994 – Ames pleads guilty and is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In October 1994, Ames’ wife receives 63 months in prison.
1970-1991 – David Boone serves in the US Army as a signals intelligence analyst. During the late 1980s, he is assigned to the National Security Agency as a senior cryptologic traffic analyst.
October 1988 – In the midst of a divorce and financial problems, Boone goes to the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, and offers to spy on the United States. He is paid about $20,000 a year for his work over the next three years. He continues spying after being transferred to a post in Germany.
1991 – Boone loses his security clearance and retires from the Army, remaining in Germany.
1998 – He is contacted by a retired FBI agent posing as a Russian agent. The agent meets with Boone in London and the United States and pays him $9,000 to return to spying for Russia.
October 14, 1998 – Boone is charged with passing defense documents to the Soviet Union. He pleads guilty in December 1998.
February 26, 1999 – He is sentenced to 24 years in prison.
January 14, 2020 – Boone is released from prison.
1996 – Peter Rafael Dzibinski Debbins makes visits to Russia to meet with their intelligence agents. He is given a code name and signs a settlement “attesting that he wanted to serve” them.
1998-2005 – Debbins joins the Army, where he serves in chemical units before being selected for the US Army Special Forces.
May 14, 2021 – The DOJ announces that Debbins is sentenced to 188 months in federal prison for conspiring with Russian agents to provide them with US defense intelligence.
1968-1986 – Noshir Gowadia is employed by Northrop Grumman where he works on technology relating to the B-2 Spirit Bomber, aka the “Stealth” bomber.
July 2003-June 2005 – Travels to China six times to “provide defense services in the form of design, test support and test data analysis of technologies to assist the PRC with a cruise missile system by developing a stealthy exhaust nozzle.” He is paid over $100,000 during this period.
October 2005 – Arrested and charged with passing national defense information to China. Superseding indictments are issued in 2006 and 2007.
1980 – Begins working for the counterintelligence unit, focusing on the Soviet Union.
1981 – Transfers to FBI headquarters, initially tracking white-collar crime and monitoring foreign officials assigned to the United States. He is later assigned to the Soviet Analytical Unit.
1981 – Hanssen’s wife catches him with classified documents and convinces him to stop spying.
October 4, 1985 – Resumes spying.
1991 – Breaks off relations with the KGB.
1999 – Resumes spying, this time for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
2000 – The FBI identifies Hanssen from a fingerprint and from a tape recording supplied by a disgruntled Russian intelligence operative. The FBI also obtains the complete original KGB dossier on Hanssen.
December 2000 – The FBI begins surveillance of Hanssen.
February 18, 2001 – Hanssen is arrested in a Virginia park after making a drop of classified documents. Agents find a bag nearby containing $50,000 that they believe is Hanssen’s payment for the documents.
July 6, 2001 – Pleads guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy in exchange for the government not seeking the death penalty.
May 10, 2002 – He is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Fall 2000 – The FBI and DIA begin investigating Montes.
September 11, 2001 – In response to attacks on the United States, Montes is named acting division chief, which gives her access to the plans to attack Afghanistan and the Taliban.
September 21, 2001 – Montes is arrested in Washington, DC, and is charged with conspiracy to deliver defense information to Cuba.
March 20, 2002 – Pleads guilty to espionage and is sentenced to 25 years in prison.
1978 – Myers travels to Cuba and is recruited by Cuban intelligence.
1979 – Myers and his girlfriend [later his wife], Gwendolyn, begin spying for Cuba. It is believed they receive little to no payment for their services.
1985 – He is hired by the State Dept. as a senior analyst.
October 31, 2007 – Myers retires from the State Dept.
November 20, 2009 – He pleads guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy to commit espionage. Gwendolyn Myers pleads guilty to conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information.
July 16, 2010 – Myers is sentenced to life in prison. His wife is sentenced to 81 months.
1980 – Harold Nicholson joins the CIA after serving in the United States Army.
1982-1989 – Nicholson works for the CIA in the Philippines, Thailand and Japan.
1992-1994 – Deputy Chief of Station/Operations Officer in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
June 1994-November 1996 – Provides Russian Intelligence with sensitive information.
June 5, 1997 – He is convicted of espionage and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
2008 – Nicholson’s son, Nathaniel, is arrested on charges he met with Russian agents to collect money owed to his father.
January 18, 2011 – Harold Nicholson is sentenced to an additional eight years in prison on charges of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Nathaniel Nicholson is sentenced to five years probation.
1965-1979 –Ronald Pelton works for the National Security Agency, with top-level security clearance.
1979 – Pelton leaves the NSA due to financial problems.
January 1980 – After declaring bankruptcy in 1979, Pelton begins spying for the Soviet Union. He discloses classified information on the United States’ ability to intercept Soviet communications.
November 25, 1985 – After a KGB defector reveals his name, Pelton is arrested and charged with espionage.
June 5, 1986 – He is convicted of spying.
December 17, 1986 – Pelton is sentenced to three concurrent life sentences plus 10 years.
November 24, 2015 – Pelton is released from prison.
1983-1996 – Earl Edwin Pitts works at the FBI.
1987-1992 – Pitts passes information on FBI operations to the Soviet Union and Russia.
1995 – A Russian diplomat at the UN names Pitts as a former spy. FBI agents posing as Russian intelligence officers contact Pitts to attempt to lure him back to spying. Pitts delivers documents in exchange for $65,000.
December 18, 1996 – Pitts is arrested. He is charged two days later with conspiring and attempting to commit espionage.
February 28, 1997 – Pleads guilty. At the time, he is only the second agent in the FBI’s history to be found guilty of espionage.
June 23, 1997 – Heis sentenced to 27 years in prison.
December 20, 2019 – Pitts is released from prison.
June 1984 – He begins spying for Israel, passing on information on Arab countries. He earns $1,500-$2,500 a month.
November 21, 1985 – Pollard is arrested outside the Israeli Embassy after his request for asylum is denied.
June 4, 1986 – Pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage.
March 4, 1987 – US District Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr. rejects a plea agreement reached by federal prosecutors and Pollard. Instead, he sentences Pollard to life in prison. Pollard is the only person in US history to receive a life sentence for spying on behalf of a US ally. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have rejected pleas for clemency.
1995 – Israel grants Pollard citizenship.
May 11, 1998 – Israel admits for the first time that Pollard was working as its agent.
1969-1994 – George Trofimoff, a naturalized American citizen of Russian parentage, works as a civilian for the US Army at the Joint Interrogation Center in Nuremberg, Germany. He also attains the rank of colonel in the Army reserve.
1994 – Trofimoff and a priest in the Russian Orthodox church, Igor Susemihl, are arrested in Germany on spying charges. The charges are later dropped.
1994 – Retires and moves to South Florida.
June 14, 2000 – Trofimoff is arrested. US Attorney Donna Bucella describes him as “the highest-ranking US military officer ever charged with espionage. He is accused of passing classified information on Soviet and Warsaw Pact military capabilities from 1969-1994. Allegedly, he received payment of over $250,000 during that time.
June 27, 2001 – He is convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. He is later sentenced to life in prison.
President Biden on Saturday signed legislation reauthorizing a key U.S. surveillance law after divisions over whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans’ data nearly forced the statute to lapse.
Barely missing its midnight deadline, the Senate had approved the bill by a 60-34 vote hours earlier with bipartisan support, extending for two years the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Mr. Biden thanked congressional leaders for their work.
“In the nick of time, we are reauthorizing FISA right before it expires at midnight,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said when voting on final passage began 15 minutes before the deadline. “All day long, we persisted and we persisted in trying to reach a breakthrough and in the end, we have succeeded.”
What is Section 702 of FISA?
U.S. officials have said the surveillance tool, first authorized in 2008 and renewed several times since then, is crucial in disrupting terrorist attacks, cyber intrusions, and foreign espionage, and has also produced intelligence that the U.S. has relied on for specific operations, such as the 2022 killing of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri.
“If you miss a key piece of intelligence, you may miss some event overseas or put troops in harm’s way,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said. “You may miss a plot to harm the country here, domestically, or somewhere else. So in this particular case, there’s real-life implications.”
Section 702 permits the U.S. government to collect, without a warrant, the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence. The reauthorization faced a long and bumpy road to final passage Friday after months of clashes between privacy advocates and national security hawks pushed consideration of the legislation to the brink of expiration.
Though the spy program was technically set to expire at midnight, the Biden administration had said it expected its authority to collect intelligence to remain operational for at least another year, thanks to an opinion earlier this month from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which receives surveillance applications.
Still, officials had said that court approval shouldn’t be a substitute for congressional authorization, especially since communications companies could cease cooperation with the government if the program is allowed to lapse.
Hours before the law was set to expire, U.S. officials were already scrambling after two major U.S. communication providers said they would stop complying with orders through the surveillance program, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.
Attorney General Merrick Garland praised the reauthorization and reiterated how “indispensable” the tool is to the Justice Department.
“This reauthorization of Section 702 gives the U.S. the authority to continue to collect foreign intelligence information about non-U.S. persons located outside the United States, while at the same time codifying important reforms the Justice Department has adopted to ensure the protection of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties,” Garland said in a statement Saturday.
Some lawmakers hesitant to renew Section 702
But despite the Biden administration’s urging and classified briefings to senators this week on the crucial role they say the spy program plays in protecting national security, a group of progressive and conservative lawmakers who were agitating for further changes had refused to accept the version of the bill the House sent over last week.
The lawmakers had demanded that Schumer allow votes on amendments to the legislation that would seek to address what they see as civil liberty loopholes in the bill. In the end, Schumer was able to cut a deal that would allow critics to receive floor votes on their amendments in exchange for speeding up the process for passage.
The six amendments ultimately failed to garner the necessary support on the floor to be included in the final passage.
One of the major changes detractors had proposed centered around restricting the FBI’s access to information about Americans through the program. Though the surveillance tool only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications of Americans when they are in contact with those targeted foreigners. Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber, had been pushing a proposal that would require U.S. officials to get a warrant before accessing American communications.
“If the government wants to spy on my private communications or the private communications of any American, they should be required to get approval from a judge, just as our Founding Fathers intended in writing the Constitution,” Durbin said.
In the past year, U.S. officials have revealed a series of abuses and mistakes by FBI analysts in improperly querying the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including a member of Congress and participants in the racial justice protests of 2020 and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
But members on both the House and Senate intelligence committees as well as the Justice Department warned requiring a warrant would severely handicap officials from quickly responding to imminent national security threats.
“I think that is a risk that we cannot afford to take with the vast array of challenges our nation faces around the world,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
CIA Director William Burns acknowledged Thursday that without military assistance from the U.S., Ukraine could experience significant setbacks in its war with Russia.
Ukrainians are “at a tough moment on the battlefield right now,” Burns said during a Q&A session at the Bush Center Forum on Leadership in Dallas.
With supplemental assistance from the U.S., Burns said, Ukrainian forces “can hold their own on the battlefield in 2024 and continue to do damage with deeper strikes in Crimea…and against the Black Sea fleet.”
Burns added that “with the boost that would come from military assistance, both practically and psychologically…the Ukrainians are entirely capable of holding their own through 2024 and puncture Putin’s arrogant view that time is on his side.”
His comments come as a deadlocked Congress continues to stall on Ukraine aid. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled three bills to provide military assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, including $60.4 billion for Ukraine.
“Without supplemental assistance, the picture is a lot more dire,” Burns said. “I think there is a very real risk that the Ukrainians could lose on the battlefield by the end of 2024, or at least put Putin in a position where he could essentially dictate the terms of a political settlement.”
Burns Thursday also addressed the Middle East, China and other pressing national security topics. He alluded to far-reaching implications of the war in Ukraine, including in the Indo-Pacific. While initially, Western solidarity in the face of Russia’s aggression was sobering for Chinese President Xi Jinping as he considered making a move on Taiwan, Burns said, “the surest way to undo that impact is for us to be seen to be walking away from the Ukrainians right now.”
Of the Middle East, Burns said he had “rarely seen a moment more combustible than it is today” over his 40 years in public service.
He called Iran’s direct attack on Israel last Saturday a “spectacular failure” because of integrated air defense, good intelligence, Israel’s military prowess and help from the U.S. and regional partners.
He said the “broad hope” of President Biden and his administration was “that we’ll all find a way to deescalate this situation, especially at a moment when…the Israelis have demonstrated so clearly their superiority.”
American officials have been pressing for a six-week cease-fire that would allow for a phased release of hostages and an accompanying release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons. Israeli officials said that around 240 people were believed to have been taken hostage amid the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7. Six months later, less than half of those captured have been returned.
Burns noted that he has met with hostage families, and that striking a deal had “proven very difficult.”
“It’s a big rock to push up a very steep hill right now,” he said, adding it was a “deep disappointment” to get a negative reaction from Hamas to the most recent proposal.
“I cannot honestly say that I’m certain that we’re going to succeed, but it’s not going to be for lack of trying,” Burns said. “And I do know that the alternatives are worse.”
He said U.S. competition with China was broad and crossed many domains, including space, technology and cybersecurity.
Speaking Wednesday to steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Mr. Biden said he would urge U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai to triple Chinese steel and aluminum tariffs from their current rate of 7.5%.
Burns said he believed Xi was “determined in the course of his political lifetime to control Taiwan.”
“[That] doesn’t mean that he’s planning to invade tomorrow or next month or next year, but it means we have to take very seriously that ambition,” he said.
Burns warned that China and Russia were working “most closely together now than any time in my memory,” adding that the deepening partnership was a “significant challenge” for the U.S.
The phenomenon of transnational repression from autocratic nations like Russia, China and Iran reaching out to “kill or intimidate” activists outside of their own borders was a significant problem, he said.
“It’s a growing challenge and it’s one as an intelligence service that we take very seriously,” Burns said.
Burns also addressed the challenges from technological advancements, including ubiquitous surveillance, as well as the benefits of strategic declassification of intelligence. He addressed the “Duty to Warn” responsibilities biding intelligence agencies to provide warnings when civilian lives are at stake, mentioning the recent terror attacks in Russia and Iran.
“We, the U.S. government, did provide quite accurate intelligence to the Russian services about what we could see was an impending terrorist attack by ISIS against, you know, a pretty big entertainment center in Moscow. And, you know, you’d have to ask the Russian services…why they didn’t pay more attention to that, why they didn’t act on it.”
On May 2, 2011, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces during an early morning raid at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
– Built in approximately 2006. – Significantly larger than other homes in the area, and worth a reported $1 million. – Lacked telephone and internet service. – Residents burned their trash rather than having it picked up. – Approximately 24 people lived at the house. – Surrounded by 12- to 18-foot walls topped by barbed wire. – Had two security gates. – Bin Laden and his family’s living quarters were on the second and third levels. – The third floor terrace had a seven-foot privacy wall. – Located only about a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy.
US forces retrieved numerous items from bin Laden’s compound, including 10 hard drives, five computers and more than 100 storage devices, such as disks, DVDs and thumb drives, according to a senior US official.
2007 (approx.) – US intelligence uncovers the name of one of bin Laden’s most trusted couriers.
2009 (approx.) – Intelligence sources identify the area of Pakistan where the courier and his brother live.
August 2010 – US intelligence sources identify the Abbottabad compound as the home of the courier and his brother, who have no obvious means of affording a $1 million home.
September 2010 – The CIA informs President Barack Obama that bin Laden may be living in the Abbottabad compound. They base this on the size and price tag of the compound as well as the elaborate security.
February 2011 – The intelligence on the Abbottabad compound is considered strong enough to begin planning action.
March 14, 2011 – President Obama chairs the first of five National Security Council meetings to discuss an operation to raid bin Laden’s compound.
March 29, 2011 – Second National Security meeting.
April 12, 2011 – Third meeting.
April 19, 2011 – Fourth meeting.
April 28, 2011 – Last of the National Security Council meetings on the bin Laden raid.
April 29, 2011 – At 8:20 a.m. ET, President Obama gives the order to raid bin Laden’s compound.
May 2, 2011 – In the early morning hours (mid-afternoon on May 1 in the United States), a group of 25 Navy Seals raid the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. – They arrive outside the compound in two Black Hawk helicopters. – The operation takes 40 minutes total. – US Special Forces breach the outer walls of the compound before fighting their way through the ground floor of the three-story building. The firefight then moves to the second and third floors. – In the last 5-10 minutes of the firefight, bin Laden is killed by a gunshot wound to the head. – Three men, including a son of bin Laden, are killed as well as one woman. – Bin Laden’s body is identified by one of his wives. Facial recognition is also used.
May 2, 2011 – Bin Laden is buried at sea off the deck of the USS Carl Vinson in the Arabian Sea. – He is buried within 24 hours according to Islamic law. – The hour-long ceremony aboard the USS Carl Vinson is conducted according to Islamic law.
May 2, 2011 – A DNA test is done on a sample from the body, confirming that it is bin Laden.
May 3, 2011 – White House Press Secretary Jay Carney offers new details on the raid. He clarifies that the woman killed was on the first floor, not with bin Laden, and was killed in the crossfire. Carney also says that bin Laden was not armed but did put up resistance.
May 3, 2011 – A congressional source tells CNN that bin Laden had approximately $745 and two telephone numbers sewn into his clothing.
May 3, 2011 – Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mojahed releases a statement, “Obama has not got any strong evidence that can prove his claim over killing of the Sheikh Osama bin Laden… And secondly, the closest sources for Sheikh Osama bin Laden have not confirmed” the death.
May 4, 2011 – White House Press Secretary Carney announces that President Obama has decided not to release photos of bin Laden’s body.
May 6, 2011 – Al Qaeda confirms bin Laden’s death, in a statement on jihadist forums.
May 12, 2011 – US officials confirm to CNN that US authorities have interviewed three of bin Laden’s wives.
May 13, 2011 – It is revealed that a large amount of pornography was seized from the Abbottabad compound during the raid. It is unclear to whom it belonged.
May 13, 2011 – A US military official tells CNN the Navy Seal team who carried out the bin Laden raid wore helmet-mounted digital cameras that recorded the mission.
May 17, 2011 –Senator John Kerry announces that Pakistan will return the tail of the US helicopter damaged during the raid.
May 18, 2011 – Admiral Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates tell reporters there is no evidence that the senior Pakistani leadership knew of bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan.
May 26, 2011 – A team of CIA forensic specialists is granted permission by the Pakistani government to examine the compound.
June 15, 2011 – Pakistan’s intelligence agency arrests several people suspected of assisting the CIA before the raid.
June 17, 2011 – The US Justice Department formally drops terrorism-related criminal charges against bin Laden.
July 11, 2011 – Pakistani security forces detain a doctor suspected of helping the CIA attempt to collect the DNA of bin Laden’s family members through a vaccination drive.
October 6, 2011 – Pakistan’s information ministry says the doctor suspected of helping the CIA target bin Laden will be charged with treason. Also, bin Laden’s compound will be turned over to city officials.
February 2012 – Pakistani authorities begin to demolish the compound.
May 9, 2012 – Citing that it is of national security interest, a federal judge has denies Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information request regarding the release of bin Laden death photos.
May 23, 2012 – Shakeel Afridi, the Pakistani doctor accused of helping the CIA track down bin Laden, is fined $3,500 for spying for the United States and sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason by a tribal court.
September 4, 2012 – The memoir “No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden” by former US Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, written under the name Mark Owen, is published.
February 11, 2013 – Conflicting information about which Navy SEAL killed bin Laden appears when Esquire magazine reports on an unnamed former Navy SEAL who says he fired the kill shot, not the point man as told in Bissonette’s book “No Easy Day.”
May 21, 2013 – A three-judge federal appeals court panel rejects an appeal from a conservative legal group, ruling that the release of post-mortem images of bin Laden’s body could result in attacks on Americans.
November 7, 2014 – Former Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill says in an interview with The Washington Post that he was the one who fired the shot that killed bin Laden.
May 10, 2015 – In a published report, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh contends the Obama Adminstration lied about the circumstances surrounding the killing of bin Laden. The White House later dismisses the report as “baseless.”
April 2023 –Newly released photos, obtained from the Obama Presidential Library via a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, offer a window into the meticulous planning – and tension – among the highest-ranking members of the US government on May 1, 2011.
Is a distinguished visiting professor and founder of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University.
Worked as a cab driver during college.
January 1970-January 1972 – Analyst at Headquarters Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
January 1972-May 1975 – Chief of Current Intelligence Division at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.
July 1975-August 1979 – Academic Instructor at Reserve Officer Training Corps Program, St. Michael’s College in Vermont.
June 1980-July 1982 – Chief of Intelligence, 51st Tactical Fighter Wing, Osan Air Force Base, South Korea.
1984-1986 – Air attaché, US Embassy, Bulgaria.
1986-1989 – Political-Military Affairs Officer, US Air Force Headquarters.
1989-1991 – Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control, National Security Council.
1991-1993 – Chief, Secretary of the Air Force Staff Group.
1993-1995 – Director of Intelligence, US European Command.
1996-1997 – Commander, Air Intelligence Agency, and Director, Joint Command and Control Warfare Center.
1997-1999 – Deputy Chief of Staff, United Nations Command and US Forces Korea.
1999-2005 – Director of the National Security Agency.
April 2005 – Is appointed principal deputy director of national intelligence.
May 30, 2006 – Is sworn in as the director of the CIA.
February 5, 2008 – During congressional testimony, Hayden acknowledges for the first time that the CIA has used waterboarding in the interrogations of detainees.
July 1, 2008 – Retires from the Air Force.
February 12, 2009 – Steps down as the director of the CIA.
February 13, 2009 –Leon Panetta is sworn in as the new director of the CIA.
April 2009 – Joins the Chertoff Group, a security consulting firm founded by Michael Chertoff, former Department of Homeland Security secretary.
September 11, 2014 – In an interview with U.S. News and World Report, Hayden compares the White House strategy of using air strikes against ISIS to casual sex. Hayden says, “The reliance on air power has all of the attraction of casual sex: It seems to offer gratification but with very little commitment.”
December 9, 2014 – The Senate releases a report criticizing the CIA’s interrogation tactics used against terrorist detainees during the Bush era. Hayden responds in an interview with Politico, calling the Senate’s conclusions “analytically offensive.”
February 23, 2016 – Hayden’s book “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror” is published.
Children: Douglas, Samantha, David, Daniel, Sarah, Stephanie and Susan
Education: City College of New York, B.A., 1970
During his career at the FBI, Levinson specialized in investigating organized crime in Russia.
His family said Levinson suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure.
1970s – Levinson is hired by the FBI after six years with the Drug Enforcement Agency.
1998 – Levinson retires from the FBI.
1998-2007 – Levinson works as a private investigator.
2006 – Levinson is hired as a contractor by Tim Sampson, head of the Illicit Finance Group within the Office of Transnational Issues at the CIA, to write reports for the agency. The contract is for approximately $85,000. Three CIA employees, including Sampson, later lose their jobs for overstepping their authority as analysts and withholding information about Levinson after he disappeared.
March 8-9, 2007 – According to State Department officials, Levinson travels to Kish Island in Iran and checks into a hotel. Reportedly, Levinson is in the Middle East to investigate cigarette smuggling on behalf of a client. During the visit, he meets with American fugitive Dawud Salahuddin, who is the last person to acknowledge seeing him on March 9.
December 2011 – The Levinson family publicly releases a “proof of life” video they received in November 2010. In the video, Levinson says, “I have been treated well, but I need the help of the United States government to answer the requests of the group that has held me for three-and-a-half years. And please help me get home. Thirty-three years of service to the United States deserves something. Please help me.”
September 2012 – Christine Levinson attempts to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the UN General Assembly in New York. He does not meet with her but tells CNN, “They told me (Levinson) was in Iran, and of course the question came up in my mind, what was an American intelligence officer doing in Iran…an individual is lost, how are we supposed to find him among 7 billion people spread across the globe? What we can do is assist, help and cooperate, which we have been doing, and we are doing… as a humanitarian gesture and action.”
January 2013 – The Levinson family releases a series of photographs they received in April 2011. In the photos, a bearded, shackled Levinson, wearing an orange jumpsuit, holds signs written in broken English.
December 12, 2013 – The Associated Press and The Washington Post report that Levinson was working for the CIA when he disappeared in 2007, possibly investigating corruption among Iranian officials. The AP says it first learned of Levinson’s CIA ties in 2010 but delayed publishing the information at the government’s request. The next day the New York Times reports it has known of Levinson’s CIA work since 2007 but also delayed publishing the information to avoid jeopardizing his safety.
December 13, 2013 – White House Spokesman Jay Carney says Levinson “was not a US government employee when he went missing in Iran.”
March 21, 2017 –Levinson’s family files a lawsuit against Iran with the US District Court in Washington, DC. The complaint states that the family is filing suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act “for injuries suffered by each of them as a result of Iran’s unlawful acts of hostage taking, torture and other torts.”
March 25, 2020 –The family of Levinson announces that they believe he is dead. “We recently received information from U.S. officials that has led both them and us to conclude that our wonderful husband and father died while in Iranian custody,” they said in a statement.
October 1, 2020 – A US court orders the government of Iran to pay more than $1.4 billion to Levinson’s family for compensatory and punitive damages.
Former CIA software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte was sentenced to 40 years on espionage and child pornography charges, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.
Schulte was convicted in July 2022 of eight federal charges stemming from accusations that he was behind the largest theft of classified information in CIA history.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Schulte “caused untold damage to our national security in his quest for revenge against the CIA for its response to Schulte’s security breaches while employed there.”
This is a breaking news story. Please check back for developments.
Cara Tabachnick is a news editor and journalist at CBSNews.com. Cara began her career on the crime beat at Newsday. She has written for Marie Claire, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She reports on justice and human rights issues. Contact her at cara.tabachnick@cbsinteractive.com
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A new intelligence report warns foreign terrorists may use the ongoing Israel-Hamas war to increase calls for violence during the holiday season in the U.S. Catherine Herridge has the details.
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Education: US Military Academy – West Point, B.S., 1974; Princeton University, M.P.A., International Relations, 1985; Princeton University, Ph.D., International Relations, 1987
April 23, 2015 – Petraeus is sentenced to serve two years probation and fined $100,000 for sharing classified information with his biographer and lover, Broadwell. Prosecutors agree to not send him to jail because the classified information was never released to the public or published in the biography.
June 12, 2019– The University of Birmingham announces that Petraeus has accepted an honorary professorship in the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security. The three-year position begins immediately.
President Biden invited CIA Director William Burns to join his cabinet on Friday, citing Burns’ expertise and leadership in confronting a range of national security challenges, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing U.S. tension with China.
“Bill has always given me clear, straightforward analysis that prioritizes the safety and security of the American people, reflecting the integral role the CIA plays in our national security decision-making at this critical time,” Biden said in a statement. “He leads with dignity and represents the very best of America, and I look forward to continuing to work with him in the years ahead.”
Burns will join Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, who has been a cabinet member since the start of the Biden administration.
CIA Director William Burns arrives for an official State Dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 22, 2023.
STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Both have been leading voices in the administration’s decision to widely share and occasionally declassify U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the war in Ukraine, which officials have said shored up Western alliances, a move which caught Russian President Vladimir Putin off guard.
In a statement Friday, Haines said Burns’ nomination reflected the president’s “reliance and confidence in Bill for his unique insights and advice.”
Burns’ addition to the cabinet is largely symbolic and not without precedent. His predecessor, Gina Haspel, was part of former President Donald Trump’s cabinet, though in previous years only the national intelligence director was included.
A veteran diplomat who previously served as ambassador to Russia and Jordan, Burns has often been tasked by the president with managing delicate situations overseas. He was dispatched to Moscow in November 2021 to warn Putin against invading Ukraine. Before that, he met with Taliban leaders just before the fall of Kabul in August of 2021.
He has traveled frequently to Kyiv since the war erupted, and in May became the senior-most U.S. official to visit Beijing after a protracted freeze in relations. He has since suggested that communicating through discreet intelligence channels with China could help prevent “unnecessary misunderstandings and inadvertent collisions.”
Burns has spoken of the need to steer the agency clear of politics and leave his former role in policy-making behind.
“They’re two very distinct professions, and I’m very well aware of that,” he said in public remarks in April. “My job now is to support policymakers, it’s not to become a policymaker as well.”
In a statement on Friday, he praised the CIA’s workforce.
“The president’s announcement today recognizes the essential contribution to national security the Central Intelligence Agency makes every day, and reflects his confidence in our work,” Burns said. “I am honored to serve in this role, representing the tremendous work of our intelligence officers.”
The U.S. intelligence community routinely acquires “a significant amount” of Americans’ personal data, according to a new report released this week by a top spy agency.
The report outlined both privacy and counterintelligence concerns stemming from the ability of U.S. government agencies and foreign adversaries to draw from a growing pool of potentially sensitive information available online.
Absent proper controls, commercially available information, known as CAI, “can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons,” the report, compiled last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, found.
“It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals,” it said. “Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”
Dated January of 2022, the report was written by an expert panel convened by Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. It was declassified earlier this month and publicly released this week.
Redacted in places, the report noted that the market for online data is “evolving both qualitatively…and quantitatively,” and can include meaningful information on American citizens and be acquired in bulk. Even when anonymized, agencies can cross-reference data sets to reveal information about specific individuals.
“Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained, if at all, only through targeted (and predicated) collection, and that could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety,” the report said.
Information from social media, digital transactions and smartphone software for medical, travel, facial recognition and geolocation services are among the types of data widely available for purchase. It can be used to identify individuals who attend protests or participate in certain religious activities. Adversaries can use it to identify U.S. military or intelligence personnel, or build profiles on public figures, the panel wrote.
The report recommended that the intelligence community develop a set of standards for its purchase and use of online data, noting it would be at a “significant disadvantage” — to those such as foreign adversaries — if it lost access to certain datasets.
“CAI is increasingly powerful for intelligence and increasingly sensitive for individual privacy and civil liberties, and the [intelligence community] therefore needs to develop more refined policies to govern its acquisition and treatment,” the panel wrote.
In a statement, Haines said the intelligence community was working on a framework governing the use of such data. Once finalized, Haines said, “we will make as much of it publicly available as possible.”
“I remain committed to sharing as much as possible about the [intelligence community]’s activities with the American people,” she said.
Haines first promised to evaluate the intelligence community’s use of commercial data during her confirmation hearing under questioning by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon in 2021. She again committed to publicly releasing the findings earlier this year.
“If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due-process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance,” Wyden said in a statement this week. “Meanwhile, Congress needs to pass legislation to put guardrails around government purchases, to rein in private companies that collect and sell this data, and keep Americans’ personal information out of the hands of our adversaries.”
For the second time this year, concerns of Chinese spying on the United States have cast a shadow over a planned visit to China by the US’ top diplomat as the two superpowers try to improve fractured ties while keeping a watchful eye on each other.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to land in Beijing over the weekend following the postponement of his earlier trip planned for February after a Chinese surveillance balloon meandered across the continental US, hovering over sensitive military sites before being shot down by an American fighter plane.
But with Blinken poised to make a trip seen as a key step to mend fractured US-China communications, another espionage controversy has flared in recent days following media reports that China had reached a deal to build a spy perch on the island of Cuba.
Beijing has said it wasn’t “aware” of the situation, while the White House said the reports were not accurate – with Blinken earlier this week saying China upgraded its spying facilities there in 2019.
The situation is just the latest in a string of allegations of spying between the two in recent months. They underscore how intelligence gathering – an activity meant to go on without detection, out of the public eye – is becoming an increasingly prominent flashpoint in the US-China relationship.
CIA Director Bill Burns secretly traveled to China in May to meet counterparts and emphasize the importance of maintaining open lines of communication in intelligence channels, CNN reported earlier this month.
“Crisis communications are arguably in their worst state since 1979. This puts a premium on both countries’ ability to gather intelligence to understand each other’s capabilities, actions, and strategic intent around the globe,” said Lyle Morris, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
That pushes intelligence gathering itself to become “another factor that is complicating US-China relations,” he said.
That’s especially the case, experts say, as China continues to expand its own intelligence gathering capabilities – catching up in an area where the US has traditionally had an edge.
“It’s fair to say that we’ve been spying on each other at various scales for a long time,” said former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) China analyst Christopher Johnson.
“No doubt there’s been an uptick from both sides, but probably more so on the Chinese side, simply because they’ve gotten larger, more influential, richer, and therefore have more resources to devote than they did in the past,” said Johnson, who is now president of the China Strategies Group consultancy.
That’s been accompanied by “a consistent emphasis on enhancing intelligence capabilities, modernizing technology, and improving coordination among different security agencies,” according to Xuezhi Guo, a professor of political science at Guilford College in the US.
China’s main intelligence activities fall under departments within the People’s Liberation Army and its vast civilian agency known as the Ministry of State Security (MSS). Other arms of the Communist Party apparatus also play a role in activities beyond conventional intelligence gathering, experts say.
The MSS, established in 1983, oversees intelligence and counterintelligence both within China and overseas. Its remit has encouraged analogies to a combined CIA and Federal Bureau of Intelligence. But the sprawling Beijing-headquartered MSS is even more secretive – without even a public website describing its activities.
The agency is “expected to play an even more significant role in China’s domestic and international security and stability” in the coming years, amid mounting challenges at home and abroad, Guo said.
In the context of both China’s growing clout and geopolitical frictions, experts say it’s no surprise Beijing is allegedly seeking to establish or expand surveillance facilities in Cuba – or other places around the world – with the US as a key target, but not the only one.
Meanwhile, intelligence gathering in China has become harder.
Xi has consolidated his power and become increasingly focused on security – including building out the state’s ability to monitor its citizens, both online and through China’s extensive surveillance infrastructure.
“The task of collecting intelligence in China is arguably harder than ever and yet more necessary than ever,” said Johnson, the former analyst, pointing to challenges of gaining insight into the government under the centralized leadership of Xi, who maintains a “very small circle of knowledge or trust.”
China’s building of a domestic “surveillance panopticon” has also enabled its counter-intelligence, according to Johnson.
US intelligence has difficulties having operational meetings or “going black” (dodging surveillance) within China, he said, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic when movement was tightly controlled and even more digitally monitored than usual.
CIA operations also suffered a staggering setback starting in 2010, according to The New York Times, when the Chinese government killed or imprisoned more than a dozen sources over two years.
In 2021, CNN reported that the agency was overhauling how it trains and manages its network of spies as part of a broad transition to focus more closely on adversaries like China and Russia.
This contrasts with what some US lawmakers and commentators believe has been a too relaxed approach to national security with regards to China, where even private businesses are beholden to the ruling Communist Party, which also seeks to keep tabs on its citizens overseas.
Experts have also warned about the overlap between espionage efforts and operations like those of China’s United Front – a sprawling network of groups that manage the party’s relationship with non-party industries, organizations and individuals around the world.
Heightened concern and awareness about Chinese intelligence gathering – or the potential for it – has exploded in the US in recent years.
That’s played out in debates about the use of Chinese telecoms equipment and social media platforms – think Huawei and TikTok – as well as in government efforts to prosecute economic espionage cases and prevent any influence campaigns from impacting American democracy.
Beijing has said repeatedly that it does not interfere in the “internal affairs” of other countries. Both Huawei and Tiktok have repeatedly denied that their products present a national security risk or would be accessed by the Chinese government.
In the US, there’s also been concern about over-hyping the threat and sparking anti-Chinese sentiment.
The US Justice Department last year ended its 3-year-old China Initiative, a national security program largely focused on thwarting technology theft, including in academia, after a string of cases were dismissed amid concerns of fueling suspicion and bias against Chinese Americans.
US intellectual property had long been a traditional target of Chinese espionage.
A survey of 224 reported instances of Chinese espionage directed at the United States since 2000, conducted using open source data by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington, found nearly half involved cyber-espionage, while over half were seeking to acquire commercial technologies.
Beijing appears to be increasingly pushing back on what it sees as a double standard – as the US’ international surveillance efforts have also been well-documented.
The 2013 leak produced by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, for example, revealed Washington’s vast global digital surveillance capabilities, against both rivals and allies alike.Meanwhile, the US intelligence community is widely understood to have its own overseas facilities for collecting signals intelligence.
Last month, Beijing released a report from a national cybersecurity agency titled “‘Empire of Hacking’: The US Central Intelligence Agency.” It accused the US of promoting the internet in the 1980s in order to further its intelligence agencies’ efforts to launch “Color Revolutions” and overthrow governments abroad.
“The organizations, enterprises and individuals that use the Internet equipment and software products of the USA have been used as the puppet ‘agents’ by CIA, helping it to be a ‘shining star’ in global cyber espionage wars,” the report also claimed.
China’s own internet is heavily censored with access limited by a “Great Firewall” – part of its extensive efforts to control the flow of information alongside its extensive digital surveillance of its own population.
China’s Foreign Ministry last month again pointed its finger at the US after Washington released a warning alleging that a Chinese state-sponsored hacker had infiltrated networks across US critical infrastructure sectors.
Earlier this month, the ministry also slammed the US for sending what it said were more than 800 flights of large reconnaissance aircraft “to spy on China” last year – though no assertion was made of crossing into Chinese airspace.
The comment came after each country’s military accused the other of misbehavior after a Chinese fighter jet intercepted a US spy plane in international airspace over the South China Sea.
Experts say this rhetorical back-and-forth over each other’s clandestine activities is likely only to continue as US-China competition drives both to ramp up their intelligence gathering – and China continues to expand its own prowess, including through technological advancements such as satellite networks, surveillance balloons and data processing.
“China increasingly has capabilities (that the US has been known for) … this is moving from a one way street historically to a two-way street,” said John Delury, author of “Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China.”
He pointed to how China had long been subject to US offshore surveillance and – prior to the restoration of diplomatic relations in the 1970s – direct aerial surveillance.
“There’s a psychological dimension to this as well,” Delury added, noting that the spy balloon incident earlier this year brought this to the fore – giving Americans the unnerving sense that China “can do this to us now, they have technical capabilities and can look at us.”
Meanwhile, there’s much at stake in how well the two governments can repair official communication – seen as a key element of Blinken’s expected visit on Sunday and Monday.
“When there’s less communication, the two intelligence communities inside the two governments have to do more and more guesswork,” said Delury. “Then there’s a lot more room for faulty assumptions.”
A man now under arrest walked up to the CIA Headquarters’ gate Tuesday and allegedly said, “I’m here and I have a gun,” a law enforcement source told CNN.
Uniformed federal officers turned him away and notified Fairfax County, Virginia, police of his description, the source said Wednesday.
He later was arrested and charged with felony possession of a firearm on school property, police said. He was identified as Eric Sandow, 32, of Gainesville, Florida.
Sandow said he was headed to the CIA and had an AK-47 and another weapon in his vehicle as he was arrested Tuesday at Dolley Madison Preschool in McLean, Virgnia, after he trespassed on school grounds around 11 a.m., police said.
The preschool is less than 1.5 miles from CIA Headquarters and about a 10-minute drive to major Washington, DC, landmarks, including the National Mall.
“He requested access to the (preschool) building facilities to use the restroom, which was denied by school staff,” Dolley Madison Preschool said in a statement Wednesday. “At no point did he gain physical entrance to the school building.”
Fairfax County police were then called to the scene. “While speaking with him, he made statements he had weapons inside his car located on school property,” the police department said Wednesday in a statement.
“Officers searched the car and found two weapons, an AK-47 and a pistol, along with magazines and ammunition.”
Sandow was arraigned Wednesday morning in Fairfax County General District Court, a court official said.
He was being held Wednesday without bond, police said. It was not immediately clear whether Sandow had legal representation.
“It does not appear he was acting in conjunction with anyone else,” Fairfax County police said. “Sandow did not make any threats and the weapons never left the vehicle.”
Sandow does not appear to have a lengthy criminal history, public records show. He was charged with misdemeanor domestic battery in 2014 and did not declare a political party with his voter registration.
Law enforcement lauded an alert person who summoned them Tuesday to the day care.
“We’re grateful to the community member who did the right thing and called us,” police said. “We’d like to remind our community to report suspicious activity as you never know what you may prevent by making that call.”
FBI searches of U.S. citizens’ electronic data — under a warrantless surveillance program — plunged significantly last year, according to an annual report released Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Searched dropped from more than 3.4 million in 2021, to just over 204,000 in 2022, according to the report, a decline of nearly 94%. The decline follows a series of major reforms instituted by the FBI, which had been accused by lawmakers and civil liberties advocates of overreach and abuses of its existing authority.
The reduction was the result of changes to FBI “systems, processes, and training relating to U.S. person queries,” the report, compiled by ODNI, found.
Other U.S. agencies, including the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA), also acknowledged making changes to the way their U.S. person queries were conducted or counted, resulting in smaller revisions.
“Reducing our current numbers was not the goal of our reforms. And in fact, this number could well increase again in future years,” a senior FBI official told reporters in a briefing on Friday. “However, what this decrease does show is how significant an effect our reforms have had on the FBI’s querying practice overall.”
Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), U.S. agencies are authorized to collect, via telecommunications providers, electronic data – including phone calls, text messages and emails – of foreigners overseas, even if those communications involve U.S. citizens. Those records, which do not require a warrant to obtain, can then be searched for information related to national security investigations.
ODNI’s statistical overview has been released annually since 2014, following the leaks by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. It acknowledges that trends are prone to fluctuation year-to-year, as agencies’ use of the authorities can be influenced by world events, technological changes and target behaviors.
It comes amid an intensifying debate in Congress about the reauthorization of legal authorities permitted under Section 702, which is due to expire at the end of this year. It was last renewed in 2018.
“While there was a sharp decline in U.S. person queries from December 2021 to November 2022, it is incumbent upon Congress, not the Executive Branch, to codify reforms to FISA Section 702,” Rep. Darin LaHood and House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Mike Turner, both Ohio Republicans, said in a statement Friday.
“Without additional safeguards, a clean reauthorization of 702 is a non-starter,” they said.
Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking member, also said additional reforms were needed, but praised the FBI for making effective inroads.
“The transparency report released today provides strong evidence that the reforms already put in place, particularly at FBI, are having the intended effects,” he said, adding Congress would have to “build on that success.”
Top intelligence officials have said that the authorities allowed under Section 702 are essential to protecting U.S. national security. In congressional testimony in March, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said Section 702 had been “crucial” in counterintelligence matters, including tracking China’s efforts to send spies into the United States. NSA director Gen. Paul Nakasone called it, “the #1 authority that we need.”
In this episode of “Intelligence Matters,” host Michael Morell speaks with Ursula Wilder, a clinical psychologist at the Central Intelligence Agency, about why intelligence agencies conduct psychological profiles of world leaders, and how past policymakers have used what they have learned to make strategic decisions. Wilder, who also worked in CIA’s counterterrorism center and Medical and Psychological Assessments unit, explains the “dark tetrad” of personality — narcissism, paranoia, Machiavellianism and sadism — and how those traits can influence how leaders make decisions and engage in negotiations. She and Morell also discuss how policymakers respond to psychological profiles compiled by government agencies.
Highlights:
How to profile a world leader: “The very first thing I do is find a regional specialist to be my partner. Whereas I know something of the psyche and the development of the psyche and personality features, et cetera, I can’t know every cultural context. And the magic really happens, when you do a psych assessment, between the psychologist who brings all of the knowledge of the how psyche is developed, maintained, how it’s framed, how it’s defined, and you add that to regional knowledge, cultural backdrop, the idea of the structures that that leader is reacting to and in that you can really come up with a fairly accurate state of play of this person’s personality in that particular context.”
Influence of life stages on leadership psychology: “So every decade of adult life has specific stages of development that we go through as adults. It doesn’t just end in childhood. So the priorities and rhythms of a 20-, 30-year-old are very different than a 50- and 60-year-old, they’re just very different orientations to reality. And when you’re thinking through a leader, you have to bear in mind what their age would imply about their physical and mental state and emotional state. And then you have to put that in context.”
Importance of explaining a hold on political power: “One of the things you have to do, no matter how maladaptive or pathological they seem, though, is you have to be able to account for how they got where they got and how they held power. So no matter how unattractive, unappealing, and broken a person seems, if they’re holding on to political power, then something in their personality is enabling them to do that. And we owe it to our customers to define that.”
MICHAEL MORELL: Ursula, welcome to Intelligence Matters. It is great to have you on the show.
URSULA WILDER: It’s great to be here.
MICHAEL MORELL: And I should say that that usually we we tape these things virtually, but we’re lucky today to actually have you in the studio so face to face. And that’s a really nice thing that we used to do pre-COVID and now we don’t do enough. So it’s great to have you here in person.
URSULA WILDER: It’s a great analog experience to actually speak with a person on the screen for a change.
MICHAEL MORELL: Exactly. So I just want to start by saying that we’re going to talk about the psychology of leaders. And I think our listeners might be thinking they’re going to hear about current world leaders, recent world leaders, and you’re just not in a position to do that. And I just want you to explain why.
URSULA WILDER: I’d be happy to. So let’s begin with official policy. We, as U.S. government employees, cannot opine about leaders in our country, recent leaders as well as currently serving leaders. That’s an absolute boundary that we are very careful to attend to, and in this case I’ll be able to speak more fully about leaders during World War II, American leaders during World World War II and before that, and make occasional comments about U.S. persons and recent leaders, but have to be very careful about that.
In terms of leaders in general, including overseas, the ethics of the profession, of my profession, of clinical psychology, are very clear that we cannot speak publicly about living people of any sort – celebrities, politicians. It’s just considered unethical to publicly opine about them.
MICHAEL MORELL: So it would be like seeing somebody in private and then going out and talking about them.
URSULA WILDER: You just can’t use your skills that way, for two reasons. The first is, you really do need to have an interaction face-to-face with a person to fully understand them and to understand them accurately. And that’s because the work isn’t just what they say in response to questions, but how they say it and what they don’t say. And so that interaction is critical to the diagnostic or interviewing process as a clinical psychologist.
And the other, of course, is privacy, basic privacy and consent. So publicly, this is not something that psychiatrists, psychologists and other clinicians do. So that’s another reason. And so I’ll be able to speak of dead leaders. They have to be dead, dead. You can’t be politically dead.
MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah, but I might be able to throw something in there.
URSULA WILDER: I was going to say –
MICHAEL MORELL: I don’t face the same restrictions.
URSULA WILDER: You do not. And if something I say strikes you as, from your experience, from the people you’ve met and just your knowledge of history, jump right in. I think that would really help us.
MICHAEL MORELL: So Ursula, let’s start with how you got to be where you are. So, what attracted you to clinical psychology? What attracted you to the Central Intelligence Agency? And then why have you stayed there so long?
URSULA WILDER: All right. So I grew up overseas until I was 13. It was a hardship posting. My parents were missionaries, so we were in Paris and Brussels and Strasbourg. And so I had an extensive time in childhood overseas. My parents loved to travel, and I think that kind of formed my interest in the world in general. In fact, for a while I spoke better French than English because I only spoke English with my parents, and my siblings and I were in French schools, so we spoke French with each other.
And then after college, I came to Washington and I was going to be a physician at that point. I had planned on being a physician and done all the coursework as an undergraduate, but I had an older sister who’s now a physician, and I looked at what she was doing in a first year of medical school and I said, “Not for me.”
So then I had to figure out something else, and I fell into psychology. I had taken one undergraduate course, which I didn’t like much because we were teaching pigeons to peck pellets and rats to run in mazes. And I thought, “I’m interested in the depths of the human mind.” But I did take a couple of abnormal psychology courses and realized that this was for me. And so I began graduate school as a clinical psychologist.
Now, what drew me to the agency wasn’t the agency, but a boyfriend who I met, who you know very well, you were both young CIA officers and cubicles way back in that time in 1979, 1980.
So I met Dennis and very quickly we knew we were going to – he’s also a Methodist missionaries’ child, so we said we have an arranged marriage through Methodist circles.
And I fell in love with this guy and found him interesting and and very engaged in the world and quite different in his thinking than I was. And that was intriguing. And I began to come to family days at the agency. So I started as a fiancée and then as a wife and meeting some of his friends and having discussions with him. And it was it was just very clear to me that this world of intelligence was full of intriguing people and an interesting mission.
I read some history books and read all about the scandals. And that was interesting as a psychological exercise. I was in graduate school for a decade and married to Dennis, and then I saw an advertisement for CIA psychologists and applied and was accepted. And so that was my pathway. It began in love, if you want to look at it that way. And bit by bit I was exposed to the people of the agency and found them interesting and kind and very supportive of family and actually –
MICHAEL MORELL: Strong sense of family, right?
URSULA WILDER: Yeah, yeah. Very deep and very eager to be kind to family and to be supportive of family. So I thought this would be a good place to serve.
And I also was attracted to the privacy aspect of this. This was – some would call it insular, I would call it a very closed community, but inside not closed at all. And I rather liked the idea of not getting caught up in the Washington swirl. Which was not something I was attracted to.
So I liked that the community was very ordinary people. We all hear this. We have visitors come to our buildings and they look around and expect Tom Cruise and Jessica Chastain and are like, “You’re all very ordinary people.” And that we are. And I did like that because I knew the work was fascinating, but the feel of it was was communal and not overly buying into the mystique that you could see in the movies. And I just intuited it, that it would be a good place to work. So that was how I came to the agency. Would you like me to talk about what I’ve done so far?
MICHAEL MORELL: How about, why did you just stick? Why did you stay? I think we’ll get into some of the others later.
URSULA WILDER: I stayed because my impression was confirmed. And I realized that throughout my career I would be doing a series of very interesting things. It’s like a bunch of mini-careers, all applied clinical psychology.
And again, I was impressed with the history of psychology as used by the agency all the way back to OSS days – the Office of Strategic Services our predecessor organization in World War II. Carl Jung was an agent of the OSS and he was handled by Allen Dulles. So you don’t get much better than that.
And so I quickly read up on Jungian theory and what he had to say about world leaders and that drew me in as well.
MICHAEL MORELL: So you started, Ursula, to talk about the history, this fascinating relationship between Allen Dulles and Carl Jung. Take the history from there.
URSULA WILDER: All right. So, that era, OSS era, was the beginning of psychology applied to the intelligence mission, and Allen Dulles brought it. He was a visionary, in a sense.
And afterwards, he said, the world will likely never know the contributions that Dr. Jung made to the intelligence missions. We know that some of Carl Jung’s reports made it all the way to the president, but he also tended to OSS agents who had had negative experiences. He, obviously, Carl Jung had, as the Germans would say, a fingertip feel sensor of the overall patterns of politics and morale across Europe because so many people came to him for treatment. And he also would be deeply immersed in cultural philosophy and cultural psychology.
And so we, in OSS days, also hired some cultural anthropologists who nowadays would be analysts, who would have regional specializations, who would work with the psychologists. So that was a big program then as well.
And so the two things came together very well in the OSS days. And then when CIA was formally founded, it was continued. Psychologists working with regional specialists and specialists of various sorts to understand – for a while it was the political dynamics of particular countries and eventually it moved into understanding the psychology of individual leaders or leader groups.
MICHAEL MORELL: And then why does CIA find doing psychological assessments of foreign leaders so valuable? Why do it?
URSULA WILDER: My PhD was completed at George Washington University and my dissertation advisor was Jerrold Post, who had had a 20-year career at CIA as a psychiatrist, and he founded the modern efforts of assessing world leaders because we began to see more and more of our leaders asking for what were essentially psychological questions.
Now, the famous and overt assessments that came out of the Camp David Accords were of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. President Carter commissioned those on the spot and while he was visiting the building. So it created a lot of immediate work. You know how that goes, Michael.
But these two assessments have now been released in redacted form. But there’s a lot of public information about the famous Camp David Accord psych assessments. And Jimmy Carter said afterwards – he has several times made shout outs about how critically useful they were in that context to the ultimate outcome.
So when Camp David was created as a context where the negotiations could happen in a fluid kind of way, separate from all the concerns that normally press upon world leaders. But in that kind of context, the personality of the world leader tends to come to the fore as a major element that engages the negotiations positively or negatively.
And so the assessments were, in a quick kind of summary, that Anwar Sadat was very much a big-picture person, very much focused on his role in history, very imaginative, very much willing to take risks, self-evidently, and to break the mold. Whereas Begin was
a very detail-focused, lawyerly kind of person. And the more under stress he got, the more focused he got on keeping everything controlled, rigidly laid out.
And so these two personalities were either potentially on a course of mutual frustration, pr alternatively, they could balance each other and have the outcome that was had. And so they both were awarded the Nobel together.
As for the great outcome of those negotiations, one ended up depressed, Begin ended up in a chronic depressive state. And sadly, he was in that state when he died and Sadat was assassinated by those who did not cleave to his vision of change. And so that’s a very publicly known story of how psychological assessments are used.
MICHAEL MORELL: So if you’re the president and you get these assessments, it gives you a sense about how to approach an individual, to – I don’t want to say to get what you want out of them, but, to get the best out of them. Right?
URSULA WILDER: Well, occasionally leaders wish to trigger certain reactions, okay. So that can happen. Figure out – or they don’t want to trigger certain reactions. So you’re looking for trigger points.
Alternatively, what you’re thinking about is how this personality engages in negotiations and how best to mutually engage in negotiations.
I have a list here and I think it’s pretty complete about the questions that Carter had, President Carter had, regarding the negotiations that he had set up at Camp David. So I think that’s a very good – and he listed these in his memoir and it’s pretty complete.
Let me just give a few of those. So he said in his memoir, written in 1983, called, Keeping Faith: “I wanted to know all about Begin and Sadat, of course, what had made them national leaders.” That’s a political question, okay.
“What was the root of their ambitions?” So that is what drives them from their core.
“What were their most important goals in life?” Now, goals in life is political, can include political goals, but it’s also other goals as well.
So you think back to Begin – this is Ursula, not President Carter speaking – being focused on details, very lawyerly approach to life and Sadat being creative and very innovative. That would be important goals to be able to do those things each in contrasting ways.
“What events during the past years helped shape their characters?” Now, Ursula speaking again: the events during the past years can help shape a person’s character, but the childhood events are the most important events to know. And if there are memoirs written, autobiographies written by the individuals, then that’s where you get a goldmine to help answer the previous questions.
“What were their religious beliefs? Family relations and state of health?” State of health is critically important. If you think about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and how sick he was at the end of of his career and of his life, it can really have an impact.
Woodrow Wilson having a stroke and other leaders who’ve been depressed. Lincoln and Churchill had chronic depression. Caesar had a seizure disorder, so did Napoleon, Peter the Great.
MICHAEL MORELL: I know you can’t comment on this. But there’s lots of speculation about Putin’s health and what impact that may be having on his decision-making regarding Ukraine.
URSULA WILDER: That is a very, very natural question to be asking. And age also plays into this.
So every decade of adult life has specific stages of development that we go through as adults. It doesn’t just end in childhood. So the priorities and rhythms of a 20-, 30-year-old are very different than a 50- and 60-year-old, they’re just very different orientations to reality. And when you’re thinking through a leader, you have to bear in mind what their age would imply about their physical and mental state and emotional state. And then you have to put that in context.
So here’s another interesting question from President Carter. “What are the relations of Sadat and Begin with other leaders, their peers?” That’s always so interesting to watch.
MICHAEL MORELL: These are all great questions.
URSULA WILDER: Yeah, these are presidential questions.
And here’s another one: “Likely reaction to pressure in a time of crisis?” And so we would see perhaps President Sadat becoming more creative, more visionary and more willing to break the mold. In a time of crisis, your personality crystallizes to a point, and we would have President Begin become perhaps more rigid and oppositional to change, which would not necessarily help with those negotiations.
“Commitments of political constituencies.” That’s a practical question, you need to know what they have to think about back home.
And here’s an interesting one. “What were their attitude towards me?” – meaning President Carter – “and the United States?”
Well, of course, that’s something you need to know about the leader, him or herself, and also about the country in general.
How about this one? “Whom do they really trust?” So, who are the others you can go to get a different perspective and to try to open something up that might have become
closed.
And this is self-evident once you say it: “What was their attitude towards one another?”
So those are just some of the questions that can be addressed. And I thought that we should quote President Carter, who was a visionary, and and used psychological science beautifully in this particular set of negotiations.
MICHAEL MORELL: Certainly my experience as a PDB briefer and then as the deputy director that other presidents have had the same interest. Maybe they didn’t articulate the questions in a step-by-step way that President Carter did. But they’ve all been interested in this.
So, Ursula, how do you do a psychological assessment on a leader? And I guess the question that always gets asked is, you’re not in the room with them, right? You’re not spending time with them, seeing their reactions, right? So how do you do that?
URSULA WILDER: So the very first thing I do is find a regional specialist to be my partner. Whereas I know something of the psyche and the development of the psyche and personality features, etcetera, I can’t know every cultural context. And the magic really happens, when you do a psych assessment, between the psychologist who brings all of the knowledge of the how psyche is developed, maintained, how it’s framed, how it’s defined, and you add that to regional knowledge, cultural backdrop, the idea of the structures that that leader is reacting to and in that you can really come up with a fairly accurate state of play of this person’s personality in that particular context.
When I brief leaders, I always insist on bringing with me somebody who is expert in not necessarily the leader, although that’s usually best, but in the context, because in the end, if I present and present well and have done a thorough assessment of the person, the important part is how the political behavior is coming out of that person and how it applies to our policymakers and to our customers. That’s first thing you do.
And when I said earlier that way back in OSS days, we were hiring anthropologists and working with them, like Ruth Benedict – you’d be interested in this as a Japan expert – The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was one of ours.
We’ve done this throughout our history of doing psych assessments, so that’s the first thing you do.
The second thing you do is start thinking what you can’t know about this person because you can’t do the interview. You can’t meet with the person. And you have to be careful to evaluate the data that you do have on the person, particularly in regards to where empty places might be.
Psychologists actually have it a little easier than most analysts because everything you see of a leader is behavior. And if you have enough behavior and have enough theory and
have somebody to help you understand the context, you can get a pretty good picture as to what’s driving the person.
MICHAEL MORELL: You see a lot of patterns, right?
URSULA WILDER: Each person has patterns, and breaks in patterns, and that’s what the goal is, in the early stages of an assessment, is to work out what the patterns are and where absences exist, where there should be something. So, where there should be empathy, okay, for example, or where there should be panic and it doesn’t exist, or where there should be happiness and joy and and that’s not there. And so you know what a fully functioning personality should be able to do and might look like. And then you apply that theory to what’s beginning to emerge from all the research on the individual. Any psych assessment will do that.
And then you have to caveat because you can’t meet with the person. It’s the burden of historians and biographers everywhere. But based on the structures and the behaviors that you have, you can arrive at a good approximation, a profile, if you will, of the behavior.
This wonderful book that was awarded the Pulitzer for biography in 2010 about Cleopatra. There’s no information about her inner life. So what the author did was just looked at the structures of everything she had to deal with: Rome, the economy, Alexandria, the opulence that was common to the Egyptian royalty, the constant killing of siblings and marrying of siblings, her knowledge of languages, just – throughout the book it’s like reading a travelogue of that time in in history. And by the end of it you feel like you have a good grasp of this person, though not necessarily of her inner life, because the author avoids that. So here we have somebody who married and had relationships with both Julius Caesar and Anthony of Rome, and the author speaks about how this was politically astute.
In both cases she made a dramatic entrance. So she was carried in a bag and famously dropped at the feet of Julius Caesar. It wasn’t a carpet, it was likely a laundry bag. And she made this big entrance with Anthony in this gold covered barge and perfume and music and glittering candlelight everywhere. So she knew how to make an entrance. So she did that and had these relationships in which children ensued.
But the author won’t go beyond the political aspects of that, whereas a psychologist might be able to talk about what it was, and this multilingual person, this queen, who had bonded with her people more than she had with the royalty because she learned their language and publicly practiced their religion – what it was about her that was so charismatic and so, just to get back to the current time – we can do the same thing now.
So you do that, properly caveated, and then you start looking, going through the elements of a good psych assessment. Would you like me to do that with some examples? What would be useful at this point?
MICHAEL MORELL: Maybe we should actually move on because there’s some good stuff coming here. So, Ursula, can you talk a little bit about the difference between a healthy world leader and a pathological world leader?
URSULA WILDER: So I, in my work on this topic, have very self-consciously toggled between healthy leaders and unhealthy leaders. So that my baseline doesn’t get totally imbued with the unhealthier elements or the pathological features of personality.
So a healthy personality. Each of us has a unique personality and each of us has fault lines that are compensated for if we have a healthy personality by other, by different aspects of the personality. You can think of it as a mechanism, if you will.
So if you have a bit of selfishness or even a predatory attitude and you’re healthy, that might be compensated by empathy. If you have a little bit of psychopathy, like you like to break rules, you like to pursue goals and break through boundaries, you might have some respect for the rule of law. And unfortunately, when all of us are in distress, we tend to get very rigid, with only one or two aspects of personality that come forward.
Although over time and as you age, you get more able to be totally present in all your pieces when – hopefully not in pieces – but all there to deal with situations. And it’s harder to do that when you’re young.
So healthier personalities are actually more difficult to assess because they’re unique and you have to work out all these complexities which feature personality, empathy, extroversion, introversion, tendency to depression, tendency to a very detailed approach to reality, tendency to a more florid, kind of creative approach to reality. All of that in a healthy person, you have to try to find some evidence, and good evidence for, and then you put it together in an overall picture which usually includes four parts.
One is important: history that led to this. If you write that well, Michael, most people will just skim the rest because they’ll know they feel like they know the person.
The next will be intellectual style – and we all have one.
And then personality features. And the last, social style. And that’s a basic psych assessment. And it’s hard to do with healthy people
Now, with unhealthy people, it’s usually so evident that the problems are evident, that the goal there is to be able to make what you see congruent with the behavior that you see, make what you see in terms of personality congruent with the behavior.
So I’ll go through some of the most salient personality issues that are present in leaders, political leaders.
One of the things you have to do, no matter how maladaptive or pathological they seem, though, is you have to be able to account for how they got where they got and how they
held power. So no matter how unattractive, unappealing, and broken a person seems, if they’re holding on to political power, then something in their personality is enabling them to do that. And we owe it to our customers to define that.
So Stanley McChrystal, General Stanley McChrystal, wrote a book on leadership, and he makes the point – he’s very structuralist in his orientation – that the structures and the political system and the cultural issues are more important than the individual. That’s his approach. But he’s very clear that he never allowed himself to underestimate an opponent. He talks about Zarqawi, who is famous, infamous for having beheaded a person as his –
MICHAEL MORELL: The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
URSULA WILDER: Yes –that was his self-introduction to the world, okay, doing this.
But I was talking with a colleague of mine who’d also recommended the book, who started his career at 23 as an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam. And he said, “Underestimating the opponent is fatal.” And so we don’t want to fall into that.
So even as I go through all of this, remember, when you think of leaders who demonstrate these capabilities, they also have something else that’s keeping them in power, even if it’s utter ruthlessness. So here are the pathological aspects to look at.
Let’s focus on what’s commonly called the “dark tetrad” of personality. And the tetrad are –the elements of that are – narcissism, paranoia, Machiavellianism and sadism.
Now, we could add psychopathy also here, but psychopaths are notoriously impulsive. And so they don’t usually have the discipline to become leaders. They can be at the beck and call of leaders, but they very rarely reach the top. So I’m going to focus on the four that permit a person to still be orderly, be logical, get things done because it’s necessary to being a leader.
So let’s start with narcissism. So narcissism is something, as you mentioned earlier, that everybody has a piece of if they’re are achiever of any sort, because it requires – to achieve, you have to have a vision. You have to be willing to pursue it. You have to be willing to pursue it against opposition. And you have to think that you know best what needs to happen in the moment if you’re going to be a leader.
So a little bit of this is very important, even for the most altruistic leaders of all time. They still have to have a bit of this self confidence, this kind of almost fearless dominance of their vision.
Pathological narcissism is something entirely different than that. This is a person who can only be the center of events and is distorting reality because a person can’t see beyond themselves. So that’s what a pathological narcissist looks like. And their signature is narcissistic rage because they are so focused on being the center of events that they can’t afford to be critiqued, to being criticized, to being put at the side of events. They they get
very rageful when this happens.
So a normal – there are two stages in life where narcissism is expected. One is when you’re two years old. So when you see a little child at the grocery store and they’re waving to everybody and everybody’s waving back, it’s so cute. If you don’t wave back, they fall apart. And the other is adolescence. Okay, adolescents to be a little narcissistic because they have to be self-focused to develop their own identity. Then they kind of hopefully grow out of it.
So there’s an adaptive part to narcissism, because some degree of it is necessary to every world leader, every achiever.
But in the more pathological sense and diagnostic sense, you can think of narcissism as a grandiose self navigating atop a sea of internal insecurity. So their egos are like balloons. Huge but very fragile. And any little prick on the balloon, just, it explodes in rage. And that is not adaptive if you’re world leader.
So in a calm resting state, they’re driven by dreams of glory and delusions of grandeur. But it all covers this deep insecurity. They lash out, are vengeful towards challenges and threats. Their emotional state is of protecting themselves against shame – this is how it gets set up in childhood. They cannot – and shame is a social construct. When you’re ashamed, you’re thinking that other people are seeing you negatively. It’s different than guilt. And that is what a narcissist protects themselves against at all cost.
They’re egocentric, obviously, always center stage. They have feelings of invulnerability and omnipotence, which they believe are true and that they’re entitled to those feelings. They reject any vulnerability. They have contempt for inferiors.
So if you’re negotiating, for example, with a personality like this, you have to be very, very careful not to trigger that rage – unless you want to. In some contexts, some leaders and some countries try to actually push buttons and trigger phobias. That’s not our usual style.
MICHAEL MORELL: What about paranoia?
URSULA WILDER: So paranoia is a self that is terrorized and small and naked and afraid. This is unconscious; in the case of paranoia, it’s people who are paranoid who have often been deeply abused in terrible ways when they were too small and vulnerable. And so they’re this bleeding, vulnerable, terrified child in an Iron Man suit bristling with weapons and sensors. That is a paranoid person.
It’s a disorder of thinking because they have a fundamental, permanent belief that there’s always a threat, and some situations are not threatening. So you might be offering them an olive branch, but they will see that as a threat and react accordingly.
So it’s logic, they’re logical and they’re very acutely sensing of what’s going on around
them. They’re very good at details, but their judgment is not necessarily accurate. So that’s paranoid people.
Now, it’s adaptive at times because, for example, studies have shown that people in the business sphere with a little bit of paranoia do better. And also there’s the old saying in certain contexts, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” right. Paranoia is often called the political disease, because if you’re in political life, there’s always somebody somebody after you.
MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah.
URSULA WILDER: And so healthy leaders know how to manage this so that they don’t spiral into full-blown paranoia. They know how to keep themselves grounded. They – oftentimes it’s by having people who they trust – because paranoids cannot trust, but healthy leaders can trust – tell them the things that nobody else will will say to them. And that keeps him kind of grounded. But unhealthy leaders just spiral into this pattern.
Paradoxically, a paranoid person will become calmer in a crisis. That’s a bit of a tell. Because when there’s a crisis, then the threat that they knew was always there has made it evident. Whereas everybody else is hitting the panic button.
MICHAEL MORELL: And they said, “Huh, finally, I knew it.”
URSULA WILDER: I knew this was coming.
MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah, I knew it all along.
URSULA WILDER: And so they’re defined by kind of this suspiciousness, there’s this constant, like, coiled spring that actually has an effect on their bodies in the long term, this constant state of tension. But they’re like coiled springs at any moment, waiting to jump into action against a threat.
MICHAEL MORELL: And I would imagine it makes them difficult to deal with.
URSULA WILDER: Well, they create the very thing that they say is there because they’re hostile, they’re suspicious. They see themselves as a center of of everything, including constant negativity. And they act accordingly. And then people do get angry at them and do get hostile. And then they say, “Well, it’s there all along.”
So, for example, if somebody extends an olive branch or tries to engage with them and they brutally reject it, then the person who extended the olive branch might, if it’s, let’s say, another leader, might respond with their teeth – you know all leaders, have them, their own aggression.
And then the paranoid person is like, “Yeah, I knew you were that way all along. And so it’s a distortion of reality.”
MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah. So let’s do the last two fairly quickly here. Machiavellianism and sadism.
URSULA WILDER: Okay. Very quickly then. Machiavellianism is strategic selfishness and they’re cold. So Machiavelli said that the prince cannot afford the pleasures of normal morality. The Prince must do what’s best for the prince and for the state.
So this is in very cold, calculating. They’ll be virtuous if it’s a tool that works. They’ll be vicious if it’s a tool that works.
Context is critical to them, to their behavior. They’re expedient and opportunistic and flexible. They’re incredibly sensitive to social situations because they’re trying to figure out their poise and trying to figure out how to position themselves. And they’re absent guilt or remorse – it just isn’t there, for misbehaving or being selfish.
And fundamentally a Machiavellian has a dark view of humanity. So you never want to try to – with a paranoid – to try to engage with their positive feelings because they will see that you think them as being weak and having positive feelings and they know you’re a threat. But it’s the same with Machiavellians – if you try to engage your the positive feelings of a machiavellian, they will manipulate that. And if it means being positive back and your best friend, they’ll do that. And so that’s Machiavellians.
And let’s quickly get to sadism. Now, Sadism, believe it or not, is not that central to leadership, except if it’s like Ivan the Terrible, who was so sadistic that he killed his entire regions of Muscovy and ended up killing his own government. And so – but back to sadism. Sadism is taking pleasure in the pain of others.
And it’s important to leadership because when you have that kind of power, there’s ample opportunity to be sadistic. But it doesn’t necessarily undermine, at least for a while, a person’s ability to lead.
The classic example in our time is Saddam Hussein and his two sons, Uday and Qusay.
And Ivan the Terrible is oftentimes listed as one of the great sadist leaders, an effective leader in some ways, before his sadism got him in trouble.
But Saddam Hussein liked – and Stalin also, he was friends with, kind of as much as a sadist can be – with Beria and they used to exchange stories of their sadistic plans. But Saddam Hussein used to take his sons, according to the sons, when they were of age, which is 7 or 8 years old, to Saddam’s personal torture chambers and encouraged them to torture and to kill people. So those two didn’t have a chance to do anything but become what they became.
So sadistic behavior is very noteworthy to a degree. But unlike the others, that can distort a person’s thinking. A sadist, as long as their sadistic tendencies and desires are being met can be an effective leader within their context. At least, have an effective hold on power.
MICHAEL MORELL: So Ursula, we’re running short on time. I just want to ask you one more question. How do customers, particularly senior customers, senior policymakers, typically respond to the work that clinical psychologists do on world leaders?
URSULA WILDER: Well, the first thing that happens is, when I start getting into sadism and paranoia and narcissism is they start pointing fingers at each other, at their aides, and saying, “Oh, now I know what’s wrong, well, can you do a full diagnosis of this person?” So it can get very funny at times.
MICHAEL MORELL: Or start thinking about themselves? Right?
URSULA WILDER: Occasionally there is that question: Is this being done to us? And the answer to that is, “Well, if there’s a culture that has a history of using psychologists and psychiatrists in their national security apparatus, you can assume that perhaps they are.”
And so that’s kind of an intriguing thought to a degree. They’re mostly very engaged in the content. They find it very interesting. They’re very interested in in the psychology of power and the psychology of leadership, because this is something that is part of their lives. And so, I don’t know if I can ask you a question, but how are you reacting to all this?
MICHAEL MORELL: Well, I’m sitting here thinking about which of these things apply to me and which don’t. So that’s that’s why I asked the question, as a matter of fact.
URSULA WILDER: Well I can tell you you’re not a sadist
MICHAEL MORELL: That I know for sure.
URSULA WILDER: And you’re not paranoid.
MICHAEL MORELL: I think there’s a little bit of narcissism there, for sure, and a little bit of Machiavellianism.
URSULA WILDER: Well, every high achiever in the political sphere needs that. If you don’t have it, you don’t achieve. Even the leaders who are humanitarian have to have some Machiavellianism. You can call it political astuteness, you can call it that, and definitely a sense of of drive.
MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah. Ursula, thank you so much for joining us. We could talk about this for another two hours.
URSULA WILDER: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
MICHAEL MORELL: You’re welcome. It’s great to have you.
When a Chinese high-altitude balloon suspected of spying was spotted over the United States recently, the US Air Force responded by sending up a high-flying espionage asset of its own: the U-2 reconnaissance jet.
It was the Cold-War era spy plane that took the high-resolution photographs – not to mention its pilot’s selfie – that reportedly convinced Washington the Chinese balloon was gathering intelligence and not, as Beijing continues to insist, studying the weather.
In doing so, the plane played a key role in an event that sent tensions between the world’s two largest economies soaring, and shone an international spotlight on the methods the two governments use to keep tabs on each other.
Until now, most of the media’s focus has been on the balloon – specifically, how a vessel popularly seen as a relic of a bygone era of espionage could possibly remain relevant in the modern spy’s playbook. Yet to many military historians, it is the involvement of that other symbol of a bygone time, the U-2, that is far more telling.
The U-2 has a long and storied history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them were shot down while on surveillance missions over China.
Those losses haven’t been as widely reported as might be expected – and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.
Adding to the mystery was that the planes were being flown not by US pilots nor under a US flag, but by pilots from Taiwan who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.
That the CIA would be tight-lipped over what these American-built spy planes were doing is hardly surprising.
But the agency’s continued silence more than 50 years later – it did not respond to a CNN request for comment on this article – speaks volumes about just how sensitive the issue was both at the time and remains today.
The US government has a general rule of 25 years for automatic declassification of sensitive material. However, one of its often-cited reasons for ignoring this rule is in those cases where revealing the information would “cause serious harm to relations between the US and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the US.”
Contemporary accounts of what the planes were doing – by the Taiwan pilots who were shot down, retired US Air Force officersand military historians among them – leave little doubt as to why it would have caused a stir.
The planes – according to accounts by the pilots in a Taiwan-madedocumentary film and histories published on US government websites – had been transferred to Taiwan as part of a top-secret mission to snoop on Communist China’s growing military capabilities, including its nascent nuclear program, which was receiving help from the Soviet Union.
The newly developed U-2, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, appeared to offer the perfect vessel. The US had already used it to spy on the Soviet’s domestic nuclear program as its high-altitude capabilities – it was designed in the 1950s to reach “a staggering and unprecedented altitude of 70,000 feet,” in the words of its developer Lockheed – put it out of the range of antiaircraft missiles.
Or so the US had thought. In 1960, the Soviets shot down a CIA-operated U-2 and put its pilot Gary Powers on trial. Washington was forced to abandon its cover story (that Powers had been on a weather reconnaissance mission and had drifted into Soviet airspace after blacking out from oxygen depletion), admit the spy plane program, and barter for Powers to be returned in a prisoner swap.
“Since America didn’t want to have its own pilots shot down in a U-2 the way Gary Powers had been over the Soviet Union in 1960, which caused a major diplomatic incident, they turned to Taiwan, and Taiwan was all too willing to allow its pilots to be trained and to do a long series of overflights over mainland China,” Chris Pocock, author of “50 Years of the U-2,”explained in the 2018 documentary film “Lost Black Cats 35th Squadron.”
Like the U-2, Taiwan – also known as the Republic of China (ROC) – seemed a perfect choice for the mission. The self-governing island to the east of the Chinese mainland was at odds with the Communist leadership in Beijing – as it remains today – and at that time in history had a mutual defense treaty with Washington.
That treaty has long since lapsed, but Taiwan remains a point of major tensions between China and the United States, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping vowing to bring it under the Communist Party’s control and Washington still obligated to provide it with the means to defend itself.
Today, the US sells F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan as part of that obligation. In the 1960s, Taiwan got the US-made U-2s.
The island’s military set up a squadron that would officially be known as the “Weather Reconnaissance and Research Section.”
But its members – pilots from Taiwan who had been trained in the US to fly U-2s – knew it by a different name: the “Black Cats.”
The author Pocock and Gary Powers Jr., the son of the pilot shot down by the Soviets and the co-founder of the Cold War Museum in Washington, DC, explained the thinking behind the squadron and its mission in the 2018 documentary film.
The other CIA unit in Taiwan
Coinciding with the Black Cat Squadron, the Black Bat Squadron was formed under the cooperation of the Central Intelligence Agency and Taiwan’s air force, according to a Taiwan Defense Ministry website.
While the Black Cats were in charge of high-altitude reconnaissance missions, the Black Bats conducted low-altitude reconnaissance and electronic intelligence gathering missions over mainland China from May 1956. It also operated in Vietnam in tandem with the US during the Vietnam War.
Between 1952 to 1972, the Black Bats lost 15 aircraft and 148 lives, according to the website.
“The Black Cats program was implemented because the American government needed to find out information over mainland China – what were their strengths and weaknesses, where were their military installations located, where were their submarine bases, what type of aircraft were they developing,” said Powers Jr.
Lloyd Leavitt, a retired US Air Force lieutenant general, described the mission as “a joint intelligence operation by the United States and the Republic of China.”
“American U-2s were painted with ROC insignia, ROC pilots were under the command of a ROC (Air Force) colonel, overflight missions were planned by Washington, and both countries were recipients of the intelligence gathered over the mainland,” Leavitt wrote in a 2010 personal history of the Cold War published by the Air Force Research Institute in Alabama.
One of the first men to fly the U-2 for Taiwan was Mike Hua, who was there when the first of the planes arrived at Taoyuan Air Base in Taiwan in early 1961.
“The cover story was that the ROC (air force) had purchased the aircraft, that bore the (Taiwanese) national insignia. … To avoid being confused with other air force organizations stationed in Taoyuan, the section became the 35th Squadron with the Black Cat as its insignia,” Hua wrote in a 2002 history of the unit for the magazine Air Force Historical Foundation.
At the Taiwan airbase, Americans worked with the Taiwan pilots, helping to maintain the aircraft and process the information. They were know as Detachment H, according to Hua.
“All US personnel were ostensibly employees of the Lockheed Aircraft Company,” Hua wrote.
The ROC air force and US representatives inked an agreement on the operation, giving it the code name “Razor,” Hua wrote.
He described the intelligence gained by the flights as “tremendous” and said it was shared between Taipei and Washington.
“The missions covered the vast interior of the Chinese mainland, where almost no aerial photographs had ever been taken,” he wrote. “Each mission brought back an aerial photographic map of roughly 100 miles wide by 2,000 miles long, which revealed not only the precise location of a target, but also the activities on the ground.”
Other sensors on the spy planes gathered information on Chinese radar capabilities and more, he said.
Between January 1962 and May 1974, according to a history on Taiwan’s Defense Ministry’s website, the Black Cats flew 220 reconnaissance missions covering “more than 10 million square kilometers over 30 provinces in the Chinese mainland.”
When asked for further comment on the Black Cats, the ministry referred CNN to the published materials.
“The idea was that black cats go out at night, and the U-2 would usually launch in the darkness. Their cameras were the eyes, and it was very stealthy, quiet, and hard to get. And so combining the two stories, they became known as the Black Cats,” the author Pocock said in the documentary.
The squadron even had its own patch, reputedly drawn by one of its members, Lt. Col. Chen Huai-sheng, and inspired by a local establishment frequented by the pilots.
But the Black Cats, like Powers Sr. two years before, were about to find out their U-2s were not impervious to antiaircraft fire.
On September 9, 1962, Chen became the first U-2 pilot to be shot down by a People’s Liberation Army antiaircraft missile. His plane went down while on a mission over Nanchang, China.
See photos showing US Navy recovering spy balloon from water
In the following years, three more Black Cat U-2 pilots were killed on missions over China as the PLA figured out how to counter the U-2 missions.
“The mainland Chinese learned from their radars where these flights were going, what their targets were, and they began to build sites for the missiles but move them around,” Pocock said.
“So they would build a site here, occupy that site for a while but if they thought the next flight would be going over here, they would move the missiles. It was a cat-and-mouse game, literally a black cat and mouse game between the routines from the flights from Taiwan and those air defense troops of the (Chinese) mainland, working out where the next flight would go.”
In July 1964, Lt. Col. Lee Nan-ping’s U-2 was shot down by a PLA SA-2 missile over Chenghai, China. According to the Taiwan Defense Ministry he was flying out of a US naval air station in the Philippines and trying to gain information on China’s supply routes to North Vietnam.
In September 1967, a PLA missile hit the U-2 being flown by Capt. Hwang Rung-pei over Jiaxin, China, and in May 1969, Maj. Chang Hsieh suffered a “flight control failure” over the Yellow Sea while reconnoitering the coast of Hebei province, China. No trace of his U-2 was ever found, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.
Two other Taiwanese U-2 pilots were shot down but survived, only to spend years in Communist captivity.
Maj. Robin Yeh was shot down in November 1963 over Jiujiang, Jiangxi province.
“The plane lost control when the explosion of the missile took out part of the left wing. The plane spiraled down. Lots of shrapnel flew into the plane and hit both of my legs,” Yeh, who died in 2016, recalled in “The Brave in the Upper Air: An Oral History of The Black Cat Squadron” published by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.
He said that following his capture Chinese doctors removed 59 pieces of shrapnel from his legs, but couldn’t take it all out.
“It didn’t really affect my daily life, but during winter my legs would hurt, which affected my mobility. I guess this would be my lifelong memory,” Yeh said.
Maj. Jack Chang’s U-2 was hit by a missile over Inner Mongolia in 1965. He, too, suffered dozens of shrapnel injuries and bailed out, landing on a snowy landscape.
“It was dark at the time, preventing me from seeking help anyway, so I had to wrap myself up tightly with the parachute to keep myself warm … After ten hours when dawn broke, I saw a village of yurts afar, so I dragged myself and sought help there. I collapsed as soon as I reached a bed,” he recalled in the oral history.
Neither Yeh nor Chang, who were assumed killed in action, would see Taiwan again for decades. The pilots were eventually released in 1982 into Hong Kong, which at the time was still a British colony.
However, the world into which they emerged had changed greatly in the intervening years. The US no longer had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and had formally switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Though the Cold War US-Taiwan alliance was no longer, the CIA brought the two pilots to the US to live until they were finally allowed to return to Taiwan in 1990.
Indeed, by the time of their release CIA control of the U-2 program had long since ceased. It had turned the planes over to the US Air Force in 1974, according to a US Air Force history.
Two years later, the Air Force’s 99th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron and its U-2s moved into Osan Air Base in South Korea. Commander Lt. Col. David Young gave the location the “Black Cat” moniker.
Today, the unit is known as the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron.
But US U-2s continue to be involved in what might be characterized as “cat-and-mouse” activities and their activities continue to make waves occasionally in China. In 2020, Beijing accused the US of sending a U-2 into a no-fly zone to “trespass” on live-fire exercises being conducted by China below.
The US Pacific Air Forces confirmed to CNN at the time that the flight had taken place, but said it did not violate any rules.
Meanwhile, for those involved in the original Black Cats, there are few regrets – even for those who were captured.
Yeh told the documentary makers he had fond memories of life at 70,000 feet.
“We were literally up in the air. The view we had was also different; we had the bird’s eye view. Everything we saw was vast,” he said.
Chang too felt no bitterness.
“I love flying,” he said. “I didn’t die, so I have no regrets.”
