The Trump/Kushner ‘Trojan horse’ inside the CIA has agency on alert

The Central Intelligence Agency is no stranger to “moles” feeding highly-classified intelligence to outside parties. The Cold War and subsequent years saw moles within the CIA being ferreted out by U.S. counter-intelligence officers. However, what is unprecedented is the fact that the current CIA director, former Kansas Tea Party Republican Representative Mike Pompeo, is suspected by CIA counter-intelligence officials of conveying critical intelligence on certain key CIA operations to Donald Trump and his close associates, including Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. It is well known that Kushner and his ex-con father, Charles Kushner, enjoy close relations with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Mossad.

What has CIA internal security and counter-intelligence personnel particularly worried is a decision by Pompeo to have the agency’s Counterintelligence Mission Center (CMC) to report to him directly. The CMC is responsible for investigating Trump and the Trump Organization’s links to a myriad of Russian and other Eurasian individuals, companies, and syndicates. Pompeo’s decision was so egregious to CIA career employees, one or more leaked to The Washington Post Pompeo’s unusual decision to have the CMC bypass its intermediate superiors within the agency’s chain-of-command and pass on all relevant information on counter-intelligence operations, including raw intelligence, directly to Pompeo.

The CMC is an outgrowth of the CIA’s original counter-intelligence center formed by the legendary CIA mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton, who suspected Soviet moles had penetrated the CIA and other government agencies. However, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover believed that Angleton was so paranoid about moles that Angleton may have been one himself. If Angleton, who was very Catholic and very anti-Communist, was a mole, it was probably for Mossad, with which he maintained an unauthorized close relationship.

When Ronald Reagan’s campaign finance chairman, William Casey, took over the reins at the CIA in 1981, he immediately appointed New York businessman Max Hugel to the post of Deputy Director of Operations. Hugel’s off-the-books contacts with Mossad and the Israeli government ensured his quick departure from Langley and a counter-intelligence damage assessment from his short tenure—May 1981 to July 1981—as the head of CIA clandestine operations. The official reason Hugel was sacked was a seven-year old civil case involving securities fraud. It was much more convenient for Casey and the agency to cite an old civil case in firing Hugel than having to admit they placed a suspected Mossad mole in charge of the CIA’s espionage operations.

Bill Clinton’s CIA director, John Deutch, was investigated by CIA counter-intelligence and the FBI for mislabeling several classified CIA laptop computers as “unclassified” and taking them home. After Deutch pleaded guilty on January 19, 2001, to a misdemeanor of mishandling government secrets, Clinton pardoned him. Deutch was discovered to have used his classified laptops from home to access a number of pornographic websites, some of which downloaded data-retrieving “cookies” programs onto the computers’ hard drives.

CIA officers told the Post that Pompeo’s political activism on behalf of Trump has the agency extremely concerned about security compromises. Agency officials expressed concern to the Post that never in the history of the CIA has there been a director so willing to place politics over the agency’s non-partisan intelligence and counter-intelligence mission.

In what could be bad news for Trump and Pompeo, career CIA officers have responded to Pompeo’s political meddling in CIA operations by providing counter-intelligence evidence on suspected security breaches committed by Pompeo to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller and agents with the FBI. Although the CIA and FBI have had a traditionally stormy relationship, the unofficial and low-level cooperation between the CIA and the Bureau has grown closer as Pompeo has shown himself to be a dangerous mole within Langley.

Pompeo has no prior intelligence experience, other than peripheral, from serving as an Army officer in Germany after graduating from West Point. Pompeo, who ran businesses in the oil sector, received his political boost from the Koch brothers.

One anonymous CIA officer told the Post, “People have to watch him [Pompeo] . . . It’s almost as if he can’t resist the impulse to be political.” Another CIA officer fretted, “if you were passing on something too dicey [to Pompeo] he would go to the White House with it.” Even though White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser (NSA) Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster have purged the White House of far-right political hacks, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, with McMaster previously purging from the National Security Council ex-NSA Michael Flynn loyalists Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Rich Higgins, Derek Harvey, and Victoria Coates, Pompeo remains a significant malignant Trojan horse within the national security structure. Moreover, the continued presence of Kushner and Trump speechwriter, Stephen Miller, within the White House pose a significant counter-intelligence threat, especially where Israel’s Mossad is concerned.

Thanks to Kelly and McMaster, neocon war hawk and former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, is now also persona non grata in the Oval Office. Bolton has been trying to undo the Iranian nuclear agreement on behalf of his Israeli paymasters.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).