The sorry state of the FBI and CIA

In American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla writes in part,

During my years on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff, CIA officials’ preference for their personal and corporate interests over professional standards continued to get worse. It turned out that every last one of the Cubans they thought were our agents were actually working for Cuban intelligence. In East Germany, the United States had not a single “good” agent. Not only had CIA never recruited even one high-level Soviet agent, but for a decade, Aldrich Ames, CIA’s own chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union/Russia, the man who validated the Russians who offered their services and oversaw our operations in that country, worked for the KGB.

So congenial did the agency find the disinformation coming its way that it was reluctant to investigate. Finally, when it did suspect that the dispatches coming from our agents had been crafted by the KGB, it sent them on to the president anyway because, according to the inspector general, “they contained thoughts they believed the President should consider.”

In short, CIA officials—and not just a few people at the top—have so valued their own opinions, have so wanted to influence U.S. policy, that they have mistaken their own opinions and desires for the truth.

…Robert Mueller’s directorship (2001-2013), followed by his friend James Comey’s, made the FBI into the domestic danger it is today.

The investigation into the letters containing weapons-grade Anthrax, which killed five and injured 17 Americans, defined Mueller’s directorship and today’s FBI. No one was ever charged with the crime. From the beginning, the FBI’s “profiling” process concluded that no foreign government or entity had been responsible, but rather that the attacks had been the work of a lone, white, conservative scientist. Thus the bureau pursued and nearly broke Steven Hatfill, whose lawsuit the government settled for $ 5.8 million.

The FBI then turned its attention to someone else who fit its profile, Bruce Edward Ivins. He was never charged. The bureau ruined his reputation and hounded Ivans into suicide. After which the bureau declared him guilty, but refused to make public the evidence on which it had reached its conclusion. Reassuring, isn’t it?

To be sure, the current inspector general’s general reprimand of the FBI “ineffective management and oversight of confidential sources,” for the lack of “adequate controls” in its validation of human sources,” for “jeopardizing FBI operations, and placing FBI agents, sources, subjects of investigation, and the public in harm’s way,” refers primarily to the bureau’s massive political malfeasance since 2016. But that malfeasance results from a disease that goes beyond politics, a disease that has sapped the moral and professional character of a class of people for at least a half-century.

Alas, in the current political environment, only political reactions are possible.

Read more here.