President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former House Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, a military veteran, for Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Former Texas congressman John Ratcliffe, who served as DNI in 2020, is Trump’s pick to head the Central Intelligence Agency. To fully understand what they are up against, Gabbard and Ratcliffe might consult the works of Edward Jay Epstein, who passed away in January.

Epstein’s college thesis became Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth. That led to Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, well worth attention to this day. The contacts Epstein gained in those works included CIA counterintelligence man James Angleton, whose experience went back to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.

That, in turn, led to his 1989 work, Deception: The Invisible War Between the CIA and KGB, which was largely ignored after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but highly relevant today.

To deceive foreign intelligence services and political opponents, the Soviet Communists set up a fake network of opposition to their own regime: dissidents, guerrilla fighters, and such. This operation required a source inside foreign intelligence agencies to gauge how these operations were being interpreted and possibly countered. Angleton was on to the “deception loop” but in 1974, the CIA fired Angleton and many in his counterintelligence team. According to Epstein, this turned the clandestine agency upside down.

President Carter’s CIA director, Stansfield Turner, sidelined espionage and relied more on electronic surveillance. As Epstein shows, the Soviets were adept at setting up fake shows for American satellites, and better at mounting deception operations in general. At one time, Glasnost and Perestroika were part of the fakery, part of the Soviets’ plan to show a trend of moderation.

Turner’s CIA was unable to prevent the Islamic regime headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini from seizing power in Iran. Epstein shows how Iranian agents tricked the Americans with ruses of “moderates” opposed to their regime. In 1979, that regime invaded the U.S. embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the CIA had its hands full with resurgent Islam.

In 1980, the CIA hired Fordham grad John Brennan and posted him to the Middle East. In 2013, President Barack Obama tapped Brennan to head the CIA and kept him in that post until 2017. In 2020, Brennan joined a group of 51 “intelligence community” veterans, including former CIA directors, who signed a letter charging that the reporting in The New York Post and other conservative sources about the damaging information on Hunter Biden’s laptop smacked of “Russian disinformation,” an accusation every signatory knew was false.

Also in 2020, Brennan published Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad. Once again, Epstein’s work about intelligence agency deception can put this book in the proper context. The Penkovsky Papers, published by Doubleday in 1966, purports to be the work of double agent Oleg Penkovsky, executed by the Soviets in 1963. The best-seller was actually written by the CIA to convince Congress of their successes against the KGB.  The CIA is doubtless the principal author of Brennan’s Undaunted, which views Islamic jihad as “as a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal” and contends that jihad has nothing to do with violence. That is like saying German National Socialism or Soviet Communism were peaceful, moral causes.

Likewise, the disclaimer in John Gentry’s Neutering the CIA: Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences, released in 2023, does little to dissuade the reader that it is speaking in the CIA’s voice. According to the former CIA analyst, the forces that triggered the attack on Trump “remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.” (emphasis added)

Republican Donald Trump has now been elected president of the United States. With the CIA still “ready for reactivation” against Trump, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and the American people have a right to wonder how the clandestine agency is performing its primary task: preventing attacks on the United States.

Last year, China sent a surveillance balloon over most of the continental United States, including Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, where nuclear weapons are stored. China’s craft surveilled Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, home of U.S. Strategic Command, in charge of the nation’s nuclear forces. China’s balloon also got a close look at Whiteman Air Force Base, home to the B-2 stealth bomber, capable of delivering nuclear and conventional payloads.

China’s craft was first sighted by a private photographer, picked up by national media, and only then acknowledged by the Biden-Harris administration. The Communist regime claimed the balloon was for “mainly meteorological purposes,” that the craft had “limited self-steering capability,” and that “westerlies” blew it off course.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, echoed that claim, but when pressed whether the balloon was on an intelligence mission, he told CBS News, “I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn’t transmit any intelligence back to China.” Like Col. Kong (Slim Pickens) in Dr. Strangelove, Milley was taking evasive action.

“The balloon could be controlled by operators on the ground, who could raise or lower the craft to pick up different wind currents,” explained Dr. Marina Miron of the War Studies Department at Kings College London.” You would want to be able to make it linger over a spot to collect data. This is something you can do with a balloon which you cannot do with a satellite.”

If the CIA, the Biden-Harris administration, and U.S. military had been doing their jobs, China’s spy mission would have been outed up front and the craft shot down the moment it entered American air space. The CIA likely has no effective agents in China. That was the belief of the late Angelo Codevilla, a former staffer for Sen. Malcolm Wallop of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a staunch critic of the CIA, particularly the claim that it was immune from foreign deception. It isn’t, and the covert agency can’t trust some of its own agents.

Asif W. Rahman, a CIA official with top-secret clearance, has been charged with leaking classified materials on Israel’s response to the attack by Iran. The materials dealt with missiles and once leaked could end up anywhere. Ratcliffe and Gabbard need to identify Rahman and find out who hired and promoted him. As Neutering the CIA notes, Obama fundamentally transformed the CIA into a woke agency that practices DEI hiring.

Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard “appalled” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer, who found Gabbard unqualified for the post. Hired by the CIA in 2002, Spanberger worked undercover from 2006-2014, so she served a year under John Brennan. That raises an issue concerning the “undaunted” former CIA boss.

As Ron Radosh (The Rosenberg File) notes, Clinton national security advisor Anthony Lake failed to become CIA director partly because he thought Alger Hiss might be innocent. He wasn’t, as Allen Weinstein explained in Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. In 1976, John Brennan voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR. So even if Brennan wasn’t a CPUSA member, the CIA never should have hired him as a matter of common sense.

On Brennan’s watch as a CIA officer, the CIA failed to stop 9/11, and as CIA director Brennan deployed the agency against enemies “at home.” Brennan also joined 50 other “intelligence community” types in branding the Biden laptop “Russian disinformation.” John Ratcliffe should look into it.

As Director of National Intelligence, Ratcliffe fielded requests for material on “Crossfire Hurricane,” one of the covert operations against candidate and President Trump. The president-elect has been the target of endless slanders, lawfare, FBI raids, and has now survived two assassination attempts, one very nearly succeeding. The transition period could prove quite exciting. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.