The CIA has declassified its files on the Venezuelan electronic voting machine company, Smartmatic, appearing to confirm widely held suspicions that the company used complex algorithms to fix election results that helped keep Venezuela’s leftist regime in power for two decades. The firm that’s been newly based in the UK now provides election machines for California’s populous Orange County.
Jonny Gannon had one final mission.
The longtime CIA operative had exfiltrated the families of spies from the most repressive of Middle Eastern regimes and tattooed the word “ARGONAUT,” an homage to seafaring heroes from Greek mythology, across his right forearm. By 2023 he had a Washington desk job with a rank equivalent to an Army two-star general.
That’s when the director tapped him to return to the field.
His assignment: Find out whether the “spy sheikh” could be trusted with some of America’s most cutting-edge technology.
The Covid pandemic began over six years ago, killed millions, cost the world trillions of dollars and caused untold tragedy. Despite its world-historical significance, there are still many unanswered questions about the virus.
The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation.
David J. Rush, who was arrested last month and charged with one count of theft of public money, constructed what is known as a “special access program,” a sort of black box for the most secret intelligence operations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Even intelligence personnel with the highest security clearance cannot access an individual SAP, as they are known, without specific authorization.
THE CIA’S INSANE GOLD BARS SCANDAL. Here is the basic story, as alleged in an affidavit filed in federal court
The Central Intelligence Agency vehemently denied reports of its participation in deadly operations against drug cartels in Mexico.
On Tuesday, CNN published a report alleging that the CIA had vastly expanded its operations in Mexico against drug cartels, including getting directly involved in assassinations of cartel figures. The most notable was its alleged facilitation of a car bombing on a busy Mexican highway that killed Francisco “El Payin” Beltran on March 28. CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyons denied the report in strong terms, accusing the outlet of endangering American lives.
If you attended school any time after the Nixon administration, then you likely beheld at some point the CIA World Factbook, a map and reference manual of Planet Earth and its inhabitants upon which nearly everyone could agree.
Maybe you read parts of it from a floppy disk or a CD-ROM for that social studies project due tomorrow. Or scanned its list of countries for Latvia, because that is the country you are representing next week in Model U.N. Even better, you wandered the earth in your imagination as you held the physical Factbook in your own hands, unfolding its maps and understanding, perhaps for the first time, that the thumbs-up gesture your friends flash each other is considered an obscene insult in parts of the Middle East, Europe and Argentina.
A pity, as a blogger I have relied on it on many occasions.
In a dramatic repudiation, CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Friday rescinded or revised 19 intelligence reports the agency produced dating back to the Obama era because they were politically biased or used poor spy tradecraft, including one analysis suggesting that women who pursue traditional motherhood were at danger of becoming violent extremists.
A senior CIA official told Just The News the reports were initially flagged during a review by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, then reviewed by career agency officials before being retracted, recalled or revised.
In a decade-long covert operation, the U.S. spy agency dropped modified poppy seeds in an attempt to degrade the potency of Afghanistan’s billion-dollar opium crop.
In 20 years of grinding war in Afghanistan, the United States dropped a multitude of weapons from the skies: Millions of tons of ordnance. Hellfire missiles launched from Predator drones. Even the “Mother of All Bombs,” the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in existence. And, amid the more conventional projectiles, tiny poppy seeds. By the billions.
On and off for over a decade, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an audacious highly classified program to covertly manipulate Afghanistan’s lucrative poppy crop, blanketing Afghan farmers’ fields with specially modified seeds that germinated plants containing almost none of the chemicals that are refined into heroin, The Washington Post has learned.
The Central Intelligence Agency is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against small, fast-going boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations. Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.
The agency’s central role in the boat strikes has not previously been disclosed. Donald Trump confirmed last Wednesday that he had authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela, but not what the agency would be doing.
By law, the Central Intelligence Agency isn’t allowed to operate domestically in the United States. But that reassuring civic factoid has long come with a big asterisk: going back to its earliest years, the agency has, in fact, interfered in homeland affairs to combat dissident movements (historically, from the Left), to defend its institutional prerogatives — and, increasingly, to recruit assets among the financial elite.
Forget James Bond. George Minden was the real thing. A Romanian aristocrat by birth, he could have spent his days in manor houses, sipping brandy and debating politics. Instead, he entered the world of espionage. A CIA operative, with a mind like a dagger, he moved without drawing attention, deliberate and invisible. In 1983, while the world braced for nuclear war, Minden was planning something truly subversive. He would flood communist Poland with forbidden literature. Not leaflets. Not propaganda. Real stories. The kind that rattled regimes. The kind that made people think.
Aldrich Ames spent nearly a decade selling secret information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 clandestine operations, and leading to the deaths of at least 10 Western intelligence assets. On 28 April 1994, the double agent was jailed for life. In February of that year, the BBC spoke to one of the spies who was betrayed by Ames, but who lived to tell the tale.
In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. One by one, these Western intelligence sources were picked up by the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, interrogated and, very often, executed.
John Ratcliffe, Trump’s appointee as CIA director, says that he wants officers who are “willing to go to places no one else can go and do things that no one else can do”. This, one might have thought, is a straightforward enough description of any intelligence operative worth his keep, just as country analysts in Langley must be really fluent in foreign languages to do their jobs effectively. Certainly, Ratcliffe seems keen to employ only the best at the CIA, and has offered eight months of pay and benefits to those who prefer to leave.
The Central Intelligence Agency is poised to take a larger, more aggressive role under President Donald Trump in the battle against Mexican-based drug cartels, devising and evaluating plans to share more intelligence with regional governments, train local counternarcotics units and possibly conduct other covert actions, according to people familiar with the matter.
The expanded focus on cartels, which smuggle fentanyl and other narcotics into the United States, represents a new and potentially risky priority for the spy agency, which in recent years has made espionage against China, counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and Africa, and support for Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion its main concerns.
WAPO is worried this will upset the Cartels.
#BREAKING: The Mexican Senate has just APPROVED the entry of U.S. Special Forces to take on the cartels
FINALLY!
Trump has designated the cartels as “foreign terrorıst organizations” and they’re about to PAY for the American lives they’ve taken pic.twitter.com/f3J2MmN1Lf
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) February 17, 2025
