CIA Laptop Dancing and Other Follies
21st November 2023
The CIA was created after World War II to prevent another Pearl Harbor attack, writes Charles S. Faddis, a former CIA operations officer and Middle East station chief. Faddis believes the agency “no longer works,” an easy case to make but not exactly news.
Al Qaeda was well known but “we had not a single source inside that organization capable of warning us of the 9/11 attacks that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.” It took a decade to take out bin Laden, and one doubts it went down as portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty.
As with 9/11 “we received no warning prior to the outbreak of the pandemic,” and the CIA could “apparently provide no useful information regarding the origins of the disease,” still true years later. The CIA has “no sources inside China’s top bio lab,” which is probably true of most, if not all, of China. Faddis blames bureaucratization and politicization but may underestimate the problem in both cases.