The challenges at America's top spy agency

The al-Qaeda terrorist attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, was one of the biggest intelligence failures of all time, which might have been avoided if America’s spy agencies had worked more cohesively. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was created in the aftermath of 9/11 to learn that painful lesson, and ensure that every one of America’s 18 intelligence agencies coordinates and cooperates with each other. But now this overseer of spooks - from FBI agents to military intelligence - is under attack by the Trump administration, senior Congress politicians and long-serving intelligence officers have warned. They are alarmed over the appointment of a new acting director for the ODNI who, before he took over the reins on June 19, had never had any experience of the secret spying world. The relatively-unknown Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist, is head of the government’s federal housing finance regulator. He will be keeping that job, too, while joining the cabinet in his new senior intelligence role. Pulte, 38, arrived at the ODNI office at 1500 Tysons McLean Drive, Virginia, just outside the Washington DC border, with a list of names to be chopped, and his role appears to be to cut, cut, cut. The apparently arbitrary nature of the job losses has raised questions over whether the ODNI will be so undermined as to be ineffective, or whether it survives at all. The ODNI was set up by President George W Bush in April 2005, after the excoriatingly thorough inquiries that followed the 9/11 attacks. The investigations found that vital clues to Osama bin Laden’s plot to train terrorists in Florida to fly Boeing airliners and launch them like cruise missiles into the Twin Towers and Pentagon had been picked up by the FBI. Likewise, the CIA obtained covertly-acquired information - but the two threads were not connected in time. The ODNI has gone through many variations. It expanded to about 1,660 personnel, became too bureaucratic and has continued to rival the CIA for winning the ear of the president. But after the 9/11 catastrophe, most members of the US intelligence community would concede that a DNI remains an important post. But not if it’s filled by a man with no clue about intelligence matters. A former long-serving CIA officer told The Times: “I do think this an effort to, at the very least, significantly scale down the size of ODNI. Frankly, that’s not entirely a bad thing. It has ballooned in ways that was never intended since 2005. “The question is how they do it — will they go about it strategically or with a sledgehammer? There’s no question that we need a DNI, but a more tailored and rightsized ODNI wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.” A more alarmist interpretation of Pulte’s appointment as intelligence chief was delivered by Senator Mark Warner, Democratic vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Representative Jim Himes, Democratic ranking member of the House intelligence committee. “We are concerned that your record as director of the federal housing finance agency demonstrates a willingness to misuse your position, including your access to sensitive information, to pursue President Trump’s perceived political enemies and further his retributive political agenda,” they wrote in a letter to Pulte. They also warned that further job cuts (in addition to the 500 losses announced under Tulsi Gabbard who resigned from the DNI post last month) would “risk jeopardising the mission of an organisation explicitly created after 9/11 to prevent any future such terrorist attack”. The shake-up at the ODNI comes as Trump has repeatedly shown that, rather than listen to the advice of his own intelligence agencies, he prefers to operate on gut instinct and on occasions to seek the views of non-US spy chiefs who have their own particular furrow to plough. The classic example of this was in February, before the war with Iran. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, appeared with David Barnea, the head of the Mossad spy agency, a video screen during a national security meeting in the White House’s basement “situation room” and predicted that airstrikes would bring down the regime in Tehran and lead to a popular uprising. A day later, American intelligence analysts had interrogated the claims. John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, described the Israelis’ regime change scenarios as “farcical” while Marco Rubio, secretary of state and national security adviser, agreed they were “bullshit”, according to the New York Times. But Trump appeared to trust Netanyahu and Mossad more than the CIA’s own assessments, and the Israelis were proved wrong: Operation Epic Fury, the war started on February 28, did not create a revolution. Similarly, the White House was furious after leaked intelligence reports suggested that last year’s US-Israeli strikes on Iran had only set back Iran’s nuclear programme by a few months, rather than completely “obliterating” it, as the President had boasted. Former senior officials with long experience of working with the US intelligence community fear that Pulte’s appointment is part of Trump’s long-running battle with the alleged “deep state”. They shared the concerns expressed by Senator Warner and his House colleague over the the acting director’s qualifications and motivations. “I would say that there are arguments that the DNI experiment led to some bureaucratic bloating and the DNI was never given control over IC [intelligence community] budgets that would have allowed the occupants of the office to really oversee the entire IC as many hoped would be the case,” one former senior official said. “But whatever the arguments may be for reform, putting someone like Pulte in charge who has no knowledge of or experience with intelligence, not only violates the spirit but the letter of the law. “Even more troubling is the fact that Pulte is there to execute Trump’s retribution agenda against the alleged ‘deep state’ who drew attention to the extraordinarily unusual array of contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and envoys of Russia’s government. It is a gross politicisation of the intelligence structures and endangers US national security.” Trump has also tasked Pulte with investigating “rigged elections” as part of his intelligence agency role. Last week the acting director was reported to have installed a woman who worked on election monitoring for the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, raising further criticism. Senator Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, remarked that Pulte’s office was supposed to be countering foreign threats, not importing “election denialism into the intelligence community.” Pulte’s tenure is expected to be temporary. Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor in New York, to be Gabbard’s permanent replacement. Clayton, 59, a former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and veteran Trump Administration official, is at least a more conventional choice for the role. “Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay,” Trump said earlier this month in a Truth Social post announcing his pick. “I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible.” However an attempt by Democrats to speed up Clayton’s appointment before Pulte could begin work was also derailed by the president. As part of a political tug of war with his critics, Trump demanded that the Senate hold hearings to confirm Clayton’s replacement as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York before they interviewed him for the post of Director of National Intelligence. The question being raised on Capitol Hill is: how much damage can Pulte do as acting director before Clayton’s appointment comes up for confirmation by the Senate? PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS

Does anyone care about North Korea?

The whole world goes crazy with wars, unbelievable heatwaves, earthquakes etc etc and all while these things are going on, North Korea just keeps on building more missiles, more warheads, more artillery, and MORE NUKES. No one cares. No one is dashing off to the UN Security Council to demand resolutions, no one is going to Beijing to demand Xi Zinping restrain Kim Kong-un, the North Korean leader, there are no headlines in any newspaper warning North Korea could blast us all to kingdom come. All we get are news stories showing Kim Jong-un standing around watching the latest firing of something or other aimed at destroying South Korea or the US or wherever. No one cares. Well, I'm sure South Korea cares but no one else seems to worry about it. It's one of the most extraordinary facts of life in this mad world, that one individual leader can get away with building a massibe nuclear and conventional force without anyone batting an eyelide, apart from continuing with sanctions which make no difference to the lifestyle of the leader sitting in his palace in Panmunjon.

Trump doesn't want to see Andy Burnham

Donald Trump probably thinks Britain has now gone down the tubes so far he doesn't even have to bother talking to whoever is in 10 Downing Street. Initially it was Keir Starmer and that was bad enough in his eyes, although he did say Starmer seemed a nice guy. But now Starmer is about to exit from Downing Street, thanks to his back-stabbing and chest-stabbing cabinet colleagues, and there will be a new bloke in Downing Street whom Trump has clearly never heard of. He called him a town mayor. And liberal, ie socialist. So he made clear in chats with reporters in the Oval Office that he didn't expect or want to see Burnham in the White House. He could make his first trip abroad as prime minister to Guatemala for all he cares. He didn't say that. I said it. But that's what he is implying. So, not a good start for this town mayor who is to become prime minister without a fight on July 18. What a farce. Certainly we voters didn't vote for Burnham. We had nothing to do with it. It's all down to the Labour party mafia who killed their leader and went for someone with a bigger smile and flashier glasses. Trump will probably have to meet with Burnham at some point but it ain't going to be soon. In fact, Burnham has suggested his first trip abroad might be to Israel to face up to Benjamin Netanyahu. Good luck with that, Andy.

Who to believe, the US or Iran, over the negotiations?

Ever since the negotiations between the US and Iran began, whether directly or through intermediaries (Pakistan, Qatar), we have seen conflicting reports of what has or has not been achieved. The US makes big claims, and Iran denies them. Vice President JD Vance claimed yesterday that the Tehran negotiators had agreed to allow international nuclear inspectors into Iran to monitor all suspected nuke programmes. Iran said this wasn't true. Who are we to believe? It's actually the same old story. The Iranian negotiators might say something privately to someone, whether to Vance or to the Pakistan prime minister, but then in public says the opposite. What matters as far the rest of us is concerned is the public statement because that is how Iran works. The public statements are the ones that matter. So even when Donald Trump claims the Iranians have said privately that they will do this or do that, it only counts when a formal statement is made in public, and that more often than not contradicts what some Iranian negotiator might have whispered into someone's ear during negotiations. The US behave in a different way. When Trump makes bold claims about what Iran has agreed to do during private discussions, they turn out to be "in your dreams" remarks. So, for example, Trump said Iran had agreed to hand over the 440 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium and that the US and Iran would work together to dig out the material in canisters from deep underground where they were buried by the B-2 bombing in June last year. Tehran said they never agreed to that. So, this is what we have to put up with for the next 60 days or, claims from both sides which clash. The lesson is to listen to what Iran says publicly because that is when the supreme leader and his military backers have agreed what to make public. All the supposed private stuff doesn't really matter.

Trump challenged by Iran and algae

It's going to be tough-going for Donald Trump to get a final settlement with Iran that looks and seems better than the one signed by Barack Obama in 2015 without firing a shot. So far, from the 60-day talks in Switzerland, the discussions are all about exactly the same things that Obama's negotiating team talked about, with the big exception that Iran has found its super-leverage card in the Strait of Hormuz and neither side has yet got down to the nitty-gritty details vis a vis Tehran's nuclear programme. And yet already the US has temporarily lifted a whole bunch of sanctions and allowed Iran to export oil which means that the new regime in Tehran has won a huge bonus just from day one of the Switzerland talks. How many more goodies is the US going to grant Tehran? No wonder the Republicans in Congress are beginning to feel uneasy about the war and the aftermath. American taxpayers will also be asking why Iran is benefting so much from the talks while the cost of living for them is still high and causing suffering. This is all bad news for Trump and now he has been hit by the algae problem, the spreading green on the famous Reflecting Pool in Washington DC which should be super-blue. The millions of dollars spent on updating the pool appear to have been wasted. The algae is back and the blueness has gone. One poor duck has already died sipping the water. All Trump needs now is for the ballroom he is building at the eastern end of the White House to go pear-shaped. It's already massively over budget. Perhaps the golden look he is creating will turn green, like the Reflecting Pool.

Trump can't bomb Iran again

Since the much-criticised Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the US and Iran, Donald Trump has at least three times said that if a final settlement is not reached to his satisfaction he can always go back to bombing Iran. Everyone knows, probably even Trump, that this is not true. Now that the peace momentum, if there is a peace momentum, is underway, the option of returning to bombing has gone for good. What would it achieve anyway? Just more death and destruction and therefore more money will have to be raised to help Iran reconstruct. Also, it wouldn't look very good if Trump just reverted to bombing every time the negotiations are beginning to look a bit fragile. Iran will just bury itself in its bunker and refuse to continue negotiating and probably do its best to rush for a nuclear bomb, although that would be impossible at the moment because so much was destroyed by the US and Israeli bombing of nuclear plants in June last year. No, Trump's only option now is diplomacy and keep fingers crosssed that the mullahs and generals in Tehran will be ready to do a deal of sorts. So, that's a win for Iran. Meanwhile, the Iranian negotiators continue to use the other winning card they possess - citing Lebanon and Israel's continuing strikes against Hezbollah as the key element, as far as they are concerned, in the negotiations. If Tehran is happy with the progress made it's because they know they have screwed Trump over Israel's actions in Lebanon. Trump knows that however much he swears at Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader will carry on targeting Hezbollah every time Hezbollah targets Israel.

Iran has all the cards as talks begin

The negotiators from Tehran gathering in Switzerland for the beginning of talks with the US to forge an overall long-term deal will be super-confident that they hold the cards. This is because the main card in Donald Trump's hands is the bombing card but he doesn't really have that anymore because if he starts bombing again, the whole deal will crash and we will be back to square one. Whereas Iran has the Strait of Hormuz card, which will remain its best leverage for ever. Also, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, one of the two main negotiators, has all the wealth of experience of negotiating on behalf of Tehran for the nuclear deal agreed under the Obam administrion in 2015. He knows his nukes much much better than any of the American negotiators. He has all the technical stuff in his head. His fellow negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. knows his onions, too, and won't conceded anything which might weaken the power of the IRGC. So, JD Vance who seems to spend more time writing books than performing as vice president, and the other two negotiators, Steve Whitkoff, Trump's business buddy, and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, know more about business ventures and property than the intricacies of diplomacy. All in all, these talks in Switzerland are going to cement in all the goodies already promised in the memorandum of understanding - sanctions relief, unfreezing of Iranian funds and the $300 billion reconstruction fund - while failing probably to get a fullproof nuclear deal. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.