Philip Giraldi, who knows, weighs in on something Larry Johnson, who knows, mentioned the other day. The CIA, founded in deception and wickedness, has grown self-converged to a crippling degree.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), famed for its hidden agendas and its preference to operate in the shadows, has featured in a couple of recent breaking stories. On July 22nd the White House announced that CIA Director William Burns would be stepping up to cabinet level in the Joe Biden Administration. That means that beyond being in theory a principal government source for reliable information that can be used to make policy, he would himself become a policy maker, co-equal with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Though the gesture is largely symbolic and creates some bureaucratic scrambling of roles and functions, it is not unprecedented. President Ronald Reagan included his CIA Director and close friend William Casey in the cabinet and the inevitable Bill Clinton elevated no less than two Directors, John Deutch and George Tenet.

Interestingly, of the four cabinet level CIA Directors, only Casey was an experienced intelligence officer, having served in the OSS during the Second World War and he became a controversial director who was inclined to support unnecessarily risky operations, particularly in Latin America. Deutch was something like a professional bureaucrat, having worked at the Pentagon before moving on to the Agency. He left CIA after little more than a year in office in December 1996 and it was subsequently learned that he had been keeping classified material on his own laptop computer, which appears to be a Democratic Party trait. Bill Clinton pardoned him before he could be prosecuted for failing to protect classified information. Tenet was a congressional staffer before becoming Director and he, of course, gifted the American people with the massive intelligence failure known as the Iraq War.

Burns likewise is a career diplomat, not a spy, and the two roles are very different, …

Johnson mentioned the merger of analysis and operations over the past 40 years. This amounts to mixing and drinking the Kool-Aid. This explains what appears to be a constant series of mistakes. Given what could otherwise happen, that might be for the best. The Company may have administratively reduced itself to just another part of the political structure. That would make it as irrelevant as the rest of the show.