It Is Time for America to Declare Its Independence from the CIA...

by Scott Ritter at Scott Ritter Extra

**William Burns, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency**

The CIA prides itself on being called the clandestine service. Webster’s Dictionary defines the term clandestine (an adjective) to mean “kept secret or done secretively, especially because illicit.” I was therefore quite surprised when, on July 1, 2023, during a lecture delivered to the Ditchley Foundation in the United Kingdom, William Burns, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), declared that “Disaffection with the war [Russia’s ongoing Special Military Operation in Ukraine] will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service.”

Not too clandestine there, Mr. Director.

My experience with human intelligence collection, while dated, is sufficient to know that the less you speak about it, the better your results will be. But Burns’ statement was not the first time that the agency he heads has gone public regarding its desire to exploit what it assessed to be the disaffection with the war in Ukraine among military officers and oligarchs who have been impacted by the war. Back in November 2022, David Marlowe, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, told an audience at George Mason University that the CIA “was open for business,” actively looking for “Russians who are as disgusted with [Putin’s actions in invading Ukraine] as we are.”

Scott Ritter will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 79 of Ask the Inspector.

It’s not just that Burns and Marlowe have gone public with the who, what, where, and why of the CIA’s desire to recruit new Russian spies—they violated every maxim in the intelligence business by emphasizing the “how,” in particular the CIA’s new recruitment tactic of trolling for spies online, using social media platforms such as Telegram to reach out to prospective agents and provide them with a self-described “secure” means of contacting a CIA case officer, who would be only too pleased to process their application.

During my time as an intelligence professional,…