How I Became a Deep State Dissident
The “Havana Syndrome” scandal reveals the corruption and cowardice of Joe Biden’s Intelligence Community
From its appearance in America’s political discussion a little less than a decade ago, the controversial term Deep State failed to resonate with me. First, it’s of Turkish origin, and that country is infinitely more conspiracy-minded and opaque than America will ever be. Second, aficionados of the term, mostly Trump superfans, failed to define what it meant. To some the Deep State implied shadowy U.S. spy agencies, while to others it simply meant any government-adjacent entity that wasn’t enthusiastic about President Trump. As a sometime member of that Deep State, I required some precision: Are we talking about Men in Black or the Environmental Protection Agency here?
That said, by the end of Trump’s rollercoaster four years in the White House, it was evident that Deep State detractors had a point. I criticized Donald Trump’s presidency for its ham-fisted efforts to politicize the Intelligence Community, including staffing top IC jobs with dubious MAGA sycophants, yet in their zeal to defeat Trump, Democrats wound up dragging the spooks into politics just the same, with disastrous long-term consequences.
The clarifying moment for me, as for many IC veterans, came in mid-October 2020, shortly before our election, when 51 former IC officials, many of them spook bigwigs, issued a public letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s infamous waylaid laptop was a Russian disinformation scheme. The letter was hedging in its analysis and some of its claims – for instance, some voices pushing the laptop saga were uncomfortably close to the Kremlin – were undeniably true, but the broader implication was that nobody should be talking about this issue because you’re helping Vladimir Putin.
This pained me, since among the letter signers were friends and former colleagues of mine. Worse, Democrats and their media partners pushed the letter as justification for stifling public discussion of the laptop issue. Then Big Tech entered the fray, actively suppressing social media activities related to the Hunter Biden story. In a truly shocking moment, Twitter and Facebook limited the visibility of comments on this issue by the New York Post, with Twitter temporarily suspending their account. Keep in mind that the Post was established in 1801 by Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.
This was a direct assault on the freedom of the press, the most sacred of American rights, an act of collusion between intelligence bosses, the Democrats, the media, and Big Tech against free speech and debate. Its implications for civil liberties were nothing sort of terrifying. This was considerably worse than anything President Donald Trump had done to stifle free expression or the media.
Worst of all, they were wrong. We now know that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell,” with its sordid contents, was real, as the FBI concluded several years ago. The counterintelligence implications therein, with Chinese intelligence payments of millions of dollars to Biden, Inc., are another troubling issue. Two years ago, the New York Post executed a deserved victory lap, denouncing the “spies who lied” about the laptop.
Those disastrous events of October 2020, which left a lasting stain on the Intelligence Community’s reputation, were the outcome of a lamentable process that had been building for years. When Donald Trump entered the presidential race in mid-2015, upending American politics, it didn’t take long for some liberals to get interested in Kremlin lies, what experts term disinformation, in order to attack Trump. (Ironically, the Obama administration was bewilderingly uninterested, and the White House in November 2015 shuttered the only office in the entire U.S. Government that tracked and debunked Russian disinformation). During Trump’s presidency, this became a Democrat obsession.
Here's a simple rule of thumb, based on my long career in countering Kremlin disinformation: If you weren’t talking informatively about dezinformatsiya before 2015, you’re a hack, probably a partisan fluffer too, and I don’t care about your opinion, and neither should anyone else. Democrat-linked instant-experts created a whole “disinformation” industry, flush with cash, devoted to attacking Republicans. In a remarkable sleight of hand, they changed key definitions for partisan effect. Disinformation means lies created and propagated by Russian entities and allies, e.g. the infamous KGB Active Measure in the 1980s that the Pentagon created AIDS, but under the revised understanding, it applies to anything the Kremlin’s friends talk about. Ergo, Russians were talking about Hunter’s laptop, so if you discuss it, you’re helping Moscow (and perhaps secretly working for them too). This is lunatic stuff, not to mention straight-up McCarthyism, which liberals loudly deplored for sixty-odd years, right until it became useful for them to smear Trump and his party.
Neither was the overt partisan bias hard to detect. Kremlin propagandists are omnidirectional in their attacks on the West. There’s little consistency since that’s not the point. Moscow-linked liars spout venom about the “racist” nature of American society one day, praising Black Lives Matter, then the following day push agitprop castigating America for alleged anti-white bias. I’ve never once heard any of the battalions of liberal “disinformation experts” state that we should banish BLM from polite society because Kremlin propagandists talk about them, sometimes favorably.
I suppose I should address my own bias. I’m a former intelligence officer, a National Security Agency senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer. I’ve worn other hats with different IC agencies, but that’s another story. Moreover, I’m a second-generation spook. Both my parents were career NSA officials. I was “born with clearances” as they say in the spy trade. I grew up in the spooky IC cocoon and spent a good chunk of my adult life there. I know that secretive world and, while I’m a critic at times, I accept that we’re always going to have spies. Espionage is termed the “second oldest profession” with cause.
Above all, I want the Intelligence Community kept firmly out of American politics. Getting the spooks involved in partisan affairs is the quick road to banana republic status, something no active-duty American spy should contemplate doing even for a moment. Yet, that is precisely what Democrats have done, with ruinous consequences for public trust in our intelligence agencies. And it’s gotten considerably worse under President Joe Biden.
I’m afraid I have little if any good news to share here. President Barack Obama’s two terms witnessed gradual politicization of the IC, installing party loyalists in top intelligence positions, regardless of their qualifications, though the mainstream media ignored all this (which they certainly did not when President Trump tried the same thing). This politicization has continued under President Biden, which is no surprise since it’s functionally Obama’s third term. Cadres decide everything, Stalin famously said, and Biden’s national security team is mostly Obama retreads.
The impact of this on the IC has been nothing short of catastrophic. Others* have explained in detail how this creeping politicization has turned the Federal Bureau of Investigation into something damaging to democracy, bringing us all of the problems of J. Edgar Hoover’s long leadership of the FBI, if not worse, with none of Hoover’s benefits in terms of operational efficiency. This pernicious rot now spreads far beyond the FBI, however. Even critical matters of foreign intelligence, of the highest importance, under Biden have been politicized in the service of partisanship and expediency.
Take the vexing case of the COVID-19 origins issue. Obviously, the biggest global pandemic in a century, which killed more than a million Americans and upended life for everyone, is a very significant issue. The notion of a Chinese “lab leak” probably in Wuhan as the source of the pandemic was considered off-limits by the Western liberal establishment from early 2020. Dissenters were silenced and ridiculed. Now, many have conceded that a lab leak really might be the origin of COVID-19, but the Intelligence Community has known that from the start. As this newsletter explained in detail years ago, certain IC entities – not coincidentally the ones with the best knowledge in medical intelligence matters – had considered a Chinese lab mistake to be the most likely cause of the pandemic, from the very beginning.
Unable to untangle this mess, almost three years ago the Biden administration kicked the issue to the spooks to sort out, with the proviso that Congress must be kept informed. Three months later, when the IC issued its findings, via the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it was one of the biggest letdowns in the annals of American espionage. The IC’s less-than-banal assessment really came to no conclusions worth mentioning. As this newsletter put it at the time:
Even with such modest expectations, the ODNI’s unclassified statement is deeply unsatisfactory. Not merely over its vagueness, nor due to its analytic splitting the baby, which comes as no surprise to people who understand how the interagency intelligence assessment sausage gets made inside the Beltway. What’s unacceptable is that the Key Findings present really nothing new at all.
After speculating that the IC’s timidity about blaming China for the pandemic was due to the Biden administration unwillingness to upset Beijing, I concluded: “We need to know what really happened in Wuhan in the fall of 2019. If the spooks won’t tell us, Congress needs to force some answers from the executive branch, sooner rather than later.”
To its credit, Congress tried. It just didn’t work. Months of pressure from the Hill finally forced the ODNI to cough up a bit more information, but this yet again amounted to a nothingburger analytically, while not explaining the deep divisions among IC agencies over the exact origins of COVID-19. Efforts by Congressional Republicans to get more detailed analysis were simply rebuffed by Team Biden. At the unclassified level, we really know hardly anything more of substance about the intelligence regarding where the pandemic came from than on the day that Joe Biden entered the Oval Office. It clearly will stay this way as long as Biden is president.
Neither is this an accident. DNI Avril Haines is an Obama retread and Democrat loyalist (who had zero intelligence experience until Obama named her CIA’s deputy director in 2013). As the boss of the IC, Haines has served the interests of the president and her party over those of the American people – or of the spies she leads. Bill Burns has been an unusually busy CIA director for Joe Biden. The career diplomat turned spy boss has been employed by the White House as an all-purpose diplomatic fixer, worldwide, with Burns being raised to cabinet status by Biden. This can be generously termed anomalous since the IC reforms after 9/11 created the DNI to be the “face” of the spooks to the president. The less we say about Burns’ strange, unexplained relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps the better.
However, the IC’s COVID-19 debacle appears almost benign compared to the unprecedented hash that Biden’s spooks made of the controversial “Havana Syndrome” issue. That appellation, derived from a series of “anomalous health incidents” experienced by U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba around 2017, is a misnomer. As readers of Top Secret Umbra know, the AHI problem in fact goes all the way back to the mid-1990s. By now there are well past a thousand victims and similar incidents have been reported in dozens of countries around the world. Most alarmingly, there have been several attacks in the U.S., not just in the Washington, DC, area, but in Florida too. Indeed, the pace of these incidents has been increasing, if anything. As this newsletter pointedly asked three years ago this month: How many American spies have to die before we do something here?
Biden’s IC promised to get to the bottom of this lethal mystery but, just as with the COVID-19 origins issue, what the spooks have told the public is deeply unsatisfactory. Which is shocking, considering that a good percentage of AHI victims are intelligence personnel. At the beginning of 2022, on the basis of a review of a thousand cases, CIA determined that “Havana Syndrome” was not the result of enemy action, although Langley conceded that in a couple dozen AHI cases, hostile intelligence operations could not be ruled out. The many IC personnel who have been victims of this mysterious malady took CIA’s verdict as a gut-punch.
It got worse in March 2023, when the ODNI released its much-anticipated unclassified report on the AHI mystery, echoing Langley’s take. This was its bottom line:
Most IC agencies have concluded that it is “very unlikely” a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs. IC agencies have varying confidence levels, with two agencies at moderate-to-high confidence while three are at moderate confidence. Two agencies judge it is “unlikely” an adversary was responsible for AHIs and they do so with low confidence based on collection gaps and their review of the same evidence.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to independently assess any of that bureaucratese, because the IC redacted the supporting analysis so heavily that it’s indecipherable. The accompanying statement from DNI Haines made her position clear: “U.S. adversaries, including Russia, were not engaged in a global campaign resulting in AHIs,” adding, “IC agencies assess that symptoms reported by US personnel were probably the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary, such as preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses, and environmental factors.”
In other words: it’s all in your silly heads, folks. Many of the spooks who fell victim to AHIs took this as a betrayal, justifiably. DNI Haines offered the standard platitudes that the IC cares about its people and this painful matter isn’t closed, but anybody who understands Beltway politics knows that shutting the door on this messy issue is precisely what Haines attempted here. Rumors and more, for years, that the Kremlin, particularly the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, the sinister GRU, was behind these attacks with some sort of acoustic weapon, were officially shoved aside by the IC, with DNI Haines’ support.
Which is exceptionally mysterious since one IC agency, my former employer NSA, a decade ago admitted that there was something weird going on here. This was years before any AHIs were reported in Havana. It came in a reply to Mike Beck, a retired NSA officer and the “Patient Zero” for AHIs. In 1996, Beck and a colleague, Chuck Gubete, visited a foreign country for the agency – Beck and NSA won’t state it, but it’s known to be Russia – and were struck down by the mystery malady. Gubete died several years ago, and Beck has been in declining health for years. He’s attempted to get NSA’s support, mostly unsuccessfully. However, the agency’s 2014 letter to Beck confirmed that the IC does know that something unpleasant is going on: “[NSA] confirms there is intelligence information from 2012 associating the hostile country to which Mr. Beck traveled in the late 1990s with a high powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate or kill an enemy over time and without leaving evidence,” adding: “This weapon is designed to bathe the target’s living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damaged nervous system.”
Where did that vital information go? It appears that the DNI and her allies decided that it would be impolitic to publicly blame Russia for harming hundreds of Americans, perhaps more, including some fatalities. So, they didn’t. Considering that AHIs impact spooks too, this constitutes an epic exercise in dishonest cowardice by Joe Biden’s IC.
However, the White House’s desire to see the “Havana Syndrome” issue fade out got a stunning rebuke one week ago, when a journalistic bombshell was dropped simultaneously by multiple outlets, exposing shocking truths about AHIs. This was the outcome of a five-year joint investigation by CBS News’ 60 Minutes with The Insider, a Russian investigative outlet, and Germany’s Der Spiegel. This resulted in an extended TV segment plus finely detailed written analysis, both of which are worth your time. I won’t spoil the story, which is intricate and shocking, but this analysis leaves little doubt that AHIs are the work of GRU, in particularly its shadowy and unpleasant Unit 29155. That sinister wetwork outfit has run amok during the Putin years, conducting assassinations and bombings worldwide, most infamously the poisoning with a lethal nerve agent of GRU defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in 2018.
These new reports offer a remarkable amount of detail, never before seen by the public, regarding what GRU has been up to with AHIs. While the full picture isn’t in focus, the reports nevertheless “bring the receipts” as they say: names, faces, medals, technical details, operations, plus travels by Unit 29155 personnel in multiple countries which happen to coincide with several known “Havana Syndrome” attacks. With this specific information, it seems safe to state that AHIs originate in Moscow.
Moreover, the detailed evidence these reports provide is something which American intelligence, among others, must know about. And presumably has for years. If journalists can access such sensitive Kremlin records, including travel analysis, are we really expected to believe that CIA, NSA, and all their spy-partners, with their vast global intelligence collection capabilities, cannot?
At a minimum, we can now state that Biden’s Intelligence Community hasn’t been honest with the public and its own personnel regarding AHIs. While the nefarious activities of GRU’s Unit 29155 may not be the only explanation for “Havana Syndrome,” at this point they appear to be the most plausible explanation we have.
It’s not difficult to imagine why Team Biden has been unwilling to state the truth about AHIs. Vladimir Putin, an angry fellow with a lot of nuclear weapons, wouldn’t take kindly to having Washington’s finger pointed at GRU and the Kremlin for these attacks. Moreover, admitting that Russia’s behind this mystery would hardly improve the morale of American spies and diplomats, nor would it reassure them that their own government can protect them.
However, honesty matters, as does accountability. Putin has stated that Russia’s already at war with NATO and the U.S. anyway, Ukraine’s just the battlefield, so what’s Team Biden afraid of? By continuing to suppress the difficult truth about this painful issue, Joe Biden’s Deep State has covered itself in mendacious dishonor. The spooks deserve better leaders than this administration has given the Intelligence Community. Regrettably, there’s no reason to think any of this will improve in a second Biden term in the White House.
This is a personal matter for me. I know several spooks who have fallen victim to “Havana Syndrome.” Mike Beck is a former colleague of mine in NSA’s Counterintelligence Division. He’s a good guy and a patriot who deserves better treatment from his own government than he has received. I, too, could have fallen victim to AHIs, since I fit the profile of so many IC personnel who were attacked: spies who work Russian issues and are considered an irritant by Moscow. I believe that during one trip to a location I won’t name I narrowly avoided being attacked with the mystery weapon.
Top Biden officials have spread whispers that the AHI matter was resolved, discreetly, with Moscow in 2022. The GRU bear has ceased his lethal games, supposedly. However, this is merely more dishonest play-acting, since the Pentagon has confirmed that an unnamed senior Department of Defense official was struck down with “Havana Syndrome” symptoms during the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania in July 2023. Therefore, I ask again: How many American spies have to die before we do something here?
In response to queries about the 60 Minutes segment, the White House dodged the issue, saying the IC is correct in its assessment of AHI, while adding the usual Bidenesque blather about how “seriously” the administration takes this issue and treats “Havana Syndrome” victims “with respect and compassion.” Over the past week, there have been no comments on this issue from DNI Haines or other IC leaders.
* Allow me to recommend the new book Big Intel by my friend Mike Waller; it’s a disturbing deep-dive into how negatively CIA and the FBI have been altered in recent years.