Tuesday, January 24, 2017

CIA Starts Recruiting Its Newest Asset: Donald Trump

Photo illustration by the Daily Beast


By Kimberly Dozier 

Langley is ready to woo the new president like a foreign leader. The key? Flattering his ego. ‘He is extremely insecure like an adolescent boy,’ one analyst told The Daily Beast.

After a brutal start, the CIA is set to mend fences and win over “Customer Number One,” President Donald Trump, putting aside his awkward address to the agency on Saturday and doing what they do best: recruit him to their way of thinking.

“Congratulations, he’s already recruited. Where is first place he showed up? His main intelligence agency,” said one former senior CIA official whose job used to be cultivating foreign sources.

The CIA’s main job overseas is to get into the mind of foreign leaders, and to recruit foreign intelligence assets to help them do that, wooing and winning them into becoming useful to the CIA and the United States. Intelligence officials current and former say that’s what they’re now doing with Donald Trump, though slightly in reverse: studying what’s important to him to learn how best to get through to him, and how the intelligence agency can be a useful tool to his presidency.

There are also key policies various factions of the CIA would like to see addressed. Some want to shore up the agency’s role as key operator of drone strikes against overseas terrorist targets—which the Obama administration had hoped to transfer in large part to the military. Others would like to roll back some of the recent reorganization of the CIA into 10 geographic or mission specific new centers. (It’s something newly confirmed CIA director, conservative Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo has already said might need “tweaking.”) 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The Daily Beast

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