[We are delighted to welcome Jeremy Kuzmarov as our new Managing Editor at CovertAction Magazine. In this first, short piece, Kuzmarov casts needed critical light on former CIA Director John Brennan and his role in both Russia Gate and the developing new Cold War. Stay tuned: More articles on these critical matters are coming soon.—Editors.]
In October, John Brennan, CIA Director from 2013 to 2017, will release a memoir titled Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad.
Early excerpts from the book, published in The New York Times on Thursday July 30, quote Brennan expressing outrage that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Devin Nunes (R-CA), then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (HIC), remained silent when he and other intelligence officials purported to lay out evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Brennan wrote: “I was not surprised that McConnell and Nunes, early and ardent partisan defenders of Mr. Trump, were silent in the face of what everyone else recognized was a clear national security threat.”
The timing of Brennan’s book and partisan attacks make clear that it is his latest salvo in a four-year campaign designed to intensify a new Cold War with Russia and remove Trump from office.
With the War on Terror losing its legitimacy, raging street protests, and threat of class warfare growing amidst the current economic breakdown, America’s ruling elite is ever more nostalgic for the time when the threat of the “evil empire” could be invoked to justify massive military budgets and regressive domestic policies.
Joe Biden is the preferred candidate to lead the new Cold War crusade over Trump, who conveys a bad image for America. Though authorizing enormous military spending, Trump made some overtures toward cutting back support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and forging better relations with Russia, and recently removed thousands of troops from Germany.
During the first Cold War from 1945 to 1991, the CIA perfected sophisticated psychological warfare techniques—including planting disinformation in the media, recruiting pliant academics, and repeating the big lie over and over—which effectively conditioned the public into viewing the world in Manichaean terms.
Brennan developed an intimate familiarity with these techniques after joining the agency in 1980—at the height of Ronald Reagan’s post-Vietnam revitalization of the Cold War.
Over the subsequent decades, Brennan became an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, served as CIA Station Chief in Saudi Arabia, and helped President Obama select targets for assassination in the drone war, earning him the nickname “the grim Irishman.”[1]
In his last major act as CIA Director in January 2017, Brennan coordinated the drafting of an intelligence assessment, which a HIC report found suffered from “significant intelligence trade-craft failings” that “undermined confidence in its judgments regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategic objectives for disrupting the U.S. election.”[2]
Brennan sounded like former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in an August 2018 New York Times op-ed warning about Russian agents’ expertise in the “art of deception” and ability to “shape political events abroad through [a] well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capability, information operations, and old fashioned human intelligence spycraft.”[3]
Russia, like every nation-state, tries to shape political events in other countries. But these statements are mainly a form of psychological projection, where someone projects his own behavior onto others. Brennan’s contention that Russian intelligence had “manipulated wittingly or unwittingly” and “bought outright” a “variety of political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers”[4] in the United States lacks substantiation. So does his accusation of Russian aggression in Ukraine given that the war there started after a U.S.-backed coup d’état.
Brennan earned the nickname the “Godfather of Russia-Gate” for helping to initiate the $30 million Mueller investigation, whose April 2019 report failed to support the charge that Trump or any other American had colluded with the Russians to try to fix the 2016 election.[5]
A study released in July 2017 by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of experienced intelligence operatives, determined that Russia’s alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails—the main basis for accusations of Russian election interference—was an internal leak based on the speed of the modem.[6]
The Justice Department in 2020 also dropped charges for lack of evidence against two Russian firms alleged to have advanced Trump’s election chances on social media, with evidence that social media ads influenced the election in any way being difficult to establish.[7]
John Brennan is a CIA disinformation specialist and conceivable war criminal whose memoirs are clearly part of a psychological warfare operation designed to condition the American public to fear Russia and provoke a new Cold War.
As Trump is a great danger to this nominal republic, so is Brennan and others in his circle who may yet lead us down the nuclear abyss—as the last Cold War almost did.
[1] Brennan’s background and role in the drone program is detailed in: Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019). https://www.claritypress.com/product/obamas-unending-wars-fronting-the-foreign-policy-of-the-permanent-warfare-state/
[2] Aaron Maté, “The Brennan Dossier,” November 16, 2019, http://nd.theclassifiedsplus.com/news/aaron-mate-the-brennan-dossier?uid=123838.
[3] John Brennan, “President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash,” The New York Times, August 16, 2018. See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/opinion/john-brennan-trump-russia-collusion-security-clearance.html.
[4] John Brennan, “President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash,” The New York Times, August 16, 2018. See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/opinion/john-brennan-trump-russia-collusion-security-clearance.html.
[5] Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Mueller Testimony Points to New Cold War as a Farce,” Dissident Voice, July 28, 2019, https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/07/mueller-testimony-points-to-new-cold-war-as-a-farce/
[6] “Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence,” VIPS Memo, July 24, 2017, reprinted at Consortium News, https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/
[7] Aaron Maté, “New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social Media Involvement in U.S. Politics,” The Nation Magazine, December 28, 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/russiagate-elections-interference/; Josh Gerstein, “Justice Department Drops Plans for Trial Over Russian Interference in 2016 Election,” Politico, March 16, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/16/russia-election-justice-department-132875
August 10, 2020, 22:30 EST – Article updated with footnotes and minor edits.
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About the Author
About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Isn’t Brennan the jerk who voted for the CPUSA in a Presidential election? Most persons with that type of background wouldn’t even be hired as janitors at the CIA!
I do not know a lot about politics, but whenever I have watched John Brennan and James Comey being interviewed they always sound extremely honest, sincere and intelligent. They may not always do the right thing but I think that their intentions are good.