On July 19, 2018, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Will Hurd, the sitting Republican Congressman representing the 23rd District of Texas.
It was entitled "Trump Is Being Manipulated by Putin. What Should We Do?"
Mr. Hurd, identified as a "former C.I.A. officer", began his op-ed thusly:
"Over the course of my career as an undercover officer in the C.I.A., I saw Russian intelligence manipulate many people. I never thought I would see the day when an American president would be one of them.
The president's failure to defend the United States intelligence community's unanimous conclusions of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and condemn Russian covert counterinfluence campaigns and his standing idle on the world stage while a Russian dictator spouted lies confused manybut should concern all Americans.
By playing into Vladimir Putin's hands, the leader of the free world actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign that legitimized Russian denial and weakened the credibility of the United States to both our friends and foes abroad."
Read down ten paragraphs into a related article in US Today--with the more inflammatory title "GOP Rep. Will Hurd, an ex-C.I.A. agent, blasts Trump for being 'manipulated by Russia"--and you'll find the backstory to Hurd's op-ed:
"The congressman is in a highly competitive race for re-election in his swing district, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso. He faces Democratic candidate Gina Ortiz Jones, a former Air Force intelligence officer."
His on-line bio states that "Hurd worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for nine years from 2000 to 2009, stationed primarily in Washington, D.C. including a tour of duty as an operations officer in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India."
So, Congressman Hurd's C.I.A. "career" of 8-9 years was served "primarily" in D.C., a town crawling with spies.
Hurd was born in 1977, so he can be forgiven for not knowing either the history of the USSR's/Russia's efforts to "manipulate" American opinion, nor the serial failures of the U.S. "intelligence community"--particularly the C.I.A.--to anticipate major geo-political world events.
Here's a short list of just some of those failures:
April 1961, the Bay of Pigs fiasco;
January, 1968, the Tet Offensive;
October 1973, the Yom Kippur War;
1979, the Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini;
December 1979, the USSR's invasion into Afghanistan;
December 1991, the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR;
May 1998, India's unexpected underground nuclear blasts.
"The controversy surrounding the American pre-war intelligence assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs dominates the airwaves and print media. Behind-the-scenes investigations spawned by the Iraq performance as well as the tragedies of September 11, 2001 offer a fleeting window of opportunity to chart and implement much-needed reforms of a beleaguered intelligence community."
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And let's not forget the Boston Marathon Bombing, April 15, 2013. Warnings from Russia were ignored by the "intelligence community."
Regarding Russia's effort to "manipulate" the U.S., a decade before Congressman Hurd was born, a young U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Agent was sitting at the Saturday duty desk in a regional branch of a Continental U.S. Military Intelligence Group at a major U.S. Army base when a Special Forces Sergeant, born in a Russian satellite country, walked in to report he'd been approached by a male traveling with a girl's ice-skating troupe from the sergeant's home country. The man asked if he was interested in spying against the U.S.
The Sergeant had been targeted by the Soviet Bloc "scalp hunter" when he chatted-up some of the girls in their native language after their skating performance.
Russian efforts to "manipulate" by infiltration go back much further than a decade before Congressman Hurd's birth.
The U.S. "intelligence community" is not now, nor never has it ever been, infallible or unassailable. Its history of analysis and prognostication is‚...spotty.
Earlier Presidents took intel briefings at face value and suffered subsequent consequences.
Take, for example, the long-running Phoenix Program (AKA: Phụng Hoàng)
It was, from start to finish, a C.I.A. operation.
And a complete and hideous failure.
It's unusual for a sitting Republican member of Congress to accuse a Republican President of the United States of being "manipulated" by the Russians. Perhaps it's Hurd's tight race for re-election that provoked his anti-Trump "blast."
Trump's comments about balancing Putin's assertion of no Russian interference in the 2016 election against what the "intelligence community" was telling him, has aggravated others in politics, mostly Democrats though, as well as many in the media.
But it shouldn't.
Lee Cary——Bio and Archives
Since November 2007, Lee Cary has written hundreds of articles for several websites including the American Thinker, and Breitbart’s Big Journalism and Big Government (as “Archy Cary”). and the Canada Free Press. Cary’s work was quoted on national television (Sean Hannity) and on nationally syndicated radio (Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin). His articles have posted on the aggregate sites Drudge Report, Whatfinger, Lucianne, Free Republic, and Real Clear Politics. He holds a Doctorate in Theology from Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL, is a veteran of the US Army Military Intelligence in Vietnam assigned to the [strong]Phoenix Program[/strong]. He lives in Texas.
On July 19, 2018, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Will Hurd, the sitting Republican Congressman representing the 23rd District of Texas.
It was entitled "Trump Is Being Manipulated by Putin. What Should We Do?"
