Spy v. Spy

"My moral compass is strong." ~Gina Haspel

The connection between top ranking government employees and the roles they played in President Trump’s first administration are really quite interesting. People who should have long been retired or removed from government kept coming back into the picture. Some had left government for the private sector, where they were making real money, only to come back to government service under President Trump. With all of the supposed stories of in-fighting and animosity, it didn’t make sense on the surface. Yet, there they were.

There were connections between so many people, it was difficult for me to track. I had this vision of linking them all on a giant chalkboard like something from the movie A Beautiful Mind.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. There isn’t a chalkboard big enough to fit all of the connections I found. Since the internet isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, there were gaps and roadblocks down every path I traveled. Someday, I hope to have the time and the resources to really dig into all of the players. For now, I’ll have to settle with an overview while I focus on the topic of this paper.

For some reason, everything keeps coming back to 9/11 for me. A lot of people were driven to researching that conspiracy since the moment it happened. That wasn’t me. It was a horrible event in our history, and although I’ve had my suspicions, it wasn’t on my list of topics to dig into. Lately though, it keeps coming into focus and it feels like everything is somehow connected to that event.

The connections don’t start or end solely with 9/11. They are also connected to people who were involved in investigations into the Clintons. Since terrorist attacks escalated during the Clinton Administration, I can’t help but think that that too may be a connection.

The Key Players

There are many more connections that what I have listed below, but these were the most obvious:

• William Barr worked for the CIA from 1971 to 1977, as well as the DOJ, before serving as Attorney General to President George H.W. Bush. After spending several years in the private sector, where he reportedly made millions of dollars, he returned to public life as Attorney General to President Trump. I wonder why.

• Robert Mueller served as FBI Director under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. During that time, I suspect he was aware of many of the scandals surrounding the Clintons. Mueller retired from public service in 2013, only to return after being chosen by Rod Rosenstein to serve as Special Counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

• Rudy Guiliani worked at the Southern District of New York (SDNY) prior to becoming Mayor of New York, which was his role during the September 11th terror attacks. After serving as an advisor during his 2016 campaign, Rudy Guiliani joined President Trump’s legal team.

• James Comey was hired by Rudy Guiliani at the SDNY. Comey worked at the DOJ until 2005, when he left government service to work for the private sector. Following Robert Mueller’s retirement, he returned to serve as FBI Director under Presidents Obama and Trump. Comey worked on the investigations of the Clinton Whitewater scandal, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, and Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal (and probably more).

• Christopher Wray worked at the DOJ under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He left the public sector in 2005 for employment at King & Spalding but returned to serve as FBI Director under President Trump.

• Rod Rosenstein was employed at the DOJ under President George W. Bush and worked in the Independent Counsel’s Office investigating the Clinton Whitewater scandal. Rosenstein became Attorney General under President Trump, and after leaving that position, went to work at King & Spalding.

• Mike Pompeo was a representative from Kansas who co-wrote the report on the Benghazi hearings. He served as CIA Director and Secretary of State under President Trump. Imagine what he learned during his time at the CIA and State Department.

• Gina Haspel was employed by the CIA since 1985. After Mike Pompeo became Secretary of State, she was appointed Director of the CIA. After Haspel resigned, she went to work as an advisor at King & Spalding.

The connections keep going from here. You know that trendy phrase, “There’s no “there” there?” As it relates to the connections between the key players, there is absolutely a “there” there.

The previous roles of the key players and their recent connection to President Trump lead me to believe that we’ve been watching a methodical take-down of the CIA by the FBI.

9/11 – The CIA – The FBI

When I started looking into the connections between the key players in the Trump Administration and their connections with the terrorist attacks on September 11th, as well as their connection to the Clintons, it turned into a huge web of coincidence. Knowing that we’re limited by what we can find online, I‘m certain there are much deeper connections that are being hidden from us. The number of people who were involved in Clinton-era investigations who later became prominent in the Trump Administration is interesting. The scandals, the increase in terrorism during the Clinton years, and the tension between the CIA and FBI all seem to intersect.

While writing my three papers on Guantanamo Bay, I read dozens of articles. Am I the only person whose brain has a difficult time processing Arabic or middle eastern names? Any time there was a reference in those articles to the names of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay, my mind just passed over them. They weren’t relevant in terms of the story, which were the changes and improvements to the Navy base and prison. However, when I wrote Guantanamo Bay, I started to pay attention to some of the names of the men who were held there. They’ve been held for decades and their trials have been continuously postponed for various reasons. When Lloyd Austin revoked a previously negotiated plea deal near the end of Biden’s term, I suddenly wanted to understand who these men were, why they were there, and why their trials keep getting delayed. Although there are currently 15 terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, the one name most important to my story was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (al-Nashiri).

Is there more to the story of why al-Nashiri, and others, have been held so long without resolution? Do they know something important? Can they provide information about what happened on 9/11, the USS Cole bombing, and other terrorist attacks? Do they know who or what is behind Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations? Is it possible that, like Lee Harvey Oswald, these men are patsies in a bigger conspiracy? Are they being saved for something bigger? Or have I read too many spy novels?

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

al-Nashiri was captured in November 2002 and accused of organizing the bombing of the USS Cole which took place on October 12, 2000, in which 17 soldiers were killed. His trial date has been set for October 6, 2025 – almost 25 years after the attack. The military judge in the USS Cole case threw out confessions al-Nashiri made after years of imprisonment by the CIA, saying that the confessions were the result of the torture he was subjected to. The torture allegedly took place while Gina Haspel was Station Chief at a secret CIA black site.

The confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of conspiring in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were also considered tainted due to the enhanced interrogation tactics performed by CIA interrogators.

At her confirmation hearing, when asked about the destruction of the CIA tapes which contained evidence of torture, Haspel said that the tapes were only of one detainee, al-Nashiri. However, the CIA’s response to the ACLU litigation included a declaration that 92 tapes were destroyed and they depicted abuse of two detainees. Haspel told the committee that she would speak more on that in a confidential setting. Was she mistaken about one detainee or is there something more to it?

Gina Haspel

Gina Haspel joined the CIA in 1985 and moved up through the ranks throughout her career. In 2002, she ran a secret detention site in Thailand and was Chief of Staff to the Director of the National Clandestine Service. Although her exact role is unclear, it’s reported that she bears some responsibility for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) that occurred during her watch.

As I was reading media stories about Gina Haspel, I came across the story of the destruction of the CIA torture tapes. In 2003, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act and litigation was underway seeking to make information about the torture program public. While that litigation was pending, all 92 videotapes were destroyed. Despite previous media stories, Haspel said that she was not present during the interrogation of the prisoners. It was reported that one of the detainees on the destroyed videotapes was al-Nashiri. Since I remembered his name as one of the Guantanamo Bay detainees whose trial keeps getting delayed, I started to pay attention.

CIA Tape Destruction

At her confirmation hearing as CIA Director, Gina Haspel was questioned about her involvement in the destruction of the tapes. Although there was speculation that Haspel was present during the interrogations and she appeared on the videotapes, which is why she ordered them to be destroyed, she claimed that she wasn’t there and she wasn’t on the tapes. In regard to the destruction of the tapes, Haspel said she was told that there was no legal requirement to keep them since a written account existed of their contents.

At the end of 2007, the CIA Office of Inspector General and the DOJ announced an investigation into the destruction of the videotapes. Federal prosecutor John Durham began a criminal investigation of the destruction of the tapes. This is the same John Durham who was appointed Special Counsel to investigate the Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. (There’s another connection.) Haspel was brought back from London, where she was station chief, and questioned at length. Following the investigation, it was announced that CIA officials would not face criminal charges for the destruction of the videotapes since those involved had acted on the advice of lawyers that what they were doing was legal. And because, as we’ve seen, no one in government is ever prosecuted for anything.

In a 2011 memo, the Deputy Director of the CIA exonerated Haspel saying it was not her decision to destroy the tapes, but instead was the decision of the Director of National Clandestine Services, Jose Rodriguez. Haspel partnered with Rodriguez in supporting the destruction of the videotapes, but Rodriguez was the person who gave the order to destroy them.

The CIA tape destruction was a big deal. Staff members on the 9/11 Commission were surprised that they weren’t told that interrogation tapes existed until 2005, since the commission had concluded its investigation in 2004. Apparently, members of the 9/11 Commission were livid that they had not been told about the existence of the tapes.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. “No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also wasn’t aware that the tapes existed and didn’t know that they had been destroyed.

In December 2013, the existence of a secret internal review was revealed. This review was conducted by the CIA and aligned with the Senate's report, but it conflicted with the CIA's official response. In other words, the secret review came to the same conclusion as the Senate review, but the CIA wasn’t going to publicly admit that. The following January, CIA officials claimed that staff of the Intelligence Committee had accessed the CIA’s server and removed information without authorization. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, confirmed that a portion of the secret internal CIA review had been copied and transferred to a safe in the Senate's Office Building. Feinstein said this was necessary to protect the documents from the CIA, since they had already destroyed the torture videos. In addition, the CIA removed documents from the Committee’s computer network without authorization. Feinstein said that the CIA initially denied removing the files, then blamed IT contractors, and finally falsely claimed that the White House had requested their removal.

During a 2014 speech, Feinstein said that the CIA unlawfully searched the Committee's computers trying to determine how they had obtained the secret review documents. John Brennan denied that the CIA searched the Senate computers, stating, "As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn't do that. I mean that's just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do... When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong." Instead, he was wrong.

The CIA's Inspector General confirmed that the CIA had improperly searched the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer network, read emails, and sent a criminal referral to the DOJ based on false information. A DOJ spokesman announced that they would not pursue charges in the hacking incident (no surprise there). An internal review panel appointed by John Brennan decided that the searches were lawful because, after all, they were done at the behest of John Brennan.

Brace yourself for this next part because it’s either an example of government incompetence or blatant corruption. In 2016, the CIA's Inspector General's office informed Congress that it had inadvertently deleted its only copy of the Senate report on enhanced interrogation techniques, both in electronic and hard copy forms. Only a limited number of copies of the full report were made, and there was concern that the CIA was attempting to cover up or erase the findings in the report. Incompetent or corrupt?

The acting Inspector General reportedly uploaded the report to the CIA's computer network, followed protocol and destroyed the hard copy. Another staff member apparently misinterpreted instructions from the Justice Department not to open the file and deleted it from the server. Fortunately, not all copies were destroyed and a District Court Judge ordered the preservation of the full classified report, in case it was needed during the prosecution or appeal of suspects during their Guantanamo Military Commissions. President Obama announced that he would add the report to his presidential archive which would be available for declassification after 12 years.

Apparently, the report contains an entire chapter on al-Nashiri’s treatment while in CIA custody from 2002 to 2006.

The 2019 movie The Report is available on Amazon Prime and provides a lot of background on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and the investigation that took place after its discovery.

Were the Torture Tapes Really Destroyed?

In 2005, the CIA learned that the Washington Post was going to publish a story of torture and the CIA black sites. It was decided at that time that the torture tapes should be destroyed. Haspel was told by Counterterrorism Center lawyers that destroying the tapes would be legal so she drafted the approval to destroy the tapes. “This was not done on Gina Haspel’s authority,” John Bennett, Deputy Director of the NCS told a reporter in 2017. “And I know because I was there.”

In 2013, The Daily Beast reported that retired CIA Analyst Gail Helt said a colleague told her that some of the tapes still exist. The colleague reportedly archived the surviving tapes and sent them to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for storage.

A CIA spokesman defended Haspel’s role in the tapes’ destruction. “With respect to the videotapes, Haspel has been consistent and clear about her role. She did not appear in the videotapes, nor did she make the decision to destroy them.”

It’s important to note that Gail Helt does not have first-hand knowledge that any of the tapes survived. This report is from The Daily Beast and contains he said/she said information so discretion is important. BUT, can you imagine if those tapes still exist and are in the custody of the Patriots?

Q

My papers are not centered around Q posts, although I absolutely believe in them. They were much easier to process when they arrived a few at a time so it’s easy to understand why newly awakened people don’t find it important to read the almost 5,000 drops. Most of the drops were over my head, so I waited for someone else to put together a decode to help me better understand them. Not that the decodes were guaranteed to be accurate, but many people understood them more than I did.

The tricky thing about Q posts is that no one knows what is true and what isn’t. There are a lot of theories and many of them are very good, but we can’t be completely certain that any of them are true. Most of the decodes are just someone’s interpretation. The media did a great job of ostracizing Q followers, so a lot of people avoided them. If you followed them before the media backlash, you’re probably more open to believing in them. Considering the way censorship was (and is), if the drops weren’t legitimate or posed a threat, we wouldn’t still be able to access them online.

Many times, when I write a paper, I check the Q posts to see if I can find anything relatable. While I was researching this paper, I came across an article that led me to the Q posts. When I looked for verification, all I could say was…WOW.

Thing Big

In 2014, the New York Times published Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations which reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a sweeping indictment of the CIA’s detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. Senator Feinstein announced that the CIA had misled the White House and Congress about information it gathered through interrogations and failed to provide oversight of its secret prisons.

The Senate report is more than 6,000 pages long, but only a 524-page executive summary was declassified. It was described as a portrait of a spy agency that was unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators. Among other things, the report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the CIA to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.

It was the last paragraph of that article that caught my attention:

Cables from CIA headquarters to field offices said that overseas officers should put together “wish lists” speculating about what foreign governments might want in exchange for bringing CIA prisoners onto their soil.

As one 2003 cable put it, “Think big.”

If you’re a Q follower, I’m willing to bet that like me, you also sat up straight when you read “Think big.”

Searching Qalerts for the post that includes “Think big,” brought me to post 520 dated January 13, 2018.

It’s long, and I’m not going to pretend to know what it means – no one does – but there was one line that stood out among all the others. I did an amateur decode and wasn’t disappointed by the result.

This is the line in the Q Post that caught my attention:

I have no idea what that means, but anything GITMO gets my attention. Since I had been reading so much about Gina Haspel, on a whim I Googled “Haspel + z9-A,” and a New York Times article appeared titled Gina Haspel Observed Waterboarding at CIA Black Site, Psychologist Testifies. Reading through the article I came across the following:

James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected Mr. Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Ms. Haspel.

As Q asks many times, “Do you believe in coincidences?” Was Q pointing to Gina Haspel in this drop?

I don’t think anyone really knows what happened to Gina Haspel. There were rumors in December 2020, that she was injured or killed during an exercise in Germany. Who knows if that’s true or not. The official story is that she retired – via Tweet – in January 2021 after 36 years of service. She then became an advisor at King & Spalding.

Is there a connection between the men still detained at Guantanamo Bay and information regarding the CIA, 9/11, or other terrorist activities? Do copies of the “enhanced interrogation” tapes still exist? Do they contain valuable information? Is the line “WHO IS TALKING” from Drop 520 in reference to Gina Haspel? Is Gina Haspel the Spy to end all Spies? While we’ve been distracted with Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and news of the FBI, what’s been happening with the CIA?

The following is from a 2014 New York Times article:

If this movie that we’re living in ever ends, will it end with the dismantling of the CIA? Would that be such a bad thing?