Although President Trump replaced its top leaders, this is by no means sufficient to “drain the swamp” in the Intelligence Community ranks, corrupted by bad leadership for many years. Contrary to the common view that Intelligence Community political bias existed only at the top among “the generals”, over the years too many “foot soldiers” have become politically biased too, endangering our nation with Left-leaning non-objective analysis.

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The Intelligence Community “Corporate View”

Intelligence Community leaders tend to surround themselves with people who share their worldview and political biases, who in turn do likewise, creating an ideological “domino effect” that reaches down to the analytical ranks.

Intelligence Community analysts are not free to publish their own unvarnished personal views—even if they are the best experts. Their work is subject to a process of “coordination” with colleagues, immediate superiors, and ultimately Intelligence Community leaders who can suppress any product that does not reflect the “corporate view.”

Analysts who dissent from the “corporate view” are under enormous pressure toconform, or be sent to the equivalent of Siberia.

Thus, during at least the 8 years of the Obama Administration, Intelligence Community analysts have been under pressure to conform to Obama’s worldview, and have been peopled for 8 years with new hires conforming to those views.

Since most Intelligence Community analysts are hired from universities, given the hard-Left bias prevalent in universities, an increasingly far-Left tilt seems inevitable among analysts, thereby politicizing intelligence leftward from “the bottom-up” as well as from “the top-down.”

Perilously—for the survival of the United States depends on sound intelligence—the Intelligence Community’s increasingly leftward bias, sharply accelerated under President Obama, has been ongoing for at least 27 years. 

The Clinton Administration—Leftward Ho!

President Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 brought to power an administration peopled with far-left and liberal activists who wanted, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, to cut defense and intelligence budgets and use this “peace dividend” to expand social programs.

I am an eyewitness to the leftward politicization of intelligence during the Clinton years.

For example, in 1993, I was a CIA analyst working on Russian nuclear weapons and strategy. A high-ranking CIA official visited our branch seeking “pro forma” approval from analysts for the Clinton Administration’s plans to make deep cuts in resources dedicated to the Russian nuclear threat.

My branch and division chiefs told me to raise no objections during the meeting.

However, since the high official supposedly was sincerely seeking our opinion about deep cuts, I spoke up, the only analyst to object. I warned that cutting intelligence against the Russian nuclear threat—the only nation in the world that could destroy the United States in 30 minutes—while that nation was undergoing revolutionary changes, was imprudent.

Afterwards, the high-ranking CIA official wanted to punish me for “speaking truth to power” by having me re-trained as an economist and sent to Indonesia to count rubber plants. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and I did not have to move my family to Jakarta.

The Bush Administration—Missed Opportunity for Centrism

President George W. Bush inherited the Clinton Administration’s Intelligence Community and post-9/11 made significant organizational changes, like creating a Director of National Intelligence. Centralizing intelligence under a DNI potentially reduces opportunity for diverse “corporate views” among agencies and increases opportunities for imposing politically biased uniformity.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration did little to make far more important cultural changes—even though the 9/11 Commission Intelligence Reform Act recommended such changes to produce better, more intellectually balanced, intelligence products.

President Bush imprudently retained many Clinton Administration intelligence leaders, including at CIA, missing an opportunity to stop the Intelligence Community’s political drift leftward, and move it toward the political center.

The Obama Administration and Now

President Obama’s Intelligence Community moved so far Left, the liberal Clinton Intelligence Community, including the high official who wanted me exiled to Jakarta, looked by comparison ultra-conservative.

A recent article in International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence by John Gentry, former CIA analyst, warns, with masterful understatement:

“A considerable body of evidence, much of it fragmentary, indicates that many CIA people have left-leaning political preferences, but less evidence shows that political bias influences CIA analyses…But in 2016 observers of U.S. intelligence began to wonder if the CIA’s once firm prohibition on partisan politics had changed, and to ponder whether a new kind of politicization had arisen: namely, institutionallyembedded, partisan bias.”

In fact, the Intelligence Community has been corrupted into a propaganda machine for the Democrat Party, part of “the resistance” to President Trump’s policies, constituting an ongoing dangerous intelligence failure. For example, according to President Trump’s own Intelligence Community, Obama was right about everything:

--Manmade climate change is an existential threat, even though there is no scientific consensus “anthropogenic climate change” is real.

--"The [Intelligence Community] currently has no specific, credible information indicating there is an imminent threat to critical infrastructure from an EMP attack”, according to DHS official Brian Harrell, contrary to overt threats from North Korea, Congressional EMP Commission Reports, and the White House EMP Executive Order.

--The Intelligence Community continues clinging to deeply erroneous EMP threatassessments, like the classified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee EMP Report, despite their exposure as incorrect.

--The Intelligence Community parroted the Obama Administration’s view North Korea was a decade away from H-bombs, ICBMs, and has few nuclear weapons, until all proved false in 2017: the North Korean nuclear threat is here and now, not a decade away.

--The Intelligence Community contends Iran is complying with Obama’s nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), even though Israel’s capture of Iran’s nuclear archives and other evidence indicates Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program: and may already have nuclear-armed missiles.

--The Intelligence Community appears blind to the New Cold War and the combined threat from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran working together against the U.S.

--The Intelligence Community appears to have boundless faith in arms control and treaties with Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran as the answer to everything, rarely warning about their past and present cheating.

Whole House Cleaning Needed

President Trump’s intelligence leaders, DNI Dan Coates and acting CIA Director Gina Haspel, appear to be part of the problem, endorsing the above and other dangerous nonsense. They have not even recalled or questioned the Obama Administration’s unclassified National Intelligence Estimate, falsely implying President Trump owes his election victory to Russia!

Haspel, who served long and honorably in CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service, may not be the best person to correct analytical malfeasance in CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. Haspel’s plan to strengthen CIA by hiring more spies will not fix analytical products corrupted by political bias.

Is spy gal Haspel up to the job of correcting bad work by intelligence analysts on EMP, nuclear weapons, arms control and other technically complex subjects? She does not even appear capable of correcting simple oversights by her speech writer.

Speaking recently at Auburn University, Haspel said: “Our Russia and Iran investment has been strengthened after years of falling behind our justifiably heavy emphasis on counterterrorism in the wake of 9/11.” But what about China and North Korea, regarded by many as greater threats than Russia and Iran?

“Groups like ISIS and al Qaeda remain squarely in our sights,” said Haspel. But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ansar Allah are bigger, newer, terrorist threats than ISIS and al Qaeda, that are crippled.

One reporter writes of Haspel, “Internally, CIA personnel have welcomed having one of their own leading the agency.” No doubt.

Mr. President, your Intelligence Community, from top to bottom, needs to be purged.

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry served as Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission (2001-2017), on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee (1995-2001), and in the CIA (1985-1995). Dr. Pry is author of many books and articles on national security, including "Blackout Wars" and "POSEIDON: Russia’s New Doomsday Machine".

EMP Disinformation: Losing the Next War?

Klaus Fuchs—Nuclear Master Spy

Klaus Fuchs, a Cold War era physicist and Soviet spy, did immense damage to the safety and security of the Free World in the 1940s and 1950s by penetrating the U.S. and British nuclear weapon programs, giving Stalin A-bomb and H-bomb secrets.

But perhaps the greatest damage inflicted by Soviet spy Fuchs on the West was his misleading analysis about certain nuclear weapon effects that may still be undermining U.S. and British nuclear military planning—even until today.

“Active measures” in the parlance of Russian espionage are designed to mislead policymakers,  the public, and military, usually through disinformation, to adopt wrong policies and incorrect military plans, to make the U.S. and the West weaker and more vulnerable.

According to one-time Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers: “That power to influence policy has always been the ultimate purpose of the Communist Party’s infiltration.  It was much more dangerous, and as events have proved, much more difficult to detect, than espionage, which beside it is trivial, though the two go hand in hand.” (“Witness” quoted in Diana West’s “The Red Thread”)

Today, as during the Cold War, Russia’s intelligence services, including the GRU and SVR (successor to the KGB) regard as far more important and effective than merely stealing secrets such “active measures” as disinformation.

Russia and China have powerful incentives to use “active measures” to disinform U.S. policymakers about nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, to convince Washington to leave unprotected or under-protected U.S. critical infrastructures and military forces.  According to the EMP Commission Chairman’s Report:

“Combined-Arms Cyber Warfare, as planned by Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran may use combinations of cyber-, sabotage-, and ultimately nuclear EMP attack to impair the United States quickly and decisively by blacking-out large portions of its electric grid and other critical infrastructures.  Foreign adversaries may also consider nuclear EMP attack as the ultimate cyber ‘denial of service’ weapon, one which can gravely damage the U.S. by striking at its technological Achilles’ heel, without having to engage the U.S. military.”

Moreover: “The synergism of such combined-arms is described in the military doctrines of all these potential adversaries as the greatest Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) in history—one which anticipates rendering obsolete many, if not all, traditional instruments of military power.”

(See also my EMP Commission report “Nuclear EMP Attack Scenarios and Combined-Arms Cyber Warfare”.)

Russian and Chinese intelligence services have successfully penetrated the hardest U.S. targets—the Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, Department of Energy and its national nuclear laboratories—to steal secrets.  Why not also to disinform and undermine U.S. preparedness for EMP attack?

And there is no dearth of young people serving in every department and agency of the U.S. Government, including Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories, who have been radicalized in universities, think global warming is the greatest threat to humanity, are anti-nuclear and anti-Trump, and have their own personal reasons for doing the wrong thing for U.S. national security—not unlike the young Klaus Fuchs himself.       

President Trump’s EMP Executive Order  

Unfortunately, when it comes to perhaps the greatest threat to Western Civilization—electromagnetic pulse (EMP)—Moscow does not appear to need a Klaus Fuchs.  Electric power industry lobbyists and their allies in the Department of Energy are more than glad to disinform Washington and the American people, making false claims EMP is not an existential threat.

On March 26, 2019, President Trump signed his “Executive Order on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses”.  The White House EMP Executive Order gives high priority and puts on a fast track protecting the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures from protracted blackout by a nuclear or natural EMP.

The EMP Executive Order implements recommendations of the Congressional EMP Commission, that has been warning for nearly 20 years, as it did again in 2017:

“A plausible long term nationwide blackout of the electric power grid and grid-dependent critical infrastructure—e.g. communications, public health, transportation, food-and-water supply—could disable most of our critical supply chains, leaving the U.S. in its condition prior to the advent of electric power in the 19^th Century, when the national population was less than 60 million, but today without many of the past skills and assets necessary for our population to survive in those conditions.  The result could be the death of a large fraction of the American people through the effects of starvation, disease, and societal collapse.” (EMP Commission Chairman’s Report)

Scientific consensus about the potentially catastrophic nature of a nuclear or natural EMP is also substantiated in reports by the U.S. Air Force Electromagnetic Defense Task Force, Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and every major study of EMP done by the Department of Defense since 1963. 

EMP Disinformation—Electric Power Research Institute Reports

However, lobbies for the electric utilities, including the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Edison Electric Institute (EEI), have for years been churning out “junk science” studies arguing just the opposite. 

According to them, EMP is not an existential threat, and we can trust the electric utilities to manage even a nuclear EMP attack, without unnecessary regulatory interference or hardening requirements imposed by the U.S. Government. 

Indeed, EPRI’s Mario Rabinowitz used to argue EMP is not even a real phenomenon.  His incorrect views are still misinforming people on the internet.

Most recently, on April 30, 2019, EPRI published “High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse and the Bulk Power System” which is sharply at variance with all major U.S. Government studies, very optimistically and incorrectly concluding: “Because damage to large power transformers is expected to be minimal, recovery times following a HEMP-induced blackout would be expected to be commensurate with historical large-scale blackouts…Research findings do not support the notion of blackouts encompassing the contiguous United States…and lasting for many months to years.”

The EPRI EMP study is being widely heralded by scientifically illiterate reporters as proving, as one article is titled, “The Grid Might Survive an Electromagnetic Pulse Just Fine” (WIRED).

Astonishing anyone could be so gullible. 

The Great Northeast Blackout of 2003 that put over 50 million Americans in the dark, including New York City, was caused by a tree branch damaging less than 0.001% of the Ohio grid.  So after a nuclear EMP attack, millions of times more damaging, everything will be just fine?

EPRI’s “happy face” EMP report shamelessly cooks the books to arrive at its unwarranted conclusions:

--EPRI’s authors are not bona fide EMP experts;

--They grossly underestimate EMP field strengths;

--Grossly overestimate survivability of transformers and other critical equipment;

--Ignore generator vulnerability;

--Pretend only transformer vulnerability causes protracted blackout.

EPRI’s bogus EMP report is obviously intended to derail President Trump’s EMP Executive Order. 

EMP “Useful Idiots” Within The U.S. Government

EPRI and their handful of well-placed allies in the Department of Energy (DOE) and elsewhere in government may be succeeding in undermining White House plans to achieve national EMP preparedness.

For example, on April 29, DOE Assistant Secretary Bruce Walker reportedly “told a crowd at…the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association…that EMP attack ranked behind physical and cyber attacks on the grid on his list of priorities.  Walker said his office worked with EPRI on the report.”

Surprising that Bruce Walker, a member of President Trump’s own administration, would low-ball the EMP threat so close upon the heels of a White House EMP Executive Order assigning the EMP threat high-priority. 

And strange that Walker would boast “his office worked with EPRI on the report”.  The ethical appropriateness and legality of DOE partnering with EPRI, a lobby for electric utilities, on a matter vital to national security is highly irresponsible—especially given EPRI’s foreign connections. 

EPRI’s Principal Technical Leader, Ram Narayanamurthy, in an online 2017 briefing states EPRI membership includes “more than 30 countries” and international members provide “25% of research funding”. 

EPRI’s members include China and Russia. 

Interestingly, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran in their military doctrines and scientific and technical reports do not subscribe to EPRI’s benign view of the EMP threat.  Indeed, among these potential U.S. adversaries, there is not even any dissenting minority view like EPRI, proclaiming the EMP threat is overblown. 

Instead, among these hostile powers, there is a scientific and military consensus about the necessity to defend against and exploit offensively the potentially catastrophic and militarily decisive effects of EMP to defeat the high-tech U.S. and its allies.    

A small number, a half dozen, DOE employees, reviewed the bogus EPRI EMP Report.  None of them are bona fide EMP experts, with deep technical understanding of EMP phenomenology, or long technical experience testing and protecting equipment from EMP effects.

Obama’s Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) EMP Report

However, at least some of the DOE participants in the EPRI report were authors of the erroneous Obama-era 2014 Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) EMP Report.  The Congressional EMP Commission found this report, in the words of EMP Commission Chairman, Dr. William Graham: “The worst EMP threat assessment ever written.”

The JAEIC EMP Report, highly classified perhaps to protect it from critics, has been doing enormous damage to U.S. national security for years.  The EMP Commission wrote a necessarily classified rebuttal of the classified JAEIC EMP Report.

Nonetheless, authors of the JAEIC EMP Report wrote derivative, equally erroneous, classified reports apparently calculated to create the false impression that there is a “scientific consensus” between the Trump and Obama administrations on EMP.  This cabal of a half-dozen people, whose work is not peer reviewed, tried hiding their identities and reports from the EMP Commission—an illegal act (as explained below).

Good science and national security policy do not flourish in the dark.  Those who disagree with the EMP Commission should have come forward and met with us to prove that our threat assessments are wrong, or to learn why they are wrong. 

But our critics did not and still do not have the courage of their convictions.  Instead they went to great lengths to hide their reports and themselves from discovery, waiting for the EMP Commission to expire.    

To limit further damage to U.S. national security, the EMP Commission recommended that the JAEIC EMP Report be recalled by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and corrected.

Unaccountably, DNI Dan Coates has not recalled the erroneous JAEIC EMP Report.  Dan Coates also ignored requests by the EMP Commission to brief him on the real EMP threat. 

2019 “Worldwide Threat Assessment”

Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coates, on January 29, 2019, in his “Worldwide Threat Assessment” to Congress, makes no mention of the EMP threat from Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran.  A bewildering omission, since EMP looms large as an important dimension of  “cyber warfare” and “electronic warfare” and even “information warfare” in the military doctrines and plans of these potentially hostile nations.

DNI Coates’ “Worldwide Threat Assessment” does begin with cyber warfare—but while ignoring EMP seriously underestimates the cyber threat too. 

DNI Coates’ 2019 “Worldwide Threat Assessment” parrots the EPRI and electric utilities view of cyber threats as capable of only “localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure—such as disrupting an electrical distribution network for at least a few hours”. 

DNI Coates’ view of cyber warfare as a minor irritant contrasts markedly with the 2014 testimony of Admiral Michael Rogers, then Chief of U.S. Cyber Command, and the views of many cyber experts today, that China and Russia have the capability to blackout the U.S. national electric grid for months or years by means of cyber warfare.  “It is only a matter of when, not the if, that we are going to see something traumatic,” Rogers testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (November 20, 2014).

In the five years since Cyber Command’s Admiral Rogers warned of a nationwide blackout from Russian or Chinese cyber-attack, have Russia and China become dramatically less competent in cyber warfare?  Have U.S. utilities become dramatically more competent in defending themselves? 

Or has the electric power industry, that has a lobbying budget of $145 million annually, persuaded too many U.S. Government officials to see EMP and cyber threats through rose colored glasses?    

Death of the EMP Commission

At least we still have the EMP Commission to speak truth to power, and to help advance President Trump’s EMP Executive Order, right? 

Wrong.

Congress allowed the legislative mandate of the EMP Commission to expire on September 30, 2017—amidst false allegations of corruption leveled against the Commission by Obama-holdovers in DOD, including one of the lead authors of the erroneous JAEIC EMP Report.

During the first year of the re-established EMP Commission (2016-2017), Obama’s Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense (OASD/NCB) sabotaged the EMP Commission by slow-rolling our funding and security clearances. 

OASD/NCB also illegally hid from the EMP Commission the existence of the erroneous JAEIC EMP Report—which we had to discover on our own, contrary to the law establishing the EMP Commission:

“Cooperation From Government Officials—In carrying out its duties, the Commission should receive the full and timely cooperation of the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and any other United States Government official serving in the Department of Defense or Armed Forces in providing the Commission with analyses, briefings, and other information necessary for the fulfillment of its responsibilities.”  (Floyd D. Spence FY 2001 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 106-398, Title XIV)

Only when President Trump won election in November 2016 did OASD/NCB finally begin releasing our money (not DOD money, funds appropriated by Congress exclusively for the EMP Commission) and providing security clearances.

The EMP Commission held its first official meeting in January 2017—having lost all of 2016 due to OASD/NCB sabotage—and we spent the next six months racing to produce 14 unclassified and classified reports.

My reward as Chief of Staff of the EMP Commission was to be accused by OASD/NCB of working too many hours and over-billing in 2017, and violating the Anti-Deficiency Act by working for free throughout 2016.  The DOD Inspector General launched an investigation that cost me thousands of dollars in legal fees, threatening to drive me into bankruptcy.

My boss, EMP Commission Chairman, Dr. William Graham—an historic figure in his lifetime, having served as President Reagan’s Science Advisor, who also ran NASA and helped discover the EMP phenomenon—defended me thus:

“As Chairman of the statutory EMP Commission from 2001 through 2017, this letter is to exonerate Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, the Commission’s Chief of Staff and Subject Matter Expert, from false accusations and rumors of wrongdoing while serving in those capacities.  Dr. Pry’s service to the EMP Commission under extremely trying circumstances—when the Obama Administration staff within the Department of Defense did everything they could to delay and obstruct the EMP Commission—was indispensable, exemplary, and heroic.”  (From open letter to House Armed Services Committee Chairman, Rep. Mac Thornberry, April 9, 2018)

The DOD Inspector General ignored Chairman Graham’s request for an investigation of those who accused the EMP Commission and myself of corruption falsely.

OASD/NCB published fewer than 100 copies of the 14 unclassified and classified EMP Commission reports, circulating only a handful to select members of Congress (mostly hand-delivered by me)—as if to suppress analyses by the foremost experts in the Free World on the EMP threat. 

No one in Congress or the Department of Defense even wrote a letter of thanks to the 9 EMP Commissioners for their long and excellent service to their country, more or less continuously for 17 years, as unpaid volunteers:

--Dr. William R. Graham, Chairman.

--Dr. John S. Foster Jr. (former Director, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).

--General (USAF ret.) Richard L. Lawson (former Chief of Staff SHAEF, Director Policy & Plans Joint Chiefs of Staff).

--Dr. Robert J. Hermann (former Director, National Reconnaissance Office).

--Dr. Joan Woodard (former Deputy Director, Sandia National Laboratory).

--Dr. Lowell L. Wood Jr. (former Chief Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the most inventive American in history, holding more patents than Thomas Edison).

--Dr. Gordon K. Soper (former Principal Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs).

--Mr. Earl Gjelde (CEO Summit Energy Group International, former Under Secretary Department of the Interior, Counselor to the Secretary of Energy, Special Envoy to China).

--Mr. Henry M. Kluepfel (Senior Cyberspace Security Advisor to President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee).   

The EMP Task Force--Still Fighting

Dr. Graham, at his own expense, maintains a website for all the unclassified EMP Commission Reports for policymakers and the public (www.firstempcommission.org).  I established a small nonprofit, the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, to carry-on the mission of the EMP Commission as best we can, with virtually no resources.

In contrast, not only does the erroneous JAEIC EMP Report continue to misinform and serve as an excuse to undermine national EMP preparedness, but authors of this fallacious report have been allowed write additional erroneous EMP reports during the Trump Administration--also deeply classified as if to protect these bogus EMP threat assessments from critics.

Despite President Trump’s EMP Executive Order—that gives clear direction that the EMP threat deserves high-priority—“EMP naysayers” at DOE and DHS are being allowed to run riot.  They still produce bogus EMP analyses that undermine and defy the White House EMP Executive Order. 

Instead of being fired, these dangerously ill-informed and irresponsible people are well funded with taxpayer dollars, and enjoy job security, comfortably burrowed into Senior Executive Service federal positions.

Why?

Dr. Graham, far wiser than I, counsels, “In Washington, never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by stupidity.”

Perhaps all of the above malfeasance on EMP by EPRI, DOE, DHS, and DOD is explainable by sheer stupidity.

But memories of Klaus Fuchs haunt me, and I wonder.

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, served as Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission (2001-2017), on the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, Director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, and on the staffs of the House Armed Services Committee and the CIA.

Dr. Pry has excellent articles on NewMax!! Click below:

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and served on the staffs of the U.S. congressional EMP Commission, Strategic Posture Commission, House Armed Services Committee, and Central Intelligence Agency.