This beats a Tom Clancy spy thriller, you can’t make up spooky stuff like this: America’s “in the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda” and our “CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent,” writes Eamon Javers in a must-read special report in Politico, CIA moonlights in corporate world. Doesn’t the CIA have enough to do in protecting America? Do they really have lots of extra time on their hands? If derivatives are the “weapons of financial mass destruction,” as Warren Buffett calls them, this policy is as dumb and as dangerous as selling nuclear weapons to terrorists. Why the hell is CIA endangering America’s security?
But even worse for investors, Javers says the CIA is “in one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in ‘deception detection,’ the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.” Yes, and how to deceive and manipulate Main Street America’s 95 million investors.
The Politico piece comes from Javers’ new book, ‘Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.’ Javers says this “never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to connect the ‘dots,’ this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253 … Sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries.
The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll. A government official familiar with the policy insists it doesn’t impede the CIA’s work on critical national security investigations. This official said CIA officers who want to participate in it must first submit a detailed explanation of the type of work involved and get permission from higher-ups within the agency.” Once again, money and individual greed win out.
Warning: Under the cover of secrecy, the lure of huge salaries, and likely a few discrete campaign donations, we ‘re seeing one more sneaky trick hedge funds, Wall Street and the “Happy Conspiracy” octopus are using to take control of America’s government.