Intel world

New chief for military spy agency

Rear Adm. Robert Sharp will become the next director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in February, according to a Dec. 26 news release from the organization.

He will take over for Robert Cardillo, who has served as head of the agency since 2014.

Sharp currently leads the Office of Naval Intelligence and serves as director of the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office. On Nov. 29, the White House nominated Sharp for his third star and the Senate approved the nomination Dec. 22. In a Dec. 26 press release, the NGA formally announced the change in leadership. Politico had reported that Cardillo might be retiring and that a uniformed officer might be chosen to take his place.

NGA, which collects, analyzes and distributes geospatial information to the military and intelligence community, has been led by a civilian for eight years.

Intel world

Draining the Swamp, Mr Trump? Try a Toxic Ocean of Privatized Intelligence!

According to a 2010 Washington Post investigative report, “the top-secret world the (US) government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

A sampling of figures cited by a series of Washington Post reports was truly staggering:

•    By 2010, there were already 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence across 10,000 locations in the United States.

•    An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances with nearly 500,000 of them being private security contractors.

•    By 2013, about 5.1 million people — or more than 1.5 percent of the US population — were holding security clearances, spurring an industry in background checks worth $5.9 billion alone.

US national security is now a commodity sold on the borderless bazaar. Even the king troll, replete with bogus credentials, now fancies himself as a player in international affairs and wouldn’t hesitate to confect cockamamie intelligence via the most ludicrous plots. 

Intel world

Death of theGRU Commander

As a career U.S.Army military intelligence officer, and our senior military attaché to Russia from 2012 to 2014, I met with General Sergun and his staff several times for extended periods. I found him soft-spoken, unassuming, complex, erudite and nuanced. And I learned that even as Sergun relentlessly directed global intelligence operations against our interests, he — paradoxically — also viewed constant confrontation with theU.S. and West as not in Russia’s best long-term interest.

Before U.S.–Russia relations collapsed, Sergun facilitated increased contact between our countries’ military intelligence leaders. During 2012-13, I watched as U.S. and Russian intelligence chiefs from strategic regional and global commands discreetly met in cities across Russia: Khabarovsk in the east, Rostov in the south, and also Sochi, just before the 2014 Winter Olympics. These meetings — which were often the first face-to-face interactions between these senior U.S. and Russian MI officers — always entailed straightforward, cordially hardnosed discussions that intelligence officers understood from a world of black and gray, and rarely white, as traditional adversaries, often foes. Clearly, both sides entered cautiously, but increasingly saw substantive talks emerge on carefully cleared topics.