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Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn has spent 33 years in the intel business and was appointed to two key positions by President Obama; deputy director of national intelligence and the director of the defense intelligence agency. He is currently being considered as a running mate for Donald Trump. But in the four years that Flynn served in the Obama administration, he was never summoned to a meeting with the president nor ever asked for his views on any issue.

Four hours after three suicide bombers killed at least 41 people and wounded hundreds more at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, CIA Director John Brennan said the attacks bore the grim hallmarks of ISIS and warned that the fanatically violent Islamic terrorist group wants to conduct similar large-scale attacks in the United States. “I am worried from the standpoint of an intelligence professional who looks at the capabilities of Daesh … and their determination to kill as many as people as possible and to carry out attacks abroad,” Brennan said in an exclusive interview at CIA headquarters with Yahoo News. Brennan credited...

Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials. Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shooting in November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack. The Jordanian officers who were part of the scheme reaped a windfall from the weapons sales. The training program, which in 2013 began directly arming the...

CIA Director John Brennan said Sunday that releasing the 28 classified pages from the 9/11 Commission report would be a mistake because they contain inaccurate, un-vetted information that could be used to tie Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

CIA Director John Brennan told NBC News in an exclusive interview that his agency will not engage in harsh "enhanced interrogation" practices, including waterboarding, which critics call torture — even if ordered to by a future president. "I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure," Brennan said. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has said that if elected president, he'd authorize the use of waterboarding which was banned in 2009. Trump said the technique, considered torture under international law, and other methods he characterized as "a...

The CIA Accidentally Left 'Explosive Training Material' on a School Bus By Elizabeth McLaughlin Apr 1, 2016, 9:24 AM ET The Central Intelligence Agency accidentally left stable “explosive training material” in a school bus last week after concluding a routine training exercise. The Loudoun County, Virginia, school bus unknowingly took elementary and high school students to and from school on Monday and Tuesday with the material under the hood of the bus. On Wednesday, the CIA was notified that the explosive training material, while inert, was found in the bus during a maintenance check. On Thursday the CIA said in...

The Central Intelligence Agency three-year "Diversity and Inclusion Strategy" includes a dedicated program to recruit transgender individuals and agency-wide "unconscious bias" training. The plan, released by the CIA's Diversity and Inclusion Office last week, lays out several goals for "weaving diversity and inclusion throughout the talent cycle." One agency goal is "Becoming an Employer of Choice," and includes "dedicated programs" to recruit every demographic imaginable. "Cultivating an inclusive culture that encourages collaboration, flexibility, and fairness enables all officers to contribute to their full potential," the CIA plan stated. "When employees feel included, have a voice, and are given opportunities to...

A spokesman for the CIA is criticizing the Michael Bay movie "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi" as a "distortion of the events and people who served in Benghazi that night." The spokesman, Ryan Trapani, was quoted in an exclusive Washington Post story, which also features an interview with the CIA chief in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed in a siege of the diplomatic compound and attack on the CIA annex. "No one will mistake this movie for a documentary," Tripani told the Post. "It's a distortion of the events...

Taking a noticeably darker tone than President Obama, CIA Director John O. Brennan warned Monday that the Paris terrorist attacks were not "a one-off event" and that intelligence officials anticipate the Islamic State has other sophisticated plots "in the pipeline." While Mr. Brennan said authorities are still trying to confirm the extent to which the Islamic State's Syria- and Iraq-based leadership played a role in Friday's deadly coordinated attacks, his remarks on the extremist group as a whole were notably tougher in tone and more alarmist than almost simultaneous comments President Obama was making at an international summit he was...

WASHINGTON — David Petraeus has been reinstated as CIA Director and given $2.2 million in backpay following new legislation that decriminalizes the leak of top secret information, as long as it is done by people who have deep political connections or fame. Congress unanimously passed legislation on Friday that takes into account a convicted person’s sociopolitical rank before passing sentence on a convicted criminal, particularly when it comes to matters of national security. In this controversial bill, lawmakers standardized the long-standing practice of allowing high-ranking political and military figures to break the law without any fear of the consequences, which...

The secretive head of the agency’s National Clandestine Service is retiring amid reports of infighting over a reorganization of the intelligence service. The director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the storied home of the agency’s most secretive intelligence operations, has announced that he plans to retire, The Daily Beast has learned. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed that the director announced his retirement “after a long and distinguished career at CIA. We thank him for this profound and lasting contributions to both CIA and to our nation’s security.”

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General. The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before ordering CIA employees to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in...

After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, top CIA officials secretly told lawmakers that information gleaned from brutal interrogations played a key role in what was one of the spy agency's greatest successes. Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta repeated that assertion in public, and it found its way into a critically acclaimed movie about the operation, "Zero Dark Thirty," which depicts a detainee offering up the identity of bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, after being tortured at a secret CIA interrogation site. As it turned out, bin Laden was living in al-Kuwaiti's walled family compound,...

Obama Throws America's Spies Under The Bus MICHAEL B KELLEY AND BRETT LOGIURATO SEP. 29, 2014 One Intelligence Official Says Obama's "BSing." In a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday night, President Barack Obama placed blame squarely at the foot of the US intelligence community for the rise of the Islamic State, the extremist group also known as ISIS. Citing comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Obama said the intelligence community had "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," referring to the rise of ISIS militants in the country's northeast. But American spies, experts, and journalists who have been...

Jesse Watters pointed out today on The Five that during the Valerie Plame affair back in 2005 Senator Barack Obama called the leak a crime. He also called for an immediate investigation. “Remember what Obama as senator said about Valerie Plame? We have it right here. He called for an immediate Congressional investigation. He called it a possible “criminal act.” He said it jeopardized the safety of the networks of our intelligence agencies.” Plame was a CIA desk jockey at the time. Last weekend the Team O leaked the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan.

According to the AP, a CIA agent’s name was leaked by the White House . The AP calls it an “embarrassing flub” even though it was a crime when an aide in the Bush administration leaked the name of part-time agent Valerie Plame. What’s given little attention in the story is the fact that the Washington Post reporter who wrote the story sent his copy to the White House to be checked for “accuracy.” ... First of all, any reporter worth his salt would not depend on the subject he’s reporting on to verify accuracy. That’s just crazy. He’d make...

**SNIP** Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA operative outed by the W. Bush administration, also chimed in. “Astonishing: White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan,” she tweeted in a sardonic message on Monday. The name of the CIA’s chief of station in Kabul, the agency’s top spy in Afghanistan, was listed among the 15 officials briefing Obama upon his arrival at Bagram Air Base. The White House only caught the error when Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson alerted the press office, after Obama’s schedule was included in an email that was circulated to as many as 6,000 members of the media.

The White House press office canceled the daily briefing with reporters Tuesday, dodging tough questions after the press office mistakenly revealed the identity of the top CIA official in Afghanistan. The official was named in a list of participants of a meeting with President Obama during his brief trip to Afghanistan. After journalists at the Washington Post questioned the White House decision, the press office scrambled to update the list of participants sent to the press pool. On Tuesday afternoon, the White House surprised reporters by canceling the White House press briefing and instead scheduling a press call on President...

The White House has launched an internal probe after its press office inadvertently outed the top CIA official in Afghanistan -- a national security blunder that could put that individual at risk. A spokeswoman with the National Security Council confirmed to Fox News that the White House chief of staff asked White House Counsel Neil Eggleston to “look into what happened” and make recommendations on “how the administration can improve processes and make sure something like this does not happen again.” The brief statement from the National Security Council was the first on-the-record comment made by the administration since the

Anybody can make a mistake, and that certainly appears to be what led to the Obama White House’s exposure of the top CIA official in Afghanistan this weekend. Unfortunately, as Roger Kimball details , this is not an isolated incident. In year six of the Obama administration, it speaks volumes about not just incompetence but immaturity and the skewed priorities that come with it. Exactly because anyone can make a mistake, large organizations — presidential administrations included — build layers of vetting into the disclosure of information to the public. In this instance, because the commander-in-chief made a surprise visit...