'The Mission': Revelatory on CIA leadership, less so for privatization and technology
The undercover CIA officer Tomas Rakusan's leadership of covert operations against Russia following the 2016 U.S. presidential election is the major revelation in Tim Weiner's new book.
Nearly two years after legendary national security journalist Seymour Hersh revealed the depravities of CIA and U.S. Army torture at the Abu Ghraib prison 20 miles west of Baghdad, a veritable who’s who of CIA chiefs of station and their deputies flew into Kuwait in early March 2006 to strategize on how to combat an adaptive network of Sunni insurgents flowing from Iraq into neighboring Syria. The world would later know them as ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
A leaked cable from U.S. Embassy Kuwait, attributed to then-Ambassador Richard LeBaron, summarized the counterterrorism meeting in detail and concluded that “the primary motivator for most [terrorists/foreign fighters], as reported by U.S. military intelligence, remains perceived U.S. abuses of and lack of due process for detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.” Published in full as part of the WikiLeaks ‘Cablegate’ disclosures with identifier 06KUWAIT913, its contents were later quoted at length in a May 2016 testimony to a House subcommittee on national security by former U.S. Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora, as part of advocating for the closure of the U.S. military detention facility located within its Guantánamo Bay naval station in Cuba.
(‘Gitmo,’ as the military detention facility name is often shortened, remains open to this day, with 15 of its total 780 detainees remaining as of May. The second Trump administration publicly announced the further detainment of 10 “high-threat illegal aliens” at the separate Migrant Operations Center within the Guantánamo Bay military base in February and recently opened a controversial new immigrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades west of Miami, ominously named “Alligator Alcatraz.”)
The March 7-8 counterterrorism meeting in Kuwait was the opening scene — and the WikiLeaks cable was the first endnote — of the thirteenth of 28 chapters of “The Mission,” the long-awaited 395-page sequel to former New York Times journalist Tim Weiner’s classic history of the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes.” The central figure was Damascus chief of station Thomas Sylvester, Jr., who later replaced David Marlowe as the CIA’s operations chief in June 2023 and was briefly acting CIA director during the beginning of Trump’s second term, prior to the arrival of John Ratcliffe.
Operating under cover as the Regional Affairs Officer for U.S. Embassy Damascus, under chargé d’affaires Stephen Seche, Sylvester was further revealed in “The Mission” to have helped set up the 2008 U.S.-Israeli assassination of Hezbollah chief of staff Imad Mughniyeh, with the bomb being mailed by diplomatic pouch from the CIA special activities division base at Harvey Point in North Carolina. Other attending station chiefs had similar cover, including Peter Enzminger and Thaddeus Troy posing as Regional Affairs Officers for U.S. Embassies Amman and Ankara, respectively. (Kuwait station chief Joseph J. Forcier II was, by contrast, under cover as political / military affairs chief of the embassy.)
Though his name is unmentioned in “The Mission,” Philip Francis Reilly, the former CIA special activities chief who is currently CEO of the private security and logistics firm behind the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, was at the time deputy chief of station in Baghdad and attended the Kuwait meeting under cover as “Deputy ORA Chief” of U.S. Embassy Baghdad, under then-deputy chief of mission David Satterfield.
There are admittedly several befuddling omissions for a book billed as an authoritative recent history of the CIA, especially Susan Miller, the first chief of the CIA’s China Mission Center, who earlier led the U.S. Intelligence Community’s counterintelligence investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election and then became chief of station for Israel. Another is Michael Anne Casey-Tyler, who rose from her controversial role under Alfreda Frances Bikowsky in the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s Bin Laden Issue Station — leading to the composite character of ‘Maya’ in the pro-torture propaganda film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ — up to, according to her LinkedIn profile, leadership of the Biden administration’s new technology espionage center, the Transnational and Technology Mission Center (T2MC), prior to retiring from the CIA in October.
(Like Reilly, Casey-Tyler has close ties to the primary financial backer of the GHF, McNally Capital. Dave Pitts, who is disclosed within “The Mission” to have been Kabul chief of station in April 2021, when President Biden announced the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, joined the board of the artificial intelligence company Clear Fracture last year, following the company’s spin-out from McNally Capital’s FedData.)
But the book cements its place in history through the revelation of the central role of Tomas Rakusan in covert operations against Russia following the 2016 election. Rakusan’s public disclosure of his past role as the CIA’s deputy director of operations date back to at least May 2022, according to a cache in The Wayback Machine, but went unremarked by journalists, regrettably including the author of this article, who has previously reported on Rakusan’s then-employer.
Rakusan had made his bones circa 2003, leveraging his fluency in several Slavic languages to operate under diplomatic cover in Baghdad as a member of the Czech interior ministry. As a result of his dedication to countering Russia, in December 2018 Rakusan traded his role as CIA operations chief with Elizabeth Kimber, the first head of the CIA’s Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, despite it being a nominal demotion. Rakusan’s work, as well as that of Russia House head Pat Weninger and close cooperation with other U.S. intelligence agencies, is credited by Weiner with producing advance notice of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — somewhat rolling back the ‘stench’ of the CIA’s false justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Beyond a discussion of the revolving door between former CIA counterterrorism officials and the private military contractor previously known as Blackwater, there is admittedly little discussion of the private industry afterlives of central figures in the book. Both Rakusan and Weninger went into leadership positions with Tracker Capital, an early-stage technology investment firm owned by the billionaire Cerberus Capital co-founder Stephen Feinberg, who is currently Trump’s deputy secretary of defense, with Rakusan as an advisor. Both Rakusan and Weninger held leadership positions with Tracker Capital’s Presage Technologies and/or its subsidiary, Chess Solutions, which have built products claiming to leverage artificial intelligence to uncover deception and recently completed a $1.8 million contract with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD-I) for “reimagining polygraphs.”
(Weninger in May became an executive vice president at McNally Capital’s Orbis Operations, which, under Reilly’s leadership, birthed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and Safe Reach Solutions in November. Former Orbis board member Michael G. Vickers was President Obama’s under secretary of defense for intelligence at the same time as former Orbis chairman Michael J. Morell was acting CIA director.)
There is also no mention in “The Mission” of Elizabeth Kimber’s role as vice president for intelligence of Carlyle Group’s Two Six Technologies, whose information operations platform, Pulse, was born out of the classified DARPA ‘More Eyes’ crowdsourced surveillance program largely run out of a tiki bar outside of Jalalabad. (While less evocative, Marlowe was announced as a vice president at the government services contractor Amentum in October 2023.)
Chapter ten of “The Mission” — “A Beautiful Operation” — likewise contains a fascinating discussion of the special activities unit of the CIA’s counterproliferation division taking down Abdul Qadeer Khan’s nuclear exportation business out of Pakistan, under the leadership of James Lawler and in partnership with the CIA’s Information Operations Center wiretapping Switzerland’s Tinner family. But no reference is made to former CIA Korea Mission Center head John Finbarr Fleming last January becoming executive chairman of the U.S. branch of the Israeli spyware firm Paragon Solutions, which merged into the offensive cyber company RED Lattice in December, under the ownership of the Florida-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners.
Few books are as revelatory on the tenures of CIA leadership, with Weiner’s primary competition perhaps being the regular must-reads from Steve Coll and the 2006 book “Safe for Democracy” from the late intelligence historian John Prados of George Washington University’s National Security Archive. (Weiner’s wife, Katharine Doyle, has long been a senior analyst on Latin America at the National Security Archive, and the acknowledgements section of the book thank two of his daughters for their research contributions.) A large number of central characters in “The Mission” —including former deputy chief of operations for Europe Marc Polymeropoulos and his predecessor as chief of base in Shkin, Afghanistan, Fogbow president Michael P. Mulroy — have also granted enlightening multi-hour live interviews to the video interview series “The Team House,” which is co-hosted by former 5th Special Forces Group soldier-turned-journalist Jack Murphy and served as the unofficial launch platform for Weiner’s book.
In terms of editorial slant, “The Mission” is decidedly anti-Trump, anti-Putin, anti-WikiLeaks, dismissive of criticisms of the so-called Havana syndrome, and sides with The Washington Post in the conclusion that Ukrainian intelligence unilaterally conducted the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, under the leadership of SBU colonel Roman Chervinsky, despite objections from the CIA. More surprising is that, in the final chapter of Weiner’s new book, entitled “The Morality of Espionage,” he twice refers to the Israeli military’s ongoing killings of Gazan civilians as “slaughter” and conjectures that, “Perhaps [President Biden] thought the success of Israeli intelligence in assassinating terrorist commanders was a counterweight to the remorseless killing of women and children by the Israeli military.”
Any serious student of U.S. national security should immediately pick up a copy of “The Mission.” Beyond the history-making details uncovered through on-the-record interviews with former senior CIA officials, it is guaranteed to serve as fertile ground for investigations which extend beyond the boundaries of the book itself.