Marc Ambinder has a useful piece at the Atlantic (circa 2013, so may be out of date due to later reorganization efforts) that lays out the broad outlines of the various parts of the
NSA. Offices with “S” as the opening of their designation are under the Signals Intelligence Directorate, “Q” is the Security and Counterintelligence Directorate, “R” is the Research Directorate, etc.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/03/18/the-trump-toadies-who-are-worried-about-being-unmasked/
There was one person, however, who McMaster couldn’t get rid of: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence programs. McMaster tried to remove him in March, but President Trump, at the urging of Bannon and Jared Kushner, told McMaster that Cohen-Watnick was staying, as first reported by Politico. According to a senior White House official, the two men had a sit-down meeting the following week in which McMaster acknowledged that he hadn’t been able to do what he wanted to do, and that they would keep things as they are and “see how they go for a while.” That was over four months ago. That Cohen-Watnick, 31 years old and largely unknown before entering the administration, has become unfireable reveals how important he has become to the Trump White House, where loyalty is prized.
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The senior in Cohen-Watnick’s title reflects the importance of his job, if not the level of experience he brings to it. The senior director for intelligence programs on the NSC is a powerful position, designed to coordinate and liaise between the U.S. intelligence community and the White House.
"If the incumbent has an effective working relationship with the national-security adviser or even the president directly, the senior director for intelligence has an opportunity to exercise considerable influence on intelligence policy, covert actions, and sensitive collection operations," said Stephen Slick, a former CIA official who held the position during the Bush administration.
The CIA has traditionally had control over who fills this position, and normally the job is staffed by a more experienced official. McMaster, assuming he’d be allowed to relieve or reassign Cohen-Watnick, had gone so far as to interview Cohen-Watnick’s potential replacement, Linda Weissgold, a veteran CIA officer.
Despite his prominent, and apparently quite secure, position in Trump’s NSC, little is known about Cohen-Watnick, who had spent much of his short career as a low-ranking official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Information about him in publicly available sources is scarce. Few higher-ups from the DIA remember him. Only one picture of him can be found online, a snapshot unearthed by Al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen.
Unlike other White House officials who have become public figures in their own right, Cohen-Watnick never speaks for himself publicly, leaving others to fill the void. Yet he hardly comes into sharper focus when you talk to co-workers, friends, and former colleagues. Ask around about Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and people get defensive. Some profess not to know him, or ask why anyone would want to write about him. Others simply refuse to discuss him.
“I won’t talk to any journalist about Ezra,” said Michael Ledeen, a Flynn confidant who knows Cohen-Watnick well.
“Is it one of your hit pieces?” asked Bannon, who didn’t respond to a further request for comment.
Bannon and Ledeen may be wary of talking about Cohen-Watnick after his first, and thus far only, turn in the national spotlight. Washington got its first real look at Cohen-Watnick when he was identified as one of two White House sources who provided House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes with evidence that former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the “unmasking” of the names of Trump associates in intelligence documents. In the intelligence world, incidental collection refers to intelligence agencies obtaining, in the course of monitoring foreigners, communications that either refer to or involve Americans, whose names are typically “masked” unless officials request that they be “unmasked.”
The incident, coming in the aftermath of Trump baselessly accusing his predecessor of wiretapping Trump Tower, became one of the first dust-ups related to the investigations into possible Russian collusion during the 2016 campaign that have gripped the White House. The president later accused Rice of having committed a crime; for her part, Rice has denied that she ordered the unmasking for political purposes.
Despite that early controversy, Cohen-Watnick retains one of the most consequential intelligence jobs in the nation, and his influence is rising. He is in the thick of some of the most important policy fights at the White House; he is viewed as an Iran hawk and has been characterized, for instance, as a main proponent of expanding U.S. efforts against Iran-backed militias in Syria. And beyond policy specifics, he’s become a flashpoint in the long-running tension between Trump and the intelligence community, a part of the U.S. government that the president has at times openly disdained.
Yet what we don’t know about Cohen-Watnick far outstrips what we do. Was he a central player in the Nunes scandal, or just a bystander? Has he retained his job due to his talent, or is he being protected because he's advancing the agenda of powerful West Wing patrons? What, besides loyalty to the president, are his credentials? Is he Flynn's mole on the council, or does he not even know the deposed national-security adviser all that well? Is he brash and difficult to work with, or modest and brilliant? And perhaps most important: Now that he has the president’s ear, what will he whisper into it?
Cohen-watnick was raised in chevy chase, maryland, an affluent suburb of Washington. His father is a lawyer; his mother a doctor; the couple is separated. Liberal, affluent Montgomery County is not exactly a hotbed of right-wing sentiment. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine won 74 percent of the vote there in 2016.
Cohen-Watnick attended Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School, graduating in 2004. It was in high school when Cohen-Watnick seems to have become politically active. One person who knew him at the time said that, together with a friend, Cohen-Watnick set up a table outside the Barnes and Noble in downtown Bethesda in the summer of 2003 to “just sort of argue with people about the Iraq War … just to get into fights with Bethesda liberals.” A White House official denied this anecdote, saying it was “false.”
“Ezra’s politics are not at all normal for the cultural milieu in which he grew up,” this person said. (Cohen-Watnick did, however, intern for then-Senator Joe Biden in high school.)
Cohen-Watnick entered the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2004. He struck one classmate there at the time as a libertarian, but over the years seemed to shift in a more hawkish direction, the classmate said. Cohen-Watnick was involved in an on-campus Terrorism Awareness Week connected to the controversial conservative writer David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” events.
"We need people to be passionate about the problem of terrorism,” he’s quoted as saying in a Daily Pennsylvanian article about the event, advocating more courses devoted to the subject.
As a sophomore, Cohen-Watnick told The Daily Pennsylvanian that from a young age he had wanted to serve in the Navy. “Cohen said it was very important to him to be able to give back to something he has benefitted from—in this case, the national security that has kept generations of his family safe,” the paper reported.
Not sure what the deal is with this guy. Something fishy! Q mentioned Ezra BRIDGES and connecting people.
Ezra is connected somehow to CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA through either a parent company or his position as someone who would receive the intel from Cambridge.
But in September 2007, he also told a friend that his main goal was working for the CIA. Cohen-Watnick talked about his goal of becoming a spy “all the time,” this person said. “He did talk about the DIA,” this person said. “He always talked about it as the backup to his CIA goals.”
One White House colleague who has known Cohen-Watnick for a long time described 9/11 as a formative event for him, and remarked that members of his age group were old enough to remember the attack vividly, but young enough that it happened before they had embarked on careers. This person pointed out that Cohen-Watnick’s career path was unusual for his milieu: “Not many folks from our sort of sphere were making the decision to go into public service.”
Cohen-Watnick’s history becomes murkier around 2008, his final year at Penn. His friend from school says the last time they saw him or heard from him was before the spring semester that year. Cohen-Watnick is listed on an online roster among a group that attended the Penn in D.C. internship program in Washington in 2008, in his case interning with the Office of Naval Intelligence. Cohen-Watnick took a civilian job with the Navy after college.
A DIA spokesperson confirmed that Cohen-Watnick had joined the DIA in 2010, and left it in January of 2017, but would otherwise not confirm or comment on the details of his service. One colleague of Cohen-Watnick’s said that his last job was three or four ranks higher than the one in which he began.
Newsweek reported that Cohen-Watnick entered the Defense Clandestine Service in 2012 and was sent to “The Farm,” the CIA training facility in Virginia, in 2013. Al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen reported on Twitter that Cohen-Watnick had done work on Haiti while based out of the Department of Defense’s Miami office. Records show he registered to vote in 2012 with a Miami address, as a Republican and as a Hispanic male (his mother is Colombian).
According to a former senior intelligence official, Cohen-Watnick later served overseas in Afghanistan at a CIA base. “He was embedded with the Agency guys,” said a person familiar with Cohen-Watnick’s career. “But the Agency guys were all like ‘Fuck this guy, he’s just here to spy on us for Flynn and the DIA.’”
A White House official said that Cohen-Watnick did not know Flynn at the time he was in Afghanistan but did not dispute that there were “rivalries between CIA and DIA.”
It was Cohen-Watnick’s connection with Michael Flynn that would catapult him into the top ranks of America’s intelligence officials. But even the seemingly straightforward question of how and when they met yields contradictory and conflicting accounts. One person familiar with his career asserted that Cohen-Watnick had met Matt Flynn, Michael Flynn’s son, at “The Farm.” Another, a former senior intelligence official, said he had briefed Flynn at the DIA.
According to a third person familiar with the matter, the real story is that Cohen-Watnick actually met Flynn much later, in 2016, at a coffee arranged by Michael Ledeen’s wife Barbara, who Cohen-Watnick knows from growing up outside of Washington. Ledeen is a friend of Flynn’s and co-authored the book Field of Fight with him. Barbara introduced him to Cohen-Watnick; the couple connected the young officer with Flynn, and the two kept in touch over the course of the year. Flynn became a prominent surrogate for the Trump campaign, famously leading a “lock her up” chant at the Republican National Convention, and was even considered as the running mate.
Flynn’s time at the helm of the DIA was notoriously troubled. The general came in with a brash approach that rubbed his colleagues the wrong way and eventually led to his being forced out in 2014 by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers.
if you want the rest of the story her's the link
https://8ch.net/qresearch/res/2855303.html#q2855761
Lol can't spell sorry either. serious lag here!
Yeah usually not, at least not true anons. Every once in a while there will be some school teaching Engfags in here though.