The Man McMaster Couldn't Fire
Thirty-one-year-old Ezra Cohen-Watnick holds the intelligence portfolio on the National Security Council—but almost everything about him is a mystery.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/ezra-cohen-watnick/534615/
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 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.’”