>>7643247 (pb) Q —————————— The only way to restore faith is through transparency and accountability.
*Gina Haspel → Moar about Gina in London.
Interdasting Details:
(msn.com - 7/31/2019)
"The quiet director: How Gina Haspel manages the CIA’s volatile relationship with Trump"
(article excerpt)
'Honorary U.K. desk officer'
Haspel’s instinct to subsume herself into her work is in keeping with her three decades at the agency, current and former officials said.
“She’s unburdened by ego and self-promotion,” said Michael Sulick, who ran the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, now the Directorate of Operations, where Haspel spent most of her career.
Several of Haspel’s colleagues remarked, unprompted, about her lack of ego, which they cautioned not to mistake for a lack of ambition and confidence.
“I’d go into her office and there was a big poster of Johnny Cash” — Haspel is a lifelong fan — “but I didn’t see any photos of herself,” said Henry “Hank” Crumpton, who hired Haspel as his deputy when he ran the CIA’s national resources division, which gathers intelligence in the United States by talking to people who have traveled overseas.
“She understands who she is, and she takes her ego out of her decision-making,” he said. “In the CIA, that’s pretty unusual.”
It is also unusual for someone with Haspel’s credentials to become the CIA director. The job rarely goes to career officers, and presidents frequently tap members of Congress or longtime political operators, particularly ones they consider allies. Haspel’s appointment was unprecedented in two respects: She is the first career clandestine officer to ascend to the top job, and the first woman.
“She was very focused. Disciplined. People told me, ‘You won’t become friends with her,’ ” said a former British intelligence official who worked closely with Haspel when she served in London.
“She wasn’t all business. But she was mostly business,” said another former British intelligence official. Haspel was not the type to head to the pub with co-workers, he said. “Gina was not a beer drinker.”
(notable comments)
But what she lacked in after-hours sociability she made up for with deep professional ties to the upper echelon of the British security establishment. “She had access to anyone in our service,” the former British intelligence official said.
It is rare for an officer to serve twice as station chief in the same place, particularly in as coveted a post as London. Haspel has become the CIA’s linchpin to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, its most important foreign partner. Her British colleagues say that she knows them so well — warts and all — that they call her the “honorary U.K. desk officer.”
That bond has helped Haspel stabilize the transatlantic alliance, which Trump has assailed in speeches and tweets. In addition to threatening that he might pull out of NATO, Trump has accused the United Kingdom of conspiring with American intelligence to spy on his presidential campaign.
Those accusations have rattled the British government at the highest levels. The United States and the United Kingdom share more intelligence with each other than with any other nation. And they are party to what officials describe as an inviolable agreement not to spy on each other or three other key, English-speaking allies — Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
In 2017, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited Fox News pundit Andrew Napolitano’s claim that three intelligence sources had told him the Obama administration used Britain’s electronic eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, to spy on Trump and avoid “American fingerprints.” GCHQ took the extraordinary step of issuing a public statement, saying the claims were “utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-quiet-director-how-gina-haspel-manages-the-cias-volatile-relationship-with-trump/ar-AAF4Rqj