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“We hate to break the news to Twitter, but no, Pete was not in the CIA,” Buttigieg’s national press secretary Chris Meagher derisively told The Daily Beast, which directly referenced both Grayzone reports. “As for the Somaliland trip, it was not related to his work anywhere.”
The Daily Beast article appeared in response not only to factual reporting by The Grayzone, but to a wave of allegations spread online through hashtags like #CIAPete which accused Buttigieg of being a CIA asset.
Following the fiasco in Iowa, in which voting results were blocked thanks to faulty technology produced by a dark money outfit linked to Buttigieg – and Mayor Pete inexplicably took to himself the victor – the hashtag trended nationally.
Neither article published by The Grayzone accused Buttigieg of working for the CIA. However, according to military documents that have gone mostly under the media’s radar, it does appear that the former mayor worked alongside the CIA while serving as a high-ranking Naval intelligence officer during his short stint in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the unit Buttigieg supervised was a subset of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the US agency responsible for the disastrous war on drugs that has spawned humanitarian catastrophes throughout Latin America and much of the world.
‘We were working with everybody across the civilian spectrum in the intelligence community’
Early on in his military career, Pete Buttigieg worked as an intelligence analyst at US European Command, where he “conduct[ed] research and analysis of information to create accurate, timely intelligence products in support of USEUCOM theater operations,” according to mostly redacted military records released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Under a section labelled “command employment and command achievements,” Buttigieg’s papers indicate that intelligence was provided to “USEUCOM, NATO, Deployed Units and other commands, including operations in Africa and the former Yugoslavia.”
Buttigieg would eventually return to EUCOM, where he was promoted to team leader, supervising one officer and four intelligence analysts.
Two years into Buttigieg’s time as mayor, in 2014, he was called for duty again, this time to serve with the US Navy in Afghanistan.
Contrary to Buttigieg’s portrayal of himself as a gun-toting, freedom-fighting soldier, he enjoyed an immediate high rank during deployment. Just into his first term as mayor, Buttigieg “made sure my chain of command knew that I would rather go sooner than later, and would rather go to Afghanistan than anywhere else,” he wrote in his book.
Buttigieg was apparently shuttled over quickly, and left soon after.
He spent his six months in Afghanistan in 2014 with a little-known unit that operated under the watch of the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), according to his appointment papers. The job description in his discharge papers is blank.