How Intelligent is the Central Intelligence Agency?

It's clear to anyone following national news developments carefully that there is a big league Deep State battle going on as the Trump Administration prepares to take power.

On the frontlines of this battle, we have on one side the CIA and on the other the military/military intelligence.

Trump has surrounded himself with military/military intelligence advisers and they are getting set to clean house and declaw the CIA when Trump takes power. The CIA understands this.

The bizarre leaks concerning Russian hacking related to the election are the doing of the CIA. The leaks are attempting to serve a dual purpose of delegitimizing the Donald Trump presidency and to paint Russia as an adversary.

The near-house organ of the CIA, The Washington Post, even put out an absurd editorial titled, Trump refuses to face reality about Russia, stating without any evidence that

 darker suspicions persist. Mr. Trump has steadfastly refused to be transparent about his multibillion-dollar business empire. Are there loans or deals with Russian businesses or the state that were concealed during the campaign? Are there hidden communications with Mr. Putin or his representatives? 

In other words, the CIA is so over-the-top in its attempts to discredit Trump that it is barely hiding its anti-Trump operations. How intelligent is this?

When you have a good chunk of the pretty obtuse masses recognizing that an anti-Trump operation is going on, you are not launching a very sophisticated operation.

Watching the CIA operate against Trump, you begin to realize why they failed so many times in their assassination attempts against Castro. And fail they did, time after time.

From Wikipedia:

The Church Committee stated that it substantiated eight attempts by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1960–1965. Fabián Escalante, a retired chief of Cuba's counterintelligence, who had been tasked with protecting Castro, estimated the number of assassination schemes or actual attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency to be 638, and split them among U.S. administrations as follows:

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1959–1961): 38
John F. Kennedy (1961–1963): 42
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969): 72
Richard Nixon (1969–1974): 184
Jimmy Carter (1977–1981): 64
Ronald Reagan (1981–1989): 197
George H. W. Bush (1989–1993): 16
Bill Clinton (1993–2000): 21

With Trump, the Central "Intelligence" Agency must have actually believed the election pollsters who stated that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, since it doesn't appear that the agency launched aggressive anti-Trump operations until after he was elected. (Unless you count the goofy election campaign of  Evan McMullin as a CIA effort) Mistake number one.

The last-minute attempt to derail the electoral college vote for Trump had the feel of a college student writing a term paper the night before it was due. Goofy operation number 2.

And now we continue to have odd operations surrounding reports of Russian hacking. The latest, a report that the Vermont electric grid was hacked using outdated Ukrainian malware.

A report duly reported by the Washington Post with this headline:


Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say

Was this supposed to get the masses in a panic over Trump and Russia?

The CIA television network, CNN, discussed little else for over 24 hours,

But the tale was so absurd and not founded on fundamental facts that WaPo had to retract the CIA press release:

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid.

These do not strike me as well thought out operations.

No doubt, the CIA will continue with its anti-Trump efforts but do they have the brainpower at Langley to step up their game? And what will they do if these efforts don't succeed do they have a Plan B?

-RW