How to Trash a Decades-Long Career and Reputation in One Day

I met with Mike Morell when he was Deputy Director of the CIA in his office on the 7^th floor of Langley Headquarters across the hall from the Director’s office and secure conference room. We were discussing a prototype system I had helped to develop that could use open-source market information to identify anomalous price patterns that could indicate a coming terrorist attack.

The premise was that terrorist associates (not necessarily the lead actors) could not resist insider trading ahead of the attack. Such trading leaves a footprint in the markets because it produces results that are at odds with market trends, sector trends, and fundamentals.

When such patterns are seen in the absence of any news that could explain them, it’s a fair inference that actors had information unknown to the market. From there, a combination of inferential methods, forensic analysis, and what’s called all-source fusion could lead to the terrorists and stop the attack.

The system had been years in development and worked better than expected, including a “red alert” days before the August 2006 liquid bomb plot was taken down in London by MI5 and New Scotland Yard. Our team was meeting with Morell to get the final green light to proceed with a more robust version of the prototype.

He shot us down.

His logic had nothing to do with whether the system worked; it did. Instead, he was concerned that a leak to the New York Times might result in headlines to the effect that: “CIA trolls through American’s 401(k) accounts.”

The system did nothing of the sort. It relied exclusively on open-source intelligence (OSINT), including price feeds that anyone could buy from the CME or NASDAQ. At one point, I asked if CIA analysts were allowed to watch television (TV is OSINT). I’m sure that remark didn’t make me any friends on the 7^th floor.

I came away with the impression of Morell that he was highly intelligent but also highly political. He cared more about PR and agency popularity on Capitol Hill than he did about improvements in counterterrorism capability. This article confirms my impressions.

It turns out that in 2020, Morell was the ringleader of a campaign of lies designed to help elect Joe Biden. The New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story just days ahead of the key Trump-Biden debate and the 2020 presidential election. Morell worked with the Biden campaign to organize a letter signed by over 50 high-level intelligence professionals saying the laptop looked like “Russian disinformation.”

The laptop was real. Morell’s letter was a lie. But it did give Biden a talking point when Trump raised the laptop issue in the debate.

After the election, polls showed that over 70% of Americans had never heard of the laptop (because of social media censorship), and 16% of voters would have switched from Biden to Trump if they had known.

Morell manipulated the 2020 election in favor of Biden. Mission accomplished. Too bad his reputation is now in tatters, and he will be known to history as a liar and partisan hack.

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