John Brennan's Merry Skate to CIA

The increasingly desperate Republicans must be grinding their molars over President Obama’s nomination of John O. Brennan to run the CIA, a place where he spent about 30 years.

I mean, what’s the worst they can say about the shooting guard of “The Reaper Presidency,” as the U.K.-based Bureau Investigative Journalism calls Obama’s first term? That he’s talks too much?

On the CIA's Evolving Thoughts About ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Moviegoers would be well advised to remember what one of the CIA’s most ardent defenders of torture, former clandestine services head José Rodriquez, admitted last April: That agency interrogators couldn’t get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to give up Osama Bin Laden’s courier despite days of water-boarding and sleep deprivation.

The current CIA boss, acting director Michael Morell, has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on torture’s role in finding Bin Laden, denouncing Zero Dark Thirty’s strong implication that "enhanced interrogation techniques"led directly to Bin Laden's courier and thus to the al-Qaeda chief, but also saying that "whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved."

Three members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and John McCain, a former Navy pilot who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, are not amused. They’re now wondering exactly what Morell and other CIA officials really told filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, and are demanding an explanation.

Jane Harman for CIA Director? Really?

Even in a town with memory holes as deep as dark space, the persistence of Jane Harman’s name near the top of lists for CIA director is a mystery.

Apparently, Harman’s role in an Israeli intelligence influence operation has been forgotten by Washington's Great Mentioners.

Churchill's Christmas Secret: Germans Would Not Come

I’ve been racing through my friend Paul Reid’s biography of Winston Churchill like a panzer through France, stopping only to refuel.

Reid, who shares billing with the late William Manchester, author of the first two volumes of “The Last Lion,” in this third and final installment, "Defender of the Realm," magnificently recreates the look, feel and smell of Londoners under the pounding of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, seemingly surviving only on the inspirational exhortations of their heroic prime minister.

That Reid, a journalist with no previous books under his belt, has succeeded brilliantly at building on Manchester’s foundation has been well noted elsewhere.

But a major revelation in the 1,182-page tome has drawn scant notice, as far as I can see.

And that is that even in the darkest early months of the war, Churchill had secretly concluded that Hitler would not invade Britain--and even if he did, the Fuhrer would be decisively beaten.

Spy's Case Offers Rare Glimpse Inside CIA

A  highly decorated former CIA deep cover operative’s long quest to nail the spy agency for obliterating his career in retaliation for exposing the security violations of a senior agency official and her State Department husband gets a rare public hearing Friday.

“Peter B,” whose full name and former duties remain classified, contends that he lost his CIA job because he had learned about an affair that the husband of his supervisor, Margaret “Peggy” Lyons, was carrying on with a Taiwanese spy. 

Lyon’s husband, State Department Asia expert Donald Keyes, eventually pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his affair with the Taiwan operative and the hoard of secret documents he kept at home.

But investigators also discovered that Lyons, too, had illegally carted home dozens classified CIA documents. 

“I believe that the work I was doing, and about to do, potentially risked exposure of the illegal activities of her husband and that defendant Lyons sought to eliminate me as a threat to her husband, and perhaps, to her own actions,” Peter B. told the court in a 2010 declaration.

After edging him out of the CIA to protect their activities, Peter B. maintains, Lyons and other unidentified agency officials blocked him from working for Abraxis, a McLean, Va. company founded by an ex-agency official that gins up deep cover schemes for CIA operatives.

What's in Grover Norquist’s Private Files?

Thanks to Helen Gandy, the world never learned of the true reach of J. Edgar Hoover’s choke-hold on American politicians. According to a congressional inquiry and other sources, the notorious FBI director amassed secret files on the sexual and other peccadillos of politicians, entertainers, writers and officials, giving him immense blackmailing powers over his real and imagined enemies on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

We'll never really know the whole story, because Miss Gandy, his longtime secretary, destroyed the files upon Hoover's death in May 1972.

It may turn out that tax maniac Grover Norquist also has his own Miss Gandy, primed to destroy the contents of his locked safe when the grim reaper comes. Until then, he's got the Republicans' cajones in his hands.

Norquist himself suggested his true grasp on power Monday night when he "took a pot shot at Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) marriage,"  according to Raw Story's Arturo Garcia, after the Long Islander suggested he might abandon his no-taxes pledge after nearly two decades.

"I hope his wife understands that commitments last a little longer than two years or something,” Norquist fumed.

What other than the possession of embarrassing details on the private lives and messy business deals of Republican legislators can explain the right-wing lobbyist’s hammerlock on tax policy over the past quarter century?

Broadwell's Petraeus Book Rushing to Paperback

Penquin Books is working overtime to rush out the paperback version of Paula Broadwell’s infamous biography, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus,” according to an industry insider.

Hey, it’s a business.

Surely not far behind: A tell-all about her affair with the legendary ex-general. (“All Out”?)  After that, it's not hard to see a cable movie, even a talk show, advice column, beauty tips and TV commercials in her future.

What a great country.

And it would hardly be a surprise.

According to voluminous news reports, including today’s riveting Washington Post story on Broadwell’s dizzying accent through the capitol’s military and think-tank elites, the comely West Point grad and long distance jogger is quite the striver, shedding prevarications in her resume like so many candy wrappers.

Speaking of which, Penguin might consider editing her author’s bio on its web page.