![]() ![]() Polymeropoulos issued what he refers to as “a call to arms.” “Every station was directed to refocus its efforts on Russia,” he explained. As far as the Agency and Polymeropoulos saw it, the area in between-Europe, Ukraine, Turkey, the Caucasus-was now a battleground between the United States and Russia. Polymeropoulos’s new job was to run clandestine operations across the Center’s approximately 50 stations, which dotted the landscape from Ireland to Azerbaijan. “Stuff like that that really alarmed us considerably.” Some of it, he added, made his “head explode.” Bush inviting bin Laden after 9/11 and saying, ‘Eh, we’re good,’ ” Polymeropoulos told me. “I remember thinking this is like George W. He also seemed determined to make nice with the Kremlin, even going so far as inviting the Russian foreign minister into the Oval Office in May 2017, and using the occasion to mock ousted FBI director James Comey and to share highly classified Israeli intelligence with the Russians-without Jerusalem’s sign-off. ![]() Yet the new president dismissed their findings and denigrated intelligence officers as the “deep state” who wanted nothing more than to thwart his agenda. It was the kind of high-confidence, public assessment that rarely came out of the fractious world of U.S. Shortly before Trump was inaugurated, the intelligence community released its conclusions that the Russian government had successfully meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Polymeropoulos arrived in Moscow at the end of Donald Trump’s first, chaotic year in the White House. ![]() Suggestions otherwise in your story are simply not true.”) (In a statement to GQ, CIA representatives said that “the Agency’s top priority is the health and well-being of our officers followed very closely by collecting on hard targets, including Russia, and providing that intelligence to policymakers. “I want the Agency to treat this as a combat injury.” He has also grown alarmed that the Agency and this administration are neither investigating nor pushing back against the apparent perpetrators who are targeting his old comrades-and other Americans-in increasingly brazen ways. “It’s incumbent on them to provide the medical help we require, which does not include telling us that we’re all making it up,” he told me. Though many of these apparent attacks have been publicized, including those that took place in Cuba and China, others have not been revealed until now, including at least three incidents that officials from the CIA and Capitol Hill say targeted American citizens on American soil.Ī loyal soldier of the CIA even after his untimely retirement, Polymeropoulos has never detailed publicly what he calls his “silent wounds.” But in the year since he left, he has become increasingly frustrated by the Agency’s reluctance to give him and the other CIA officers affected with the medical care they need. Rather, it was his macabre initiation into a growing club of dozens of American diplomats, spies, and government employees posted abroad who were suffering in much the same way he was-targets of what some experts and doctors now believe were attacks perpetrated by unknown assailants wielding novel directed energy weapons. In the months ahead, he would come to realize that it wasn’t a spoiled sandwich that had mowed him down. It would end a promising career that had just catapulted him into the ranks of senior CIA leadership, and threw him into the middle of a growing international mystery that has puzzled diplomats and scientists, and raised concerns on Capitol Hill. Struggling to regain control over his body, Polymeropoulos couldn’t have imagined that this incident would upend his life. But that night, paralyzed with seasickness in the landlocked Russian capital, Polymeropoulos felt terrified and utterly helpless for the first time. He had been shot at, ducked under rocket fire, and had shrapnel whiz by uncomfortably close to his head. He had hunted terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. He had spent most of his career in the Middle East, fighting America’s long war on terrorism. Polymeropoulos was a covert CIA operative, a jovial, burly man who likes to refer to himself as “grizzled.” Moscow was not the first time he had been on enemy territory. He felt, he recalled, “like I was going to both throw up and pass out at the same time.” ![]() It was the early morning hours of December 5, 2017, and his Moscow hotel room was spinning around him. But when he tried to get out of bed, he fell over. Food poisoning, he thought, and decided to head for the bathroom. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |