If This Is "Intelligence", Then I am...

Pope. Rebekah Koffler has an "impressive" (for DC) resume and she is "from the former USSR" and she is an embodiment of why the United States finds itself where it finds itself today vis-a-vis Russia and pretty much the rest of the world. There is very little about this Koffler lady on the internet, say how old is she and where in the USSR was she born precisely (she states she was born in Kazakhstan), but there is very little doubt in that she read too much of Solzhenitsyn and, judging by her appearance, she does look like my peer and that is why she is full o' shit. No, I am not talking about her book and "Russian hacking", I am talking about her urban myths and BS about the USSR she spews on the air at Fox (and elsewhere) and here is the latest this "Russia expert" delivers three days ago. 

Born and raised in a totalitarian state, I am intimately familiar with government spying on ordinary citizens. Recent revelations about possible actions surrounding government surveillance by the NSA took me back 30 years ago to a place that no longer exists, my birth country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – the USSR.  In the course of daily life in the USSR, we assumed all our communications were monitored by the state. Back then, it was phone calls and snail mail. Speaking in code over the phone was common for ordinary Russians in order not to get in trouble with government authorities. We even had a special phrase, "This is not a phone conversation," to end a discussion veering into dangerous territory. Any criticisms of Soviet leaders, government control, or the socialist system could get you expelled from school or fired from work.

I am not claiming that the USSR was a "free" country in Western understanding but it is clear that I and millions of my peers and Rebekah lived in a different USSR and that this intelligence "professional" is milking her "Soviet" biography for some kind of gain, most likely monetary, and tells fairy tales about USSR popular among former Soviet (primarily Jewish, but not exclusively) Brighton Beach populace. For starters, why she lies: criticism and anecdotes about Soviet government and Communist Party were not just common, but they were spoken openly from smoking rooms to diners to even barracks in Soviet military (and she certainly has no experience with that) and nobody were persecuted let alone "expelled from schools", because the only reason to be expelled from any Soviet school was two fold--discipline and academic failure. Period. Hundreds of my peers, who entered naval academy with me in 1980, same as before that, or after, were political anecdotes and jokes telling, American jeans wearing, rock-music listening and long-haired dudes, have been checked by KGB (namely counter-intelligence) before even allowed to apply, well...

Never in my life have I heard of any kid "expelled" from the school on the bases she proposes and I met and studied with very many peers who were border-line asocial and anti-Soviet. One of my academy classmates made it into the KGB organization NEVER being in Komsomol, let alone  being a member of Communist Party and... had no problems in advancing along the career path. Koffler, obviously, when she left USSR at a young age, had only Soviet dissident narrative, much of it hearsay and outright BS, and urban myths to sell in the US, which was eager to listen to any contrived BS as long as it was instrumental in drawing a caricature of a country, they had no real understanding of. It is not surprising then, when having such "analysts" and "experts" as Koffler, who sounds like a keynote speaker at the regional Communist Party gathering and who deliberately oversells this "totalitarian thingy" for own benefit, that the US "intelligence community" has become a butt of a jokes around the world, especially in anything related to Russia. 

She claims that she was an analyst of "Russian strategy and cyber warfare", well, strategy is a very broad term, but Koffler's feeble attempts to sell her Soviet high school experiences as a valuable contribution to the intelligence field while having zero experience and education with Soviet institutes of state power and security, be that military or security services are telling, as are her misguided and incompetent attempts to draw parallels between the USSR and modern USA. She is no big thinker. She is also utterly militarily incompetent. Here is a proof from her book:

This is the "level" of "experts" who consulted and continue to consult on Russia inside the US and who think that two technological catastrophes such as F-35 and LCS are "capabilities" for the United States, then there is no surprise with the outcomes we all observe. You can extrapolate the rest of the skill-set for such "analysts". I am not gonna buy her book because I don't have time to review yet another pseudo-intelligence drivel (Koffler states that Steele Dossier was a Russian operation, face-palm) about Russia from a person who has zero background in both USSR and Russia and has only her past security clearance to wave around and use big words and catch phrases. I will just remind you of a superb piece by our esteemed guest Mark Hackard about another dissident BSer Yuri Bezmenov, who was selling exactly what Koffler sells--a hot air. Here is Mark's succinct conclusion about Bezmenov, which applies fully to Koffler:

Today Bezmenov is clearly useful to US media and political elites, and so his assertions of Soviet subversion are dusted off and given a new lease on life. It’s much easier to ascribe the failure and dysfunction of an entire political system to “Kremlin meddling,” or an even older KGB plan just now being realized, than to shine light on the predations of an oligarchic superclass that has misruled America into civilizational breakdown. Anti-communism is a sure hit with the right, and liberals are programmed into a newfound hatred of Russia; each side is manipulated via dialectics in order to further obfuscate the truth and obscure any viable resolution to real cultural, political and economic challenges. There very well may be a resurrected Bolshevist spirit of subversion present in the current disorder, a phenomenon that infused the Frankfurt School’s transvaluation of all values in the West. In our twenty-first century that spirit animates neither communism, an ideological corpse long-buried, nor the SVR, modern Russia’s intelligence service. Rather, the ruling class itself, with its panoply of media organs, multinationals, academia and government agencies, seems possessed by a force spiraling towards destruction.

This also explains why those "analysts" cannot find their own ass with both hands in a brightly lit room. They call it "intelligence."

I am still puzzled with the role Koffler ascribes to "advanced" Littoral Combat Ships in the "war with Russia". Unless she means to build so many of them that Russians exhaust completely their stock of anti-shipping missiles sinking them and then surrender? Then several thousand of LCS should be built. I am sure it was Russian clandestine operation too, to convince Pentagon to invest innumerable billions into shitty technologies, such as F-35 and LCS. It has got to be Russian operation. How else can you explain this clusterfuck. I am sure Koffler will write a book on that too. Nah, I am screwing with you.