The intelligence world’s relationship with assassination is threefold: analytical (uncovering and assessing an event’s details), exploitative (leveraging news of an attack for propaganda gains) and executive (affecting a hit). As details of the 13 July attempt on our former president’s life continue to emerge, and reactions continue to range from stoic to lunatic, let’s look at the evolving situation through an intelligence lens to bring a few things into better focus.
Analysis. In CIA’s New Analyst Course, I was trained to step back from the melee of competing narratives that arise with fast-breaking, high-impact stories to mitigate the effects of the fog created by conflicting information, changing story lines, and gaps in knowledge. Leaps of logic, unsupported assertions, and conspiratorial thinking can fast creep into such situations, and there is no room for that when you are writing for “The Book,” the President’s Daily Brief. Such discipline is lacking, however, in many “assessments” we see about the Pennsylvania incident, even in news outlets that chose ratings over solid journalism.
What can we do? Open your media literacy toolkit. Pull out Occam’s Razor, review the signs of the Dunning-Krueger effect, and scrutinize author and purpose and intended audience of the information you consume.
Also, beware of commentators whose credentials give an authoritative air, but who — on closer inspection — lack specifically related qualifications to provide truly meaningful input. For instance, many people commenting on security arrangements, response times, and Secret Service agents’ performance in Butler lack experience in protective detail work — from congresswomen who were not there to adrenaline-fueled eyewitnesses who cannot put their observations into a professional security context to the mixed martial artist running a podcast out of his mom’s basement.
While the factual details of the shooter’s motive remain a matter for discovery, politicians’ presentation of conjecture on that motive as fact — and constituents’ acceptance of such — reflects intellectual dishonesty by one and intellectual laziness by the other.
“Those who know, don’t say; those who say, don’t know.”
— old spy adage
Steer clear, too, of pundits who fail to demonstrate even a grade-school level ability in logic, argumentation and critical thinking. (Spoiler alert: It is improbable that Thomas Matthew Crooks was under CIA mind control, that the incident was staged by the GOP, or that Big Foot was taking selfies in the tree line.)
Exploitation. Foreign intelligence services’ influence campaigns began tapping this recent example of politics, guns and violence colliding in a democracy even before the former president was manhandled into his armored vehicle. Look carefully at the narratives coming out of Moscow and Beijing. They are clearly crafted to further inflame divisions in our national politics, advance their preferred U.S. presidential candidate, and convince their own people that democracy is a sham. (Domestic political operators on both sides of the aisle are exploiting the incident for their own messaging, but that is beyond the scope of this article.)
Executive. U.S. intelligence community tracking of Iranian plots to assassinate Trump (in retaliation for his ordered killing of a military leader, General Soleimani, in a third country in 2020) caused early speculation about foreign involvement in the recent shooting in Pennsylvania. That scenario is now eclipsed by a growing body of publicly available information pointing to a lone wolf scenario, but that may change as more information becomes available. It is noteworthy, however, that many Americans immediately dismissed the possibility of foreign involvement, apparently unaware of recent foreign intelligence assassination attempts on U.S. soil.
In January, for instance, the Department of Justice indicted three conspirators tied to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security who planned to kill a dissident in Maryland. In November 2023, India’s Research and Analysis Wing attempted to kill an activist in New York. In June of last year, the U.S. sanctioned the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for plotting to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton in Washington, D.C., or Maryland, and there was an assassination attempt in Miami against Russian defector and former SVR officer Alexander Poteyev. Remember when Putin critic Dan Rapoport in 2022 “fell” out of his high-rise apartment in D.C.? Many observers considered that a “Moscow Swan Dive,” a calling card of Russian intelligence.
So what now? We wait. We carefully assess information as it emerges. We parse fact from informed analysis from unfounded opinion. Most importantly, we refrain from spreading speculation and rumor.
J.P. Atwell is a former senior CIA operations officer. His two-decade career began as an intelligence analyst and took him to every continent, save Antarctica. He now calls Hawaii Island home. He welcomes your comments at island.intelligencer@gmail.com.