'Stand down': How the Obama team blew the response to Russian meddling

CIA Director John Brennan was angry. On Aug. 4, 2016, he was on the phone with Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB. The phone call was one of their regularly scheduled ones, the main subject once again the horrific civil war in Syria. By this point, however, Brennan had had it with the Russian spy chief. For the past few years, Brennan’s pleas for cooperation in defusing the Syrian crisis had gone nowhere. And after they finished discussing Syria — again with no progress — Brennan brought up two other issues not on the official agenda.

First, Brennan raised the problem of Russia’s harassment of U.S. diplomats — an especially pressing matter at Langley after an undercover CIA officer had been beaten outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow two months earlier. The continuing mistreatment of U.S. diplomats, Brennan told Bortnikov, was “irresponsible, reckless, intolerable and needed to stop.” And, he pointedly noted, it was Bortnikov’s own FSB “that has been most responsible for this outrageous behavior.”


Source : Yahoo