Tulsi’s Task Force: From the CIA to EIS and Beyond – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), is deploying the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) to investigate weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community. While investigating the CIA, NSA, and such, the DIG sleuths should take a hard look at the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), established in the 1950s to prevent infectious diseases from arriving on American soil. Events in recent years give the people cause to wonder.

Investigating the US ‘Health’ Agencies

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), began her career in 1995 as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer in the National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID). In early 2020, Dr. Messonnier was the government’s first spokesperson on COVID and conducted a series of telebriefings not shown to the public. (RELATED: Never Forget What They Did to Us Five Years Ago)

The CDC official warned that a “novel coronavirus” had emerged from the “Wuhan market” and the highly contagious new virus would “gain a foothold” in the United States. Many people would be infected, and there was “no immunity.” (RELATED: How COVID Mania Inspired the Events of January 6)

In her Jan. 24 briefing, Dr. Messonnier told reporters, “CDC has a team that’s been in China for many years where we work closely with the Department of Health in China.” Some reporters were curious about people traveling to the United States from Wuhan, but in her Feb. 5 briefing, Dr. Messonnier said, “That’s something I’m not at liberty to talk about today.”

The EIS veteran, a captain in the Public Health Service, did not reveal who was laying down the rules, but some realities were already apparent. The intrepid “disease detectives” of the EIS failed to prevent the COVID virus from arriving on American soil. That supplies the DIG detectives with a long list of questions.

Dr. Messonnier shows up in a 2013 EIS conference report revealing that 12 new EIS officers were citizens of other nations, including the People’s Republic of China. Which nation’s interests do the Chinese EIS officers represent? Were any PRC nationals on the CDC “team” working with China for many years?

Who were the EIS officers on the ground in China in late 2019 and early 2020? What do they know about the origin of the COVID virus, and the way it was vectored to America and the world? Who was the government official barring Dr. Messonnier from discussing travel from Wuhan? How did Dr. Messonnier’s briefings differ from China’s talking points?

In 2021, the EIS veteran suddenly retired, and CDC director Rochelle Walensky proclaimed her a “true hero.” What had Dr. Messonnier done that was truly heroic? Was it related to the COVID pandemic? Why did she suddenly retire? And so on. (RELATED: Dr. Fauci Doubles Down)

Dr. Messonnier gave way to Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Dr. Fauci, who claimed to represent science, contended that COVID arose naturally in the wild and branded reports of a lab origin as a “conspiracy theory.” On his way out of the White House, Joe Biden pardoned Dr. Fauci without naming any crime he might have committed. (RELATED: Standing Up for Bureaucracy Is Not Standing Up for Science)

On the other hand, Biden announced no pardon for Fauci allies such as former NIH acting director Lawrence Tabak, who admitted that the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Biden announced no pardon for former Galveston National Laboratory (GNL) director James Leduc, who signed secret agreements with three Chinese labs, including the WIV, giving China the power to destroy files, materials, and equipment. (RELATED: Dr. Anthony Fauci: What Exactly Did Biden Pardon?)

Joe Biden announced no pardon for Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who wasn’t at liberty to talk about those giving the orders. The revamped CDC, HHS, and NIH, now under Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, might probe the Fauci allies for matters that might interest the Department of Justice. So should the DIG task force, without diverting attention from the CIA. Fortunately, the secret agency has already provided a confession of sorts. (RELATED: Bhattacharya Did Not Follow the COVID Herd)

Investigating US ‘Intelligence’

In 2020, former CIA director John Brennan published Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad. Brennan charts the CIA’s failure to prevent the massive attack of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subtitle confirms the agency’s pivot to domestic politics.

In 2023, former CIA analyst John Gentry published Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump has Long-Term Consequences. As Gentry explained, the forces that triggered the attack on Trump “remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.”

These realities confirm the belief of Angelo Codevilla, a former Naval intelligence officer, staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and author of Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century. In 2020, a year before he passed away, Codevilla contended that the CIA is “not very good at what it is supposed to be doing” and had become another partisan bureaucracy. The remedy was to “Abolish FISA, Reform FBI and Break Up CIA.”

Another key CIA veteran, whom Codevilla respected, had thoughts on the CIA, too.

During WWII, James Angleton ran counterintelligence for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, which he joined at the outset in 1947. In 1954, the agency made him head of counterintelligence, a strategic function the CIA steadily downgraded.

In a June 6, 1975, session of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence, Angleton testified that CIA counterintelligence was “very very poor” and had set back the agency 20 years. Sen. Howard Baker wanted to know how Angleton would rehabilitate the CIA.

“My feeling is that the agency has to go through the purgatory, these fires that no man would put out,” Angleton told the committee. “My view is, the bigger the fires, the better. So my view is, let it all come out, and let people take the consequences.” That was decades before the CIA failed to stop 9/11 and shifted to domestic politics, where it has no mandate.

The DIG task force has good reason to stoke the fires, let it all come out, and let people take the consequences — whatever their titles, salaries, and reputations. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, the struggle against unaccountable government is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

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Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.