The case they
cannot ignore

The Analysis Corporation (TAC) was founded in 1990 and built and maintained TIPOFF, the original terrorist tracking database used by the CIA and the Department of State. The U.S. government owned the data; TAC owned the software, the algorithms and the patent.

Critically, TAC also built the tools that searched it: Fuzzy Finder in 1990, Arabic Name Search in 1997, and Russian Name Search in 2000. Those programs existed to catch every valid Latin spelling of names written in Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek. Any public statement that a terrorist’s name was missed or overlooked because of a different spelling is therefore a lie. A record could not be overlooked unless U.S. intelligence chose to overlook it.

That is the question the 9/11 failure raises. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi obtained valid U.S. visas and entered the United States on January 15, 2000, after the CIA had tracked them to a Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda meeting. Their names were not lost to a spelling variation. The tools that existed specifically to prevent that had been running for a decade.

John Brennan was not running TAC in 2001; he was a senior CIA official. But he had been head of terrorism analysis in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in 1990 and 1991, the very years TAC began providing this capability to the CIA, and he became CEO of The Analysis Corporation in 2005, hired by SFA, Inc. to help spin the company off for an IPO.

In 2007 TAC lost the Hawkeye contract and filed a protest. The CIA’s Office of General Counsel concluded that the TAC officers who submitted it, Brennan and Alexander Drew, made material false statements, and wrote to the GAO that the Agency was “extremely concerned regarding the apparent disingenuousness of TAC’s protest.”

Based on the information that is public, it is of my opinion, that he indeed is and that the CIA may have promoted him through their ranks based on these political sympathies. However, what we do know is the following:

Brennan is not a documented member of the Communist Party, and no source supports calling him an operative. What is documented is this: in 1976, at age 21, he voted for Gus Hall, the Communist Party USA candidate for president. He disclosed it himself during his 1980 CIA entry polygraph, when asked whether he had ever worked with a group dedicated to overthrowing the United States. The CIA hired him anyway.

Brennan has described that vote as a protest, “signaling my unhappiness with the system”, and later called it an “indiscretion.” He said he was only vaguely familiar with Hall’s name. Voting for a candidate is not party membership. But casting your first presidential vote for a Stalinist, disclosing it under polygraph, and still being welcomed into the CIA says something about the institution’s standards in 1980.

The introduction to High Stakes Treason asks how a man who voted for the Communist Party’s presidential candidate went on to run the Central Intelligence Agency.

Recently released primary documents from the intelligence community, internal emails, the September 2016 pre-election assessment, and a withdrawn Presidential Daily Brief, show the assessment was first ordered as a National Intelligence Estimate and then downgraded to a less rigorous Intelligence Community Assessment “in the interest of time.” The documents state there was “no indication” Russia was manipulating the vote count, record that the FBI and NSA held only low confidence in the attribution of the data leaks, and show the September 2016 judgment was that Russia sought to discredit the process rather than elect any candidate. Read the documents and the ten findings →

Yes. The DNI-released HPSCI report “Oversight Investigation & Referral” (declassified 22 July 2025) finds that the ICA’s central judgment failed the intelligence community’s own analytic standards, that the Director of CIA ordered previously withheld, substandard reporting published so it could be cited, that the phrase “strongly preferred Republicans” does not appear in the raw intelligence at all, and that NSA dissented. Read the ten findings side by side with the book, every quote sourced to the report itself: The Declassified Record →

High Stakes Treason works from three terrorism events, each given its own chapter: the Christmas Day 2009 "underwear bomber" (Abdulmutallab, Northwest Flight 253), the Norway government attack (Breivik, 22 July 2011), and the Boston Marathon bombing (April 2013).

Here is what Congress actually appropriated for the Global War on Terror in each of those fiscal years, official CRS figures, all agencies, nominal dollars:

The total fell 45% across the three events, from $171.0 bn to $94.5 bn. Congress passed no supplemental in response to Norway or Boston. Boston's year was the lowest war appropriation since 2003–04.

That is precisely the point. Brennan did not need total war spending to rise. He needed the counterterrorism slice to rise while the wars wound down, and it did:

• Aviation security: after the Christmas Day plot, DHS sought a $1.1 bn increase, with TSA's budget request rising from $5,267m to $5,729m for body scanners and screening.
• Afghanistan/OEF: $59.5 bn (2009) → $104.9 bn (2010) → $119.4 bn (2011).
• After Boston: the FY2015 budget requested a new $5.0 bn Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund.

A shrinking war budget with a growing counterterrorism budget is the ideal environment for an NCTC-centred contractor, which is exactly where Brennan held his shares.

Sources: Congressional Research Service RL33110 (2010, 2011, 2014 editions), R41232, R41189, R44519; Public Law 111-212; Department of Defense Cost of War reports; Brown University Costs of War; U.S. Department of Justice. The 2013 cumulative figure is derived from CRS totals and is approximate.