Remembering 9/11: CIA Contractor Cindy Kwitchoff

By Cynthia Kwitchoff
Former CIA employee then contractor, (1989-2013)
STARRS Webmaster

I was working from my home office outside Washington, DC, for a training company that trained CIA and NSA employees on counterintelligence and security. Like I do for STARRS now, back then I monitored CI and security news for the company’s website.

2001 had already started with an earth-shaking event for us when FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robert Hanssen was arrested in February for being a Russian spy. My bosses and many co-workers were retired from the FBI and had worked with Hanssen. When I went into the office the day of the arrest to ask the president of the company if he knew a “Robert Hanssen” who was just arrested as being a spy, he doubled over as if I had punched him in the stomach. Later he told me that was because he realized the amount of highly classified information Hanssen knew was now in the hands of the Russians.

Moving forward to that exceptionally clear blue morning in September 2001, my boss frantically called me to turn on the TV and start recording. I immediately hit the record button but wasn’t sure what I was looking at, was this something out of a movie? He knew terrorists were attacking.

The office where we held classes was off of Rt. 395 and at the time, had a lousy internet connection and no TV. Back then, you couldn’t watch live TV on the internet, so the office called me to purchase a TV for them. I went over to Circuit City in Tysons Corner and pulled the first TV set I saw, all the while people at the store were huddled around watching the TV displays.

Driving to the office was surreal because everyone was leaving 395 going south away from the Pentagon and I was trying to go north. I saw the smoke from the Pentagon attack in the distance. After hours at the office conferring with our instructors about the situation, I left to go home. Another surreal experience was being almost the only one driving on the Beltway.

I live under flight paths for commercial airplanes and helicopters, and it was so odd for the skies to be quiet except for an occasional F-16 flying in the sky. Later, every time I drove by the Pentagon and saw the shocking big gash in its side, it made me angry.

It came out in the news a prayer to Allah that one of the 9/11 attackers had written. Because the news had translated Allah to God, it seemed like a prayer than any Christian would also pray in their worship and devotion to God. I was confused. Didn’t Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews, as most thought back then? The church was packed the Sunday after 9/11 with people seeking answers, assurance, security. Unfortunately, the minister provided no answers because he probably didn’t know any more about Islam than the rest of us. He just gave an already prepared sermon, not even touching on the subject which left people empty.

I began my own research, starting with Robert Spencer’s, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). From there my library that was full of espionage books was now filling up with books about the true nature of Islam and its doctrine. My boss was doing parallel research and we decided to create a course in 2006 about Islamic doctrine similar to the Cold War courses about Soviet doctrine. And we would add counterintelligence tools for the CIA to fight jihadists.

The course, “The War on Terrorism: Roots of the Conflict and Counterintelligence Response,” was for the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center who provided it to operations officers and intelligence analysts. To make it clear what America was up against, the cover of our 322-page course reader included this quote from a 1998 fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden and others from the International Islamic Front: “We issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies–civilians and military–is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

And the next 20 years saw attack after attack from jihadists in different countries, including the United States.

CIA operations officers taking the course told us if they had known this information about Islamic doctrine when they were in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are people who would be alive today. It was very powerful and simultaneously, we had colleagues in the Pentagon and FBI who were also giving the same type of training to their employees about the doctrine.

Then it all stopped.

John Brennan, who worked as a national security advisor to President Obama in the White House, issued a memo forbidding the government from teaching their employees about Islam and the threat of jihadists. It was a combination of Muslim activist groups putting pressure on the White House but also, from solid sources, that Brennan himself had converted to Islam while a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

(Also, if you didn’t know, Brennan had voted for Communist Gus Hall in a presidential election before joining the CIA as an intelligence analyst. In a later news interview, he wondered if he would even get through the security process at the time considering his vote for a Communist. It was a shameful thing for Obama to appoint Brennan as Director of the CIA. But then again, it shouldn’t be surprising since Obama’s college friends were quoted in a book that Obama considered himself a Marxist-Leninist in college.)

In the training company I worked with, we continued to try to warn people about Islamism (and Communism) and I continued doing so as a freelancer for clients, some of whom had been kicked out during Brennan’s purge of counterterrorism training.

One of our instructors, a Muslim reformer named Tawfik Hamid, was asked to give a briefing to general/flag officers in the Pentagon. After he gave his talk on the reality of doctrinal Islam, he said the officers were wide-eyed stunned and seemed frozen. It was because they realized there was little that military could do with all its weapons to win the war. It was rather a war of beliefs and because of our “separate of religion” and allowing any religion in America, they nor others were allowed to counter a bad religious belief system with a better one. We can only hope to have more moderate Muslims who don’t follow all the Islamic laws and doctrine like Islamists/Jihadists do.

Today, despite watching the unbelievable abomination of an Islamist-Communist becoming mayor of a city once brutally attacked by Islamists, and other Islamist radicals being elected to political office, I am heartened by seeing people on social media are much more educated on the true nature of Islam than they were 20 years ago.

I joined the CIA to fight communism and later fighting another equally miserable ideology, Islamism. The two have joined forces because they have a common enemy–America and its founding principles.

The fight continues.

More Info:

Regarding the purge, see: Living the Purge–Not Loving It by Stephen Coughlin, retired Army intelligence officer who worked in the Joint Chiefs of Staff G2 office.

The Purge of US Counterterrorism Training by the Obama Administration (Unconstrained Analytics)

Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad by Stephen Coughlin. (Also: Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s Strategy and Tactics To Transform America by Stephen Coughlin and Rich Higgins)

Polygraph panic: CIA director fretted his vote for communist (CNN, 15 Sept 2016)

Also see: Comey Was a Commie? (American Spectator (21 May 2019)

Excerpt from book: The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis–The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor:

Obama’s college classmate John Drew: “Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met him in the fall of 1980. I know it’s incendiary to say this, but Obama was basically a Marxist-Leninist. . . . At the time I met him — this was probably around Christmastime in 1980, because I had flown out during Christmas break from Cornell, where I was doing my graduate work — young Obama was looking forward to an imminent social revolution, literally a movement where the working classes would overthrow the ruling class and institute a kind of socialist utopia in the United States. I mean, that’s how extreme his views were.… I was kind of more [in] the Frankfurt School of Marxism at the time. I felt like I was doing Obama a favor by pointing out that the Marxist revolution that he and [our friends] were hoping for was really kind of a pipedream…. I was still a card-carrying Marxist, but I was kind of a more advanced, East Coast, Cornell University Marxist, I think, at the time. [Obama] kind of thought I was, you know, a little reactionary… like I was kind of insensitive to the needs of the coming revolution. [Obama] was full-bore, 100% into that simpleminded Marxist, revolutionary mental framework.”

Obama published his autobiography, “Dreams of My Father,” which was ghostwritten by Marxist Bill Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground, who maneuvered Obama’s path to political power. In August 2001, Ayers was photographed for a magazine article where he was stepping on the American flag. Then on September 11, 2001, the New York Times ran an article about Ayers where he said he did not regret setting bombs and wished he had done more. One of the many sources

Brennan converting to Islam article in the Middle East Forum
I’ll also add that I learned that a chief of the Near East Division in operations had also converted to Islam and displayed the Quran in his office. This is like, during the Cold War, the chief of the Soviet Division was a Communist and displayed a copy of Das Kapital by Marx. Unbelievable.

BOOKS:

Statement to DACODAI – Cynthia Kwitchoff

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