Sy Hersh “reports” on NPR:
HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think [Cheney’s] put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.
I’m guessing that the “minor point” up to which Cheney’s “stay behinds” control U.S. policy is precisely every misstep this administration makes. The people who mistranslated the word “reset” on that big red button Hillary gave to the Russians? That had to be the stay behinds, right?
