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Twitter Has Onboarded at Least a Dozen FBI and Intelligence Agents Since 2019

Neil Campbell
Neil lives in Canada and writes about society and politics.
Published: June 22, 2022
Twitter has onboarded at least a dozen FBI and CIA agents, including Atlantic Council-trained members. Many have been given very high positions in the company.
A file photo of Twitter on a phone. Twitter has onboarded at least a dozen FBI and intelligence agents since 2019, new investigative journalism reveals. Some consider it a conflict of interest. (Image: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

Twitter, a soon-to-be jewel in the world’s richest man’s crown, has taken in a minimum of 12 FBI and other U.S. intelligence agents since 2019 — and mostly to very high positions — according to a new investigative journalism report. 

MintPress News (MPN) published a June 21 article that appeared to rely on a simple scrape of LinkedIn bios, making the discovery based on publicly available information. 

Some of the heads Twitter has hunted include:

  • A former Lockheed Martin Director of Innovation turned FBI Senior Innovation Advisor who became Twitter’s Director of Corporate Resilience in March of 2020
  • A 20-year veteran FBI supervisory Special Agent turned Twitter Director of Corporate Security and Risk in August of 2020
  • A 14-year FBI SWAT Team Leader turned Twitter Corporate and Executive Security Services member in September of 2019

Additionally, the outlet noted three former FBI agents — who keep their last names obscured with only an initial on LinkedIn — that now hold Director-level positions in different corporate risk, security, and trust divisions.

Besides FBI agents, another individual served as a CIA analyst of 10 years before becoming Senior Policy Specialist at Twitter Singapore in 2019. They transferred to Silicon Valley in July of 2021.

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The outlet quoted former-FBI-agent-turned-9/11-whistleblower Coleen Rowley as stating she knows of a “revolving door” between the FBI and those industries. 

Rowley told MPN she felt the situation created a serious conflict of interest, “The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement.”

According to MPN, many of the agents listed in the article “were active in the FBI’s public outreach programs,” which the outlet described as “a practice sold as a community trust-building initiative.”

Rowley characterized such programs as “ways for officials to meet the important people that would give them jobs after retirement,” deriding the affairs as “warp[ing] and pervert[ing] the criminal investigative work that agents do when they are still working as agents because they anticipate getting lucrative jobs after retiring or leaving the FBI.”

The whistleblower, who was named one of Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year for 2002, shared her opinion on the advantage this type of recruitment presents to Big Tech’s cornerstones, “Retired agents often maintained good relationships and networks with current agents. So they can call up their old buddy and find out stuff.” 

“There were certainly instances of retired agents for example trying to find out if there was an investigation of so and so. And if you are working for a company, that company is going to like that influence,” she added.

MPN also pointed out that Twitter has absorbed at least three graduates or fellows of a training facility under the Atlantic Council, an establishment think tank.

One of the most notable, albeit perhaps lesser-noticed, missives issued by the Atlantic Council in recent years was “The Longer Telegram,” a policy instruction initiative that advocates for regime change inside China

However, the document does not call for the elimination or the fall of the notorious human-rights-abusing and mass-murdering Chinese Communist Party, but instead for the replacement of current CCP leader Xi Jinping in favor of a more traditionally Marxist-Leninist Party head.

One individual mentioned by MPN was directly hired from NATO in 2019 “to work on cybercrime policy.” 

The man is notable because, “There is sparse information on what [he] did at NATO, but, alarmingly, his own LinkedIn profile stated simply that he worked on ‘psychological operations’ for the military alliance,” MPN said.

The individual removed the references to psyops from his profile after an April article by the publication brought the references to light.

In May of last year, Newsweek published an article chronicling how the Pentagon had created a “secret army” of clandestine online operatives tasked with serving as something of the English-language version of the CCP’s “wumao” state-backed internet influencers.

The article was a result of a two year investigation covering 600 resumes, 1,000 job postings, and a variety of undisclosed Freedom of Information Act requests, Newsweek stated. 

In the end, they found an army 60,000 strong, “many working under masked identities and in low profile,” backed by an annual budget of more than $900 million.

In May, an undercover video sting by investigative journalism team Project Veritas caught a Twitter senior engineer inauspiciously bragging to a woman he believed he was on a date with that staff not only worked as little as a few hours a week and weren’t trying to make money, but that “we’re all commie as f***.”

“I started working for Twitter and became ‘left.’ I think it’s just like the environment… like you’re there and you become like this commie,” he admitted candidly.