300 people decide what's true. They take orders from K Street.
In 1945, President Truman made a fateful decision. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was being dissolved. Most of it would become the CIA. But one piece, the Research and Analysis Branch, went somewhere unexpected.
It went to the State Department. It became the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. And for 80 years, while you worried about the CIA, the real power was hiding in plain sight at Foggy Bottom.
The INR doesn't steal secrets.
It doesn't run agents.
With just 300 employees, it's the smallest agency in the intelligence community. But according to whistleblower testimony now under federal investigation: "When I say that the State Department is a lot more dangerous than the CIA, I'm telling you that's the way it is, because they negotiate all the deals."
The INR doesn't gather intelligence. It manufactures it.
It takes raw data and shapes it into whatever story power needs told. And for four years under Antony Blinken—WestExec co-founder—it shaped intelligence to match promises made in corporate boardrooms years earlier.
This is how they turned truth into product.
The Gossip Column
At a 2022 Spy Museum event, something extraordinary happened. INR officials, thinking they were among friends, revealed exactly how they see themselves.
They called themselves "the page six of the intelligence community."
Page Six. The New York Post's gossip column. The place where narrative matters more than truth, where perception becomes reality, where the story is whatever sells papers.
The metaphor was more honest than they intended. Because the INR doesn't investigate. It narrativizes. It doesn't discover truth. It constructs it.
During the Biden administration, those constructions served one purpose: justifying policies that WestExec had already sold.
Ellen McCarthy, then running the INR, explained their actual job with wild candor: "We have people whose entire job it is to ensure that the rest of the intelligence community, those agencies that do collections, are satisfying the needs of the policy maker. They're satisfying the needs of the Secretary of State."
Read that again.
The intelligence community's job wasn't to inform policy.
It was to satisfy the policy maker.
The Bloodline
To understand the INR's power, you need to understand its DNA.
When the OSS recruited in the 1940s, it didn't visit state schools or factory towns. It went to Yale, Harvard, Princeton. It recruited Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Mellons.
The American aristocracy didn't just join the OSS. They were the OSS.
According to declass’d OSS records and confirmed by
’s testimony: "It was actors. Vanderbilts. Rothschilds. They were called out by name."When OSS became INR, the bloodlines continued.
Sons followed fathers. Proteges followed mentors. The same families, the same clubs, the same worldview. Passed down like heirlooms along with the family silver.
This matters because the INR was never about intelligence in any objective sense. It was about maintaining a particular vision of American power.
One that serves elite interests while wearing the mask of national security.
Manufacturing Ukraine
Want to see the INR in action?
Watch how they built the Ukraine narrative.
Before Russia activated, INR assessments painted a specific picture.
Ukraine's military was resilient. Its government was democratic. Its cause was righteous. These assessments didn't just inform policy. They invented it. Weapons flowed. Aid packages passed. NATO hustled to expand.
But here's what those assessments left out: Ukraine ranking among Europe's most corrupt nations. The Azov Battalion and other neo-Nazi units integrated into its military. The banning of opposition parties. The closure of independent media. The imprisonment of journalists.
These weren't intelligence failures. They were intelligence products.
Multiple former analysts, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the same pattern: "We'd get the conclusion first, what the Secretary needed to be true. Then we'd work backwards to find intelligence that supported it."
The narrative had already been sold by WestExec to Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and every other defense contractor profiting from a war their advisory fees helped engineer.
The INR's job was to make that narrative look like intelligence analysis.
The China Double Game
The INR's most audacious manipulation involved China.
On one side: INR threat assessments painted Beijing as an existential danger, justifying massive defense spending that enriched WestExec clients.
On the other side: The same State Department was approving Huawei, ZTE, and Aventura Technologies as intelligence vendors.
How does the same building that produces "China threat" reports also approve Chinese surveillance companies as partners?
Because the threat was the product.
The fear was the commodity.
The actual relationship with China was something else entirely. A careful balance that kept tensions profitable but never genuinely dangerous.
The INR made this possible through compartmentalization. The analysts writing threat assessments never saw the procurement approvals. The officials approving Chinese vendors never read the threat assessments they contradicted. The left hand was kept ignorant of the right hand—by design.
The Bioweapon Blueprint
In 2005, then-Senators Obama and Richard Lugar were detained at a Russian airport. They were traveling to Ukraine to ‘inspect biological research facilities’.
The same laboratories that would later become central to a certain pandemic..
The INR wrote the intelligence assessments that justified those labs. They shaped the narrative that presented biological research in former Soviet states as purely defensive. They created the framework that allowed dual-use research, work that could create both vaccines and weapons, to proliferate under U.S. funding.
When COVID emerged, the INR shaped the narrative again.
Not to investigate origins, but to provide intel supporting whatever explanation policy makers needed. The lab leak theory wasn't suppressed because it was wrong, it was suppressed because it wasn't the product being sold.
The 300 Who Rule
With just 300 employees, the INR shaped more policy than agencies ten times its size.
How?
Because they controlled interpretation. Raw intelligence is meaningless without analysis. Data requires narrative. Facts need framework.
The INR provided all three, shaped to order.
They turned intelligence into a subscription service. WestExec clients didn't just buy future policy, they bought the intelligence assessments that would justify that policy. They purchased reality itself, custom-manufactured by 300 people in Foggy Bottom who understood their real job: making true whatever power needed to be true.
One analyst described the culture:
"There's a joke in the building. CIA tells you what is. NSA tells you what was said. INR tells you what should be. And under Blinken, 'what should be' meant whatever WestExec had promised would be."
The System Perfected
The genius of the INR-WestExec partnership was its elegance.
WestExec would meet with corporate clients, learning what policies would benefit them. They'd advise these clients to position themselves for "likely future developments." Then WestExec alumni would return to government, where INR would provide intelligence supporting exactly those developments.
It wasn't prediction. It was production.
Take the $113 billion in Ukraine aid. In 2019, WestExec advised defense contractors to prepare for "Eastern European contingencies." By 2021, INR was producing assessments warning of Russian aggression. By 2022, those contractors were perfectly positioned for the largest weapons transfer since World War II.
Coincidence? Or coordination?
You already know the answer.
The Deeper Game
The INR's 300 employees aren't stupid. They're not evil. They're something more dangerous:
True Believers.
They genuinely think that serving power serves America.
They can't conceive of intelligence that doesn't conform to elite consensus because they are the elite consensus. They're the third generation of families who've been shaping American intelligence since 1945.
To them, manufacturing intelligence isn't corruption. It's statecraft.
Shaping reality isn't lying. It's leadership.
Serving WestExec's clients isn't betrayal.
It's maintaining the natural order where those who matter make decisions for those who don't.
The Reckoning
Today, the INR faces its first real crisis since 1945.
Criminal investigations are examining whether intelligence was deliberately falsified. Congressional committees are demanding documents showing how threat assessments aligned perfectly with defense contractor wish lists. Foreign allies questioning whether US intelligence can ever be trusted.
But the real question isn't whether crimes were committed.
It's whether we're willing to acknowledge that the entire system is criminal. That intelligence has become indistinguishable from marketing. That analysis has become advocacy. That truth has become whatever powerful people need it to be.
Security clearances were revoked. Investigations are expanding. But until we understand that the INR wasn't corrupted by WestExec, it was WestExec's natural partner, we haven't truly learned the lesson.
The shell company needed an official intelligence agency to manufacture justifications for its promises. The intelligence agency needed a shell company to monetize its products.
Together, they turned American foreign policy into a closed loop where corporate profit and national security became the same thing.
Tomorrow, in Part III, we’ll examine the architect who connected all the pieces: Lisa Monaco, who built the bridges between surveillance and suppression, between pandemic control and population management, between intelligence and enforcement.
And yes, her security clearance was revoked, too.
But her story is just beginning.
<3EKO
Next: Part III—The Monaco Doctrine: From FISA to Epstein
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I spent 30 years in the defense industry. We did exactly as you described but paraphrased from a defense contractor viewpoint: We'd get the conclusion first; what the SecDef and CJCS wanted to buy from Lockheed. Then we'd work backwards and modify our warfare and engineering models to support our proposed weapons systems to match the desired weapons system.
Case in point: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. I was part of a team that was tasked to analyze the requirements from NATO nations. When my team and I walked into that conference room at Lockheed Martin Aero in Ft Worth, we saw stacks of boxes containing the requirements from 11 NATO nations. Within one day, we were given the answer. Gentlemen: NATO ALWAYS buys what we build, NOT what they want us to build. THAT WAS THE ANSWER. So LM built 3 variants: A Navy jet with beefy landing gear and a tail hook. A Marine Corps with VTOL capability to replace the AV-8B Harrier, and an Air Force version that can land easily on 10,000 ft runways. We had to go through the motions but that's how it works. Those countries buying F-35's like hotcakes. President Trump is right - again. The world buys what AMERICA makes.
The corruption of what I have always believed to be the "shining light on the hill" is so demoralizing. I love the Constitution and the ideals it seeks. And I understand that anything humans touch degrades the ideal. I just didn't understand how far degraded our government has been in my lifetime. Tens of thousands have died based on the hidden corruption perpetrated by these elites in our government. People need to go to prison for a long time. We need DOGE and Hegseth and Bondi and Rubio to ruthlessly scrub out the rot. I pray it happens. Thank you, EKO.