CIA’s cover blown in Brazil, but still safe in the New York Times
By
Bill Van Auken
23 June 2017
The identity of the CIA’s station chief in Brazil, previously a closely guarded secret of the US government, was plastered across every Brazilian newspaper and reported throughout the country’s mass media earlier this week.
Duyane Norman, who had previously been working under the all-too-common cover of a “political officer” in the US Embassy in Brasilia, was listed as the “station chief of the CIA” in a public schedule released by Brazil’s Institutional Security Council (known by its Portuguese acronym as the GSI) for its chief minister, Gen. Sérgio Etchegoyen.
The US Embassy refused to “confirm or deny” whether Norman headed the US intelligence agency’s operations in Latin America’s largest country.
Folha de Sao Paulo quoted the GSI—which oversees the Brazilian spy agency, the ABIN—as saying the public daily schedule, which is regulated by the Free Information Act of 2012, “is an active instrument of transparency” and “the names and positions of all attendees are to be registered in accordance to the principles of transparency, without exception.”
That such a formal regulation would compel the secretive Brazilian security agency to blow the cover of the CIA’s top man in the country strains credulity. The possibility that the incident involved some sort of “spy versus spy” frictions playing out between the two intelligence agencies, reflecting broader conflicts between US and Brazilian capital, cannot be discounted.
There is also the possibility, however, that the naming of the CIA chief was the product of incompetence and crisis within a Brazilian government confronting continuing economic crisis and mounting social unrest, while…