I do think you have a point that the excerpt is pretty weak and boring, and overall the article isn’t particularly compelling. I won’t comment on the deep-stat

I do think you have a point that the excerpt is pretty weak and boring, and overall the article isn’t particularly compelling. I won’t comment on the deep-state stuff as that appears to be a dog whistle for some other political argument. What I do find interesting: a lot has changed since the 80s. The idea proposed in this article that low level employees still have access to documents is far-fetched in the modern age of email, virtual ACLs, etc. I suspect that the agent was not instructed to steal documents but rather to execute binaries on computers in the secure network. We know from other reporting that Russian tradecraft has the agent use shortwave communication to transmit and communicate with their handler. For example, the agent would sit in a cafe and await the arrival of the handler, who would never enter the cafe but be nearby in a car. That is modern tradecraft. We also know from the Vault 7 leaks that the CIA focused most of their implant development on binaries that would be executed by someone knowingly infecting their computer. That is another example of modern tradecraft.