What’s Joe Di Trani doing these days?
You may recall that before he resigned from the six-party negotiations team, Di Trani was one half of the New York Channel, along with Han Song Ryol (Han, who is a real bastard, has also moved on). Those were the bilateral talks that the State Department was pretending not to have while the Democrats and some Republicans were demanding we have them. Di Trani, who was at the CIA previously, went to the Directorate of National Intelligence. Now (via Richardson) Di Trani is the “project manager” for North Korea at the DNI. I found this quote interesting:
The lessons-learned inquiry on the role of the mission manager also raised some longer-term gaps in the intelligence community’s coverage of North Korea. While officials declined to discuss most of the findings, one area that DNI officials want to improve is what they call “open source” reporting. In other words, they want to do a better job of collecting and analyzing information available in foreign newspapers and broadcasts, on websites, and from other public sources.
“The community doesn’t do it enough, yet, by any means. Culturally, we have never valued open source,” says Graham. “If we do it right, we will better know where to spend our clandestine resources.”
My impression of Di Trani, aside from the fact that he’s a very genial person, is that he is, to put it mildly, no hard-liner, but also no fool. I can’t say any more without violating an off-the-record pledge to Katie Hassig (and that’s not something I would recommend).
Outpost of Trani.