Staff Writer @theatlantic. Author. Podcaster. Filmmaker. https://teapaw.org/t.co/MzUhRIy2uw Signal: shaneharris.64
Washington, DC
Joined July 2009
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Shane Harris retweeted
NEWS w/ @anna_c_kramer: Trump aides are privately pressing US firms to take shipments Russian diesel currently crossing the Atlantic, sources say
Firms do not want to say yes, seeing major legal & reputational risks
Ukrainians warn against accepting “blood money”
washingtonsun.com/whitehouse…
This also could have been a segment on The Electric Company. Things like this were the visual landscape of my early childhood.
I like to imagine the 1975 Oval Office meeting when Gerald Ford, pipe clenched between his teeth, WH Chief of Staff Don Rumsfeld and his deputy Dick Cheney greenlit this ad.
Cheney: “It’s the bicentennial next year. We need to get the hippies on board.”
Ford: “Darn right. The bums in Haight-Ashbury are American too.”
Rumsfeld: “We have just the thing, Mr. President.”
Shane Harris retweeted
Exclusive: Pete Hegseth has fired another top general in the military—presaging more upheaval in the Pentagon’s upper echelons as Trump looks to break the stalemate of the war with Iran, @nancyayoussef reports: theatlantic.com/national-sec…
The Year AI Ate Math
“My field is as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. Is it for the machines now?”
By @stevenstrogatz
theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…
Shane Harris retweeted
A State Department official confirmed that a statement posted by Kristi Noem to her official envoy account and personal X account was created using fabricated State Department letterhead and was not an official department press release; first reported by Politico
Reminder: cbsnews.com/news/cia-directo…
Shane Harris retweeted
A senior Ukrainian commander told me he lost more than $1 million in drones the first night StarShield went out. The next 3 days, speeds remained so unstable they canceled almost all ops striking RU logistics to protect Ukrainian infantry in the kill zone nytimes.com/2026/10/21/world…
New in @TheAtlantic, my profile of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, one of Trump's closest advisers, and the man in the middle of the president's deeply conflicted Ukraine policy.
theatlantic.com/national-sec…
Ratcliffe has made good on his promise to focus the agency on clandestine ops. Several people remarked, if you're working in the Special Activities Center, you're very happy these days! Ratcliffe has publicly lauded CIA's role in the Venezuela raid, Iran, and the rescue of a downed pilot.
But some of these covert missions have stirred anxiety inside the CIA. Recently retired officers told me that some of their colleagues have avoided taking jobs in the Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center, because they want no part of the agency's reported role in potentially illegal boat strikes or other counternarcotics missions in the region. “There are people at the operational level who, when the Democrats take over the House, will be left holding the bag,” one former officer told me. “The agency is over its skis right now.”
But on the flip side, people told me, things could have been much worse. Some of those 60 probationary employees were already on performance-improvement plans, meaning they weren't working up to standards. And unlike Patel or Hegseth, Ratcliffe doesn't routinely vilify his own workforce or stoke culture wars in the ranks.