The tell-tale signs were always there. When John Owen Brennan, who had served as Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser was sworn in to head the Central Intelligence Agency, the Jesuit-educated former CIA officer opted to take the oath on a copy of the U.S. Constitution, not on the bible as every past CIA director, Christian and Jewish, had done. Brennan is also the highest-ranking U.S. official to have ever visited the Islamic holy city of Mecca, a privilege reserved only for pious Muslims and special guests of the Saudi King, who also serves as the “Guardian of the Two Shrines of Mecca and Medina.”

Brennan served as the CIA’s station chief in Riyadh in the mid-1990s and in 1999, he worked himself up to the position of chief of staff to CIA director George Tenet. Obama wanted to appoint Brennan CIA director in 2009, but there was internal CIA and congressional opposition to his nomination. The reasons for the nomination were said to be Brennan’s involvement in “enhanced interrogation” techniques used against detainees after 9/11, but the actual reasons for the initial opposition remains unclear to this day. However, when the Senate voted to confirm Brennan in 2013, 34 senators voted no. They included Rand Paul (R-KY), who attempted to filibuster the confirmation vote; Ted Cruz (R-TX); Charles Grassley (R-IA); Patrick Leahy (D-VT); Mike Lee (R-UT); Jeff Merkley (D-OR); Bernie Sanders (D-VT); and Richard Shelby (R-AL). Barbara Boxer (D-CA) did not vote. What did these senators actually know about Brennan, especially the Democrats, who decided Brennan was not fir for the job?

It is known that Brennan, both at the National Security Council and at the CIA, has forbid the use of the term “jihadist” to describe Islamist terrorists. He prefers the term “extremists.” There is now ample evidence to suggest that Brennan himself converted to Wahhabist Islam and considers himself a “jihadist,” or “holy warrior.”

The recent revelation by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), that the Obama administration, including Brennan at the CIA, ignored the threat of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), provides yet further proof that a Saudi and Wahhabist “Manchurian Candidate” now occupies the director’s chair on the seventh floor of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Flynn said that the White House and supporters of the Syrian rebellion against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ignored the DIA’s SECRET report from August 2012 on the rise of the Islamist caliphate in Syria and Iraq and did nothing to stop it. Flynn made his accusations to Al Jazeera, which attempted to throw cold water on Flynn’s notion that the U.S. was responsible for the rise of ISIL and disputed Flynn’s statement that it was the U.S. that funneled arms to Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Jazeera, funded by the Qatar government, has hired a number of Muslim Brotherhood members for its news crews and editorial staffs.

Brennan has shuttled frequently between Langley, Jerusalem, and Riyadh to coordinate arms transfers and other logistical support to ISIL and their allied fighters in Syria and Iraq. WMR has frequently reported on witnesses in Syria, the Golan Heights, Iraq’s Anbar province, and Iraqi Kurdistan to have seen CIA and Israeli Mossad commandos transferring weapons to ISIL and affiliated forces.

A few weeks before the Senate voted to confirm Brennan as CIA director, former FBI agent

John Guandolo revealed that Brennan had, indeed, converted to Wahhabist Islam while he was CIA station chief in Riyadh. Guandalo quoted Brennan as having said that he “marveled at the majesty of the Hajj.” The Hajj is the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and is reserved only for devout Muslims. Guandalo was quoted as telling a radio interviewer, “Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia.” A website that is known to be financed by the CIA and George Soros, Snopes.com, attacked the notion that Brennan is a Wahhabist and ignored the controversy completely. The similarly CIA- and Soros-influenced Wikipedia completely ignored the controversy.

One of Brennan’s chief lieutenants at the CIA, the agency’s chief of the Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), known only as “Roger,” did convert to Sunni Islam. This fact was reported by The Washington Post. “Roger’s” career at the CIA started about the same time that Brennan joined the agency. “Roger, ” whose real name is Michael A. D’Andrea or “Mike”, joined in 1979, Brennan in 1980. Both became fluent in Arabic. D’Andrea’s CIA nickname was “The Wolf.”

During the Cold War, the CIS funded the establishment of a Muslim Brotherhood operating cell in Munich called the Munich Islamic Center. The center recruited Turkish Muslim CIA operatives from Germany’s Turkish “guest worker” community. These Turks were also ardent pan-Turkic nationalists whose symbol is the wolf. The Grey Wolves of Turkey, a right-wing group, were behind the 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Vatican City in a false flag operation designed to blame the Soviet Union and Bulgaria for the attack. One of the Munich Center’s chief CIA operatives was Muhammad Abdel Karim Grimm, a German Christian convert to Salafist Islam.

Another convert to Islam who rose in the ranks of the CIA is Andrew Warren. In 2008, Warren, the CIA’s station chief in Algiers, was ordered home by the ambassador after he was charged with drugging two Algerian Muslim women, having non-consensual sex with them, and filming the alleged rapes. Before 9/11, Warren, who speaks six Arabic dialects and Persian, left the CIA and took a job with Citigroup in New York but quickly returned to the CIA after the attack. In 2010, Warren received a 65-month prison sentence for “abusive sexual conduct” while in Algiers and unlawful use of cocaine while possessing a firearm in Norfolk. He pleaded guilty to the two charges but prosecutors decided not to charge Warren with rape, which would have carried a life sentence. The sentence was two more years than requested by federal prosecutors.

WMR learned from a well-placed U.S. intelligence source that Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings was working on a story about Warren and Brennan before he died in a suspicious fiery auto crash in Beverly Hills, California, in June 2013, a little over three months after Brennan became CIA director. The perennially-suspect Wikipedia incorrectly lists Warren’s religion as “Christian.”

What is alarming is that while President Obama is trying to get congressional approval for the P5+1 nuclear pact with Iran, a pro-Saudi Wahhabist cell within the CIA, that is working with Israel’s powerful lobby in Washington, could not only be trying to sabotage the Iran deal but are working together to provide U.S. military and other aid to ISIL.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2015 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).