Former CIA chief of staff Larry Pfeiffer called the coup talk “very disturbing.” He virtually cringed at the thought of foreign embassies in Washington filing reports on the possibility of martial law in the United States.

“This is the kind of behavior that gets intelligence officers at embassies writing cables home about impending coup plotting,” he told SpyTalk. “Usually those are Americans writing the cables. Not this time.”

Even before the coup talk, said former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos, foreign diplomats at embassy receptions in Washington were openly worrying about the president’s mental state. “The subject was, is the American president acting like Kurtz,” he told SpyTalk…

And now the CIA’s foreign counterparts are bringing it up in bilateral meetings with others around. “My friends overseas are embarrassed,” Polymeropoulos said. “We represent America.” It looks like “we’re crazy town.”