An INS special forum: US intelligence officers’ involvement in political activities in the Trump era

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Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

John A. Gentry is an adjunct professor with the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and an adjunct associate professor with the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. He is a former CIA intelligence analyst.

Retired intelligence leaders versus President Trump

David M. Barrett

We were invited to comment for this Forum on ‘activism’ directed against presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 and against President Trump since his 2017 inauguration by former and current intelligence officers. But a better framing of the topic is Trump’s overt antagonism and indifference toward intelligence agencies during his candidacy and presidency, and the resulting pushback from retired and current intelligence officers. My essay focuses on the retired intelligence agency leaders.

On 7 October 2016, Department of Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson and DNI James Clapper issued a statement saying,

The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process … .We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.⁹

The statement might have given a responsible presidential candidate pause, but candidate Trump responded: ‘We are being hacked because we have people who don’t know what they are doing.’¹⁰ This was because of failed presidential leadership, he said: ‘Whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over.’¹¹

I recall telling my US Presidency students that autumn that relations between Trump and US intelligence would be ‘interesting’ should there be a Trump presidency. He did win the presidency, and no one would deny that the last few years have been painfully interesting.

Authors’ guidelines for these essays allow me to detail the above revealing ‘encounter’ between Trump and the intelligence establishment, but they preclude me from enumerating a history of President Trump’s denigration of the intelligence agencies under his authority. No matter. Who could forget the president’s blunt, disrespectful dismissals of conclusions reached by those agencies – on topics including North Korea’s continuing nuclear ambitions, the Saudi Arabian government leaders’ responsibility for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the threats posed by Iran, and of course Russia’s continuing intervention in US politics?

There has been pushback from former leaders of intelligence agencies and, quite obviously, there are some currently working at those agencies who have resisted the president’s abuse of US intelligence. Here, I focus on Clapper, former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden, and former DCIA John Brennan – who have forcefully criticized President Trump.

Hayden wrote in the New York Times in April 2018, ‘We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years. But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter.’ Later, he spoke of ‘a White House that says so many things that are unrelated to objective reality.’¹²

Clapper was about to depart his job as DNI when President-elect Trump responded to leaks that he believed came from a US intelligence source by saying, ‘That’s something that Nazi Germany would have done.’ Clapper understandably called Trump to remonstrate.¹³ Taking note of Trump’s infamous spoken invitation to Russia during the 2016 campaign to find former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ‘missing emails,’ by then former DNI Clapper told a reporter in 2019, ‘The Russians did exactly what he asked them to do. That very day, after-hours, the GRU went and searched for those e-mails.’ Further, ‘the Mueller investigation report points out, that the [Trump] campaign expected to benefit electorally from the support given to them by the Russians.’¹⁴

More dramatically, there has been the feud between President Trump and Brennan. In a joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in July 2018, reporters pressed Trump on whether he agreed with US intelligence assessments that Russia had intervened in the 2016 US presidential election. He replied, ‘[DNI] Dan Coats came to me and some others saying they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.’ Trump’s statement was ‘nothing short of treasonous,’ Brennan tweeted.¹⁵

Brennan is (unhelpfully) more caustic and emotional than the other Trump critics, but it needs to be said that all of the above critiques were in response to a president unlike all others. Most presidents since Harry Truman have privately, sometimes bitterly, complained about supposed intelligence inadequacies, but none has publicly said (or tweeted), ‘They are wrong! … Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school.’¹⁶

I think Hayden is right. He and the others have a moral obligation (and a constitutional right) to alert the public about a president who has repeatedly ‘messaged the entire American intelligence community – if you stand up and say things that upset the president or with which he disagrees, he will punish you.’¹⁷ It is a dangerous state of affairs.

Will this phenomenon of former intelligence leaders loudly criticizing a president continue beyond the Trump era? I think it depends almost entirely on the behavior of future presidents. I hope that those chief executives will not repeatedly and publicly denigrate intelligence professionals. Why should they? In that case, I predict the rhetoric of former agency heads will be pretty tame. Something to look forward to!

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David M. Barrett is a Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He has a B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, as well as an M.A. from the University of Essex in England. He has authored two books on President Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, plus The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy and (with co-author Max Holland) Blind Over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis. For these books, he did research at about 25 archives around the United States. He is currently working on a history of the CIA and the Kennedy presidency. At Villanova, he teaches courses on national security, the presidency, and US intelligence.

Professionalism, politics, and truth

Richard K. Betts

Exactly what is the issue? If it is whether newly aggressive political commentary by intelligence personnel is improper, this is a subset of the timeless issue of professional–political relations – the responsibilities of career professional services of the permanent government (or, pejoratively conceived, ‘deep state’) to elected political leaders. In this instance, the question has little significance in its own right apart from the far larger constitutional and political context in which it is being manifested. The problem that is the premise of this symposium is only one symptom of a far larger crisis.

There have always been occasional tensions in the professional–political relationship since the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act over a century ago, replacing the spoils system with a merit-based structure supposedly insulated from partisan manipulation. Concerns have been most recognized in civil–military relations, but in whatever area they have rarely been big problems. If strains in the intelligence community have suddenly become prominent in a shocking way, it is mainly because the larger systemic constraints of public service within which they play out have gone awry in an equally shocking way. Thus, however disturbing intensified politicization of intelligence professionals may be, whether it recedes, persists, or grows will depend on how that larger political context evolves.

One underlying contributor to current tension is hard to measure: the sociology of intelligence analysts. Mainly because of self-selection, attitudes, ideologies, and assumptions about how the world works are not randomly distributed among social or professional groups. Military officers, for example, are disproportionately conservative and Republican. This has not been a significant problem when Democrats are in power because of the robust commitment to the supremacy of civilian authority and against mixing political opinions with military functions. The norm that military officers should be apolitical eroded in the late twentieth century when the professional tradition of not voting (lest making a choice would imply impaired loyalty if the opposite candidate was elected) went away, but it remains strong enough to preclude serious concern. Yet the norm against overt partisanship has been significantly challenged a few times, as when McClellan ran against Lincoln and MacArthur was insubordinate to Truman. It still falters occasionally, as when General Singlaub challenged President Carter’s Korea policy or in a brief burst of incidents of disrespect to President Clinton by military personnel in the early 1990s. It can also be put under subtle stress, as today in the pervasive constant tuning of televisions in common areas of military installations to Fox News.

Nothing yet in political activity or speech of intelligence officers matches the most problematic examples of civil–military relations. If recent political criticism by some, especially those retired, seems extreme, it is in response to extreme provocation. Consider an analogy. How unusually extreme would professional military reactions have been in 1993 if President Clinton had publicly disparaged their performance and aligned with a foreign adversary against them – in short, what President Trump did in public comments in July 2018 rejecting official American intelligence about Russian interference in US elections, with Vladimir Putin smirking at his side. One can only guess since no other president has ever done anything like that. Since 2016 the president has repeatedly impugned the professional intelligence community, even charging the FBI (hardly a hotbed of leftist radicalism) with plots against him.

In contrast to the professional military, or even the FBI, intelligence analysts in CIA or the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) tend to be disproportionately liberals and Democrats. Until recently this sociological fact has been neither prominent nor important (at least outside the Washington Beltway) because the political environment was much less bitterly polarized, most people in both parties and within the permanent government felt themselves to be in the moderate center with much in common, political compromise was the default option, and political conflicts in society at large were mostly played out in civilized ways. Stable maintenance of the political neutrality of professionals in government was facilitated by the reality that this broad center blunted the salience of moral outrage about opponents’ policy initiatives. In recent years the center in American politics has contracted and it has become ever harder for anyone to rub the sharp edges off partisan differences. The ideological orientation of personnel in certain parts of the IC that has normally been latent was activated by the climate in which each side of the political divide has come to see the other as a genuine threat to the republic.

The Trump years are not the first time former leaders of the IC have been visible and vocal in politics, nor has their politicization all been on one side of the partisan divide. One former director of central intelligence (DCI) even ran for president three times (Bush the First). Although recent political attacks by retired intelligence leaders have mostly been against President Trump, former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn led the chant to ‘Lock her up!’ at the convention that nominated him.

In any case, there is a critical difference between intelligence officers on active duty and ones who have retired. For the former, the Hatch Act ought to be enough to suppress professionally objectionable public advocacy. (It would be too much to try to discipline what working analysts talk about around the water cooler.) If the main problem is the high public profile of retired IC leaders, however, the issue is analogous to controversies over whether retired generals and admirals should speak out politically. Some civil–military relations' theorists like Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn argue for a strong norm against this. Restraint should indeed be the norm when the question is routine partisan politics, but on matters retired individuals consider within their sphere of competence and of extraordinary import they should be free to exercise their First Amendment rights to participate in policy debate. The same applies to retired intelligence officers. The line between routine and extraordinary may be hard to discern and maintain in practice but that should be the guiding principle.

If moderation, centrism, and compromise revive as the dominant tendencies in American politics, pressures to politicize professional guilds within the permanent government should ebb. If society-wide polarization continues, so will the politicizing pressures. That will be regrettable for the most part. Reverence for the constitutional value of checks and balances, however, may mitigate regret if the professionals of the deep state help save the USA from excesses of an ignorant, dishonest, impulsive, and reckless president, whenever she or he may happen into office.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Richard K. Betts is the Arnold Saltzman Professor, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, director of the International Security Policy program at Columbia University, and author of Enemies of Intelligence (Columbia University Press).

Reflections on the deep state myth

Nicholas Dujmović

The concept of US intelligence as a dangerously self-centered and potentially undemocratic conspiracy is not new. Many years ago, I wrote about this perception in Intelligence and National Security, calling it the ‘Evil Geniuses’ school of thought.¹⁸ More recently, I learned that it goes by the more ominous moniker, the ‘Deep State,’ which is now apparently a political science term.

As someone who spent 40 years in federal service, 26 of them at CIA, I’m amused by the Deep State concept. Sure, intelligence officers are federal employees and work in bureaucracies, but the idea that bureaucracies have interests is banal – why single out intelligence? Our society could more usefully focus on the harm done to our young people because of education bureaucracies.

Regarding the Deep State, I agree with Michael Hayden, ‘There is no “deep state” … There is merely “the state” [and] career professionals doing their best within the rule of law.’¹⁹ Likewise, my experience of the Deep State is that there is no Deep State. Of course, maybe the Deep State conspiracy was all around me and duped me all that time. As my wife will tell you, I’m often not quick on the uptake. But for 26 years? Working and interacting directly with the most senior leaders of CIA?

In August 2019, I happened to talk with former Deputy DNI Sue Gordon just after she had been forced to resign after 40 years in intelligence service. We shared a laugh about the fact that people around the president saw her as the Deep State, allegedly because of her ties to former DCIA John Brennan.

DNI Dan Coats, who had planned his departure for some time, didn’t have that particular albatross, but he left at the same time because apparently he was unwilling or unable to rein in those agency leaders who, when asked publicly in open congressional testimony, provided intelligence judgments that contradicted administration policies on North Korea, Iran, and Russia. As any mature observer of intelligence knows, intelligence is going to challenge policy sooner or later because intelligence is supposed to make its best judgment without regard to policy or policy outcomes.

It is my judgment that the men and women of US intelligence have generally hewed to that standard over the decades, albeit with some exceptions that don’t ‘prove the rule’ but are anomalies. The historic norm for US intelligence is to serve our country professionally.

Even so, it is clear to me that these are unique times for US intelligence in its relationship with the American people. Three recent developments seem historically unique, and each one of them plays a role in the populist perception of US intelligence as the Deep State.

First, we’ve never seen a president who publicly lambastes US intelligence as does Donald Trump. Other presidents have praised US intelligence in public or have been at most mildly critical in public while being extremely critical in private. It turns out the opposite with this president – he’ll say in private how much he appreciates intelligence officers, but in public he compares them to Nazis, asserts that intelligence is running amok, and, most recently, labels a CIA ‘whistleblower’ concerned about the possible abuse of the presidency as ‘close to a spy’ and guilty of ‘treason.’ The president’s own rhetoric, more than any other factor, fans the flames of Deep State thinking.

In second place, there’s the unhelpful role of the ‘former seniors’ – retired leaders of CIA and other intelligence agencies. Traditionally, intelligence officers went silently into retirement and stayed out of the political arena. But in recent years, they have been publicly vocal to an unprecedented degree, expressing partisan opposition to Trump, who then comes out with his tweets and other statements (see above). I categorize the former seniors into three groups who are:

• Highly critical but with a measure of respect (former DCIA Michael Hayden and former DNI James Clapper).

• Very critical and not very respectful (former acting DCIA Michael Morell).

• Shrilly critical and downright disrespectful, even purposefully insulting (John Brennan).

The statements and activities of these former seniors give the overall impression, especially to Trump supporters, that intelligence is politicized. It makes no difference that these former intelligence officers are now private citizens who are exercising their First Amendment rights out of concern, rightly or wrongly, for what they see. Rather, their criticism appears to Deep State believers as a manifestation of the Deep State and proof of its existence.

Third, there’s a new trend in political culture within the IC, or at least within CIA. It’s one thing for former intelligence officers to express political viewpoints; it’s another thing entirely when currently serving intelligence officers do so openly, even within the organizational culture. When I started at CIA in 1990, the organizational culture was such that one simply didn’t express oneself politically, but I saw that gradually change over the decades to where it is both commonplace and, reflecting general trends in American society, decidedly left-liberal in nature, particularly on social issues dealing with sex, gender, and marriage. John Gentry has rightly identified this as significant development.

Where is all this going? Beats me. It stands to reason, however, that if the public sees evidence that US intelligence officers have abandoned their former professional standards of objectivity and non-partisanship, Deep State advocates will have something to point to.

An interesting potential development concerns the role of popular culture in shaping populist perceptions of the Deep State. In the 1970s, Hollywood exploited increasing distrust of government in general and in intelligence specifically and began producing films that cast US intelligence as a malevolent conspiracy.²⁰ What seems new is a potential for the progressive purveyors of popular culture to run in the opposite direction – to return to the 1960s-era’s positive portrayals of intelligence as a way to oppose the views of this president and just perhaps to undermine the notion of the Deep State that previously was the ‘go to’ portrayal of intelligence on the part of Hollywood. If that happens, it will be unique, and you heard it here first.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nicholas Dujmović has been director of intelligence studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. since 2016. Previously he served for 26 years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst, speechwriter, editor of the President’s Daily Brief, manager, and CIA staff historian.

An enduring new form of politicization?

John A. Gentry

Michael Morell’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton, noted in the introduction to this Forum, marks the appearance of a new form of politicization by intelligence professionals. Sherman Kent famously warned against intelligence officers getting too close to policymaking. And some intelligence officers have tried to influence presidential policies to advance personal or organizational interests. Beginning in 2016, many former and current intelligence professionals sought for the first time to attack and undermine a presidential candidate and then a president. While some formers have defended President Trump, I concentrate in this essay on his critics.

Three characteristics distinguish this activity from previous forms of politicization. First, critics explicitly link their intelligence backgrounds to their political activism – using intelligence credentials to demand legitimacy for their views. Second, they often speak in highly self-righteous terms, claiming they know ‘truth’ that others do not, the inherent uncertainties of intelligence work and the checkered history of intelligence analysis notwithstanding. Third, the critics defend themselves and their agencies vigorously in ways earlier intelligence officers did not; the latter recognized that they sometimes erred and that one of their roles was to serve presidents by taking fault for what really were policy failures.

Key to assessing the importance and endurance of this change is identifying its causes. If critics legitimately and responsibly berate a bizarrely abnormal president, the damage may be, as some Trump critics assert and others less confidently hope for, slight and temporary.²¹ But it is more likely that IC agencies’ internal cultures have changed in ways that permanently encourage political activism with partisan tinges. Writings of some critics, especially former DCIA Hayden and former DNI Clapper, make clear that they oppose Trump’s worldview and policies, not just his criticisms of intelligence.²² Former DCIA Brennan has similarly made clear in tweets and interviews his ideological opposition to Trump. Given that memories of intelligence failures are long and partisan divides in the country now are deep, ‘payback’ for future Democratic presidents also seems likely.

Their political perspectives, consistent with those of then-President Barack Obama, seem to explain why Brennan and Clapper consciously, admittedly, tried to change IC agencies’ organizational cultures in ways that have appreciable political ramifications.²³ These policies centered on enhancing ‘diversity and inclusion’ by fostering recruitment and promotion of women, minorities, and gays – core elements of the Democratic coalition. By making managers accountable for implementing these policies, they injected identity politics into the management of intelligence agencies to an unprecedented degree, generating much support among employees but also what some CIA people call ‘soft totalitarianism’ – intolerance for diverse thoughts about the wisdom of their programs.²⁴ Brennan warned subordinates in 2016 that his progress was reversible and that they had a duty to oppose officials who tried to do so.²⁵

While limited in scope and incomplete, institutional engineering efforts by Brennan and Clapper seem to have contributed to the surge in leaks by serving intelligence professionals. For example, CIA officers leaked that many CIA employees opposed Trump’s first DCIA, Mike Pompeo, because they worried he might reverse Brennan’s ‘progress.’²⁶ Former CIA analyst Nada Bakos reported that many CIA employees believed Pompeo’s alleged ‘backtracking’ on diversity and inclusion threatened the workforce and national security.²⁷ Others leaked that they considered Pompeo objectionable because he was a practicing Christian.²⁸ Ironically, and surprisingly given Trump’s rhetoric, his administration has not significantly changed the internal workings of any IC element.

The volume of formers’ criticism of Trump recently seems to have diminished somewhat. In December 2017, Morell expressed second thoughts about his political activity, saying ‘there were downsides to it that I didn’t think about at the time.’²⁹ Former Deputy DCI John McLaughlin has reduced his criticism on television, saying ‘it was all getting to be too pat, too formulaic, too predictable…. The points have all been made on both sides.’³⁰ Hayden is ill.

Leaks also seem to have declined, especially since CIA careerist Gina Haspel became DCIA in 2018. Haspel is one of them, making her less threatening to the CIA workforce. She also has worked traditionally for President Trump, giving the best intelligence support possible without being partisan or confrontational.³¹ My sources report that she has a good, professional relationship with the president. The absence of press stories of Haspel-Trump tensions supports this narrative, which contradicts a common meme of Trump’s critics: his alleged ‘assault on intelligence.’³²

But Haspel, too, has not forcefully addressed the political activism that Brennan fostered. Unless she does so, and probably even if she does, the worldviews that led to the outbursts of 2016 likely will stay ready to re-activate if desired. Most IC employees (at work) are apolitical civil servants, but even a small number of activists can damage presidential-intelligence relations and thereby the usefulness of US intelligence. Some intelligence professionals evidently remain willing to do so.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

John A. Gentry is an adjunct professor with the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and an adjunct associate professor with the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. He is writing a book on this subject.

Presidential power and political activism

Glenn Hastedt

The intuitive starting point for assessing the political activism of past and present intelligence professionals is the relationship between the president and the intelligence community. While one cannot dismiss the impact of personality or the performance of the IC in understanding this relationship, to a far greater degree it is influenced by the manner in which the president exercise his power. The most frequently used starting point for characterizing presidential power is that it is the power to persuade, which Richard Neustadt first presented in 1960.³³ Congress is the primary target of presidential persuasion, and the Constitution sets the boundaries within which it is exercised. The president is commander-in-chief and the principal architect of foreign policy. The intelligence community reports to presidents, provides them with information, and carries out administration policies. Congress approves the budget and engages in oversight of presidential actions. The intelligence community is a subject of congressional oversight and must be responsive to its requests for information.

These constitutional boundaries are not designed to silence the voice of members of the intelligence community. They do not eliminate the long recognized trilogy of options open to individuals who work in organizations such as intelligence professionals: loyalty, voice, and exit.³⁴ Rather, they provide a framework within which decisions are made on how to exercise individual and collective voices. The historical record shows that this voice can be supportive of the intelligence community or critical of it; that it can be carried out in low-keyed presentations in Congress or highly volatile exchanges; and that it can be done through leaks or released documents.

Today a competing view of presidential power has emerged which holds that the presidential power to persuade Congress is no longer the appropriate starting point for understanding the dynamics of presidential power. Two lines of argument advanced by this competing perspective are particularly important for providing insight into the forces that drive the political voice of past and present members of the IC today.

One perspective advanced by William Howell argues that the dominant characteristic of presidential power today is that it is unilateral.³⁵ Presidents do not pursue their policy agendas primarily by engaging in compromises with Congress to pass legislation but through such devices as executive orders, proclamations, executive agreements, and national security directives. Once reserved for periods of national crises such as that which followed the 9/11 attacks, Howell asserts that not only has unilateral action become the primary instrument of presidential power but that the shift away from compromise to unilateral action has been long in the making. Jeffrey Tulis also sees presidents as redirecting their attention away from bargaining with Congress as the reference point for exercising their power. He too sees an evolutionary process at work. His starting point is not the unilateral issuance of presidential directives but with ‘going over the head’ of Congress and interacting directly with the American people through active and continuous communications to shape public opinion and build support.³⁶

The onset of a unilateral and rhetorical presidency holds great implications not only for Congress but for executive branch agencies as well. The impact on Congress is clear. Both views place Congress in a reactive and restricted policy-making position. The impact on executive branch agencies is to remove a layer of protection from politicization or other forms of presidential interference into their operations by moving them more directly and visibility into the policymaking process. Howell observes that unilateral presidential action is not limitless or without constraints. ‘Demanding policy change does not make it so.’³⁷ Policies must be implemented. Bureaucrats may thwart presidential policy goals by such means as selectively reading their mandates, ignoring especially objectionable provisions, and in the extreme privately or openly challenging presidential policies through resignations, whistleblowing, or public statements. Presidents seek to counter potential bureaucratic challenges to their policies by placing individuals who share their political and worldviews in key positions that once might have been filled with nonpolitical professionals.

In analyzing the rhetorical presidency, Tulis draws a distinction between soft and hard attempts to sway public opinion in support of presidential policies.³⁸ Soft rhetorical efforts center on flattering the pubic by highlighting their collective virtues and values. Hard rhetoric seeks to create or maintain divisions among the public as the core strategy to building a power base from which to govern. In both cases, one consequence is to reduce the quality of public discussion over policies and replace it with efforts to please or manipulate public perceptions of policy initiatives.

These two strands of the modern presidency, unilateral exercises of power and hard rhetoric have come together in the Trump administration. The influence of intelligence within the policymaking process has been diminished as unilateral actions designed to advance Trump’s agenda are his preferred policy tools. The IC has also emerged as a major target of Trump’s hard rhetoric on the claim that has repeatedly sought to obstruct his policies. The way in which they have come together has altered the boundaries within which past and present intelligence professionals exercise their voices, making them more vocal and political in tone.

As long-term trends, unilateralism and rhetorical power are not unique to the Trump administration. They will continue into the future and we should not be surprised to see continued high levels of political activism by intelligence professionals. However, this activism need not have the confrontational look it does today. Changes in presidential foreign policy agendas and shifts from hard to soft rhetoric will lead to changes in the nature and amount of political activism.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Glenn Hastedt is professor and chair of the Justice Studies Department at James Madison University. He received his PhD in political science from Indiana University and has authored a wide range of book chapters and journal articles on intelligence.

Why intelligence and policy-makers clash reexamined

Robert Jervis

In the wake of the intelligence failures of 11 September 2001 and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, relations between the George W. Bush White House and the intelligence community were gravely strained. Then in the fall of 2007, the IC produced its national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program, with the surprising finding that warhead design had halted in the wake of the Iraq War and probably had not resumed. Although in many ways this was good news, it undercut the administration’s diplomatic campaign to ramp up sanctions against Iran. Furthermore, the White House felt that the IC had failed to give it advance warning, while IC leaders believed that they had done so and that White House officials were simply unwilling to accept the message. Officials on both sides described the subsequent atmosphere as ‘poisonous.’

The fact that this episode was so bitter should not blind us to the fact that there are structural reasons for why policy-makers and intelligence clash, as I outlined a decade ago.³⁹ These differences can be productive by surfacing assumptions that would otherwise remain implicit and unexamined. Today’s situation is less happy, however. President Trump and his supporters believe that the IC opposed his election, covered up the crimes of his opponents, exaggerated if not invented stories about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and continually undercut his administration with malicious leaks. In turn, Trump has compared the IC to Nazi Germany and seemed to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rejection of the IC’s finding of Russian interference. Partly as a cause and partly as an effect of Trump’s attitude, former leaders of the IC have denounced him. At this writing (October 2019), the pot has come to a boil with impeachment being likely due to the IC whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.

The IC worked for Richard Nixon who had contempt for it, for Ronald Regan who did not want to be troubled by details, and for Bill Clinton who in the first years of his term simply wished it and foreign policy would go away. But it is particularly hard for the community to deal with a president who carelessly reveals classified information and traffics in fantasies like the respected cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike produced a phony claim that it was the Russians who hacked the Democratic National Committee emails and helped spirit the server away to Ukraine.

It is not unprecedented for IC leaders once out of the office to reclaim their political freedom to opine on policies and politicians, but the volume and vehemence of the current attacks are. Furthermore, they often appear partisan. Although former DNI James Clapper’s politics are unknown and former director of the National Security Agency and CIA Michael Hayden served under Republicans and strongly criticized Obama as well as Trump, the prominent role of former CIA head John Brennan has given many of the criticisms a partisan cast. Indeed, former acting director of the CIA Michael Morrell has publicly regretted his endorsement of Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. Here as in so many aspects of American life, the voracious appetite of cable TV has given these views much more prominence than would otherwise have been the case.

Although we cannot measure the size of the effects, they are surely malign. The American public and perhaps interested audiences abroad who give some credit to Trump’s opinions will come to doubt not only the competence but also the integrity of the IC; the attacks by former IC leaders will reinforce the impression that intelligence cannot be separated from politics.

One question is whether this state of affairs is irreversible. For example, should we expect to see former IC leaders take prominent public positions in the future? Although precedents have been broken, my guess is that the situation will return to something closer to the previous normal when Trump leaves office. For one thing, his successor is not likely to continue the kind of public attacks that have triggered the former IC leaders’ ire. Much also depends on the personalities of the latter. Friends and critics would agree, I believe, that Brennan is prone to be outspoken, to put it mildly. I have trouble believing that former DNI Dan Coates or current DCIA Gina Haspel would respond similarly.

Perhaps more important is the question of how the current controversies have affected IC analysis. Here the problem in answering is not that the question is speculative, but that we lack access to relevant evidence, which is the intelligence that is being produced. My sense from talking to an admittedly small number of analysts is that the impact is slight. Politicization is always a danger, but the physical isolation of CIA and the strong sense of professionalization provide at least some degree of insulation. Furthermore, to the extent that analysts’ liberal biases and reinforcing opposition to the rhetoric and policies of the president are operating, they would be met with counter-pressure against producing papers that fly in the face of administration policies.

The future of relations between the IC and not only this administration but subsequent ones is likely to be affected by the fallout from the charges by the whistleblower about Trump’s policy toward Ukraine and the handling of the relevant documents. At minimum, it will complicate the lives of analysts working on Ukraine and Russia. Writing papers on how leaders of both countries see the United States and how they are likely to react to various events will be challenging, to say the least. The other side of this coin is that this administration, if not later ones, may be even more hesitant to share with intelligence the information that is needed for sensible analysis, especially when it deals with American policy toward that country and what American leaders have conveyed to their opposite numbers.

The task for current policy-makers and IC leaders is to limit the further deterioration of relations. Continuing on the current trajectory would mean that policy would be even less informed by intelligence than is usually the case. A new administration will have a new start but it will inherit the legacies of heightened political conflict. One danger is that the IC will take any critical scrutiny as an attempt at censorship; another is that policy-makers will be quick to take intelligence indicating that their preferred policies will not work as political sabotage. These thoughts can never be banished (and indeed may have some validity), and dealing with them will take mutual attention, patience, and understanding if the country is not to suffer.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Robert Jervis is Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University and Founding Editor of International Security Studies Forum. His most recent book is How Statesmen Think (Princeton University Press, 2017). He was President of the American Political Science Association in 2000–2001 and is the founding editor of the International Security Studies Forum. He has received career achievement awards from the International Society of Political Psychology and International Studies Association’s Security Studies Section, the Grawemeyer Award for the book with the Best Ideas for Improving World Order, and the National Academy of Science’s tri-annual award for behavioral sciences contributions to avoiding nuclear war.

Trump, intelligence, and the amazing technicolor nightmare

Loch K. Johnson

No president has engaged in political warfare against the intelligence agencies of the United States to the extent that Donald J. Trump has, with his three-year-long attack against them. He has castigated the spy agencies for everything from alleged espionage against him to suggesting that their analysis of world events is often useless. The president rejected, too, the incontrovertible findings from special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III that Russian intelligence tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.

The president’s distrust of intelligence became apparent early in his administration when he accused FBI Director James Comey of disloyalty. In response to White House attacks, intelligence chiefs like Comey, Director John Brennan at the CIA, and DNI James Clapper said that the president was attempting to ‘delegitimize’ the intelligence agencies. Adding fuel to the fire in the fall of 2019 was the claim of a CIA officer that Trump had violated his oath of office by using the powers of the White House (promises of foreign military aid) to lean on the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a telephone conversation between the two heads-of-state. Trump seemed to be pressuring Zelensky to investigate self-enrichment improprieties allegedly engaged in by the son of former Vice President Joe Biden – and perhaps the vice president himself – in dealings with the government of Ukraine during the Obama administration. If the president was attempting to influence the 2020 presidential election by besmirching the former vice president, a leading Democratic rival, then the charge had the markings of an impeachable offense.

The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, decided in September 2019 to pursue a formal impeachment inquiry. In turn, Trump threatened to investigate and reveal the identity of the whistleblower and suggested darkly that the individual was guilty of treasonous behavior. The president went further, raising the question of whether Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), ought to be arrested for treason because of his public revelations about Trump’s conversation with President Zelensky.

Following his election, Trump selected as his new DCIA a right-leaning politician, Republican Congressman Mike Pompeo. He had been a leader of the Tea Party faction in the House and the fieriest critic of Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. Yet the CIA is known for its stance above politics, serving as a neutral, fact-finding organization that prides itself on objective analysis, free of ideology. Pompeo often appeared to be more of a White House aide and policymaker than he was an unbiased intelligence director – even calling for regime change in North Korea, as if he were secretary of state or defense rather than DCIA. (He would soon be appointed secretary of state.). Trump went so far as to dispatch Pompeo, when he was still DCIA, to North Korea in 2018, where he engaged in preparations for a diplomatic summit conference between Trump and the president of North Korea – an unprecedented blurring of CIA and State Department roles. Pompeo was widely reported to have supported the president’s plan to abandon the Iranian nuclear-arms pact, casting aside the view of CIA analysts that Tehran had been dutifully honoring the provisions of the agreement.

Trump further accused America’s spy organizations of leaking a secret dossier that alleged he had engaged in sexual improprieties while in Moscow in 2013; that the Obama administration and the FBI had carried out illegal surveillance against him during the campaign; and that the intelligence agencies were involved in behind-the-scenes plots against him that reminded the president of approaches used by the Nazis to defame adversaries during the Third Reich – a comparison that shocked intelligence officers throughout the government. Moreover, while the CIA had sworn off waterboarding against suspected terrorists, Trump proclaimed during the presidential campaign: ‘I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.’ Then, near the end of the year in 2018, Trump would again stun the Intelligence Community by questioning its conclusion that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia had arranged the grisly murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Further, then-HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes become an errand boy for the White House. He met regularly with White House staff to plan how he might best divert the Committee’s attention away from a thorough investigation into possible collusion by Trump with the Russians in derailing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. One of the more astonishing interventions by President Trump into the world of intelligence occurred in August 2018, when he ordered the revocation of John Brennan’s security clearance because Brennan called Trump’s uncritical acceptance of Putin’s assurances that Russian intelligence had not tampered with the presidential election in 2016 as nothing less than ‘traitorous.’

President Trump has acted in a more anti-intelligence manner than any previous president. What would have been a better approach? He could have selected non-political figures to head the intelligence agencies – with Pompeo an especially dubious pick, permitting a highly partisan Tea Party stalwart to lead the CIA. He could have taken the role of intelligence in national security affairs more seriously, as a lamplight helping the United States to see more clearly the pathway forward in world affairs. Further, he could have calmly explained to the American people the purpose of his controversial conversations with the Ukrainian president (if there was a legitimate purpose) and stayed away from trying to co-opt Nunes or otherwise interfere with HPSCI.

The United States and its Intelligence Community will weather this storm. Both are resilient. In the meantime, it is incumbent upon intelligence officers to redouble their dedication to the professional mores of strict objectivity. It will be important, too, for lawmakers, the courts, scholars, and the American people to stand guard against the unfair castigation of the nation’s security agencies and the dangerous dismissal of their thoughtful reports.

Disclosure statement

The author reported no potential conflict of interest.

Notes on contributor

Loch K. Johnson served as senior editor of this journal from 2002 to 2019 and is currently Regents Professor Emeritus, University of Georgia.

Intelligence officers, oaths and loyalty

Mark M. Lowenthal

The Trump administration has been an extremely stressful period for US intelligence. No president has entered office with so hostile an attitude towards US intelligence. (Richard Nixon comes in second, somehow blaming the CIA for his loss to John Kennedy in 1960 and referring to CIA officers as ‘clowns’.) One result of Trump’s ongoing hostility and disregard has been the willingness of former intelligence officers to push back, to defend the Intelligence Community and to question Trump’s assertions and positions.

To be fair, not all of this pushback has been as temperate as one might wish, but the very act of former intelligence officers speaking out has become controversial, raising questions as to the propriety of ‘formers’ taking political stands. After all, the IC prides itself on its non-partisan approach to its profession. Does the willingness of former intelligence officers to violate this norm put the reputation, standing, and future of the Intelligence Community at risk?

Intelligence officers take two oaths. First, along with all other civil servants, we vow to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; … ’ The second oath involves keeping classified material secret; this is a written undertaking that we all sign.

Neither of these undertakings is suspended after we leave government service. But having never given up any of our Constitutional rights, and as citizens of the Republic, do we not have a right – once retired – to speak out?

Some of my colleagues, as well as some outside critics, would say, ‘No.’ Some have argued that we owe the president ‘loyalty.’ Here I disagree. I am loyal to the Constitution. I carry a copy of the Constitution with me, along with a quote from Representative Barbara Jordan, which she stated at the outset of the Watergate hearings: ‘My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.’

As intelligence officers have made public statements and signed letters (I signed the letter protesting the decision to lift John Brennan’s clearances), I have seen something of a cleavage between civil and military intelligence officers. The cleavage is not absolute but, on the whole, retired senior military intelligence officers appear to have been more reticent about criticizing President Trump. The military oath differs from the civil oath. Military personnel also swear to obey the orders of the president and officers appointed by him.

But neither group takes an oath of loyalty to the president. The very concept reminds me of the Fuhrer oath taken by the German military, pledging ‘unconditional obedience’ to Adolf Hitler. I assume this is not what my colleagues mean when they talk of loyalty to the president. In US usage, such a concept simply does not exist.

Our history is replete with senior officials speaking out against US policy or simply resigning because they could not support ongoing policy. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Louis Denfeld was fired for his role in the ‘Revolt of the Admirals’ in 1949. General Douglas MacArthur was fired in 1951 for his insubordinate and public attacks on President Harry Truman’s policy in Korea. In 1958, Lt. Gen. James Gavin resigned in disagreement with President Dwight Eisenhower’s defense policy. In 1965, DCI John McCone quit as he lost access to President Lyndon Johnson over disagreements about policy in Vietnam. DCIs William Raborn (1965–1966) and James Woolsey (1993–1995) quit because they had no access to the president.

Nor has the Intelligence Community been as completely non-partisan as we would like to believe. Beginning in 1977, under President Jimmy Carter, DCIs and now DCIAs have been removed because of a change in partisan control in the White House. DCIs George H.W. Bush, Stansfield Turner and Robert Gates; and DCIAs Michael Hayden and John Brennan all were relieved for this reason. There was a brief hiatus to this policy in 2001, when President George W. Bush kept George Tenet as DCI. Moreover, senior officers serve at the pleasure of the president. Several have been fired – DCIs Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and William Colby, and DNI Dennis Blair – for a variety of reasons.

Despite the fact that the IC and its senior officials operate in this political milieu, the Community has remained non-partisan and professional in its work. This is not only possible but mandatory.

I do not defend the remarks of some former senior officials that have been intemperate. These do not help in the least. But I do believe that few people beyond the IC have a good understanding of what is at risk when US intelligence becomes a political punching bag. I have spent much of my career trying to explain what intelligence does and does not do as a means of broadening understanding and, perhaps, support for intelligence. As Michael Hayden has noted, in a democracy, intelligence functions by permission of the voters and their elected representatives. It is difficult to maintain this very necessary political support without occasionally defending our profession from unwarranted and sometimes ignorant attacks.

Speaking out entails risks. It can look self-serving and may be so to a degree. Several historical figures have asked the same question: ‘If not us, then who?’ There has already been discernible damage to US intelligence since 2017. If veteran intelligence officers do not speak up and alert Congress and the public, what can we expect at the end? We are being true to our oath, to our duty and to our professional responsibility – to warn. But we must do so in a way that builds support without sinking to the level of our harsh and often uninformed critics.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mark M. Lowenthal served as the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis & Production and Vice Chairman for Evaluation on the National Intelligence Council, 2002–2005. He was staff director of the House Intelligence Committee, 1995–1997.

Former intelligence officers in the public square: cause for concern?

Mark Stout

Former American intelligence officers are taking visible part in partisan political debates more than ever. This essay addresses two questions springing from this phenomenon: 1) Is this an indication of politicization within the intelligence agencies? 2) What are the effects of this behavior on the standing of the intelligence profession in the eyes of the public? It concludes that there is little present reason for alarm but much room for research.

We have insufficient data and theoretical understanding to conclude that the participation of former intelligence officers in political debates correlates to partisan politicization in the Intelligence Community. First, we do not know whether the political views of former intelligence personnel reflect or influence the beliefs of serving personnel. Second, we have no data to suggest that actual politicization of intelligence products or processes has increased during the Trump era beyond the normal (mercifully low) level.

Anecdotally, it appears that more former intelligence officers take to the public square to oppose President Donald Trump than to support him. Even assuming that to be true, however, we do not know the relationship of the views of former and current intelligence officers. Indeed, we know very little about the political leanings of the IC’s work force. It could be that the Community is a hot-bed of liberals, Democrats, and never-Trump Republicans but there is little basis in evidence for such an assertion.⁴⁰ Nor is it clear that political leanings are uniform across the Community. The FBI, for instance, has long had a reputation for being right-leaning. Meanwhile, the CIA has a reputation of being to the left of the FBI, and if anyone bothered to ask the question of INR, they would probably make the same assumption. Meanwhile, it is a reasonable guess that the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies lean conservative given that the military is more Republican and more conservative than the US population as a whole. But, crucially, all of these are assumptions.

Furthermore, even if we accept for the sake of argument that the largely anti-Trump views of vocal former intelligence officers reflect the views of the present workforce, this still tells us little about politicization. There is little research on the relationship between intelligence officers’ personal political beliefs and the content of their reporting or analyses – i.e. whether they are engaging in politicization, though Robert Jervis offers some modest but appealing hypotheses on the subject.⁴¹ We do know, however, that ‘objectivity’ is a core component of American intelligence ethics and that it is considered profoundly unprofessional to slant intelligence products on the basis of political preferences.

One bias that American intelligence analysts do have is toward pessimism. It has famously been said that ‘analysts lean toward pessimism – when they smell roses, they look for the funeral train.’⁴² How does this pessimism interact with analysts’ political beliefs when it comes to producing intelligence products? We do not know the answer to this either, but it is easy to imagine President Trump or any president mistaking pessimism for politicization.

There are more data available to enable judgments on whether the public enunciation of partisan opinions by former intelligence officers is harming the standing of the profession in the eyes of the public. Precedents from civil–military relations and current data both suggest that it is not.

Many of the most prominent former intelligence officers who have taken sides regarding President Trump are retired military officers, including General Michael Hayden, Lieutenant General James Clapper, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, and Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer. Some of these officers have supported Trump (Flynn, Boykin, and Shaffer) and others have opposed him (Hayden and Clapper). The behavior of these officers falls not only within the nascent field of civil-intelligence relations but also within the well-developed realm of civil–military relations. Many of the issues raised in the context of civil–military theory do not apply to civilian intelligence personnel. However, one subject that arises in civil–military relations and which may have echoes in civil-intelligence relations is whether participation in the partisan fray will undercut the public’s confidence in the military.⁴³

This fear seems to be unfounded. To begin with, the analogous phenomenon has not occurred with the military. Members of the US military have long been disproportionately Republican and former military officers have engaged in the partisan debate since at least 1992 when former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe endorsed Bill Clinton’s candidacy for president in 1992. At the time, there was great debate as to the propriety of the act.⁴⁴ When another former Chairman, General Hugh Shelton, endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012, it went scarcely remarked.⁴⁵ Yet, despite the ever-increasing participation of retired officers in the political debate, the US military is the most trusted institution in the country.⁴⁶

The situation with the IC is similar; former officers are increasingly participating in the political debate and some people have expressed concern that this will undercut confidence in the community.⁴⁷ Gallup, however, has repeatedly polled the American public about its views on the CIA and the FBI.⁴⁸ These polls show that Americans' views of these two pillars of the Intelligence Community have been steadily improving since 2003. Asked ‘How would you rate the job being done by the [CIA/FBI]? Would you say it is doing an excellent, good, only fair or poor job?’ The results were as follows:

Table

While former intelligence officers are more publicly visible than they have ever been, this is not a cause for alarm about politicization of intelligence work. That said, there is a crying need for research on the questions embedded within this topic. In addition, if in the future there is a spike in politicization of intelligence products, it will be important to examine the internals of the phenomenon. Politicization can be a bottom-up phenomenon in which activist rank and file analysts prioritize partisan advantage over intellectual integrity and the ethical requirement to be objective in serving the constitution and the truth. It can also be a top-down phenomenon. This can happen if agency heads impose a partisan line on production, as was alleged to have happened with regard to some issues during William Casey’s tenure as DCI. It can also happen if leaders, including presidents, engage in what Joshua Rovner calls ‘indirect manipulation,’ the sending of signals about preferred analyses or the enunciation of punishments and rewards for various behaviors by the community.⁴⁹ Finally, one can imagine that politicization might come about because increasingly poisonous American politics led to a redefinition of intelligence ethics to require the kind of agreement with the president that is expected in policy agencies. The good news is that the available evidence shows that the day is not at hand.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mark Stout has served with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and with the Central Intelligence Agency. He has also been the Historian of the International Spy Museum and presently directs the M.A. in Global Security Studies for Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs in Washington, D.C. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Leeds.

Politics and the intelligence community

Gregory F. Treverton

From my perspective, actions by my former colleagues, Jim Clapper, Mike Hayden and John Brennan, don’t seem to be political activism, let alone politicizing intelligence. There might have been a reason to question what they did in ‘normal’ times. But these are not normal times: it is now thinkable that a president of the United States might unleash civil war rather than submit to electoral defeat. The first American republic is in its gravest danger since the Civil War. What I see is former intelligence officers reacting as citizen-patriots to the peril when the commander-in-chief tweets in vulgarities, is impervious to facts, and probably is clinically ill.

The president not only ignores intelligence but publicly disses it, saying its leaders need to ‘go back to school.’ Trump lies so much that it has become almost normal. Worse, the lying is so endemic that the truth seems unavailable to us. And that is precisely the point: whether they intend it or not, Trump and his colleagues are breaking down entirely any idea that statements can be tested against empirical reality at all. Theirs is an assault on the very idea of truth.

The current administration will end, though after how much damage to constitutional order remains in question. In the normal course of American politics, it will be followed by a swing to the left, and a foul-mouthed narcissist will be replaced by a more decent person, one who realizes that those 80,000 professionals in the US Intelligence Community work for the nation, not for an administration or political view. Politics will seem more normal, and those patriots will feel less urgency in breaking a lifetime of silence on ‘political’ issues. There will be less risk that young people will shun careers in intelligence, asking themselves why they should pay the costs – in money and lifestyle – only to be dissed by their commander-in-chief.

Yet damage will endure. Our political dialogue has been debased, and that will not go away. It is driven by the polarized anger of our politics, which Trump dramatically exacerbated but did not cause. The great irony of the information technology revolution is that all those wonderful devices intended to connect people have so far sorted them into echo chambers where their views are only reinforced. That seems likely to get worse as, for instance, end-to-end encryption makes it easier for people to hide in those like-minded echo chambers. Perhaps ‘civil political discourse’ is an oxymoron. It will, in any case, be so for us as far as the eye can see.

The still greater damage is the assault on truth. The National Intelligence Council, which I had the honor to chair in the Obama administration, takes bed and board from the CIA. Whenever a car took me downtown for a meeting, I would ask to meet it outside the front door of the old CIA headquarters building, with the grand marble lobby and big CIA seal on the floor. It was light and airy but also reminded me of the business I was in. I always smiled, though, at the quote from John 8: 32 etched into the wall: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.’ Perhaps divine truth is absolute but intelligence truth is not. It is the best we mortals can do, often under intense time pressure. And sometimes it is, as they say, ‘good enough for government work.’ In my experience, moreover, intelligence truth was more likely to constrain – identifying all the reasons a policymaker’s favorite idea wouldn’t work – than to set free.

That we seem to have been set free from the truth will be the enduring damage. Even if the next president reads and so can digest his President’s Daily Brief on other than a placemat like the ones kid-friendly restaurants provide along with crayons, there will still be all those chat rooms, not to mention mass media, most but not all on the right, for which truth matters less than the party line. In take-no-prisoners politics, the loser too often is the truth. In the line usually attributed to Mark Twain: ‘A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.’ In our era, all the studies show that fake news propagates faster on the web that true news, probably because it is more bizarre.

This new (ab)normal will be uncomfortable in the extreme for intelligence. I can see no alternative, though, to doubling down in pursuit of the truth. Years ago, when I was vice-chair of the NIC in the Clinton administration, my friend, mentor and colleague, Harold Brown, said to me that he wished intelligence would help him read his Washington Post: what was true and what not? When I ventured to Capitol Hill as NIC chair, I was often asked why the IC needed so many analysts. I would respond, trying as best I could to restrain my incredulity: ‘Information is exploding, and you want fewer people trying to inform policymakers by sorting out the fact in the stew of fiction and disinformation?’

Intelligence’s validation function will become more and more important. We can only hope there are policymakers who listen.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gregory F. Treverton was Chair of the US National Intelligence Council until January 2017. He is now Professor of the Practice at Dornsife College, University of Southern California, and Executive Advisor to SMA Corporation.

Politicization in intelligence

Amy Zegart

History is filled with fraught relationships between intelligence leaders and the presidents they serve. President Kennedy so distrusted CIA Director John McCone, he ignored McCone’s warnings about the Soviet military buildup in Cuba until it was nearly too late. Nixon harbored deep suspicions of the CIA, calling it ‘disloyal,’ and asking ‘What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?’⁵⁰ Clinton’s relationship with his CIA Director, James Woolsey, was so bad as to be non-existent.⁵¹ George W. Bush’s CIA Director, Porter Goss, was ousted after a short, tumultuous stint.

Some tension is inevitable. Intelligence officials are supposed to be rigorously apolitical while presidents are inherently political. In every administration, intelligence officers must walk a fine line between responsiveness and independence, gaining the president’s trust without sacrificing credibility, providing intelligence without offering policy advice, and supporting the nation’s elected leader while speaking inconvenient and unwelcome truths.

But the current moment differs from the past in two key respects. The first is the nature of President Trump’s attacks. Criticizing intelligence agencies for performance is one thing. Publicly casting doubt on their integrity and objectivity is quite another. The president has called intelligence officers ‘Nazis.’⁵² He has accused the FBI, and more recently an intelligence whistleblower, of being part of a deep state cabal that is ‘spying’ on him, launching ‘witch hunts,’ and attempting a ‘coup’ – without any evidence.⁵³ Trump has repeatedly said that he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of interfering in the 2016 presidential election more than the judgments of his own intelligence agencies.⁵⁴ When DNI Daniel Coats stepped down in August 2019, Trump ominously tweeted that America’s intelligence agencies needed to be ‘reined in,’⁵⁵ by which it appears he meant that they should start agreeing with him more regardless of what the facts say. Armed with 65 million Twitter followers – more than any other current world leader – Trump has mastered the art of virality, assaulting the IC’s integrity and objectivity in tweets that are picked up by the mainstream media. The result: amplification of the frequency, ferocity, and velocity of his claims.

The second difference is that while current intelligence officials appear to be adhering to a longstanding duty of silence about criticizing a sitting president, many former intelligence officials are not. These include DCIAs John Brennan and Michael Hayden, former Acting DCIA Michael Morell, former DNI James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey.⁵⁶ Brennan has devoted more than 92 per cent of his tweets to criticizing Trump, often in deeply personal terms. Brennan has called Trump ‘a national disgrace’ and someone whose ‘venality, moral turpitude and political corruption’ will relegate him to a ‘disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.’⁵⁷

Nobody knows yet what the consequences of this hyper-political moment for US intelligence agencies could be. This phenomenon is new and historical polling data about trust in intelligence agencies is sparse.⁵⁸

But emerging research in civil–military relations has already examined the erosion of apolitical norms in the military and the effect of norm erosion on the military’s credibility as an institution. The results are not encouraging. Using survey experiments, Michael Robinson finds that the American public view the credibility of retired generals through a partisan lens: Respondents give higher credibility scores to ‘co-partisans’ or activist generals on the same side of a political issue but gave lower credibility scores to generals with identical qualifications who take positions on the other side of an issue. ‘Retired officers who are perceived as partisans risk the very credibility they leverage when speaking publicly,’ Robinson concludes.⁵⁹

In addition, psychology research has long found that repeated exposure to a statement increases its acceptance as true: falsehoods repeated are falsehoods believed.⁶⁰ Psychologists have also found that efforts to debunk lies often backfire, leading recipients of false messages to believe them even more.⁶¹

Both lines of research suggest that the current moment could have long-term effects for American intelligence agencies. The president’s falsehoods could prove sticky, especially given what researchers are discovering about the current online information ecosystem. At the same time, if the military’s experience is any guide, efforts by former intelligence officials to defend the community may unintentionally make partisan filters worse.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Amy Zegart is the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and professor of political science, by courtesy, at Stanford University. She is the author of three books examining US intelligence challenges.

Notes

1. Morell, “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I am Endorsing Hillary Clinton.” New York Times, August 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html.

2. Clapper, Facts and Fears.

3. Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence.

4. Comey, A Higher Loyalty.

5. McCabe, The Threat.

6. Campbell, Crossfire Hurricane.

7. For example, Del Quentin Wilber, “Sessions Promises Crackdown on Leaks.” Wall Street Journal, August 5–6, 2017, A4.

8. Usowski, “Former CIA Officers Writing about Intelligence, Policy, and Politics, 2016–2017”; Gentry, “A New Form of Politicization?”; Gentry, “‘Truth’ as a Tool for the Politicization of Intelligence”; O’Brien and Rodriguez, “Speaking Out.”

9. “Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security.” October 6, 2016, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national.

10. Jim Sciutto, Nicole Gaouette, and Ryan Browne, “US finds growing evidence Russia feeding emails to WikiLeaks,” CNN, October 14, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/politics/russia-us-election/.

11. Philip Bump, “The answer that best exemplifies how badly Donald Trump was out of his depth in the debate.” Washington Post, September 27, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/27/the-answer-that-best-exemplifies-how-badly-donald-trump-was-out-of-his-depth-in-the-debate/.

12. Michael V. Hayden, “Michael Hayden: The End of Intelligence.” New York Times, April 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-intelligence.html; “All Things Considered.” August 16, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/08/16/639371764/former-cia-director-michael-hayden-weighs-in-on-trump-revoking-security-clearanc.

13. Ayesha Rascoe, “Trump accuses U.S. spy agencies of Nazi practices.” Reuters, January 11, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump/trump-accuses-u-s-spy-agencies-of-nazi-practices-over-phony-russia-dossier-idUSKBN14V18L.

14. “PBS Newshour.” May 20, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-barr-looks-into-trump-tower-intelligence-briefing-clapper-denies-leaking-its-contents.

15. Rebecca Morin, “Trump: I Don’t See Any Reason Why…” Politico, July 16, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/16/trump-putin-meeting-election-meddling-722424; John Brennan, Twitter, July 16, 2018.

16. Caitlin Oprysko, “Trump Tells Intel Chiefs to Go back to School’.” Politico, January 30, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/30/trump-national-security-1136433.

17. Ian Schwartz, “Hayden on Brennan.” RealClearPolitics, August 15, 2018, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/15/hayden_on_brennan_trump_just_told_intel_community_not_to_disagree_or_he_will_punish_you.html.

18. Dujmović, “Getting CIA History Right.”

19. Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence, 85.

20. See my critique of Hollywood’s portrayal of US intelligence, “Hollywood, Don’t You Go Disrespecting My Culture.”

21. Author discussions with numerous people with such views.

22. Clapper, Facts and Fears; Hayden, The Assault on Intelligence.

23. Clapper, Facts and Fears, numerous references; Jenna McLaughlin, “More White, More Male, More Jesus: CIA Employees Fear Pompeo Is Quietly Killing the Agency’s Diversity Mandate.” Foreign Policy, September 7, 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/08/more-white-more-male-more-jesus-cia-employees-fear-pompeo-is-quietly-killing-the-agencys-diversity-mandate/.

24. Author discussion with Nicholas Dujmović, June 2019.

25. McLaughlin, “More White, More Male, More Jesus.”

26. For example, John Kiriakou, “Mike Pompeo’s CIA Will Not Reflect America’s Diversity.” truthdig, September 17, 2017, at https://www.truthdig.com/articles/mike-pompeos-cia-will-not-reflect-america/.

27. Ibid.

28. See note 25 above.

29. Alex Pfeiffer, “Former CIA Director Regrets How Intel Agencies Treated Trump.” The Daily Caller, December 11, 2017, at http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/11/former-cia-director-regrets-how-intel-agencies-treated-trump/.

30. McLaughlin email to the author, July 30, 2019.

31. Shane Harris, “The quiet director: How Gina Haspel manages the CIA’s volatile relationship with Trump.” Washington Post, July 30, 2019, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-quiet-director-how-gina-haspel-manages-the-cias-volatile-relationship-with-trump/2019/07/30/c54cae04-9920-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html.

32. See note 3 above.

33. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents.

34. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

35. Howell, Power without Persuasion.

36. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency.

37. Howell, Power without Persuasion, 21.

38. In writing on hard and soft rhetoric, Tulis phrases the distinction in terms of hard and soft demagoguery.

39. Jervis, “Why Intelligence and Policymakers Clash”; also see Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, ch. 4.

40. Gentry, “A New Form of Politicization?” offers significant anecdotal and suggestive evidence regarding the CIA but only suggests rather than claims that it is representative. The article does not significantly address other agencies.

41. Jervis, “Why Intelligence and Policymakers Clash,” 199–200.

42. Byman, “Intelligence and Its Critics,” 270.

43. Kori Schake, “Why Donald Trump’s Endorsement by 88 Generals Is So Dangerous,” FP, September 6, 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/06/why-donald-trumps-endorsement-by-88-generals-is-so-dangerous-civilian-military-relations/; NPR Morning Edition, “Military Leaders’ Endorsements of Political Candidates Questioned.” September 8, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/09/08/493073644/military-leaders-endorsements-of-political-candidates-questioned.

44. See, for example, David Evans, “Crowe Endorsement of Clinton Raises More than Eyebrows.” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1992, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-09-25-9203270346-story.html.

45. Stephen Dinan, “Retired Top Military Brass Push for Romney.” Washington Times, November 4, 2012, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/nov/4/retired-top-military-brass-push-romney/.

46. Colman Andrews, “What Public Institution Do Americans Trust More than Any Other? Hint: It’s Not the Media.” USA Today, July 8, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/08/military-is-public-institution-americans-trust-most/39663793/.

47. See, for instance, Usowski, “Former CIA Officers Writings about Intelligence, Policy, and Politics, 2016–17,” 12.

48. Gallup, “Government,” n.d., https://news.gallup.com/poll/27286/government.aspx.

49. Regarding “indirect manipulation,” see Rovner, Fixing the Facts.

50. Quote in Moran and Aldrich, “Trump and the CIA.”

51. William J. Clinton Presidential History Project Interview with R. James Woolsey, Miller Center, University of Virginia, January 13, 2010, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/r-james-woolsey-oral-history-director-central.

52. Mark Lander, “Trump Under Fire for Invoking Nazis in Criticism of U.S. Intelligence.” New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/donald-trump-nazi-comparison.html.

53. Philip Bump, “Trump’s latest ‘coup’ table-pounding follows a classic Fox News feedback loop.” Washington Post, April 26, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/26/trumps-latest-coup-table-pounding-follows-classic-example-fox-news-feedback-loop/. On October 6, 2019, Trump tweeted, “Democrat lawyer is same for both Whistleblowers? All support Obama and Crooked Hillary. Witch Hunt!” https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1180966726227386368.

54. Zegart, “Trump Says Russia Isn’t Still Targeting the U.S. – But He’s Wrong.”

55. Zachary Cohen and Nicole Gaouette, “Trump says Ratcliffe will ‘rein in’ U.S. intelligence agencies as spy chief.” CNN, July 30, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/30/politics/trump-ratcliffe-rein-in-us-intelligence-agencies/index.html.

56. Julian E. Barnes and Mark Mazzetti, “For Spies Emerging from the Shadows, a War with Trump Carries Risks.” New York Times, July 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/us/politics/trump-security-clearances.html.

57. Sophie Tatum, “Former CIA chief to Trump on McCabe firing: ‘America will triumph over you’.” CNN, March 17, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/17/politics/john-brennan-donald-trump-mccabe-firing/index.html. Analysis of Brennan’s tweets from January 2019 to October 10, 2019 by author.

58. I fielded national YouGov polls that included questions about public confidence in US intelligence agencies in 2012 and 2013. The University of Texas and Chicago Council on Global Affairs began fielding annual polls examining public attitudes in US Intelligence on 2018.

59. Robinson, “Danger Close.” For a more extensive discussion, see Robinson, Danger Close: Military Politicization and Elite Credibility.

60. Christopher and Matthews, “The Russian Firehose of Propaganda Falsehood Model”; Begg, Maynard., Anas, and Farinacci, “Dissociation of processes in belief”; Arkes, Hackett, and Boehm, “The generality of the relation between familiarity and judged validity.”

61. Nyhan and Reifler, “When Corrections Fail,” 303–330; Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance; Schwarz, Newman, and Leach, “Making the Truth Stick and the Myths Fade.”