US President Donald Trump increasingly employs the US’ vaunted spy services as the proverbial drunk uses lamp posts: for support rather than illumination. And that presents a huge, albeit slow-moving and often invisible, threat to national security.
If the president and his spy masters keep signaling to spooks, agents and analysts throughout the so-called intelligence community (IC) that independent, honest, skeptical and apolitical assessments of threats and risks are out, while motivated reasoning and groupthink are in, the best people will leave and the worst will rise. Confidence in the IC’s processes and output will decline, and allied countries will share less information. Attention will go to whatever preoccupies Trump, while other perils are ignored — dangers that, in time, might kill Americans.
This dynamic appears to be well under way, as part of an increasingly brazen weaponization of the IC for political purposes. The US administration is waging this campaign with an Orwellian communication strategy that presents its own clamp-down as a necessary correction of the sin they are committing: In a deadpan attempt to invert reality, the directors of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, both claim to be acting to “end the weaponization of government against Americans” and “to eliminate the well-documented politicization that has taken place in the intelligence community from bad actors in the past.”
Illustration: Mountain People
Take one step back. The US’ — or any country’s — spy services have never been, nor could ever be, entirely clean of politics or groupthink, because cognitive bias is human. This insight calls for extra doses of self-awareness, integrity and “intellectual humility.”
The intelligence failures resulting from bias are well known, above all the disastrously flawed assessments leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but those shortcomings were bugs rather than features in the system. They led, as snafus always should, to reforms, with new legislation and standards for objectivity and apolitical independence.
The coming spy disasters in the Trump administration, by contrast, will not necessarily be accidental, argues Brian O’Neill, who used to be in the CIA and other agencies and now teaches on the subject.
Instead, “they become manufactured. In that system, the next intelligence failure will not be a surprise. It will be a choice,” he says.
The US’ various agencies — Gabbard oversees 18 — are feeling pressure to align “with the president’s instincts, and with his narrative,” to demonstrate loyalty and to reinforce his boasts and claims, O’Neill says.
Agents who produce assessments the president does not like quickly feel the heat. They might be furloughed, moved, fired or — a neologism — Loomered. Or they might lose clearances or find themselves swept up in leak investigations and subjected to polygraph tests.
Sometimes the effect is more bizarre than ruinous. After Trump made clear that he wants to seize Greenland, Gabbard directed agencies to gather information about that territory, which is part of Denmark, one of the US’ closest allies and in no universe a security threat. Maybe those agents might have been better deployed looking into, say, Russian efforts to put nuclear weapons in space.
Other times the politicization is patently nefarious. To justify mass deportations of Venezuelan migrants, Trump wanted to invoke a law written for situations in which the US is being invaded by a foreign nation, and for that he needed to show that a Venezuelan crime gang was backed by the Venezuelan government.
However, the US National Intelligence Council, part of Gabbard’s outfit, concluded that it was not. So the council was told to look again and rewrite. The second assessment came to the same conclusion as the first. At that point Gabbard fired the council’s top two officials.
As ever, Gabbard claimed that she was the one trying to correct politicization, rather than the one doing the politicizing.
However, Thomas Fingar, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council (who is now at Stanford University), told me that the two officials, whom he knows, are beyond reproach, and that their firing sends a “damning and dangerous signal to the community” — basically, to “pull your punches and fuzz it up.” (On the first day of his second term, Trump took away Fingar’s security clearances because he had once cosigned an open letter warning about Russian interference in the US presidential election in 2020.)
The IC looked no better after Trump ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Those were “obliterated,” the president boasted almost instantly, long before any proper battle damage assessment.
However, an early analysis by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, part of the Pentagon, found that Iran’s atomic program might have been set back by only a few months.
Gabbard, Ratcliffe and others peddled the president’s narrative and joined him in railing against the media. In reality, nobody can know the actual damage in Iran for quite some time, and spy chiefs with integrity should simply say that.
This worrisome trajectory arcs toward the intelligence culture in authoritarian countries. Michael Hayden, a former director of the US National Security Agency and the CIA, and David Gioe, a former CIA analyst, have said that Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, created conditions “in which subordinates told him only what he wanted to hear.”
On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that dynamic was televised in tragicomic form, when Putin bullied his spy chief (“Speak plainly”) into repeating the assumptions behind the looming “special military operation” that he, Putin, wanted to hear, and which proved wrong on all counts.
The US, despite its own intelligence failures, has mostly been better than that. Aware of, and honest about, human shortcomings, it inculcated an ethos in its spy agencies to overcome bias: by asking uncomfortable questions, remaining fiercely apolitical, telling leaders what they did not want to hear, emphasizing rather than hiding uncertainty, and ignoring fake litmus tests like loyalty in pursuit of objectivity and truth. The goal was not to reinforce narratives, but to help presidents make better decisions.
This ethos has been a huge, if often unsung, asset in keeping the world as safe as possible. The loss of that intelligence now will prove not only hard to reverse, but potentially tragic.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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