The Atlantic‘s Shane Harris (“CIA Officers Can Sense the Threat Within“):
The CIA officer Ray Cline, who was the agency’s chief analyst during the Cuban missile crisis, once observed that when it comes to intelligence analysis, “objectivity is the only virtue that really counts.” By that standard, senior Trump-administration officials have fallen short, and they risk corrupting a system that’s supposed to remain apolitical and grounded in facts, according to a recent survey of CIA analysts.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, the number of CIA employees who said they are concerned that the objectivity of analysis is being undermined by political influence has gone up significantly, according to the survey, which is conducted annually by the agency’s ombudsman for analytic integrity. The results haven’t been made public, but they were described to me by several people familiar with them.
It’s not clear how many of the thousands of career employees involved in producing reports, briefings, and other materials for the president and his advisers responded. But their comments show how acutely some of them feel pressured to reach preferred outcomes instead of following the facts wherever they lead, the people familiar with the voluntary survey told me. They requested not to be identified by name so that they could speak candidly.
There’s a lot more, but the results aren’t surprising. The administration, to an unprecedented extent, has made it clear that they want only good news and information that supports its narrative. That’s propaganda, not intelligence.
Cline was right. Analysts must be free to reach the natural conclusions of the available evidence and present it up the chain unvarnished. Policymakers have every right to accept risks. But doing so without the best available information is reckless and foolhardy.
Given that our students are primarily U.S. military officers, along with U.S. interagency personnel and officers from allied and partner nations, we naturally spend considerable time analyzing adversaries. One thing that Russia, China, North Korea, and pre-war Iran* had in common was a political culture that makes truth-telling impossible. Their military commanders are shadowed by political commissars of one form or another to ensure they don’t deviate from the party line. Xi and Putin are very much of the paranoid style and have purged senior officials whose loyalty is under even remote suspicion. Kim, of course, has taken that to extremes.
The longtime CIA officer and scholar Paul Pillar’s 2011 masterwork Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform dissected the Bush administration’s pressures on the intelligence community to support the narrative that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks and stifle any doubts that Iraq had a robust, active nuclear program. The result was tragic. Doing this across the board is madness.
*I don’t know enough about the current command relationship to know whether this remains true, although I would guess that it is.
