Dick Cheney, Karl Rove…and Donald Trump politicized the CIA
After reading Susan Hasler's book "A Novel of the CIA," I thought about how then President Trump belittled the CIA and NSA, and how he rendered these agencies to become his political pawns.
In her book, Hasler
describes the world of CIA analysts who work deep within the bowels of the
CIA and who sift through mounds of incoming intelligence transmitted from
various collection sources from around the globe: overseas case officers and
their recruited spies, spy satellites and all types of electronic eavesdropping
paraphernalia, OSINT research of foreign media, from the diplomatic service and
military attaches…the list is endless.
The pile of incoming
raw data keeps piling up, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour. By the day’s end,
thousands of reports lay on their desks. They analyze the origins of them all,
including the reliability of each source and how productive it has been in the
past. Each report is rated as to its urgency and the extent to which it is to
be distributed (who sees it) is determined.
She describes how
dedicated analysts weigh all the incoming evidence into a cohesive whole and
avoid “choosiness,” or cherry-picking some bits of information while ignoring
others. Unfortunately, some of America’s leaders may employ “hired pens”, a
term describing to describe individuals who pick and choose only what the
policymakers want to hear.
Under President
George W. Bush, Vice President Dick made dozens of unprecedented visits to the
CIA in Langley and pressured the CIA’s managerial staff to ensure such “hired
pens” selected from their intelligence piles only that evidence that suggested Iraq
could have been involved in the 9/11 attack.
Cooking
the intelligence to suit the policy-maker’s liking and playing fast and loose
with the professional intelligence collection and analysis process is what
happened during the Bush administration.
After the 9/11
attack, hundreds of CIA analysts focused on finding out who the al-Qaeda
leadership were, where they were at, and the best way to hunt them down and
kill them. Their manhunt was immediately terminated. Pressured by their
managers after another Dick Cheney visit, analysts were directed to refocus
back on Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
Reluctantly, the CIA’s
management pulled specialized analysts who were the most knowledgeable on Iraq
away from hunting down bin Laden and al-Qaeda and reassigned them to refocus on
Iraq. The managers told them, through heavy sighs, that Vice-President Cheney
was taking them to task for not doing the job properly on Iraq. Even though
Baghdad didn’t fly airliners into the twin towers, the overworked,
understaffed, and overextended analysts within the bowels of the CIA sifted
through the rising piles of incoming intelligence on their desks, searching not
for the whereabouts of bin Laden and al Qaeda or Saudi Arabian connections to
the twin towers attack, but for any feeble and flimsy Iraqi connections.
At one point, Vice-President
Dick Cheney demanded that a complete and thorough assessment of all possible
Iraqi links to 9/11 be on his desk in two days. As the actual schemers who
killed 2,996 people and wounded 6,000 were retreating deep underground, the ill-used,
exploited, and browbeaten CIA analysts fretted over the possibility that bin
Laden and al-Qaeda may be planning a follow-up attack. They knew that Iraq
wasn’t behind the strikes but were forced to refocus on preparing a fabrication
for Cheney and other policymakers to regurgitate on CNN, MSNBC, Meet the Press
and, of course, a sympathetic Fox News. Despite a herculean effort, a case to
be made against Iraq involved in 9/11 could not be made.
Unfortunately, former President Trump followed in Dick Cheney’s
footsteps. He politicized intelligence by reinforcing his questionable pro-Putin
and pro-Russian convictions. For four years, American intelligence remained
frozen in its attempts to counter Russian crimes and human rights’ offences.
While
Trump was president, CIA intelligence analysts once again were forced to ignore
their training and they were unable to present to policymakers the objective
analysis needed to make sound foreign policy decisions. Trump undermined the
institutional safeguards which steer the U.S. Intelligence Community and its institutional
safeguards, including ombudsmen and inspectors general, were unable to push
back against the pressure that led to bias and politicization.
Every
president since the creation of the U.S. intelligence community after World War
II has supported this principle- until Donald Trump who repeatedly pressured
the intelligence community to present analytic judgments consistent with his
views, rather than those of its expert analysts.
When the Intelligence Community presented its 2019 Worldwide Threat
Assessment before Congress, which concluded that Iran, at that time, was living
up to its commitments under the 2015 nuclear agreement and that North Korea was
unlikely to ever give up its nuclear weapons, Trump told them to “go back to
school.” He took the same tack in Helsinki in 2018, when he told the world that
he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies
on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
This blatant violation of the truth placed all Americans in harm’s way. Watch this video: "The Consequences of Trump Turning Against His Intelligence Community".
Robert Morton is a member of the Association
of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), enjoys writing about the U.S.
Intelligence Community, and relishes traveling to the Florida Keys and Key
West, the Bahamas and Caribbean. He combines both passions in his CoreyPearson- CIA Spymaster series. Check out his latest spy thriller: MISSION OF VENGEANCE.
1 comment:
It's infuriating. Sad that it works so well that they never have to answer for the pressure and politicization of such an important department of government. the world barely remembers what Cheney did.
Post a Comment