Sunday, July 4, 2021

The politicization of the CIA places all Americans in harm's way

 

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.


Journey through the Caribbean, Bahamas and Florida Keys with CIA Spymaster Corey Pearson in MISSION OF VENGEANCE


     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:

Janet K. Smith, PhD, Old Testament said...

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.