On May 16, Foreign Policy magazine published an article by three experienced intelligence officers, including one who has chronically politicized U.S. intelligence, who argued that the U.S. intelligence community (IC) is getting a bad rap at a critical point in history for unfortunate, unjustified reasons. Only the first part of the assertion is correct. Far more accurate would have been a judgment that the declining respect for the IC reflected in polls is a direct result of the recent partisan political activism and dishonesty of ostensibly respectable senior former intelligence officers and many inaccurate “leaks” by current intelligence officers, mainly against candidate and then President Donald Trump.
This activism is new. For many decades the organizational culture at the CIA, most importantly given its role of supporting presidents, was that intelligence officers inform all presidents as best they can in apolitical ways, whatever the receptivity of presidents to intelligence or the accuracy of their complaints about intelligence. People believed politicization of any sort — from the political Right or Left — damages the usefulness of intelligence and agency interests. Insightful intelligence officers such as the CIA’s Martin Petersen knew that intelligence had to perform well constantly to maintain presidential confidence and that errors in judgment and lapses in integrity had severely negative, long-term consequences. There was no need for an intelligence norm equivalent to the military’s normative prohibition on political activism by former generals and admirals because intelligence officers rarely were politically active. There had never been a General Douglas MacArthur-like challenge to presidential authority.
But President Obama sought to change the demographics and the political complexion of the federal work force, and intelligence leaders such as CIA director John Brennan (2013-2017) made clear that they intended to change the organizational cultures of agencies in politically significant ways. They succeeded brilliantly, with overt activism in defense of Obama/Brennan changes beginning in 2016, when Trump emerged as a potential threat to the “progress” that Obama’s policies allegedly had achieved.
This radical change became glaringly obvious when former CIA deputy director Michael Morell invoked his CIA credentials in a New York Times op-ed to rationalize endorsing Hillary Clinton for president while harshly criticizing Trump. Morell then became one of the “talking heads,” along with Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director Michael Hayden, and several dozen less-senior people whom the mainstream liberal press promoted as legitimate observers of everything relevant to their anti-Trump campaign. In 2018, senior CIA officer Peter Usowski noted that partisan activism by former CIA officers, whose last titles always precede their names in public discourse, was likely to be seen widely as activism by the agency proper. Usowski’s insightful observation was ignored.
Morell admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that he and former CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos connived in October 2020 with the Joe Biden campaign in the person of Antony Blinken to debunk an accurate New York Post story that Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, abandoned at a repair shop, contained information suggesting that he and Joe Biden may have corruptly sold influence abroad. Morell and Polymeropoulos wrote a prospective open letter suggesting that the laptop’s contents, which the FBI had already determined were genuine, had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Fifty-one former intelligence officers signed the letter. The insinuation worked. Politico, which had published earlier politically-oriented open letters, obligingly converted the linguistic obfuscation of the letter into a definitive statement of Russian culpability in its headline. With intelligence help, Joe Biden won his election, averting an “October surprise.” One recipient of a Morell-Polymeropoulos pitch told me the explicit goal of the solicitation was to help Biden, not recruit expertise about Russian disinformation techniques.
Brennan was nearly as bad. In op-eds and tweets, he repeatedly bashed Trump, charging that Trump was a dupe of Russian President Vladmir Putin, calling him treasonous, and comparing him to swindler Bernie Madoff. Brennan also, while still CIA director, urged CIA employees to be politically active, arguably coming at least close to violating the 1939 Hatch Act that prohibits political activities by serving government employees.
Hayden, who published a fine book in 2016, published an emotional anti-Trump diatribe in 2018 that is riddled with errors. Titled The Assault on Intelligence, it documents no such thing. Trump largely ignored intelligence and the federal workforce generally. In October 2023, Hayden tweeted that Senator Tommy Tuberville should be removed “from the human race,” which led Tuberville to report Hayden to the U.S. Capitol police and others to see as an assassination threat.
The list of outrageous claims is long. Some, like many of Brennan’s, were simply outlandish. Many others were untrue. Many activist partisans, who accurately noted Trump’s casual respect for facts, wantonly misrepresented Trump and their own motives and actions. Several prominent critics, including Brennan, Clapper, and the FBI’s James Comey and Andrew McCabe, were accused pointedly of lying. Use of favorable versions of “truth” became a frequent tool of the politicization of intelligence. Chronic, blatantly obvious dishonesty is not conducive to public confidence in people who claim to speak “truth to power.”
Serving intelligence officers politicized in different ways. Unable to appear on MSNBC or write op-eds, they leaked often incorrect information — falsehoods designed to damage Trump. Leaks surged early in the Trump administration and evidently remained at lofty levels. These included incorrect reports that Trump received briefings in early 2020 about the dangers of COVID and did nothing to address the problem. The Defense Department refuted the assertions. More significantly, the IC’s analytic ombudsman reported that China analysts in the IC withheld information from the White House that they believed might help Trump administration officials — a potential national security threat.
Given this history, intelligence partisans of recent years unsurprisingly are again misrepresenting the legacy of activism of recent years. But it is hard to know how much is purposeful dishonesty and how much is self-delusion. National Intelligence University faculty incongruously argued in 2021 that Hollywood fables were to blame in part for growing public distrust of intelligence and that intelligence should better tout its value.
Hence, public confidence in intelligence rationally is declining. A Rasmussen poll released in October 2023 found that only 36% of American voters believed that intelligence agencies behaved in an impartial manner, while 51% said the agencies have their own political agendas. And 65% believed it likely that the agencies are influencing corporate media’s coverage of political issues. Another Rasmussen poll released in March 2024 showed that most Americans think the IC is trying to influence the 2024 presidential election. Per Peter Usowski, this is an understandable fear given the actions of Morell, Brennan, Comey, and many others since 2016, whether senior intelligence executives now orchestrate politicization directly or not. While many intelligence professionals lament the activism quietly, some have spoken against the politicization. For example, former CIA counterintelligence chief Mark Kelton observed that widespread worry in 2015, when Brennan was director, about “fraying professional discipline” of the workforce turned into a “tsunami” of leaks in the Trump years.
It is axiomatic in many walks of life that trust is earned slowly but can be destroyed easily. Hard, honest work done consistently over a long time is the only way to rebuild trust in intelligence. Restoration of the longstanding norms of apolitical public service and establishment of new norms of civil-military-like conduct are essential to restoring trust. But current and former intelligence officers first need to recognize that they caused the problem and accept that the task of rebuilding confidence in intelligence is theirs alone. There is, however, no evidence that many of them yet see the problem. Instead, the ideology and interests that led intelligence officers to oppose Trump in 2016 seem likely to reappear, especially given that Trump seems to recognize that he ignored management of the federal workforce in 2017-2021 and appears determined to remedy his error if he wins in November. Many of the activist former officers have irreparably damaged their credibility, but others seem likely to emerge.
In another election year, citizens should remember that intelligence activism of any sort by current or former intelligence officers reflects gross violations of longstanding, effective norms that intelligence people well understand. Citizens should remember, too, that the politicizers try to deflect responsibility for their actions and are practiced in doing so.
John A. Gentry is a former CIA analyst and author of Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences. Follow him at @gentry_johna.
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