First Congress and then voters will decide whether President Trump’s apparent effort to utilize U.S. aid to compel political favors from Ukraine’s government warrants his removal from office. Whatever happens, there is one certainty: One of the biggest casualties of the Trump presidency will be trust in the intelligence community.
Intelligence politicization has been a problem for decades. After Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter, for example, the intelligence community revised (against both evidence and logic) its earlier conclusions that the Soviet Union had used biological weapons, fearing that to maintain that conclusion would give Reagan an excuse to turn away from arms control talks.
Intelligence politicization became the heart of controversy in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, where so much pre-war intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program turned out to be false or exaggerated. Rather than address the root cause of the intelligence problems (human and signals intelligence both confirming false or exaggerated accounts, because Iraqis believed Saddam Hussein’s bluffs), the Central Intelligence Agency used leaks to credulous journalists to wage bureaucratic battle.
As CIA and Pentagon analysts drew different policy conclusions, many intelligence sources blamed the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (full disclosure: in which I served) for twisting intelligence. A subsequent Defense Department inspector general report noted that such leaks misidentified the office, and that “the actual OSP had no responsibility for and did not perform any of the activities examined in this review [of pre-Iraq war intelligence].” U.S. partisans suggested the Iraq War was original sin, and adversaries abroad used the narrative created by such leaks and lazy journalists to tarnish the Iraq War and justify violence against the United States.
Intelligence has long been politicized on Iran. During the Bush administration, the National Intelligence Council shifted definitions between the 2003 and 2007 National Intelligence Estimates with regard to Iran’s nuclear work in order to conclude Iran’s motives were purer. The goal was simple: undercut any momentum within Bush’s advisory circles to hold Iran to greater account.
The Obama administration massaged intelligence in advance of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. It selectively withheld documents seized from al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s hideout to bury those detailing al Qaeda links to Iran. After concluding the Iran nuclear deal, Obama shifted earlier metrics, the International Atomic Energy Agency withheld inspections from military sites, and the White House exculpated Iran for the violations which nevertheless occurred.
While most within the intelligence community are consummate professionals, the surprise of Trump’s win and hyperpolarization has already eroded the intelligence community’s nonpartisan image. Former Obama-era CIA director John Brennan took to Twitter to lob increasingly polemical and partisan insults at the commander in chief. The CIA also engaged in bureaucratic maneuvering to keep those with whom it disagreed on policy out of key National Security Council jobs.
Which brings us to the present. The substance of the whistleblower report might be valid, but the growing polarization is reflected by the inaction of the CIA and others in the intelligence community against unprecedented leaks of Trump conversations with other world leaders. The sole purpose of those leaks appears to be to embarrass the White House.
Trump may ultimately be a victim of his own erratic personality, but the unprecedented political involvement of the intelligence community in the greatest crisis to confront his presidency will have an impact long after Trump is gone from the White House. As the CIA or individuals within it become less restrained about wearing their own politics on their sleeves and as they enjoy impunity against the backdrop of the CIA’s own bureaucratic abuses, every future administration will rightly question whether the CIA puts professionalism first, whether CIA officials understand the line between policy debate and intelligence analysis and whether they can be trusted with discretion.
Here, the problem may not simply be the whistleblower and whomever helped him or her construct the complaint, but rather the culture of leaks in which the CIA has for too long engaged and over-the-top castigations by Brennan who, rather than speaking truth to power, increasingly appears to be the mirror image of Trump’s own persona, conducted at the expense of the CIA’s own organizational reputation.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
