Speaking Truth to Trump: The challenges of a CIA in transition

Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below.

President Ronald Reagan (right) with his first Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Casey, in 1983. Casey both contained and carried out the conservative insurgency at CIA which unravelled in the Iran-Contra Affair (Ronald Reagan Library Museum, public domain).

‘The IC [Intelligence Community] has been observing foreign adversaries, particularly Russia, conducting additional influence operations intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans.’¹ That was the statement put out by three US Government agencies on the eve of the 2024 presidential election.

On election day itself, the FBI reported ‘bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains.’² While the threats were judged non-credible they did have the potential to disrupt voting in Democratic strongholds in several swing states.³

If election night had been the drawn out affair that many anticipated, such events would have fuelled significant controversy. As it was, the swing to Trump was too consistent for the bomb hoaxes to affect the result. If the Russians were behind them, they may have preferred a less decisive outcome, but likely got the President they wanted.

Others may not have. The same statement that warned of Russian operations repeated previous assessments that ‘Iran has conducted malicious cyber activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign.’⁴

The partisan symmetry of this analysis may not be enough to endear the intelligence community to the incoming administration, given how much allegations of Russian influence coloured Trump’s relations with key intelligence agencies during his first term.

Former officials are already expressing concern that Trump will stack the agencies with political appointees and impose a congenial bias on intelligence assessments.⁵

The proper relationship between political activists and technocratic experts is a problem for all governments, particularly new and radical ones. The role to be accorded to ‘non-party specialists’ was a key issue in the early Soviet Union.

Multi-party democracies must, by definition, institutionalise the turnover of political cadres in some form. Every consequential election is a minor revolution. In Britain, the Victorian tradition of a neutral civil service makes this a fairly rapid and controlled process. In the United States, however, a political transition is a much more far-reaching and contested exercise.

This reality has always sat ill with the Truman-era vision of the CIA as a source of centralised analysis remote from the sectional interests of the Defense and State Departments. The tradition of independence from policy associated with the leading early analyst Sherman Kent was inevitably tested when it challenged prevailing orthodoxies as it did over Vietnam and many issues of the later Cold War.

The Team B exercise of 1976 marked the coming together of a bipartisan coalition of conservatives and cold warriors, who sought to shift the emerging climate of intelligence scrutiny away from CIA operations to analysis. Many of those involved would go on to join the Reagan campaign.

Trump’s America First politics is very different to Reagan’s more neoconservative coalition. The 1980 transition is nevertheless a very relevant example of the coming to power of a conservative insurgency animated by a radical critique of the intelligence establishment.

The memoirs of former CIA director Robert Gates show how one ambitious analyst navigated the pressures of that era. He recalled:

while several CIA old-hands were part of the transition team (John Bross, George Carver, Walter Pforzheimer), the ‘politicals’ - Angelo Codevilla, Ken de Graffenreid, Mark Schneider and others - dominated the effort and set the tone. As hard line conservatives and Republican members of the Staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they found little they liked at CIA.⁶

The intelligence clearouts of the 1970s provided a ready-made counter-establishment made up of the former intelligence officers associated with groups like the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and other member organisations of the Common Interest Network.

By contrast, officers who had served under Carter, and even Nixon and Ford, were suspect. A transition team report of 22 November 1980 targeted 26 senior CIA officials for removal on the grounds that they were ‘Carter administration protégés who advanced in grade and position during the past four years because of their willingness to support leftist-oriented perceptions and programs.’ According to the Washington Post, the targeted ‘leftists’ included Frank Carlucci, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and future chairman of the Carlyle Group, and the Director of Operations, John McMahon.⁷

Reagan’s eventual nominee for Director of Central Intelligence was William Casey, a CIA outsider but a veteran of the wartime OSS. According to Gates, ‘Casey won some early sympathy and support when he simply threw out the transition team and its report. Nor did he fire a single senior career officer.’⁸

Many of the transition team’s nominees ended up instead at the National Security Council, sparking a rivalry that would lead to the resignation of Casey’s deputy, Admiral Bobby Inman in 1982.

That was tied, in part, to a possible reorganization of counterintelligence operations, according to Administration officials. Admiral Inman, who was popular on Capitol Hill, opposed that review, fearing it might lead to a consolidation of counterintelligence responsibility in a new and powerful organization with authority to collect information in the United States.⁹

While Casey protected the CIA as an organisation, he was nevertheless willing to challenge its analysis and route around its operational structures. He did both in working the NSC to expand covert action in Central America, a project which unravelled in the mid-1980s with the onset of the Iran-Contra Affair.

The scandal briefly threatened Reagan’s own position and shifted the political balance within the administration towards the foreign policy establishment. Analysts who had tacked towards the prevailing political winds found those winds had shifted abruptly. Allegations about his own role cost Bob Gates his first chance at becoming Director of Central Intelligence, although he would later attain that position.

The bureaucratic battles of the Reagan era prefigured those of the George W. Bush administration, when neoconservatives made the intelligence case for the Iraq War from powerbases in the NSC and the Pentagon. That catastrophic success ultimately paved the way for the Republican Party to take a more paleoconservative turn under Donald Trump.

If many conservative Presidents have clashed with CIA analysis, allegations around Trump’s relationship with Russia brought a new element in 2016, one that would contribute to the firing of FBI director James Comey in 2017 and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in 2019.

The CIA found a certain modus vivendi with Trump through director Gina Haspel, whose role in the CIA’s War on Terror torture program appealed to the President’s sensibilities.¹⁰ Haspel nevertheless had her clashes, threatening to resign over a plan to install Trump loyalist Kash Patel as her deputy in late 1920.¹¹

It is ‘politicals’ like Patel, John Ratcliffe and Ric Grenell who are likely now in line for key intelligence positions. Emboldened by a stronger mandate and a united government, Trump has more scope to display the authoritarian instincts that Haspel played on, and to drive the politicisation of intelligence beyond the limits of previous administrations.

Ironically, this could replicate a traditional weakness of Soviet and Russian intelligence, exemplified by the debacle of 1941, which witnessed the execution of Ivan Proskurov, the head of military intelligence who warned of a German invasion, while his successor Filipp Golikov prospered by suppressing information which challenged Stalin’s preconceptions.¹²

In pushing back against analysis of Russian interference, Trump could turn the CIA into an agency more like the KGB or the SVR, one that will suit him better but serve him worse.

Related: Team Trump Two: How a second Trump presidency could reshape the US intelligence community, 14 July 2024.

1. Joint ODNI, FBI, and CISA Statement, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 4 November 2024.

2. FBI Statement on Bomb Threats to Polling Locations, FBI National Press Office, 5 November 2024.

3. Edith Olmsted, Are We Just Ignoring How Russia Openly Helped Trump on Election Night? The New Republic, 6 November 2024.

4. Joint ODNI, FBI, and CISA Statement, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 4 November 2024.

5. Dan De Luce, Former CIA officials worry Trump could politicize and weaponize intelligence agencies, NBC News, 8 November 2024.

6. Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, Touchstone, 1996, p.191.

7. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Conservatives Had CIA 'Hit List', Washington Post, 15 March 1987.

8. Gates, 1996, p.193.

9. Bernard Weinraub, NO. 3 C.I.A. OFFICIAL CALLED AS LIKELY SUCESSOR TO INMAN, New York Times, 26 April 1982.

10. Adam Goldman, Gina Haspel, Trump’s Choice for C.I.A., Played Role in Torture Program, New York Times, 13 March 2018.

11. Jonathan Swan, Scoop: Gina Haspel threatened to resign over plan to install Kash Patel as CIA deputy, Axios, 15 January 2021.

12. What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa, by David E. Murphy, reviewed by Donald P, Steury, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2006), CIA.