Trump sends loyalist to conservative intelligence redoubt
Devin Nunes to head President's Intelligence Advisory Board
Donald Trump and Devin Nunes in the Oval Office on 4 January 2021, when Nunes received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (Shealah Craighead, public domain).
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The Trump transition team unveiled another intelligence appointment this weekend, with the designation of former Congressman, and current head of Trump Media, Devin Nunes, to head the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB).1
The board has been through various incarnations over the years, and its significance has generally been at the discretion of individual presidents. It originated under Eisenhower in 1956 as the Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, partly to pre-empt proposals for a congressional intelligence committee. The initial slate of board members were all recommended by CIA director Allen Dulles, resulting in an a cast of conservative cold warriors which would endure in subsequent administrations. The board initially lapsed under the Kennedy Administration, only to be reconstituted as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) after the Bay of Pigs.2
The pattern of turning to PFIAB as an executive branch response to CIA scandals was repeated when political scrutiny peaked in the ‘Year of Intelligence’ - 1975. The Rockefeller Commission, itself the product of another White House attempt to get out in front of Congress, recommended PFIAB’s expansion.3
The Rockefeller Report was overshadowed by the Senate’s Church Committee, which concluded that the CIA was not a ‘rogue elephant’ but an instrument of presidential power. Yet the onset of Congressional oversight itself wrought a subtle change in this, giving intelligence chiefs a certain room for manoeuvre between the White House and Capitol Hill.
PFIAB’s own scrutiny focused on not on the covert action excesses that pre-occupied the Church Committee but on intelligence analysis, the one area where an intrinsic requirement for objectivity allowed the CIA a certain independence from policy.
The PFIAB critique had strong policy implications, suggesting that détente between the superpowers was based on an under-estimate of Soviet strength. The struggle was fought out during the Team B exercise in which a group of PFIAB-mandated outside experts reviewed CIA intelligence and produced their own assessments.
The results were predictably hawkish. Team B’s Strategic Objectives Panel concluded:
Within what is, after all, a large and expanding GNP, the Soviets have made it absolutely clear that defense requirements have an almost absolute first call on available resources. Denial of consumer needs is not a new or inconsistent pattern of Soviet behaviour - exactly the contrary is the case. Therefore, Soviet strategic forces have yet to reflect any constraining effect of civil economy competition and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.4
As Anne Hessing Cahn remarked caustically in her book on the Team B exercise, ‘Fourteen years later, the Soviet Union no longer existed.’5
The immediate impact of Team B was blunted by the election of Jimmy Carter, who abolished PFIAB. It was, however, an important reference point for the wave of hawkish conservatives who came to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.
After Reagan’s CIA Director Bill Casey declined to clear out the agency’s senior staff, a reformed PFIAB and the National Security Council provided key berths for the conservative intelligence counter-establishment.
Every president is entitled, within the law, to implement his policies through the executive branch, and, as the Reagan precedent shows, the Trump administration wouldn’t be the first to be concerned about the implications of Congressional oversight or analytical independence for presidential authority over the intelligence community.
In Trump’s case, however, these tensions are compounded by frictions over the community’s counterintelligence function. Like John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel, the incoming candidates to head the CIA and FBI, Nunes is a Trump loyalist with a record of strong criticism of official investigations into the President-elect’s alleged links with Russia.
Despite this unique situation, there are areas where the Reagan playbook might still be relevant. The appointment of Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, Ric Grenell, as a special envoy for North Korea and Venezuela suggests Latin America as one such possibility.6
Among Bill Casey’s more political appointments in 1981 was a new National Intelligence Officer for Latin America, Constantine Menges, a former Hudson Institute staffer whose Senate testimony led to Democratic complaints about his ‘rhetorical tone and selective use of information that bordered on policy prescription.’7
According to Duane Clarridge, a not-especially dovish CIA operations officer, Menges swiftly became a liability for Casey
In the end, Menges had alienated too many people with his arrogance and extremist political views. Casey saw too it that Menges got a job with the NSC having to do with Latin America.8
Menges was replaced as NIO by John Horton, another hard-bitten former operations officer who nevertheless did not share his predecessor’s view that Mexico was about to go the way of the Shah’s Iran.9
At the NSC, Menges worked with Clarridge on covert action in Central America, until he was replaced at inter-agency meetings by Oliver North, whose name became famous when the whole operation blew up into the Iran-Contra Affair.
With Trump reportedly threatening a ‘soft invasion’ of Mexico it is not hard to imagine similar scenarios playing out over the coming months.10
Charlie Savage, Devin Nunes, Pugnacious Trump Loyalist, to Lead Espionage Advisory Board, New York Times, 14 December 2024.
Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, Pennsylvania State University, 1998, pp.100-1.
Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, Pennsylvania State University, 1998, pp.102.
INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY EXPERIMENT IN COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS: SOVIET STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES AN ALTERNATIVES, REPORT OF TEAM “B”, DECEMBER 1976, p.23. Archived at Central Intelligence Agency.
Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, Pennsylvania State University, 1998, p.168.
Elizabeth Williamson, Trump Names Richard Grenell for ‘Special Missions’ Role, New York Times, 14 December 2024.
Robert Parry, Democratic Senators pi[… …] CIA report on Caribbean, Associated Press/Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 December 1981. Archived at Central Intelligence Agency.
Duane R. Clarridge, with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA, Scribner, 1997, p.242.
John Horton, Mexico, The Way of Iran? International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1986. Archived at Central Intelligence Agency.
Katie Hawkinson, Trump team said to be debating ‘how much’ to invade Mexico, Independent, 27 November 2024.