Trump takes a leaf from the neocon playbook on intelligence analysis
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President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Al Saud during the U.S. - Saudi investment forum at the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center, Riyadh where Trump delivered an address on 13 May 2025 (Daniel Torok, public domain).
In a striking passage in his speech in Saudi Arabia last week, President Trump remarked that ‘the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.’1
Yet even as Trump denounced the neoconservatives, his own officials were adopting an approach to the intelligence community that was more than a little reminiscent of the neoconservative contribution to the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last week fired the two senior officials of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the top analytical body responsible for producing national estimates based on information from across the US Government.2
The decision came shortly after the NIC declassified a memo concluding that the Tren de Aragua crime gang was not being directed by the Venezuelan government.3 The Trump administration has characterised Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organisation as part of its justification for deporting Venezuelans to Salvadoran prisons under the Alien Enemies Act.4
Following the dismissal of NIC chair Mike Collins, and his deputy Maria Langan-Riekhof, an ODNI spokesperson said that ‘the Director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the Intelligence Community.’5
US intelligence analysts have long had a ethos of independence from policy, a tradition particularly associated with the name of Sherman Kent, who headed NIC’s precursor, the Office of National Estimates, in the 1950s.
This tradition would faced a sustained challenge from the 1970s onwards, much of which was driven by neoconservatives, former liberals who moved to the right as the Cold War consensus in American politics broke up after the Vietnam War.
Intelligence was part of a larger foreign policy struggle as one protagonist, Angelo Codevilla, told the Washington Times in 1985.
Mr Codevilla said the congressional and press “attack” on U.S. intelligence agencies during the mid-1970s grew out of internecine bureaucratic conflict within the intelligence community on resource allocation. What was portrayed as a fight over civil liberties was really a struggle between proponents of detente and cold warriors over the agencies’ reliance on technical systems - as opposed to human agents - for collecting and analyzing data.’6
An early battle in this struggle was the Team B exercise of 1976, in which outside experts were brought in to challenge CIA analysis of the Soviet Union. The Team B Strategic Objectives Panel, led by neoconservative Richard Pipes, concluded that ‘Soviet strategic forces have yet to reflect any constraining effect of civil society competition, and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.’ In fact, Moscow’s military spending was already coming up against the economic limitations that would later lead to the Soviet Union’s implosion.7
In 1979, Pipes was among the founders of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), an academic group dominated by cold warriors who were sceptical of CIA analysis while calling for a revival of the agency’s counterintelligence and covert action programs.
CSI thinkers were prominent in the 1980 Reagan transition team for the CIA. Among the most militant was Codevilla, who argued for the mass dismissal of the agency’s Office of Soviet Analysis (SOVA).8
Although the transition team failed to persuade DCI Bill Casey to act on their wider ‘hit list’ for the agency, which called for a purge of such ‘leftists’ as Deputy DCI Frank Carlucci, many of their recommended replacements found berths at the National Security Council and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.9
Casey nevertheless brought strong pressure to bear on CIA analysts. When SOVA refused to identify the Soviets as the sponsors of international terrorism, he procured a more hawkish estimate from the Defense Intelligence Agency. When Casey pushed for a a Mexican estimate that would support the administration’s Central American policy, the responsible NIC officer, John R. Horton, resigned.
The policy blew up shortly afterwards into the Iran-Contra affair, which marked the high watermark of neoconservative influence in the 1980s. Neoconservative criticism of CIA analysis nevertheless continued into the post-Cold War era.
In a 1992 CSI paper on Iraq’s secret WMD programme, Abram Shulsky argued that the the CIA’s authority over intelligence analysis gave the agency too much influence over policy debates.10 In another contribution to the same series, Paul Wolfowitz charged that the centralization of analysis ‘actually encourages the manipulation of intelligence judgements for political policy purposes. If you can get the authority of the Intelligence Community on your side, you can appeal to to authority without having to bother appealing to the evidence.’11
As Deputy Secretary of Defence in the George W. Bush administration, Wolfowitz mounted a strong challenge to CIA’s dominance of analysis. State sponsorship of terrorism was once again a key theme, this time in the shape of Iraq and Al Qaeda. During the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Abram Shulsky headed the DoD’s Office of Special Plans which provided supportive intelligence analysis to the policymakers making the case for war.12
In the Trump administration, the neoconservatives are an object of derision but their spirit lives on. Then again, they always operated under the patronage of more established figures in the wider conservative coalition. Maybe you don’t need a cadre of mid-level bureaucratic infighters if you are prepared to just fire everyone, but the crudity of Trump’s approach to cherry-picking intelligence is unlikely to make it any more successful than it was for his predecessors.
Full text of Trump’s speech in Riyadh: ‘Dawn of the bright new day for the great people of the Middle East', Times of Israel, 16 May 2025.
David Klepper, Gabbard fires 2 top intelligence officials and will shift office that preps Trump’s daily brief, Associated Press, 14 May 2025.
David Klepper, Declassified intelligence memo contradicts Trump’s claims linking gang to Venezuelan government, Associated Press, 7 May 2025.
Federal judge OKs use of Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans, Associated Press/NPR, 14 May 2025.
Warren P. Strobel, Gabbard fires leaders of intelligence group that wrote Venezuela assessment, Washington Post, 14 May 2025.
Bill Gertz, Hill oversight of intelligence shifts focus to effectiveness, Washington Times, 30 July 1985.
Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, p.168.
Knut Royce, CIA lost influence on Soviet issues, Baltimore News-American, 1 February 1983. Archived at CIA.
Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Conservatives Had CIA Hit List, Washington Post, 15 March 1987.
Abram Shulsky, ‘What is Intelligence? Secrets and Competition among States’, in Godson, R., May, E., and Schmitt, G. (eds) US Intelligence at the Crossroads: Agendas for Reform, Brassey’s, 1995, p.27.
Paul Wolfowitz, Comments on Douglas J. MacEachin, ‘The Tradecraft of Analysis’ in Godson, R., May, E., and Schmitt, G. (eds) US Intelligence at the Crossroads: Agendas for Reform, Brassey’s, 1995, p.76
Tom Griffin, State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory: From Cold-War Liberalism to Neoconservatism, Routledge, 2022, p.195.
Team B was torpedoed by a probable mole by the name of John Paisley.