BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT — President Donald Trump vowed throughout his 2024 campaign that if elected, he would initiate a revamp of the intelligence community (IC). “We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,” Trump said in November. “The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled.” Some of Trump’s choices for top IC positions — in particular Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI Director — have echoed the President’s calls for dramatic change.
Institutional change and “overhaul“ can mean many different things, of course, especially for an institution as large and multifaceted as the U.S. intelligence community. As Trump‘s second term gets underway, and with an unprecedented array and diversity of threats facing the country, we asked several members of The Cipher Brief expert network, all longtime veterans of the IC, for their thoughts on the challenges ahead for U.S. intelligence. While they all agreed that change was needed, they differed on the most important challenges – from counterrorism to the China threat, from hybrid warfare to data management in the AI age, and more.
All were in agreement on one thing: the nature of the threats has never been so broad, and the crises and challenges “certainly don’t wait,” as one expert put it. Cipher Brief expert Glenn Corn likened the challenge of reforming the IC in the modern era to “fixing your car, and repairing it while you're driving.”
THE CONTEXT
- President Donald Trump has criticized the intelligence community, calling it part of the “deep state” and saying the IC focuses too much on issues such as climate change and workforce diversity. Trump said during the 2024 presidential campaign that several IC departments and agencies would be “completely overhauled.”
- The Senate confirmed John Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence in the first Trump administration, to serve as Director of the CIA for the second Trump administration. Ratcliffe has said he will work to improve the CIA’s intelligence capabilities, including the adoption of AI and quantum computing and expansion of human intelligence collection. “We’re not where we’re supposed to be,” Ratcliffe said at his confirmation hearing.
- Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard to be his Director of National Intelligence (DNI). She has faced criticism for her past ties to ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, statements expressing sympathy for Russia, and her support of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. She says that she has reversed her opposition to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for warrantless surveillance of foreign targets. Her confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee was held Thursday.
- Trump has nominated former national security official Kash Patel to be FBI director. Patel has spoken about downsizing the Bureau and pursuing “conspirators” in the government and media. His confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was also held Thursday.
The Cipher Brief spoke with former CIA Station Chiefs Ralph Goff and Glenn Corn; former CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations Paula Doyle; and former CIA Deputy Director for Analysis Linda Weissgold to understand the challenges facing the intelligence community at this time of transition.
Their comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
THE EXPERTS
Goff: Every four years, sometimes eight years, the Intelligence Community goes through having to adjust to a new administration. And no two administrations are alike, even if it's the same president.
One of the things I loved about the CIA – and I'm sure many of our critics out there will disagree with me – but frankly, the Agency is one of the least politicized organizations in the federal government. And presidents, whether they're pro-CIA or anti-CIA, after they get in office and they've worked with us for a while, they come to understand that as well. Because really, there's only one presidential appointee. It goes through the confirmation process, the director. You compare that to the State Department, where you have dozens and dozens of appointees from the secretary of state to the undersecretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries.
There are systemic challenges. We've had John Ratcliffe and the new Chairman of the Senate [Intelligence] Committee, Tom Cotton, both come out with announcements saying that there are serious problems within the IC writ large, in the Agency in particular, and both of them are stressing this idea that the Agency has lost its way, that the focus on mission has been blurred or supplanted by a focus on what would normally be mission enablers such as diversity, equity, and that agenda. I have to say, based on my experience, they're not really incorrect in that assumption. There are changes that need to be brought to the IC and the Agency in particular to focus on mission.
“Overhaul” is a big word and it's a scary word. But at the same time, world events don't go away and they certainly don't wait. None of our adversaries are going to say, 'Wait, time out while the agency overhauls, while the U.S. IC gets its act back together.' So, any overhaul or any changes have to be made with the realization that you can't put the machine on idle and you can't create an environment where the mission becomes the overhaul itself. There are limits to what you can do in a given amount of time.
One need only look at the track record for the last few years of the IC and the CIA. The collapse of Syria; the collapse of Afghanistan; the poor performance of the Russian military; the great heroic performance of the Ukrainian military; the ongoing gray-zone activities of Russian intelligence in Europe — where were the predictions on this? When was the policymaker alerted to this before the fact?
The challenge for the IC is to not lose more time as we go through this overhaul. A lot of people think the greatest intelligence failure was 9/11. Well, that was a bad one, but an even greater failure was, in my opinion, the failure of the IC to adjust from the War on Terror to global competition. Al-Qaeda was never an existential threat to the United States. We figured them out by 2005. But it still took us another decade, 15 years or so, to pivot from counterterrorism back to where China was target number one and then Russia, which never took their eye off us. And so the biggest challenge I see is for us to recover this lost ground. And we're only going to do that if we're not distracted by overhauls, and we're not distracted by political infighting, and we're not distracted by political events in other countries that we have no control over.
Doyle: CIA Director Ratcliffe laid out the CIA’s priorities with great clarity during his confirmation hearing: China, the border, the Russia-Ukraine war, the risk of nuclear fallout, Iran, North Korea, and the rising collaboration among America’s rivals. He reinforced his commitment to depoliticize the agency and eliminate distractions. These are unambiguous foundations on which the director can begin to assess the CIA’s collection and analytic postures and - where necessary - realign financial and human resources quite quickly. This means that CIA personnel who find themselves in jobs that do not directly and productively contribute to or support the president's intelligence priorities should consider raising their hands to learn the nuclear fuel cycle and the means of countering its proliferation; learn Chinese, Farsi, Russian, Korean, and Spanish languages; and do everything necessary to master the tradecraft and deep expertise required for mission success.
I am deeply encouraged by Ratcliffe’s commitment to increase the Agency’s capacity to collect foreign intelligence (FI), conduct authorized covert action (CA) on behalf of the President, and produce insightful, objective, all-source analysis. These are the CIA’s three undisputed and authorized intelligence jobs.
When the CIA focuses on FI, CA, and objective analyses, there are only three overarching sets of management and oversight questions that matter: A) Do the CIA’s raw and finished intelligence products answer policymakers’ questions in a timely and accurate manner – yes or no? And if not, why not? B) Are the CIA and other elements in the IC finding and prosecuting U.S. spies and leakers before they do grave harm to America? Again, yes or no, and if not why not? And C), is the CIA achieving the goals set out in each of the president’s covert action findings - yes or no, and if not, why not? It takes thousands of well-trained personnel to conduct these missions around the world, but It does not take hundreds or thousands of personnel to provide the answers to these questions.
The intelligence challenges and national security targets the director-designate laid out in the hearings are all hard and, in many cases, very dangerous for those working at the pointy end of the collection spear. I am therefore excited about his direction to the CIA’s workforce that they buckle up to perform them, or find a different line of work. I lived through a few downsizings in my former State and CIA careers; no one should see his remarks as threatening - rather, they should see them as an open invitation to recommit to the hardest challenges and missions ahead – or leave without drama. Not everyone is suited to work at the pointy end of the collection and covert action spears.
Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea play hard ball. CIA’s HUMINT [human intelligence] and technical collection officers must be smart, cunning, and courageous every single day. It was edifying therefore to hear DCIA-designate Ratcliffe evoke CIA’s WWII predecessor – the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – in his confirmation hearing. He roughly quoted OSS General “Wild Bill” Donovan when he said the ideal Agency officer is "a PhD who can win a bar fight.” There are a lot of bar fights out there, and Wild Bill won most of them, as the OSS fought the tyrants of WWII. May the women and men of CIA who choose to buckle up find great success as they go about their vital mission of protecting us all from every corner of the globe.
Corn: I am concerned that we've lost ground in some key areas and key continents and that we have lost influence. So the new administration is going to be inheriting a very difficult situation, at a time when there's also a legitimate call for reform of the government, maybe some downsizing and reinvigoration of the federal bureaucracy. Taxpayers are spending a lot of money, and they have every right to know that the money is being spent smartly. President Trump and his team are talking about major reforms, and all that's going to have to be done in a very polarized political environment.
Many of the conflicts that we're dealing with now are conflicts that need to be fought by the intelligence community and, maybe, the special operations units of the U.S. military. We also need the private sector to invest and get more involved and be brought into some kind of partnership. For example, competing with the Chinese in Africa is going to require U.S. investment, not just having an embassy somewhere, but having a robust U.S. business presence and investment to help counter what the Chinese are offering people to try and expand their influence and unfortunately undermine our influence.
And then there is hybrid warfare, which [includes] everything from propaganda to disinformation, actual physical sabotage, and political action. These things are happening all over the world and we're seeing it every day. The United States and our allies are paying a price when we don't respond, and we don't respond effectively. We've got to pay attention to it; the intelligence community needs to have the capability to respond quickly and effectively.
I believe that the intelligence community has a role in identifying concrete objective information that an actor is responsible or preparing to do something, and they also have a role in disrupting threats to the U.S. It’s not just admiring the problem. You have to come up with a plan to stop the problem. Often it has to be a whole-of-government approach, or at least working with other partners in the U.S. government, whether it's the military or law enforcement. But the IC's number one mission is to identify those threats and then come up with a plan to stop them before they impact the United States and our interests and our citizens.
I think there's work that needs to be done. We have not had the level of success we need to have for a country of our size and the period that we have right now. There are examples where we probably had failures, or at least lack of success; we have to be realistic about that. So we're going to have to do more and be more effective at a time when the budget's probably going to be cut.
I do think that the IC, like other parts of the government, has gotten too large. The management structure has layers and layers of management, and it slows things down. It makes it hard to be decisive or respond quickly. Sometimes it undermines initiative. My own view is that some of the priorities need to be refocused. We really need to make sure that the intelligence community is focused first on mission.
It's going to have to be pretty quick, while we're still fighting these wars, while we're dealing with all the threats that are going on and trying to protect the morale of those officers that are committed to executing the mission. It's like fixing your car, and repairing it while you're driving.
Weissgold: When you talk about overhaul, one of the things [that] still has to be worked through is that so many of our threats don't stop at borders. That is also the case when you're talking about the blending of foreign and domestic. I have a great concern that we are entering back into a period where parts of the intelligence community don't know what they can share with each other. Overseas data, for example, that might involve a U.S. citizen. If an American citizen is having a conversation with someone that is abroad, and someone was targeting the person abroad – now you've got an American citizen on the phone. What do you do with that? What can you share? How can you report? There’s still a lot of confusion about it. What I fear is that if we don't make some hard decisions and come up with greater clarity, things will drop between the cracks, a lot like what happened before 9/11.
A big part of this is coming up with clear governance on data, in particular how that data is going to be stored and exploited. You may have a piece of information today and you don't know it's really important – it's only a year from now, when you're doing research, finding something out and you realize, Wait, that is the missing piece of a puzzle? When we were researching and trying to figure out what eventually led to the downfall of [Osama] Bin Laden, it was older information, finding that and piecing that together. Now there's discussions about information from social media: how long can you actually hold it? Who can look at it? Who can scrape that data?
AI is a tool to be used. It’s still in its infancy, it needs to be verified and checked, and you need the expertise to know that what you might have was a hallucination. But I do think there are many applications that can help in that sorting through, to find the needle in the haystack. One of the biggest changes that occurred during my 37 years at CIA was the amount of information that analysts now have to sort through.
AI can also help with creativity. It can help to challenge the analysts – you can ask it to start thinking about, Where did I miss? Where are the holes in my argument? What's going on? It can help improve and sharpen analysis, and it can do things faster. All of that is important, because the other thing that’s really changed is the expectation of how quickly people need to react. Policymakers are being expected to make a comment about something almost in real time. Analysis and intel take time, and so there's a mismatch there.
I don't think that folks should be afraid of looking at [reforming] the intelligence community. The world has changed and technology has changed, to the point where you can get incredible satellite imagery on your phone. When we set up the National Geospatial Agency, that was never the case. Does that make a difference now? I still think you need to have individuals focused on imagery and focused on it for the war fighters and for all kinds of other reasons. I'm not saying do away with NGA, but I'm saying that maybe there's a difference in how we approach some of these topics with changes in technology.
I don't think we should be afraid to look at [reforms], as long as we maintain what is at the core of the IC. [President Harry] Truman set up the CIA for two reasons: First and foremost was the analytic side. [Truman] wanted a place that gave him that objective independent analysis. And then it was the clandestine collection of information. It's a two-headed hydra. We need to make sure that we don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
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