EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION -- Today, the Central Intelligence Agency faces a crisis of trust. While CIA officers have long confronted adversaries abroad, the Agency now finds itself navigating an increasingly politicized relationship with the American public it serves.
A dangerous perception has taken root in recent years, namely that the CIA, intended to be apolitical by design, has become a partisan actor in our polarized national politics. If left unaddressed, this perception threatens not only the Agency’s effectiveness but, by extension, the country’s broader national security. Reflecting on my 34-year career in intelligence and nearly a decade beyond it, I recognize that such existential challenges, though rare, are not unprecedented. And there are ways to recover.
In the more than four decades since I first took the oath of office as a new CIA operations officer, I cannot recall a time when CIA was not confronted with daunting challenges. From the Cold War through the 1990’s when we dealt with what then-Director James Woolsey called “a jungle full of a number of poisonous snakes,” to the post-9/11 war against jihadi terror and the reappearance of peer competitors, there was never a time when the Agency was not called upon to provide crucial intelligence on, and sometimes to directly confront, our nation’s adversaries. I imagine those serving today face similarly formidable tasks: from countering China’s rise, dealing with Russian irredentism and Iranian-inspired terrorism, to integrating cutting-edge AI across the breadth of Agency operations, and rebuilding the service’s human intelligence arm after the severe damage wrought by the ‘reorganization’ of 2015.
I can, however, recall only a few times when the Agency’s existence was existentially challenged. The Church Committee and ‘Time of Troubles’ of the mid-1970’s, were before my time. But I served during the interregnum of the 1990’s, when some misguided souls thought we had reached the end of history and that, with the demise of the ‘Evil Empire,’ the nation no longer needed an intelligence service. I was also there in the post-9/11 era when the Agency was assigned disproportionate blame for that murderous assault on our nation. The professionalism and effectiveness of CIA officers in carrying out the Agency’s mission were ultimately proof against those efforts to dismantle the organization.
Today, as I look at CIA from afar, it seems to me yet again to be under existential threat because many of the citizens the Agency serves have come to see it as an adversary. In truth, there has always been a particular tension in the juxtaposition between the secret world in which Agency officers live and the values of the democracy they serve. Even Presidents have sometimes voiced discomfort with the nature of the CIA’s mission. President Harry S. Truman judged that “secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix.” John F. Kennedy thought that “the very word secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Those views are reflective of the uneasiness of the American people with the secret world and with actions seen or portrayed as less than honorable that are undertaken in their name. Former CIA Director Richard Helms addressed this inherent friction between secrecy and democracy when he wrote that “the nation must take it to a degree on faith that we, too, are honorable men dedicated to their service.”
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There were rare moments when the Agency enjoyed popularity. I will never forget watching the cheering crowd in front of the White House hailing CIA and the U.S. military in the wake of our delivery of justice to Osama Bin Laden. But, for the most part, the American people seemed in accord with the reluctant toleration of the Agency’s activities expressed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower when he pronounced intelligence “a distasteful but vital necessity.” They seemingly understood that CIA has an incredibly difficult job, and that, consequently, its officers must – as John le Carre wrote in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – sometimes “do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night.”
Public opinion surveys show confidence in the CIA has experienced fluctuations over time, marked by periods of erosion and recovery. Such shifting views of CIA are understandable given its role. An assertion by the Agency’s first Director, Allen Dulles, that an issue under discussion in his time was “a policy matter and not my job’ notwithstanding, CIA has often found itself at the center of policy debates.
I can recall seemingly innumerable instances over the course of my career when the Agency, invariably hindered by its secret nature in defending itself, was used as a political football in all too often internecine arguments.
Of late, however, public confidence in the CIA has eroded significantly compared to previous decades. While most Americans still view the Agency as vital to national security, there are persistent and growing concerns about civil liberties, partisanship, and transparency.
Partisan polarization is a particular concern as trust in the CIA is increasingly shaped by political affiliation. Support among Democrats grew during the Biden administration, while Republican support declined. Moreover, Americans are more likely to judge the CIA’s performance based on their alignment with the sitting president. Given the dictates of our democratic system, that perception of political bias portends serious problems not only for CIA’s mission-effectiveness, but potentially for its very existence, if not addressed.
In order to do so, it is necessary to ask how that perception took hold. How did CIA which, by definition, must be an apolitical organization, come to be tarred with a partisan brush? Some will see it is a natural outgrowth of the deep divisions that characterize our nation’s politics today. There is, sadly, a lot of truth in this. However, it must also be admitted that the actions of some who have an abiding love for the organization they serve, or served in, helped widen those rifts. They include, in the first instance, any CIA officers who, in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election, violated the law and their oaths to the Constitution by joining in what could only be described as a tsunami of leaks of classified or politically sensitive information as part of an attempt to ‘resist’ a President elected to office by a majority of American voters.
Further, one need only listen to half the country to understand that those serving and former officers who explicitly or implicitly cited their CIA affiliation – thereby implicitly indicating access to information unknown to the average citizen - in support of political causes contributed greatly to that perception of partisanship.
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Specific instances of this include lending support to the legitimacy of the since conclusively discredited “Steele Dossier” and, particularly, signing the open letter characterizing the ‘Hunter Biden laptop’ as having the hallmarks of a Russian information operation. Whatever personal views individual officers might hold on these and other politically contentious issues, there can be no doubt that many of our countrymen – not to mention many senior government officials - view the public statements of former CIA officers as the Agency putting its thumb on the political scale.
The organization has made clear this is not the case. But, as Henry Kissinger said, “it is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” The question now is what CIA and Agency officers, past and present, can do to change that perception. A few steps come to mind.
First, CIA needs to reinforce its efforts to identify leakers and bring them to justice. As the Snowden case demonstrated, given the nature of modern technology and the speed with which information can be propagated, there is no difference in terms of the negative impact of their actions on U.S. national security between those who leak information and those spying for a foreign power.
Second, the time when former Director William J. Casey’s expressed desire for a “no-profile agency” having long passed, CIA should re-double its public outreach efforts. Such programs will not, of course, quash the many conspiracy theories out there ranging from the serious (i.e., that CIA somehow had a hand in the JFK assassination) to the ridiculous (e.g., disproving the presence of the remains of space aliens being stored in the basement of the Original Headquarters Building). But the judicious release of historical information and the like does help educate the American people on what the Agency does in their name.
Finally, the Agency should remind former officers that they have life-long secrecy obligations but also reinforce the message that they remain representatives of CIA even after leaving the service in the eyes of their countrymen who, for the most part, do not distinguish between past and present Agency officers. Consequently, invoking their Agency experience in support of any endeavor that is clearly politically partisan can only damage the organization they served and make the already difficult jobs of those still serving harder still. And those are consequences to which no one who had the privilege and honor of serving at CIA wants to contribute.
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