What impact will President-elect Donald Trump’s attack on the Intelligence Community have on the CIA as it steels itself to deal with its already contentious new first customer?
The agency’s conclusion in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the election not just to undermine confidence in the electoral process and democracy, but to actively help Trump win, sparked a flurry of contemptuous comments this weekend from Trump and his team blasting the CIA in response to The Washington Post’s report.
This is making a difficult situation even worse, Cipher Brief network experts and former IC members say, and it will likely impact morale, recruitment, and retention internally within the Agency. But they also point out Trump would not be the first POTUS to ignore intelligence and suggest that even as he weakens his relationship with the Agency, the CIA will continue to adhere to its apolitical ethos in the face of a leader who has shown little respect for the intelligence service.
Trump’s comments have “made an important relationship even more difficult to establish,” former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden told The Cipher Brief this weekend.
“Look, they’ve been called politicized, they’ve been called incompetent, and that’s just in the last 48 hours. All they’ve done is their job, and those who are condemning them are not condemning them on their work – they’re not condemning them on faulty analysis or because they have additional facts that the Agency hasn’t considered,” Hayden said. “This is the organizational equivalent of the ad hominem attacks we saw during the campaign, where they didn’t argue policy, it was just ‘Crooked Hillary’ or ‘Lyin’ Ted’ or ‘Little Marco.’”
John Sipher, who retired in 2014 after a 28-year career in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, said Trump’s “facts-free style will not mesh well with a large professional cadre whose entire reason for existence is to uncover facts.” The IC, and CIA in particular, “takes great pride in its culture of non-partisan professionalism,” Sipher said.
“It is clear that Mr. Trump wants the information about Russian interference to be untrue. However, it is also clear that he has no independent means to dispute the information. Simply wanting something to be true or untrue and making baseless claims is the exact opposite of what intelligence professionals do every day. The IC takes particular pride in going where the intelligence leads even if it is uncomfortable,” Sipher, who now serves as director of Client Services at CrossLead, Inc., said.
Trump’s response is “not a good sign, obviously,” former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell, who supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign, told The Cipher Brief.
“In a world with so many threats and challenges facing the United States and in a city where politics and policy disputes color so many views, a President, if they’re going to be able to protect the country, they need someone to provide them with an objective, unbiased view of what’s going on in the world, and why it matters to them, and why it matters to the country. That job falls to the Intelligence Community led by the CIA, and that’s why the relationship between a President and the Intelligence Community and the CIA is so special, and the President and the DNI (Director of National Intelligence) and the Director of the Agency need to nurture that special relationship. And right now that special relationship is being undermined.”
Trump’s transition team issued a statement taking aim at the CIA in the wake of the report, writing that “these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” That wasn’t the only attack on the IC from the next administration, however. Trump, who repeatedly questioned U.S. intelligence information both during and after the election, claimed on “Fox News Sunday” that he does not need daily intelligence briefings because “I’m, like, a smart person.”
“I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump said, adding that “But I do say if something should change, let us know. Now, in the meantime, my generals are great, are being briefed. (Vice President-elect) Mike Pence is being briefed, who is, by the way, one of my very good decisions. He's terrific. And they're being briefed. And I'm being briefed also.”
Reuters reported on Friday that Trump is receiving the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) about once a week, while Pence is being briefed several times each week.
Steven Hall, a former senior CIA officer who retired in 2015 and spent much of his career overseeing intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact, said the way the president-elect has gone about this is “really unprecedented” and his response to the CIA will reverberate throughout the IC. Typically, Hall said, politicians who speak negatively on the intelligence process and the IC prior to receiving briefings have a “come to Jesus moment” when they “actually come in close contact with it and see the nature of the information and understand better the complexity” of the operation.
“This particular politician has had that experience, has seen the briefings, has gotten some information and yet continues to basically say, ‘yea, this probably isn’t really worth a whole lot of my time.’ And that can’t but help damage the relationship between, not only CIA, but the IC writ large, and the White House,” Hall said.
Internally, morale will likely take a hit as well, experts told The Cipher Brief.
“Of course, the morale in the intelligence Community will be damaged if it is not considered relevant by the incoming administration. Presidents always have the right to ignore findings by the IC and the CIA, and Trump would not be the first POTUS to do so,” former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence Carmen Medina, a 32-year veteran of the IC, told TCB. “But if he continues to do it in a public and insulting way, experienced professionals will take early retirement and recruitment will suffer. So it's about more than just morale. It's about performance and long-term viability.”
If things continue in this direction, there will be a “really insidious erosion of morale,” Hall noted.
“What’s going to happen is that you’re going to get some of the best and the brightest—and I don’t mean just Russia, but certainly the Russia folks as well—are going to look at the situation and go, ‘Do I really want to be part of this. Is it worth the risks?’ They are certainly not in it for the money,” Hall said. “I think you’re going to get some of the best and the brightest at CIA and maybe across the Intelligence Community, who will say, ‘Look, this is simply not worth it.’”
Sipher, meanwhile, said Trump’s comments will certainly impact morale “in the short run,” but added that he doubts “they will have any impact on the IC's performance. CIA is used to doing its work in a politicized environment, and the Agency has gone through periods where presidents did not pay attention to its intelligence.”
Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway also knocked the CIA’s conclusion that Russia had interfered in the election specifically to help Trump, echoing the president-elect’s claim that the assessment is “laughable and ridiculous.”
“[Trump] absolutely respects the Intelligence Community,” Conway told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “He has made very clear he is going to put his own people in there as well. What he has said is laughable and ridiculous is this entire notion, which people are just using as a foregone conclusion, that somehow this was meant to defeat Hillary Clinton and elevate him to the presidency.”
Another potential shift given a contentious relationship with the White House could be in who the CIA is mainly serving, Medina suggested.
“I also see the possibility that the IC over time would end up working more for Congress than for the Executive Branch,” she said. “I can imagine members on both sides of the aisle protecting the IC's analytic capability against attacks by the Administration.”
But right now, the agency is “looking for its current leadership – and frankly, it’s future leadership – to step up and defend the Agency against these kinds of accusations,” Hayden said.
CIA officers and analysts will be looking for the next director — Rep. Mike Pompeo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, is Trump’s nominee for the post — to support their work and push back against the president when necessary.
"I think the broad view in the Intelligence Community was that they were happy with this choice," Hayden said. “Now the question is, will he stand up and defend them against the kind of accusations that have been made?”
Pompeo will likely be “considered a complete, non-independent Trump person” by those in the agency if he fails to do that, Hall noted. But it will be a difficult line to walk.
“If he does what the workforce would like him to do, which is go back and say ‘No, you need to look at this more,’ he’s going to put himself perhaps in an untenable position with the new president,” Hall said. “It’s going to be a really tough job for him.”
The FBI, meanwhile, has not reached the same conclusion of Moscow’s intent to steer the election toward Trump as the CIA reportedly has — a difference that highlights the respective approach each agency takes. The FBI, a law enforcement agency, looks for conclusive evidence to prove a case. The CIA does not try to come up with a legal case, but instead uses raw intelligence to better understand what adversaries are up to and to produce the best assessment possible of that information.
“Keep in mind that the Bureau works to prove things beyond all reasonable doubt,” Hayden said. “That’s not the job of the CIA. CIA is an intelligence organization. CIA’s job is to enable action, decisive, important action, even in the face of lingering doubt.”
“You’ve got tensions that exist simply because of the nature of these organizations; it’s not a good default position to simply say this is the forces of good versus evil. It may simply be a difference in the character of the organization. The level of proof that the Bureau requires before they say anything might be much higher than what the Agency requires before it starts to say something,” he added.
The CIA’s assessment is not the first instance of the IC weighing in on Russia’s involvement in hacking U.S. political institutions during the 2016 campaign, although it is the first to suggest that the Kremlin did so to favor a specific candidate. In October, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Security released a joint statement officially accused Russia of intending to interfere with the U.S. election process, stating that the IC was “confident” that the Russian government directed the hacks.
As for what’s next at the agency, “the prospects for an organization whose mission is to do the best it can to uncover reality don't appear to be robust in a post-truth world,” according to Medina. “Trump appears to be more about creating reality than responding to it.”
Former CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations and formerly chief of Russian Operations Rob Richer told TCB that he thinks there could be potential for a more constructive relationship if Trump takes note of the IC and its work early in his presidency.
“I think quite frankly, within six months or so, if the President devotes time to understanding how intelligence works, it will be a productive relationship. He is known, from what I understand of Mr. Trump, to be a delegator,” Richer said. “If he thinks they’re doing their job, he’ll let them do their job. If he doesn’t, well that’s going to be a problem."
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
Pam Benson, Suzanne Kelly and Fionnuala Sweeney contributed to this report.
