National Interest

by Joshua Yaphe

Can the intelligence community come to grips with the myths that it has created about itself

    The Trump administration seeks to hold the US intelligence community accountable for its part in a coordinated political effort to mislead Congress and the American public about President Trump’s relationship with Russia. Even if the full range of evidence remains largely classified, the prosecutions never go beyond grand jury indictments and the American people eventually tire of the story, the ramifications will nonetheless be profound.

    It is the type of thing that happens once in a generation, like the 9/11 Commission, in which senior intelligence officials (former and possibly even current) will be held to account in full public view. It will send a signal that, even within the intelligence community, leadership must be about taking personal responsibility and institutions cannot simply deflect criticism by hiding behind bureaucratic organizational reform.

• Coordination and Collusion

    There is undoubtedly an enormous amount of documents yet to be viewed by the public, from draft versions of assessments in which different analysts hash out differences of opinion in their edits to the reviews by higher-level managers seeking to translate the instructions of agency heads. Most of the correspondence surrounding the issue will probably never be declassified, due to the understandable need to protect sources and methods. However, a clear pattern is emerging from the documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this summer and to date, there is no evidence that the documents are inauthentic or inaccurate.

    It would appear that the Hilary Clinton campaign, in collaboration with the George Soros Foundation, sought to distract attention from her own scandal by concocting a false narrative about Russian collusion, in anticipation that sympathetic administration officials would launder the story as intelligence fact.

    In turn, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, with the assistance of CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey, rushed into production an assessment based on information they knew to be questionable, over the objections of a number of colleagues. That is the plain and simple reading of the newly released details. It is hard to find a rational alternative interpretation.

• Intelligence Is Political

    This should dispel two key myths that the intelligence community likes to promote about itself, namely, that it is objective and apolitical. These two fictions are cornerstones of analytic tradecraft and pillars of the overall drive toward the type of scientific method in whose name the profession claims respectability. The data upon which the raw reporting is based may exist in actual fact, but any step the intelligence professional ventures beyond the restatement of confirmed and verified events involves some element of subjective opinion. That is not a bad thing. It is simply a reality that must be admitted, just as it must be acknowledged that policymakers are looking to understand events in terms of narratives and it is part of the job of analysts to craft those storylines.

    It may come as more of a surprise that senior intelligence officials, in order to reach the heights of a cabinet-level appointment, have to make themselves attractive to politicians. It is no different than the position of Secretary of Defense, or even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where national security qualifications are certainly paramount, though in many cases, it is the political connections or expectations that provide the decisive factor in choosing one candidate over another.

    We can easily imagine former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, who reportedly wrote the open letter from 51 former intelligence officials in an attempt to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop, doing so as a way to push his name to the top of the list for CIA Director. Similarly, we can see the possible motivation of then-congressman (now Senator) Adam Schiff (D-CA), who reportedly allowed selective leaks of his committee’s investigations through various intermediaries, as an effort to vie for the same position of CIA Director.

• The Long-Term Repercussions of Intelligence Politicization

    The intelligence profession is predicated on a culture of secrecy that can easily breed arrogance and unaccountability among senior officials if left unchecked. This is not a universal truth for intelligence agencies worldwide. There are places where intelligence services understand and appreciate that their access and privilege can only be maintained as long as they have the trust of the head of state and the confidence of the public. And that degree of humility does exist within the American intelligence culture.

    However, it remains an open question as to how much of that is genuine respect for civil rights and how much is performative art directed at Congress for the sake of preserving budget allocations and legal authority. The US intelligence community has promoted the idea that intelligence failure is a matter of not separating the signals from the noise, communicating the right data at the right time, or adjusting for cognitive bias in the process, all of which implies that more scientific rigor can improve the product and thereby save American lives.

    Sometimes that’s true. But Russiagate also implies that we live in an era of narrative and the intelligence community is just as taken up with storytelling as any news outlet, think tank, political action campaign, or social media influencer. Whether intentional or unintentional, it is misleading for former senior officials like Brennan and Clapper to parse out the words of their assessment in an effort to clarify what was evidence and what was innuendo, when the Steele Dossier’s “rumint” was ultimately inseparable from the overall narrative it was peddling.

    All of this exists on a spectrum of personalities who hope to persuade and convince an audience. And intelligence agencies are no less preoccupied with the goal of trying to influence as well as inform, even if their work is rather far from the other end of that spectrum. As these investigations, declassifications, revelations and possible indictments move forward, intelligence agencies in Washington are going to have to recognize that they are not above the fray, living a separate existence from the rest of political DC and its media landscape, serving as the ultimate arbiters of what is or isn’t truth.

    To paraphrase Martin Gurri, the intelligence community will have to come to terms with the reality that even if they are government institutions in possession of large amounts of sensitive information, they are no longer an exclusive voice of authority and they should carefully consider the image they present of themselves when they act like one. The American public can see with their own eyes that this current US intelligence community leadership is able and willing to release a wealth of information without hiding behind classification banners and security clearances. They will expect future administrations to do the same.