Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America project will feature its latest series titled “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done.
The Central Intelligence Agency is America’s most famous spy outfit. It’s not our biggest or best-funded intelligence service — that’s the National Security Agency — but the CIA’s reputation was long ago established in the popular imagination, between spy movies and novels. When people think about espionage, the CIA is what comes to mind.
The agency is an experienced bureaucratic player inside the Beltway. It protects its turf with more effectiveness than the agency sometimes displays with its spy mission. However, the hour for serious reform has arrived. During former President Barack Obama’s second term, his relationship with the CIA turned toxic, thanks to his excessively cozy relationship with Director John Brennan, a naked Democratic partisan. Matters hardly improved under former President Joe Biden, when CIA leadership and too much of the intelligence community corrupted themselves by endorsing White House lies about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attacks on U.S. intelligence personnel known as the Havana Syndrome.
We need a fresh start in the second Trump administration, yet so far results are mixed. CIA Director John Ratcliffe enjoys a good relationship with the White House. The administration’s emphasis on payback against the deep state for its past sins against Trump is a top priority for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, but Ratcliffe has played along too. Gabbard’s reaching into CIA ranks to purge suspected anti-Trumpers, especially when the anti-Trump evidence against some of those officers is very thin, doesn’t sit well with many Langley veterans.
The larger problem, which Team Trump must address, is that the CIA shouldn’t have the political power it possesses, much of which is derived from its status as the U.S. government’s chief intelligence analyst. It’s the CIA that owns most of the analysts who provide the White House with intelligence, including the President’s Daily Brief, going back to President Harry Truman. That’s too much power vested in one spy agency, plus a recipe for politicization — exactly as occurred under Obama and Biden. The agency’s Directorate of Analysis, formerly Intelligence, boasts battalions of analysts, of frankly mixed quality. One very accomplished CIA analyst once described his colleagues as “rather bright graduate students” in their mentality, which explains their politics, too.
The fix here is a simple one. Copy the United Kingdom’s Joint Intelligence Committee, which takes intelligence officers from all Britain’s spy agencies and rotates them to perform national-level intelligence analysis and assessments. The U.S. must do the same. Disband the Directorate of Analysis and create a top-level analysis shop, with the best spy minds. Make sure none of them serve there too long, because that’s what leads to partisan politics infecting the intelligence business. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, just mimic the U.K.’s JIC, which has existed since before World War II.
The CIA’s most famous mission resides in its Directorate of Operations, which is where the real spies are. The DO’s core mission is to steal foreign secrets. Per Hollywood depictions, DO officers serving all over the world, under various forms of cover, represent the pointy end of Langley’s secret spear. Sometimes, it can be very dangerous work, as the agency’s storied Memorial Wall attests.
The DO’s operational model, which is largely based on employing U.S. diplomatic facilities to collect foreign intelligence, has changed remarkably little since the agency’s establishment in 1947. It still works rather well on the whole. In most of the world, CIA spies work the diplomatic cocktail circuit, per the spy-film cliché, while waiting for walk-ins to show up at the U.S. Embassy door, selling secrets.
However, this venerable modus operandi faces serious challenges in “hard target” countries such as China and Russia, where AI-enabled facial recognition systems and the ubiquitous local security service watch suspected CIA personnel so closely that getting any work done outside the embassy can be extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. To say nothing of “denied areas” such as Iran and North Korea, where the U.S. has no embassies, nor do American businesses operate. The CIA is all but shut out.
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The bigger problem is the disappearance of traditional cover thanks to the internet and biometrics. This challenge confronts spy agencies worldwide, and nobody yet has a firm solution. The old ways of masquerading as a diplomat or businessperson, thanks to fake documents, get much trickier when quick database and social media checks can reveal the spy’s true identity with astonishing ease. These days, casual habits regarding cover can get CIA personnel arrested or even killed.
The agency is addressing this through its Directorate of Digital Innovation, established a decade ago, which counts among its missions finding new ways to employ cover in the digital age. This effort requires maximum effort because the CIA’s traditional espionage practices are disappearing rapidly in the always-online world.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.