John Ratcliffe’s first six months at the CIA have been a series of self-inflicted wounds.
John Ratcliffe has just drafted the first paragraph of his obituary. It will read something like this: “…regarded as the worst director of the Central Intelligence Agency in history….”
Ratcliffe has capped his first six months in office by forcing out the CIA’s top spy, Tom Sylvester. The New York Times, my old newspaper, broke the story, and I provided a quote: “The C.I.A. is not shooting itself in the foot; it’s shooting itself in the head. Ratcliffe is a political ideologue, and ideology is the enemy of intelligence. He has just keelhauled one of the best C.I.A. officers of his generation. Tom Sylvester helped Ukraine survive after Russia invaded, among other achievements. That seems to be one reason why he’s been sacrificed.”
The CIA’s stated reason? “Mr. Ratcliffe wants to appoint a younger CIA officer who is aligned with the agency’s new, more aggressive approach on recruiting sources and running clandestine operations," an unnamed Agency flack told The Times. To appreciate how absurd that statement is, it helps to know a bit about Tom Sylvester’s thirty-four years at the CIA. (You can learn a lot more in THE MISSION.)
Sylvester recruited a platoon of Iraqi sources who spied on Saddam Hussein’s military and intelligence services before the American invasion of 2003. He was chief of station in Damascus, running operations under the nose of the brutal Assad regime in 2006. He spent most of the next decade conducting aggressive counterterrorism operations all over the world. He was a leader of the CIA’s four-year effort to penetrate the Kremlin with spies – which wound up stealing Putin’s war plans for invading Ukraine.
Let’s hold that record up against Ratcliffe’s eight months of experience in the world of intelligence during Trump’s first term. That time was a foreshadowing of this moment.
Ratcliffe was an archconservative three-term Texas congressman whose campaign biography invented his accomplishments as a federal prosecutor in terrorism cases. He had been on the House intelligence committee for less than a year, his attendance spotty, his grasp of the issues tenuous, when Trump saw him on Fox News railing against “the Russia hoax.”
The president liked the way he looked on TV and decided to make him director of national intelligence -- the post now held by the incomparable Tulsi Gabbard. Trump said Ratcliffe was going help him bring the CIA to heel: “I think we need somebody like that that’s strong and can really rein it in. As you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok. They’ve run amok.” This pronouncement was the first clear sign that the president was prepared to place political hacks in control of American intelligence.
FBI director Kash Patel, DNI Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA director John Ratcliffe
Ratcliffe and his principal deputy – Kash Patel, now running, or ruining, the FBI – spent the better part of 2020 trying to ransack the CIA’s Russia House, rifling through top secret files for anything that might fulfill Trump’s desire to deny that he was Putin’s chosen candidate, and to support his attack on the CIA as the headquarters of the Deep State conspiracy, the laboratory where the idea that Russia had influenced the election had been invented.
Ratcliffe refused to release the intelligence community’s traditional annual threat assessment, which had for three years running surveyed Putin’s attacks on the United States. He cut off the flow of classified information to Democrats on the intelligence committee, assailing them as leakers. He canceled all oral intelligence briefings to Congress on the subject of Russian election interference. His own directorate told Congress at the end of his short reign that he had delayed, distorted, and obstructed reporting on Russia’s election interference.
“This idiot is abusing his office,” the former CIA director Mike Hayden had tweeted back then. “The head of the intelligence community should be hands off on politics. This is reprehensible!” (If Trump won a second term, Hayden had predicted, the United States “will be just like Russia or China. A tin pot dictatorship.”)
Above all, Ratcliffe fed Trump’s obsession that the Democrats had used the CIA to subvert him.
“Obama knew everything. Vice President Biden, dumb as he may be, knew everything,” Trump told Fox on August 13, 2020. “They spied on my campaign, which is treason. They spied, both before and after I won, using the intelligence apparatus of the United States to take down a president, a legally elected president, a duly elected president of the United States. It is the single biggest political crime in the history of our country.” This oldie but goody is once again in heavy rotation on Trump’s Top Ten, amplified by Gabbard and Ratcliffe.
The CIA flack to the contrary notwithstanding, I suspect Ratcliffe has ended the career of one of America’s finest intelligence officers for reasons other than an alleged lack of derring-do. Tom Sylvester ran brilliant espionage operations against Russia under Trump’s nose during his first term. He was essential to Ukraine’s survival against the Kremlin’s aggression. He embodies the traditions of espionage as opposed to secret prisons and drone strikes. And he’s been quoted on the record in my book chronicling Trump’s attempts to sabotage and undermine American intelligence.
The past is prologue, people. And an intelligence service in the hands of an autocrat and his acolytes is a dangerous thing.