Mao shakes hands with Pol Pot, 1976.
Putin shakes hands with Trump, 2025.
In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, educated people were purged because they wore glasses. Because they could read.
The goal was “destroying the old society to create a pure new one,” Elizabeth Becker, the journalist who best chronicled the Khmer Rouge regime, told me. The dictator “destroyed a civilization by killing those who embodied it: artists, musicians, scholars, scientists, librarians, teachers….”
In Donald Trump’s America, the best intelligence officers are being purged because they have seen things clearly.
The president has demanded an ideological cleansing of America’s national-security agencies. He wants to destroy the people who have fought the Russians and their political warfare against our democracy. It’s an act of national suicide, says William J. Burns, the greatest American diplomat of his generation and CIA director from January 2021 to January 2025.
“This is not about reform. It is about retribution,” Burns warned in The Atlantic. “It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.”
“That’s what autocrats do,” Burns continued. “They cow public servants into submission—and in doing so, they create a closed system that is free of opposing views and inconvenient concerns…. If intelligence analysts at the CIA saw our rivals engage in this kind of great-power suicide, we would break out the bourbon. Instead, the sound we hear is of champagne glasses clinking in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai,” the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s targets are the intelligence officers and analysts who have peered inside the Kremlin, fought the Russians, helped Ukraine survive, briefed Trump about Putin in the Oval Office, and worked to defend the United States against Russian sabotage and Chinese cyberespionage. One of his goals is to memory-hole the Russian intelligence services’ attacks on the American body politic, their support for his election and re-election, and their continuing assault on Western democracies. To that end, he has ordered his minions – John Ratcliffe at the CIA, Kash Patel at the FBI, and Tulsi Gabbard, the national intelligence director – to ruin the careers and wreck the reputations of some of the best minds in American intelligence.
Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials on Tuesday. One, I am told, was the CIA’s top Russia analyst. That person was working under cover, making Gabbard’s publicly naming them potentially illegal. Many others had analyzed and reported Russia’s hack of the 2016 presidential election. Among them were two of the CIA's most heralded analysts, Beth Sanner and Ted Gistaro. Both were Trump’s White House briefers and both are quoted on the record in my new book, THE MISSION.
Gabbard also keelhauled the National Security Agency’s chief data scientist, Vihn Nguyen. The New York Times reported that Nguyen, the son of a South Vietnamese general who fought alongside American forces in the Vietnam War, was recruited by the NSA at age 17 for his prodigious math skills. He was in charge of developing AI and quantum computing programs that could break the codes of Russian and Chinese encryption systems, with the potential of transforming 21st-century espionage.
For his part, Ratcliffe ended the career of one of the CIA’s most decorated officers, Tom Sylvester, the chief of the clandestine service, by cancelling his final tour as London station chief. Sylvester also is quoted, extensively, in THE MISSION, which may have something to do with this. Ratcliffe’s been on a rampage, firing new hires, forcing out veteran spies, and imposing loyalty tests – loyalty to Trump. He has had a devastating effect at headquarters. He’s lost the building, and that’s a dangerous state of affairs.
At the FBI, Patel is dismantling the national-security and intelligence directorates that guard the nation against foreign spies and their American agents. He is firing leaders right and left -- including Brian Driscoll, who briefly served as the bureau’s acting director in January, and Steve Jensen, the head of the FBI’s Washington field office. The specific sins those two committed included overseeing investigations into Trump and his supporters, and trying to bring the mob at the January 6 insurrection to justice.
At the State Department, hundreds of career diplomats have been purged in the name of Trump’s invincibly ignorant ideology. They were given six hours to clear out. “When I was expelled from Russia,” one told Burns, “at least Putin gave me six days to leave.”
Trump has dismantled the defenses America erected over the past decade to guard against political warfare waged by Moscow and Beijing. China is already inside our nation’s telecommunications and computer software, and building surveillance networks for the future. “Russia is conducting hybrid attacks against NATO countries every day. Cyberattacks, targeted assassinations, arson, political interference, disinformation, bribery, corruption, you name it,” in the words of Kurt Volker, once Trump’s ambassador to NATO.
And if Putin is allowed to keep the land he has stolen from Ukraine – and Trump would let him do it – he won’t stop there. NATO will be staring down the barrel of World War Three.
The wrecking ball Trump is swinging is destroying the architecture of American national security erected in the eighty years since World War Two. It’s madness, like Oedipus ripping out his own eyes. Flying blind against the enemies America faces is an existential threat to our citizenry – and our democracy. Trump has said he would gladly cancel the next elections in the event of an international crisis. The subversives he has placed in charge of American national security make it far more likely he will get one. And should that crisis come, God help the United States.