Welcome to CODEWORD.
I’ve been reporting, writing, and thinking about intelligence, national security, and foreign policy for the better part of forty years. My goal is to get you thinking about them too. My hope is that you’ll subscribe to this newsletter – and buy my new book. It’s THE MISSION: The CIA in the 21st Century.
In CODEWORD, you’ll read my dispatches from within the American intelligence community. You’ll hear the on-the-record accounts of American spies. You’ll learn how the CIA executes American foreign policy, for better or for worse, often the latter. You’ll hear about the lives of CIA directors, station chiefs, and paramilitary officers. And you’ll get my reporting and analysis of what goes on in the secret world.
Today, American intelligence is being subverted by the President of the United States. The CIA director is forcing out experienced spies and analysts. The FBI director is wrecking the bureau’s counterspy capabilities. The nation’s intelligence czar is a crackpot conspiracy theorist. The secretary of defense is a feckless amateur.
At the root of this turmoil in the American intelligence community is Trump’s invincible ignorance. He is an ideologue, and ideology is the enemy of intelligence. His mind is made up, and he does not wish to be confused with facts.
He hates and fears the CIA. He sees it as the capital of the deep state. That is why he chose John L. Ratcliffe, once a right-wing congressman, to run the world’s most famous secret intelligence service. He knows Ratcliffe will tell him whatever he wants to hear. That is decidedly not the job description of the CIA director.
CIA director John Ratcliffe at the White House.
Ratcliffe has summarily fired everyone the CIA hired in 2023 and 2024 in the name of Elon Musk’s chainsaw massacre of government workers. And that was just for starters. He is carrying out an ideological purge at the CIA to align it with the president’s malign view of the world. He has made a criminal referral to the Justice Department against John Brennan, the former CIA director, because Brennan oversaw the ironclad intelligence assessment that the Russians monkey-wrenched the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Ratcliffe has abolished the CIA’s policies mandating a diverse workforce and dismissed the people assigned to fulfill them -- despite the fact that “diversity is the agency’s greatest strength,” in the words of Marc Polymeropoulos, the former deputy chief of Russian operations. “It’s how we don’t get caught.” For more than forty years, the clandestine service had been trying to recruit and retain African American, Arab American, and Asian American officers, on the sound basis that sending an all-white cadre to spy in places like Somalia, Pakistan, or China was terrible tradecraft. In an age of ubiquitous technical surveillance, the CIA desperately needs spies who could blend into the human terrain abroad, who like the best analysts had a command of the languages and the cultures of the countries they covered. It’s now harder to find them and keep them.
As the president assaults America’s civil liberties and democratic institutions, seeking to finish the job his mob had started in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the instruments of its intelligence and national security are in the hands of amateurs and toadies. The foundations of its foreign policy are corroding and crumbling. The State Department is shuttering embassies and consulates around the world. The diplomatic cover they gave dozens of CIA stations and bases is disappearing. The ranks of the CIA’s most experienced spies and analysts are thinning. America’s ties to its closest international allies are fraying.
All this makes the risk of a catastrophic intelligence failure as high as it was at the start of the twenty-first century.
Imagine what would happen if the United States were struck again by a surprise attack in days to come. What would stop the president from declaring martial law or canceling elections? Congress or the Supreme Court? Who then would disobey him if he ordered the clandestine service to rebuild the secret prisons, overthrow a sovereign nation, or assassinate his enemies?
A nation’s intelligence officers, John le Carré observed, are “the infantry of our ideology.” In America, they follow the command of presidents and presidents alone. One year ago, the Supreme Court has ruled that presidents are protected from prosecution for crimes committed in the ambit of their power. A president “who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics . . . has a fair shot at getting immunity,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent from the court’s 6–3 decision. “The president is now a king above the law.” The CIA veterans John Sipher and James Petrila have observed: “If a president should choose to declare a political rival guilty of treason, deploy a paramilitary group to assassinate that rival and direct the attorney general to sign a document saying that said rival’s death is necessary for ‘the securing of liberty,’ these would be official acts for which the president is immune.”
This fear is not that far-fetched. A lawless chief executive could command the CIA to serve as his secret police, to spy on Americans, and to support right-wing dictators, as it had done in the greatest secrecy during the cold war. He could demand that it cease spying on Russia and subvert American allies instead. He could order it to conduct political warfare against the citizens of the United States. The officers of the CIA would be the only line of resistance. Unless they rebelled against him, the CIA would no longer be an intelligence service under law, but a secret weapon wielded by a man above it.
In the next CODEWORD, I’ll report on the ongoing assault on American intelligence by Trump. Please subscribe here: timweiner.beehiiv.com