Intelligence in a Trump Presidency

The election of Donald Trump has generated plenty of interesting talking points for pundits, political scientists, and everyday people. I am mostly fascinated by the interpretation of his actions by the media.  It is an interesting time to be a social scientist.

One recent area that has received a lot of attention lately is the apparent feud between the President-Elect and the intelligence community.  This issue has come to a head because of the Russian hacking accusation and scandal. In a recent article in Politico, there is a discussion of the issue in which Trump accuses the intelligence community of playing politics because the Top Secret briefing he is supposed to receive has already been leaked to the media.

"How did NBC get 'an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?'" Trump tweeted Thursday. "Who gave them this report and why? Politics!" 

The network says a senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed leaked details of the report first published in the Washington Post, which states that U.S. intercepts captured Russian officials congratulating themselves on Trump's election win, citing U.S. officials. The overall report makes the case that Russia intervened in the election, NBC News reported. 

The president-elect is set to meet with intelligence officials on Friday, when he is expected to be briefed on evidence uncovered by the Russian hacking probe. Trump has repeatedly questioned intelligence agencies' conclusions that Russian operatives were behind several cyberattacks during the 2016 presidential race.

The accusation that intelligence is politicized is not a new one. Remember the ink that was spilled about the Bush Administration pressuring the CIA to provide evidence of Iraqi non-compliance with WMD? Goodman (2003, 62) attributes the failure of strategic intelligence to a politicization of intelligence at the CIA under Director Casey in the 1990s, and which he noted continued under Robert Gates:

Casey and Gates were directly responsible for the CIA’s poor analytical record in dealing with Soviet issues throughout the 1980s, from the failure to foresee the Soviet collapse to the revelation that CIA clandestine officer Aldrich Ames had been a Soviet spy for nearly a decade, altogether the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the agency until the terrorist attacks in 2001. In an unguarded moment in March 1995, Gates admitted that he had watched Casey on ‘issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued’. There has never been a better definition of politicization by a former director of central intelligence.

Loch Johnson (2003, 659), the father of modern intelligence studies, also weighed in on the issue of politicization of intelligence in a piece about theories of strategic intelligence had this to say:

Beyond these basics, a theory will have to take into account the most significant inadequacies of intelligence, including its periodic irrelevance and lack of timeliness, the frequent unwillingness of policymakers to accept reliable information (often a function of pathologies in the relationship between the producers and the consumers of intelligence), and the risks posed to democracy by the politicization of information.

His definition of politicization comes at the information presentation stage of the intelligence process.  The larger issue, and one which seems to be more frequently applicable today, is the leaking of intelligence information (which may be politicized in the Johnson context first) to the media.

News that Trump wants to shake up the intelligence community may cause them to lash out, but NPR has a great story about how the CIA has lost these battles in the past.

This particular agency battle will be one that should be interesting to watch unfold over the coming months and years.
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 Goodman, Melvin A. 2003. "9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence." Intelligence and National Security, 18(4): 59-71.

Johnson, Loch K. 2003. "Preface to a Theory of Strategic Intelligence" International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 16(4): 638-663.