Sherman Kent, the godfather of intelligence analysis, argued that the first obligation for his profession was to give policymakers accurate and unbiased information, through what he called “a mastery of background knowledge, evaluation and structuring of all-source material, and tradecraft expertise.”
What happens when honest intelligence work can get you fired?
The U.S. appears to be on the verge of finding out.
May 16, 2025
Telling inconvenient truths to presidents is what intelligence analysts are supposed to do. CIA analysts have done this for decades — for instance, in challenging U.S. military strategies during the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Presidents never like to be told they’re wrong, and they often persist in misguided policies, regardless of the evidence. But in this administration, it seems, truth-telling is a cause for dismissal.
Gabbard compounded the mistake by ordering a bureaucratic reshuffle of intelligence analysis. She will relocate the National Intelligence Council from the CIA to her ODNI headquarters. And her organization will also take over production of the President’s Daily Brief, the document that shapes national security policy decisions across he government, according to the New York Times. This is ironic, given that one of Gabbard’s aims was to streamline and downsize her office.
Intelligence community angst is the last thing Trump needs at a time when he has taken on unusually challenging foreign-policy missions, including attempting to negotiate peace in the Ukraine and Gaza wars and to strike a new nuclear deal with Iran.
Rather than searching analysis, Trump might get mush. As the 2002 CIA study of Kent’s legacy noted: “When an intelligence staff has been screened through [too fine a mesh], its members will be as alike as tiles on a bathroom floor — and about as capable of meaningful and original thought.”
The trigger for Gabbard’s putsch was probably an April 7 report by the National Intelligence Council titled “Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua.” After reviewing the evidence, the report said that the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” Intelligence reports alleging such direct links are “not credible,” the report argued.
The dry report had big implications, because Trump’s rationale for his March 14 decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport allegedly TDA-linked migrants was that the group acted “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.” U.S. District Judge Stephanie L. Haines cited Trump’s assertion in her ruling this week that the TDA deportations under the Alien Enemies Act were legal and that the court couldn’t challenge whether Trump has “sufficient support” for his claims.
The price for questioning Trump’s contention became viscerally clear this week. Gabbard fired acting NIC director Michael Collins and his deputy, who had overseen the Venezuela report (along with hundreds of other products reviewed by the NIC).
The purge followed a social media campaign against Collins by MAGA activist Laura Loomer, who had earlier pressed successfully for the firing of Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency, along with a half-dozen staffers of the National Security Council.
On April 20, Loomer had posted a brief work history for Collins and a complaint: “Why do we still have Biden holdovers and career anti-Trump bureaucrats at the National Intelligence Council undermining President Trump and his agenda?” In a later post, she repeated the demand that “the NIC senior officials should be fired,” again with details about Collins.
The MAGA message was underlined by the Fox News story on Tuesday breaking the news that Collins and his acting deputy would be fired. “‘It takes time to weed them out and fire them,’ one official told Fox News Digital, adding that ‘plans to eliminate non-essential offices within ODNI that we know are housing deep state leakers are underway.’”
Intelligence analysts “are terrified,” said a longtime senior CIA official who talked with analysts after they emerged from an all-hands meeting in which Gabbard’s move was announced. “They want to do their jobs,” this official said. With an inexperienced DNI and her staff looking over their shoulders, “people will second-guess themselves. They will worry that if someone decides they’re ‘deep state,’ they will lose their security clearances and their jobs,” this former official said.
John McLaughlin, a former CIA acting director who for many years supervised the agency’s analysts, said the advice he would give young officers today is “just keep doing your job professionally.” The abiding rule for a good analyst, he said, is: “Be humble. Open your eyes. You don’t know everything. You’re predicting the future. Be explicit about what you know and don’t know.”
The unlikely truth is that this approach, sometimes careful to a fault, is what in fact characterizes the intelligence professionals MAGA derides as the deep state. Sometime in the future, Trump will ask his intelligence advisers about a policy initiative — Will this work? Does it make sense? — and there won’t be anyone left to give him an honest answer.