CIA historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools’
The longtime chronicler of the spy agency on his Legacy of Ashes follow-up and what keeps him up at night
It
may seem perverse to pity the Central Intelligence Agency. The powerful
spy organization’s history is rich with failures and abuses – from the
Cuban missile crisis to the post-9/11 torture program to its role in the
overthrow of a long string of democratically elected leaders. But among
the many consequences of Donald Trump’s open hostility toward America’s intelligence community is that no less a CIA critic than Tim Weiner now sounds like a defender.
To understand why, Weiner – author of the unsparing history of the agency, the 2007 bestseller Legacy of Ashes – suggested
a thought experiment in a recent interview: imagine spending years as
an intelligence officer, working diligently to subvert the Kremlin, only
to watch the US stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea, as it did in
February when it voted against a UN resolution condemning the invasion
of Ukraine. In that moment, Weiner said: “You come to the realization,
if you hadn’t already: ‘My God, the president of the United States has
gone over to the other side. He has joined the authoritarian axis.’”
I’m not known as a great defender of the CIA but neither am I a defender of willful ignorance
Tim WeinerWeiner
was sitting on the patio of his Brooklyn apartment, a sunny book-lined
penthouse purchased with some of the proceeds of Legacy, the
700-page tome that, to his evident surprise, became one of the
unlikeliest beach reads in recent memory. A former national security
reporter for the New York Times, the author has spent nearly four decades laboring to unlock the agency’s secrets. His latest book, The Mission, which is out on Tuesday, is something of a sequel, picking up where Legacy left off to examine the evolution of the CIA
since 9/11. Based on interviews with numerous CIA officials (including,
improbably, current deputy director for operations Tom Sylvester), it’s
the story of an organization purpose-built for a bygone era, still
adrift more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, failing to
spot the emergence of a formidable new adversary in Al-Qaida, and then
playing a panicked and catastrophic game of catchup. The results
included misbegotten intel about WMDs, the depraved and ineffective
torture program, the failure to predict the Arab spring and other
screwups.
But it’s the book’s final chapters,
which find the organization blindsided by Russia’s influence operation
on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency, that readers may
find most striking. Weeks before the election, Russia’s intelligence
services, with an assist from WikiLeaks, began releasing a trove of
hacked Democratic National Committee emails, dealing a devastating blow
to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was, as Weiner puts it in The Mission,
“an audacious act of political warfare [that] helped elect a demagogue
president of the United States”. Weiner dismisses the theory that Trump
is a Russian asset, but says it’s beside the point. “He’s Russia’s ally.” (That said, as Putin is discovering this week, the president’s loyalties are somewhat fluid.)
The
CIA soon embarked on a delicate balancing act: working to neutralize
the very force that worked to put their new commander-in-chief in
office. Tom Rakusan, then newly installed as the chief of the
clandestine service, called a meeting of senior officials. “He told
them, in so many word: ‘The Russians stole our fucking election. How do
we make sure this never happens again?’” Weiner recounted. Agents who
had spent the last 15 years working on counter-terrorism would turn
their attention back to the Russian threat. “The call to arms proceeded,
I’m quite confident, without his knowledge,” Weiner added, referring to
Trump.
Following two impeachments (and two
acquittals), an insurrection and another election, Trump is back in the
White House and bent on revenge. “Donald Trump hates the CIA,” Weiner
said, noting that Trump considers the agency the beating heart of a
“deep state” that he believes is working to undermine him. Consequently,
the president has appointed “a coterie of dangerously incompetent and
servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security”. Weiner
describes the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe – a former personal
injury attorney, Maga congressman and, briefly, director of national
intelligence in Trump’s first term – as “a spineless person who will do
whatever Trump tells him to do”.
Shortly after we spoke, Ratcliffe ordered a review that criticized
the CIA’s original report on Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation,
and the former CIA director John Brennan became the subject of a
criminal investigation by the FBI.
The new
director has also moved aggressively to implement a purge at the CIA’s
Langley, Virginia, headquarters. “He’s attempting to rid the CIA of its
most experienced officers,” Weiner said, “and to impose ideological
purity tests. Ratcliffe said explicitly from the get-go that he aimed to
align the leadership of the CIA with the president’s view of the world.
Since the president’s view of the world is largely based on falsehoods
and imaginary enemies, I think this will be an extremely difficult
task.”
Tim Weiner. Photograph: Jessica D B Doyle
Meanwhile,
Ratcliffe dismissed hundreds of recently hired staffers and then sent
their names to Elon Musk in an unclassified email that Weiner said was
probably intercepted by the Russians and Chinese, who he posits are now
presumably working to recruit them as spies. “All they need to do is to
find people who are either deeply resentful or who might have a
financial or a drug problem to be exploited.”
Trump’s
anti-diversity crusade will also have national security repercussions,
Weiner predicted. In February, a judge allowed the administration to
reassign the team responsible for diversifying the agency. “For decades,
the CIA has tried to hire people who don’t look like they just got off
the bus from Kansas on the very sound principle that if you want to spy
in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a
workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak
languages other than English,” Weiner said. “Diversity was one of the
CIA’s few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to
diversify the CIA’s officers and analysts was one of the most stupid
self-inflicted wounds that Ratcliffe could have delivered.”
Meanwhile, as Politico recently reported, allies may now be reluctant to share sensitive information with the US, no doubt mindful of the 2017 incident
in which the president gleefully handed the Russian foreign minister a
highly classified Israeli tip. “The CIA, to an extent that people rarely
understand or appreciate, is really dependent on allied intelligence
services,” Weiner explained. The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as
director of national intelligence, who oversees the CIA and 17 other
intelligence agencies, only compounds the risk, Weiner said. Gabbard has
never worked in the intelligence community and has been accused of parroting Russian propaganda. “What ally would share secrets with a dangerously deluded person like that?”
Weiner
recognizes it might come as a surprise to some to hear him extolling
the virtues of the agency he has previously skewered. “I’m not known as a
great defender of the CIA but neither am I a defender of willful
ignorance,” he said of the Trump administration’s seeming unconcern
about the threats posed by foreign adversaries. “I do think that the
mission of intelligence to divine the secrets of the enemies in the
United States is worthwhile. There’s unfortunately no mechanism for
defining the intentions of the president, and therein lies a danger.
“What
keeps me up at night,” he continued, “is the fact that Trump has put
the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots
and fools, and that their incompetence and ideological blinkers will
blind them to a coming attack. If the United States gets hit again under
Trump, he will destroy what is left of our democracy.” When I asked
Weiner how he thought the CIA might respond to Trump’s provocations, he
chuckled. “Is the CIA going to join the resistance? No,” he said flatly.
That
said, the spot where we sat was just blocks from the site where, weeks
before, demonstrators had assembled for one of several thousand “No
Kings” protests – thought to be the largest mass demonstration in US
history. “We’ve learned, to our sorrow, that Robert Mueller is not going
to save us,” Weiner said. “Barack Obama is not going to save us. The
supreme court is not going to save us. But the other day, several
million Americans marched in the street to protest the Mad King. And
just as only we can defeat ourselves, I think only we can save
ourselves.”