Donald Trump has purged one of the CIA’s most senior Russia analysts
The move will have a chilling effect inside American spy agencies
The cia officer had worked in American intelligence for more than 20 years. In 2016, as the country’s top intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, she oversaw the production of a report, which described how Russia had meddled in that year’s presidential election in favour of Donald Trump. A few years later she returned to the agency as a senior manager, overseeing the cia’s operations and analysis relating to Russia and the former Soviet Union.
On August 19th her career came to an abrupt end, when Tulsi Gabbard, America’s director of national intelligence, revoked her security clearance, along with those of 36 other serving and former officials accused of “betray[ing] their oath to the Constitution”. Mr Trump’s administration has previously used its control over clearances as a political cudgel against retired officials. But the cia officer in question, along with two others involved in that 2016 report, Shelby Pierson and Vinh Nguyen, are some of the most senior serving career intelligence officials to be purged under Mr Trump. These steps mark a sharp escalation in his war on American spooks.
The Economist understands that the removal of the cia officer, who oversaw hundreds of analysts and other personnel, prompted alarm among many current and serving intelligence officials. To lose a clearance is a “career ender”, says Larry Pfeiffer, a former cia officer who had his own clearance yanked on January 20th. “Even the cleaning crews have clearance.” Many officers also rely on security clearances after retirement to seek consulting positions. The cia officer was thought to be close to retirement age. “Who will want to work on some controversial issue or go out on a limb analytically?” asks an insider. “It is one thing to speak truth to power in the abstract, and another when your career and family livelihood is very much on the line.”
In April an aide to Ms Gabbard pushed analysts to rewrite an assessment on Tren de Aragua, a gang, to suit Mr Trump’s policy. In June Mr Trump also attacked leaked intelligence assessments by the Defence Intelligence Agency which contradicted his claim to have destroyed Iranian nuclear sites. The cia has a long history of delivering unwelcome news to presidents—its dissenting analysis during the Vietnam war in the 1960s and the Iraq war in the 2000s resulted in repeated clashes between Langley and the White House—but this level of retribution is unprecedented. “It is hard to overstate the impact on morale,” says a former colleague of the cia officer. “Everyone is so afraid and looking over their shoulder, asking am I next?”
Many of the 37 targeted officials had worked on Russia only tangentially and a long time ago. Mr Nguyen was the chief data scientist at the National Security Agency (nsa), America’s signals-intelligence service. Weeks earlier insiders had told The Economist that he was “the most thoughtful person on ai in the federal government”. That agency’s director, General Tim Haugh, and its top lawyer, April Doss, were fired in April and July respectively. Others appear to be on the list for no other reason than their criticism of Mr Trump. Ted Gistaro, a former cia officer who served as Mr Trump’s main intelligence briefer from 2016 to 2019, had made mildly derogatory comments about Mr Trump. Most others appeared on a list published by Laura Loomer, a far-right activist, on July 29th.
The latest steps are part of a broader campaign to impugn officials and documents critical of Mr Trump. In July John Ratcliffe, the director of the cia, took the unusual step of publishing an internal review of the analytical “tradecraft” in the Russia report of 2016. The review praised many aspects of that report, but found that it had been written too quickly and with too much involvement from agency heads. That same month, Ms Gabbard also declassified a much older House Intelligence Committee review into the same report. The review, co-authored by Kash Patel, who is now the director of the fbi, included verbatim quotes from intercepts and descriptions of human sources in Russia, and was declassified over the objections of the cia.
On August 20th Ms Gabbard also announced that she would reduce her own Office of the Director of National Intelligence (odni), which co-ordinates the work of America’s 18 agencies, by 50%, in part with the aim of cutting bureaucracy and “rooting out deep state actors”. The odni was created after the September 11th attacks to ensure that intelligence was shared properly across America’s government. Ms Gabbard’s pruning is dramatic, but even many of Mr Trump’s critics acknowledge that the odni has grown too large and failed to stamp its authority on the agencies it oversees.
The administration is also using harsher legal means to strike at critics. In July it was reported that Mr Ratcliffe had made a criminal referral of John Brennan, one of his predecessors, to the fbi for allegedly lying to Congress. Mr Brennan, who had his clearance revoked in Mr Trump’s first term, was cia director at the time of the Russia report and clashed with the president in the early days of his first term. The Justice Department said it had also opened a criminal investigation into James Comey, the fbi director at the time of the report. Mr Comey had already been investigated for a social-media post in May which the Trump administration portrayed as an assassination threat.
“This is uncharted territory,” says Mr Pfeiffer, “particularly in terms of the numbers of people and the lack of detail about what they did wrong.” Mark Warner, the senior Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, speaking to The Economist shortly before the recent purges, said that the situation was worse than he had expected. “I thought Gabbard would be bad,” he observed. “I didn’t expect this bad.” In private, he noted, Republican colleagues on the intelligence committee, fearful of sticking their head above the parapet, had encouraged him to speak out in public. “I’ve literally had [allied] Five Eyes partners say: what’s going on?”
On August 20th Bill Burns, Joe Biden’s cia director, wrote an open letter to the “discarded” officials in the Atlantic, a magazine. “If intelligence analysts at the cia saw our rivals engage in this kind of great-power suicide, we would break out the bourbon,” he wrote. “Instead, the sound we hear is of champagne glasses clinking in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai.” ■
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