The CIA officer Ray Cline, who was the agency’s chief analyst during the Cuban missile crisis, once observed that when it comes to intelligence analysis, “objectivity is the only virtue that really counts.” By that standard, senior Trump-administration officials have fallen short, and they risk corrupting a system that’s supposed to remain apolitical and grounded in facts, according to a recent survey of CIA analysts.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, the number of CIA employees who said they are concerned that the objectivity of analysis is being undermined by political influence has gone up significantly, according to the survey, which is conducted annually by the agency’s ombudsman for analytic integrity. The results haven’t been made public, but they were described to me by several people familiar with them.
It’s not clear how many of the thousands of career employees involved in producing reports, briefings, and other materials for the president and his advisers responded. But their comments show how acutely some of them feel pressured to reach preferred outcomes instead of following the facts wherever they lead, the people familiar with the voluntary survey told me. They requested not to be identified by name so that they could speak candidly.
The survey, which covers last year and was sent to members of the agency’s analytic workforce, combines multiple-choice questions with an open-ended section where respondents can give feedback in their own words. Most analysts who provided written responses objected specifically to actions by then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to a person familiar with the survey.
Among the analysts’ concerns was last year’s dismissal of two senior career intelligence officers after one of Gabbard’s deputies tried to rewrite their assessment that Venezuela was not directing a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. The administration wanted to claim the opposite to create a legal basis for deporting Venezuelan immigrants.
Respondents also cited Gabbard’s decision to revoke the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former national-security officials, without citing any evidence of wrongdoing. Some of them had worked on the intelligence community’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Trump derisively refers to as “the Russia hoax.” Gabbard, who left office last month, spent much of her time in office trying unsuccessfully to gin up evidence that intelligence leaders had engaged in a conspiracy to link Trump to Russia.
A majority of officers who responded to the survey said they were satisfied with how their own managers protected objectivity, according to a person familiar with the results. That indicates that at the rank-and-file level within the agency, integrity and adherence to standards remain generally intact, even if those principles have been put under pressure from above.
But the survey results should not be read narrowly as criticism of only Gabbard, people said. They reflect broader concerns about a political climate in which the president has routinely misrepresented intelligence to the public and directed his advisers to find evidence, however dubious, to support his claims about a stolen election in 2020.
“Trump ran on a platform, and ran his first term, in a way that made it clear that he saw the intelligence community more like a press and propaganda office,” Steven Cash, a veteran intelligence officer who also served as a staff member on congressional oversight committees, told me. “That’s fundamentally at odds with why there is an intelligence community.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other senior agency leaders are aware of the survey’s findings. “CIA is committed to providing objective analysis to policymakers to ensure they always have a decisive strategic advantage, as evidenced by successful operations like Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve,” Liz Lyons, the agency’s director of public affairs, told me in a written statement. She was referring, respectively, to last year’s U.S. air strikes on facilities associated with Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and to the military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran]
The strikes on Iran last year, however, offer another example of the cost that officers can pay for not toeing the administration’s political line. The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, was dismissed following a preliminary report that the air strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities by only a few months. Trump had said they were “obliterated.”
Generations of political leaders have been frustrated by analyses that don’t come out the way they want. And analysts have long bridled at influence from the top. In an essay for Foreign Affairs in 1987, then–Deputy Director Robert Gates wrote, “Far from kowtowing to policymakers, there is sometimes a strong impulse on the part of intelligence officers to show that a policy or decision is misguided or wrong, to poke an analytical finger in the policy eye. Policymakers know this and understandably resent it.” Gates, who went on to serve as CIA director and secretary of defense, wrote that in his experience, administration officials often tried to influence analysis by asking “carefully phrased questions” and, “on rare occasions,” trying to intimidate officers. “The pressures can be enormous.”
But intelligence officers have rarely had to worry that they might lose their job, or worse, for telling the truth. Officers whose names are not publicly disclosed have had their identities revealed and been harassed online. Some have told me that they worry that, in addition to losing their clearances, fanatical supporters of the president might show up at their home.
“In my time, I don’t think anyone was afraid they’d get fired or your name would suddenly make your way to Laura Loomer’s blog,” Cash, who served at the CIA from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, said.
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The results of the survey will be sent to Congress so that lawmakers charged with overseeing the intelligence community can judge for themselves whether the administration has brought undue influence to bear. The question could hardly be more timely. Trump has instructed his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to find and disclose evidence that he actually won the 2020 election. Pulte will have access to essentially all of the classified information in the government’s possession, and will have the authority to selectively declassify reports. Lawmakers worry that he will give the public an incomplete picture of what really happened in the 2020 election, and that he will undermine confidence in the fairness of the midterms later this year.
The Senate is scheduled to hold a hearing later this month on Trump’s nominee to permanently serve as DNI—U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton. If senators want to know his views on the importance of objectivity, they could show Clayton what the officers he would lead have to say.