An Intel Crisis Inside a National Security Crisis

subbasement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations

across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to DSR, I am your host David Rothguff, this week we're going to do something special. We're going to take a deep dive into a shadowy area that couldn't be more important and that

“is in the news but should be in the news more and that's what's going on in our intelligence”

community. We have with us a special guest, an old friend, John Cipher who worked for the CAA's Kleine Destin Services for 28 years and has now a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council,

CEO of Spycraft Entertainment and co-host of the Mission Implausible Podcast, he also writes

a lot on intelligence topics for CNN for the bulwark and others and we are very fortunate to have him with us. Welcome, John, you know, I've read some of what you have been posting and writing in different places, CNN, the bulwark and so forth and there's a lot of controversy about the state of play right now, within O.D. and I, where the president has, guy who has no experience

doing this stuff in there and fire in people, he's already apparently fired six political appointees and 25 career people in the past 24 hours. And then there's a broader set of issues about even whether O.D. and I should exist. I find myself, kept candidly, I find myself kind of, with mixed emotions, I don't agree with much that Trump is doing and yet when they started the Office of Director of

National Intelligence back after 9/11, I wrote a whole bunch article saying this is not, we don't need another layer bureaucracy and he was government. There are other ways to solve this problem. And so I'm not a huge fan of a big, you know, sort of, you know, Shepo bureaucracy.

“And I'm just wondering, where do you come out on where we are right now?”

Well, I'm there too. I mean, I remember in 2004 when they created it, it was very Washington type of thing, someone had to, you know, there was a problem, you had to show something to suggest that you're fixing it and then you know, congratulate yourself and say it's fixed. And of course, people who are working in the community didn't see it as fixed.

They just took pieces from other places, stuck it there, together, almost made it into an additional management layer and then said, oh, this is a great success. Now, and since that time, it hasn't been anything special, it's been a place, you know, where, you know, it's supposed to be a place where sort of wonky intel people come in and then try to make sure that the priorities are set across the intelligence community.

There's budget discipline, and there's de-confliction. There's standards across the analytic cadre. But what's happened now is the weaknesses of the O.D. and I, as a place, now are showing themselves because it's become a place where a president can put non-professionals to try to, as, he's almost personal, detective agency to dig up conspiracy theories.

And so it's supposed to be this powerful, independent, professional integrator that it was

imagined to be after 9/11. It is really just a layer of middle management over the agencies that actually do the collecting, analyzing and acting. And of course, the agencies do need some version of, of, of community setting and budget discipline and those things.

But what's happened is, President Trump has used it to put in people who were there to just

“deep, find information, make public information that was secret, find things that looked”

to fit a conspiracy theory that that fits him and to tell him he wants to hear. And of course, when Tulsi Gabbard and I came in there, they are firing people who come up with analysis and intelligence that they don't want to hear. So I, too, you know, I wrote a thing for the Bullworks and might be best just to get rid of it.

But in some senses that's, you know, I'm overstating that because we do need some form of coordination among the intelligence community, but I probably could be a much smaller organization in the National Security Council or something like that. Well, you know, I, you know, two books on the NSA, when the NSA was established in 1947, so was the Central Intelligence Agency and the idea behind the CIA is manifest in its title.

the National Security Council and feed the information out that way and direction was

expected. So there was a structure. What happened was 17 other agencies got born. It got super complicated and nobody wanted to pick favorites and you got rivalries between the CIA and CIA and so forth.

But then even after the DNA was established, you would have, people come into the CIA and say, well, I'm not taking this job if I report to that guy. And so they would then say, so I got to be on the cabinet and I've got to be a peer, which, you know, happened George Tan, other people came in and they were like, no, I'm a peer. It's a mess.

“I mean, I will get to the Trump mess, but the structure, right?”

The structure right now is, is, is suboptimal, right?

I agree with that and, you know, and, but the thing is abolishing or shrinking the ODI, which I would be behind, should be done through some serious review statutes, congressional oversight, not by installing some unqualified loyalists, with just a mandate to fire people. Because, as you know, like, bed reform is worse than no reform. And you can argue that the ODI and I was bed reform, but now, if you politicize and put

politicize loyalists in charge, you don't get better intelligence, you get weaker institutions, you get analysts who are scared, you get allies that are confused by what's happening. And you get a president who just gets what he wants to hear. And, as you know, is a historian that people like Stalin and other Putin and other dictators that create fear in a system and get an intelligence service to just tell them what they want to hear,

bad things come from that.

Yeah, well, the reality is this, every administration tries to get the intelligence they want.

I was in the Clinton administration, and I remember when somebody provided intelligence on something that people didn't like, and that got lost his job. Well, it wasn't just Dick Cheney, right? It happens throughout history. And, you know, so you need people who really committed to and who understand intelligence, and that gets us into this current problem.

Because, unusually, among many jobs in the government, the director of National Intelligence Job actually has an experience requirement.

“And it says, "You need to have in-depth experience in the intel community."”

And when Tosi Gabbard got hired for this job, people were like, "This is not going to work." She did a little bit of intelligence work as a reserve officer in the military. She was a congressperson, but she was not heavily immersed in this. And people said she's not qualified because she wasn't qualified. Now, they're replacing her with this guy Bill Polty, who comes from, I think, bit

bath and beyond, and the mortgage part of the US government, who has literally zero experience in this, and his only qualification is being a loyalist. And I would add before I get to the question part of this, that the guy they are proposing to replace him, who ran the Southern District of New York as a lawyer, doesn't really have any intelligence experience either.

But people are going, "Well, at least he was intelligence adjacent. That's better than Polty, but it does seem to miss the whole point. It's a low bar." It's a low bar, but from your perspective, you were in the intelligence community for decades. To my experience, the intelligence community is filled with these dedicated professionals,

they're no organizations perfect, but this is full of a lot of people who serve, selflessly, get less credit that most government officials for what they do, put their lives on the line in many cases, certainly all make big sacrifices, and to have the agency politicized in that way must be really infuriating to the rank and find it. Absolutely.

I mean, we take great pride in the fact that we're supposed to tell truth the power. Like you said, we understand that there's times when policymakers don't want to hear it. We used to have that saying, "You can bring intelligence to a policy maker, but you can't make them think."

But at least, we saw ourselves as professionals, and frankly, you know, in the where I worked, we were collectors, we had a big analytic cadre in CIA. We did the work of intelligence, and the DNI, frankly, is a process job.

“That's why it really needs someone who understands maybe has long experience in different”

organizations that does intelligence, because it is not a place where there's any collection.

There's any of the work that's done any action taken in the agencies.

It is just meant to be processed to make sure that there's standards and classifications and regulations across the organization and de-confliction and those type of things. So you put anybody in, even this guy supposedly in the Southern District, even if he's a smart guy, it's a complicated and complex system that is trying to run efficiently, and you put someone who doesn't know anything, and his only mission is to give the present

what he wants. It's dangerous. And it creates problems that probably the outsider doesn't see is, you know, over time, analysts get the message that they can't say things that the administration doesn't want to happen.

So they soften their judgments.

You know, classified information with sensitive sources can be declassified to be used for political purposes. It can be used to validate conspiracy theories, you know, they're punished professionals. It scares away foreign partners who want to share information with us and might scare away potential like human sources.

And so there's a lot, you know, and morale, like when you're treated, when you're work

“for organizations and you're treated like you're not important and no one wants what you”

do, it has a long term effect. And over time, you're not going to get good people who want to join it. You're going to get people who quit. You're going to get the sort of toodying and jerks, so move up in that system and make it bad.

Now, I think the intelligence service has avoided some of the pain so far that justice and FBI and others are are really suffering. But by putting these kind of people like Gabbard and Pulti, and what's his name Clayton in position, yeah, you're creating a real bad situation. I hate to interrupt this thrilling podcast, but we have some exciting news at the DSR

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We appreciate your support and thank you for listening. Now back to the show. Yeah, in fact, I'm old enough to remember, and you're much too young to remember, but I'm old enough to remember, when John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, was not qualified enough to be the head of the CIA, he made the one run at it before, but one of the problems

here is that a lot of the work of the intelligence community by definition takes place in the shadows, and that obviously has benefits if you're collecting intelligence in the traditional way it's collected. It also creates opportunities for mischief on the part of political leaders, and so you had to see Gabbard shortly before she departed her office, going to Atlanta and looking

at whether or not being involved in the collection of records of the 2020 election, and you're like, "Well, what is the DNI doing there?" And then you were like, "Oh, no, I get it." What they're going to do is say that some of these weird conspiracy theories that foreign governments were meddling were true, and they can't tell you what they were because that's

all classified, but they're going to have to get really deep into the voting records, and that could really play havoc with forthcoming elections.

“And clearly, I think there's a worry that a guy like Pulti will come in, get rid of people”

who are not cooperative, get rid of people who may have been involved in things that were uncomfortable for Trump like the whole Russia association, but also start playing around with the handles, levers, and knobs of the intelligence community in ways that could advance nefarious anti-democratic schemes of the president?

Absolutely, I mean, these are powerful organizations, and over time, they become very effective

at doing the things that need to collect foreign intelligence, and we've seen hints of it of the kind of stuff we can do with technical collection. You see the NSA could do CIA's involved in all these type of things. Over the years, with the CIA got involved within the 50s and 60s, there was a lot of pushback from it because it caused problems for administrations, and there were reforms, very important

inform Congress of the things they're doing, and a series of laws and regulations to keep our intelligence community focused abroad and not to be used for political games at home, and to see these people come in and just throw that away and think that the intelligence community, and it's

very, very powerful skills and techniques and technical advantages to be used potentially against

Americans, and so a guy like Pulti comes in, and it's clearly his job is just a cherry pick information that makes the president look good or to fit his preconceived notions, and there's real consequences to that, like I said, foreign partners are going to be dead. Moral is a problem. Sources are going to be analytic integrity over time. It can really damage a lot a lot of things,

“and I think if the American public race stopped to think about it and said, do we really want”

our powerful foreign intelligence agencies messing around domestically? Because if it can happen for a public administration, it can happen for a democratic administration as well. Yeah, of course I can, and I think, you know, this has been a struggle within the intelligence community for decades and decades and decades, and more transparency and less involvement in the U.S. and battles over who could listen into what and so on and so forth, have been a sort

of a central part of the debate around intelligence thus far, but we're also at an inflection point where the nature of intelligence collection is going to be profoundly changed by new technologies, whether it's ubiquitous sensing technologies, drone technologies, space-based technologies,

or AI-based technologies, and this requires incredible depths of knowledge in order to make the

“right decisions about how to invest, how to ensure things are secure, how to respond to foreign”

competitors, how to structure organizations for this future, and it just seems to me that haven't the head of bedbath and beyond, and there is not the way to get there. No, it's definitely not the way to, it's definitely not the way to get there. And yeah, it's embarrassing, frankly, as an American, and so I did, you know, intelligence is a wide variety of things, it's technical collection and space collection, and like you said, these new things that we have to be doing,

I did the old fashion, just recruiting spies abroad. And one thing I would often tell people is, we probably have the best intelligence agencies and process in the whole world that has saved American lives, it has helped American economy, all of these things over the years, and it's not because people like me were particularly good at what we do, or we have a culture that's, you know,

“espionage front, like some other places, it's because we represent the United States. The reason”

people like me were successful, again, not because I was particularly skilled, it's that people who live in countries that look up to the United States, they live in countries that are corrupt, they live in countries that are brutal, they live in countries where they want something better, they saw the United States as something that could play a positive role in their lives, it could influence policies that would help their country in the long run. And so I have to say, if you

move up from what's happening in the intelligence community, what's happening in general in Washington, we are making ourselves into one of those same corrupt kind of countries that only looks out for itself, doesn't give a crap about values, doesn't give a crap about other countries, you know, it's just our chance to steal, we're in power, we're going to steal. The kind of people,

the incredible people that would come and give us those secrets that save American lives,

are not going to come to us if we just look like another corrupt country like the one that they're trying to fight in their own system. Yeah, and I don't think people fully understand that all the time. That such a huge portion of what is done by Clint Easton services in the intelligence community is to go to somebody and get them to betray their country, to provide information for the United States, which almost inevitably puts them at legal or personal risk. That's right.

And so, you know, anything that makes us look less trustworthy or more erratic or likely to shift from one kind of orientation to another every time there's an election, it's got to make that job a thousand times harder. Absolutely. It's a serious job, and if the president doesn't want to take intelligence seriously, and if all he wants is people to tell him what he already knows, then you don't need to waste government taxpayer money and all this things. You don't need it

to tell his community if you already know if what you say is already gospel, you don't need to tell his community to do it. And so, I'm sure, you know, I'm careful not to reach into my old colleagues and stuff because, you know, like you said, these people are mean-spirited and they're

But, you know, the morale is low people are keeping their heads down.

“There's probably, you know, just like you, people, you know, that want to get into journalism or”

want to get into intelligence work or government work. They come, young people come to talk to you about, oh, what should I do? What's it like? You know, right now, the best and the brightest aren't really looking to come work in a government like this where you could get fired any minute. You could be told you got to sign a loyalty oath, those kind of things. And what's happening with Polty and the new guy with same J, whatever his name is? It's essentially the same thing

that's happening in places like the FBI and just Department and other places. And it's been

destruction of the administrative state. Yeah, and you know, administrative state, when somebody

hears that they think, well, yeah, who wants that? I don't want a lot of bureaucrats. I don't like

“paperwork. You know, getting rid of all those administrators is a good thing, right? But of course,”

it's a scam, right? Because that's not what he's trying to get rid of. You know, the big donors are trying to get rid of the part of the state that regulates them and charges them taxes. Right? You know, and other people, you know, who are white-collar criminals are trying to get rid of the people in the FBI and the IRS who go after them. And, you know, the residents are trying to get rid of people who don't do what they want because they have

to follow the law. Right. Or who, you know, may have in the past done investigations into them,

which they find uncomfortable. And we do see Trump trying to erase parts of his history, but they're trying to erase that he was impeached or trying to erase people who were involved in the Mueller investigation or with come here, whatever, because he wants to say, no, Russia, Russia was a hoax. And that gets me into my last couple of questions because you were deeply involved with Russia. And, and Russia, Russia was in a hoax, we when I've talked about this

before, we can have a debate about the legal definition of what collusion is or what isn't, but there was a lot of cooperation that took place between this incoming group and Trump. But let's send all that aside. Imagine you're sitting in the Kremlin. And you look at the United States and you say, well, what would I like to do? Well, I'd like to have my guy in charge, I'd like to get rid of people in high positions who I couldn't control. Let's get rid of the

parts of the FBI and the Justice Department, the track Russian corruption. Let's get rid of parts of counterterrorism initiative. Let's get rid of parts of the government that do counter-espionage against the Russians. Let's weaken the leadership of the Department of Defense. Let's get rid of the NSC. Let's weaken the leadership of the intelligence community. You know, if when I look at what has happened from an objective point of view, the pattern is gutting the U.S. National Security apparatus

and in particular making us vulnerable to certain actors in ways we were not before notably the Russians, but also degraded the Chinese. And to me when I see this, every red light goes off in my head. I have to go into a dark environment compound because this is, to me, this is betraying the country. To me, this is goes to another level. And I'm just wondering, is somebody who has

“involved in that or a whole life, do you have a similar reaction? Do you think I'm overreacting?”

How do you deal with this pattern of, not individual acts, but the pattern of behavior? I couldn't agree more. The Russians, the work that their security service could be under the sort of rubric of political warfare. Their job is to try to influence minds, to manipulate people, to use their intelligence services or diplomatic services, their negotiations is a part of warfare to be weakened down the enemy. And this administration is stepping right into there with what they do.

So look at, you got people like Witkov and Jared Kushner doing negotiation with these people. You don't have professional diplomats who have studied and understand the Soviet Union and Russia. You don't have intelligence officers who understand the dangers and have been working on these issues, speak the languages for years. You have people that the Russians can see this person could be manipulated. They are interested in business deals. I can hang out there that, oh,

there's all these minerals and things and money to be made if we sort of improve relationships.

secrets from people who give us information. But the Russians use their secret services for a much wider variety of things and we've been incredibly susceptible to what they do.

Russian, like Chinese organizations that come from roots of revolutionary roots,

what they do is they create security services whose job is to keep the leadership in power at all. So it's regime security, not national security. So everything is a part of warfare to keep the leadership in power. And so it's not, their services aren't till truth the power. Their point is do anything to make sure there's no opposition domestically and there's no opposition from overseas to keep our leadership in power. And this administration somehow was bought into those things

that Americans for many, many years understood and new to avoid and saw them as rightfully as enemies.

And so when you talk about collusion, yesterday was collusion that if you're just read the Senate

intelligence report on 2016, it all but says exactly that. Why would a campaign trying to win votes in Iowa need to be working with hundreds of Russians? It doesn't make any sense. And so a lot of what

“we're seeing, I think like you said, is they want to protect themselves. They're worried that the”

intelligence community and others could uncover a thing that would embarrass them. And so they're going to try to go on the offensive and destroy the expertise and our intelligence services to I guess, and it means to protect themselves. And then they don't want those expertise out there

trying to negotiate and do things with the Russians because they don't want to be told that they're

being manipulated like they are. And so I buy into what you're saying. I think it's horrendous for for the United States National Security. It's frustrating that American citizens don't understand that we were in many ways the leaders of the world and by being the leaders of the world had benefited us tremendously in terms of our financial, economic place in the world. And these guys are throwing it away to a country that really, I mean, has an economy that size a Portugal,

that is brutal to its own citizens and offers nothing in terms of commercial, nobody buys anything of Russian, the Russians make. And so it's it's it's maddening to anybody who's worked and lived in that country to see what they did. And also, if you were like Snoop and around in Russia at one point, you found a little to-do list in Russian and it was like the Kremlin to-do list. But the to-do list might be like this. Blow up NATO, get rid of sanctions on Russian oil so we can make money,

stop supporting Ukraine because they're a pain in our ass and give us some negotiators that are pro-Russian and anti-U-crain and got the US national security establishment. And we're doing all those things. Everybody box is checked. Terrible. It's it's it's it's it's really really stunning.

“And and that's why I'm so glad we had a chance to talk to you about it. I hope we can get you back.”

The Russians are not our friend. That's the thing is about this. They hate Putin hates the United States. It probably hates Trump. And so the notion that these people think that they can have a relationship with Putin and the Russians is crazy. Do you think Putin-but I mean we before we went on there we were talking a little bit about Trump's state of mind. Trump's a hold and got a bunch of problems going. Putin looks to me like old and and like his batteries are running down too. Do you

think that's going to change the way he behaves? Well, I think just like Trump, I think as you get older, you become more of yourself and more of the bad things come out. So I'm not optimistic that

“we're going to see a better Putin as he gets older. No. Yeah, I think that's I think that's a very”

safe bet. I can see why you got to such heights in the intelligence community. All right, John, it's great to see you hope to see you again soon. And everybody, we're going to stay on these stories because we think they're important. Please join us for everything else we're doing here at the DSR and network. For now, thanks everybody. Bye-bye.