Last month, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired two senior officials of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). In recent years, the NIC – through its national intelligence officers, who are subject-matter experts in various areas – has been responsible for producing “coordinated views of the entire Intelligence Community.” The U.S. intelligence community is large: 18 organizations, a workforce of approximately 100,000 employees, and an annual budget in excess of $100 billion. So coordinating their views is a difficult task.
Gabbard’s office gave only vague explanations for the firings, but outside analysts feared the officials had been fired because they had overseen an April intelligence community assessment that concluded the Venezuelan government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating” with the gang Tren de Aragua and was “not directing” the gang’s “movement to and operations in the United States.” That intelligence assessment undercut President Trump’s March invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to grant himself additional legal authority to remove certain classes of immigrants. The administration justified the moves in part because the president had declared that Tren de Aragua “is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.” Subsequent emails from a senior Office of Director of National Intelligence political appointee, Joe Kent, to the NIC urged some “re-writing” of the assessment so that it could not be “used against” Gabbard or Trump. This news, in turn, further heightened concerns of overt politicization of the U.S. intelligence community.
To ask about this episode and intelligence politicization more broadly, Good Authority editor Christopher Clary chatted with Joshua Rovner, associate professor in the School of International Studies at American University and author of Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Cornell University Press 2011). Their discussion, lightly edited for clarity and length, is below.
Christopher Clary: In your book, Fixing the Facts, you identify what you call “pathologies of intelligence-policy relations.” What are they? And how are they pathological?
Joshua Rovner: Intelligence-policy relations are always prone to friction. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Healthy tension among intelligence officials and policymakers helps guard against groupthink. But there are some cases that go beyond the bounds of ordinary friction. These are the pathologies of intelligence-policy relations.
Two pathologies deserve extra scrutiny: neglect and politicization. Neglect occurs when policymakers ignore intelligence, or when intelligence officials deliberately remove themselves from the policy process. This is problematic because it removes a potentially important source of information and insight from the policy debate. It also makes it more likely that dubious policy assumptions will remain unexamined.
Politicization is the manipulation of intelligence to reflect policy preferences. Policymakers can manipulate intelligence directly or indirectly. They can also do so by appointing and promoting pliant intelligence officials, a method I call manipulation-by-appointment. Intelligence officials are also guilty of politicization if they let their own policy preference color their analyses. This is sometimes called bottom-up politicization.
And, in your view, do you think the facts as we understand about the Tren de Aragua assessment might represent politicization? If so, how might that be consistent with other episodes of politicization?
As I wrote in Fixing the Facts, politicization is most likely when policymakers make controversial public pronouncements – despite inconclusive or even contradictory intelligence. In these cases, policymakers have strong incentives to pressure the intelligence community to toe the line. Because people tend to view secret information as credible, secret intelligence is a powerful public relations tool. Thus policymakers can win support by pointing to intelligence that bolsters their arguments.
Some reports suggest that the director of national intelligence removed key intelligence officials from the National Intelligence Council for offering estimates that contradicted administration statements. Subsequent reporting suggests that at least one senior leader tried to manipulate intelligence assessments to manufacture the image of support. If this was indeed the case, then it would be a clear-cut case of politicization, and a troubling precedent.
The reporting described above is consistent with past cases of politicization, both in terms of officials’ conduct and their motives. But while I am concerned about these reports, one thing I’ve learned from studying secret intelligence is that details are often murky for years after the fact.
Many questions remain unanswered. For example, were the NIC officers removed because of the Tren de Aragua assessment – or were there other reasons they fell out of favor? Is it possible that they were caught up in the Trump administration’s feverish attempt to reshape the executive branch? The White House, after all, hasn’t been shy about cutting federal personnel. If this was the case, then the Tren de Aragua affair may have been a pretext for decisions that were already in the works.
Why is politicization bad? After all, U.S. citizens elect a president and not an intelligence community. Why shouldn’t the president be able to politicize the analysis his employees create?
Episodes of politicization can do a lot of harm. In the short term, they tend to skew intelligence, sometimes leading to overconfident conclusions even when the underlying information is unreliable. Politicization makes it more difficult to reassess these conclusions even when better information becomes available. And in the long term, such episodes reinforce negative stereotypes on both sides of the intelligence-policy divide. In the aftermath, policymakers increasingly suspect that intelligence officials are political opponents in disguise. And intelligence officials come to view policymakers as bullies.
This was the pattern of events that characterized intelligence-policy relations before and after the Iraq War. It’s not something we should want to repeat.
It seems as if “excessive harmony” appears unlikely in this administration, but are there other areas where you think “neglect” or “politicization” might be a possibility in intelligence-policy relations given the issues on the U.S. national security agenda today?
“Excessive harmony” is what happens when intelligence and policy officials are overly deferential to one another. This is pretty rare historically, and I agree that it’s very unlikely in the Trump administration.
So what other pathologies are possible? A lot of the focus so far has been on politicization, as in the cases we talked about here. But neglect may become the norm over the next few years.
Trump appears to be supremely confident in his own analysis, and he has publicly questioned the U.S. intelligence community for many years. In his first term, Trump appointed senior foreign policy officials who were well-known in the national security establishment. These were the so-called “adults in the room,” and their appointment was comforting to those who were looking for policy continuity.
This time is different. Second-term Trump has shown less interest in accommodating establishment figures, much less appointing them. He seems perfectly willing to ignore their advice, and the same may be true of the intelligence community.
