Angry Planet - The growing rift between Trump and his intelligence agencies, and why it’s cause for concern

Episode Date: March 22, 2017

Even before he took office, Donald Trump was denigrating the U.S. intelligence community – in large part because of its investigation into Russian influence on the presidential election, which challenged the integrity of his victory. That relationship has continued to sour, through Trump’s controversial speech at CIA headquarters and his attack on leaks that helped lead to National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation. As president, Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community hasn’t improved. His supporters believe there is a “Deep State” operating within the intelligence community, which is trying to undermine the administration. What happens when a president doesn’t trust his intelligence agencies, or they don’t trust him? How does this kind of fractured relationship affect intelligence gathering – and the military operations that come from it – overseas? This week on War College, national security expert Tim Weiner – author of “Legacy of Ashes,” his award-winning history of the CIA – examines Trump’s complicated relationship with the U.S. intelligence community. He explores the president’s power over his agencies – not just to pick a CIA director, but to sign orders for operations overseas. And he offers historical context for what can happen when things go horribly wrong.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. If the President of the United States doesn't believe what his intelligence services are telling him, you might as well not have an intelligence service. Today we have a special episode of War College.

Our regular host, Matthew Galt, is handing the mic over this week to Reuters as Helen Koster and Arshad Mohammed. They'll be speaking to National Book Award winner and regular commentary contributor Tim Weiner on the U.S. intelligence community and its relationship with President Donald Trump. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of a war. world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello and welcome to the War College podcast. I'm Helen Costa, senior editor of the commentary section of Reuters. And I'm Arshad Mohammed, Washington-based diplomatic correspondent for Reuters.

We're joined today by Tim Weiner, who has covered intelligence and espionage for 30 years. He's the author of five books, including Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA, which won the National Book Award. His journalism on secret government programs received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He's also a frequent contributor to the commentary section of Reuters. Tim, thanks for being with us today. You're more than welcome. So let's start with a question about Donald Trump. The president has done something unusual for an American president. Even before he took office, he was denigrating in the U.S. intelligence community. Can you describe for us the root cause of that tension and how it has played out so far? Yes, President Trump is certainly the only chief executive

of the United States who came to office comparing the CIA to Nazis. On his first full day in office, he went to CIA headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., and gave a remarkable rambling campaign speech, which was a kind of a public insult to the members of the CIA present. And, and, you know, and to the intelligence community in general. The president and his chief advisor and spiritual guide, Steve Bannon, apparently feel that there is something called a deep state within the intelligence community,

which is trying to undermine them. This is not a good foot on which to get off as the president of the United States, in a state of war with your own intelligence community. So, Tim, it seems like what you're talking about here is partly a question of trust and the lack of mutual trust between the president and the intelligence community. What are the dangers of they're not being trust between the person who sits in the Oval Office and the U.S. intelligence agencies? They are profound. The intelligence business is based on trust.

You have to trust your fellow Americans when you are working at CIA. or FBI, because when you are working overseas trying to work with foreign agents and get Russians or Chinese or people from other countries to commit treason and work for the United States as spies, you have to use a calculated combination of lies and truth in order to suborn them. When you're back in Washington in dealing with your fellow Americans, you have to tell the truth to one another, or the entire business goes sideways. An intelligence officer, a CIA officer, an FBI agent in Washington has to have a moral gyroscope to stay straight. If the president thinks you're lying, if the president puts the word intelligence in ironic air quotes when he

tweets or when his spokesman speaks, we're in trouble. Do you think that there is a chance that the US intelligence community will try to hurt the president, for example, by disclosing or otherwise using information that they have that might be damaging to him. Is there any reason to think that the trust has deteriorated to such a degree in almost two months that they might actually be trying to subvert him? No, we're getting into Hollywood territory there. I don't believe that we have a deep state. I agree with David Remnick of the New Yorker who wrote, we don't have a deep state. We have a shallow president. And Tim, one bit of fallout from this tense relationship is certainly the magnitude of leaks that have been coming out of the intelligence community. You've written for us about Trump's

response to those leaks and your thoughts on whether or not it's a good approach. Could you speak about that a little bit? I have a very narrow definition of what a leak is. A leak is the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. That is a phrase written into law. Leaks, as we generally define them, are the free flow of information in the democratic society, I think. And leaks become a torrent when the machinery of government is clashing and breaking down, when there is friction, pipes break and information leaks. That's how the machinery of government works when it's not working. And the more conflict there is at the top of the government, the wider and richer the flow of leaks. And the Trump White House's approach to these leaks so far has been what? How would

you characterize it? Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter allegations. Tim, there's something I've never understood about the way in which the U.S. intelligence community works. I printed out a list of all the former directors of Central Intelligence and then their successors, the directors of national intelligence. And for much of the history of the modern history of the American intelligence community, the heads of the community have come and gone, have sort of been blown by political wins. Not always the case, of course, Alan Dulles stayed on from Eisenhower to Kennedy, at least for a while. But why is it that in the American system there is this tradition, for the most part, of the president getting to pick his own director of intelligence?

Why shouldn't it be a more impartial, professional role and be less subject to political choice? That is a very good question. At the FBI, after J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, Congress gradually determined that there should be a 10-year term for the FBI director, where he could only be fired for cause by the president. We might do well to think of intelligence as above politics. It should be above politics. And perhaps the CIA director or the director of national intelligence, or both, should be appointed.

and confirmed by Congress to 10-year terms so they are not buffeted by the political wins. And tell us a little bit about how that worked out, if you would, in the case of John F. Kennedy and Alan Dulles. What brought Dulles down? How successful was his successor, John McCone? Does that suggest anything about the usefulness of keeping somebody on from the previous administration? Well, Alan Dulles was the brother of John Foster Dulles, who was the Secretary of State, under Eisenhower. And the Dulles brothers, one running state, one running CIA, were a formidable team.

They could make American foreign policy on Sunday afternoons around their sister, Eleanor Swimming Pool, and decide what it was and execute it. Sometimes with President Eisenhower's knowledge, and sometimes not. This system came a cropper after John Foster Dulles died, Allen was alone, and the CIA, planned and executed the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in early 1961 just a few weeks after

President John Kennedy had taken office. The Bay of Pigs is synonymous with intelligence failure. It was royally screwed up, if I may use a technical term. Many people died. The invasion failed, and Castro's position as a hero for defeating the mighty United States was cemented, for the next 50 years. After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy said he wanted to break up the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the four wins. Instead, he broke Alan Dulles, fired him, and appointed a conservative millionaire Republican shipbuilding businessman named John McCone as the head of the CIA. Now, McCone had been under Secretary of the Air Force, a decade. A. earlier and he knew a thing or two about ships and planes.

And when the Cuban missile crisis came a year later in the fall of 1962, McCain had the bright idea of using ships to blockade and quarantine Cuba so that Soviet vessels carrying nuclear weapons components couldn't reach the island. Good idea. It worked, and it saved the world from World War III. Every president has the right to choose his own CIA director. However, there are very, very few people in the United States qualified to do that job. They have to know how intelligence works. It's a very complicated business.

It is also, especially after 9-11, a difficult, dirty, dangerous, deadly business, and people are going to get killed. are people and their people. So you want somebody in that job who understands how the machine works and not a political appointee who looks good on camera and may have sat on a congressional committee overseeing the CIA but doesn't know how the machinery works. The clandestine service of the CIA, the people who do things overseas, the operators as opposed to the analysts who sit in suburban Virginia and think about things. They don't like outsiders, and you can understand why.

It's a tribal community. They speak their own language. They feel that only they understand one another. And to that part of the CIA, almost everyone is an outsider. And Tim, beyond obviously the enormous role of being able to select a CIA director, can you speak a little bit about the power that the U.S. President has over the intelligence communities? And because we're in a podcast right now discussing war in the military, can you speak specifically about operationally? So what kind of power does the President have over his community as they conduct their affairs overseas in particular?

The CIA belongs to the President. It is upon his order that they do things overseas when a major, covert operation is launched. The president is required to sign a piece of paper called a finding in which he says, I, the president of the United States, find that this operation is crucial to the national security of the United States. That is a modern invention created nearly 40 years ago to prevent the president from using the CIA as a secret weapon. He has to sign on the dotted line. And these findings, as they're called, are supposed to be shared with Congress. Well, usually they are, but on occasion they're not. They're hidden. They're backdated. That happened under President

Reagan infamously. So there is a fail-safe mechanism whereby the Congress can be informed not only of the crash landings of a covert operation, but of the takeoff and landing plans. Could you talk a little bit about the Iran-Contra issue and the retroactive finding that President Reagan signed? Does that, to you, illustrate the dangers of having your own person as the CIA director, in that case, Bill Casey, might that not have happened if it had not been a handpicked sort of political operative who, in fact, had run Reagan's campaign, and therefore might be more inclined to do the president's bidding? Well, as usual, you put your finger on it. Less than 10 years after this system of findings was created, it was broken.

President Reagan and his closest national security advisors, in their wisdom, decided to sell millions of dollars' worth of lethal weaponry to the Iranian National Guard, overcharged them 600%, skim the profits, and backhand the money to anti-communist rebels in Central America. Congress had cut off funding for the Central American rebels, and it was probably a bad idea to send anti-tank weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, even though at the time they were killing Iraqi soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war. It violated not only the laws of the United States, but probably the laws of God and man to conduct such a deal. And, of course, they knew it was illegal. it was wrong. They did it in secret, and the findings that were crucial to this operation, like let's put a bunch of missiles on an airplane and ship them to Iran, were falsified and backdated. The president could have been impeached for this. He wasn't in the event,

but the key members of his national security team were indicted, and then in the end, Christmas week in 1992, pardoned by the outgoing President Bush 41. We've been talking for a while about Donald Trump and the intelligence community, but we haven't yet spoken about Russia. How much of the apparent animus between President Trump and the intelligence community do you think has to do with what the U.S. intelligence agencies found or concluded about Russian efforts to influence the U.S. election? And how much on the president's side do you think his criticism of the agencies may be an effort to defend? the integrity of his victory. As to the first question, I would say more than 50% the animus and possibly something approaching 99.4% of the animus that the president feels toward the intelligence community flows

from their unanimous conclusion that the Kremlin threw a no-look pass at the Trump campaign and got an assist in his victory. There is no question whatsoever in the mind of every one of the 17 American intelligence agencies, not to mention the British intelligence services and the German intelligence service, that Vladimir Putin is on a global campaign to undermine Western democracies, from the Westernage of Russia to the west coast of the United States. United States. And that is a very serious matter. There came a time during 2016 where the disruption of the American democratic system and the election of Donald Trump became one goal, two missions, one goal. What could be more disruptive of the American political system than the election of Donald Trump? So the Kremlin got a twofer. And that mission is accomplished. That's over. That's done. He won.

The intelligence document that was produced regarding the Russian efforts to influence the election campaign, if I'm not mistaken, concluded that there was no actual tampering in the voting and so on that took place in November of last year. They weren't stuffing ballot boxes. They were playing with people's minds. That's a different issue. What we had here was a 21st century hybrid warfare campaign that involved propaganda, that's an old-fashioned term for fake news, cyber warfare, and covert influence operations that was designed to undermine the Democratic candidate and support her opponents.

and I'm using the word opponents multiply for a reason. I was thinking too, Tim, about Trump's position on enhanced interrogation, talk that he's preparing in an executive order that would clear the way for the CA to reopen black site prisons and so forth, things that are a real departure from Obama. Do you think that that's in the cards now

through Trump's view of the world and the U.S. intelligence community's role in it? It depends on whose ethics, executing that order. If the CIA is called upon to reinstitute torture, to re-institute black sites, to reinstitute waterboarding, it probably helps that cause that the number two person just named at CIA was in charge of those kinds of operations for many years after 9-11. and she has a reputation for not only supporting torture, waterboarding, enhanced interrogation, which is an Orwellian euphemism, but participating in them.

So if the CIA gets an execute order to do that, they might well carry it out. If the Pentagon gets an order to do that, General Mattis has indicated that he's not down for that. And we get into a situation where if a military officer is ordered to do something that he thinks is illegal, unconstitutional, or immoral, he or she can throw down his stars and say, Mr. President, I resign on principle. One thing I wanted to ask you about to take you back to where you started with President Trump's first full day in office and his speech at the CIA. In your account, and according to intelligence officials that my colleagues and I have spoken to, the appearance didn't go down well at all. And I wonder if you think the animosity between the intelligence community and the president is likely to lead to more retirements of senior officers, mid-level officers,

looking to make more money in the private sector, which they can, of course, do, and might actually deter younger Americans from joining the intelligence community because what's the point of becoming an intelligence operative or analyst if your work isn't being read by the president every morning? That is a very good point, a very salient point. It has precedence in our recent past, and it reminds me of something that the director of central intelligence under Presidents Johnson and Nixon

Richard Helms once said. He said, if we are not believed, we have no purpose. If the President of the United States doesn't believe what his intelligence services are telling him, you might as well not have an intelligence service. You have to have one. If you are, like we are, a superpower projecting its power beyond its borders and around the world, you have to have the best intelligence to give the president foresight, not just what just happened, but what does it mean and what might happen next? And if the president doesn't want to hear that, he is deliberately breaking his sword and renouncing the use of power that intelligence gives you. Information is power. Secret intelligence, is powered squared.

And secret intelligence that you and only you can deliver to the president is power cubed. And if the president doesn't want to hear it, the result is a diminution of American power and American freedom to act in the world. So, Tim, what happens when the president-elect gets his first really serious intelligence briefing before taking office? Generally, his mind is blown, and he emerges goggle-eyed and with some trepidations about what lies ahead. President John Kennedy realized he was going to have to deal not with Vietnam only, not with Laos only, but with Cuba. And three months later came the Bay of Pigs invasion.

When President Elect Carter was briefed by the outgoing. CIA director George H.W. Bush, he was told, listen, you want to know a few things. For example, the King of Jordan is on our payroll. And Carter being a moralistic man, said, what? When the briefers from the CIA, who were then joined by President Obama, told President Trump that he better keep a very close eye on North Korea, he clearly. He clearly, emerged both impressed and somewhat goggle-eyed. He thought health care policy was complicated? Try North Korea. These are existential threats to our country, and no one gets an operating manual on how to be president and how to handle an existential crisis. You have to have your own team,

You have to have your faith in your intelligence, and you've got to start making contingency plans for what could go wrong if. And that is a terrifying responsibility because the fate of the nation is in your hands. Trump has generals running the NSC, the Pentagon, and Homeland Security. These are positions that have historically been filled by civilians. What might that do to his foreign policy? Military personnel are used to formal chains of command in which decision making goes up the chain, decisions are made, and the execution orders go down the chain of command.

We have more of a chaos presidency in which orders get tweeted out in the early hours of the morning and decisions are made on the fly. We have had now two months of political crises, tweeted crises, televised crises, but we have not had a genuine foreign policy crisis that is a life and death existential decision. We have a policymaking machinery in which crucial cogs, that is, positions of power, remain unfilled. God help us if in weeks or even months to come, we have a genuine crisis that will require full-dress meetings of the cabinet and decision-making coming out of the Oval Office, the National Security Council, and decisions to be made by the Pentagon and the American Intelligence

community. Military officers are sworn to uphold the Constitution. They serve the country. If they are told to do something illegal or unconstitutional, they are duty-bound to throw down their stars. And there may come a moment in months and years to come, where there will be a constitutional confrontation between the desires of the president and the duties of the uniformed military and the intelligence community. I'd like to thank our guest, Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes, its history of the CIA, and a longtime reporter on intelligence and espionage for being here today.

I'd also like to thank our co-host, Arshan Mohammed, Washington-based diplomatic correspondent for Reuters. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. Matthew Galt usually hosts the show. He'll be back next week. Thank you to our guest host this week. And it's produced by me, Bethel Hoppe. If you like the show and want to support us, please leave us a rating, preferably

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