As the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, President Donald Trump has decided to overhaul the post-9/11 overhaul of the intelligence community, which he has seen as his enemy for so long.
Trump has held a notable hostility toward the intel community since his first term, when he learned that he was included in investigations around 2016 Russian meddling in the election. Trump has a belief that officials investigated him, specifically, and leaked damaging information about him. That paranoia that the "deep state" is quietly leaking things about him and his Cabinet has only deepened in his second term.
National Public Radio reported on Wednesday that Trump's attitudes toward the intelligence community are now leading to changes that don't make the U.S. safer; rather, they make Trump feel better personally.
Ex-CIA officer John Sipher told NPR that when he was working at the agency, he spent much of his time focusing on Russia, but after the U.S. was attacked in 2001, the community shifted to crafting new technologies, expanding data collection, improving communications and using drones and other tools to track terrorist networks.
He explained that all of those things helped in locating Osama bin Laden and bringing down al-Qaeda and ISIL.
"Frankly, tracking and hunting terrorists, finding people, finding a needle in a haystack was not something that we trained for," said Sipher.
When the Department of Homeland Security was created, it became one of the largest departments in the U.S. government, second only to the Pentagon.
Trump appears readying to dismantle that. He portrays national security and intelligence officials as corrupt actors working against him. Critics say that after decades of work, Trump is tearing it down without any plan to replace it. He's now installing loyalists with little experience into key positions, including Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, Kash Patel at the FBI and John Ratcliffe at the CIA. They are all more likely to tell Trump what he wants to hear rather than provide an independent assessment.
John Feeley, the former US ambassador to Panama, told The Guardian last month about an incident in which he first entered Trump's office, where the president demanded to know what Panama did for the United States. Feeley walked through all the ways that the East Coast is able to purchase affordable goods because the Panama Canal has ships that can shuttle goods from one hemisphere to the other more easily.
He recalled Trump's response was "Huh... Who knew?"
"I kid you not, man," said Feeley. "And that's one of the things that contributed to my — I mean, all joking aside, that contributed to my unease about continuing to be his personal representative. This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant, who is surrounded by people who are not ignorant, who in their presentation toward a region that I dedicated about 30 years of my life to have such a fundamentally superficial view."
The report mentioned Steven Cash, who abandoned government employment after he said Trump turned work of career officials against Americans.
One issue is that Trump has essentially eliminated the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While someone is there, the one who briefs Trump is the CIA director. So, instead of using the person who coordinates 18 separate intelligence agencies, Trump wants his CIA guy.
"Counterterrorism is getting second fiddle to the threats from China and Russia, and the current administration's focus on the border and narco-trafficking means a shift of resources to the Americas," said former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos. "I am afraid that counter-terrorism will not be a priority until a mass casualty event, and then it very much will be once again," Sipher says one of the most damaging ideas that's taken root is that career intelligence officials actively take sides in partisan politics.
"We have allowed our partisan anger, and specifically the Trump administration, to create this narrative that there's a deep state and that the intelligence services work for one party or another. I think it's a real danger," he said.
But the damage has already been inflicted after Trump alienated the world with his trade war, tough talk and bombastic rants online.
"The CIA in particular relies or depends on intelligence sharing with friendly and not so friendly foreign intelligence services," Weiner said. "It it is still only 20,000 people, and they cannot cover the entire world. They need the British. They need the Dutch. They need the Saudis. They need help."
After Sept. 11, help was easy to come by, he said. That has changed, however.
