Former Senior CIA Officer Urges Reform of US Intelligence
[EDITOR’S NOTE BY ADINA KUTNICKI: It is beyond urgent — akin to a national emergency of the nth degree — to create an impenetrable firewall between intelligence gathering (in whatever form it takes) and the political agendas of this and that agency’s top-tier at the behest of either political party. And if one political weaponization stands head and shoulders above the rest, it is the brazen and illegal, yes, criminal, attempted “take-down” of Trump by the fascist-left in Congress via the co-option, collaboration, and cooperation of crooked Comey’s hench-people, DOJ’s “legal” spears, as well as the CIA’s leftward, compromised leadership, among others! This is no longer in dispute. In this regard, let’s delve into what awaits if the status quo remains, as well as what must take place to truly secure the ship of state. Effectively, mega knock-on effects of the highest magnitude…..]
AMERICANACTIONNEWS.com Paul Crespo April 20, 2020
Politicized senior intelligence officers, politicized intelligence, intelligence failures, and restructuring of US intelligence. All these topics are of tremendous importance to US national security. Recently I have written on how US intelligence is trying to confirm whether the Wuhan Coronavirus (COVID-19) leaked from a Chinese lab, but it has been slowed, in part, by the CIA’s ‘decimated’ clandestine intelligence networks in China. Yet, while US intelligence is facing many challenges abroad, the challenges within might be the most serious.
One retired 25-year veteran CIA officer is leading the fight to fix and reform US intelligence. Brad Johnson spent his entire CIA career fighting America’s enemies in the shadows, but after retiring he has a new mission — to depoliticize, rebuild and reform US intelligence.
To fulfill his new mission, Johnson — who retired as a Senior Operations Officer with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and was Chief of Station (COS) at various US embassies — founded Americans for Intelligence Reform. As Johnson writes in American Military News (AMN):
Over the previous decades, I have observed the Intelligence Community turn away from its core responsibilities for the safety and security of all Americans to a far more political agenda. The intelligence community’s (IC) quadrennial report about global trends published in 2017 is a poster child example of what is wrong with intelligence today. It overwhelmingly focuses on things like global government integration to face future issues. It argues the positives of what is known today as the globalist movement, a hardcore leftist philosophy that is deeply political.
Johnson notes that the IC’s 2017 quadrennial report focuses more on global warming than it does on global terrorism. As important as issues of globalization and global warming are, they are primarily political and policy issues, not matters for intelligence. The IC’s primary mission is to collect and analyze critical information on the organization, plans and activities of foreign governments and hostile non-state groups, not to get involved in politics or policy. Political neutrality and dispassionate analysis are key to the intelligence profession’s integrity and effectiveness.
Sadly, the intelligence community has been politicized, and damaged, but not necessarily by the current administration. Johnson explains that the CIA’s so-called “modernization” plan implemented under the Obama administration by former CIA director John Brennan is a case in point.
Brennan’s damaging plan did not receive the attention it should have from the CIA’s congressional overseers, or the media. As Johnson states, the Brennan plan “systematically dismantled and destroyed the CIA’s operations division — the heart of the agency’s central mission of using people to steal vital secrets around the world.”
Johnson adds, “Many of us who devoted our lives to the clandestine service as CIA operations officers were stunned to hear Mr. Brennan announce that based on his “modernization plan, he no longer regards the CIA as being in the espionage business. ‘We don’t steal secrets,’ Mr. Brennan astonishingly stated in an interview with NPR.”
As Johnson describes it in AMN:
The Brennan plan instead called for other nations’ intelligence services to provide the CIA with spies as intelligence collectors. Real espionage is the direct recruitment of spies or reporting sources who steal information from other countries or organizations such as terrorists. An important feature of this process is that no one should know that our spies are stealing the information. Keeping the operations clandestine is fundamental to the credibility and reliability of the information. When another intelligence service selects spies for the CIA, the information provided could easily be mixed with damaging disinformation and we have no way to be sure of who else is aware we are receiving the information.
This plan fundamentally alters and undermines the US intelligence mission, and according to Johnson, “combined with other factors makes the IC fundamentally unreliable and marginalized when they are so desperately needed for our National Security.”
Johnson has many other examples of how the intelligence community has been led astray by politicization and bad ideas, and has recommendations for reform. I expect to write more about him and his organization, Americans for Intelligence Reform, in the months to come.
Paul Crespo is a defense and national security expert. He served as a Marine Corps officer and as a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at US embassies worldwide. He holds degrees from Georgetown, London, and Cambridge Universities. Paul is also CEO of SPECTRE Global Risk, a security advisory firm, and a Contributor to American Defense News.
