Why Americans need well-informed national security decisions – not politicized intelligence analysis

The United States’ security depends on leaders who make well-informed decisions, including matters ranging from diplomatic relations around the world to economic relations, threats to the U.S., up to the deployment of military force. The nation’s intelligence community – 18 federal agencies, some military and others civilian – has the responsibility of gathering information from all over the world and delivering it to the country’s leaders for their use.

As a nearly 40-year veteran of the intelligence community, both in and out of uniform, I know that regardless of what leaders do with the information, the American people need them to have as thorough, unbiased, fact-based and nonpoliticized intelligence assessments as possible.

That’s because reality matters. Those tasked with gathering, analyzing and assembling intelligence material work hard to assemble facts and information to give leaders an advantage over other nations in international relations, trade agreements and even warfare. Reality is so important that a key policy document for the intelligence community tells analysts that their top two priorities are to be “objective” and “independent of political consideration.”

But an investigation into the intelligence community found that during the first Trump administration, intelligence workers at many levels made political value judgments about the information they assembled, and did not report the truest picture possible to the nation’s leaders.

Analysts are a key defense against politicization

In general, each administration develops a national security strategy based on global events and issues, including threats to U.S. interests that are detailed and monitored by the intelligence community. Based on the administration’s priorities and interests, intelligence agencies collect and analyze data. Regular, often daily, briefings keep the president abreast of developments and warn of potential new challenges.

In a perfect world, the president and the national security team use that information to determine which policies and actions are in the nation’s best interests.

With the recent arrival of a new presidential administration, recent reports indicate that at least some workers in the intelligence community are feeling pressure to shift their priorities away from delivering facts and toward manipulating intelligence to achieve specific outcomes.

Current and former intelligence officials have publicly worried that President Donald Trump might be biased against the intelligence community and seek to overhaul it if analyses did not fit his policy objectives.

It happened in Trump’s first term. After Trump left office in 2021, Congress turned to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – which oversees the entire intelligence community – to investigate whether intelligence reports were politicized under Trump’s leadership.

The investigation determined that they were, up and down the intelligence system. The report found that some people who didn’t agree with the president’s policy views and objectives decided among themselves not to provide a full intelligence picture, while others tried to tailor what they showed the president to match his existing plans.

At times, individual analysts withheld information. And managers, even up to the most senior level, also edited analyses and assessments, seeking to make them more appealing to leaders.

For instance, the report found that top intelligence community officials, members of the National Intelligence Council, “consistently watered down conclusions during a drawn-out review process, boosting the threat from China and making the threat from Russia ‘not too controversial.’”

The ombudsman’s report pointed out that this type of event has happened before – specifically, in 2003 around questions of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – which it was ultimately found not to. As the report describes, “politicians and political appointees had … made up their mind about an issue and spent considerable time pressuring analysts and managers to prove their thesis to the American public.” That biased, politically motivated intelligence led to a war that killed nearly 4,500 U.S. service members, wounded more than 30,000 more, and cost the lives of about 200,000 Iraqi civilians, as well as more than $700 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds.

Leaders don’t have to listen

At some point or other, almost every president makes decisions that run contrary to intelligence assessments. For instance, George H.W. Bush did not prioritize a crumbling Yugoslavia, and the challenges that presented, choosing to focus on Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the resulting U.S. military Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

President Bill Clinton inherited the Yugoslavia situation, in which a failing country was at risk of political implosion, and chose to ignore intelligence warnings until the ethnic cleansing in that country became too public to ignore, at which point he began a U.S.-led NATO air campaign to stop the fighting. Clinton also ignored several intelligence warnings about al-Qaida, even after its deadly attacks on two U.S. embassies in 1998, and in 2000 on the USS Cole, a U.S. Navy destroyer. He chose more limited responses than aides suggested, including passing up an opportunity to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

President Barack Obama chose to dismiss indications relayed by intelligence officials that Russia was going to invade Ukraine in 2014 – which it did. He focused on the Middle East instead. Obama’s goal of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq led him to discount warnings of the potential threat from what would become the Islamic State group – which in 2014 took advantage of the American departure to launch a major assault and seize a massive amount of territory in both Syria and Iraq. Driving the group out required significant reengagement from the U.S. military.

And President Joe Biden ignored military and intelligence assessments that the Afghan military and government were weak and would not be able to withstand Taliban attacks if the U.S. military withdrew. And until almost the last moment, the Biden administration did not believe warnings that Russia was about to launch a second invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In both cases, the intelligence predictions were correct.

Elected officials are accountable to the American people, and to history, but I believe accountability is key to ensuring the intelligence community follows its own standards from top to bottom, from senior leaders to the most junior analysts. Failure to abide by those standards harms American national security, and the standards themselves say violations are meant to bring professional, and potentially personal, consequences.

Perfection is elusive

It’s impossible for intelligence collection and analysis staff to get everything right – they don’t have a crystal ball. Leaders aren’t under any obligation to follow the intelligence community’s recommendations. But if intelligence officials and political leaders are to have effective relationships that safeguard the nation’s security, each must understand their role and trust that each is doing that work as best as possible.

Providing unvarnished truthful assessments is the job of the intelligence community. That means assessing what’s happening and what might happen as a result of a range of decisions the policymakers might choose. In my experience, putting aside my own views of leaders and their past decisions built trust with them and improved the likelihood that they would take my assessments seriously and make decisions based on the best available information.

It’s not that intelligence professionals can’t have opinions, political ideologies or particular perspectives on policy decisions. All Americans can, and should.

But as a second Trump administration begins, I think of what I told my colleagues and staff over the decades: National security requires us to keep those personal views out of intelligence analysis.