The Atlantic on October 23 published a profile of CIA chief John Ratcliffe. Its subheadline contains the most significant “tell” from the piece—“CIA Director John Ratcliffe leads an agency that’s at war with Russia, even as Trump makes nice with Putin.”
The Atlantic article makes no bones about its ulterior purpose. It is to present Ratcliffe as an even-handed professional who has mastered the intricacies of the Ukraine War and tells it “like it is” to the president, leaving the latter to decide his options.
This panegyric to Ratcliffe, however, hides substantive issues about the probity of CIA intelligence analyses, their impact on policy, and the extent to which the pure excitement of militarized covert action inevitably hobbles intelligence agencies and analytic reporting.
Intelligence is never wholly objective. And its professionalism largely hangs on service culture, which can—and does—change.
As one example, a former head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence research and analysis division, General Itai Brun, warned that Israel’s inability to recognize what Hamas was planning for October 7 resulted, not from a lack of information, but from a failure of culture and approach. Per the Times of Israel’s report of his comments:
Even after the massacre, intelligence didn’t internalize that Hamas believed it could succeed…. The whole military intelligence network “was not listening, because it was convinced it knew…. It could not accept the possibility that it was wrong.
So, when it comes to “culture,” in this sense, two points in the Atlantic piece stand out: First, the article hints that Ratcliffe is seen by his staff to be “clear-eyed about the threat Russia poses not just to Ukraine—but to the United States and its allies.” This suggests that Radcliffe sees Russia as an eternal enemy of the West, or at least a current enemy with nefarious intentions. Secondly, the article emphasises that the CIA is in “the lead” on Ukraine and that its paramilitary wing—Covert Action—is thrilled at being so busy. As Larry Johnson, a former CIA official, outlines:
The CIA helps Ukraine knock out Russian refining capacity. Diesel prices soar. Then… in the middle of peace talks in Miami… President [Trump] announces a deal for Russia to sell its diesel on the world market…. So the United States is simultaneously paying to destroy Russian diesel production and begging Russia to sell it more diesel. You could not design a more incoherent policy if you tried.
The Atlantic piece lends credence to what has long been supposed—that Trump’s attempts to secure a “deal” with Russia (most recently by importing Russian diesel into America to bring the price down for the midterm elections) is a deceit intended to coax Moscow towards making a deal (unfavorable, in the Kremlin optic) with Trump.
It would be a deceit because the CIA pursues its own (militarised) covert action war on Russia. The Atlantic, citing a CIA officer, reports:
Armed with information that the U.S. provides, Ukraine’s military has launched strikes deep inside Russia. And U.S. spy satellites provide early warning about incoming missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground, “the CIA is in the lead,” a retired senior officer who travels frequently to Ukraine told me.
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