The book is the history of the CIA from 2001 until now. I want to start with the ending. What's happening with the CIA in the second coming of Trump?
After Trump was acquitted in early 2020 on impeachment charges for extorting Ukraine—withholding weapons and demanding dirt on Joe Biden—he was emboldened. In the last year of the first Trump term, it was like a clown car loaded with dynamite crashing into a fireworks warehouse, as his former aide Stephanie Grisham said in her book. Trump believed the CIA was the capital of the so-called Deep State, and he set out to try to control, manipulate, and destroy it in those final months. He installed John Ratcliffe as the director of national intelligence, and Ratcliffe spent his eight months in that office manipulating and distorting intelligence to please Trump, withholding information from Congress, and behaving as a stooge.
After he was defeated in the 2020 election, Trump tried to install Kash Patel as the head of the CIA, and keelhaul Gina Haspel, the director. She fought back and prevented that. And when Trump fired the secretary of defense during this period, she predicted we were on the way to a right-wing coup. And we were, with the insurrection at the Capitol. Now in his second term, Trump has put at the CIA John Ratcliffe. He has placed crackpots and fools in charge of all the instruments of American national security. Pete Hegseth, the Christian nationalist and Fox News host, at the Defense Department. Tulsi Gabbard, the conspiracy theorist and Putin admirer, as DNI. Patel at the FBI. It is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes that people who are valued only for their loyalty to the leader are installed in positions of power.
In the first six months of Trump’s second term, we are seeing what was foretold by the last year of his first term—a direct attack on the CIA and the national security community to beat them into instruments of his will. He is demonstrating that ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you're an ideologue, your mind is made up. You don't need facts, and you don't think intelligence is necessary. Look at what Secretary of State Marco Rubio notably said when the intelligence community disputed Trump's claims to have completely destroyed Iran's nuclear program with a bombing raid: “Forget about intelligence.” You can put that on a banner and hang it at the White House.
One major theme of the book is that the CIA moved from an espionage-driven agency to a counterterrorism and paramilitary force after 9/11. What happened and what did that mean for the agency?
The CIA was never created to be a lethal paramilitary force. It was never created to be the operator of secret prisons, the jailer of terrorist suspects, or the interrogators of this prisoner. And for 15 years, counterterrorism and all of that swamped everything. It swamped traditional espionage. It swamped traditional analysis. It sucked the oxygen out of the American intelligence system. That began to change at the end of 2016. There was a new chief of the clandestine service, the part of the CIA that handles covert operations, including espionage activity. His name was unknown to Americans until now: Tomas Rakusan. His roots are Czech. His parents were Czech, and he was nine years old when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring. His hatred of the Russians was bred in his bones.
At this point, he called in his top people, who had spent the previous 15 years targeting terrorists. And by targeting, I don't mean putting warheads on foreheads. I mean finding out who they were, identifying them, tracking their movements and trying to recruit them. He told them, in so many words, that the Russians just fucking manipulated our elections. How do we make sure that this never happens again? So the best people in the clandestine service were tasked to go after Russians—Russian spies, Russian diplomats, foreign ministry officials, Russian oligarchs. Identify them, find out who they were, when they were at home, all for possible recruitment. Four years later, the CIA wound up stealing Putin's war plans to attack Ukraine.
The penetration of the Kremlin had been the highest goal of the CIA since its inception in 1947. The world was dubious when President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken warned about Putin’s aims in Ukraine. They said, “Oh yeah, really? Aren't you the people who said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?” But a disbelieving world saw that intelligence was right on the mark, and while it didn't stop the war, it did unite a fractious NATO in support of Ukraine. The CIA had been working to ensure the survival of Ukraine since 2014. But that 10-year effort may now be coming to an end if Trump sells out Ukraine and undermines the Western alliance.
So the CIA started beefing up spying operations aimed at Russia, which culminated with it gaining access to Putin’s plans for attacking Ukraine. Is Russia still a top priority for the CIA, with Trump’s flunkies now in charge?
I strongly doubt it. The CIA belongs to the president. With rare exceptions, it does what the president tells it to do. It is an executor of American foreign policy. Imagine for a moment that you’re a CIA officer in a position of prominence and power at the clandestine service. What have the last six months done to you? The president has gone over to the other side. He has joined the axis of authoritarians. He did that on February 24, when he voted at the United Nations with Russia, Iran, and North Korea against a resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine on its third anniversary. It is a head-spinning, gut-wrenching, and nauseating thing to contemplate. You and I and our colleagues, along with any number of American spies and diplomats and citizens, have wondered over the last decade, is Donald Trump an agent of Russia? We have the answer: No, he's not their agent. He's their ally.
Let's go back in time. In the first decade of this century, at the start of your book, the CIA went from the WMD disaster to the secret prison and torture scandals, which you write about extensively. What was the impact on the agency itself of sliding into the dark side?
They knew it would never stay a secret. They knew that they would be called to account. They knew that the prisons, the torture, would be revealed by journalists. And it was. I think they were fine with doing what they did. No regrets. I can't speak for everyone who was involved with all this, but at the time they believed that it was the only way to figure out what al-Qaeda was up to. On September 9/11, the CIA didn't know jack shit about al-Qaeda. (I'm quoting Bob Gates, the former CIA director and secretary of defense.) If they had had a thick dossier on who was who in al-Qaeda, and how they moved money around, and how they traveled from country to country, the prisons and the torture wouldn't have been necessary for them. It was a lack of intelligence that drove them to do this.
When we learned that the CIA had engaged in torture, there was a big debate about whether torture yields solid and reliable intelligence. One part of that debate was whether torture had produced information used to locate Osama bin Laden. Sen. John McCain, for one, argued torture was wrong and counterproductive. FBI interrogators said it was not effective. Can you answer the question for us? Did the CIA’s torture pay off?
The great body of the intelligence that led to the discovery of bin Laden's location was not derived from waterboarding. It was painstaking and slow analytical work. Toward the end of the 2000s, the CIA in Pakistan recruited agents from al-Qaeda, and that was what supercharged the investigation that led to bin Laden's lair in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But put the bin Laden raid aside, did the torture in other cases produce important and significant intelligence that made a difference? I think not. Was torture necessary? I think the CIA would say the answer is unknowable. But if the answer is unknowable, then you have to impose a moral equation on an amoral agency. Was it worth it? Was the shame that it brought on the United States worth it? I would say no.
We’ve known each other a long time. We met while covering the trial of Tom Clines, a side character in the Iran-Contra scandal. It’s always seemed to me you have a love/hate relationship with the CIA. You have spent a lot of your life covering it. You write much about its ineptitude and screwups. But in this book and elsewhere, you also relish its successes. In The Mission, you write, “For every great debacle, there was a beautiful espionage operation.” Give us an example of this beautiful espionage.
A great intelligence operation is a beautiful thing because it involves cunning, patience, and a spark of genius. One of the successful operations that I write about was a nine-year effort to take down the global nuclear weapons technology smuggling ring run by a Pakistani metallurgist named A.Q. Khan. Three key people in this CIA operation spoke to me at great length on the record.
The inspiration for this operation came when one of them, Jim Lawler, who is now a spy novelist, was listening to a lecture at the CIA by an FBI agent named David Major who had run operations against Russians for decades. Major was describing the first great intelligence operation of the Soviet spy service, the Cheka, after the Russian Revolution. Long story short, it was a sting. They created phony resistance organizations that lured Russian exiles into traps across Europe. After the exiles were caught, they were tortured and executed. Lawler thought, if the Bolsheviks can do that, why can't we? With his colleagues, he set up a series of front companies that looked like they were smuggling nuclear weapons technology. They lured in Khan and his associates. Think of a Venus flytrap. The culmination of this operation led not only to the capture and destruction of Khan’s ring, but the dismantling of nuclear weapons programs in countries like Libya. It made the world safer.
That sounds like a good use of our tax dollars.
Espionage is fascinating because it is ultimately a search for knowledge, and reporters and spies—I'll speak for myself—are not dissimilar. We are both interested in what's happening under the surface of things. We're both interested in taking the lid off life and looking at the works, like a kid taking apart a watch to see what makes it tick.
As you write in this book, there is a moral—or amoral—component to this. The search for truth is indeed a noble endeavor, but the CIA often does this through subterfuge and betrayal and by encouraging others to break the law and put themselves in harm's way.
When a CIA officer recruits a foreign agent, they are entering into a criminal conspiracy to commit treason. The bond between them is a covenant, not unlike marriage, in which trust is the fundament of the relationship. This is what makes writing about espionage fascinating. The epigraph for the book is a quotation from a fellow named Hugh Cunningham, who was the director of training at the CIA for many years, from the 1950s into the 1970s. He told this to thousands of trainees at the CIA’s school for spies, known as The Farm, in rural Virginia: “We must have the greatest immorality, and we must have the greatest morality.”
The first part of that is the essence of what an American spy does abroad: lying, cheating, and stealing. He is a species of a legal criminal. Espionage is illegal everywhere and is often punishable by death. The morality is that bond between the spy and the recruited agent—people in regimes like Russia or Iran who help the CIA in the hope of perhaps a better life, perhaps money, perhaps revenge. They put their lives in the hands of the American spy within this tension between morality and immorality. It makes a good story.
There’s a conflict at the heart of this. We live in a democratic society of transparency and laws—or at least that's what we're told. Yet we have a government agency that is licensed to break the law, to lie, and to keep secrets. It's supposed to act in a way that's responsible and accountable. It must engage in skullduggery but do so according to a set of rules. That has always seemed to me a dicey proposition. You tell thousands of people you can do these things, but when you testify to Congress, you can't lie. And when it comes to torture, you must follow guidelines. This may work on paper, but I've always thought it's an incredibly hard thing to pull off. No surprise, scandals and controversies occur again and again.
Here's the danger of the present moment. We are taught to believe that America is a democracy. It is a shining city on the hill, and we represent freedom. That is not true anymore. We are an autocracy today, and an intelligence service in the hands of an autocrat is a dangerous thing.
It's one thing to go out there and lie for democracy. It's quite another thing to go out there and lie and break laws for autocracy.
The book ends with a rather frightening idea. I'm going to quote you: “The risk of a catastrophic intelligence failure was as high as it had been at the start of the 21st century.” This is you commenting on the current state of the world and the state of the CIA.
That’s because Trump has put the CIA, the Pentagon, and the other agencies of American national security in the hands of these dangerous clowns.
