{UAH} Allan/Gook/Pojim: Spies and their masters: How America’s intelligence agencies are preparing to serve Donald Trump | The Economist
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Spies and their masters: How America's intelligence agencies are preparing to serve Donald Trump
THE meeting on January 6th between Donald Trump and America's four most senior intelligence officials was never going to be easy. For months, Mr Trump had poured scorn on the conclusion of America's intelligence agencies that Russia had launched a hacking operation aimed at subverting the presidential election. Mr Trump was even more miffed by the recent allegation that the hacking had been intended to secure his victory. Although no view had been expressed by the intelligence agencies as to whether the Kremlin's efforts had affected the outcome of the election, Mr Trump suspected a ploy to undermine his legitimacy. Worse still, the agency heads had also decided to apprise Mr Trump of serious but unsubstantiated allegations that Russia had compromising material on the president-elect and on Russian contacts with his campaign team.
Unhelpfully, Mr Trump's choice of national security adviser (NSA), Lieutenant-General Mike Flynn, was fired from his job as head of the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) by one of the spy chiefs in the room, Lieutenant-General James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and had entered into a losing turf war with another, John Brennan, the director of the CIA. Mr Flynn had been a respected intelligence officer, helping special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. But once picked by Mr Clapper to gee up the 16,000-strong DIA bureaucracy, he struggled as a manager and clashed with other intelligence agencies, particularly over Islamist extremism, which he felt they were underplaying. He had a point, but in the two years after leaving the DIA his views have become stridently Islamophobic. Another hobby horse, not shared by many other intelligence officers, is that Russia can be an ally in restraining Iran and fighting jihadists. Given this history, Mr Flynn is not the person to ease his master's suspicions of America's spooks.
Since the time of John F. Kennedy, presidents and their closest defence and foreign-policy advisers have received a six- to-eight-page daily brief (known as the PDB or "the daily book of secrets"), now put together by the director of national intelligence's office but drawing on all America's vast intelligence resources. According to David Priess, a former senior CIA presidential briefer who has written a history of the PDB, at its best it provides presidents with unique insights into foreign leaders' thinking and emerging threats.
The only president who declined to receive the PDB was Richard Nixon, who believed (without any evidence) that the supposedly liberal-leaning CIA had sabotaged his 1960 election campaign by providing exaggerated estimates of a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union that Kennedy was able to exploit. But unlike Mr Trump, after eight years as vice-president Nixon was a genuine foreign-policy expert. As Mr Priess points out, he also had the formidable Henry Kissinger as his NSA. Mr Trump has already suggested that he will not want to see the PDB every day.
General Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and George W. Bush's last director of the CIA, says that intelligence briefers have the same challenge with any new president: "There's the fact [intel] guy and the vision guy; one's a pessimist, the other's an optimist. The intel guy has to find a way to get into the head of the president while not forgetting what got him into office." However, Mr Hayden admits that Mr Trump represents that challenge in a particularly extreme form.
Mr Hayden wonders whether someone who has so much confidence in his instincts and doesn't read much will take on board what the spies are telling him. His advice for the new head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, is that his people cannot allow this to affect their work. He believes that the way to "break in" will be through the vice-president-elect, Mike Pence. The PDB will also go to Generals Jim Mattis at the Pentagon and John Kelly at Homeland Security, both of whom know how to absorb intelligence (he thinks the same should be true of Rex Tillerson, the former boss of Exxon Mobil, who has been nominated to be secretary of state).
The intelligence agencies will do their best to adapt to a Trump presidency. But the chances of finding a workable compromise with the new president are not helped by the presence of Mr Flynn, who sees himself as a provocateur rather than someone like Brent Scowcroft or Stephen Hadley (two NSAs under Republican presidents) who viewed their job as making every element of the foreign policy and national security machine hum on behalf of the president. As one person who knows and used to admire Mr Flynn puts it: "You might not want him to be the one shooting pool with this president."
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