Ex-agent: Politicization of CIA started in Obama era

FPI / December 31, 2023

Geostrategy-Direct

American intelligence officials abandoned all objectivity to wage political warfare against Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election, a former CIA agent says in a new book.

The politicization of U.S. intelligence agencies originated in the Obama administration, which first introduced ideological activism and social engineering that continues today unabated, John Gentry writes in his book, “Neutering the CIA: Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences”.

President Barack Obama and his appointees “made and institutionalized significant changes, largely by creating new structures, policies, and incentives designed to alter organizational cultures in ways congruent with Obama‘s political agenda,” Gentry said.

“The activism is concentrated in the CIA, the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and the FBI,” Gentry said, adding that the CIA‘s analysis directorate remains “a center of partisan political activity.”

The first sign that intel agencies had jettisoned objectivity came in 2016 when former CIA analyst Michael Morell wrote an op-ed in The New York Times endorsing Democrat Hillary Clinton for president while slamming Trump.

Then, former intelligence officials were recruited by intelligence activists inside the government to promote policies they supported.

That work culminated in the 2020 letter signed by 51 former high-ranking intelligence officials who claimed that the information contained on a laptop owned by Hunter Biden was likely a Russian disinformation operation. The letter was distributed to legacy media despite the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies had determined at the time the laptop was genuine, Gentry stated.

The politicization at the FBI became evident with the bureau’s embrace in the midst of the 2016 campaign of the Christopher Steele dossier, which was rife with false damaging information regarding Trump.

The dossier was championed by top FBI leaders, including FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, Gentry said.

“While activists tried hard to keep observers’ focus on Trump and his exceptionalism, the preponderance of evidence points strongly to the continued existence of a politicized [intelligence community] that will cause problems for years to come — long after Trump has left the political scene,” Gentry stated.

Gentry cites in the book a source in government who told him that serving CIA officers since 2016 have used classified and unclassified government communications systems to “share anti-Trump messages among themselves and outsiders.” The messages prompted no disciplinary action despite current technology that closely monitors such communications for unethical behavior, he said.

Gentry, a veteran of both executive branch and congressional intelligence agencies and now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, also warns that the politicization of the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, created a problem that threatens American security to this day.

Created to be a strictly neutral service for both Republican and Democratic administrations, the politicization within the CIA first became an issue during the 1990s when CIA analyst Robert Gates ordered analysts to skew reports in favor of political narratives of elected officials, Gentry states

But what happened since 2016 has been far more serious and damaging to the agency’s role and mission, writes Gentry, a 12-year employee of the agency, including two years as a senior analyst on the staff of the National Intelligence Officer for Warning, who now teaches Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies. The author is also a retired Army Reserve officer who spent time with special operations and intelligence units.

“A new, dramatically stronger and damaging form of politicization — partisan, political activism willing to damage or destroy politically a sitting American president — had taken root in parts of the U.S. intelligence community,” Gentry writes. “It dwarfs the politicization episodes of the past in magnitude and importance, and it promises to have lasting, negative consequences.”

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