Carol M. Highsmith via Wikimedia Commons

Politicized senior intelligence officers, politicized intelligence, intelligence failures, and restructuring of US intelligence. All these topics are of tremendous importance to US national security. Recently I have written on how US intelligence is trying to confirm whether the Wuhan Coronavirus (COVID-19) leaked from a Chinese lab, but it has been slowed, in part, by the CIA’s ‘decimated’ clandestine intelligence networks in China. Yet, while US intelligence is facing many challenges abroad, the challenges within might be the most serious.

One retired 25-year veteran CIA officer is leading the fight to fix and reform US intelligence. Brad Johnson spent his entire CIA career fighting America’s enemies in the shadows, but after retiring he has a new mission — to depoliticize, rebuild and reform US intelligence.

To fulfill his new mission, Johnson — who retired as a Senior Operations Officer with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and was Chief of Station (COS) at various US embassies — founded Americans for Intelligence Reform. As Johnson writes in American Military News (AMN):

Over the previous decades, I have observed the Intelligence Community turn away from its core responsibilities for the safety and security of all Americans to a far more political agenda. The intelligence community’s (IC) quadrennial report about global trends published in 2017 is a poster child example of what is wrong with intelligence today. It overwhelmingly focuses on things like global government integration to face future issues. It argues the positives of what is known today as the globalist movement, a hardcore leftist philosophy that is deeply political.

Johnson notes that the IC’s 2017 quadrennial report focuses more on global warming than it does on global terrorism. As important as issues of globalization and global warming are, they are primarily political and policy issues, not matters for intelligence. The IC’s primary mission is to collect and analyze critical information on the organization, plans and activities of foreign governments and hostile non-state groups, not to get involved in politics or policy. Political neutrality and dispassionate analysis are key to the intelligence profession’s integrity and effectiveness.

Sadly, the intelligence community has been politicized, and damaged, but not necessarily by the current administration. Johnson explains that the CIA’s so-called “modernization” plan implemented under the Obama administration by former CIA director John Brennan is a case in point.

Brennan’s damaging plan did not receive the attention it should have from the CIA’s congressional overseers, or the media. As Johnson states, the Brennan plan “systematically dismantled and destroyed the CIA’s operations division — the heart of the agency’s central mission of using people to steal vital secrets around the world.”

Johnson adds, “Many of us who devoted our lives to the clandestine service as CIA operations officers were stunned to hear Mr. Brennan announce that based on his “modernization plan, he no longer regards the CIA as being in the espionage business. ‘We don’t steal secrets,’ Mr. Brennan astonishingly stated in an interview with NPR.”

As Johnson describes it in AMN:

The Brennan plan instead called for other nations’ intelligence services to provide the CIA with spies as intelligence collectors. Real espionage is the direct recruitment of spies or reporting sources who steal information from other countries or organizations such as terrorists. An important feature of this process is that no one should know that our spies are stealing the information. Keeping the operations clandestine is fundamental to the credibility and reliability of the information. When another intelligence service selects spies for the CIA, the information provided could easily be mixed with damaging disinformation and we have no way to be sure of who else is aware we are receiving the information.

This plan fundamentally alters and undermines the US intelligence mission, and according to Johnson, “combined with other factors makes the IC fundamentally unreliable and marginalized when they are so desperately needed for our National Security.”

Johnson has many other examples of how the intelligence community has been led astray by politicization and bad ideas, and has recommendations for reform. I expect to write more about him and his organization, Americans for Intelligence Reform, in the months to come.

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Comments

  1. The magic word that he used was John Brennan who is set to be indicted in a very short time. Why on earth is the CIA spending time on “Climate Change”? Climate change has been happening since the earth was formed and unless you can control the axis that the earth is spinning at or the speed at which it spins, or the activities of the sun, you just ain’t changing it. You can try to paint all exposed surfaces like roads, parking lots, building roofs, etc. white or reflective silver and see if that changes anything, but I would be shocked if it did. We need to get the politics out of the CIA as well as the FBI and return them to nuts and bolts intelligence gathering. Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma Bombing, may have not done it if not influenced by U.S. Attorney Eric Holder and the FBI hadn’t try to trap him by providing him access to knowledge and materials a year before. The CIA was involved in the Cocaine trade. Things like that lack morality. Back to the basics because we need them to provide real factual intelligence.

    1. The appropriate term is NIHILISM.
      The CIA and maybe the FBI are so corrupt, so decadent, so riddled with political hacks that the ONLY solution is to destroy it. Not sure if we really need to replace it. After all. Where would you get people for it but from the same cesspool.

        1. Human induced climate change – started by Al Gore and others – is the largest financial scam ever run on this planet.

    2. Even the scientists who have investigated “climate change” say that anything we can do even with extreme measures will not really affect the climate by much. The world was not designed to be manipulated by mankind. Sure we can do what we can to decrease emissions and clean up our waterways but to think we can change the climate is ridiculous.

  2. Roy, you are so right, climate change is not an intelligence issue. But dems in this country today are using it as an issue so it is political in nature and BO is a dem. In all cases most dems ignore the changes made in BO’s administration that were profitable for their donors. Indeed for the dems the issue even today of stopping coal production and fracking is their goal. But what the dems had to realize is that stopping of production in the US led to importing the products discontinued in the US via their donors often as the middle men and the US making the dem donors even richer. I am sure the kickback for the dems was very profitable.

    But the cost of importing what was needed and a lot of other actions in the BO fundamental restructuring of the US resulted in the loss of jobs, closing of the companies that produced the coal and oil and other items used by our nation. The loss of using our own resources is a large part of what led to the horrible economic downturn in the US, 2% or less GDP. I think BO’s actions could best be described as the fundamental destruction of the US economy.

    And recently via the virus miasma it was also discovered that some very sensitive industries all all moved their production off shore to China and in this crisis it identified another BO move that was a disaster in times of a crisis. That is going to be changed and quickly for the nation’s best interest.

    And along with his destruction agenda, BO actually warped the very agencies being discussed and hired and promoted those who agreed with his destruction agenda only and put them in charge. Today the issues with several agencies who morphed away from their original mandate because of BO and his actions are surfacing literally under criminal investigations that extended even into the very first years of Trump’s administration.

    I sincerely hope all of those deep state holdovers from the really criminal administration of BO are removed from their jobs and charged for their criminal actions. None of them were unaware of their actions, things were done with intent, criminal intent.

  3. Politics is the global mega industry controlling earth’s destiny. To that end the intelligence community is what determines who leads and who must follow in global politics and wealth. Those two sentences define the roll of every major nation’s intelligence services, CIA, MSS, SVR RF, SIS(MI-6) and the rest. Corrupt clandestine operations globally and internally to their native lands and politicized operations to serve the global elite are counter to their creation.Our CIA has dramatically changed and morphed into an organization of esoteric missions at the behest of forces beyond America’s borders. The CIA must be focused on the needs of America and its greater population first and foremost, political whims of the elite be damned. Elections, the ecology and an infinite number of specialized American internal politicized focuses be damned.

  4. John Brennan, after found guilty in a court of law, should be hanged in the middle of Washington DC and left there to hang as a reminder to others what is NOT acceptable behavior in the greatest nation on earth.

    If we treated treasonounous people like Brennan in this fashion, others would end their actions against this nation.

    1. And just who appointed the communist Brennan to head the CIA and destroy its capability? Why, gee, wow, wasn’t it comrade Obama? Yes, I believe it was! And is it too much of a stretch to conclude that Brennan was following exact orders?

    2. Brennan is a self admitted communist and how in the world he was allowed to have free reign over the CIA is beyond me! i would think that someone must have been smart enough to wave a red flag… this is what has become wrong with America. this man should be executed for treason for all to see! what a sad joke! we have been duped and right in front of our own eyes!

  5. Careful now—- we are talking about all the “great” things done by the obumba administration…. the media will be pissed…. never a bad word about him… never a good word about Trump. MAGA! KAGA!!

  6. John Brennan has been the single most damaging government functionary in recent American history. He did dismantle (again) the US direct information collecting CIA function, much as did Jimmy Carter. And Brennan has continued his anti-American crusade in his anti-Trump diatribes. John Brennan converted to Islam when stationed in the Middle East, and he converted to an anti-Christian attitude. One wonders why Obama appointed this man, hostile to Western civilization, to head the US CIA. It certainly lends credibility to the idea that Obama favors the Muslim world view over the West.

    1. +Would that also be the reason his housemate s folks hold the Pres. or what ever the title is to both mens and womens brotherhood? Guess its s good constant flow of whats going on and has been for all the years he was in office. Sure as hell he still has his MOLES working in OUR government offices. Especially to cause we the people and OUR country HARM! His travels are not for any good benefits of the USA! And that would be a SURE BET!

    2. Three Words: Both are Islamist!!!!
      What happen to the McCarron Act that bared immigration from Muslims because they could not swear fidelity to United States but only to Satan excuse I did not miss type, Allah.
      Look at Islam it’s opposite to everything Jesus Christ preached to Jews and Christianity. Thus Satan answer to Christ’s religion on Earth.

  7. Nothing will happen. It’s a sign of just how deep the deep state really is. I’ve watched the worst of criminals, thieves and liars avoid prosecution or get off Scott free.
    I’m sorry I have lost hope that these cockroaches will ever be brought to justice. It’s horrible what is happening to our country. I just can’t put my arms around the reason why? Why do Dems hate the founding principles of our country? Makes me sick.

  8. It is so much more fun investigating global warming then actually doing your job and of course you can hang out with the Hollywood elite and othe celebraties including17 year old Swedish girls like Greta Thunberg. If they actually did their job then we would already where the Communist Chinese Corona Virus came from and when it actually started.
    I really don’t give a damn what your party affiliate is, or who you vote for or why, just do you damn job, not the one you wish you had but the one may tax dollars is paying for.

  9. The operative phrase for the politicization, betrayal and chaos that the US Intelligence Community has become is…wait for it…Barack Hussein Obama!!! It is Obama, and Obama alone, at whose feet this fiasco can be laid. History will remember this impostor as the worst POTUS ever. I am convinced of that; although I am too old to be around when that final assessment is announced. Nevertheless, it will happen.

  10. It’s going to require the firing and permanent barring from government service of every single executive level officer of the Intelligence Agencies to make sure that the Deep State Swamp Creatures are effectively stripped of power.
    I’ve proposed elsewhere that all of the D.C. personnel who aren’t classified as “lab rats” need to be moved out of DC and distributed to field postings, while those currently in field positions need to be rotated into DC for a term. Only by completely “churning” the waters will the political operatives be brought to the surface where they may be skimmed off and depostied on the refuse heap.

  11. Mr. Johnson is absolutely correct. The intelligence services are indeed both corrupt and politicized. This has been going on since the Clinton administration and found impetus during the Obama years. Our President should have made this one of his priorities, just look how much damage Brennan and Clapper have done not only to this administration but also to the intelligence services themselves. It’s difficult to have faith in them.

  12. I am hoping that all the indictments are coming in a strategic timeframe, this summer so the corruption and malfeasance can be e posed before the 2020 election. Because BO placed a medical device tax on all manufacturers or said products, a lot of those manufacturers went overseas, ie. Face masks. I also believe the CHiComms released this contagion on purpose to sabotage the world economy and show Trump in a bad light. A lot of these “bad actors” would love to see a change of guard in the US so they can continue to walk all over the US, like they did in the BO years. They know Trump won’t allow it because he actually puts the US first. It’s obvious he loves this country and is tough on other countries treating us like chumps! KAGA 2020!

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