The President’s Most Dangerous Enemy Isn’t “Godless Communists”

Trump’s campaign rhetoric echoes an old pattern in American history. The real danger is not partisan hyperbole itself, but the politicization of an intelligence community that was created after Pearl Harbor to guard against political blindness.

President Donald Trump has been messaging repeatedly that this November’s congressional elections will pit “freedom-loving” MAGA Republicans who love America against “godless communist” Democrats who represent a “mortal threat” to America that is greater than that of the intelligence failure to provide warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Before considering that hyperbolic rhetoric, it is worth remembering a lesson history provides: America’s gravest intelligence failures have rarely resulted from analysts missing information. They have occurred when presidents demanded intelligence that supported policy rather than challenged it.

In the mid-1970s, I was a young congressional aide who investigated intelligence failures for the House Intelligence Committee. When our bipartisan committee probed post-war U.S. intelligence performance, we initially saw some familiar failures of collection and analysis. The National Security Agency (NSA) officers didn’t always speak to the CIA officers, and the CIA wasn’t in close enough touch with FBI counterintelligence, and so on. This produced failures such as the following:

• President Lyndon Johnson first learned that the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 when Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin informed him. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms expressed his embarrassment that in the weeks before the attack, U.S. signals intelligence had lost sight of Soviet troop movements in neighboring Poland.

• And on October 16, 1973, the day before Saudi Arabia announced the Arab Oil Embargo that sent gasoline prices skyrocketing for millions of shocked American car owners, CIA Director William Colby had said it wouldn’t happen.

But the more our committee learned about the intellectual complexities of intelligence failures, we discovered that the most consequential failures had a different cause entirely. They stemmed from strong-minded policymakers in the White House who demanded intelligence to support their political and policy objectives.

Vietnam

A brutal case in point was the two-decade civil war in Vietnam, which had ended in 1975 with a communist victory after costing 58,220 American (and millions of Vietnamese) lives.

We learned that over the years, honest American intelligence analysts had been pressured by the White House (and Defense Department) to produce intelligence that would project to the American public “an image of success,” as one now-declassified Pentagon cable put it in 1967. To summarize a library of scholarly works, Vietnam was not fundamentally an intelligence collection failure. It was a policy failure occurring when political leaders pressured analysts to produce conclusions that supported predetermined policy.

Eventually, this whole story came out. In his memoir, None So Blind, published in 2001, former CIA analyst George Allen wrote of his having participated in 1967 in an unsavory White House interagency effort orchestrated in the Situation Room. The aim, Allen explained, was “to manipulate public opinion” to believe what the president and his aides “wanted the public to believe.” Allen, who revealed he had been ordered by CIA Director William Colby not to be “candid” with our congressional inquiry, confessed that in 1967 he had felt he had been “crossing well over the line into immorality.”

Deja Vu

Fast forward to today, watching the Trump administration’s weakening and misuse of the intelligence community is deja-vu, as he fires or sidelines those from the Intelligence Community (IC) who report any intelligence that doesn’t support his political objectives. Trump has undermined American Intelligence analysts’ principal duty: to speak truth to power, which is so essential to protecting our country from those who would harm us.

Moral lines are again being crossed, as Donald Trump has politicized, weaponized, and weakened the U.S. intelligence community to an unprecedented extent. Just last week, in a primetime address to the nation, the president again falsely accused American intelligence officials of what amounts to treason: concealing evidence of interference in the 2020 presidential election he lost to Joe Biden.

One can hope that the American public is catching on to Trump’s electoral demagoguery. Still, it is important that the 78 million Americans who voted for him remember that it was because of the pre-Pearl Harbor “lack of an independent intelligence agency” that the post-war CIA that Trump is now politicizing was created.

Greg Rushford is a former senior congressional aide (defense & intelligence) and a former Washington-based journalist who specialized in the nexus between national security and global trade politics. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.