Episode 66: The Right-Wing Plan for Trump-Friendly Spies
Donald Trump’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence community during his time in office was often tumultuous. Now, former top Trump administration officials have put together a plan to reshape intelligence gathering should Trump return to the White House, taking aim at what they see as social engineering and a lack of loyalty to a conservative president’s agenda. Several long-time intelligence officials, including the first Director of National Intelligence, weigh the pros and cons of the right-wing plan to overhaul the intelligence apparatus.
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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If there was a unifying thread running through Donald Trump's public appearances as president, it was that Trump regularly did things and said things in front of reporters that no president had ever said or done before.
Remember that time Trump told reporters that he was considering having the U.S. government buy the rather large island of Greenland?
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Essentially, it's a large real estate deal. And strategically for the United States, it would be nice.
But for the American intelligence community, there's one particular instance of Trump talking to the press that stands out from all the rest. It was a joint news conference held by Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. This was in 2018. Right after a summit meeting they’d just held in Helsinki, Finland.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: They emerged together, the President of the United States standing side by side with the President of Russia addressing the world and pointed questions about Russia's interference in America's election.
The summit came at a tense moment. Just three days earlier, the U.S. Justice Department had indicted 12 members of Russian military intelligence on charges of hacking and interfering with the 2016 US presidential election. Going into the meeting, members of the U.S. intelligence community were basically telling Trump — in one voice — that Russia had undeniably meddled in the election and that Putin was undeniably behind it.
ARCHIVAL Vladimir Putin: [Putin speaking in Russian]
Speaking through a translator at the press conference in Helsinki, Putin shocked precisely nobody by denying everything.
ARCHIVAL Vladimir Putin Translator: The Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including election process.
Then Trump's turn came to answer questions from reporters.
ARCHIVAL Reporter: President Trump, just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U. S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin – would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?
And Trump's answer shocked almost everybody.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: So let me just say my people came to me, Dan Coats came to me, and some others, they said they think it's Russia. Uh, I have, uh, President Putin, uh, he just said it's not Russia. I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be. I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.
Needless to say, Trump's performance in Helsinki didn't play well with the U.S. intelligence community back home.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The president's own intelligence chief, Dan Coats, shot back with a rare rebuke. We have been clear in our assessment of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security.
Dan Coats was Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. And the highest intelligence official in the U.S. government. I happen to know the person who was Coats' number two at the time, Susan Gordon. The Helsinki moment is still very fresh in Gordon’s mind.
Sue Gordon: I was in my office, I could see the TV. I saw the press conference happening. I stepped out to see it and I couldn't believe it. For a president of the United States, in front of a foreign leader who had done things that we understood him to have done, and to say, yeah, I'm with him, that was chilling.
I asked Gordon about this moment — and also about Trump's historically fraught relationship with his intelligence services — to try to paint a picture of what a second Trump presidency might mean for U.S. intelligence gathering.
Intelligence agencies are the eyes and ears of an American president — scoping out potential threats to the U.S. all over the world. How presidents treat what their eyes and ears are telling them affects their choices, and those choices can also affect you.
I spoke with several veterans of the U.S. intelligence community about what they think a second Trump term could bring.
John Negroponte: I think they need to be very careful before trying to introduce more of a political coloration or element to the intelligence community.
Sue Gordon: Can we really afford to be saying, because you don't vote in a particular way, you can't do this necessary job? You run the risk of getting what you want, but not having what you need.
Gina Bennett: There's no sugarcoating that it's a blueprint for dismantling democracy as we know it.
I'm Peter Bergen and this is In the Room.
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We actually don’t have to do a lot of guesswork about what changes may be in store for U.S. intelligence if Donald Trump is elected to a second term. Supporters of Trump have been assembling detailed plans for how to revamp the intelligence community. Some of those plans can be found in a document put out by the right-wing Heritage Foundation as part of an effort called Project 2025, which you’ve probably heard of. It flew under the radar for a long time, until it was everywhere.
ARCHIVAL Stephen Colbert: Project 2025. It is a blueprint. [STUDIO AUDIENCE BOOS] You've been reading up. It's a blueprint for a radical far-right takeover of everything in the U.S. government.
The Project 2025 policy document is nearly 900 pages long. All that text has given Democrats lots of material to attack Donald Trump with. Material that likely would be pretty unpopular with plenty of voters, like a pledge to fight abortion “in every jurisdiction in America” or a plan to eliminate the Department of Education.
And although Trump has denied any involvement with it.
ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I don't know what the hell it is. It's project 25. I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it.
It’s the former president’s own people who wrote it and advised on it.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Despite Donald Trump's denials that he knows who these people are, he is deeply connected to key authors of Project 2025, which include Paul Danz, Roger Severino, Ken Cuccinelli, Christopher Miller, and Russ Vought.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Who was the former OMB director in the Trump administration. Ben Carson, the former secretary, folks like Stephen Miller.
These are some of the people who will likely be implementing policy at the highest levels in a second Trump administration.
Indeed, the chapter on the U.S. intelligence community in the Heritage document was written by Dustin Carmack who was the chief of staff to Trump’s handpicked Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe. We asked Carmack for an interview and he declined because of his present job at a tech company.
It's also worth noting that, according to Heritage, Trump's administration adopted nearly two-thirds of the think tank's policy recommendations when he was president. All of this has Susan Gordon worried about what Trump, his allies, and the Heritage Foundation are planning for the U.S. intelligence community.
Sue Gordon: I was a career intelligence officer. My last position in the government was as the principal deputy director of national intelligence — a political appointee under the Trump administration.
Gordon is one of the top former U.S. intelligence officials whose voice you heard earlier. When you talk to her, it's instantly clear how much she loved her work in government.
Sue Gordon: I had the best career, Peter. It was the best.
Gordon served for nearly four decades in the U.S. intelligence community — 27 of those years at the CIA — and she later served as Deputy Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
Sue Gordon: And then that led to my last job as the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
That's the second-highest ranking intelligence job in the U.S. government.
Sue Gordon: So, I had a career that was pretty much one of each of the disciplines of intelligence when I was at the CIA.
Peter Bergen: And when you say all this, a smile is playing on your lips throughout the whole expression of your career.
Sue Gordon: I tell people all the time I had a career that I had no right to, but I was grateful every day. I never wondered if it mattered. I love the craft and discipline of Intelligence, even though I'm probably its harshest critic at the same time.
Peter Bergen: Well, speaking of critics, we have this new Heritage Foundation document. It has a chapter on the intelligence community. The broader context is, essentially the Trump administration, if there was a second term, would come in and have a much larger number of political appointees, premised on the idea that there's sort of a fifth column inside various agencies that won't go along with a conservative president, and of course, the intelligence community being one of those agencies.
Peter Bergen: I don't know if you had a chance to look at this chapter.
Sue Gordon: I did. I've read it quite a few times. It's a fascinating chapter.
Peter Bergen: Because?
Sue Gordon: I'll start with the issue you mentioned, which is, there's an underlying premise that the intelligence community has a political bias that is resistant to a conservative president.
Sue Gordon: I want to reject it out of hand.
Sue Gordon: We're a national security agency, and that tends to be conservative. This idea that it has a political bias is just antithetical to its mission. So that premise I think is flawed. And more than that, if the premise were at all true, the remedy of more political appointees guarantees that you won't get the advantage of intelligence, which is inconvenient information that actually makes for better decisions.
Peter Bergen: If there was a second Trump term…
Sue Gordon: Mhmm.
Peter Bergen: For the intelligence community, what do you think that would look like?
Sue Gordon: I think the first depends on whether a new President Trump would follow through on his denuding of the professional, institutional, base. Listen, I think every institution over many years can get bloated and less efficient. But if you've replaced the talent and wisdom with people who would give you just what you wanted.
Sue Gordon: And if those people didn't have the wherewithal to know how to command the resources that exist, I don't know how you'd achieve any of the really significant advances in national security that we need.
Peter Bergen: Also, you'd run into the danger of having a tit-for-tat where Democrats, when they are in power, would say, well, then we need to get rid of all these, Republican political appointees, there are tens of thousands of them are populating the federal government, including the intelligence community and put our people in, which would further undermine the professionalism.
Sue Gordon: Can we really afford to be losing half of our talented leadership at a time when leadership is really needed? Listen, there is change that need to be affected. There are new things that need to be done. Can we really afford to be just saying, because you don't vote in a particular way, you can't do this necessary job. The dynamic tension between political appointees and careerists, especially in intelligence, is a strength. If you strip that balance, you run the risk of getting what you want, but not having what you need.
The last job Susan Gordon held in government was working as the number two in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI. The ODNI is a relatively new part of the intelligence community. It was set up after the 9/11 attacks, to make sure that all 18 of the U.S. intelligence agencies communicate properly with each other and share their findings with the White House. Because Project 2025 has some pretty specific recommendations about the Director of National Intelligence, I wanted to hear from the very first person to ever hold that job.
John Negroponte: My name's John Negroponte. I was a career government official for 44 years
John Negroponte is a registered Republican but during his career as a State Department and intelligence official, he served under presidents of both parties since 1960. And when looking at Project 2025, he's not nearly as rattled as a lot of people that I've spoken with.
[MUSIC]
Peter Bergen: So you've read the Heritage Foundation document about the intelligence community and its proposals.
John Negroponte: I have.
Peter Bergen: What did you make of them?
John Negroponte: They're better than the State Department chapter.
Peter Bergen: [LAUGHS]
I'm laughing because I spent a whole show interviewing people who had some really forceful objections to the Project 2025 plans for the State Department.
John Negroponte: And I read both.
Peter Bergen: Okay.
John Negroponte: But I thought, first of all, which I found to be welcome news. They seem to want to strengthen the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, whereas their approach to the State Department is to certainly change, and I would say potentially weaken, it. I mean, they start out the chapter on the State Department by saying that it's well known that the State Department is largely populated by leftists. I mean, it's just incredible.
Peter Bergen: Are you a leftist?
John Negroponte: No, I'm not a leftist. And —
Peter Bergen: How long did you work at the State Department?
John Negroponte: Uh, well, 42 out of 44 years of government service.
Peter Bergen: Right.
John Negroponte: So, no, and I know my State Department, I really do, uh, I've worked on every floor of the State Department. They are not leftists. In any case, regarding intelligence, which was your question, I think they want to strengthen it.
Peter Bergen: But I notice if you read between the lines, there are things like that the director of the CIA, who's going to be appointed by potentially President Trump, would essentially get rid of quite a lot of the mission managers, which may seem, kind of like inside baseball, but to me, it doesn't seem like inside baseball, that a politically appointed director would then be able to go in and get a whole bunch of new mission managers, which are basically the people who run the China mission or run the Iran mission.
Peter Bergen: That seems like an attempt at politicization.
John Negroponte: Yeah, I'm not certain though that they would be able to fire the incumbents from the intelligence community. They would probably have to find other jobs for them. And they would have to choose, presumably, the mission managers…
John Negroponte: From the available pool of existing intelligence officers.
Peter Bergen: Well, that’s a good point.
As you might expect from a career diplomat, Negroponte's take on Project 2025's plans for the intel community is pretty nuanced and, well, diplomatic. The Heritage document says that Negroponte's old job, the Director of National Intelligence — the DNI — has become basically a bureaucratic "fifth wheel" without the power to really push the president's intelligence agenda.
Peter Bergen: What does the director of national intelligence do? You were the first one.
John Negroponte: I would say, the Director of National Intelligence is a little bit like the manager of a baseball team. He's a community manager of these 17 different players who are out there on the field. And he gives them guidance, but he doesn't play on the field himself.
The 2025 document recommends that if Trump were President, he should write an executive order giving the DNI power over the budgets and personnel in all of the intel agencies it oversees. Negroponte likes this idea, even if he tactfully points out that the 2025 people failed to understand that an executive order probably won’t get the job done.
John Negroponte: The other thing that I noticed is that they don't advocate a new law regarding the intelligence community. And I find that interesting. They say they think that whatever changes they favor can be made by revising the executive order that governs the intelligence community.
John Negroponte: I'm not sure I agree with that. I think if you're gonna give the DNI the kind of authority that he or she needs, there's one specific matter which can only be fixed by law. And that would be to give real budget authority to the Director of National Intelligence over the other agencies.
Peter Bergen: So the document seems to imply that intelligence is being politicized by the intelligence community. Whereas it seems to me much more often it's the politicians who either ignore intelligence that doesn't fit with their own political opinions or politicize or cherry pick the intelligence that exists.
Peter Bergen: So, during the Iraq war, my understanding is you were sounding a note of caution about regime change in Iraq, because you'd lived through Vietnam as a very young foreign service officer. But that's a classical case where the intelligence was either cherry picked or politicized, and the intelligence community was pushing back on things like Saddam Hussein's potential links to Al Qaeda.
Peter Bergen: They were saying that there wasn't evidence for that. And you even hired somebody called Tom Fingar, who was a prominent dissenter from the idea.
John Negroponte: I made him my director of intelligence. Yeah.
Peter Bergen: Right. And he had —
John Negroponte: Deputy for intelligence.
Peter Bergen: And he had dissented from the view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. So if you could maybe reflect a little bit, I mean, you've served in the U.S. government in various roles for over four decades. Does the intelligence community routinely politicize its intelligence?
John Negroponte: The short answer would be, I don't think so. But I think here's what can happen and I think to some extent happened In Iraq. I think part of it was people trying to fill a vacuum or void, so we didn't know. We asked the question, well, do they have WMD? And so there was a lot of extrapolation from past observations or assumptions made because we found…
John Negroponte: Don't forget, back in the early 90s, we failed to detect, the fact that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. So, I think there was a sensitivity about not missing something that, that was really there. And then you had a few eager beavers like, Scooter Libby, who went running over to the CIA and were trying to massage the intelligence or find things that were wrong.
Peter Bergen: Scooter Libby being Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.
John Negroponte: Correct. And so I think there was a little bit of interference in the process, which was wrong. Mr. Libby shouldn't have done what he did. And Mr. Cheney, if he directed him to go over there, which he may well have done, shouldn't have done that either.
John Negroponte: And it's interesting. Many — not all, but many — intelligence failures are failures of analysis. They're not failures of collection. They're failures of analysis. Do you really understand what you're looking at?
John Negroponte: And what kind of inferences, or assumptions, or stereotypical ideas do you allow to creep into your analysis when you're looking at a set of facts? And I think that's what really happened. In the case of the WMD fiasco, I don't think we understood what we were looking at.
Negroponte's take on the intelligence and policy failures that got the U.S. into the Iraq war in 2003 is — true to form — also nuanced. But he's saying that, if anyone was trying to politicize the debate over whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it certainly wasn't the intelligence community.
Now, there is one place where Negroponte does get pretty critical of the 2025 plans for the intel community — and for the federal government writ large. This is where Project 2025 calls for Trump to reinstate an executive order known as Schedule F. That order could allow the incoming president to replace as many as 50,000 federal employees across the U.S. government with party loyalists.
John Negroponte: I'm not going to try to tell you the fallout, except to say I think it'd be a huge mistake, and I think they need to be very careful before trying to introduce more of a political coloration or element to the intelligence community.
John Negroponte: Right now, I think there's what — a handful, at most? — of politically appointed officials in the intelligence community, CIA has three or four, and ODNI has got a handful. We really need to be careful about that. It's a strong point of our system to have real professionalism prevail in the intelligence community. President doesn't have to accept all the analyses if he doesn't want to, but he ought to seek what the best available professional advice is.
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When it comes to getting the best available professional advice from intelligence professionals, there's a former CIA analyst I've turned to many times. Gina Bennett. She was the first person in the US intelligence community to warn US officials about Osama bin Laden, back in 1993. And when I asked her to talk to me about the Heritage recommendations for the intelligence community, I had no idea that she would spend an entire weekend digesting all 887 pages of the Project 2025 report!
Gina Bennett: I read it all. And I looked at it in total. Whether you think so or not, I'm going to decide that you owe me after this.
Peter Bergen: Gina, I do owe you because I didn't realize you were gonna read the whole document.
Gina Bennett: You should, thank you, you should know me better than that, mister.
Gina Bennett: I wrestled with this all weekend. I just wrestled with the idea of, if I don't say this very clearly as I see it, as I assess it, now I hope I'm wrong. But my analysis, my assessment of this plan aligning with the narcissist we know, whose track record indicates he would support it, is the end of a representative democracy as we've understood it to be.
Peter Bergen: Okay, well I do owe you.
Gina Bennett: This was emotionally and intellectually gut-wrenching. I'm an analyst, right? I'm going to read the details. I'm going to look for the embedded assumptions and understand what the strategic point of it is.
As Bennett read into all those details, she saw lots of specific problems. One of them was Project 2025's recommendation to ban intelligence agencies from monitoring domestic disinformation because it risks curtailing free speech.
Gina Bennett: The point they're trying to make is ignorant of how information actually flows. You know, information flowing globally in a digital domain that doesn't have borders, doesn't include name tags, doesn't include a business card, or a country flag. Disinformation specifically tries to be unattributable, and it does a pretty good job of it.
Gina Bennett: So if the conservative president tells the intelligence community it can't track disinformation and malign influence on domestic U.S. issues altogether, then we're going to set ourselves up for surprise again — and attacks — because the only way we can determine who is behind the information that is about domestic issues is to track it.
Peter Bergen: The report seems to contradict itself on page 220 because then it-
Gina Bennett: The report contradicts itself a lot.
Peter Bergen: Okay, because then it expresses irritation that supposedly some CIA officials downplayed Chinese efforts to interfere in the 2020 election.
Gina Bennett: I know. Disinformation doesn't come in saying, ‘Hi, I'm from Russia. Hi, I'm from China.’ But we can't know that in advance. If we did, you know, my God, hand me that crystal ball!
Bennett also objected to Project 2025's recommendation that intelligence agencies stop any activities that promote unnecessary and distracting quote “social engineering.”
Gina Bennett: That is shorthand for the Heritage Foundation would like every part of the U.S. government to be white, male, Protestant, straight, heterosexual, whatever. That's what, that's code for me.
Peter Bergen: You spent a lot of your career helping women at the CIA and other parts of the national security establishment advance. I mean, you yourself, you started as a typist, right? And you rose to —
Gina Bennett: Absolutely.
Peter Bergen: So, I mean, to me, this is pushing against an open door. The idea that, like, you wouldn't have women playing key roles at the agency, including directing, it seems crazy. But this reference to social engineering, that somehow CIA is engaged in, it doesn't seem like it would favor the kinds of things that, that you have advanced in your own career.
Gina Bennett: It just refuses to acknowledge that this country is not the vision of what they think it is. It's not social engineering, it's social representation. The world doesn't look like, or think like, the old school, white, male, Protestant, Yale and Harvard men.
Gina Bennett: Quite frankly, it never did. If we want the United States to be safe and secure from attacks by other white Protestant men, great. Then we don't need diversity. We don't need inclusion. We don't need alternative thinking whatsoever. But I suspect most Americans would appreciate being protected from threats and attacks by the rest of the world.
Bennett acknowledged that there is some stuff in the Project 2025 document that she agrees with. Like Negroponte, she agrees with the recommendation to make the Director of National Intelligence stronger, and give that office more power over budgets. She also agreed with the suggestion to streamline the process of approving security clearances for new hires — which can often take the CIA longer than a year to get done.
But Bennett stressed that Project 2025's section on intelligence was just 33 pages out of nearly 900 pages. And she says you can't really understand any one part of this project without looking squarely at the whole of it.
Gina Bennett: If you were to look at the chapter on the intelligence community within this plan in isolation, you might be able to rationalize away some of its points, but you can't because it's just an implement. The national security apparatus is just one tool in the entire whole of government machinery.
Gina Bennett: You set the table, right? Sit down to dinner. How often do you just eat peas? Your body requires a full meal. The U. S. government needs multiple pieces in order for it to function.
Gina Bennett: All of which, under this plan, is going to be required to carry out the vision of one single person, of one single religion and interpretation of it, of one single version of America, which is not even the majority of it.
Gina Bennett: There's no sugarcoating that it's a blueprint for dismantling democracy as we know it, it replaces it with a theocratic single party ruler. So if that's its goal, which it clearly states it is, then, of course, from their perspective, they do want an intelligence community that kowtows to the president. They do want that. They want yes men and political lackeys all over the entire executive branch. All marching, in unison with one vision.
Gina Bennett: So bin Laden couldn't turn us into a caliphate, but it looks like the Heritage Foundation will give it a try.
And Bennett's biggest problem with the Project 2025 plans for the U.S. intelligence community is the document's basic diagnosis of what purportedly ails that community: The idea that intelligence officials' personal politics are shaping the findings that they hand over to the President.
Peter Bergen: In your own personal experience, is the CIA some sort of left wing organization? Do people talk about politics? Do they just leave it at the front door? You not only worked at the CIA, you also worked at the National Counterterrorism Center. You also worked at INR, which is a smaller intelligence agency at the State Department. Did politics come into play?
Gina Bennett: The only experience I have had with pushback for my analysis or, you know, just my beliefs, I guess, has been when they didn't support the president, not the other way around.
Gina Bennett: My experience has been that the intelligence community finds it very difficult to tell the president and his most senior advisors that their assumptions and their assessments are in conflict with what the intelligence community is concluding.
Gina Bennett: I've been there. It's a difficult message to deliver. But you know, truth to power is not thumbing your nose at the president. It's providing the information as it is so that we're not surprised by reality, especially when that reality doesn't conform with what the president wants it to be.
I’ll just say here that in all my two and half decades reporting on the U.S. intelligence community, it’s completely clear that these are not a bunch of left-wing rabble-rousers. In fact they are about as conservative with a small c and as straight-laced as you can imagine.
Just think what it takes to get a security clearance to access classified materials. Any history of illegal drug use, of excessive drinking, of gambling, or of large personal debts — all of these can disqualify you.
And just like the other senior U.S. intelligence officials I spoke with for this story, Bennett believes the assumption that is embedded in the Heritage Foundation document — that the intelligence community is politicizing intelligence — gets the problem precisely backwards. If you want to understand how and why intelligence becomes political, or politicized, you should look, perhaps not so surprisingly, at the politicians.
And in Bennett's experience, political pushback on intelligence comes overwhelmingly from the top. She felt this firsthand after the 9/11 attacks, when she was directed to find links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Gina Bennett: As a terrorism analyst, you know, as a terrorism officer, we always keep the door open on whodunit until there's a solid case that we know we can attribute the attack.
Gina Bennett: And it would be negligent of us to not consider alternatives. So I, in fact, before the end of September of 2001, was directed to look at the evidence of Iraqi collusion with Al Qaeda or Iraqi government support to Al Qaeda. And I was told to look under every rock with an open mind objectively, which is what we did.
Gina Bennett: And it took a while, I mean, it took almost a year probably, but we did not find an operational relationship. We found a mutually hostile relationship. And that was delivered. That was not welcomed. Believe me, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, they were not happy with that conclusion, but we delivered it.
And Bennett sees a big danger in Project 2025's cure for what supposedly ails the intelligence community. That is, staffing these agencies with even more loyalists who see the world just like the president does. She believes this goes against the very reasoning that led to the founding of the CIA in the first place, after World War II.
Gina Bennett: Let's not forget that was because of Pearl Harbor, a surprise attack that dragged the United States into a war, World War II, which took a death toll of over 70 million people. So Congress decided, in legislation, that it would be a good idea to empower some small body of expertise to be able to tell the president what he doesn't want to hear, what he hasn't asked for, when it's necessary.
Peter Bergen: So, if you had a more politicized intelligence community, whether on the left or the right, that basically was doing the perceived bidding of the president, whoever he or she is, ultimately, it would be a disaster for kind of conventional intelligence that's the evidentiary base for the commander in chief, he or she, to make decisions about the national security of Americans, which is the most important thing that they can do.
Gina Bennett: Absolutely. You have to look at the information as it is, not as you want it to be. And the problem is with confirmation bias, if you aren't looking for what you disagree with, you will never find it, even if it's out there.
In one way or another, the people you've heard from are saying there's a totally necessary, built-in tension between the intelligence community and the U.S. president that they serve. Because it's their job to tell the presidents stuff that presidents don't always want to hear. So it's not that former intelligence officials like Gina Bennett, like John Negroponte, like Susan Gordon, are afraid of being at odds with the president. Oftentimes, that's their job. Here's Susan Gordon again. She was the number two intelligence official under Trump.
Sue Gordon: President Obama famously said to a briefer that walked in his room, he said, ‘Oh, my God, you're going to take my decision space again, aren't you?’
Sue Gordon: That is in fact the tension that yields good decisions. There's a policymaker who so wants to do what they want and then you have the intelligence community saying, I see the world as it is, not as you prefer. I'm going to give that to you and then you can make the policy that you want.
Peter Bergen: You spent a fair amount of time with President Trump in the room. I mean, how many times were you in meetings with him or briefings?
Sue Gordon: Oh, I don't know, but certainly once a week.
Peter Bergen: Okay, so over the course, of the time that you spent with him —
Sue Gordon: A hundred meetings.
Peter Bergen: A hundred meetings. Okay. I think you get a sense of somebody after a hundred meetings, right? What was your sense of him in these meetings, both as a consumer of intelligence, and as a commander in chief using intelligence?
Sue Gordon: For the intelligence community, at the beginning, he was no different from any other president because every president is different. So the fact that he was different was not different to us. The fact that he wanted bullet points and former President Obama, he loved to read pages of our deathless prose and that was not what former president Trump wanted. That was something we had to adjust to, but that wasn't hard. I think what was different about former President Trump, that in the early days that we had to adjust to was, one, he was really the first president that didn't really understand government or the intelligence community.
Sue Gordon: For example, I don't know that he really understood the difference between intelligence and law enforcement, and even though there are elements of the FBI that are in the intelligence community, they are different disciplines. So that was hard, because there were just things he didn't understand. The second is, he didn't come in believing that we were the only true opinion, that, that was one of the things that I think we always had going for us, is that our word was kind of the best word, because we had the best sources.
Sue Gordon: He didn't come in necessarily believing that. He trusted other people more than us.
Gordon told me that every president finds their own way to navigate the built-in tensions that exist between the White House and the intelligence community. But what worries Gordon and others about Trump is the tendency of his that we talked about earlier — Trump's tendency to say stuff and do stuff in public that no President has ever said or done before. Like, not only disagree with his top intelligence officials, but publicly question their integrity.
Sue Gordon: Intelligence can be maddening and you can become impatient with it because you so want it to support what you wanna do. When we were useful, we were super useful. And when we had to say that we didn't have the answer, I think that was maddening.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Trump's hostility to the intelligence community has been pretty relentless.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Donald Trump likened them to Nazis in an early morning tweet.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: The president going after intelligence community leaders full bore, saying they are extremely passive and naive when it comes to Iran.
Sue Gordon: He didn't come in with a base where we could just talk the way we wanted to talk and he would accept it. So I think just over time, the trust gap became huge.
Peter Bergen: What was the nature of the trust gap? Why did it grow?
Sue Gordon: It seemed that as he became more under siege, then he saw more people as not supporting him. And so, if you already have that intelligence is saying inconvenient things and you conflate them with institutions that may be looking at and prosecuting — the FBI — I think that just became problematic. And so you just start getting a distance between what he's doing and what we're supporting and it's difficult.
Difficult may be a bit of an understatement. Trump clashed very publicly with Gordon's boss, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats. Coats’s problem was that he insisted on reporting the actual conclusions of the intelligence community.
Stuff that Trump disagreed with like that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election. Conclusions that North Korea was unlikely to abandon its nuclear weapons program. And conclusions that Iran was so far complying with the Obama-era nuclear deal. So in 2019, Trump forced Coats out. And that's when Susan Gordon was faced with her own painful decision.
Sue Gordon: I was appointed by President Trump. Then President Trump decided that he did not want me in a position. I was the third kid of a naval officer. So if the person that hires you says, ‘You're no longer my person.’ You give a cheery ‘aye aye’ and you walk out. I lost the professional love of my life.
Sue Gordon: Um, in what unfolded the next two years, I felt like I'd left my mates in the foxhole without me.
Sue Gordon: I think I underestimated the PTSD of not being able to participate in this nation's great quest.
Project 2025 has some plans that Gordon thinks could really damage the intelligence community’s ability to provide unvarnished intelligence to the President. If Trump does get a second term, he'll have the power to ignore or adopt as many of Project 2025's plans as he likes.
But Gordon's deeper worry is that a second Trump presidency might cause some really talented people in the intel community to simply leave.
Sue Gordon: And I say that with so much humility because I wasn't that important, but I believed in what I was doing. And what I will tell you is that there are many more people like me who believe in the quest, without personal agenda and if you drive these people out, it will be less good. And in the craft that I so love of intelligence, I think you risk breaking its magic.
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If you want to know some more about the issues we discussed in this episode, we recommend: National Security Mom by Gina Bennett, and my book, The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World, both of which are available on Audible.
And a heads up that you’ll be hearing even more from Gina Bennett in next week’s episode.
She wrote the very first U.S. government report warning about somebody called Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda — eight years before the 9/11 attack.
Gina Bennett: I was like a cop on the beat looking for a serial killer. I was probably a bit obnoxiously tenacious and determined.
That’s next week on In the Room.
CREDITS
IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.
Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.
This episode was produced by Erik German with help from Nathan Ray.
Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.
Katie McMurran is our technical director.
Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Luke Cregan, Holly DeMuth, and Sandy Melara.
Our theme music is by Joel Pickard
Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross
Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.
Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.
And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.
Audible’s Chief Content Officer is Rachel Ghiazza.
Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah.
Audible Executive Producer: Lara Regan Kleinschmidt.
Special thanks to Marlon Calbi and Allison Weber.
Please note: This episode includes excerpts from broadcasts from The Guardian and ITV News.
