“There are challenges within the intelligence community and skepticism, I guess,” just-confirmed CIA director John Ratcliffe told Breitbart News in what it bills as his “first interview as CIA director” (“Exclusive: Trump’s CIA Director John Ratcliffe: John Brennan’s ‘tenure one of worst things that ever happened to agency,’ Need to Depoliticize Intelligence,” Breitbart, January 23, 2025).
There’s much bad policy to unwind and corrupt organizational ethos to supplant. Ratcliffe says he’s determined to right the ship. Which must be done speedily. China, Russia, and other threats aren’t waiting around until the United States gets its act together.
How it started
“The number one thing is to move away from the things that have contributed to all of the failures and all of the mistakes and all of the lapses that we just talked about—the politicization of intelligence, and it really started under the tenure of John Brennan [March 2013 to January 2017].
“His so-called ‘modernization’ of the CIA when he was director was in fact a politically motivated, bureaucratically imposed social justice agenda.
“The immediate…effect of that was that from that point forward, every metric of success was that the CIA performed less well. The agency collected less intelligence, it was lower-quality intelligence, and it was increasingly politicized in the analysis of that intelligence. That carried on throughout his tenure, and then even after his tenure, as we just talked about: the timing of the letter of the 51 spies who lied [about Hunter Biden’s laptop] was really the capstone of a career of politicizing intelligence. President Trump wants that to stop.”
What to do now
President Trump wants Ratcliffe “to return the CIA to a meritocracy that produces better intelligence and addresses the kind of intelligence failures we talked about and things we’ve seen recently like with regard to Afghanistan, the assessments in Ukraine, the failure to see the October 7 Hamas [attacks], and now just a few weeks ago the fall of Syria.
“All of those things are because we haven’t done what we’re supposed to be doing to inform policymakers to make good decisions. Good decisions are hostage to good information and good intelligence, and we’ve got to get back to that….
“I say this: under President Trump and under me at the CIA, someone’s race, color, creed, religion, sexual orientation and preference shouldn’t inhibit anyone’s success. But nor should it be an entitlement to success or advancement. In many cases, that is what happened and what has happened. So we’re going back to a true meritocracy where everyone in the federal government can go as high and as far as their abilities can carry them….
“[President Trump] makes the policy and I provide, as his CIA director, good intelligence to make that policy whatever it is. He needs good intelligence to end the war in Ukraine. He needs good intelligence to counter China’s moves in the Taiwan Strait or to hold them accountable with regard to COVID. He needs good intelligence to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and from [funding] terrorism throughout the Middle East. That’s what it’s all about, and I’m excited about the opportunity to do it and I’m confident that we’ll do exactly that.”
China
The People’s Republic of China was only briefly mentioned in this first installment of the interview. But Breitbart promises that more of the interview is on the way, “including in-depth discussion about China and artificial intelligence.”
In reporting on his confirmation hearing, Newsweek cited a December 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Ratcliffe in which he wrote that totalitarian China “intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.”
So let’s have the nonpoliticized, more competent spying and intelligence as soon as possible.
