On May 16, Foreign Policy magazine published an article by three experienced intelligence officers, including one who has chronically politicized U.S. intelligence, who argued that the U.S. intelligence community is getting a bad rap at a critical point in history for unfortunate, unjustified reasons.
Far more accurate would have been a judgment that the declining respect for the IC reflected in polls is a direct result of the recent partisan political activism and dishonesty of ostensibly respectable senior former intelligence officers and many inaccurate "Leaks" by current intelligence officers, mainly against candidate and then President Donald Trump.
For many decades the organizational culture at the CIA, most importantly given its role of supporting presidents, was that intelligence officers inform all presidents as best they can in apolitical ways, whatever the receptivity of presidents to intelligence or the accuracy of their complaints about intelligence.
Insightful intelligence officers such as the CIA's Martin Petersen knew that intelligence had to perform well constantly to maintain presidential confidence and that errors in judgment and lapses in integrity had severely negative, long-term consequences.
Among the worst ways, Morell admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that he and former CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos connived in October 2020 with the Joe Biden campaign in the person of Antony Blinken to debunk an accurate New York Post story that Hunter Biden's laptop computer, abandoned at a repair shop, contained information suggesting that he and Joe Biden may have corruptly sold influence abroad. Morell and Polymeropoulos wrote a prospective open letter suggesting that the laptop's contents, which the FBI had already determined were genuine, had "All the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." Fifty-one former intelligence officers signed the letter.
National Intelligence University faculty incongruously argued in 2021 that Hollywood fables were to blame in part for growing public distrust of intelligence and that intelligence should better tout its value.
In another election year, citizens should remember that intelligence activism of any sort by current or former intelligence officers reflects gross violations of longstanding, effective norms that intelligence people well understand.
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