The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), founded in 1947 under President Harry Truman, has been in existence for 73 years and has dealt with foreign intelligence under 13 different presidents — the most recent being Donald Trump. In a February 10 article for Just Security, Douglas London (a retired CIA senior operations officer who left in 2018) takes a look at the state of the agency in the Trump era. And London, who now teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., laments that in the last few years, the CIA has been acting in Trump’s interests more than in the foreign intelligence interests of the United States.
Mike Pompeo, now secretary of state in the Trump Administration, served as CIA director from January 2017 to April 2018 — and London recalls that when Pompeo was in charge of the CIA, “anything that could somehow embarrass the president or make him appear weak had to be avoided.”
The former CIA operations officer explains, “Pompeo prioritized shielding Trump from news he didn’t want to hear, an approach to the job that sometimes subjugated the country’s interests to those of the president. Concerned more about his own standing with the president, Pompeo also refused to provide the CIA workforce with any words of support in the face of Trump’s repeated attacks on it — fearing such encouragement would anger Trump.” Continue reading.