The recent installation of Richard Grenell as ODNI has set off a firestorm within the intelligence bureaucracy and Congress. Democrats have decried his moves to clean up the political machinations and corruption going on within these agencies, even attempting to accuse the former Ambassador to Germany of "interfering" in the upcoming election. When Rep. Adam Schiff starts to cry foul and send angry letters, that’s a sign that the right things are happening.
"I take solace in my confidence that Mr. Trump will learn, even after the Senate confirms Mr. Ratcliffe and the president replaces still more professionals with less capable political loyalists, that gagging the intelligence community will be far more difficult than hushing the Justice Department or overriding the wisdom of our medical institutions," Douglas London, who retired from the CIA in 2018, wrote in a Monday op-ed for the New York Times.
London, whose last assignment was chief of counterterrorism for South and Southwest Asia, noted that despite Grenell "parroting the president’s politicized inaccuracies" on the coronavirus pandemic, "he has also failed at breaking the intelligence community’s determination to do its job."
To be frank, if this is how any significant number of intelligence officials think, their institutions need to be torn down at this point. This is yet another take on Chuck Schumer’s assertion that the CIA has ways of getting back at those that cross them. It’s tyrannical nonsense, proposing that unelected bureaucrats should somehow hold absolute power over the country’s decision making.
London continues by pushing the tired faux patriotism angle, which suggests that these career officials could never harbor biases, nor act on them.
In response to Grenell’s actions, we’ve seen targeted leaks, but one former official decided to speak on the record recently.