A Letter To Senior CIA Leadership – The Problem Is Not Perception, It is Reality

This article is intended as a response to the piece published by Cipher Brief on July 16, 2025, by retired senior intelligence officer Mark Kelton entitled CIA’s Latest Existential Challenge.

I commend Mr. Kelton for having the moral courage to acknowledge, as he does, that CIA has a problem. It has lost the trust of the American people. I submit, however, that his commentary falls squarely into the category of being far too little, far too late.

Mr. Kelton acknowledges, “Of late, however, public confidence in the CIA has eroded significantly compared to previous decades. While most Americans still view the Agency as vital to national security, there are persistent and growing concerns about civil liberties, partisanship, and transparency…Given the dictates of our democratic system, that perception of political bias portends serious problems not only for CIA’s mission-effectiveness, but potentially for its very existence, if not addressed.”

Mr. Kelton even goes so far as to suggest that there may be some legitimate reasons for this “perception” and the rifts with the American people. Some individuals, he admits, out of “an abiding love for the organization they serve, or served in, helped widen those rifts.” He even goes so far as to criticize those who lent “legitimacy” to the Steele dossier and stated that the Hunter Biden laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian information operation. “Whatever personal views individual officers might hold on these and other politically contentious issues, there can be no doubt that many of our countrymen – not to mention many senior government officials - view the public statements of former CIA officers as the Agency putting its thumb on the political scale.”

And, then predictably enough, Mr. Kelton assures us that all of this is a matter of perception, and that the Agency remains on the right side of the issues. Those who think the CIA intervened in domestic American politics are flat out wrong.

“The organization has made clear this is not the case. But, as Henry Kissinger said, it is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true. The question now is what CIA and Agency officers, past and present, can do to change that perception.”

Here is the bottom line. Americans do not think that senior Agency officers, serving and retired, intervened in American domestic politics. They do not suspect that these individuals put their “thumb on the scale” as Mr. Kelton suggests. They know that these individuals knocked those scales over and rigged the game.

Consider one piece of what we now know transpired in 2016. Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, was hired by a research firm, Fusion GPS, to prepare a dossier smearing then-candidate for President Donald Trump with false accusations of collusion with Vladimir Putin. Fusion GPS was working for the law firm representing candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The money to pay Steele and Fusion GPS, as well as the lawyers involved, was coming from Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

You don’t have to be a steely-eyed clandestine operative to figure out what that means. Steele had been hired to write a hit piece to slander Donald Trump and influence the results of an American Presidential election.

What Steele produced was trash. If a walk-in to an American embassy abroad had handed over something like what Steele produced, it would have immediately been viewed as garbage and largely ignored. It might have been sent back to Headquarters for the general amusement of the desk officers, but nobody would have paid any attention to its salacious, poorly sourced accusations. It was RUMINT at its worst.

Senior CIA officers at the time were aware of all this. They knew the dossier was junk. They knew it was a political hatchet job. They should have refused to give it any credence and stood well clear of the internal political warfare it represented.

Senior CIA officers did not stand clear. To the contrary, as we now know, the very top levels of the organization, including Director Brennan himself, intervened, overrode the normal analytical process, and mandated that the dossier would be used as the basis of an assessment tying Donald Trump to Moscow and suggesting strongly that he was the chosen candidate of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps, most shockingly, virtually no one spoke up against this action or any of the other almost endless such moves that followed, all designed to influence the outcome of a Presidential election and decide for the American people who would rule.

CIA should not be within ten miles of American domestic politics. CIA officers should never shade their analysis or run their operations based on political considerations. They serve the American people. They swear an oath to the Constitution.

The men who participated in the effort to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and then to depose him broke that oath. They turned their backs on the American people. They also betrayed all of those brave, patriotic CIA officers who honorably serve all over the world every day and continue to believe in their mission and the ideals of the nation they serve.

CIA does not have a perception problem. It has a reality problem, and only by admitting what happened in 2016 can we begin to correct that problem, restore a critical national security agency to greatness, and guarantee this never happens again.