Tearing Apart The Intelligence Community Is The Easy Part - It's The Rebuilding It That Will Be The Challenge

DNI Tulsi Gabbard just announced a major reduction in the size of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). It’s a good start. The ODNI was never supposed to become the bloated, inefficient bureaucracy into which it evolved. Sizeable as the reduction is, though, that’s all it is - a good start. There is much more work to be done, and it is not all just about cutting the number of personnel.

As DNI Gabbard herself has noted repeatedly, the reform of the Intelligence Community (IC) is not just about numbers and size. It is about focus, the composition of the workforce, and restoring efficiency and effectiveness. What we have now is not just too big. It is incapable of getting the job done.

Earlier this week, DNI Tulsi Gabbard pulled the security clearances of 37 individuals involved with the Russiagate hoax and efforts to stage what amounts to the first coup in American history. None of these individuals is currently in federal service, but an examination of their records and the positions they held says something very disturbing about the condition of our national security apparatus in general and the IC in particular.

Take a look at just some of the 37 individuals in question:

Andrew Cedar – Andrew graduated from Yale in 2006. In 2008, he was named as part of Barack Obama’s transition team. By 2009, Andrew, who was 25, was holding the position of Senior Director for Global Engagement at the National Security Council at the White House, where he was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy and programs related to “public diplomacy, international broadcasting, civil society engagement, entrepreneurship, and the intersection of technology and foreign policy.” Having effectively never held a real full-time job before, Andrew was now sitting in the White House in the NSC and directing American foreign policy.

Maher Bitar – Maher is an anti-Israeli Palestinian activist associated with groups that support Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Despite that, Maher held senior positions at the National Security Council under both Obama and Biden. In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed Maher as senior director of intelligence on the National Security Council (NSC). In 2024, he became the Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Intelligence and Defense Policy. This guy, who was effectively part of the political wing of Hamas, was at the center of all American intelligence activities and privy to the most sensitive operations underway worldwide.

Dilpreet Sidhu – Dilpreet graduated from college in 2009. Under Joe Biden, she held a variety of positions, including Special Assistant to the President, Deputy Chief of Staff, and Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, managing and steering the President’s primary advisory and coordination body on national security and foreign policy. Before being placed in the White House, Dilpreet worked for a total of four years at the State Department. Dilpreet studied English literature in college.

Samantha Vinograd – Samantha was born in 1983. In 2009, at the ripe old age of 26, she joined the Obama administration and was assigned to the National Security Council. She served as director for Iraq, director for international economics, and as senior advisor to National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon. Under Biden, she became the assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security in February 2021.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Our national security apparatus is filled with individuals who have never actually done anything other than work on political campaigns, espouse the right political beliefs, and sit in offices in Washington attending meetings, writing briefing papers, and preparing PowerPoint presentations.

Step back for a moment and take a look at the older, more senior members of the cabal that tried to destroy President Trump, and you will see the same phenomenon at work. There are precious few individuals who have run operations or made their living mastering the hard trade of crafting sound, finished intelligence reports. Overwhelmingly, what you are looking at are government bureaucrats, political hacks, and functionaries.

Exhibit A in all this probably should be our former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who, before she was put in charge of the world’s largest intelligence apparatus, was the owner of an independent bookstore in Baltimore. There, she specialized in readings of erotic literature for bored young urban professionals.

It’s not just about specific individuals, however. Much of the problem is structural. Take a look at the CIA. This organization exists to recruit sources, produce intelligence, and conduct covert action at the direction of the President. The component that does all that is the Directorate of Operations (DO). Logically, then, this should be a DO-centric organization. It should be led by DO officers, and every other piece of the organization should be a supporting arm.

Not anymore. Brennan and his devotees changed all that. The Director of Operations, who used to “fight the ship” and run ops worldwide, has been stripped of much of his power. The senior people at CIA are now largely administrative types who have rarely left Washington and who have no idea what “mission accomplishment” means. They exist to attend meetings, move memos, and service the “self-licking ice cream cone” that Headquarters has become.

Brennan created a whole host of mission centers to replace what had been DO divisions focused on operations. In these mission centers, operational personnel, analysts, and all sorts of other folks with no precise skill set are mashed together in “blended” organizations that are often run by individuals with no operational background or training. Worse yet, these mission centers, which theoretically run ops worldwide, do not really answer to the Director of Operations. They answer to the Chief Operating Officer (COO), who is never a DO officer and knows little or nothing about recruiting sources or running ops.

The result is predictable. We generate a lot of process and spend a lot of time on DEI and other frivolous pursuits. We recruit precious few sources, and most of the intelligence that is produced is on a par with what you can glean from reading open-source material on the Internet.

To fix all this, we need to do a lot more than just fire people. To start with, we need to fire the right people and retain those who actually do productive work. Then we need to erase from the org chart all those components that do things that are best irrelevant and all too often counter-productive. We need a laser focus on mission accomplishment and the kind of simple, flat, nimble apparatus that can make that happen.

Yes, cutting a big chunk of the ODNI is a good start, but let’s keep this in mind. Tearing the IC apart is relatively easy. It is the rebuilding of it that will be the real challenge.