Mike Pompeo Is Donald Trump's De Facto Intelligence Czar
By James Risen, The Intercept
30 July 19
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is still heavily influencing the U.S.
intelligence community, more than a year after he left the CIA for the State
Department, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
Pompeo, who was Donald Trump's first CIA director, is now serving as a key
intermediary between Trump and the U.S. intelligence community, the
officials say, a very unusual role for the secretary of state, who is
supposed to be a customer of the intelligence community, not its master.
The intermediary role Pompeo has largely usurped is supposed to be filled by
the CIA director and the director of national intelligence, a post created
after 9/11 and designed to coordinate the work of all of the nation's
intelligence agencies. But CIA Director Gina Haspel seems to have accepted
the fact that Pompeo continues to help set the agenda on intelligence in the
Trump administration from the State Department, the officials say. And after
months of rumors that Dan Coats, Trump's longtime director of national
intelligence and nominal head of the U.S. intelligence community, would soon
be replaced, Trump announced Sunday that Coats will step down on August 15.
The president said he would name John Ratcliffe, a pro-Trump, Republican
representative from Texas, to take Coats's job. Ratcliffe, one of Trump's
most ardent defenders during special counsel Robert Mueller's appearance
before the House Judiciary Committee last week, will likely be far less
independent of the Trump White House than Coats was.
Meanwhile, Pompeo has emerged as the administration's de facto intelligence
czar. Although some officials say that both Haspel and Coats have been
present when Trump receives his intelligence briefings and so have had
regular, direct access to the president, Pompeo has gained Trump's trust in
a way they haven't.
Spokespeople for the CIA, the State Department, and the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
Haspel, whose ties to the CIA's torture program made her anathema to
Democrats, has been in an unfavorable political position since she became
CIA director. She was chief of base at a secret CIA black-site prison in
Thailand in 2002, when a detainee was subjected to waterboarding and other
torture tactics. In 2005, when she was chief of staff for Jose Rodriguez,
then chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Haspel drafted an order for
Rodriguez to destroy videotapes of CIA interrogations.
During Haspel's 2018 confirmation hearings, Sen. Kamala Harris asked her
whether, in hindsight, she believed that the CIA's post-9/11 torture program
had been "immoral." Haspel refused to give a straight answer to the
California Democrat, who is now running for president. Haspel briefly
considered withdrawing her nomination in the face of the Democratic
resistance, before finally winning a narrow confirmation vote in the Senate.
Haspel skated by, but her lack of bipartisan support on Capitol Hill put her
deeply in Trump's debt. She has little room to maneuver to maintain her
independence from Trump, or even from Pompeo. The agency's independence and
integrity have been threatened as a result.
One of the first signs that Haspel would not be a fully independent CIA
director came in the months just after her May 2018 confirmation. Insiders
say that Pompeo was able to reassure Trump that he could keep an eye on the
CIA while at State. At the same time, the White House considered imposing
its own choice for deputy director at the CIA, a move that would have
virtually eliminated Haspel's ability to keep the agency free of the White
House's gravitational pull. After what some in the intelligence community
saw as a rather unseemly delay, Haspel was finally able to make her own
selection, but she chose someone who was sure to be considered harmless by
the White House. Vaughn Bishop, 72, one of Haspel's old agency friends from
her time dealing with Africa, came out of retirement to take the post.
Since then, Haspel has been most notable for her absence from high-profile
appearances expected of a CIA director, while Pompeo has sometimes taken the
lead in dealing with Congress on intelligence-related matters in her stead.
Last November, for instance, Pompeo led an administration briefing for the
Senate on Saudi Arabia and refused to answer reporters' questions about why
Haspel did not make an appearance.
At the time, the most sensitive issue in the U.S.-Saudi relationship was the
murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, specifically whether the CIA had
evidence of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's complicity in the
killing. Not long before the November hearing, the press reported that the
CIA had determined that the Saudi crown prince, known as MBS, had ordered
Khashoggi's murder, so senators from both parties wanted to hear from the
CIA director.
Instead, Pompeo merely told journalists that there was "no direct reporting"
that linked MBS to the order to kill Khashoggi.
It seemed clear that Trump didn't want Haspel to share with Congress the
CIA's evidence linking MBS to the murder because the president wanted to
continue working with MBS and the Saudis without interference.
Sen. Dick Durbin said after the briefing that the lawmakers were told that
Haspel didn't show at "the direction of the White House," adding that he
couldn't remember a similar briefing on a sensitive matter "where we have
been denied access to the intelligence agencies of the United States."
More recently, Pompeo has been the bearer of bad news from Trump to Haspel.
Pompeo has relayed to Haspel that Trump has been unhappy with some of the
agency's Iran-related intelligence, according to former intelligence
officials. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment.
***
Pompeo's outsized role is yet another sign that the former tea party
congressperson from Kansas is one of the only high-profile officials in the
U.S. national security apparatus who has cracked the code on how to flourish
under Trump.
Of course, that's a dubious distinction, given that it means Pompeo has
learned how to properly suck up to a racist, misogynist, would-be autocrat
who gained power with the illicit help of Russian intelligence. It also
means that Pompeo has learned how to turn a blind eye to the fact that Trump
has bullied the CIA ever since he took office and constantly downplayed the
intelligence community's assessment that the Russians intervened in the 2016
election to help him win.
In fact, one of the secrets to Pompeo's success is that he has become
Trump's willing partner in the politicization of intelligence.
Before joining the administration, Pompeo had plenty of practice in
leveraging national security policy for partisan political gain. While in
Congress, he belonged to the Republican-led committee that sought to use the
2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi as a cudgel with
which to beat Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state when the attack
occurred.
While he was CIA director, Pompeo frequently enabled Trump's attacks on the
intelligence community and the Trump-Russia case. In 2017, he said publicly
that the intelligence community had concluded that Russian intervention in
2016 did not affect the election's outcome, a false statement that the CIA's
spokesperson had to publicly deny. (The U.S. intelligence community did not
issue an assessment on whether the Russian intervention affected the outcome
of the election.) Pompeo also held a private meeting with a former
intelligence official who had become an advocate for the disputed theory
that the theft of the Democratic National Committee's emails during the
campaign was an inside job, rather than a hack by Russian intelligence.
Pompeo took the meeting at the urging of Trump.
As director, Pompeo also reportedly grilled agency officers involved in the
intelligence community's assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016
election to help Trump win and required the agency's counterintelligence
center, which was involved in the Russia investigation, to report directly
to him.
As a result, Trump has enthused about Pompeo in a way that he rarely has
about any other top official in his administration. "We're always on the
same wavelength," Trump said last year when he named Pompeo secretary of
state.
By contrast, almost everyone else who held a senior national security job at
the start of the Trump administration is now gone. The firings,
resignations, and other forms of defenestration have led to the departures
of one or more occupants of the posts of defense secretary, national
security adviser, attorney general, FBI director, secretary of state, White
House chief of staff, secretary of Homeland Security, and director of the
Secret Service. The national security apparatus is bereft of leadership, as
it gets more difficult for Trump to attract talent. The Pentagon has been
virtually rudderless since December, when Defense Secretary James Mattis
resigned in protest over Trump's policies on Syria. He is finally being
replaced by Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist.
Pompeo has taken advantage of the power vacuum.
***
Coats never bonded with Trump as Pompeo has. A former Republican senator
from Indiana, Coats has repeatedly irritated the president by doing what
Pompeo seemed reluctant to do: forcefully and publicly defend the
intelligence community's assessment that Russia intervened in the election
to help Trump win.
Coats also stood by the intelligence community's assessment that Iran was
abiding by its nuclear agreement with the West - at least until Trump
withdrew the United States from the deal. Intelligence officials say that
this may have also led to friction with Trump and Pompeo.
There have been rumors for months that Coats was about to be fired, but
Coats's strong ties to Senate Republicans, as well as Vice President Mike
Pence, the former governor of Indiana, protected him until now. Trump seems
to have waited to move against Coats until after Mueller's report was issued
and the special counsel had testified before Congress.
Now, Trump will rely ever more heavily on Pompeo as the dominant figure in
his administration on national security and intelligence.
Haspel may not last long at the CIA either. But the fact that both she and
Coats have survived this long speaks to an oddity of the Trump
administration: The U.S. intelligence community that Trump and his far-right
supporters have railed against as the supposed bastion of "the deep state"
had for two years avoided the kind of high-level personnel purge that is
Trump's trademark. Instead, Trump found that Mike Pompeo was the right man
to keep it on a leash.
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