Every generation seems to require its own intelligence debacle before Washington remembers why intelligence counts.
The Church and Pike Committee investigations of the 1970s followed revelations of domestic spying, covert abuses, and a culture of secrecy that had escaped meaningful democratic oversight. The Iraq War produced a different reckoning after intelligence about weapons of mass destruction proved disastrously wrong. The Snowden disclosures triggered yet another debate over surveillance, privacy, and accountability.
Each crisis produced reforms. Some endured. Some did not. But a cautionary thread ran through them all: when intelligence is distorted, ignored, politicized, or manipulated, the consequences can be profound.
That is why intelligence reform should be among the first orders of business if the midterm elections deliver Congress to Democratic control.
The immediate catalyst is Iran. But the deeper problem is Donald Trump.
No modern president has displayed greater contempt for the intelligence process itself.
The warning signs appeared long before the Iran war. During his first presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly displayed a curious affinity for Moscow and an equally curious disregard for the concerns of America’s intelligence professionals.
He hired Paul Manafort as campaign chairman despite Manafort’s long history of advancing pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. Manafort’s own deputy, Konstantin Kilimnik, would later be identified by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee as a Russian intelligence operative who posed a counterintelligence threat.
Then came Trump 1.0 – and Russia-gate.
Whether the MAGA president viewed the investigations as legitimate or politically motivated, he emerged convinced that America’s intelligence agencies were populated by enemies determined to destroy him. That resentment hardened into something more dangerous: a willingness to seek validation elsewhere.
That tendency reached its most notorious expression in Helsinki in 2018 when Trump publicly sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the unanimous assessment of America’s own intelligence agencies regarding Russian election interference.
For many presidents, such a moment would have been an aberration.
For Trump it catalyzed a governing principle: If intelligence professionals produced conclusions he disliked, he would simply look elsewhere.
The same impulse appears to have shaped his approach to Iran.
Reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times has revealed that key deliberations leading to Operation Epic Fury were conducted within a remarkably small circle. The meetings reportedly included Israeli officials presenting their case directly to Trump.
Yet many of the normal mechanisms designed to ensure broad intelligence review appear to have been either marginalized or bypassed.
Haberman and Swan reported that Trump’s decision was driven less by a consensus intelligence assessment than by instinct and the confidence of a small group of advisers who viewed his instincts as virtually infallible.
Equally troubling were subsequent reports suggesting that only after crucial decisions were made did senior American officials begin highlighting reservations within parts of the U.S. intelligence community about key assumptions underlying the campaign.
Those concerns became even more significant as evidence accumulated that expectations of rapid regime destabilization in Tehran had been badly overstated.
Congress should want to know how that happened.
The central issue is not whether Israeli intelligence is competent. Much of it is.
The issue is whether American intelligence was given a fair hearing before the United States committed itself to military action.
All allies possess interests. Israel’s interests are not identical to America’s any more than Britain’s, France’s, or Germany’s are identical to America’s. Foreign intelligence services naturally analyze threats through the lens of their own strategic objectives. The responsibility of an American president is not to adopt those assessments wholesale but to subject them to rigorous scrutiny by American analysts whose sole obligation is to American interests.
That process appears to have broken down.
Ironically, now that hostilities are cooling, the U.S. intelligence community may have begun recovering some of its lost relevance. Recent reporting by Axios indicates that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other senior officials have warned Trump that intelligence collected by multiple American agencies raises serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to honor the commitments now enshrined in the joint Memorandum of Understanding.
In other words, American intelligence is once again delivering unwelcome truths to policymakers.
That is its core mission.
It is not to make presidents feel comfortable. It is not to justify policy. It is not to provide talking points.
It is to discover facts that powerful people would often prefer not to confront.
Trump has spent years devaluing precisely that mission.
His purging of intelligence agencies, his preference for loyalists over professionals, his appointment of individuals manifestly unqualified for senior intelligence positions, his repeated attacks on unwanted or inconvenient intelligence assessments, and his willingness to substitute personal instinct for institutional analysis have all weakened the culture of truth-seeking upon which sound policy depends.
That contempt has recently been on display once again as he searches for new Director of National Intelligence to replace the underqualified Tulsi Gabbard.
His initial choice, housing regulator Bill Pulte, was widely criticized for his own appalling lack of relevant experience. Under pressure Trump appeared to retreat. Then, almost as quickly, he restored the nomination as part of a bizarre scheme to leverage Congressional support for a pro-MAGA voter identification law.
The entire episode suggests that the president regards the intelligence community less as a source of truth than as one more bargaining chip in his own deranged domestic agenda.
In the meantime, he is stonewalling renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), one of our most important, and controversial, intelligence weapons, until he gets his way on the election proposal.
If that’s not sick, I don’t know what is.
As someone who long served as a CIA officer in Vietnam, I learned in the most painful way imaginable what happens when presidential arrogance, overreach and delusional thinking push intelligence aside.
The result was a policy catastrophe that betrayed countless Vietnamese who had come to matter to me as much as close family. On the final day of the war, I watched as desperate civilians swarmed the embassy walls and American officials confronted realities that our best intelligence sources had long warned about.
Those scenes never left me.
That is why I view Trump’s treatment of intelligence with such alarm.
That is why I welcomed the Church and Pike investigations after the fall of Saigon. They reminded the country that intelligence agencies, presidents, and policymakers alike must answer to democratic institutions.
Those investigations helped produce promising reforms. Among them: strengthened Congressional scrutiny, tighter reporting requirements for covert action, enhanced inspector-general functions, greater transparency, legal restrictions on intelligence abuses, and eventually the modern architecture of intelligence accountability.
Above all, they taught us that secret power requires visible oversight.
The Afghanistan experience reinforced the same lesson decades later.
The inspectors-general who reviewed the war repeatedly identified problems that many policymakers preferred to ignore. Their reports did not prevent failure. But they created a public record. They established accountability. They ensured that future officials could not honestly claim that nobody saw the warning signs.
That was a huge step in the right direction.
Democracy requires a soundtrack of accountability running beneath policy decisions.
Today much of that accountability structure lies in ruins thanks to Trump.
Inspectors-general have been marginalized or removed. Whistleblowers face increasing risks. The Freedom of Information Act has become slower, weaker, and easier for agencies to evade. Oversight mechanisms that took decades to build have been steadily eroded.
Accordingly, intelligence reform should focus not simply on beefing up intelligence agencies and making them more responsive to genuine policy concerns. It should seek to restore accountability across the board.
To that end, Congress should rebuild inspectors-general offices throughout the national-security bureaucracy and create new guardrails to protect them from political retaliation.
It should expand whistleblower protections for intelligence professionals who raise concerns through authorized channels.
It should strengthen the Freedom of Information Act so that historians, journalists, watchdog groups, and citizens can examine government decision-making while it still matters.
It should require that major intelligence estimates identify where allied intelligence has materially influenced conclusions.
Significant dissenting views should automatically be shared with congressional oversight committees. Key members of the intelligence community should maintain permanent red teams charged with challenging assumptions that become politically fashionable.
Congress should also undertake a long-overdue reassessment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself.
The DNI was created after the Iraq debacle to improve coordination among intelligence agencies and prevent the kind of stove-piped analysis that helped produce the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco.
Even viewed generously, the results have been mixed. In practice the Office has often inserted another bureaucratic layer between intelligence professionals and policymakers while diffusing accountability for failure. The position was intended to strengthen intelligence. Too often it has merely complicated it.
Under Trump the Office has been further degraded by overt politicization. What was supposed to be a mechanism for reform has increasingly become an instrument through which intelligence can be manipulated, filtered, or repackaged for political purposes.
Congress should therefore examine whether the office should be fundamentally restructured, stripped of some authorities, or perhaps abolished altogether.
Wherever the solution, it should aim for fewer political intermediaries, clearer accountability, better watchdogging, and a more direct path for professional intelligence judgments to reach policymakers without partisan distortion.
Most important, Congress must reassert its constitutional role.
The purpose shouldn’t be partisan revenge.
It should be to ensure that no president—Republican or Democrat—can drag the country toward war based primarily on instinct, political grievance, or intelligence shopping.
The inscription in Langley’s foyer is not merely a biblical quotation. It is a warning:
“And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free.”
Intelligence reform is ultimately about preserving the institutions whose purpose is to discover that truth, even when presidents would prefer not to hear it.
That may be the strongest argument for intelligence reform since Vietnam.
Congress should act before the next crisis reminds us again.