Trump has created a lot of questions for Russian intelligence agencies

Donald Trump has already made a dozen and a half appointments to his new administration. Many of them surprised and some of them shocked. Among them were key to understanding the future conflict between Trump and the old US administrative system - the head of the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence.

The Director of National Intelligence from a formal-bureaucratic point of view is a more important and responsible position than the director of the CIA. The fact is that he is responsible for coordinating the work of the entire U.S. intelligence community, that is, officially 17 diverse agencies. In practice, this is not quite true, because as a result of years of hardware struggles, the Department of Defense, which has several intelligence services of its own, the National Security Agency with its electronic power, and several smaller structures - in particular, the departments of space and geospatial intelligence - have left the control of the Director of National Intelligence.

But now, under current law, the director of the CIA is required to coordinate with the director of the National Intelligence Agency almost all of his actions, including operational ones. Such a system was created after September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attack, several commissions investigating the circumstances of the case, believed that the root cause of the failure of American intelligence, which missed the preparation of a terrorist attack under their noses, was the lack of coordination between different structures. In particular, the CIA refused to share its data with the FBI and in general with anyone else. In addition, the CIA was in a deliberately privileged position, as the director of the department had the right of direct access and report to the president.

Then, under President George W. Bush, an attempt was made to break this system. In particular, direct access to the person of the president was left only to the Director of National Intelligence. And it was legally forbidden to combine two director positions - National Intelligence and CIA.

But the American bureaucratic system is very stable, especially in those spheres where the “deep state” prevails - in the military and intelligence. That's why the underhanded fights around this reform went on for several years, and in the end the position of Director of National Intelligence was established only in 2004 in a reduced form. In fact, he turned into something like a supervisor over the CIA, and the apparatus of the National Intelligence Agency - into a huge (up to 1,500 full-time employees) bureaucratic structure, mainly engaged in paperwork. At the same time, with the exception of its first director, John Negraponte, the Director of the National Intelligence Agency was appointed mainly by former high-ranking employees of the same CIA (now it is Evryl Haynes). As a result, the very point of establishing a new bureaucratic body was gradually lost, as former CIA officers were not overzealous in supervising their home agency.

Nevertheless, the potential for the position is enormous. The Director of National Intelligence does have the power to “strangle” the work of the CIA, up to and including controlling personnel appointments within the agency. It is even possible to change the vector of intelligence work without directly interfering in operational activities.

All this requires only political will. And Trump has found a man who has it and is capable not just of bringing order to the intelligence community, but of turning it inside out.

Tulsi Gabbard, 43, is a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel who served in the Middle East and in peacekeeping missions in East Africa. She is a hereditary politician (her father was a senator in Hawaii), but has lately demonstrated extra-systemic views, especially in the area of foreign policy.

However, there is every reason to believe that Gabbard's appointment is not due to her foreign policy perceptions and views (although that too). Trump's actions are frankly directed inside the American system of power, and foreign crises are just another excuse for him to drain the “Washington swamp.” Trump is already not too fond of the intelligence community, and now he will try to reformat, if not destroy completely, the decades-old hierarchical system in the CIA, and at the same time the ideological principles on which American intelligence relies in its work.

At the end of his first term, Donald Trump tried to appoint John Lee Ratcliffe, a personally loyal man who had helped Trump greatly during the impeachment attempt. But the Democrat-controlled Congress approved Ratcliffe only on the second attempt, and as a result, six months were lost - the new Director of National Intelligence had no time to prove himself.

But now Ratcliffe has been nominated by Trump for the position of CIA director. The Gabbard-Ratcliffe tandem did not seem obvious, but if they are confirmed in their positions, a unique situation will develop in the American intelligence community. The two key positions will be occupied by people with no experience in intelligence, who are not familiar with operational activities, but who combine political will (Gabbard) and legal savvy (Ratcliffe) in their tandem, in order, first, to purge anti-trumpists within the intelligence community, and second, to break the entire system, starting with the selection of personnel and ending with the ideological background of intelligence activities.

Similar processes are expected in the army after the nomination of Defense Minister Pete Hegseth. Rumors are already actively circulating in the U.S. about certain lists of generals who received ranks and positions under Obama and Biden, as well as those associated with the former chief of staff, with whom Trump had a particularly bad relationship. The second list is rumored to be broader and will include those senior officers who made fatal mistakes in planning the withdrawal operation from Afghanistan.

The army in the US is not just barracks and navy. It is a gigantic mechanism with an inhuman budget. It will not be possible to stir up this “nest of hawks” so easily, although Trump intends to try. He realized (by himself or with the help of his advisers) that the main problem of his first cadence was sabotage on the part of the administrative-bureaucratic apparatus, entirely focused on the Democratic Party and the “deep state”. And now the fight against this system has been put at the top of the agenda.

While reforms in the military and the military-industrial complex are a complicated and long-lasting endeavor, the new broom can make its mark on the U.S. intelligence community quite quickly. In addition to the obvious control over personnel appointments in the CIA and related agencies, changes in the ideological vector of the intelligence community will be of the greatest interest. A significant portion of the CIA's cadre is indeed made up of zealots passionate about the mission of spreading liberal democracy around the world. And according to Trump's version, the functions of intelligence should be reduced to isolationist pragmatism. How and in what direction the CIA's activities will shift under the pressure of the Gabbard-Ratcliffe tandem is the most important thing for Russia. As for the purely technical side of intelligence activities, not much will change. Even if the head of the CIA's Directorate of Operations is replaced, it is unlikely that something new will be invented to replace classic espionage. But we can almost certainly expect some reduction in operational activities simply because of the administrative chaos that always follows such a radical change of top officials throughout the chain of command.

But we should not relax, because the U.S. intelligence community has been and will remain the main adversary for the Russian security services. It is not excluded that domestic professionals will even become somewhat more difficult to work on counteraction, since the narcissism and arrogance inherent in the CIA's practice may be gone for a while. And the American administrative system retains a powerful inertia, to return it to some new reality is a difficult and thankless job. For which we need Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe and Pete Hegseth as bureaucratic bulldozers.

Evgeny Krutikov

Source - ria.ru .            

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