A Matter of Trust:
The US Intelligence Community and Us
- The United States is Canada’s most important intelligence partner. But the current US administration’s apparent determination to politicise its intelligence community calls into question the validity and reliability of the information we may be receiving.
- The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is seeking to take control of the flow of intelligence information to the White House.
- ODNI officials have also pressured the National Intelligence Council to “rethink” analysis that undermined the administration’s “probable cause” for invoking the Enemy Aliens Act to deport US residents for imprisonment in El Salvador.
- This appears to be part of a pattern of manipulating intelligence and evidentiary information to achieve political goals.
Politicisation
Can we trust our American intelligence partners? Recent budget and personnel cuts to the US intelligence community (documented in previous Canadian Intelligence Briefs) raise questions about its capacity to function properly. They also cast doubt on its role in intelligence-sharing agreements, like the Five Eyes Alliance, that include Canada.
The real question here may not be about US IC functionality. A seemingly deliberate process of politicisation calls into question both the validity of American intelligence information and the reliability of the agencies producing it.
Open Channel to the White House: The President’s Daily Brief
At the heart of the relationship between the US intelligence community and the White House is the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which comprises both a face-to-face briefing on critical intelligence matters and a comprehensive briefing book. While the briefing is delivered by officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), its contents, along with the briefing book, is prepared by senior CIA analysts whose job it is to write and prepare the PDB based on current, multi-source intelligence information.
Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, announced that assembly and production of the PDB would be moving from CIA to ODNI. This is a massive undertaking, as the infrastructure and expertise required to prepare the PDB will have to be recreated at ODNI. CIA staff assigned to the Brief have reportedly sought re-assignment rather than moving to ODNI.
There are a couple of possible explanations for relocating PDB production. One is that the President has signalled that ODNI might be a candidate for closure. ODNI was stood up in the aftermath of 9/11 to improve coordination and cooperation across the sprawling American intelligence community. It is not an “operational” intelligence agency and there have been questions over the years around whether it has outlived its usefulness. But the PDB is the President’s “eyes and ears” on the world. So, the relocation of the PDB may be a strategic move by Gabbard to prove the relevance of her office by taking control of the flow of IC information to the White House.
A President and His Intelligence Community
Uprooting the Deep State
This hypothesis seemed to be supported when DNI Gabbard announced that the National Intelligence Council (NIC), like the PDB, would be relocating from CIA to ODNI. NIC is a sort of “senior” analytical service / think tank that uses information from across and beyond the intelligence community to produce estimates of global trends. DNI Gabbard also dismissed two senior NIC officials, acting chair Michael Collins, and his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, both characterized as “deep state holdovers…trying to sabotage President Trump’s agenda.”
ODNI has been at some pains to characterize both the relocation of NIC, and the dismissal of Collins and Langan-Riekhof, as a sort of ideological housecleaning. But one of the precipitating factors appears to have been the President’s March 2025 invocation of the by now infamous 1789 Enemy Aliens Act to deport members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TDA) street gang to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. The rationale used was that TDA was waging “irregular warfare” against the United States under the specific direction of the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela.
The (Mis)Uses of Intelligence
About a month before the deportations occurred, an NIC estimate concluded that there was no link between TDA and the Maduro regime. As this specifically contradicted the White House rationale, DNI Gabbard’s Chief of Staff, Joe Kent, pressured Collins and the NIC to “rethink” its estimate and to encourage the analysts “to do some rewriting” so that it would “reflect common sense” and, perhaps just as importantly, not “be used against the DNI or POTUS.” Shortly afterwards, the administration produced evidence of one deportee’s gang membership in the form of what appeared to be a doctored photograph of his knuckle tattoos.
Intelligence agencies and their executives, officers and analysts struggle all the time with the problem of ambient political expectation. Astute intelligence officers usually have a pretty good sense of what the client is hoping for when they are tasked with an assessment or an estimate. Good intelligence officers don’t let it influence their thinking, or their judgement. But when a government decides upon a course of action and then rationalizes that decision with flawed or manipulated intelligence analysis, it’s called “situating the estimate.” An intelligence officer who uses selective analysis, either to address a client’s perceived needs or to push the client towards specific action, is also “situating the estimate,” albeit from the other direction. Either way, knowingly “situating the estimate” is not just flawed intelligence tradecraft, it is unethical.
The Question of Credibility
This is not the first time that the reliability and the validity of American intelligence information has come under scrutiny. In the aftermath of 9/11, CIA used what was euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation” to extract intelligence information from suspected al Qaeda detainees. Not only did this serve to accelerate jihadist recruiting, key US allies, including Canada, began to question all shared US intelligence, citing the uncertainty of its provenance. And in the leadup to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, CIA relied on information from a single, unreliable source – codenamed “Curveball” – to conclude that the presence of WMD in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” “Curveball subsequently recanted, admitting that he had fabricated everything.
Both “enhanced interrogation” and the Iraq “slam dunk” severely damaged the credibility of American intelligence information and the agencies involved in collecting and analyzing it. But both incidents were confined to a couple of agencies and neither seemed to be part of a larger strategy to undermine the community as a whole.
Why We Care
If the US administration persists in what seems to be a concerted effort to bring its intelligence community to heel through overt politicisation, Canada, along with its intelligence community, must itself some hard questions about its closest ally. How do we respond to an intelligence partner that is using manipulated intelligence information to defy the courts, to deny due process, and to send legal residents (and, eventually, even citizens, if the President makes good on his threats) of the United States to be incarcerated in places like El Salvador? More importantly, what are the moral implications of a remaining in intelligence-sharing relationship, even one as durable as the Five Eyes Alliance, in which one partner’s share is knowingly tainted?
This assessment is based on information current as of 1200 hrs., May 28, 2025