By Jonathan Landay
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for CIA director, John Ratcliffe, on Wednesday vowed not to fire or force out employees for their political views or their opinions about the incoming U.S. leader, who frequently has attacked the agency and its assessments.
Ratcliffe is all but certain to win the Republican-run Senate’s approval to lead the premier U.S. intelligence agency as the United States grapples with rivals China and Russia and the two countries’ growing ties with Iran and North Korea.
Committee members sought assurances from Ratcliffe that he would not allow politics to color CIA analyses and Democrats asked him to pledge not to terminate or force out personnel for their political views or opinions of Trump.
He said his record as director of national intelligence at the end of Trump’s first term showed that removing personnel for their views “is something that I would never do.”
“I would approach this position (CIA director) very much the same way and provide the same assurance,” he said.
Trump has had a rocky relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, over findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to sway the vote to him. Intelligence agencies reached similar assessments for the 2020 and 2024 elections.
The president-elect also has stirred worries about his handling of classified materials following the discovery after his first term of dozens of top-secret files at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
He has pledged to “clean out corrupt actors for our national security and intelligence apparatus,” prompting concerns of retaliation against personnel deemed disloyal.
Some close aides have vowed to pursue the “deep state,” a purportedly shadowy network of U.S. officials opposed to Trump.
Republican and Democratic committee members expressed concerns that intelligence analysis has been infected by politics.
Responding to questions from Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, Ratcliffe pledged to discipline any CIA employee who politicized intelligence and said he would not impose a “political litmus test” on agency personnel.
Ratcliffe served as the nation’s top spy from May 2020 until Trump left office in January 2021.
He said on Wednesday he was confident the United States can counter Russia and China, pledged to look into whether U.S. personnel afflicted by “Havana Syndrome” ailments were targeted by an adversary’s weapon and develop offensive cyber tools.
He also vowed not to approve interrogation methods not authorized by the Army Field Manual. That was a reference to the CIA’s use of harsh techniques on suspected extremists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, that many experts and lawmakers denounced as torture.
BETTER INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION
The Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Tom Cotton, urged Ratcliffe to carry out reforms, saying U.S. intelligence agencies had failed to warn of “anticipated major events or detected impending attacks.”
Those included a New Year’s Day truck ramming attack in New Orleans by an alleged Islamic State adherent that killed 14 people, the sudden fall in December of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to rebel forces and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, onslaught into Israel, said Cotton.
“This problem is especially acute at the CIA – which remains, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA needs to get back to its roots, but must overcome several challenges to do so,” he said.
Cotton charged that the agency has neglected its core mission of stealing secrets, was too bureaucratic, “politicized” intelligence to fit outgoing President Joe Biden’s “policy preferences,” and “needs to become bolder and more innovative in covert action.”
Ratcliffe was accused as director of national intelligence of playing politics with intelligence by former U.S. intelligence officials and Democrats.
They alleged that he released unverified Russian intelligence in a September 2020 letter to a senator to aid Trump’s re-election fight, which he lost to Biden.
Ratcliffe did not address the incident directly when asked about it.
“I certainly don’t think I did everything perfectly in terms of making decisions about every issue,” Ratcliffe said. “Most of the things that I’ve done…aged very well.”
He also said that part of his answer was classified.
In the letter, Ratcliffe said a Russian intelligence analysis alleged that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump, approved a plan to create “a scandal” by tying Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
The then-heads of the CIA and the National Security Agency opposed releasing the material that Ratcliffe himself noted was unverified and “may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
The material contradicted a 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment, a special prosecutor’s findings, and a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report that Russia used hacking and other means to try to sway the 2016 vote to Trump.
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay, additional reporting by Erin Banco and Katharine Jackson; Editing by Don Durfee, Deepa Babington and Alistair Bell)
