What does one do when the country’s intelligence leadership is acting, well, not very intelligently? That is the inescapable question prompted by last week’s reports that a senior representative of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in an official briefing that Russia is interfering in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and hopes to see President Donald Trump re-elected. 

According to the New York Times account, Trump learned of this briefing only after the fact. And if press reports are accurate, the briefer cited no direct evidence of meddling on Trump’s behalf or of Russia’s broader intentions regarding U.S. presidential elections. Rather, the case was apparently based on inferences from such inherently ambiguous evidence as Russian hacking of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, supposedly done to help Trump dig up dirt on Hunter Biden. Such inferences were evidently reinforced by an assessment, lacking in analytical merit but redolent with politics, that the Kremlin would somehow naturally favor Trump over other 2020 presidential candidates.

Republican HPSCI members reportedly erupted in response. They disputed the plausibility of an assessment that Russia would prefer a president who has built up the U.S. military, proved willing to use force in the Middle East, greatly stiffened sanctions on Moscow, fought Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, and toughened other policies affecting Russia. Why would Russians not favor Democrats who would cut the U.S. defense budget, balk at using military force, and impose a ban on fracking that would drive up global oil and gas prices and benefit Russia’s energy export earnings? Trump, in turn, called the allegation of Russian support a “hoax.” 

Should Intelligence Assessments Be Taken with a Grain of Salt? 

Should intelligence overseers in Congress, the White House, and media subject the judgments of professional analysts to tough scrutiny? History says yes. Formulating intelligence assessments is an inherently uncertain and difficult business. Even establishing basic facts is a challenge when dealing with adversaries, who attempt to shroud their capabilities in secrecy. Intelligence assessments of the Soviet nuclear forces buildup, for example, were plagued by both over- and under-estimations, leading first to erroneous American concerns about a “missile gap” under Khrushchev, and later to surprise when the Soviets tried to put missiles in Cuba and then pushed well past nuclear parity in the 1970s. 

In fact, one of the key reasons for the consistent underestimations of the Soviet nuclear force posture circa 1970s–1980s, was not a failure of the U.S. technical collection capabilities, but the CIA’s failure to accept that Moscow’s key strategic goal was to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. Ironically, Moscow was not trying to hide its thinking on this issue, as numerous Soviet military officials laid out their nuclear war-fighting ethos in published books and articles. However, U.S. intelligence analysts discounted this evidence, believing that Moscow, whatever it might have been publicly saying and doing, somehow subscribed to a mutually assured destruction theory as the best way to both maximize deterrence and minimize the risks of nuclear war.

By contrast, in earlier years, the CIA greatly overestimated the then-existing Soviet nuclear capabilities. By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union was locked in a strategic arms competition with the United States, and it was losing badly. America enjoyed a considerable and growing advantage in both long- and intermediate-range nuclear forces. Yet, having embarked on an ambitious foreign policy designed to test American resolve, and possibly drive U.S. forces out of Berlin, Khrushchev was not prepared to curtail his aspirations.

To enhance his military capabilities vis-à-vis the United States, he could have deployed a number of costly, inaccurate and vulnerable first-generation ICBMs. Alternatively, he could have chosen to invest the USSR's large, but not unlimited, resources in the development of more advanced land-based missiles (with deployment many years in the future) and other, more reliable, strategic delivery systems that might tip the nuclear balance in his favor.

Sensibly enough, he chose the latter course. However, to maintain the highest quality deterrence against the West and, even more to the point, to support the enhanced Soviet prestige necessary for an ambitious foreign policy, Khrushchev also engaged in an elaborate deception designed to make the West believe that Moscow had already fielded strategically meaningful numbers of advanced ICBMs. The Soviet leader's public statements were supported by a carefully tailored intelligence disinformation campaign that not only tried to hide Moscow’s actual capabilities but also masked Soviet insecurities by suggesting Khrushchev wanted to challenge directly the United States in building up nuclear forces. 

From Khrushchev's perspective, the plan worked like a charm, at least temporarily. The alleged "missile gap" between the United States and the USSR was seized upon by a young Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, to discredit the Eisenhower Administration and to defeat then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. Not only did the Soviet Union avoid wasting billions of rubles, but Khrushchev concluded that he could outmaneuver the inexperienced Kennedy. 

To be sure, Moscow’s gambit ultimately failed, as the U.S. eventually discovered that Moscow was not “cranking out missiles like sausages,” in Khrushchev’s oft-used expression, and blocked the Soviets from installing medium and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. This did not, however, negate the fact that for a considerable period of time U.S. intelligence estimates about Soviet capabilities were profoundly wrong.

Divining Intentions Is Extra Hard

Discerning adversary capabilities is difficult enough, particularly when dealing with closed societies with strict government controls on information. But divining an adversary’s intentions is an even more challenging task. In part, this is because capabilities, even when ascertained with the utmost precision, often lend themselves to multiple explanations of intent. Americans accurately recognized that Japan would have enormous disadvantages in an extended war with the United States, but they did not imagine that Tokyo might nonetheless attempt a knock-out blow of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Israelis correctly understood that Egypt could not hope to defeat their forces on the battlefield, but they failed to consider that Sadat might still see some advantage in launching a surprise offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Moreover, decisions made by heads of state can often surprise even their closest aides. Intelligence reporting can accurately convey information from highly-placed foreign officials, yet still miss the mark when it comes to portraying foreign intentions. This problem can arise either because the officials just do not know enough about the intentions of their superiors, or because their superiors changed their minds, or simply because their superiors chose to lie to them. Saddam Hussein, for example, deceived his own generals in leading them to believe that, despite the international sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, Iraq retained operational weapons of mass destruction

The difficulty in grasping intentions is particularly acute when it comes to foreign influence operations. Often, media operations are aimed at little more than reinforcing a state’s diplomatic messaging. The BBC and Voice of America have long broadcast content into countries dominated by state-controlled media, hoping to provide audiences with alternative perspectives on events. But sometimes media campaigns are not intended to persuade, but to deceive and even subvert—to tear the social and political fabric of their target audiences and undermine government authority.

The objectives of such subversion, however, can be agonizingly difficult to ascertain with much confidence. Sometimes the goal of subversion can be to topple a foreign authority—to so damage the operations of a regime so that it can no longer function effectively and crumbles from within. In other instances, the aim is less ambitious and more pragmatic—to force the target leadership to do things it would rather not do, such as refrain from behavior perceived as threatening. And when creating controversial online content also happens to be the most effective way to attract views, generate clicks, and bolster advertising revenues, separating subversive intent from other more mundane motivations in digital media campaigns becomes even more challenging.

More generally, given the past record of intelligence failures—particularly when it came to the analysis of intentions of various hostile powers, and the fact that there are still ongoing debates about such key Cold War episodes as the real Soviet motivations that drove a series of Berlin crises, and the Cuban Missile Crisis—the notion that the judgments of the Intelligence Community about Russian intentions virtually delivered in real-time today should be accepted without skepticism is nothing short of risible.

What Does Moscow Want?

In view of such inherent challenges, what can we say about the renewed controversy over Russian electoral meddling? There is no doubt that Russians are continuing to post-digital news and social media content aimed at American audiences. It is also clear that Russian hackers have targeted American electoral databases and vote-counting systems in the past. What is less clear are the motivations that lie behind this activity.

That it is aimed at securing the victory or defeat of any particular candidate or party is an unproven hypothesis at best. The Kremlin cannot fail to realize that any significant pro-Trump meddling would be exposed and would hurt rather than help his electoral prospects. This being the case, one might plausibly argue that the real reason Moscow might unveil some footprint of a pro-Trump campaign is because it would expect this to be discovered and actually harm Trump. In fact, such a scenario illustrates perfectly how difficult it is to ascertain Putin’s intentions, even if one had perfect evidence of what Moscow was actually doing in U.S. elections.

Moreover, the Russians almost certainly recognize that Trump has a good chance of winning reelection with no boost from them whatsoever. Likewise, it is not at all obvious how Moscow could play a meaningful role in swinging the elections either for or against Trump; activities of Russian trolls during the 2016 election cycle were small in scope, clumsy in execution, and of little discernible electoral consequence. Since these facts are well known to the Kremlin, even if it were hoping for a Trump victory, why would it believe that he needs Russian assistance, or that best way to aid him would be through election interference? The Russians may be guilty of many things, but stupidity is not one of them. 

It may well be true, as is often asserted, that Moscow hopes generally to “sow chaos” in American society and undermine confidence in democratic practices, although that case appears to be based more on intuition than dispositive evidence.  And the ultimate goals of such subversion are in any event debatable.  It is also possible that Russia may have targeted voting machinery as part of a broader effort to hold U.S. critical infrastructure at risk in the event of a conflict.

Moreover, its social media postings may simply be a way for Moscow to give Americans a perceived dose of their own medicine, to show that the United States, too, is vulnerable to outside meddling and should reconsider its evangelical approach to democratization abroad.  These are only a few of the potential motivations driving Russian behavior.

Laddling Out Political Kryptonite

All of this argues for considerable caution when it comes to assessing  Russian actions and intentions toward the 2020 elections. There is much that we do not know about the content of the HPSCI briefing or the classified intelligence reporting that underlies the Intelligence Community’s judgments. But what we do know suggests that the IC has not demonstrated sufficient analytic caution or political acumen in addressing this important subject.

Intelligence leaders are certainly aware that the topic of Russian electoral interference has convulsed our politics for nearly four years. Knowing that, they should have prepared for the briefing by donning both belts and suspenders, anticipating all the ways their points could be perceived through a partisan lens and further undermine the IC’s already shaky reputation for objectivity. They should have been loath to address the explosive topic of what electoral preferences Moscow may or may not have absent rock-solid intelligence reporting, supported by a thoroughly vetted analysis.  

Having just closed a lamentable chapter in our country’s history in which some IC leaders trumpeted false charges that Trump had colluded with Moscow to steal the presidency, whilst hinting that they harbored classified reporting that proved their case, the current leaders should not have reopened the story absent strong evidence and unassailable logic. At a minimum, they should have ensured that they did not blindside the president and stoke suspicions that they regard him more as an opponent than as what they once called their “First Customer.”

Their failure to exhibit such due diligence has only intensified the broader political warfare surrounding the White House and IC. It is clear that anti-Trump forces have embraced the intelligence cadre as part of what they call “the resistance.” They have applauded reports that a CIA analyst first blew a whistle on the president’s supposed solicitation of Ukrainian interference in the 2020 presidential election, and they have turned a blind eye to indications that the IC illegitimately spied on the Trump campaign and transition team.

Trump’s unprecedented series of anti-IC tweets and critical public remarks suggest that he has long seen intelligence professionals in much the same way, as a source of opposition not just to his policies but to him personally. It should surprise no one under these circumstances that he would turn to a political loyalist to lead the ODNI. For Trump, Richard Grenell’s lack of intelligence experience is a feature, not a bug.

The winner in this deepening struggle between the White House and the intelligence world is not yet clear. But the loser is already evident: American national security. Only a generation ago, partisanship stopped metaphorically at water’s edge. Now it gets amplified and distorted as foreign policy becomes increasingly hostage to domestic politics, and intelligence becomes an active player in advocating policies and shaping domestic perceptions. Fixing this regrettable situation is something that is in everyone’s vital interest. Getting our intelligence professionals out of the game of influencing American electoral politics is a good place to start.

David B. Rivkin, Jr., is a constitutional lawyer who has served in the Justice and Energy Departments and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.  He has also spent a number of years working for the Defense Department as a Soviet defense analyst, focusing on Soviet nuclear weapons policy and force posture. 

George S. Beebe is Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for the National Interest, former head of Russia analysis at the Central Intelligence Agency, and author of The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe.  

Image: Reuters