The Spy Masters

Two former intelligence chiefs chart the collapse of faith in government and warn of the dangers of Trumpism.

- Massimo Calabresi

IT SOUNDED LIKE A SCANDAL. IN A SERIES OF late-May tweets, President Trump alleged that the Obama Administration had placed a spy in his 2016 campaign for political purposes. “This is bigger than Watergate!” he wrote. But “SPYGATE,” as Trump dubbed it, was not exactly what he said it was. The FBI had reportedly deployed an informant to covertly question low-level members of Trump’s circle who had been contacted by Russian operatives. The goal, according to Democratic and Republican members of Congress who have seen the intelligence, was to figure out what Moscow was up to, not to infiltrate Trump’s campaign.

To James Clapper and Michael Hayden, two long-serving, retired leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, Trump’s tirade was just the latest in a string of politically motivated attacks on America’s spies. “[Trump] is undercutting the validity of institutions on which we’re going to have to rely long after he’s left office,” says Hayden, who led the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009 and the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005. Trump “is constitutionally illiterate [and] a real test of our institutions and values, and the country’s resilience,” says Clapper, who led the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1991 to 1995 and was Director of National Intelligence from 2010 to 2017.

That is unusually tough talk from two former Republican appointees. But Hayden and Clapper say the schism between the President and the U.S. intelligence community is really about the breakdown of trust between the government and the governed. Over the course of their careers, they have watched Americans’ faith in their government collapse. In 1964, 77% of Americans trusted the federal government most or all of the time, according to the Pew Research Center. As of December 2017, that number was 18%, nearing an all-time low.