Mission Critical

After decades in the shadows, former American intelligence offi cials are taking on a new and very public role: keeping an eye on Trump

- Jeff Stein

A FEW MONTHS INTO THE TRUMP administration, former CIA Director Michael Hayden took a reconnaissance mission of sorts to Pittsburgh, where he grew up in a blue-collar, Roman Catholic family and worked summers in Steelers training camps. He’d asked his brother to gather a couple dozen people to talk politics in a sports bar “over some Iron City beer,” a local brew.

“I knew many of the participants, indeed had grown up with several,” Hayden writes in his troubling and important new book, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies. “But we could have been from different planets.” Virtually everyone in the crowd, he recalls, were supporters of the erratic New York business mogul who had improbably won election and moved into the White House a few months earlier. “He is an American,” they would say. “He is genuine.... He is authentic.... He doesn’t filter everything or parse every word.”

Most distressing to Hayden, though, was the revelation that President Donald Trump’s supporters were uninterested in facts—“or at least not in my ‘facts,’” including the finding by U.S. intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored Trump and labored mightily to get him elected. When Hayden asked how many in the bar still believed the president’s claim that Barack Obama had spied on Trump Tower, hands shot up. Why? “They simply replied, ‘Obama.’”

A year later, the partisan divide over Russiagate’s well-established facts has widened into a dangerous chasm. With his popularity creeping up in the polls, the president recently sharpened his attacks on the FBI, accusing the bureau of spying on his campaign and demanding the Justice Department turn over the identity of an informant reporting on Russian contacts with Trump associates.