Pressure Points

Is the CIA director caving to Trump on Russia and Iran?

- Jeff Stein

IN EARLY NOVEMBER, CYNTHIA STORER SAT down and started sketching out her next lecture for an online course she’s teaching for Johns Hopkins University. The topic: “the politicization of intelligence.” The ex–CIA senior counterterrorism analyst, one of the famous “sisters” who tracked Osama bin Laden, remembers constant pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials to find proof that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaeda.

With White House encouragement, the agency also came up with evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In that sad episode, then–CIA Director George Tenet told President George W. Bush he could make a “slam-dunk” case for attacking Iraq. As it turned out, Bush’s sales pitch was successful, but the intelligence was a bust: No nuclear, chemical or biological weapons were found.

Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but the timing of Storer’s lecture was ideal, given the lengthening string of evidence that CIA Director Mike Pompeo has been bending the agency to his boss’s will on Russia and Iran. On November 7, the Intercept reported that Pompeo, a former Tea Party Republican from Kansas, had met in October with William Binney, an ex-National Security Agency official. Binney had been promoting a highly disputed theory that the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee was not the work of Russian agents but an inside job. Pompeo told him that President Donald Trump had inspired the invitation to CIA headquarters, Binney said. The Intercept reported that Pompeo also offered to set Binney up with other briefings at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.