President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the CIA promised senators Wednesday that he would not impose political litmus tests on the agency’s staff or force employees to demonstrate loyalty to Trump nationwide.
Trump has repeatedly described the CIA and other spy agencies as corrupt institutions pursuing a political agenda. But John Ratcliffe, the former Texas congressman chosen by Trump to lead the spy service, spoke in respectful terms about his job during his Senate confirmation hearing and vowed he would not purge employees because of their political beliefs.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, asked Ratcliffe to assure him “that you will resist efforts to fire or expel career CIA employees because of their perceived political views and that you will not ask these employees to place loyalty to a political figure above loyalty to the country.
Ratcliffe said he never had this approach as director of national intelligence (DNI) during Trump’s first term and would not engage in a partisan overhaul as CIA director.
“If you look at my file and my file as DNI, this never happened. It’s never something that anyone has alleged,” he said. “That’s something I would never do.”
The committee asked Ratcliffe written questions ahead of the hearing about Trump’s 2023 promise to “clean out every corrupt actor in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are many of them.”
Ratcliffe responded that he was unable to comment on quotes attributed to Trump “where context may be lacking.” But he said that throughout his career he found CIA employees “to be competent professionals, driven by their mission and not by political or ideological bias.”
Unlike other confirmation hearings, Ratcliffe’s two-hour hearing, which was followed by a closed session to discuss classified matters, went smoothly, with relatively little partisan rancor. Ratcliffe is expected to be easily confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, where he has mostly received praise for his performance as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term.
Former intelligence officers, Democratic lawmakers and Western officials feared that Trump and his deputies could harm the work of the country’s intelligence agencies by injecting political considerations into their findings and analyses, which could discourage allies from sharing information. sensitive information.
Since the start of his first term in 2017, Trump has had a rocky relationship with the intelligence community. He and his supporters portrayed agency officials — as well as the Justice Department and the FBI — as part of a “deep state” plotting against him.
Under questioning from Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, Ratcliffe said he would not encourage an intelligence professional to change his assessments to avoid criticism from the White House and promised that no “political litmus test” or “loyalty test” would not be imposed on agency employees.
King said he hoped Ratcliffe could persuade Trump to be more open to information provided by the intelligence community.
“He is notoriously skeptical of the intelligence community, and being skeptical is not necessarily a bad thing,” King said. “But I hope that one of the first things you can work on with him is to make him receptive to the information and the truth that you will provide him because of your position.”
A focus on China
Ratcliffe said his top priority as CIA director would be the threat posed by China, and he pledged to broaden the CIA’s focus on Beijing.
“The Chinese Communist Party remains determined to dominate the world economically, technologically and militarily,” he said.
The CIA must “continue – and increase its intensity – to focus on the threats posed by China and the ruling Chinese Communist Party,” he added.
Ratcliffe said in his written responses that he would assign more CIA personnel to collecting and analyzing intelligence on China and praised current CIA Director William Burns for creating a Chinese mission center.
He said his efforts would include “developing broad and deep on-target expertise” and increasing “the number of officers with language skills in analytical and operational roles.”
Ratcliffe said he would aim to increase intelligence gathering on Chinese activities in new technologies and counter Beijing’s efforts to exploit the theft of American intellectual property and research.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said the CIA had become politicized and too bureaucratic and needed to return to what he said was its core mission: collecting foreign intelligence , or “to steal”. secrets. »
Ratcliffe acknowledged that the CIA’s primary mission was to gather intelligence and that it had to guard against “complacency.” CIA agents who fail to meet expectations will be held accountable, he said.
Cotton said the CIA failed to anticipate a series of major world events, including the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the strength of the Afghan government army fighting the Taliban, the capacity of the Ukrainian army to repel Russia’s all-out attacks. the full-scale invasion in 2022 and the fall of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad last month.
In questioning Ratcliffe, Cotton also cited an internal investigation of CIA personnel into the objectivity of their work, which is mandated by Congress but has not been made public. Ratcliffe said he was familiar with the highlights of the survey, which he said revealed significant concerns among employees about “objectivity.”
He said the investigation “reflects that a significant percentage of the current CIA workforce has concerns about the objectivity of the products they produce and even cited this in specific cases, to include the PDB, the daily report of the president,” Ratcliffe said. . He did not specify.
The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lawmakers from both parties also asked Ratcliffe to pledge to step up efforts to investigate the causes of the mysterious health incidents known as “Havana Syndrome,” which have plagued intelligence officers and diplomats, first in Cuba and then in other countries.
Ratcliffe promised to redouble his efforts to get to the bottom of the health cases, saying: “I share your frustration that four years later we are at the same point in terms of testing and determining the cause of diseases. This.”
Last week, divisions emerged within intelligence agencies over whether foreign adversaries could be responsible for the unexplained injuries, which include dizziness, severe headaches and other effects. A U.S. intelligence assessment released Friday found that two of seven unnamed intelligence agencies concluded that a foreign actor may have developed or deployed a weapon that caused the incidents.
