In recent days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has rejected the C.I.A.’s conclusions that Russian hackers attempted to sway the American elections, and has accused unnamed officials within the agency of trying to undermine him. And he has rejected the tradition of receiving the intelligence community’s daily briefing, implying that he would rather rely on information and analysis from his inner circle of advisers.
It’s a disturbing set of developments, if only because we’ve been here before. Presidents face a great temptation to go “in-house” for intelligence that fits with their plans; some have even set up formal or informal operations to circumvent the C.I.A. and other agencies. In almost every case, the result has been a disaster — for the president and for the country.
The most obvious example is Richard M. Nixon. When, as president-elect, he interviewed Henry A. Kissinger to be his national security adviser, Nixon told Kissinger that he didn’t trust the State Department or the “Ivy League liberals” at the C.I.A. Once in office, Nixon tried to use the agency to shut down the F.B.I.’s investigation of the Watergate burglary, but he was rejected by its director, Richard Helms.
But even long before Watergate, Nixon had decided to bypass the normal foreign-policy and intelligence chains. Nixon and Kissinger kept the secretary of state, William P. Rogers, in the dark on secret diplomacy and schemed to outfox the top brass at the Pentagon to conduct the bombing of Laos and Cambodia.
And when the generals and the intelligence officials refused to do his bidding, Nixon looked for someone who would. While he hated the C.I.A., he counted on J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. Lyndon B. Johnson had told Nixon that Hoover would be the only one in Washington he could trust — meaning, trust to do his dirty work, just as he had for presidents going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
But even Hoover balked. When the Pentagon Papers appeared in June 1971, Nixon ordered Hoover to dig up dirt on the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg. A shrewd self-preservationist, Hoover ducked the order; he could see that the legal system was starting to crack down on government wiretaps and “black bag jobs” — i.e., burglaries.
Thwarted, Nixon went in-house, and created an internal security unit to plug national security leaks. The unit, whose chief operatives were a former F.B.I. agent, G. Gordon Liddy, and an ex-C.I.A. case officer, E. Howard Hunt, became infamous as “the Plumbers.” Liddy and Hunt did catch a leaker or two, but during the 1972 campaign they went on to do political espionage for the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
As Nixon found, one problem with subverting the intelligence and law enforcement apparatus is the risk of incompetence. Liddy and Hunt were stumblebums who got caught. When Ronald Reagan made the mistake of sneaking around the State Department and C.I.A. to free the hostages held by Iranian terrorists in 1986, he sent his national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, on a ludicrous mission to Tehran bearing a Bible and a baked cake. McFarlane’s swashbuckling deputy, Marine Col. Oliver North, proceeded to cook up an arms-for-hostages deal that boiled over into the Iran-contra scandal, almost wrecking Reagan’s presidency.
The ends, arguably, sometimes justify the means. Before America entered World War II, Roosevelt probably violated the law in going outside normal channels to aid embattled Britain. But attempts to outflank or bully the bureaucracy usually end badly. Leading up to the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney leaned on the C.I.A. to conclude there were ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Much depends on the character of the national security adviser, who has enormous power to carry out the chief executive’s writ. Kissinger was brilliant at opening China and negotiating an arms control deal with the Kremlin. But he had a devious side.
The best model of a national security adviser was Brent Scowcroft, a scrupulous pragmatist and honest broker under George H. W. Bush. Judging from press accounts, Mr. Trump’s pick, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, is no Scowcroft. While skilled at disrupting terrorist networks in Iraq as an intelligence officer, he was regarded as an erratic and overbearing boss by many of his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency. It is easy to imagine him establishing clandestine intelligence and operational groups to feed him and the president what they want.
The bureaucracy can find ways to fight back. During the Nixon administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff grew so distrustful of the White House that they planted a spy on the staff of the national security adviser. “Deep Throat,” the famous source behind some of the earliest Watergate revelations from Bob Woodward at The Washington Post, turned out to be the deputy director of the F.B.I., Mark Felt. But those intrigues ultimately doomed a presidency and plunged the nation into crisis.
We need to heed those lessons: Congress, law enforcement, the bureaucracy and the press will need to be vigilant about the Trump White House. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Nixon tried to keep his unruly emotions a secret. President-elect Trump tweets them.
Will Trump Play Spy vs. Spy?
