Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

Ex-Spy Chief: Russia’s Election Hacking Was An ‘Intelligence Failure’

Former acting CIA director Michael Morell says the agency missed the meddling until it was too late.

By SUSAN B. GLASSER December 11, 2017
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/11/the-full-transcript-michael-morell-216061

The politics of spying in America has never been more intense. President Trump has taken to publicly bashing his intelligence agencies and continues, a full year later, to question their conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. election on his behalf. For their part, an array of career spooks have come out of the shadows where they spent their careers to challenge the commander-in-chief in once unthinkably public terms.

Michael Morell is one of the career types who’s broken with decades of practice to confront Trump. A veteran of nearly three decades in the CIA, Morell rose from within the ranks to become the agency’s longtime deputy director, twice serving as its acting leader before retiring during President Barack Obama’s second term. In the summer of 2016, he broke with tradition to endorse Hillary Clinton over Trump, and he has continued to sound the alarm ever since.

But in a revealingly self-critical and at times surprising interview for this week’s Global POLITICO, Morell acknowledges that he and other spy-world critics of the president failed to fully “think through” the negative backlash generated by their going political. “There was a significant downside,” Morell said in the interview.

Morell, who grew up as a superstar CIA analyst and eventually graduated to become President George W. Bush’s personal daily intelligence briefer during the momentous events before and after the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, was also reflective about the costs of the massive shift in emphasis toward counterterrorism after that attack – in particular, a failure to focus on the threat posed by a resurgent Russia under President Vladimir Putin until it was arguably too late.

The Russian 2016 hacking, Morell told me, was in fact a U.S. “intelligence failure” in multiple ways. It was, he argued, at the least “a failure of imagination that’s not dissimilar to the failure of imagination that we had for 9/11,” with America’s spy agencies apparently unable to have conceived of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and electronic hacking of Gmail being used to attack the country’s election.

But it was another kind of failure, too, Morell argued, of shifting money away from Russia and elsewhere in the name of fighting terrorism. “As we were trying to protect the country from terrorists,” he said, “we became more blind to what was going on in the rest of the world, both from a collection perspective and from an analytic perspective. And that was a cost…. When you make choices, you leave significant risk on the table.”

You can read the rest of our provocative conversation, which ranges from the internal debate over when Putin turned from frenemy to foe to whether Morell thinks Trump will ultimately be caught up in special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s net, below.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/11/the-full-transcript-michael-morell-216061