Former Undercover CIA operative J.C. Carleson has a message for America about the impact of Donald Trump repeatedly kneecapping the CIA and ignoring the security briefings he’s been receiving over Russia’s hacking of U.S. email accounts during the election.
“I fear that Trump’s rejection of both the content and the conclusions offered to him by the intelligence community will have a profound chilling effect on the recruitment of new assets, and the willingness of existing assets to continue to provide information,” Carleson writes. “Because, why should someone risk his or her life to provide sensitive information that the world now knows will go unread in our highest office?”
According to the former CIA official, Trump’s disregard for human intelligence has “consequences beyond Trump’s own dearth of information, because once again, it serves to erode the motivation of those who might provide us with information we desperately need—information that may include details of threats to American lives and infrastructure, for example.”
“The world knows that, in the incoming administration, facts will be ignored, and reasoned analysis will be rejected,” she writes. “On an individual level, the why determines the what, and without the motivation of knowing that their sacrifices will ultimately make a difference, CIA sources may choose, in Trump’s parlance, to walk away from the deal.”
When CIA undercover operatives work in the field overseas they risk their lives to gather information that is designed to aid America. Often they have to do this by developing foreign sources for that information, sources who are effectively committing treason against their home country in the process and risking being put to death as spies and traitors.
Why exactly should either of these people put their lives on the line for a President who simply isn’t going to listen to what they have to say, and in fact discounts and ridicules what they put themselves on the line for find out?
Yeah, exactly, they very likely shouldn’t and they very likely won’t — anymore.