The CIA’s job: Recruit spies, steal secrets and deliver the high-value analysis

OPINION:

I’ll never forget that blue ribbon day early in my CIA career, when a senior foreign intelligence officer called to tell me I needed to come to his office immediately. He emphasized over the phone that I was invited to a holiday celebration with his colleagues.

An unexpectedly pleasant surprise awaited me when I arrived at the senior official’s headquarters office, where he revealed that the phone call was just a pretext. His team had just contacted a purported defector, who had been working at a sensitive military installation deep inside the territory of one of our mutual adversaries. I spent hours debriefing the defector, who, in return for a treasure trove of intelligence, was eventually resettled in the West.

The foreign intelligence service, with which I had been working closely for some time, shared this exceptionally valuable spy operation with the CIA because it trusted us to protect the sensitive source while making the best use of his exquisite intelligence on what was a high-priority target for both of our governments.

This is the sort of behind-the-scenes collaboration that occurs worldwide between the CIA and a foreign government liaison partner, regardless of whether our high-level diplomatic relations are sailing smoothly or flailing in choppy waters. CIA officers are often portrayed in the media, television and film as lone wolf spies, but they often rely deeply on foreign government partners, who are powerful force multipliers for intelligence collection and keep our nation safe.

Recently, tension between the U.S. and some of its allies has escalated beyond the usual disagreements over policy because of the fallout from the Trump administration’s imposition of across-the-board tariffs. Meanwhile, our nation is confronted with an unprecedented number of wickedly complex threats to our national security from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, terrorists, and weapons proliferators. The CIA’s role is critical because the president needs intelligence to detect those threats way out of the “left of boom” and make the best policy decisions to prevent any harm to our citizens and homeland.

Now, as much as ever before, CIA Director John Ratcliffe is on the hook to ensure that the CIA’s vitally important relationships with foreign intelligence partners around the globe are not caught in the crossfire of increasingly acerbic diplomatic relations. Mr. Ratcliffe can comfortably rely on his dedicated and talented CIA workforce, which has earned a well-deserved reputation for what retired FBI Special Agent Robin Dreeke calls building relationships “forged by trust.”

First, CIA officers conduct their work in a nonpartisan manner. Regardless of which party holds the White House, the CIA’s responsibilities remain the same: Recruit spies, steal secrets, and deliver the high-value analysis on which the president relies to make the toughest and most consequential decisions. They faithfully carry out their mission overseas and too often in harm’s way. They collect and guard the truth with analytical precision, absent any predisposed ideological or political bias. The CIA has nothing to do with making foreign policy. If you asked any CIA director under whom I served, he would say that was how he preferred it.

Second, veteran CIA officers who have served for a couple of decades with multiple overseas tours are well known to our foreign government intelligence partners. Together, they have a proven record of conducting sensitive spy operations, often when their lives depend on one another. They speak the same language of clandestinity, which is necessary to protect their joint sources and methods.

Third, although subjected to vigorous oversight from Senate and House intelligence committees, the CIA works secretly with foreign governments and non-state actors and is immune to the vagaries of diplomacy and public scrutiny. The CIA ruthlessly protects intelligence obtained from joint operations with our foreign partners with the most sophisticated spy tradecraft, just as if those sensitive sources were our own. As one of my old CIA mentors said, “The secret of our success is the secret of our success.”

The U.S. will always experience ups and downs in its bilateral relationships, even with our closest allies, but if there’s a silver lining in those dark clouds of diplomatic spats making their way to the public square, it’s that we can comfortably rely on our intelligence professionals to cultivate invaluable relationships with their foreign counterparts to the maximum benefit of our nation’s security.

• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA.