Martin Jay
Trump's second term has stripped the intelligence community of non-partisan advisers, leaving him isolated with sycophants.
The Iran war was just as much a failure of the intelligence community as it was of the White House. This is the conclusion of whistle-blower Julia Curlee, who worked for 25 years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council advisor to the White House, and who recently resigned from her position. Her claims in a recent podcast are that the intelligence infrastructure that would normally advise U.S. presidents before they make seismic decisions - which can have an impact on the economy - has been stripped down and replaced by sycophants, and that the remaining group of intelligence officers are now working in a culture of fear where decisions are made entirely on the president's personal foibles and political objectives, with officers now afraid to point out bad decisions, fearful they will lose their jobs.
Curlee claims that in Trump's second term in office, he removed a non-partisan team of National Security Advisers whom he associated with the Biden administration. She claims that the Iran war - both the shorter one in June 2025 and then the second, more prolonged campaign starting on February 28th - happened as there was simply no one from the CIA, the Pentagon or the NSC who was prepared to even advise the President of its consequences. More interestingly, she claims that even the facility to 'crisis manage' bad decisions (like the Iraq war) is no longer there, and that President Trump is operating in an atmosphere where he is entirely alone before he goes ahead with his idiotic ideas which have such huge consequences - saying that he has replaced the normal phalanx of advisors with friends who are entirely focused on the President's ideas and objectives, no matter how personal, political or just plain stupid they may be.
She claims that Trump's second term in office is starkly different from his first, whereby there were agents working for these security attachments who did advise him against some of his zanier ideas.
And so, the Iran war came about not only because Bibi Netanyahu could convince Trump that a war would be over in a matter of days, but also because the coterie of normal experts who are tasked with using the intelligence community to work out the longer-term implications were simply no longer there. Military figures who had served in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - both countries neighbouring Iran - might have had a say about the likelihood of the reality that the Trump administration is now dealing with - catastrophic defeat militarily, geopolitically and, of course, economically - if they had an office in the White House and had functioned as they had with every other presidency before Trump.
The danger, of course, is that it makes the U.S. incredibly vulnerable to being deceived again by a foreign power - ally, frenemy or full-on enemy - and getting dragged into another conflict which is not in America's interests and will be costly in the longer term. Another unpleasant reality is that the military and CIA departments start to see a new trend of officers going rogue when they begin to understand what contempt Trump has for them and their work. Previously, the author has touched on the Lockerbie case, where sources within the British intelligence community believe that rogue CIA officers planned to bring down a U.S. civilian airliner, as they were angry about what they believed was a bombing by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 1986 of a Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. Marines. Intelligence officers going rogue is more common than most people think, as it is rarely, if ever, reported by journalists - mainly because the stories seem too far-fetched, but also through fear of reporters losing their jobs due to what would be seen as a treacherous act. This so-called 'loyalty' in newsrooms has never been more in evidence than today, and the fear that CIA officers have in D.C. of losing their jobs by giving a briefing to Trump which clashes with his own juvenile ideas about the world is replicated by mid-ranking desk editors of UK newspapers who simply can't carry out honest journalism. They failed spectacularly to report correctly on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; they failed even more to be objective about Assad and the war in Syria, preferring to demonise the Syrian leader to justify writing up propaganda supplied by Al Qaeda affiliates. And they are failing today to report on the truth about the Iran war - in particular the losses of not only personnel but planes shot down by Iran and the destruction of U.S. infrastructure in the region, to name just two examples. In this culture of fear which Curlee highlights, the knock-on effect of that fear to journalists and editors is even more abundant - so while omission becomes the main style of reporting - skirting around subjects which are in plain sight - we often see media will get into bed with the establishment and help them with their tawdry underhand work to report on trials, giving the cases themselves credibility, like the so-called 'Lockerbie bomber' case in the U.S. presently (Masud). It's hard to know if this case is also an example of rogue FBI officers taking the law into their own hands in some perverse act of patriotism akin to the original plot to bring down Pan Am 103 in the quaint Scottish town of Lockerbie (as the evidence against Masud is suspect), but we shouldn't be surprised if intelligence and law enforcement agencies do this more often in the second half of Trump's second term - when he has purged entire departments which are designed to help him in decision-making.