Leaving the Intelligence Community: A Line Analyst’s Perspective on Personal Responsibility

The Steady State | Author's Name Withheld

I am an analyst in the US intelligence community and, for the last eleven months, I’ve found myself increasingly struggling with my individual ethical responsibility working for one of the most powerful institutions on earth. I’m not a manager or executive in my organization, but I share the weight of responsible professionalism in an increasingly unprofessional environment. I look around at the damage my agency and the government as a whole are doing to foundational American democratic norms and ask, what is my personal obligation here?

Doing my job to the best of my ability and focusing on how my work helps protect my community would probably be enough under different circumstances. But they don’t feel like enough now. Organizations like The Steady State do an admirable job of calling on institutional leadership to step up, but I have yet to see much candid conversation about the burden line-level employees carry. I want to offer the thought process that led to my decision to leave federal service in the hope it helps someone else feel less alone in wrestling with the options before us.

It’s a strange thing, thinking about ethics and intelligence. The profession is quite literally built on a foundation of stealing and lying, and moral philosophers like Kant and Augustine would probably tell me my job is simply unethical by its very nature. But there’s a bargain that lies at the core of intelligence struck between policymakers and intelligence agencies. We, the intelligence professionals, will use powerful tools and authorities policymakers give us to spy and steal and lie, in order to do things like keep hostile foreign governments from harassing dissidents here in America, thwart terror attack plans, and safeguard our critical infrastructure. We formalize professional standards with ombuds and Congressional oversight committees to try to prevent misconduct in the name of national security, and use analytic tradecraft standards and buckets of training and review to try and combat the specters of groupthink and bias.

But what happens when intelligence officers no longer trust our own institutions’ decision-makers? What should we, as individuals entrusted with those tools, do when the administration repeatedly twists our work to justify decisions completely unmoored from any policy precedent or coherent strategy?

The US government is made up of people, and we are not immune to the behavior of our country’s leaders reflecting their sincerely held belief that l’etat c’est Donald Trump. I know I am far from the only one wrestling with the consequences of my work in the face of this administration’s actions. Alongside the individual moral injury, this broken trust undermines our work and leaves us all less safe. People torn between professional integrity and institutional obligation might change an assessment to appease the boss, or hold back information because they fear it will be used as a pretext for illegal or unjust action.

In this new dynamic, I see three options available. We can accept that our job is now fundamentally changed: instead of the public, we work for the President above all else, even the law, and continue with business as usual. This is the rationale being presented by the top brass across the board, and it is reasonable to expect some to swallow it. Personally, this is an option I can’t stomach. If my job had been described as “just do what the President says” when I started, I wouldn’t have started.

We can stay and be grit in the cog, pushing back on requests or directives when they clearly violate our professional standards. In conversation, most of my colleagues frame their approach in this way, and it’s a position I not only understand but had adopted in the first months of the year. Finding a new job is easier said than done, and many of my colleagues have children to support along with all the other bills to pay. And there is real value in professionals staying and refusing to take part in or accept without question illegal or unethical demands.

In different circumstances, I would embrace this approach. But when I look around, I see the structure of my agency changing in ways that will be difficult to undo. These changes concentrate and insulate power from accountability, and make career advancement contingent upon zealous promotion of the White House’s agenda. I don’t see this new era as something to weather as a natural part of government service. This is a moment to decide if I want to be someone who tries to do the right thing in spite of their job. I don’t.

I would never tell my colleagues to walk away from their work. It’s been hard enough to do it myself. But I hope those who remain do so with the same intention, integrity, and courage that led them to take the oath of office in the first place. And if the time comes that they can no longer fulfill that oath as a fed, I hope they know they aren’t alone.

The author is a former intelligence analyst who worked on counterintelligence matters regarding Latin America and the Middle East. The author is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.