Germany’s dramatic decision to expel the top US intelligence official in Berlin has put fresh strain on the frequently fraught relationship between American spies and the policymakers who rely on – and sometimes clash with – the nation’s cloak-and-dagger operatives.
The transatlantic feud comes amid a bleak six-month stretch of international crises that appear to have caught the United States flat-footed as well as at a time of skirmishes between the White House and some of the intelligence community’s career operatives.
US intelligence agencies have never been strangers to ugly controversies, from attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, to the use of interrogation practices that meet international definitions of torture, or the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They have also faced charges of incompetence, like the failure to predict the fall of the Soviet Union.
By those historical standards, 2014 hasn’t been a disaster. But the often testy relationship between spies and politicians is definitely going through a bad patch – and it may only get worse.
The last half-year has featured the shocking rampage of an al-Qaida offshoot, the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL), in Syria and Iraq, Russia’s dramatic annexation of Crimea, the White House’s accidental but headline-grabbing outing of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan, and an unprecedented war of words in which one of the agency’s most reliable congressional champions, Senator Dianne Feinstein, accused it of spying on legislative staff.
Not everyone agrees that the relationship is passing through an unusually difficult period. Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised CIA Director John Brennan.
“I think John is working hard to make sure our intelligence community functions in a way that the White House and policymakers want to see it work,” Chambliss said. “You have bumps in the road in any organization and John’s trying to smooth those out.”
The latest news out of Germany has roots in the stunning disclosures from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Already, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had openly expressed anger upon learning that US intelligence eavesdropped on her cell phone calls.