John A. Gentry

So we've already reached a pretty bad state here.

Well, maybe first the definition of politicization.

So in the U.S.

context, different countries have different ways of thinking about this.

Basically, this is the injection of politics into some aspect of the intelligence business.

So historically, there have been two ways of seeing this in the United States.

One is what they sometimes call politicization from above or top-down politicization.

And that's when politicians will use intelligence as part of their fights with other politicians, part of the foreign policy decision-making process, as part of battles in Congress and so on.

I view that more as the politics of intelligence.

It's not really politicization.

So it's not what I'm concerned about, not what I think we should be concerned about.

What we should be concerned about is what's sometimes called bottom-up or politicization by intelligence professionals.

So in this case, you've got people who are using intelligence for political purposes,

They are injecting messages into intelligence processes for purposeful reasons, be it ideological, political, organizational interests, career interests, and so on.

But this historically has been viewed as being highly inappropriate

whether it's coming from the political left or right, because it damages the credibility of intelligence and it probably damages the quality of intelligence.

So until very recently, this has been considered to be wholly, wholly inappropriate and wholly out of bounds.

And generally at CIA, the four episodes that I've identified, three of them have come from the political

left, one from the right, but all of them are generally considered to be inappropriate.

The most recent one, the one that emerged publicly in 2016, is very different from the other three in that much bigger in terms of numbers of people,