Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Cotton’s Opening Remarks at the Confirmation Hearing of John Ratcliffe for CIA Director
Washington, D.C. — Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) today delivered the below opening statement at the confirmation hearing of John Ratcliffe to serve as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Welcome everyone to this hearing on President Trump’s nomination of John Ratcliffe to be our next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Ratcliffe, welcome back to the Intelligence Committee. I also want to welcome your wife, Michele, and thank her and your two daughters for the sacrifices they’ve made across your lifetime of public service.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is also back before the Senate—I’m sure he’s nostalgic for his own confirmation process a few years ago. John, welcome; We look forward to his remarks.
I want to acknowledge my predecessor, Vice Chairman Warner. Senator Warner and I have worked together collegially over the years, even when we’ve disagreed strongly. I expect this spirit of comity to continue, not just between the vice chairman and me, but across the committee.
I also want to thank Senator Rubio for his service on this committee. He’s been a trusted colleague and respected leader on the committee for years. We will miss him, but we also look forward to his distinguished service as secretary of state.
And I extend a special thanks to the committee’s senior staff on both sides. They put in yeoman’s work over the holidays to promptly move this nomination forward.
I want to begin with a few observations from my decade on the Intelligence Committee.
The men and women of the intelligence community perform vital work to protect our nation. They often serve in dangerous and squalid conditions. Their successes are seldom celebrated or even known. Unlike our troops, no one buys them beers in the airport. Sometimes their families don’t even know what they do.
So let me say to them today, on behalf of this committee and a grateful nation, we respect you, we appreciate you, we thank you.
But we also need more from you. In these dangerous times, our intelligence agencies haven’t anticipated major events or detected impending attacks. In just the last few weeks, members of this committee—and, I presume, the president—had no forewarning of the New Orleans terrorist attack or the collapse of the Assad tyranny in Syria. The same goes for Hamas’s October 7 atrocity against Israel in 2023. I could give other examples but suffice it to say we’re too often in the dark.
While this goes for the entire intelligence community, this problem is especially acute at the CIA—which remains, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA needs to get back to its roots, but must overcome several challenges to do so.
First, the CIA has neglected its core mission—collecting clandestine foreign intelligence. Put more simply, stealing secrets. Intelligence collection is the main effort; every other job is a supporting effort. If you don’t collect intelligence by, say, handling spies or hacking computers, you should ask yourself how you support those who do, or how you harness and use what they produce.
I’ve seen way too many reports over the years with phrases like “according to,” “based on,” or “judging by” followed only by diplomatic accounts and press reports. In other words, not intelligence. And it’s gotten worse over the last four years. Those sources aren’t unimportant, but without clandestine intelligence, we might as well get briefed by the State Department or a think tank, or just read the newspaper.
Second, the CIA has become too bureaucratic. I realize that Allen Dulles probably had the same complaint five years after the CIA was created. But this has also gotten worse in recent years, in no small part thanks to former Director Brennan’s so-called modernization. Lines of authority have grown blurry, talkers have replaced doers, managers with no field experience have taken over operational roles, and more. Much like our military, the tooth-to-tail ratio at the CIA is badly out of balance.
Third, the CIA’s analysis and priorities have been politicized. Intelligence analysis all too often has aligned curiously with the Biden administration’s policy preferences. The Afghan Army is strong and cohesive. Ukraine’s Army will collapse within days of Russia’s invasion. Israel can’t possibly destroy Hamas or Hezbollah. Iran’s air defenses are mighty and fearsome. Time and again, the CIA has produced inaccurate analysis that conveniently justifies President Biden’s actions—or, as often, his inaction.
Likewise, the CIA’s misplaced priorities have yielded too many reports on matters like the prospects for gay-rights legislation in Africa or climate change. These topics may have their place in the government, but it’s not at the CIA.
And I hope to never see another video, statement, or social-media post from the CIA about “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion.” If you wonder why our intelligence agencies struggle to collect intelligence, consider this fact: the CIA offered to pay diversity consultants three times as much as a new case officer. I’m sorry, but if you feel like you need a diversity consultant or an affinity group or your pronouns in your email, maybe the CIA isn’t for you. This job isn’t about your identity or your feelings—it’s about our nation’s security.
Fourth, the CIA dabbles too much in questions of political judgment even as it neglects its core mission of intelligence collection. Some of the blame, to be fair, lies with us. I hear questions from this committee about, say, some nation’s will to fight or if we do this, that, or the other thing, what will Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping do in response. These aren’t really intelligence questions, but rather matters of statesmanship and political judgment, or prudence—the supreme virtue of the statesman.
I would observe that Lincoln and Churchill didn’t have our vast modern intelligence apparatus, but they were pretty good wartime leaders, because they were great statesmen. It’s the CIA’s responsibility to provide us and the president with timely and relevant secrets, for example, that Russia has mobilized multiple divisions on Ukraine’s border and sent perishable fresh-blood supplies to the front. It’s our job to use that information to discern the inherent logic of events, not to defer passively to the intelligence community’s convenient conclusion that Putin “hadn’t made a decision to invade” just days before the obvious impending invasion began.
Fifth, the CIA needs to become bolder and more innovative in covert action. I’ve seen successful covert-action programs and I’ve seen debacles. The latter are usually caused by ill-advised constraints imposed by political leaders or when the president uses covert action as a substitute for policy and not a supplement to policy. I’ll have to save more for our closed session, but for now I’ll just say that the timid indecision that characterized the Biden administration’s overt actions extended to its covert actions.
Mr. Ratcliffe, you have a big job ahead of you. The nation needs a strong, capable, and aggressive CIA. I believe the men and women you will lead want to serve in just that kind of agency—they joined the CIA, after all, not a church choir or a therapy session on a college campus. They and the nation are counting on you to deliver badly needed reforms, and on this committee to ensure you do.
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