By Lloyd Billingsley
Chronicles Magazine
July 11, 2025
In a new report, the CIA's Deputy Director for Analysis explains that senior leaders of the agency's center on Russia "strongly opposed" the now-infamous Steele dossier, which was advanced by former British spy Christopher Steele and deployed as the backbone of the agency's investigation of so-called Russian collusion in the 2016 election. Officials with the CIA's center on Russia said of the dossier that it "did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards" and contended that its inclusion in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of the 2016 election would "jeopardize the credibility of the entire paper."
According to the declassified CIA report released last week, John Brennan, who was the CIA director from 2013 to 2017:
showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders-one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background-he appeared more swayed by the Dossier's general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that "my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report."
Former CIA analyst Bryan Dean Wright, who served under Brennan, opined at Fox News that the CIA report shows that his former boss lied about his use of the dossier, manipulated who would write the ICA, interfered in its drafting, rushed the document to completion, and shared it with more than 200 U.S. officials to ensure that it would be leaked. Wright concluded that based on the information in the report, Brennan, who is 69 years old and retired, should be in prison.
To those who have been paying attention for the last several years, none of what the report reveals should come as a surprise.
"Vladimir Putin personally ordered the influence campaign to boost Donald Trump's election prospects," Brennan contended in his 2020 book Undaunted: My Fight Against America's Enemies, at Home and Abroad. By then, the Russia hoax had been fully exposed as a Clinton campaign operation. Brennan repeats the hoax's narrative many times in his book, which serves as a confession of the CIA's aggressive partisanship under his leadership, and its abject failure to fulfill its appointed duties.
For a better chronicle of the agency's downfall, readers can tap an insider who had more intel experience than either Brennan, Wright, or the unnamed author of the new CIA report. Angelo Codevilla received his first security clearance at age 23, when he worked for Bendix Aerospace Systems Division on Air Force contracts to study Soviet military tactics. Three years later Codevilla served as U.S. Navy officer assigned to military intelligence. That involved training in counterintelligence investigations and a tour of duty as an intelligence briefer for the chief of naval operations.
In the U.S. Foreign Service, Codevilla served as a regional analyst in Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Service on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, gave the intel vet "a unique bird's-eye view," as he explained in his 1992 book Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century.
As a staffer for Sen. Malcolm Wallop on the subcommittee on budget from 1977 to 1985, Codevilla was asked to scrutinize "a two-foot-high stack of justifications for all U.S. intelligence agencies' requests for money." Codevilla was also principal author of a report to CIA director designate William Casey, classified "above top secret." According to books such as John Ranelagh's The Agency: The Rise and Fall of the CIA, and Bob Woodward's Veil, agency bureaucrats felt threatened by Codevilla's report.
In 1974, the CIA fired Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA. After that, "the primacy of social and bureaucratic considerations" took over, and "this hurt American CI [counterintelligence] badly," Codevilla wrote.
Breaches followed. From 1968 until 1984, John Walker, his brother, his son, and his associate Jerry Whitworth, sold to the Soviet Union the operating manuals of the U.S. Navy's best code machines, together with volumes of daily settings. "Yet for 16 years," Codevilla recalled, "U.S. counterintelligence had not a hint of this potentially mortal hemorrhage." In similar style, CIA officer William Kampiles, sold to the USSR for $3000 the entire operating manual of the KH-11satellite.
Those who wanted to win the Cold War "lost out to those who wanted to manage a perpetual competitive-cooperative relationship with the USSR," Codevilla wrote in Informing Statecraft. President Gerald Ford, briefed daily by the CIA, in 1975 told the world Poland was "free" and in 1976 proclaimed " there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe ." The captive peoples knew better but, as Codevilla showed, the CIA had no clue:
The revolution that swept Eastern Europe in 1989, an event that ranks in importance with WWI, was wholly unheralded by technical intelligence. Antennas sensitive to millionths of amps, and orbiting cameras that could detect mice on the earth's surface, did not see hundreds of millions of people ready to overthrow the communist world. (italics original)
The CIA line on East Germany, Codevilla noted, "had not deviated far from East German propaganda." The "bureaucratically unchallengeable" CIA "might not always be right. But it would never be wrong." True to form, the agency was unprepared for a new century characterized by jihadists screaming "death to America."
In 1980, four years after the CIA fired James Angleton, the CIA hired Fordham University grad John Brennan, who in 1976 voted to elect the Stalinist Gus Hall, a candidate of the Communist Party USA, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. As Brennan explains in Undaunted, he voted for Hall "on a lark," a confession of poor judgment, at minimum. Instead of showing him the door, the CIA hired Brennan, who then rose through the ranks with lightning speed. The Undaunted author describes the scene at the CIA on Sept. 11, 2001:
We learned that the Pentagon had been attacked and that a plane had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania... George [Tenet] called his senior staff back into the room to coordinate actions that the CIA would need to take as the attack against our homeland was unfolding.
In other words, the mighty CIA knew nothing in advance about the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. As a leftist, Brennan believed in "the Islamic teaching that jihad is a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal," and "violence and jihad not necessarily synonymous." As the jihadist threats mounted, Brennan had his eye on domestic politics instead.