CIA Director John Ratcliffe hopes his close relationship with President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, leads to deeper cooperation between the intelligence and law enforcement behemoths, Ratcliffe told Breitbart News exclusively.
Ratcliffe said he hopes that renewed cooperation between the CIA and the FBI under his and Patel’s leadership of the respective agencies might lead to better results for the American people.
“When we go back to this issue about the president’s America First agenda and the good things we can do and how the CIA can contribute to that, I think we’ve got a historic opportunity,” Ratcliffe said in his first interview as CIA director with Breitbart News last week. “Historically, the CIA and the FBI have been at odds with one another. As you know, part of the reason 9/11 was an intelligence failure was the FBI had some intelligence on hijackers and the CIA had some intelligence on hijackers and because of territorial wars and some of the other things that were in place they didn’t share it with each other in a way that could have prevented it. We know that.
“When I think about Kash Patel coming as the FBI director, Kash and I worked together as you know to expose the whole Russia collusion hoax. We worked together to expose law enforcement abuses with FISA authorities. We worked together to expose efforts within the Intelligence Community and law enforcement communities to politicize intelligence and mislead the public.
“I think we have a historic opportunity, if he’s also confirmed, for the FBI and the CIA to finally work together and protect Americans and protect the president from both foreign and domestic threats in a way and at a level that the American people would want to see and maybe haven’t seen in the past.”
Ratcliffe’s acknowledgement of the CIA’s troubled history with the FBI and the need for the two entities to work together more closely is a huge step forward and comes just as Patel is set to face a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday morning.
It also comes after a deeply fraught history between the CIA and the FBI, with conflict between them dating back decades in the United States. For instance, the Los Angeles Times in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack in early 2002 ran this headline: “CIA-FBI Feuding Runs Deep.”
“The controversy over who knew what in the days and weeks before Sept. 11 has vaulted the rivalry between the FBI and CIA–one of the oldest back-fence feuds in the nation’s capital–outside the bounds of conventional controversy,” the Times’ Richard Cooper and Josh Meyer wrote. “The question of why the deadliest terror plot in U.S. history went unstopped has exacerbated problems at the nation’s already-troubled intelligence agencies. And disclosures made in the last two weeks indicate that, despite reform efforts at both the FBI and CIA, the interagency sparring is only getting worse.”
In their piece, they detail how the history of the FBI and CIA feud goes back more than half a century to the early days of both government agencies.
“The feud between the CIA and the FBI goes back more than half a century and reflects divergent cultures that all agree must change,” Cooper and Meyer wrote. “In the 1940s, when the Central Intelligence Agency was created to coordinate America’s response to the emerging threat of global communism, the new agency was barred from operating inside the United States. But it received sole responsibility for intelligence and counter-intelligence overseas. That meant the FBI had to withdraw dozens of agents from posts abroad, which infuriated J. Edgar Hoover, who had made his ‘G-men’ legendary, zealously guarding their turf and his own. And from the beginning, the cultures of the two institutions could not have been more different. The CIA was a self-consciously cosmopolitan and intellectual elite, patterned after the Oxbridge traditions of the British Secret Service and molded in the blue-blooded Ivy League image of its first director, Allen Dulles. The FBI saw itself as equally elite but was made of commoner clay. If the CIA was disdainfully aristocratic, the FBI was defiantly middle class, with its lawyers and accountants in their stodgy but mandatory black shoes, white shirts and felt hats.”
In the aftermath of 9/11, too, after the intelligence failures were exposed, the two agencies tried to have more face time with top officials in each to try to bridge these divides, but the deep mistrust between the CIA and FBI remains to this day. Maybe, just maybe, Director Ratcliffe can work with a Director Patel if confirmed by the Senate to fix this. It’s no secret that Ratcliffe and Patel are in fact very close and have worked together for many years on a number of fronts, including most notably unpacking the Russia collusion hoax in Trump’s first term.
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