An Unexpectedly Smooth First Year for Trump’s CIA Director

WASHINGTON — It is easy to see why President Donald Trump is fond of Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA. Pompeo proudly plays up his conservative credentials, and he rarely passes up a chance to talk tough — except when it comes to Trump, of course.

In Pompeo’s telling, the president is a sophisticated consumer of intelligence, and under his leadership, the CIA is being reshaped into a leaner, more flexible organization whose officers have been freed to focus on stealing secrets, eliminating the United States’ enemies and giving Trump the delicate information he needs to confront the challenges facing the country.

“I have seen 25-year intelligence professionals receive briefings,” Pompeo said Tuesday. “I will tell you that President Trump is the kind of recipient of our information at the same level as they are.”

In a pair of public appearances this week, Pompeo, 54, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, marked his first year as CIA director — a span that has, by most accounts, been outwardly smoother than many would have guessed.

The concerns at the outset were widespread. Pompeo’s reputation as a partisan bulldog was hardly the typical profile for a role that is intended to be apolitical. And Trump spent the weeks before taking office attacking the agency, mocking the assessment that Russia meddled in the presidential election and once comparing intelligence officials to Nazis. On his first full day as president, Trump stood in front of the agency’s memorial wall, which honors officers killed in the line of duty, and bragged about inflated crowd sizes at his inauguration.

Yet since then, Trump has largely spared the CIA the kind of political attacks he has leveled against the Justice Department and the FBI, both of which he has painted as being staffed by disloyal partisans out to undermine his presidency. Some of Trump’s silence can be credited to Pompeo, who appears to be pulling off a political balancing act: He has won over officials at America’s premier spy agency, many of whom were deeply offended by Trump’s attacks, while persuading the president of the CIA’s value and its loyalty.

Pompeo has managed to establish himself as one of the president’s favorite Cabinet members — Trump has even considered naming the spy chief secretary of state — and one of the most overtly political spy chiefs in a generation. He appears to share Trump’s bombastic manner and uses far starker language than most CIA directors.

That was the case on Monday, when Pompeo, in an interview broadcast on “CBS This Morning,” said that his goal was ensure the CIA “will be more vicious, more aggressive, more inclined to take risks to come directly at the threats that America and the world faces.”

When in Washington, Pompeo personally delivers Trump’s daily intelligence briefing, and he readily joins the fray when the president veers into policy and political discussions, topics that past directors typically sought to avoid.

Pompeo has shown a similar eagerness to express his views in public forums, making clear his skepticism of the Obama administration’s deal to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons program, playing down talk of Russian interference in the election last year, and talking at length about the need to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, even if that means using military force.

Those issues all came up in Pompeo’s appearances this week. But his focus was on talking about how he has reshaped the CIA. In an appearance Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, Pompeo boasted that he had pared bureaucracy at the agency, reducing the decisions that had to be personally approved by the director “by 40 percent.”

The United States’ list of rivals and enemies is long — it includes global powers as well as international criminal networks — and “we need to have a bias toward being as nimble as our adversaries,” Pompeo said.

He made his point with an anecdote: “I was sitting in a very long meeting with some very senior officials and I was asked, ‘Boy, if we did X, what would our adversaries do?'” Pompeo recounted. “And I responded by saying, ‘They sure as heck won’t have a meeting like this.'”

The audience laughed. “That’s exactly what happened in the meeting, too,” he said.

The changes he has made at the CIA have resulted in substantive achievements, though few could be discussed publicly, Pompeo said. He did offer one example, saying the CIA’s work had helped stop the flow of supplies vital to North Korea. But he provided no other details.

Pompeo has given only a handful of speeches and interviews since taking over the CIA. Most of his appearances have been at forums familiar to neoconservatives, where he tends to find receptive audiences and his assertions about the inner workings of the Trump administration are rarely challenged.

The audience’s questions Tuesday focused largely on North Korea, Iran and the other issues that tend to occupy the Washington national security establishment, including the fight against the Islamic State. Pompeo’s assertions about the president’s handling of the daily intelligence briefings went unchallenged, even though they run counter to accounts from other administration insiders. There was no talk about whether the president’s Twitter messages, such as calling North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong Un, “Little Rocket Man,” affected the CIA.

Still, Pompeo struck a more moderate tone than he has in past appearances this year, like over the summer when he seemed to suggest that the United States should consider leadership change in North Korea. On Tuesday, though, he made clear that a diplomatic solution to end that country’s nuclear weapons program was the goal.

But Pompeo still managed to echo the president’s view that the current administration has been left with a mess by its predecessors.

“Frankly, we have been whistling past the graveyard for decades” on some threats facing the United States, Pompeo said. “And you should know that when I say decades, that is Republican presidents, Democrat presidents, Republican Congresses of which I was a member, and Democrats who are members of our legislative branch, as well.”