How the CIA Infiltrates Politics in Plain Sight—and How Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin are Upping the Ante

Intelligence capture of politics threatens our constitutional republic.

This report originally appeared in Restoration News and is reprinted with permission.

In a recent report, Restoration News investigated the intelligence ties of Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin: Former CIA operatives who became rising Democratic stars off their national security experience and “centrist” leanings. It showed an unspoken truth about Spanberger and Slotkin that’s been hiding in plain sight—they are part of a group of intelligence officers who, since the primacy of their services was threatened by President Trump’s first term agenda, entered politics with the stated aim of solidifying these services’ control. They have been aided and abetted by the groups their preferred policies serve to entrench: Intelligence operators linked to weapons and security contractors and multinational arms conglomerates who profit off Washington’s security state.

The end result of Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s rise could be the kind of plot progression once limited to movies. Two future cabinet, vice presidential or presidential nominees would serve at the pleasure of intelligence agencies and their outgrowths, so that politics becomes intelligence, affording covert agencies the type of unquestioned influence and control they’ve always aspired to but never enjoyed. This is a scenario that takes a certain amount of history to fully understand—both root causes and long-term effects. Tellingly, that history begins, and ends, on Abigail Spanberger’s home turf: Not just Virginia, the state she aims to lead, but specifically the suburbs of Northern Virginia, which include the congressional district (the 7th) she made her political name representing.  

Digging into this history shows how the CIA and allied agencies not only shaped the growth of Washington and its surroundings, but how they branched out into the corporate, consulting legal, media, and academic worlds—affording themselves not just wide-ranging policy influence but public cover. It also suggests that, as this status quo came under threat, the CIA has entered politics directly via its veterans, who are operating on behalf of its interests in plain sight—again, with cover from the power centers of Washington.  

The Suburbs of Northern Virginia…

The transition of Virginia into a blue-leaning state has been much-remarked on the past twenty years, often attributed to cosmopolitan professionals moving to the suburbs of DC or to ideological shifts among some Republicans. What goes less mentioned is that this white collar growth is directly related to the expansion of national security agencies after the attacks of September 11 and the initiation of the War on Terror. This expansion, in turn, built on earlier growth beginning during World War II.

Since 1941, when the Pentagon was constructed in a rural neighborhood in Arlington Virginia, national defense and Northern Virginia have been synonymous. But it was only in the 1950s and 1960s, with the growth of intelligence agencies during the Cold War, that Northern Virginia began becoming a colony of the security services. In the words of one scholar, “DC’s Northern Virginia landscape, inaugurated by its first modern institution, the CIA, housed America’s covert foreign policy as it turned into a way of life.”

Allen Dulles, the CIA’s first director, not only selected the site for the CIA, on a farm once owned by the owner of Washington’s media arbiter, the Washington Post; but he encouraged his top echelons of agents to move there as well. He also, along with his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, pushed for the construction of Dulles Airport, where agents on missions to Europe or the Mideast, Africa or Southeast Asia, would drive from their nearby houses and board a plane. The 35 miles between Langley and Dulles Airport became known as the “Dulles Corridor.”

This growth changed the landscape of Northern Virginia, gradually after 1950 and at lightspeed after 2001: From horse farms and ex-plantations to upscale suburbs. Voting patterns changed in turn, from southern Democrat to establishment Republican. Recently, it’s become progressive-liberal, after the War on Terror begun by George W. Bush but expanded by Barack Obama brought millennials into the enlarged covert and defense workforce.

…and the Forever Intelligence State

Throughout these years, intelligence operatives infiltrated positions of power in Washington, D.C, moving between the worlds of corporations, consultancies, and weapons and technology contractors. Coups like the one in Guatemala in 1954 were undertaken by the CIA and benefited corporate interests like United Fruit Company in which John Foster and Allen Dulles owned stock. Consultancies like Booz Allen Hamilton were contracted by the CIA to study covert operations in outposts like Egypt and the Philippines, paving the way for more aggressive tactics used in Vietnam. Fast forward to the 1990s, and Google and Microsoft were getting their decisive boosts to market dominance with intelligence money for cybersecurity.

Then there were elite law firms like the ones Restoration News has reported on in the past. The start of these legal-intelligence entanglements, again, was with the Dulles brothers, who had represented United Fruit Company from the elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell before their government service. Over time, these ties increased. Members of these firms came into government or the judiciary, and then found creative ways to expand intelligence’s power. They used legalisms to justify the CIA ignoring congressional legislation; boosted the discretion of covert agencies; and falsified information on requests for surveillance. Arguably, they were the actors most responsible for Iran Contra, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, warrantless surveillance, and 2017’s Russiagate “conspiracy.”

They were also unapologetic about the consequences. Indeed, both intelligence operatives and their abettors had a “deep sense of mission,” a belief that their training made them “the best and the brightest,” and a resulting confidence in juggling priorities, managing many affairs of the world at once. “[He was] handling Latin America and a dozen other problems” is a description of one of Kennedy’s top foreign policy advisers during the disaster that was the Bay of Pigs—suggesting the limits of the everywhere-at-once style celebrated by CIA operatives from the 1950s to today.

But these operators were also occasionally frustrated in their operations by people with less confidence in their actions. Their moves were checked by the elected branches of government: Presidents John F. Kennedy (after 1961) and Richard Nixon; Congresses of the 1970s and 1980s; and, in the 2010s, President Trump.

A Conspiracy of Silence and Consent—and the Populist Uprising Against It

One reason mainstream history hasn’t been written in a way that reveals these tensions in Washington’s security fabric is that the CIA also branched into academia—fashioning university organizations and institutions into top-down vehicles for its foreign policy aims. Yale’s Skull and Bones Club, Georgetown’s School for Strategic and International Studies, Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins—all these were seeders of generations of intelligence agents. Many of these schools are part of or linked to the fifty or so think tanks, funded by weapons contractors and reported on by me in the past, which push militarist priorities on Washington. They are the surest routes to career success for aspiring operatives who attend them. Elissa Slotkin, for one, was studying at Columbia’s SIPA on 9/11, and has cited this experience as the inspiration for her career.

Nor has academia been the only fertile ground for intelligence infiltration; media has as well. The Washington Post consulted on whether to run controversial foreign policy columns with Vietnam architects Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, close advisers to its publisher, Katharine Graham, herself an admirer of the CIA. The Post also played down the CIA’s role in leaking the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Nixon, who was trying to bring the agency under White House control. The New York Times, which had deep connections to the Kennedy White House, didn’t report on the upcoming invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs at John F. Kennedy’s request.

Fast forward forty years to the “Russiagate” fallout, and the Washington Post had as a regular columnist Michael Morrell, the impetus behind the “spies who lie” letter casting doubt on evidence of the Biden Family’s corrupt links abroad in 2020. The Atlantic, Washington’s preeminent political magazine which regularly takes a pro-intelligence line, is run by the grandson of the founder of the Nitze School who has burnished his career with an admiring and well-reviewed biography of his grandfather’s work. MSNBC regularly has as a guest John Brennan, a signatory of the “Spies who Lie Letter” and an architect of the Iraq War, drone strikes, and warrantless surveillance. Lawfare, arguably the capital’s most respected legal-security blog, partners with the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and National Security at George Mason University. Lawfare also regularly hosts Hayden himself, a “Spies who Lie” letter signatory and open opponent of President Trump’s populism.

But, recently, the CIA’s unpublicized hold on Washington has been threatened. Since the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism, post-Reagan Republicans who shared Ronald Reagan’s concerns over Leviathan government have begun to see the national security state as its own distinct threat. They have joined forces with leftists who, since the 1950s, have criticized the national security state. This new alliance is reflected in the rise of cross-party efforts between politicians on the social democratic Left and constitutional populist Right to curbs ventures by the security state. It is also reflected by the rise of bipartisan intervention-skeptical think tanks and by criticisms of foreign involvements by commentators from Left and Right.

The Counter-Opposition from Within

In this light of intelligence agencies confronting new opposition to their long-running infiltration of Washington, it’s worth re-running key points about Abigail Spanberger’s and Elissa Slotkin’s rise covered in a recent Restoration News report.

• They entered politics in 2018 explicitly to respond to what they saw as President Trump’s attack on intelligence agencies.

• They were endorsed by a bipartisan cohort of intelligence operators linked to defense contractors and to protecting intelligence agencies from popular politics.

• They have garnered favorable coverage from The Washington Post, as well as from The Atlantic and Lawfare: all highly connected organs of establishment Washington.

• They and their endorsers, media backers, and funders are tied to the weapons and consulting contractors who, via their links to the intelligence and defense communities, make Washington run.

• The bills they have endorsed in Congress, in the name of bipartisanship, have helped these very interests.

Considered against the long history of intelligence agencies infiltrating Washington institutions, these facts about Spanberger and Slotkin make their rise look like part of an intentional play.  Namely, the active effort of a small group of intelligence operators to enter politics with the support of Washington powers-that-be; then thwart policymaking that diminishes intelligence agencies’ authority.

Reinforcing this perception is the presence of Will Hurd, the other intelligence operative besides Spanberger and Slotkin to win a congressional election in 2018. Hurd, who ran as a Republican, lasted in Congress until 2024, when he announced his presidential endorsement for Nikki Haley… and then his retirement. Never before had either two or three former CIA officers served together in Congress; in fact, before 2018 just one former officer had ever served.

Also reinforcing it is the identity of Abigail Spanberger’s successor in the 7th Congressional District on her retirement from Congress: Eugene Vindman, the brother of Alexander Vindman and a former National Security council staffer deeply tied into intelligence plays against President Trump.

This many ex-intelligence agents or intelligence players haven’t been this close to power before, and they’re likely to get even closer. Both Spanberger and Slotkin will be at least considered for vice presidential nominee or possible cabinet appointees for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2028. Alternatively, it’s perfectly possible that Spanberger, should she win the governorship and serve her single term, would move to the Senate and join Slotin as an influential voice. In any or all of these roles, both women could work to reduce congressional investigations of the CIA. They could also promote the agency as an alternative to “forever wars” abroad—encouraging covert missions of the kind that have gotten us into such trouble in the past. The benefit of the CIA, after all, has always been seen to be that it offers America the chance to affect other countries without committing troops or prestige, by using covertness to maintain “plausible deniability.” From the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to the Russiagate scandal in 2017, these expectations have never worked out.

It's not encouraging, in this context, that Spanberger’s and Slotkin’s belief in the agency, and what it taught them, seems absolute.  Elissa Slotkin’s description to Lawfare of what she learned at the CIA is telling:

At CIA one day it’s a nuclear program, another day it’s a drug cartel . . . right, like, I don’t know anything about any of these things, but I need to learn very quickly . . . and I need to constantly be attuned to . . . what are the unknowns and the things we need to know.

This is a lot like the description of Kennedy’s top adviser during the Bay of Pigs (“handling Latin America and a dozen other problems”) and the Bush Administration’s famous “known unknowns” over Iraq. And it suggests operators un-persuadably over-confident in their ability to manage the world. It’s also the opposite of what Americans have said, through the past few election cycles, they want: leaders who respect not their own management acumen but the will of the electorate.

How to Fight Back 

Stopping a problem as deep-rooted, subtle, longstanding, and fast-progressing as the intelligence capture of American politics is outside the bounds of a traditional party platform. Indeed, until the 1950s, party politics never had to grapple with a “national security state” at all. But today the CIA has to be managed by party politics, which can push policies that curb these agencies’ power:

• They can ensure aggressive oversight of intelligence agencies’ corporate and consulting contracts so that a few defense contractors don’t dominate policy and politics.

• They can monitor intelligence veterans’ ties to media and academia, and cancel the security clearances of those who use their security credentials to push political lines, advance certain causes inside the academy, or support certain politicians.

• They can link the intelligence service of people like Spanberger and Slotkin, which both have used as campaign selling points, not to patriotism but to loyalty to intelligence agencies at the expense of the American people.

This is the kind of consistent push it takes to de-weaponize intelligence and its corporate, media, academic, and government sponsors. But, so far, nothing of this nature has been forthcoming from the Second Trump Administration, which, unlike in the First Term, seems to see the military corporate intelligence apparatus as a tool to be used in its policy agenda, rather than a threat to our constitutional republic that needs to be dismantled or curbed. 

But, as a further Restoration News report will show, the threat of these military-corporate-intelligence players among the Democrats to Americans is not just there in the abstract. It is directly political, and will affect our daily lives. Namely, Spanberger, Slotkin, and other rising politicians like Jake Auchincloss and Tom Suozzi and Ritchie Torres, abetted by journalistic helpers from The Atlantic and The New York Times and nonprofit helpers from the Center for American Progress, are bringing their version of top-down military corporate governance to American cities—via the new centrist-Democratic agenda of Abundance.