How CIA Director John Ratcliffe Has Revitalized Spy Agency in President’s First Year Back
CIA Director John Ratcliffe has emerged as President Donald Trump’s “silent hammer,” a source close to the White House told Breitbart News for an in-depth profile of the world’s premier spy agency in the first year of Trump’s return to office.
This source specifically highlighted how Trump sent Ratcliffe to Venezuela just 12 days after the daring mission in which US forces captured now-deposed leader Nicolas Maduro. Ratcliffe met with Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez, Trump’s top aide and the first cabinet official to visit the country since Maduro’s capture.
“Ratcliffe has become Trump’s silent hammer,” said the source close to the White House. “He comes in, completes the mission the president gave him, then disappears into the shadows. The Agency appears to have taken the same approach, so Trump actually deserves credit for transforming the CIA into an instrument of America First power.”
For this story, Breitbart News spoke with CIA officials, Director Ratcliffe himself and numerous other members of the administration and those familiar with the Agency’s actions, for a year-long review of how Ratcliffe handled overhauling and reforming the CIA according to Trump’s vision – a monumental task given the damage done to the Intelligence Community (IC) under previous administrations and under previous CIA directors, particularly John Brennan, during the Barack Obama administration.
Photo courtesy of the CIA
“Under John Ratcliffe’s leadership, the CIA is once again focused on its mission and executing on President Trump’s national security priorities,” CIA Public Affairs Director Liz Lyons told Breitbart News. “This is a more aggressive CIA, willing to take risks to give the United States a decisive advantage. In less than a year, the CIA has helped achieve historic victories – particularly in the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere – to safeguard American interests and strengthen our national security.”
One of the biggest flaws that Brennan and others who politicized intelligence introduced to the CIA was the dwindling of Agency assets and spies over time – basically, as the CIA focused more on policy, it focused less on critical mission objectives.
One of Ratcliffe’s major accomplishments so far as CIA director has been the complete dismantling of any diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — programs within the Agency. He disbanded all DEI initiatives and eliminated all DEI-related programs, and he returned the CIA to a culture of merit.
Ratcliffe has also been under transparency at the CIA since his confirmation. He released thousands of documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He also commissioned CIA professionals with decades of combined experience to conduct lessons-learned reviews regarding analytical procedures used in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) shortly after the 2016 presidential election – where the IC reached inaccurate conclusions about Trump and Russia – and declassified that review so the public could see it.
He also worked with Attorney General Pam Bondi to declassify the intelligence underlying the so-called Durham Report showing that “Russia collusion” had indeed been falsified as part of a coordinated operation to destroy Trump’s presidency during his first term — and he declassified and released a previous assessment from 2016 that raised concerns about then-Vice President Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings in Ukraine. He even publicly stated early last year that the CIA believed the COVID virus was more likely the result of a lab leak than a natural origin.
Photo courtesy of the White House
“I don’t want to comment much on criminal cases that the Justice Department might review, but I will say this: Individuals in the intelligence community who have abused the public trust, used their role against President Trump, and politicized intelligence, should be held accountable,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News when asked about all of that and whether consequences might be imminent for those who have made mistakes in the past. “We made it clear from day one that we would no longer tolerate it; if you are a political operative rather than a public servant, you must go. We are now focused on our mission at the CIA, and this has clearly contributed to the Agency’s ability to meet the expectations of the President and the American people.”
Ratcliffe keeps a printed chart on his desk at CIA headquarters in Langley showing the Agency’s dwindling asset count before Trump returned to the White House — numbers now on the rise with Trump in the Oval Office and Ratcliffe in command of the CIA — and he is known for pulling out that chart in meetings with top officials. He reminds these senior operations officers that, along with foreign intelligence collection, the effectiveness of CIA resources – which depends on higher numbers – is the metric by which the CIA is constantly measured.
When asked about the legendary painting, Ratcliffe told Breitbart News that he almost had it framed and hung in his office, but decided against it because it contained classified information.
“I considered framing it and hanging it on my office wall, but the measurements are classified and sometimes people in my office aren’t allowed to see that kind of thing,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News. “But that’s the scorecard. Are we recruiting assets? Are we stealing our adversaries’ secrets and giving President Trump the best information possible so he can continue to lead and deliver results for the American people? We are relentless about this.”
Ratcliffe’s CIA has made efforts to recruit American assets directly from America’s greatest adversaries. For example, the CIA last year released a series of videos in Mandarin aimed at recruiting Chinese officials to help the American cause. Agency sources told Breitbart News that these efforts have been enormously successful in attracting new volunteers from inside and outside the Chinese government and securing other valuable resources. Countering China is, of course, one of Trump and Ratcliffe’s long-standing priorities for the United States.
Photo courtesy of the White House
The CIA has also taken major steps under the leadership of Ratcliffe and Deputy Director Michael Ellis over the past year to streamline the Agency’s operations, including merging two offices that separately focused on the Western Hemisphere and counternarcotics activities into a single unit: the Americas Counternarcotics Mission Center (ACMC). The Agency has also been working more closely than ever with the FBI – as Ratcliffe previously told Breitbart News in an interview just after his confirmation, his goal, given his close friendship with FBI Director Kash Patel, was to see the two entities work better together – easing historic tensions between the CIA and FBI. The CIA also launched a new Mission Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), aimed at implementing innovative strategies for technology as both a tool and a target. Ratcliffe is also working to find ways to best utilize artificial intelligence (AI) in the world of intelligence.
Over the past year, the CIA has also – true to Ratcliffe’s persona as Trump’s “silent hammer” – contributed significantly to several of the US government’s largest operations around the world, including the most recent Operation Absolute Resolve, which saw the capture of Maduro. But that wasn’t the only important issue: The CIA also participated in the U.S. bombing raid on Iran’s disintegrating nuclear program last summer through Operation Midnight Hammer and also helped capture the mastermind of the Abbey Gate bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Afghanistan during the chaotic and deadly withdrawal of U.S. forces from there during former President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
Ratcliffe told Breitbart News that he was especially proud of the capture of “Jafar,” or Mohammad Sharifullah, during the first months of Trump’s return to the White House because it sent a massive message to the world that Trump would no longer tolerate the proliferation of terrorism like Biden did.
Photo courtesy of the White House
“It sent an early message that President Trump was changing paradigms all over the world,” Ratcliffe said of Jafar’s capture. “This level of cooperation with the Pakistanis is a direct result of the 2024 election outcome. The Biden administration’s conduct in the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a national embarrassment that cost the lives of our military. President Trump immediately restored American credibility and delivered justice to these families. He immediately set the tone.”
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC), told Breitbart News that when he looked into Jafar’s eyes upon his capture, he saw “apocalyptic evil.” In this interview with Gorka recorded at the White House in the spring, Gorka paid special tribute to the intelligence community – and in particular the CIA and Ratcliffe – for their role in locating and capturing Jafar.
Beyond the captures of Maduro and Jafar, the CIA also played an instrumental role in Operation Midnight Hammer – the US military airstrikes that wiped out Iran’s nuclear program overnight. CIA sources told Breitbart News that the Agency’s technical collection helped inform military planning for the strikes and, subsequently, helped the United States correctly assess that Iran’s nuclear program was decapitated for the time being.
