The Incomplete Picture of Democracy

Democracy is usually described as a system in which citizens choose their leaders through elections. That description is accurate, but it is incomplete.

Citizens cannot make political choices without information. Before anyone votes, he or she must decide which candidates are trustworthy, which allegations are credible, which threats are real, which wars are justified, which institutions deserve confidence, and which competing explanations of events make the most sense.

The vote is therefore the end of a much longer process. That process begins with information.

This creates an important vulnerability. A government does not necessarily have to manipulate the ballots to influence an election. It can influence the information environment from which citizens make their decisions.

The Special Power of Intelligence Agencies

That is where intelligence agencies become particularly important.

Intelligence agencies possess information unavailable to ordinary citizens. They have confidential sources, classified documents, surveillance capabilities, investigative files, foreign intelligence relationships, and specialized analysts. Those capabilities are necessary for national security. But they also create an extraordinary concentration of informational power.

An intelligence agency can potentially declare that a source is credible—or that it is compromised. It can say that certain information is legitimate—or that it is foreign disinformation. It can describe an individual as a legitimate political actor—or as a conduit for foreign influence.

The public may have no way to independently examine the evidence behind those judgments. The underlying information is classified.

This creates what might be called epistemic asymmetry: the government knows things the citizen cannot know.

Secrecy is unavoidable in intelligence work. Yet secrecy creates a democratic problem. If the institution that possesses the information also controls its classification, interpretation, and dissemination, it possesses unusual power to shape what the public believes.

The central argument of this chapter follows from that fact. Intelligence agencies do not have to falsify an election to influence its outcome. They can potentially influence the information environment in which citizens decide how to vote. That is a much subtler form of political power. And it is much harder to detect.

What the “Scam” Actually Means

The word “scam” needs to be defined carefully.

The argument is not that intelligence officers routinely fabricate evidence. That claim would be both unsupported and unnecessarily partisan.

The more interesting problem is subtler. It concerns what happens when real information is selectively interpreted, classified, discredited, or presented to the public with a degree of certainty that the underlying evidence does not warrant.

Consider a simple progression.

An intelligence analyst writes: “There is some evidence suggesting X.”

A supervisor summarizes: “Evidence suggests X.”

A senior official says: “We assess X.”

A politician declares: “The intelligence community knows X.”

A journalist reports: “Intelligence officials say X.”

The public eventually hears: “X has been confirmed.”

The underlying evidence has not necessarily changed. But the certainty surrounding it has.

That transformation can occur without anyone consciously lying. Bureaucracies simplify. Managers remove qualifications. Politicians prefer certainty. Journalists need concise narratives. The public wants clear answers. Uncertainty gradually disappears.

This is one of the most important lessons from historical intelligence failures. The problem is not always fabricated intelligence. Sometimes the problem is uncertainty becoming certainty.

The Historical Warning of COINTELPRO

The United States has already experienced the consequences of intelligence agencies becoming involved in domestic political affairs. The clearest historical example is COINTELPRO.

The FBI began the program in the 1950s and eventually expanded its activities to numerous political and activist organizations. The Church Committee’s investigation in the 1970s documented extensive abuses, including surveillance and efforts to disrupt domestic political groups.

The importance of this history is not that it proves the FBI is inherently corrupt. It does not. The deeper lesson is institutional.

The Bureau was operating in a period when communism, racial unrest, political radicalism, civil disorder, and national-security threats were frequently viewed through the same lens. Some of those threats were genuine. But the definition of a security threat gradually expanded into territory involving legitimate political activity.

Protecting the country began to overlap with protecting the political order.

That distinction must never disappear. An intelligence agency can legitimately investigate someone who is secretly working for a foreign government. It cannot legitimately investigate someone merely because that person’s political views are inconvenient.

The danger is that the line between those two activities can become blurred. Once it does, intelligence power can become political power.

The Lesson of Iraq

The Iraq War provides another important example, though the mechanism was different.

The problem was not primarily domestic political surveillance. It was the transformation of uncertain intelligence into a powerful political justification for war.

The British Chilcot Inquiry examined the intelligence used in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion and found serious problems in how the evidence concerning Iraqi weapons capabilities was assessed and presented.

The broader lesson is crucial. Intelligence does not have to be deliberately fabricated to produce catastrophic political consequences. It can be wrong. It can be misunderstood. It can be selectively interpreted. Or it can be presented with more confidence than the underlying evidence deserves.

Once intelligence becomes the foundation for a major political decision, the consequences can extend far beyond the intelligence community. A mistaken assessment can become a war. A war can become regime change. Regime change can destabilize an entire region. Regional instability can create consequences lasting for decades.

Intelligence integrity is therefore not merely a bureaucratic concern. It is a geopolitical concern.

The Paradox of Foreign Influence Operations

The modern problem becomes even more complicated because foreign governments really do conduct influence operations.

Russia has done it. China does it. Iran does it. Other governments do it as well. The United States itself has historically conducted influence operations abroad.

The basic premise of counterintelligence is therefore legitimate: foreign governments really do attempt to manipulate democratic societies. But that creates a paradox.

Suppose a foreign government discovers genuine information damaging to an American politician and begins promoting it. The information is now associated with a foreign influence operation. Does that make the information false?

No.

A foreign government can amplify something that is true. It can amplify something that is false. It can amplify something partly true. It can exploit a genuine scandal. It can manufacture a scandal.

The fact of foreign amplification tells us something about the source and strategic context. It does not, by itself, tell us whether the underlying information is true.

That distinction is critical. Otherwise foreign governments gain an extraordinary weapon: they can make information politically toxic simply by touching it.

The “Conduit” Problem

This becomes particularly important when intelligence agencies characterize Americans as conduits of foreign information.

There is a huge difference between knowingly working for a foreign government and unknowingly repeating information that originated with a foreign government. There is also a difference between foreign amplification and foreign control.

Consider how a label can evolve.

“This person received information from a foreign-linked source”
becomes
“This person has connections to foreign influence,”
which becomes
“This person is a conduit for foreign influence,”
which eventually becomes
“This person spreads foreign disinformation.”

At every stage the language grows more definitive. The original evidence may not have changed. But the political meaning has.

Once someone is publicly understood to be a foreign-influence conduit, his or her credibility can collapse. Journalists may stop using the person as a source. Politicians may avoid association. Social-media platforms may scrutinize the person’s material. Citizens may simply dismiss whatever the person says.

An intelligence characterization has therefore become a political fact. And the public may have no ability to examine the evidence behind it.

The Difficult Case of 2016

This is why the 2016 election remains such an important case study. Two propositions should not be confused.

First, Russian interference in the 2016 election was real. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the matter extensively and concluded that Russia conducted an influence campaign intended to interfere with the election and undermine confidence in American democratic institutions. That finding should not be dismissed merely because it has become politically inconvenient for some Americans. Foreign interference is a genuine national-security threat.

But the second proposition is equally important. The existence of a genuine foreign threat does not mean every American response to that threat was necessarily correct.

An intelligence agency can correctly identify Russian interference and still make mistakes in a particular investigation. An investigator can have a legitimate reason to be suspicious and still draw an incorrect conclusion. A source can be unreliable without every piece of information from that source being false. And information can be foreign-amplified without being foreign-manufactured.

Those distinctions are the heart of the problem.

The 2020 Case and Operation Round River

The patterns described earlier did not end in 2016. They appeared again, in different form, around the 2020 election.

In October 2020, the New York Post published a series of stories based on material from a laptop that had been left at a computer repair shop in Delaware. The material appeared to belong to Hunter Biden and contained emails and other records related to his business dealings in Ukraine and China. Within days, more than fifty former intelligence officials signed a public letter. The letter stated that the appearance of the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The letter was careful in its wording. It said the signatories did not know whether the emails were genuine and that they had no evidence of Russian involvement. Yet the overall effect of the letter was to cast serious doubt on the story’s legitimacy. Major media outlets treated the material with extreme caution. Social media platforms restricted its circulation. In a presidential debate, the candidate whose family was implicated cited the letter as evidence that the story was a Russian plant.

Later examination showed that the laptop was authentic. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had taken possession of it in late 2019 and had verified that it belonged to Hunter Biden by matching device identifiers to his accounts. The contents were subsequently used in legal proceedings. The claim that the material was Russian disinformation did not hold.

What matters for this chapter is not the personal conduct revealed on the laptop. It is the speed and authority with which a group of former intelligence officials shaped the public’s ability to evaluate information during an election. Their collective institutional prestige carried weight that ordinary political commentary does not. The public was told, in effect, that experienced professionals saw the classic signs of a foreign operation. Most citizens had no independent way to test that judgment.

Declassified material released in subsequent years pointed to a related internal effort known as Operation Round River. According to those records, analysts associated with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force began gathering earlier reporting from confidential human sources that contained derogatory information about the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine. That reporting was then flagged or annotated in ways that marked it as Russian disinformation. Certain officials, members of Congress, and journalists were also characterized in internal documents as potential “conduits.”

The precise scope and intent of Round River remain subjects of ongoing scrutiny. What is clear is the institutional pattern: information that might have been politically inconvenient was processed through the language of foreign influence and thereby rendered suspect. Once again, the public’s ability to weigh evidence was affected by characterizations it could not independently verify.

The Broader Pattern Beyond the United States

These dynamics are not unique to one country.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, received systematic reporting from the country’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, on the internal deliberations and campaign plans of his main political rivals in the Social Democratic Party. The intelligence relationship gave the governing party a tactical advantage that ordinary political competition does not provide. Historians later documented the practice as a clear example of an intelligence service being used for domestic political purposes.

Other democracies have faced similar pressures. Britain’s intelligence agencies operate under comparatively strong statutory and parliamentary oversight, including the Intelligence and Security Committee and independent judicial commissioners. Even there, questions periodically arise about the boundary between national security and political sensitivity. In various European systems, domestic security services have at times expanded their focus from genuine foreign threats to broader categories of political or social dissent. The pattern is familiar: the definition of a security threat can widen, and once it does, the tools of intelligence become available for use against political competitors or inconvenient narratives.

The common thread is institutional. Intelligence agencies exist to manage uncertainty and secret information. When that function intersects with electoral politics, the temptation to resolve uncertainty in ways that favor one side is real. The danger is not limited to any single party or ideology.

Geopolitical Consequences

When intelligence power is perceived as having been used for domestic political advantage, the damage is not only domestic.

Public trust in the institutions that produce national-security assessments declines. Citizens become more willing to dismiss official warnings about foreign interference, because they suspect those warnings may themselves be selective. Foreign adversaries notice. They exploit the resulting polarization. Influence operations become more effective precisely because the target society no longer trusts its own information authorities.

There is also a longer-term strategic cost. Intelligence agencies that are seen as political actors find it harder to recruit sources, maintain liaison relationships, and speak with credibility to their own policymakers. The credibility of the entire intelligence enterprise depends on a reputation for analytical integrity that is independent of the electoral calendar. Once that reputation is compromised, recovery is slow.

Safeguards

The problem cannot be solved by abolishing secrecy or by pretending that foreign influence operations do not exist. Both secrecy and counterintelligence remain necessary. The task is to design institutional restraints that reduce the risk of political misuse.

Several principles follow.

First, the distinction between foreign intelligence and domestic political activity must remain bright. Investigating Americans solely because their political views are inconvenient, or because information damaging to a preferred candidate has surfaced, crosses a line that history has already shown to be dangerous.

Second, public characterizations that rely on classified information should be subject to higher internal standards of evidence and review when they touch elections. The progression from “some evidence suggests” to “we assess” to “the intelligence community knows” should not be allowed to outrun the underlying material, especially in the final weeks of a campaign.

Third, oversight must be real and bipartisan. Congressional intelligence committees, inspectors general, and independent review mechanisms exist for a reason. They lose effectiveness when they become captured by one political faction or when they are starved of information.

Fourth, former intelligence officials retain the right to speak as private citizens. They do not retain the right to wrap partisan or campaign-driven statements in the residual authority of the institutions they once led without clear disclosure of the limits of their knowledge.

Finally, culture inside the agencies matters as much as formal rules. Analysts and officers need institutional protection when they resist pressure to harden uncertain judgments for political convenience. The alternative is a slow erosion of the very integrity that makes intelligence valuable in the first place.

Intelligence agencies will always possess asymmetric knowledge. The democratic question is whether that asymmetry is used to inform the public’s choices or to shape them. The historical record, from COINTELPRO through Iraq to the episodes of 2016 and 2020, shows that the second path is always available. The safeguards exist only if they are deliberately maintained.

Closing Reflections

The central claim of this chapter is modest but consequential. Intelligence agencies do not need to alter ballots or stuff ballot boxes to affect the outcome of an election. They can shape the information environment in which citizens form their judgments. Because much of the underlying evidence remains classified, the public often has no practical way to test the characterizations that are offered in its name.

That power is not inherently illegitimate. Secrecy and specialized knowledge are unavoidable features of modern statecraft. The difficulty arises when those tools are applied, even with the best of stated intentions, to domestic political contests. History shows that the boundary between protecting the country and protecting a preferred political order can blur. Once it does, the institutions charged with providing objective assessments risk becoming participants in the very contests they are supposed to remain above.

The episodes examined here—from COINTELPRO to the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq, from the difficult case of 2016 to the events of 2020—illustrate different versions of the same problem. Sometimes the issue is overconfidence in uncertain judgments. Sometimes it is the rapid elevation of provisional assessments into public certainties. Sometimes it is the application of the language of foreign influence to information that later proves authentic. In each instance the effect is similar: the citizen’s capacity for independent evaluation is narrowed by claims that cannot be independently checked.

Foreign influence operations are real. Russia, China, Iran, and others continue to attempt them. Ignoring that reality would be reckless. Yet the existence of genuine foreign threats does not automatically validate every domestic response to them. An agency can correctly identify foreign interference and still mishandle a particular piece of information. A source can be compromised without every claim associated with that source being false. Foreign amplification of damaging material does not, by itself, establish that the material is fabricated. These distinctions are not pedantic. They are the difference between counterintelligence and political intervention.

Other democracies have confronted versions of the same tension. The German experience of the 1950s and 1960s, the periodic controversies surrounding British agencies, and comparable episodes elsewhere all point to the same institutional vulnerability. Wherever intelligence services exist, the temptation to use asymmetric knowledge for domestic advantage is present. The strength of a democracy is measured in part by how successfully it resists that temptation.

The geopolitical stakes are high. When large segments of the public come to believe that intelligence assessments are shaped by partisan considerations, trust in warnings about actual foreign threats declines. Adversaries notice and adjust their methods accordingly. Polarization deepens. The very institutions designed to protect democratic decision-making become sources of democratic distrust.

No set of formal rules can eliminate the problem entirely. Secrecy will always create asymmetry. Officials will always face pressure, subtle or overt, to support preferred narratives. What can be done is to maintain clear norms, effective oversight, and a professional culture that treats analytical integrity as non-negotiable—especially when elections are near.

The vote remains the formal expression of popular sovereignty. But the quality of that vote depends on the quality of the information that precedes it. Intelligence agencies, by the nature of their work, sit at a critical point in that information chain. The intelligence trap is the risk that their necessary powers become instruments for quietly directing, rather than merely informing, the choices of free citizens. Avoiding that trap is not a partisan project. It is a condition of democratic self-government.