Looking for something new to read, I snagged Brad Thor’s Shadow of Doubt from the public library. Thor’s novels are best-sellers and familiar to me, but I’d never read them. Having gotten through Shadow of Doubt, the odds are strong that I won’t attempt any of the others.

Thor’s thriller features three separate plots. First, the CIA has tracked a Russian aircraft carrying a mysterious cargo to Belarus, possibly some sort of a nuclear weapon for use in the ongoing war in the Ukraine. In Paris, a French intelligence agent, Karine Brunelle, and a policeman, Vincent Gilbert, discover a web of high-level government officials who are feeding information to the Russians. Meanwhile, ex-SEAL and top spy Scott Harvath and his fiancée, Norwegian agent Solvi Kolstad, go on the run to protect a Russian defector in Solvi’s custody.

Those who enjoy thrillers with lots of hi-tech gizmos and gunplay will enjoy Shadow of Doubt. As for me, the shoot-outs became a bit much—I lost track of the number of Russian corpses Harvath and his men left behind, and the ambush with bullets flying in the Bois de Boulogne seemed absurd. The descriptions of rich food, wine, and expensive spirits consumed by these spies and bureaucrats became cloying, and the anti-Russian strain that runs throughout the book soon read like propaganda.

Most off-putting, however, was the book’s depiction of the Central Intelligence Agency and related clandestine organizations. The thriller is actually a fantasy. The author generally presents agents as dedicated professionals, bright men and women who live and work only to serve their country, and who rarely fail in their assigned missions.

The last 50 years or so tell a different story. Here are just a few examples.

In the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched a major attack that stunned U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. American intelligence had failed to detect the build-up to this attack.

American intelligence failures in the late 1970s in Iran played a role in establishing that country as an Islamic theocracy, with negative results  we’re still living with today.

There is debate over whether the CIA knew of the impending fall of the Soviet Union. It seems most likely that the agency was aware of the economic instability of the USSR, but failed dismally in its analysis of that data.

After the disaster of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which demonstrated once again flaws in the intelligence community, lawmakers created  the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate data collection and analysis among U.S. agencies..

The belief that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction led to the 2003 invasion of that country by America and its allies. No such weapons were found. In this case, the intelligence agencies were again either faulty in their analytical skills or had engaged in deception.

The largest most recent debacle was the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. Once again there are questions as to whether our intelligence agencies predicted this catastrophe, yet even to an ignorant observer like me, the answer seems obvious. If the cloak-and-dagger gang couldn’t tell after years of an American presence in Afghanistan whether the Afghan forces would stand against the Taliban rather than melt away as they did, then intelligence was not only poor; it may have been nonexistent.

Missing from this list are many other failures, including terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11.

Which brings us to Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard, Donald Trump’s nominee for the post of director of national intelligence, recently underwent quite a grilling by senators regarding her qualifications for this position and for her allegedly controversial statements regarding international affairs. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, Gabbard wrote that “this war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border.” Many of us find nothing untoward in that idea, but D.C. politics, like Brad Thor’s spy thrillers, demand a Russian bogeyman. 

Whether Gabbard wins this post is immaterial to my arguments here. How she was perceived is the point, and given the attacks on her, Gabbard is clearly viewed as a threat to bureaucrats and certain politicians, especially considering she will be serving a president who was raked over the coals by the intelligence community in his first term. One of their nastier stunts, the false document signed by 51 members of this community that Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation, contributed to Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.

In an article at The Federalist, Margot Cleveland took a look at this hoax, then added:

Harder to address, though, is the other half of the story—something Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer spoke of in glee, in response to then-president-elect Trump’s criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies. “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s host Rachel Maddow.

Think on that a moment: a senator finds humor in the fact that the intelligence community can crush an elected president of the United States.

Senator Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican who supports Gabbard, said in praise of her, “I think that she’s an outsider, a disrupter.”

Outsiders and disrupters like Trump and Gabbard are exactly what American needs and what the intelligence community and their political backers fear.