The spies are coming in from the cold
Formerly secretive agencies are putting on a public face with their fate in the balance following November's election
Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir, a once-secretive company that was partly funded by the CIA’s venture capital arm, talked extensively about its work Friday on Bill Maher’s show. He touted its use of “weapons-grade software” to help national security agencies identify threats, win wars and keep the peace, boasting, “We had the biggest impact on anti-terror of any company in the world.”
In London, the chiefs of the CIA and MI6 made their first-ever joint public appearance at a Financial Times event this month to warn of risks to the international order.
And even the once highly-secret National Security Agency is getting in on the act. It has come out with a podcast whose title spoofs the agency’s long history of avoiding the public eye: “No such podcast.”
Spying in the 21st century is a far different business than it was when John le Carré wrote his novel, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” in 1963. In a preface written 50 years after it was first published, le Carré recalled that he wrote the book at the age of 30, “under intense, unshared, personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.”
As he noted, “In the sixties — and right up to the present day — the identity of a member of the British Secret Services was and is, quite rightly, a State secret. To divulge it is a crime.” Coming in from the cold, in le Carré’s terminology, meant to retire from actively practicing espionage.
Telling and selling
While they still guard agents’ identities, agencies have grown accustomed to telling — and selling — their story to the public. “We are the Nation's first line of defense,” the CIA website declares. “We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.”
President Joe Biden’s administration famously declassified intelligence to warn the public that Russian President Vladimir Putin was amassing forces to prepare for invading Ukraine.
“There’s a lot more public exposure,” former CIA official Douglas London told me. “It’s a witting outcome from the 9/11 Commission to increase transparency between the intel community and the US public…. We’ve got this intelligence, how can we action it?”
London retired in 2019 after a 34-year career as a Senior Operations Officer, Chief of Station and CIA’s Counterterrorism Chief for South and Southwest Asia. He is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of the book “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.”
“Seizing the narrative has become very important in this social media age,” London noted. Executive orders by US presidents have restricted the tactics intelligence agencies can use covertly. Much of the regulation of the intelligence community occurs by executive order rather than through laws passed by Congress, London noted.
“Seizing the narrative has become very important in this social media age.”
For example, Executive Order 12333, originally issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, sets limits on how agencies can collect, retain and disseminate information about US citizens and permanent residents.
By speaking publicly, he said, agencies can accomplish many of the same objectives they once would have tried to achieve in secret.
But there are downsides, given the risk that declassifying data and images can give adversaries a window into US intelligence sources and methods.
Project 2025 and beyond
There’s also a political dimension to the outspokenness of the spies, since former President Donald Trump has made clear his dissatisfaction with US intelligence agencies and suggested that if he is elected in November, things will change.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial agenda for a second Trump term, includes a section on the intelligence community.
“The 32-page chapter, part of a larger blueprint for a second Trump administration, reads like a retribution manifesto for Trump and his perceived grievances with the U.S. intelligence community,” wrote Lynn Schmidt, a columnist and editorial board member at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As with related chapters focused on national security, Project 2025’s recommendations for the intelligence community would protect one man and make the rest of America and the world much less safe.”

The US intelligence community is composed of 18 agencies and spends $81.5 billion a year, according to a 2020 estimate by the Center for American Progress. Tens of thousands of people work in the intelligence agencies.
Trump has denied that Project 2025 represents his plan for a second term, though many officials connected with his administration had a hand in drafting it.
The Project 2025 chapter on the intelligence community is under the byline of Dustin J. Carmack, a former fellow at the Heritage Institute who served as Chief of Staff for the Director of National Intelligence during the Trump administration and left Heritage to join Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ unsuccessful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.
The intelligence community (IC), Project 2025 recommends, “must restore confidence in its political neutrality to rectify the damage done by the actions of former IC leaders and personnel regarding the claims of Trump–Russia collusion following the 2016 election and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation and media revelations of its existence during the 2020 election.”
As the Wall Street Journal reported this month, the lawyers defending Trump against a since-dismissed indictment on a charge of mishandling classified documents said “one of his defenses would be to demonstrate that the ‘intelligence community has operated with a bias against him,’ offering a litany of grievances dating back to the first impeachment inquiry while he was president…”
“Current and former senior intelligence officials are warning that Trump during a second term might seek to retaliate and harness America’s powerful spy agencies for his own political purposes,” according to the Journal. It quoted Trump adviser Brian Hughes, saying, “President Trump is committed to returning the intelligence community to its proper constitutional and statutory limits.”
A president has the power to staff the top ranks of the intelligence community. And given the pivotal role executive orders play in governing the intelligence agencies, any president has the power to fundamentally change their ground rules without having to seek approval by Congress.