The Deep State’s Op-Ed Machine: Why Retired CIA Officers Keep Writing The Same Column

This morning, The New York Times published an opinion essay under the headline “I Worked for the C.I.A. for 28 Years. Bill Pulte Is a Dangerous Choice.” [note: the NYT frequently changes the headline throughout the day] The author is John Sipher, and the Times presents him exactly as the headline suggests, as a retired veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service who left in 2014 as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, a former station chief, a decorated professional. Every word of that résumé is true. It is also, for the purpose of evaluating his argument, radically incomplete. The question a careful reader should ask is not whether Sipher served honorably in the CIA. He certainly could have. The real question is what he has been doing for the 12 years since he left, and why the Times declined to tell you.

Begin with a concept. Call it credential laundering. The analogy to money laundering is exact and worth spelling out. Dirty money enters a legitimate business, passes through its books, and emerges clean on the other side, indistinguishable from honest revenue. A partisan attack works the same way. It enters the system as ordinary political advocacy, the kind any campaign operative might produce. It passes through an institutional credential, in this case 28 years at Langley. And it emerges on the opinion page of the Times as neutral expertise, the sober warning of a disinterested patriot. The argument has not changed. Only its appearance has. The credential is the washing machine.

Now apply the concept to the author in question. Since retiring, Sipher has built a second career, and it is not the career of a neutral analyst. His own institutional biographies identify him as a senior advisor to the Lincoln Project, National Security Leaders for Biden, the Steady State, and the Council on American Security. Consider what each of those entails. The Lincoln Project is a political action committee created explicitly to defeat President Trump and elect his Democratic opponents. National Security Leaders for Biden was, as the name announces, a campaign organ. These are not think tanks. They are electoral weapons, and Sipher advised them. A reader might reasonably wonder whether the Times would publish a piece attacking a Democratic appointee by a senior adviser to a pro-Trump super PAC while identifying the author only as a retired civil servant. The question answers itself.

The advocacy did not stop at advisory titles. In October 2020, Sipher signed the now infamous letter from former intelligence officials asserting that the Hunter Biden laptop story carried the hallmarks of a Russian information operation. The laptop was authentic. House investigators later established that the letter’s genesis traced to outreach from Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken to former acting CIA director Michael Morell, who acknowledged he wanted to hand the Biden campaign a debate talking point. That episode is the purest specimen of the genre we will ever have: retired intelligence credentials deployed, on a compressed campaign timeline, to neutralize a damaging and accurate story about a Democratic candidate’s family. Sipher’s signature is on it. The Times did not mention that either.

Nor was the laptop letter an aberration. In 2017, Sipher publicly defended the Steele dossier’s collusion framework as generally credible, a judgment that aged about as well as the dossier itself. In 2019, he argued it was entirely plausible that the president of the United States had been compromised by Russian intelligence, hedging only that Trump was not an agent in the technical sense, a distinction that comforts no one and concedes everything about the author’s priors. This spring, writing in The Bulwark, the house organ of professional NeverTrump opinion, he accused the administration of doing structural damage to American intelligence. In May, weeks before the Pulte essay, he attacked Tulsi Gabbard’s tenure at ODNI and dismissed Richard Grenell as an unserious loyalist. The Pulte column, in other words, is not a cri de coeur from a troubled retiree. It is the latest installment in a continuous, decade-long publication schedule, and the schedule has a single subject.

Here a fair-minded reader will object, and the objection deserves a serious answer. Is Sipher not entitled to his views? Of course he is. Retired officers do not surrender their First Amendment rights at the Langley gift shop. Might his criticisms of Pulte have merit on their own terms? Perhaps some do. The statutory requirement that a DNI possess extensive national security expertise is real. These are legitimate points for debate, and conservatives should debate them on the merits. The complaint here is narrower and more important. It is not that Sipher spoke. It is that the Times dressed him in the costume of neutrality. The reader was told the author’s first career and denied his second, and the second career is the one that explains the column. Disclosure is the whole game. A newspaper that identified him as “John Sipher, senior adviser to the Lincoln Project and National Security Leaders for Biden” would have published a perfectly legal opinion piece that persuaded almost no one outside its existing congregation. The omission is the persuasion.

Notice, too, how formulaic the genre has become. The retired officer opens with tenure, 28 years, 31 years, 33 years, the number itself doing argumentative work. He invokes the cardinal sin of politicized intelligence, as Sipher does, warning that the administration treats intelligence not as a tool for national security but as a collection of secrets to weaponize against political rivals. He gestures at Iraq and weapons of mass destruction as the cautionary tale. He closes by suggesting that this appointment, unlike all the previous appointments he also opposed, is the truly dangerous one. The template has been run against Grenell, against John Ratcliffe, against Gabbard, and now against Pulte. Sipher told NBC News that Pulte’s record suggests he is meant to run a detective agency for the president out of the DNI’s office. One may grant the rhetorical skill while observing that a warning issued against every Trump intelligence appointee, without exception, across 10 years, is not a warning at all. It is a policy. The policy is that the president may not control the intelligence community, and any officer he selects to assert that control is, by definition, a threat.

And that is the heart of the matter. The intelligence bureaucracy is the one province of the executive branch that has most successfully resisted presidential direction, and Trump is the first president in generations determined to break that resistance, through declassification, through personnel, through downsizing, and through accountability for the abuses of the Russia collusion years. The network of retired officials that Sipher inhabits, the Steady State prominent among them, exists precisely to defend the province’s autonomy. Its members are not conspirators in trench coats. They are something more effective, a self-recruiting commentariat with shared interests, shared institutional loyalties, and in several documented cases shared funding streams from advocacy organizations whose purpose is electoral. When Trump moves to place a loyalist atop the 18 agencies, the network activates, the op-eds appear, the cable hits multiply, and each is introduced with the same laundered credential. The wagons circle on schedule.

What, then, should readers demand? Not censorship, and not the silencing of retired officers. The remedy is cheaper and older than that. It is disclosure, the same standard the Times applies with vigor when the author is inconveniently conservative. Tell the reader that the 28-year veteran is also a Lincoln Project adviser. Tell the reader he signed the laptop letter. Tell the reader he vouched for the dossier. Then let the argument stand or fall in honest light. A reader so informed might still oppose the Pulte appointment, and that would be a respectable conclusion honestly reached. What the Times offered instead was a verdict smuggled inside a résumé. Conservatives who have watched this trick repeat since 2016 are not paranoid for naming it. They are simply reading the byline all the way to the end, which is more than the editors hoped anyone would do.

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