# OPINION: The CIA slams the door on the NIC — American intelligence fractures over Iran

> Sources cited by Reuters and relayed by IC Brief on June 10, 2026 revealed that the CIA has stopped contributing to certain assessments by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) regarding Iran. This withdrawal is not an administrative error. It is not a technical disagreement between analysts. It is the public manifestation of an internal war within the American intelligence c

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Note
- Published: 2026-06-29
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/billet-la-cia-claque-la-porte-du-nic-le-renseignement-americain-se-fracture-sur-

## Introduction: an unprecedented institutional fracture

### The CIA's silent withdrawal

Sources cited by **Reuters** and relayed by **IC Brief** on **June 10, 2026** revealed that the **CIA** has stopped contributing to certain assessments by the **National Intelligence Council** (NIC) regarding **Iran**. This withdrawal is not an administrative error. It is not a technical disagreement between analysts. It is the public manifestation of an internal war within the **American intelligence community** — a war provoked by the reforms imposed by **Tulsi Gabbard** at the head of the **DNI**.

The direct consequence of this fracture is alarming: no coordinated assessment of **Iranian threats** against the **19 American officials** on one of **Tehran**'s target lists will be produced before **September 2026**. While American negotiators work to finalize a deal with Iran, the intelligence structures tasked with evaluating Tehran's real intentions are paralyzed by internal conflicts. This is a genuinely Kafkaesque situation.

### The Director's Initiatives Group as detonator

At the heart of the conflict lies the **Director's Initiatives Group** — a unit created by **Tulsi Gabbard** at the **DNI** to develop alternative assessments to the mainstream analyses of the intelligence community. The **CIA** sees it as an attempt to bypass its analytical conclusions, particularly on **Iran**, in favor of assessments more aligned with the **Trump** administration's foreign policy. Several intelligence veterans, cited by **IC Brief**, describe this unit as a **"political think-tank"** dressed up as an intelligence agency.

The **CIA**'s reaction — withdrawal rather than contamination of its own analyses — is understandable on an institutional level. But it carries a considerable operational cost. The **NIC** is designed precisely to produce consensus assessments from the entire intelligence community. Without the **CIA**, these assessments on **Iran** are incomplete, partial, potentially misleading.

*I cannot verify all the details of this internal dispute — intelligence services do not communicate about their institutional conflicts. But what I can say with certainty is that when the CIA withdraws from an assessment on Iran while Trump is negotiating with Tehran, something fundamental has been broken in the architecture of American intelligence.*

## Tulsi Gabbard and the politicization of intelligence

### A DNI reforming at full speed

**Tulsi Gabbard**, appointed **Director of National Intelligence** at the beginning of **Trump**'s second term, has driven several controversial reforms since her arrival. The creation of the **Director's Initiatives Group** is the most symbolic: it gives the **DNI** its own analytical capability, distinct from the assessments of the intelligence community's member agencies. In theory, it is a cross-checking tool. In practice, according to the agencies concerned, it is a tool for replacing analyses that displease the executive.

The parallel with the **Office of Special Plans** created under **Cheney** before the **Iraq** invasion in **2003** is explicitly drawn by several analysts. That office had provided the **Bush** administration with assessments on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that contradicted the conclusions of the regular agencies. The sequel is history. The comparison may not be perfect — but it is not out of place either.

### The question of analytical independence

The analytical independence of the intelligence community is one of the fundamental guarantees of the American system. Presidents may reject intelligence conclusions — they have the right to. What they should not be able to do is build parallel structures to produce more palatable alternative conclusions. That is precisely what the **CIA** perceives in **Gabbard**'s **Director's Initiatives Group**.

The **Bill Pulte** awaiting confirmation as permanent **DNI** adds an additional layer of uncertainty. Democratic senators have explicitly conditioned their support for any **FISA** renewal on **Pulte**'s departure from the acting post — illustrating how thoroughly the intelligence crisis has transformed into a broader political crisis, according to **Eastern Herald** on **June 10, 2026**.

*There is something profoundly troubling about the idea that an administration is conducting the most complex negotiations of its term — on Iranian nuclear matters — without coordinated assessments of Tehran's real intentions. Negotiating without reliable intelligence is like playing poker without seeing your own cards. And the stakes here are not a wager — they are nuclear proliferation.*

## The 19 American officials on the Iranian list

### Targets without a threat assessment

The most concerning information revealed by **IC Brief** is the absence of any coordinated threat assessment for the **19 American officials** on one of **Tehran**'s target lists — a list linked to Iranian reprisals for the assassination of General **Qassem Soleimani** in **2020**. These officials include former members of the **Trump** administration and military officers involved in that operation.

Without a coordinated **NIC** assessment, their protection services — the **Secret Service**, the **DSS**, various military protection units — are operating with fragmented and potentially incomplete information. The concrete risk is real: if **Iran** decides to intensify its attempts to act against one of these targets, the United States may not have the integrated assessments needed to anticipate and counter that attempt.

### An Iranian threat Tehran has never abandoned

Despite the ongoing negotiations and the signing of the **MOU** on **June 17, 2026**, **Iran** has never officially renounced its ambitions for reprisals over Soleimani's elimination. The **Revolutionary Guards** maintain active operational cells in several countries, including the United States. The **FBI** has dismantled several Iranian plots against American targets in recent years — each time with the help of coordinated intelligence assessments.

Depriving the intelligence community of its capacity to produce these coordinated assessments, precisely at the moment when negotiations with Tehran are entering their most delicate phase, is an operational risk that many experts consider unnecessarily high. The deal in progress may change the overall trajectory of American-Iranian relations. It does not overnight eliminate the capabilities of **Tehran**'s hardline factions.

*This situation illustrates what I call the pathology of political certainty: when an administration is so convinced of its own policy that it no longer needs contradictory information. History has shown repeatedly that it is precisely in these moments of excessive certainty that the greatest geopolitical catastrophes occur.*

## The Iran-Trump deal and the paradox of paralyzed intelligence

### Negotiating a deal without assessing the adversary

The timing of the fracture between the **CIA** and the **NIC** is particularly revealing. It occurs in the weeks preceding the signing of the **Trump-Iran memorandum** on **June 17, 2026**, and during negotiations over its content. The **Trump** administration concluded a deal with Iran without having recent and coordinated assessments of **Tehran**'s real intentions — its actual priorities, its flexibility on the nuclear file, the positioning of factions within the regime.

Certainly, fragmented assessments exist — each agency produces its own analyses. But the very purpose of **NIC** assessments is precisely to integrate and reconcile these divergent sources into a coherent picture. Without this integration process, American negotiators may have received contradictory signals, insufficiently reconciled, about **Tehran**'s intentions.

### Republican hawks use the fracture as an argument

Republican senators critical of the Iran deal — notably those who have asked to see the full text of the **MOU** before taking a position — are using the CIA-NIC fracture as an additional argument to demand greater transparency. If the administration negotiated without complete intelligence, how can it guarantee the deal is solid? That is a legitimate question to which the **Trump** administration has not yet provided a satisfactory public answer.

The confluence of these two crises — the intelligence fracture and the criticism of the Iran deal — creates significant political pressure on the administration. The question is whether this pressure is sufficient to force a reform of intelligence governance, or whether it will be absorbed by the usual flood of crises in the Trump era.

*I sometimes wonder whether the Trump administration is fully aware of the precedent it is setting with this fracture. By politicizing intelligence structures to the point of forcing the CIA to withdraw from assessments, it is laying the groundwork for the next administration — whatever it is — to inherit a profoundly dysfunctional intelligence apparatus.*

## The FISA-Pulte impasse and its systemic effects

### An intelligence community under pressure from all sides

The CIA-NIC fracture does not occur in a vacuum. It is part of a series of tensions simultaneously affecting the **American intelligence community** since early **2026**. The expiration of **Section 702** on **June 12**, the controversy over **Pulte**'s appointment to the **DNI**, and now the **CIA**'s withdrawal from NIC assessments on Iran form a coherent picture: an intelligence community subjected to political pressures unprecedented since the **McCarthy era**.

This accumulation of crises has a systemic effect beyond the individual files concerned. It sends a signal to the intelligence community's career analysts: your conclusions are not protected if they displease the executive. Some veterans choose to leave rather than compromise their professional integrity. Others stay and adapt their analyses. In both cases, American intelligence emerges weakened.

### The Axios-KPMG axis and fragmented media coverage

Information about this institutional fracture was reported by **IC Brief** and **Axios** on **June 11, 2026**, with additional details in **KPMG**'s **Capitol Hill Weekly** for the week of **June 15**. Mainstream media coverage was relatively limited — overshadowed by the signing of the Iran deal and the **FISA** crisis. That is regrettable: the CIA-NIC fracture is perhaps the most important institutional story of this month of June, precisely because it flies under the radar.

It is symptomatic that the deepest institutional crises are often the least covered. Spectacular images — a deal signed at the **White House**, a law expiring, a **Supreme Court** vote — capture attention. The slow degradation of internal governance structures passes through the blind spots of surface journalism. This column tries precisely to illuminate those blind spots.

*I must admit that I do not have all the elements needed to pass a definitive judgment on who is wrong in this conflict between the CIA and Gabbard. Both sides have arguments. What I know is that the result — Iranian threat assessments not being produced while American officials are on a target list — is unacceptable regardless of the cause.*

## What this means for Western allies

### The Five Eyes facing a disorganized partner

The fracture within the American intelligence community is not only a domestic problem. The **United States** is the pivot of the **Five Eyes** network — the intelligence-sharing alliance between the **United States**, the **United Kingdom**, **Canada**, **Australia**, and **New Zealand**. When the **CIA** withdraws from standard evaluation processes, this affects the quality of intelligence shared with these partners.

European diplomatic sources, unnamed but reported in the specialized press, describe growing concern about the reliability of intelligence exchanges with **Washington** under the current administration. If American assessments on **Iran** are fragmented and uncoordinated, the foreign policy decisions of allies that partially rely on these assessments may be based on insufficient information.

### Iran observes and adapts

**Tehran** is perfectly capable of reading the signals of institutional dysfunction in the **United States**. Iranian intelligence services follow American political debates closely. The CIA-NIC fracture, though poorly covered by the media, is certainly noted and analyzed by the **Islamic Republic**'s strategists. It can influence their calculation of how hard or soft to be in the ongoing negotiations on the nuclear deal.

If **Tehran** perceives that the **United States** is negotiating without complete intelligence on its intentions, that strengthens its negotiating position — giving it the ability to conceal its real priorities behind a cooperative façade. This is precisely the type of calculation that makes American institutional fractures dangerous beyond their immediate domestic consequences.

*I end this opinion piece with a question that has no satisfying answer: how can an administration simultaneously conduct the most complex negotiations of its term — on Iranian nuclear matters — and jeopardize the very intelligence structures meant to inform it? The answer I fear is that these two things are not incompatible for an administration convinced that politics must take precedence over analysis.*

## Institutional inertia as a last resort

### Bureaucratic resistance mechanisms

Faced with these pressures, the intelligence community is not without resources. Decades of jurisprudence and internal regulations protect a certain analytical independence. The **DNI Inspector General** can theoretically investigate political interference in analyses. **Whistleblowers** can flag irregularities to **Congress** — even though the protections for intelligence whistleblowers have been weakened under the current administration.

Members of **Congress** from both parties have requested hearings on the state of the intelligence community. Former agency directors have publicly spoken out against **Gabbard**'s reforms. This institutional resistance is not spectacular, it does not make headlines, but it contributes to maintaining pressure on the administration to preserve a minimum of functionality in its intelligence structures.

### The September 2026 window as a horizon

The date of **September 2026** — cited by **IC Brief** as the date by which a coordinated assessment of Iranian threats could be produced — represents a worrying timeframe. Until then, three months will pass without an integrated picture of the Iranian threat to targeted American officials. Three months during which negotiations on the final deal with Iran could advance or collapse. Three months during which **Tehran**'s hardline factions could decide to test American resolve.

The **Trump** administration has chosen to navigate these troubled waters with partially broken navigation equipment. One can hope the crossing will be uneventful. One can also note that hope is not a strategy, and that preparation — in the form of complete and independent intelligence — is what prevents catastrophic surprises.

*I remain profoundly skeptical about this administration's ability to reconcile its political imperatives with the requirements of reliable and independent intelligence. These two logics are fundamentally incompatible. And it is precisely this incompatibility that makes the CIA-NIC fracture not an accident, but a structural symptom.*

## Historical precedents and institutional memory

### The lesson of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction

The recent history of American intelligence offers a striking precedent. In **2002–2003**, the **Office of Special Plans** created under **Dick Cheney** had produced alternative assessments on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, contradicting the more nuanced conclusions of the regular agencies. These alternative assessments contributed to justifying the invasion of **Iraq** in **March 2003** — a decision whose consequences continue to be felt twenty years later.

**Gabbard**'s **Director's Initiatives Group** is not the **Office of Special Plans**. The contexts are different, the actors are different, and the stakes — though considerable — are not identical. But the basic structure is the same: a unit created by the executive to produce alternative assessments to those that intelligence professionals organically provide. Past experience should inspire considerable caution.

### The institutional versus the political: a permanent conflict

The tension between the institutional logic of intelligence — producing fact-based assessments, even uncomfortable ones — and the political logic of obtaining information that supports the chosen policy is as old as modern intelligence itself. All administrations face it. What distinguishes responsible administrations is their ability not to sacrifice one to the other, to maintain an institutional barrier between analysis and policy.

This barrier — imperfect, porous, always under tension — is precisely the one that **Gabbard**'s **Director's Initiatives Group** appears to be eroding. The **CIA**, by choosing withdrawal over compromise, made a painful but institutionally coherent choice. It preferred not to participate rather than to validate assessments it considers compromised. In the current circumstances, that is a form of institutional resistance that deserves to be named as such.

*Institutional memory is one of the most precious resources of a state. American intelligence agencies were built on decades of experience, painful mistakes, and difficult reforms. Watching that institutional memory be bypassed by political structures created from scratch is, for those who believe in the necessity of solid intelligence, genuinely disheartening.*

## Conclusion: a fracture that will not heal easily

### The institutional price of the politicization of intelligence

The fracture between the **CIA** and the **National Intelligence Council** over Iranian assessments is not an isolated incident — it is the visible symptom of a deep degradation of American intelligence governance under the **Trump** administration. This degradation carries a real operational cost, measurable in terms of threat assessments not produced, policy decisions made without complete information, and fragile intelligence partnerships.

It also carries a longer-term institutional cost: the confidence of intelligence professionals in the protection of their analytical independence. Once eroded, that confidence is difficult to restore. The talent that leaves does not easily come back. The institutional cultures that degrade take decades to rebuild.

### A signal for partners and adversaries

For **America**'s allies, this signal is troubling: their most powerful partner is operating with intelligence structures weakened by politically motivated internal conflicts. For adversaries — **Iran**, **China**, **Russia**, **North Korea** — it is, on the contrary, an invitation to probe the blind spots created by these fractures. The history of intelligence teaches that windows of institutional vulnerability are rarely left unexploited by patient and determined adversaries.

*This story leaves me with a renewed conviction: democracy needs strong institutions to survive, and those institutions need the independence required to speak truth to power — even when that truth is uncomfortable. The day the CIA can no longer say what it thinks to those who decide, something essential is lost in the America we hope to see preserve its global leadership.*

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [IC Brief — CIA withdraws contributions to NIC assessments on Iran — June 10, 2026](https://icbrief.org/a/icbrief/2026-06-10-0103/)

- [Axios — FISA expiration and the Pulte crisis at the DNI — June 11, 2026](https://www.axios.com/2026/06/11/fisa-section-702-expiration-pulte-trump-johnson)

- [Eastern Herald — Trump, Pulte at the DNI and FISA 702 expiration — June 10, 2026](https://easternherald.com/2026/06/10/trump-pulte-acting-dni-fisa-section-702-lapse/)

### Secondary sources

- [KPMG Capitol Hill Weekly — Legislative summary for the week of June 15, 2026](https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2026/capitol-hill-weekly-june-15.html)

- [Headline Reporter — Trump in conflict with his administration — June 2026](https://headlinereporter.com/2026/06/bombshell-trump-explodes-at-entire-administration/)

- [Fox News — Democrats unified against the FISA impasse — June 2026](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/watch-dems-unite-anti-terror-spying-authority-amid-standoff-trumps-dni-pick)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/billet-la-cia-claque-la-porte-du-nic-le-renseignement-americain-se-fracture-sur-