Western intelligence services function within a tetrahedron of competing demands for trust and distrust. On one side of the tetrahedron, a mission to protect populations from external and domestic threats require significant levels of trust between intelligence officers, allied partners, and their respective institutions. The stakes are high, and the cost of failure can be unimaginable. Collaboration in judgements free of partisan influence are norms simultaneously intended to mitigate intelligence failures and increase public confidence in national intelligence services. A second side of the tetrahedron requires that those groups also navigate healthy levels of skepticism toward each other to prevent the unimaginable. Classification and compartmentalization structures are institutionalized skepticism paradoxically designed to build trust, at least in the system. In the ideal, that system works primarily because it is counterintuitive. A third side of the tetrahedron is no less important: public access. Democratic voters must traverse competing entitlements to access data without being relegated to outsiders lacking a “need to know.” The paradox of secrecy is the third side. Public trust in people they never see engaged in activities they cannot know about is fragile but necessary.
Political polarization and broadly held institutional distrust in the West forms the dark underbelly of the tetrahedron. At the same time, the decline in trust is uneven in appearance. In the Baltic Rim, approximately 80 percent of Latvians distrust government institutions due to political instability, scandals, and growing income inequality. Lithuania and Estonia show less entrenched distrust, though both face challenges from economic inequality and, in Estonia, entanglement with tensions between ethnic Estonians and Russians. Distinguishing between concerns over middle-class abandonment versus 500 years of history can be a challenge. In Finland, distrust is linked with immigration and welfare chauvinism. In Germany, institutional distrust intertwines with debates over immigration and national culture that often blur ideological boundaries.
To what degree growing distrust may be affecting the national intelligence services across the Baltic Rim is unknown. Beyond a reallocation of resources to prepare for potential extremist unrest, some might argue the effects are limited because intelligence officers are a unique class and unperturbed by wider sociopolitical forces. However, that assumption lacks data because the question has not been explored in research. Additionally, the standard profile of those most likely to distrust institutions is the lower-middle-class, less-educated, and rural voter—distinctly different from the workforce inside many intelligence services. However, new research involving 143 countries indicates that rising distrust crosses class, income, and cultural lines. [1]
Those working in intelligence organizations are expected to challenge their analytic assumptions regularly to provide national policymakers with the best actionable intelligence they can. However, they are often less adept at challenging assumptions about themselves and their institutions. Intelligence officers are just as likely to fall victim to cognitive bias as workers in other fields; like everyone else, overcoming false assumptions takes work and will.
The first step is to ask the question. National intelligence officers do not compartmentalize their lives. Work and home lives are mutually constitutive. Thus, they are not siloed from scandals, fears over falling behind, and the social pressures from issues driving institutional distrust within the wider public. Depending on agency rules, intelligence officers may have online social media accounts exposing them to the same disinformation narratives, poits of anger, and other nefarious content as the broader public. If so, they can also be subject to adversarial cognitive warfare efforts in ways that they and their institutions may not realize. Research suggests that even those trained to analyze disinformation and conspiracy narratives are ultimately affected by them. [2]The effects are typically more emergent and less overt, which can have the most insidious impact because no mitigating measures are available to address them. Thus, loyal citizens and even institutional leaders might come to distrust their own institutions before realizing the dynamic is under way.
U.S. intelligence agencies have never been immune from complex sociopolitical environments. Rather, they have historically embraced policy neutrality as a core value to insulate themselves from efforts by some to weaponize intelligence for political gain. Their efforts have not always been successful. Nevertheless, the widespread uncertainty and ambiguity within the intelligence environment challenges the accuracy of assessments enough without analysts having to participate in a “game” focused more on political advantage than security. That distinction between political power and security vanishes when policy debates become so entwined with psychological safety that leaders view having an advantage as security for the country.
The U.S. has become a live-action role play for this phenomenon. Congressional overseers across the two-party aisle promote narratives suggesting that the intelligence community cannot be trusted. Members of the left-leaning Progressive Caucus in the U.S. Congress have accused U.S. intelligence of using its surveillance authority to avoid congressional oversight. [3] In March 2025, intelligence analysts whose assessments contravened Trump Administration positions were accused of politicization and fired. [4] Administration allies in the intelligence community characterized the leaks as the work of “deep state criminals.” [5] The American public is also unsure. Gallup research from 2022 found that approximately half of those surveyed held favorable opinions about the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [6]—which is also to say that half did not.
The controversies extend beyond questions of politicization into one more basic. Could institutional distrust undermine Western intelligence services from within by seeping into the mindsets of the men and women who work there? If so, distrust would become self-reinforcing by validating the phenomenon that led to the failure to begin. The result would be to apply destructive pressure to all sides of the tetrahedron simultaneously. We cannot know until we ask the question, but the stakes are too high to adopt blinders.
Greta E. Creech
Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Intelligence & Security Studies
The Citadel (Military College of South Carolina)
Charleston, South Carolina
United States
gcreech@citadel.edu
[1] Viktor Valgarðsson et al., “A Crisis of Political Trust? Global Trends in Institutional Trust from 1958 to 2019,” British Journal of Political Science 55 (2025): 1–42, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123424000498
[2] Ruth Spence et al., “The Psychological Impacts of Content Moderation on Content Moderators: A Qualitative Study,” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 17, no. 4 (2023), https://doi.org/10.5817/CP2023-4-8
[3] “CPC Chair Jayapal Stresses Fight to End Warrantless Surveillance of Americans Will Continue,” Government, Congressional Progressive Caucus, April 24, 2024, https://progressives.house.gov/2024/4/cpc-chair-jayapal-stresses-fight-to-end-warrantless-surveillance-of-americans-will-continue
[4] Charlie Savage, “The Latest: Leaks Investigation: Suspect in Leaked Documents Expected in Court in Boston,” The New York Times, April 14, 2023, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/04/14/us/leaked-documents-pentagon
[5] Sarah Fortinsky, “Gabbard Refers Intel Leaks to DOJ, Blames ‘Deep-State Criminals,’” Media, The Hill, April 23, 2025, https://thehill.com/regulation/national-security/5264296-gabbard-refers-intel-leaks-to-doj-blames-deep-state-criminals/
[6] Gallup, “Government Agency Ratings: CIA, FBI Up; Federal Reserve Down,” Commercial, Gallup.com, October 5, 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/402464/government-agency-ratings-cia-fbi-federal-reserve-down.aspx Back to Table of Contents
