Intel gathering

Pompeo Wants to Incentivize Some ‘Incredibly Audacious’ Intelligence Gathering

CIA Director Mike Pompeo said the agency must “have a bias towards being as nimble as our adversaries,” or “we will serve America poorly and we won’t steal the secrets that our president and our senior policymakers most need at the most challenging times.”

Speaking Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, the former congressman said he would want his legacy as director to be leaving behind a CIA as “agile and as speedy as we need.”

Pompeo said he’s also focused on ensuring the agency continues “to operate in a way that engenders the American people’s trust, so that those powers and authorities remain in place.”

Elaborating on President Trump’s intelligence briefings, Pompeo said the current commander in chief has a different “pattern of taking this information” than his predecessors, and the CIA team has to be “able to convince him that the facts we’re delivering impact his capacity to perform his mission.”

“I think the day that we can’t deliver that will be the day that it starts getting pushed off, and other things begin to occupy that time and space,” he added. “…We have to make sure that the information we’re delivering meets the threshold for the president of the United States and is delivered in a manner which he can grasp sufficiently to actually be able to act upon.”