James Jesus Angleton, who ran counter-intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1954 until 1975, once described his world as a “wilderness of mirrors”. The heads of America’s intelligence agencies must have felt a similar sense of surreal disorientation, when they briefed Donald Trump last week.
The directors of National Intelligence, the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were charged with describing a Russian intelligence operation. The difficulty was that the intended beneficiary of that operation was none other than Mr Trump himself. Moreover, the president-elect had already publicly derided the spies’ work on Russian hacking during the election.
The clash between the president-elect and America’s powerful “intelligence community” has led many wiseacres to suggest that Mr Trump is making a dangerous error. It is said they could easily destabilise the new president. The idea that the spooks are more powerful than the president himself sounds worldly. But it is almost certainly wrong. If there is a struggle between the White House and the intelligence agencies, Mr Trump is clearly in the more powerful position.