So consider the full picture. The President is trying to broker a peace and ease prices for American families. Meanwhile, by these accounts, operations supported by an arm of his own government are intensifying a campaign that raises those prices and hardens Moscow’s position at the negotiating table. You do not need to believe in a cabal of rogue spies to see that something is out of alignment.

The word “faction” conjures images of plotters in a basement at Langley. The reality is probably more mundane and, in some ways, more worrying. Large bureaucracies develop their own gravity. Programs built over eleven years create careers, partnerships, budgets and a sense of mission. Relationships with foreign services take on a life of their own. People who have spent a decade helping Ukraine resist Russia do not easily accept that the policy goal has shifted from pressure to settlement.

That is not necessarily treason or sabotage. It is institutional momentum. But momentum that runs against the elected President’s direction produces the same result as deliberate obstruction: a foreign policy the voters did not choose.

Johnson’s most valuable contribution is historical. Harry Truman did not create the CIA in 1947 to run paramilitary campaigns. He created it to collect and analyze foreign intelligence and to tell the President the truth, so that no commander in chief would again be blindsided as Franklin Roosevelt was at Pearl Harbor. Covert action came in through the back door a year later, when National Security Council directive NSC 10/2 authorized secret operations. Ever since, as Johnson puts it, “the clandestine tail has been wagging the analytic dog.”

Truman watched it happen and said so publicly. In a ‘Washington Post’ op-ed on December 22, 1963, a month after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he wrote that he was disturbed by how far the agency had strayed from its intended role. “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” he wrote. The agency, he warned, “has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” In founding it, he said, “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” He asked that the CIA be “restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President.”

Those words, written more than sixty years ago, read like a memo for this moment.

Director John Ratcliffe has spoken about returning the CIA to its roots. That instinct is the right one, and he may be uniquely placed to act on it. Truman’s own words define those roots more precisely than any modern mission statement could: an intelligence service that informs the President rather than steering him.

Taking that seriously would mean a few concrete things. Covert programs should be reviewed to confirm they serve current presidential policy rather than inherited momentum. Liaison relationships with foreign services should support American diplomacy, not run ahead of it. Analysts should feel free to give the White House unwelcome assessments, including assessments of what the agency’s own operations are costing. A director committed to the agency’s founding purpose has every reason to welcome that discipline, and every tool to impose it.

We do not need to prove the existence of a secret faction to recognize the danger. When an intelligence agency’s operations grow so large and so self-sustaining that they shape the battlefield the President is trying to wind down, the question of which sets American foreign policy is no longer theoretical.

Truman answered that question in 1963. The President sets it, and the intelligence community serves it. If peace in Ukraine is the goal, the first step may be making sure every part of the American government is working toward the same one.

By Ovidiu Stanica