CIA Director John Ratcliffe has emerged as President Donald Trump’s “quiet hammer,” a source close to the White House told Breitbart News for an in-depth profile of the world’s premier spy agency in the first year back in office for Trump.
This source specifically pointed to how Trump sent Ratcliffe down to Venezuela just 12 days after the daring mission in which U.S. forces captured now-ousted leader Nicolas Maduro. Ratcliffe met with acting Venezuelan president Delcy Rodriguez, Trump’s highest-ranking and first Cabinet-level official to visit the nation since Maduro’s capture.
“Ratcliffe has become Trump’s quiet hammer,” this source close to the White House said. “He goes in, accomplishes whatever mission the President gave him, then disappears back into the shadows. The Agency seems to have adopted the same approach, so Trump actually deserves credit for turning the CIA into an instrument of America First power.”
For this story, Breitbart News spoke with CIA officials, Director Ratcliffe himself, and many others across the administration and those familiar with the Agency’s actions for a year-in-review look back at how Ratcliffe has handled reshaping and reforming the CIA in Trump’s vision — a monumental task given the damage done to the Intelligence Community (IC) during previous administrations and under previous CIA directors particularly John Brennan during Barack Obama’s administration.
“Under Director John Ratcliffe, CIA is back to focusing on mission and is executing on President Trump’s national security priorities,” CIA Director of Public Affairs Liz Lyons told Breitbart News. “This is a more aggressive CIA willing to take risks to give the United States a decisive advantage. In less than a year, CIA helped deliver historic wins — especially in the Middle East and Western Hemisphere — to safeguard American interests and bolster our National Security.”
One of the biggest flaws that Brennan and others who politicized intelligence introduced to the CIA was a dwindling of Agency assets and spies over time — basically, as the CIA became more focused on politics, it became less focused on mission-critical objectives.
One major accomplishment of Ratcliffe’s so far as CIA director has been the total dismantlement of any Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — or DEI — programs at the Agency. He disbanded all DEI initiatives and eliminated all DEI-related programs there, and he returned the CIA to a culture of merit.
Ratcliffe has also been on a transparency tear at the CIA since he was confirmed. He released thousands of documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He also tasked CIA professionals with decades of combined experience with conducting reviews on lessons learned when it comes to the procedures of analytic tradecraft employed in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) shortly after the 2016 presidential election — where the IC made inaccurate conclusions about Trump and Russia — and declassified that review so the public could see it.
He worked, too, with Attorney General Pam Bondi to declassify underlying intelligence in the so-called Durham report showing that the “Russia collusion” was indeed falsified as part of a coordinated operation to destroy Trump’s presidency in his first term — and he declassified and released a previous assessment from 2016 that raised concerns about then-Vice President Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings in Ukraine. He even made a public assessment right at the beginning of the year last year that the CIA believes the COVID virus was more likely the result of a lab leak than a natural origin.
“I don’t want to comment much on criminal matters the Department of Justice may be perusing, but I will say this: Individuals in the Intelligence Community who abused the public’s trust, weaponized their roles against President Trump, and politicized intelligence, should be held accountable,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News when asked about all of this and whether there may be some consequences looming for those who did wrong in the past. “We made it clear from day one, we won’t stand for it anymore; if you’re a political operator rather than a public servant, you’ve got to go. We are focused on mission now at CIA, and it’s clearly contributed to the Agency’s ability to deliver for the President and the American people.”
Ratcliffe keeps a chart printed out on his desk at CIA headquarters at Langley showing those thinning numbers of Agency assets from before Trump returned to the White House — numbers now back on the rise with Trump in the Oval Office and Ratcliffe manning the wheel at the CIA — and has been known to pull out the chart in meetings with top officials. He reminds these senior operations officers that, along with foreign intelligence collection, the effectiveness of CIA assets — dependent upon the numbers being higher — is the metric by which the CIA is constantly being measured.
Asked about this legendary chart, Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he almost had it framed and hung in his office, but decided against doing that because it contains classified information.
“I considered having it framed and hung on the wall in my office, but the metrics are classified, and sometimes people are in my office who aren’t cleared to see that kind of thing,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart News. “But that’s the scorecard. Are we recruiting assets? Are we stealing our adversaries’ secrets and giving President Trump the best possible information so he can continue calling the shots and delivering results for the American people? We’re relentless about that.”
Ratcliffe’s CIA has taken the effort to recruit American assets directly to America’s greatest adversaries. For instance, the CIA this past year released a series of Mandarin-language videos targeted at recruiting Chinese officials to help the American cause. Agency sources told Breitbart News that the effort has been enormously successful in getting new volunteers from inside and outside the Chinese government and in procuring other valuable resources. Countering China has, of course, been one of both Trump’s and Ratcliffe’s long-stated priorities for the United States.
The CIA has also taken some major steps under Ratcliffe and Deputy Director Michael Ellis over the past year to streamline the Agency’s operations, including merging two offices that separately focused on the Western Hemisphere and on Counternarcotics activities into one singular unit: The America’s and Counternarcotics Mission Center (ACMC). The Agency has also worked more closely than ever before with the FBI — as Ratcliffe previously told Breitbart News in an interview right after his confirmation, it was a goal of his, given his close friendship with FBI director Kash Patel, to see the two entities work better together — settling down historic tensions between the CIA and the FBI. The CIA also launched a new Mission Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), aimed at implementing innovative strategies for technology both as a tool and a target. Ratcliffe is also working to find ways to best use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the intelligence world.
Over the course of the past year, the CIA has also — true to Ratcliffe’s persona as Trump’s “quiet hammer” — significantly helped in several of the biggest operations of the U.S. government worldwide, including most recently Operation Absolute Resolve, which saw the capture of Maduro. But that was hardly the only big one: The CIA was also integral to the U.S. bombings of Iran’s nuclear program disintegrating that last summer through Operation Midnight Hammer and also helped capture the mastermind of the Abbey Gate bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Afghanistan in the chaotic deadly withdrawal of U.S. forces from there in former President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
Ratcliffe told Breitbart News that he is particularly proud of the capture of “Jafar,” or Mohammad Sharifullah, in the first months of Trump’s return to the White House because it sent a massive message worldwide that Trump would no longer tolerate the proliferation of terrorism that Biden did.
“It sent an early message that President Trump was shifting the paradigm all over the world,” Ratcliffe said of Jafar’s capture. “That level of cooperation with the Pakistanis is a direct result of the outcome of the 2024 election. The Biden administration’s conduct during the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a national embarrassment that cost the lives of our service members. President Trump immediately reestablished American credibility and is delivering justice for those families. It set the tone right away.”
Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC), told Breitbart News that when he looked in Jafar’s eyes upon his capture, he saw “apocalyptic evil.” In that interview with Gorka taped at the White House in the spring, Gorka gave a special shoutout to the Intelligence Community — and specifically the CIA and Ratcliffe — for their role in locating and helping capture Jafar.
Beyond Maduro’s and Jafar’s captures, the CIA was also instrumental in Operation Midnight Hammer — the U.S. military airstrikes that wiped out Iran’s nuclear program in one night. CIA sources told Breitbart News the Agency’s technical collection helped inform military planning for the strikes, and in their aftermath helped the U.S. correctly assess that Iran’s nuclear program was decapitated for the time being.