With fans like this, who needs enemies?

Some skepticism toward intelligence is healthy. And tension between presidents and their intelligence agencies is nothing new. Lyndon Johnson was said to compare the intelligence community to his boyhood cow, Bessie, who would swing her “shit smeared” tail through a bucket of milk as soon as he’d finished milking her. Bill Clinton met so infrequently with his CIA Director, Jim Woolsey, that when a plane crashed on the White House lawn, aides joked that it was Woolsey trying to get a meeting. (Woolsey, incidentally, had been advising the Trump transition team until resigning yesterday, reportedly due to “growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.”) Nearly all presidents leave office disappointed and disgruntled with their intelligence apparatus, for two reasons: because presidents want crystal balls and even the CIA’s smartest people don’t have them; and because presidents resort to covert operations for the toughest of problems, when all else fails—which is why covert operations usually fail, too. But no president until now has entered office with such a profound, publicly vented distrust of his own intelligence establishment.

Trump’s doubts are both understandable and alarming. Understandable because we live in an era where threats are moving faster than bureaucrats, and where hacks, tweets, leaks, and internet “news” (both real and fake) make information available everywhere, all the time, instantly. In this digital age, it is reasonable to ask just what America’s intelligence community still brings to the table.

The answer is a lot. U.S. intelligence agencies have one overriding mission: giving the president decision-making advantage in a dangerous and deceptive world. Intelligence officials risk their lives to recruit foreign assets, they intercept foreign email and cell-phone communications, they build and deploy spy satellites, they track obscure foreign government reports and trends for vital clues about the stability of a regime or the health of a foreign economy. Sure, you can find a Wikipedia page on just about anything these days. Where intelligence agencies add value is by integrating the best open-source information and integrating it with the secret nuggets they gather. All intelligence is information. But not all information is intelligence. Agencies like the CIA or NSA sort through a crushing daily stream of information and marry it with secrets to yield insights that keep Americans safe and advance the country’s national interests.

Do they get it wrong sometimes? Of course. In 1962, just weeks before an American U-2 spy plane discovered unmistakable evidence of Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba, the intelligence community completed an assessment that concluded the Soviets would not dare place missiles in Cuba. Today Americans remember the U-2 photos but forget the intelligence failure that preceded them and led the United States to the nuclear brink. The intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq WMD are still fresh and searing.