Getty War Room Former CIA Chief: Trump’s Conspiracy Theory About ISIS Is Nonsense The administration never provided support to Islamic State or Al Qaeda.

Michael Morell was the deputy director and acting director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013.



Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, seeking to make the case following the Orlando shootings that the Obama administration was somehow sympathetic to terrorists, resurrected an old conspiracy theory Thursday about the Islamic State, one that has no place in our public discourse. In a tweet, Trump pointed his followers to an article about the 2012 memo titled “Hillary Clinton Received Secret Memo Stating Obama Admin ‘Support’ for ISIS.”

This is, of course, quite a charge against President Obama and his administration at a time when Clinton was still serving as secretary of state. The problem with the charge is that it is simply not true. I know this, since in my role as deputy director and acting director of the CIA, I participated in nearly every meeting in the Situation Room at the time of the supposed memo regarding the deteriorating situation in Syria. These included deputies meetings chaired by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough; principals meetings chaired by then-National Security Adviser Tom Donilon; and National Security Council meetings chaired by the president.


At no time in any of these meetings did the administration make a policy decision—either explicitly or implicitly—to support the Islamic State or its predecessor, Al Qaeda, in Iraq. In fact, the policy focus was quite the opposite. The administration went to great lengths to ensure that any aid provided by the United States to the opposition would not fall into the hands of extremists, including the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

The conspiracy theory pointed to by Trump on Thursday was born in mid-2015 when Judicial Watch obtained, under the Freedom of Information Act, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report dated August 5, 2012. Several national security-related blogs, commenting on the memo, concluded that it made clear that the United States was providing support to the group that would eventually became the Islamic State.

The theory was that the Obama administration purposefully supported the rise of the Islamic State as a way to put military pressure on the government of Bashar Assad in Syria—a policy decision for which we are now paying the consequences.

The DIA report said “Western countries, the Gulf States, and Turkey are supporting” Syrian opposition groups in their efforts to control territory in Syria adjacent to the Iraqi border and the Turkish border. The report said the “opposition” included Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The conspiracy theory got another boost when several news outlets reported on an interview that Mike Flynn, the director of the DIA from 2012 to 2014, gave to Al Jazeera in August 2015. The media reported that Flynn said it was a “willful decision” by the administration to support extremists in Syria. Flynn’s seniority and his interview as reported by the media gave the conspiracy theory credibility.

But here is the truth about the DIA report and the Flynn interview. The report was written by a DIA official in Iraq. It was his take on the early days of the insurgency in Syria. It was just one person’s view. It was written by an individual who was far from the policy discussion in the Situation Room. And, it was simply wrong in its facts when it indicated that the West was supporting extremists in Syria.

Most important, when the cable was written in early August 2012, the United States was not yet providing any tangible assistance to the Syrian opposition, and when it began to do so later that fall, the assistance went only to the opposition deemed by the United States to be “moderate.”

What about the Flynn interview? It is actually worth watching the interview, as opposed to reading the commentary of others about it. When I watched it, I did not see Flynn agree with the interviewer’s assertion that the United States was deliberately supporting extremists. Flynn was critical of the Obama administration on a number of issues, but he did not accuse it of willfully supporting the rise of ISIS.

The threat posed by the Islamic State to the United States and to our interests is a serious one. But we should not let our understanding of that threat be hijacked by inaccurate renditions of history.