President Donald Trump has said his executive order limiting immigration and travel from seven Muslim-majority nations would make the U.S. safer if implemented — but diplomats and former CIA officials warn it would cut off an important source of intelligence for American spies.

That's because the visa process for the seven targeted countries also happens to provide a little-publicized stream of data and human assets for U.S. agencies such as the CIA, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the issue told POLITICO.


Aside from helping U.S. officials learn about trends in various countries — including Iran, the nation the White House just put “on notice” over its moves in the Middle East — visa applications and interviews are a way to recruit local intelligence agents or, in some cases, meet face to face with people known to be potential threats to America.

“In the case of some of these countries, the visa interviews are an important source of information about what’s going on,” said a former senior State Department official familiar with consular matters. “In a visa interview, you can say, ‘How’s the economy? How’s work? How are things going? Is there food in the stores?’”

Added a State Department source: “It would be hard to find a consular officer who spent any time on a visa line anywhere and did not feel the need to pass information to the CIA on at least one occasion."

Following the Jan. 27 executive order, the U.S. stopped accepting visa applications and interviewing would-be visitors from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen. The goal, the White House says, is to keep out potential terrorists while the U.S. institutes new security safeguards after a 90-day review that could, for some of the countries, translate into an indefinite ban.

The week-old order was blocked nationwide on Friday by a federal judge in Washington state pending further court hearings.

Sources stressed that visa interviews and applications are not the meat-and-potatoes work of U.S. intelligence, whose leaders can turn to more sophisticated tools such as electronic surveillance. Still, reaching people making their way through the visa process is especially valuable when dealing with countries such as Iran, where the U.S. has no diplomatic presence, or Libya, which is riven by conflict and dangerous territory for Americans to tread.

People from some of the countries are often so eager for a U.S. visa that they travel to other parts of the region to apply for one. Many go to the United Arab Emirates or Turkey, for instance, to begin what can often be an arduous application process that often takes months and frequently ends in rejection. Their applications are dealt with in part at U.S. embassies, which house not just diplomats, but also spies.

The types of people who apply vary widely, but they can indicate trends in a country. If a slew of medical professionals start trying to leave, that could be a sign that the country's health system is on the ropes, even if its government officially denies it. A sudden surge of applicants from a particular region in a country can suggest instability in that area.

Then, of course, there are some very special people who may show up — people who may have served in the top ranks of the military or atop a prominent corporation, for instance, and who may be pursued by CIA officials as potential recruits. If they want a U.S. visa badly enough, they might try to ingratiate themselves with the Americans by cooperating.

A few enemies may be allowed to join the visa line, too.

"There have been times when people whom we know are bad people have come in for an interview and we do the interview anyway because we want to know what this person is up to," said a former U.S. official familiar with intelligence gathering.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story. The CIA declined comment.

If the ban is extended indefinitely, or if it's expanded to include other countries, as some Trump aides have suggested is possible, the intelligence community may get restless, said Thomas Sanderson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Intelligence officials will tell Trump, "'You have cost us opportunities to screen and engage people from countries from which or about which we need information and often times don’t have good access,'" Sanderson predicted.

He also warned that if the targeted countries reciprocate by banning Americans altogether, that could also undercut U.S. intelligence officials by depriving them of knowledge gleaned from business leaders, academics and other Americans who once were able to travel to the countries in question.

A man crosses the Central Intelligence Agency logo in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia | Getty

In 2015, the last year for which full statistics were available, roughly 90,000 people from the seven targeted countries obtained an immigrant or non-immigrant visa to the United States, although many may not have ever used the visa or may have just visited for a few days. Of those, around 42,000 visas were issued to Iranians; most were non-immigrant visas, meaning the visa recipient could visit the United States for reasons such as vacation or to study.

If there's one country where the loss of the visa intelligence stream could prove damaging, it's Iran, which has not had diplomatic ties with the United States for nearly 40 years and where the U.S. does not have a known military presence.

The Islamic Republic has emerged as a bête noire of the Trump administration because of its ballistic missile tests and other military and political moves beyond its borders. On Wednesday, national security adviser Michael Flynn said the U.S. was putting Iran "on notice." On Friday, the Trump administration levied new sanctions on Tehran.

Despite the strained relations between the two countries, Iran remains a major source of visa applicants trying to reach the United States. That's in part because of family ties to the large Iranian-American population already in the United States, and because Iran has a highly educated population whose youth often seek higher education and jobs abroad.

Steven Hall, a former senior CIA operations officer, warned that while the visa halt may damage U.S. insight into the seven countries to some degree, the bigger injury could come as a result of the perception in many parts of the world that what Trump is doing is imposing a ban on Muslims.

That perception won't help, say, when U.S. officials try to convince intelligence agencies in Muslim-majority countries, such as Pakistan or Indonesia, to cooperate with them in the hunt for terrorists.

"All the guys sitting across the table are Muslims — they're all Muslim, and yet they're willing to work with us," Hall said. "The more the U.S. administration appears to be anti-Muslim, the harder it's going to be to have those cooperative relationships in the counterterrorism realm that are so important."