‘John Brennan, Gina Haspel era is over’: Ratcliffe, allies promise workforce changes at CIA

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Director John Ratcliffe warned his agents of “changes” to come under his leadership in a memo obtained by Fox News Digital. 

“There will be changes during my tenure as director,” the new leader of America’s top spy agency wrote in an agency-wide workforce message. Ratcliffe is currently reviewing all top staff and planning to put his own fingerprints on the senior level of the agency, Fox News Digital has learned. 

“We will collect intelligence in every corner of the globe, no matter how dark or difficult. We will produce insightful, objective, all-source analysis, never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgment or infect our products,” Ratcliffe went on in his email. 

“And we will conduct covert action at the direction of the President, going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.” 

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CIA Director John Ratcliffe warned his agents of “changes” to come under his leadership. (Getty Images)

As agents conduct work in what Ratcliffe defined as the “most challenging national security environment in our nation’s history,” he promised the CIA would be the “ultimate meritocracy.”

“Our shared mission will bind us together.”

A source familiar with Ratcliffe’s thinking said, “This was a message to Agency’s workforce that the John Brennan era, the Gina Haspel era, the eras of promoting leftwing political agendas or subverting the President — those days are over.” 

Haspel was President Donald Trump’s CIA director from 2018 to 2021 – while Ratcliffe was Trump’s director of national intelligence. Brennan headed up the agency under former President Barack Obama.  

“I’m sure it’ll rub some of the political activists burrowed in there the wrong way, but there are a lot of red-blooded, mission-focused agency officers reading this and cheering him on,” the source added.

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Ratcliffe is also looking for ways to streamline the agency’s many tech-focused offices – the directorate of digital innovation; directorate of science and technology; transnational and technology mission center; office of the chief technology officer; and directorate of analysis, which has been developing AI-powered tools – to stake out clear lines of authority and tasks. 

“Nobody comes to CIA to be somebody. Our successes remain hidden. Even our medals are presented behind closed doors, our sacrifices memorialized by stars on a marble wall. But each one of those stars represents somebody who wanted to do something, regardless of whether history would know their name,” Ratcliffe continued. 

A source familiar with CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s thinking promised a different direction for the nation’s top spy agency than under Gina Haspel, CIA director during the first Trump administration. (Reuters)

“That’s what makes this place special. That’s what we must preserve.”

Ratcliffe was confirmed by the Senate last Thursday in a 74-25 vote. 

Under its new director, the CIA released a new assessment of the COVID-19 origin which favors a lab origin with “low confidence.” 

The review was ordered by former President Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan toward the end of Biden’s time in office. 

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President Donald Trump’s nominee for CIA director, John Ratcliffe, appears for a Senate Intelligence confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on Jan. 15, 2025. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The agency has maintained for years it did not have enough intelligence to conclude whether COVID-19 originated in a lab or a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Ratcliffe recently told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the CIA to sit “on the sidelines” of the debate over the origins of COVID-19. He has long said he believes the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

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“I had the opportunity on my first day to make public an assessment that actually took place in the Biden administration, so it can’t be accused of being political,” he told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.  

“And the CIA has assessed that the most likely cause of this pandemic that has wrought so much devastation around the world was because of a lab-related incident in Wuhan, so we’ll continue to investigate that moving forward.”