Calls to dismantle the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intensified this week following a terror ambush in Washington, DC, which resulted in the death of one National Guard soldier and left another critically wounded.

The attack was reportedly carried out by an Afghan national who once served in a paramilitary unit supported by the CIA, as The Dallas Express previously reported.

The renewed push to shut down the CIA has been led most prominently by former senior intelligence officials and high-profile national security figures allied with President Donald Trump.

Gary Berntsen, a former CIA operations officer who spent 24 years in the agency, argued in a recent interview that the CIA has become so deeply compromised by foreign intelligence penetrations that it is no longer salvageable.

“I was in the CIA for 24 years. The agency has been defeated. We’ve been penetrated so badly that our enemies now influence US foreign policy,” Berntsen told journalist Lara Logan on her “Going Rogue with Lara Logan” podcast.

“It’s time to shut the CIA down and build an OSS-style service with a dedicated MI5-type counterintelligence arm.” Logan posted a clip of the exchange on X.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser and a figure who has occasionally teased a potential 2028 presidential run, publicly echoed Berntsen’s call:

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Flynn is not alone. For decades, a bipartisan minority in Washington has questioned whether the CIA, founded in 1947, still serves its intended role.

Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) long championed abolishing the agency outright, and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) attempted to dissolve the CIA in the early 1990s, even as a former CIA director, George H. W. Bush, occupied the Oval Office.

At the time, Congressman Bud Shuster (R-PA) argued in a New York Times op-ed that consolidating intelligence functions into the State Department would be a dangerous mistake. Still, Moynihan’s concerns, particularly over CIA secrecy and repeated intelligence failures, have reemerged following the DC shooting.

The CIA’s Troubling Link to the DC Shooter

The suspect in last week’s attack, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was not merely an Afghan evacuee. Lakanwal previously served in NDS-03, one of Afghanistan’s notorious “Zero Units,” elite paramilitary strike forces trained, funded, and guided by the CIA during the war on terror, according to the New York Post reporting.

These units, which conducted night raids, counterterrorism missions, and covert operations alongside CIA paramilitary officers, have long faced allegations of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and abuses, according to Human Rights Watch.

The CIA has denied these accusations.

Lakanwal, who reportedly suffered significant psychological trauma from his combat experience, was vetted by the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center before he and his family were admitted to the US in 2021 under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome program.

“He was clean on all checks,” a senior US official told CNN. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, reacting to the shooting, stated flatly: “This individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here.”

After settling in Washington state and reportedly working as an Amazon contractor, Lakanwal is accused of traveling across the country and carrying out a targeted ambush blocks from the White House. National Guard soldier Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries; another guardsman, Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains hospitalized. Prosecutors are reportedly pursuing the death penalty.

A Challenged Counterintelligence System

The episode comes as lawmakers across party lines claim the US counterintelligence structure is fractured, outdated, and routinely outmaneuvered by foreign adversaries.

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned in October that the United States maintains “a disjointed counterintelligence apparatus that just doesn’t work well together,” in a statement to The Washington Times.

His committee advanced the SECURE Act, a sweeping overhaul that would create a national counterintelligence center with broad powers to coordinate and conduct offensive counterspy operations. It is unclear who would lead this organization if it were created.

Critics argue that decades of catastrophic intelligence failures, from Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen to the collapse of the CIA’s spy networks in China, illustrate structural dysfunction so profound that reform may no longer be enough.

Former CIA officer Charles “Sam” Faddis was blunt: “The FBI has no idea what it is doing in this realm. CIA has lost its edge. If we don’t change that, we are just wishing we could do better,” per The Washington Times.

Creating an effective American counterillegence program may prove difficult, however. James A. Lewis, Senior Adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued in a 2006 paper that “constitutional differences” between Britain and the US prevent the US from establishing an MI5-style counterintelligence program.

The CIA’s website does not claim any major counterintelligence victories in its “Counterintelligence at CIA: A Brief History” webpage. And yet, the Air Force Global Strike Command apparently studies the CIA’s top counterintelligence officials and reproduces their thoughts on how to be an effective counterintelligence officer.