TIME with…THE SPY MASTERS

IT SOUNDED LIKE A SCANDAL. IN A SERIES OF late-May tweets, President Trump alleged that the Obama Administration had placed a spy in his 2016 campaign for political purposes. “This is bigger than Watergate!” he wrote. But “SPYGATE,” as Trump dubbed it, was not exactly what he said it was. The FBI had reportedly deployed an informant to covertly question low-level members of Trump’s circle who had been contacted by Russian operatives. The goal, according to Democratic and Republican members of Congress who have seen the intelligence, was to figure out what Moscow was up to, not to infiltrate Trump’s campaign.

To James Clapper and Michael Hayden, two long-serving, retired leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, Trump’s tirade was just the latest in a string of politically motivated attacks on America’s spies. “[Trump] is undercutting the validity of institutions on which we’re going to have to rely long after he’s left office,” says Hayden, who led the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009 and the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005. Trump “is constitutionally illiterate [and] a real test