The Central Intelligence Agency announced on Friday that it was retracting 17 reports and revising two others that were written over the past decade.
Most of the intelligence reports focused on issues that a senior C.I.A. official said were related to diversity, equity or inclusion. Three of them, the official said, suffered from inappropriate sourcing or were about issues that should not be of concern to the C.I.A. Those three reports were declassified and released.
Former officials questioned both the decision to declassify intelligence reports and the argument that the documents were flawed. The former officials argued that the documents were not examples of shoddy tradecraft or bias and simply reflected the policy priorities of past administrations.
Current and former officials noted that the analytic pieces flagged for purported problems were only a fraction of the tens of thousands of articles written by the C.I.A. over the past decade.
The documents were deleted from the agency’s database or revised after the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board reviewed 300 documents and flagged 19 for review. Members of the advisory board, appointed by the president, advise the White House and intelligence agencies on a range of intelligence matters.
In a statement, John Ratcliffe, the director of the C.I.A., said the declassified documents fell short of the agency’s “high standards of impartiality.”
“There is absolutely no room for bias in our work and when we identify instances where analytic rigor has been compromised, we have a responsibility to correct the record,” he said.
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Like all government agencies, the C.I.A. leadership has made moves to keep in step with President Trump: firing all of its officers who were involved in diversifying the agency and reviewing the intelligence assessment that concluded that Russia meddled in 2016 election.
One of the reports criticized on Friday, from 2020, dealt with contraception during the pandemic; one from 2015 dealt with mistreatment of gay, lesbian and transgender people in the Middle East and Africa; and one from 2021 dealt with the expanding role of women in racially motivated violent extremist groups.
In the last year the C.I.A. has shuttered a group analyzing global health, which would have produced the report on contraceptives. The intelligence assessment about female involvement in hate groups focused on overseas organizations, but it associated certain practices and policies favored by some Trump supporters, like having more children or adhering to traditional marriage roles, with violent extremist movements.
The senior C.I.A. official said that while the agency should be tracking foreign extremist groups, the retracted intelligence assessment was flawed because it was wading into political debates and discussions about gender roles in allied countries.
The official also noted that the article on contraception cited Planned Parenthood, which the official said was an advocacy group and not a suitable source of information.
Former officials who examined the documents said that they did not see any problems with the analytic work reflected in the reports, which they said would have been reasonable pieces to write at the time they were done.
The former officers interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Trump administration has stripped the security clearances of national security experts who have spoken critically about the administration.
Policymakers in power at any time are allowed to ask for intelligence work on a wide variety of issues that concern them. And while C.I.A. analysts should not advocate a particular policy outcome, they are responsible for analyzing whether different approaches might achieve the goals of policymakers. The former officials who reviewed the three declassified documents said they believed they adhered to that standard.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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