168. Trump's New Director of National Intelligence and the CIA's Missing Gold Bars

14:02David:Now, look, I've heard of people slightly embellishing their CVs, you know, slightly exaggerating their accomplishments. But this is something else. And I'm afraid, David, this raises little questions about the CIA and its employment procedures, which is, does no one check? I mean, does no one check these things? I mean, they don't strike me Is that hard to check if you're the CIA?

14:30Gordon:One would not think so. And I will say that I think the two big questions that come out of this, this is the first one, is how does a serial fabricator actually even get in? Right? Because shouldn't someone have checked or called Clemson and said, did he actually graduate? Oh, wait, no. Well, what is this diploma you've given us? Because I'm pretty sure he, I think he faked a diploma. And submitted that as part of his application. So you're right. I mean, I think a big question is how does someone like this get in and stay in? He was probably polygraphed at least three times over the course of his agency career.

15:10David:I mean, it suggests he's a very, very good liar, which you could say makes him perfect for the CIA in some ways.

15:17Gordon:Well, I actually think, you know, I mean, not to go all armchair psychologist on you, Gordon. But I think if you are a sociopath, the stress indicators that the body normally gives off when you're lying, sweat, heart rate, breathing, all this kind of stuff that can trip the polygraph, they don't happen.

15:41David:You're fine with it. Yeah. You're totally comfortable with it. You're not stressed by lying. Right.

15:45Gordon:It's the George Costanza thing. It's not a lie if you believe it, right? I mean, And that's, I think, how this happened. When you get into the sort of mechanics of how the CIA brings someone into the organization and how they do these checks, it's interesting to me because Rush would have joined around the same time that I did. I joined in 2006. He got in in 2009. So we went through a very similar process.

16:11David:One of many parallels, yeah.

16:13Gordon:Yes, one of many, including the gold sitting behind me. So on this question of how would someone get in? So when when Rush applied, as I did, you fill out this massive form, which is called an SF-86, on which you basically catalog your entire life. Where have you lived, your education, your employment history, you know, foreign ties, foreign travel, all of your relatives. You know, obviously, if you have any criminal history, drugs, whatever it is, it's a massive form. It's very invasive. You fill this whole thing out and then the CIA runs a background investigation on you. And this is a very, it's not just like a quick background check that's done digitally.

16:55Gordon:The CIA, these aren't CIA officers, I think they're contractors. They actually send people out to go and visit with people that you have listed on the SF-86. So when I went through this, they sent people to my college to talk to my college friends about me. They sent people to my neighborhood. It is actually deeply upsetting to my neighbors because this guy came out quite literally in a trench coat and he walked up and down the street on which my childhood home sits. And he asked neighbors about me and they were very creeped out.

17:29David:Yeah, I bet.

17:30Gordon:Like I think they thought that I had committed some kind of crime.

17:33David:Guy in a trench coat. First of all, how do they... I've got lots of questions about this. In the UK, it's developed vetting is the same thing. And it was quite controversial because we had it with Lord Mandelson, who had been appointed Ambassador Washington, had he been properly vetted and all these questions. But when the guy was walking in the trench coat down your old childhood street, does he say, oh, by the way, David's planning to join the CIA? I mean, how do they? But isn't it kind of obvious? Because like, why else? Why else is a guy in a trench coat asking about this?

18:01Gordon:So they're definitely not saying CIA.

18:03David:OK. The government job, they might say.

18:05Gordon:Maybe. Maybe. I mean, I'm not even sure if they do that. But he's, you know, this guy apparently was asking, I remember a couple instances of this. So the neighbors, apparently there was a lot of conversation about whether I had caused problems in the neighborhood or thrown parties or, you know, things like that. And I was young, obviously, at the time and still am. And he was very concerned about, you know, sort of youthful indiscretions. When he went to my college campus and spoke with one of my friends, apparently it was this big question about foreign travel. Because I had been on a trip to France with this friend.

18:46Gordon:Wow, France.

18:47David:Yeah. Right. Dangerous.

18:48Gordon:Very exotic. And he was like trying to figure out, okay, well, what, you know, when were you there? Did you go to other countries? This kind of thing. Because obviously what he's trying to do is he's trying to match those dates against what I put in the SF-86, as well as get kind of an overall, you know, character assessment or something like that. So the point is that it's a pretty in-depth process. And one would think that the massive number of fabrications that David Rush would have made on his SF-86 would have been caught. But here's the thing. Today, the agency, as do most big corporations, has fairly sophisticated software that it uses, obviously commercially available stuff, to run a check on the SF-86 against the digital footprint that most of us make, you know, online, right?

19:43Gordon:And to do a lot of this stuff to kind of flag applications where there might be a higher risk of, you know, fabrication. This was not done in 2006, 2009, right? This is a manual process, which means that the investigators, the contractors that were looking at David Rush's application took the, and I don't know what the procedure was, but it means they took the Clemson diploma and they never - Never checked. Maybe they put in a request to Clemson and never heard back and they said, whatever. And I do think, you know, it's interesting, like at the, when we did the Snowden series last year, there was this kind of dropped handoff between the CIA that had real concerns about Snowden and the NSA when he was working on a contract with the NSA.

20:31Gordon:Whereas like the CIA was basically like, I think it was put into this system called Scattered Castles, which oversees a lot of the clearances and kind of is like supposed to be a centralized repository for who has what clearance. And basically Stoneman was flagged by the agency in Scattered Castles, like don't give this guy clearance. But the NSA missed it because they didn't, you know, the contractor didn't check in Scattered Castles. So I actually think with the Navy, it must have been a similar dropped ball where the investigators that were doing this just didn't check with the Navy.

21:05David:They just took it on face.

21:07Gordon:They just took it on face value in the SF-86. And obviously, Rush would control the references on the SF-86. And if he's lied to his neighbors and friends about what he's doing, which he did, then everyone's going to have the same story about him. and so it's all going to check out.

21:27David:Yeah, it's all going to check out. But he'd worked at the fire department as well, hadn't he?

21:32Gordon:The Ashburn Volunteer Fire Department.

21:34David:That's right. But again there, I mean, there's this very good NBC News piece from Rich Shapiro who's gone and interviewed some of the colleagues. And it sounds like again there, there's this kind of record established of being some kind of, I mean, fabricator, fantasist, I don't quite know.

21:50Gordon:Everyone that Shapiro interviewed, and by the way, I'd highly commend this piece because it's fantastic. What a great piece of journalism. This guy went out and went to the volunteer fire department where Rush had served. Everybody there thought that Rush was a Top Gun fighter pilot. And he'd flown sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, when Rush joined, he was in great shape. He said his call sign in the Navy had been dumpster. And then he got the name because he got drunk once and wound up in a dumpster. I think that's a great call sign, I think. Definitely top tier.

22:25David:Yeah, if I was going to pick a call sign, I would not pick dumpster. I mean, Maverick, Iceman, dumpster.

22:32Gordon:So here's the thing is Rush had been in the Navy in a technical role that I think did obviously deal with aircraft. And so he could speak in a compelling way to other people about his experience as a naval fighter pilot. And he looked, all these guys in the Ashburn Volunteer Fire Department said he just, he kind of looked the part. And he wasn't, he was sort of soft-spoken about it in a way. Like he would open up about it once he was pressed, but he wasn't out there trying to advertise this to everybody. So he came across to everyone there like really credible. He looked the part. He could talk the talk.

23:13Gordon:And everyone assumed that, well, why would this guy make this up? He seems to be, of course, this is what a top gun fighter pilot looks like.

23:20David:Okay, so that kind of tells us how he managed to get in CIA. But I think the next question is the gold bars. Is how do you possibly justify, without wishing to give anyone in CIA any tips, How is it possible to get$42 million of gold bars stashed at your house? We don't want to encourage this kind of behavior, but I'd quite like to know how we did it. So when I put this question to a lot of my contacts, they all had the same answer that

23:57Gordon:Rush came up with, which is you create a fake special access program. You create a highly compartmented program that needs funding is what you do. And what it seems like he did, and I'm reading a little bit between the lines here in some of the reporting, and there's still a lot that I'm sure is going to come out. I think his special access program may have been under Department of Defense auspices. And he was a CIA liaison to this or overseeing it as part of his work with the Pentagon.

24:32David:Right.

24:32Gordon:But that would be because the Pentagon has a much larger budget. And because he was sort of sitting at the seams of the CIA and the Pentagon, I think it's very possible that neither leadership group had full awareness of what he was doing. Now, I'm a little bit reading between the lines here. But what I find fascinating, though, is the special access program, because initially where my head went when I saw the headlines on this, was like, that seems hard. Because if you're, for example, let's say you're doing what Bill Hayden was doing in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and you've created fake agents.

25:20David:Yeah.

25:20Gordon:Right. At some point, there's going to be case officer turnover. You don't get to just handle these cases in perpetuity. And so you could create a network of fake agents or really, really primo fake agent that seems to... And you write the intels that come in and they're really, really good and everyone's excited about it. But that is not going to last.

25:47David:It's not sustainable, is it?

25:48Gordon:It's absolutely not sustainable.

25:50David:Because you're right, you hand over an agent to a new officer every couple of years. So unless you were bringing them in, it just wouldn't work. And also, what's the intelligence and where's it going? But also,$42 million in gold bars seems like a lot. I mean, that's no agent or even, I mean, maybe, that seems like a lot.

26:10Gordon:Yeah, well, that's the other thing that my, you know, former colleagues have flagged is just there's a level to this that obviously Rush was exceptionally greedy and or sort of a compulsive, like he was getting sort of his kicks out of the con. And maybe the fact that these gold bars, like by all accounts, his home in Ashburn is, you know, pretty modest. He doesn't seem to have been living outside of his beans. I do wonder, again, armchair psychology here, if this was just like the thrill of the con was what he was in it for.

26:46David:He's a hoarder.

26:47Gordon:Yeah. And it wasn't about spending the money. It was about taking the money, if that makes sense. But the special access program is really interesting that he seems to have set up because it was a continuity of government operation, which is basically it's a contingency plan for keeping the American government functional in the event of like a massive catastrophe, nuclear war, you know, another pandemic. And it's a big question. In a nuclear war, how do you keep American intelligence functioning?

27:20David:Yeah. What if the banking system is taken down, for instance, by a cyber attack or by in the event of a nuclear explosion or something like that? Now I'm starting to understand a little bit about why gold might play a role because that's, you know, rather than just stacks of cash or something else, continuity of government makes more sense, doesn't it?

27:39Gordon:Because if the question at the heart of that program is, how do we maintain some kind of skeleton intelligence function if the banking system goes down? Or if three cities are obliterated in an opening strike of what becomes a nuclear conflict with the Russians or the Chinese, you could start to see how having a stockpile somewhere, like having a site, and having gold to continue to conduct operations makes some sense. Now, it's also the case, I mean, it is also the case, obviously not this amount of money, but in some geopolitical environments, we pay agents in gold. It's very dense. It's obviously, you can transport it fairly effectively.

28:32David:I thought it would be diamonds, little bands of diamonds. Sure, it could be either.

28:35Gordon:It could be either. Yeah, that's what I was imagining.

28:37David:Okay.

28:37Gordon:It could be either. So the idea of payment in valuables is, that's a thing. I mean, when we did the Tolkachev episode, I think they paid him in. They went and found some really expensive jewels at a Russian boutique jeweler in the States and then brought those to the Soviet Union to pay him with those.

28:56David:So is there a gold vault inside Langley? And again, asking for a friend, because I think there's a kind of Goldfinger style heist movie, which could be done, breaking into the gold vault at Langley? Do they have a massive storage? No. No.

29:13Gordon:No. Here's the brilliance of what he did. Because if that was the case, there's going to be somebody somewhere who has paperwork that says David Rush has checked out $42 million in gold. But if you have a special access program like this that has been set up for continuity of government operations. And if you have a line item inside it that says there needs to be a certain amount of funding for this, let's say, gold stockpile that we'll use in event of whatever XYZ catastrophe, what he seems to have done is he read in a few other colleagues, one of whom was in a position to approve the transfer of millions of dollars into this special access program.

29:59Gordon:And then he drew up a fake contract and tendered it to a defense contractor who then supplied the gold, allegedly to fund his operations. And that gold ends up at his home in Ashburn. So it's not coming out of a CIA Fort Knox gold vault. It's a contract that a defense contractor had to go out and procure this gold.

30:21David:Wow.

30:22Gordon:We should say none of this is normal. As far as I can tell, this is not like, oh, the daily business of the agency has sort of bubbled up and made it into the press. I mean, this is not a common thing. To your point on the payments though, it's not common, but also not unheard of for payments to be made to assets and maybe only a few people in the organization or maybe only one person in the organization has ever met them. Once you're in, and I think this is the part that's so, I actually think the credential fraud in many ways is the much more troubling problem here because it suggests an absolute failure of the CIA's sort of internal threat processes over the course of a decade plus.

31:11Gordon:Once you're in, there's a high degree of trust.

31:14David:I like the way you think making up something in your CV is more worrisome than being able to sneak out$42 million of gold and hide it in your house. That's a very CIA way of looking things. I think most people would go like, the latter is the slightly more surprising thing. But maybe in the world of the CIA...

31:32Gordon:The fake bachelor's degree was not caught. That's my number one concern here.

31:37David:You're outraged at that. But large suitcases of cash, it's fine. That's the way it goes.

31:42Gordon:Well, it was interesting because I had this, you know, I'm fascinated by these kind of questions of like, okay, are there examples where a case officer is going to make a request for funds and nobody else in the organization has met the person? And sure enough, as I kind of pinged my network, I found examples of this. And I won't go into any amount of detail here, but there are cases where, for example, we purchased a property for someone and the only person in the org who had met this potential asset was the case officer. Nobody else did that. So in theory, this case officer could have made this thing up and gotten that money and used it for something else.

32:30I mean, case officers do handle very significant sums of cash.

32:35Gordon:I mean, in the, I think it was the second series we did on the CIA in Afghanistan after 9-11.

32:42David:Suitcases. Yeah. Millions of dollars.

32:45Gordon:Those case officers were going in with millions of dollars to pay off warlords. Millions of dollars. could they have taken$100 ,000 out of one of those sacks and put it in their own pocket? Maybe. I think you probably could have if you had wanted to. And the great quote I got from one of my friends was the old saying is, you don't know if it's a recruitment until you turn the case over to somebody else. Because again, in that example of, let's say you've been given money to purchase a property for an asset that you invented, that case turns over in two years, And all of a sudden, you know, the case officer takes it over, says, there's nothing here.

33:24Gordon:You're going to prison, right?

33:26David:I remember hearing, talking to an MI6 officer, I'll be discreet about who, who took over in a station overseas. It was a long time ago, 50s, maybe early 60s. And when they took over, they realized that the previous guy had just made up a whole network and was just filing reports based on what was in the newspapers. Because in those days, no one back home would have access to the local newspapers and language. who was just kind of writing up all these kind of sources and agents. And that was it. But I still can't imagine anyone from MI6 would have millions of dollars in gold bars. No, never. Never.

34:00David:Although if there is anyone out there listening who knows of such a case, then please write in. The rest is classified at goldhanger.com. Happy to look at the story. But it does seem curiously CIA. I mean, he does sound like a character. We should say he wasn't a case officer either, was he? He wasn't running agents. But he was quite senior, David Rush. That's what's so interesting about him. You know, it's not some junior guy.

34:22Gordon:No. So he was an officer in the Directorate of Science and Technology. So he's not a case officer, not an analyst. Apparently, you know, from everything I've heard, had a lot of friends on the seventh floor, like well-liked. He apparently, although there have been quotes denying this, he apparently was very close with Deputy Secretary of Defense Steven Feinberg, with whom he had worked on a sensitive program related to China. So this guy, David Rush, was, you know, I think part of part of the reason he got away with it for what seems to be quite a long period of time was was that he had friends in high places who probably just, you know, they trusted him.

35:11Gordon:Right. And and saw him as a competent, you know, capable guy. I will say there's some interesting kind of interagency shot in front of you because the DO people that I have spoken to.

35:24David:Director of operations, yeah.

35:25Gordon:Director of operations. I guess there's a little bit of a buzz of like, this is what happens when the DS &T people try to run ops. This is the kind of, you let them run ops and they're going to steal millions of dollars.

35:38David:Next time someone asks for gold bars, there might be some more questions, I think.

35:41Gordon:They'll have to fill out some paperwork maybe next time they. Well, I guess we should say that's the thing. He filled out paperwork. It's just that he obviously, and I guess we'll be watching this story in the months to come because I think we might, he's in custody, obviously. I think we might be headed toward a very interesting trial. And we'll, of course, cover that if and what we do. But that's the crazy part is that this guy probably also had some witting or unwitting accomplices inside the organization. So a lot of this, you know, there's going to be some house cleaning at Langley and maybe the Pentagon that'll bring more of this to light.

36:17David:So, yes, lots to watch there and questions for the CIA. And I think there might be a little bit of house cleaning there. And speaking of house cleaning, there's also been some changes at the top of the US intelligence community. So let's take a break and afterwards we'll come back and we'll see what Donald Trump has been getting up to with his spies. See you after the break.

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38:13David:Welcome back. Enough on gold bars now to the subject of politics. and Donald Trump and what's going on, David, inside US intelligence. Because we've had some kind of really interesting shifts back and forth about who's going to be the new director of national intelligence. And we thought it might be an opportunity to give people a little bit of an update on what's going on there. And this issue, which we have been trying to watch quite closely, which is, is there politicisation? Is there a risk of politicisation? What's going on inside Washington in the intelligence world?

38:47Gordon:I guess we should say that the chronology here starts because last month in May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announces that she is going to resign effective June 30th. Her husband has a rare bone cancer and she wants to be able to be with him through his treatment. Trump then announces that he's going to name a guy named Bill Pulte to the DNI role. Now, Pulte runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is obviously a natural jumping off point to being the head of the US intelligence community.

39:23David:He's basically the government's mortgage advisor.

39:26Gordon:He chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are these two massive mortgage giants that facilitate the mortgage market in the states. He's the mortgage man. He's the mortgage man. There is immediately a high degree of alarm and consternation in the Senate because of the Pulte nomination. I think in part because he has no experience and also in part because in his role as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte has developed a reputation as a political hatchet man for Donald Trump. And there was fear on both sides of the aisle in the Senate that he would bring that mentality to the DNI role, which is supposed to be – we'll talk more about how it's changing – supposed to be a political intelligence and national security job that's given to someone who has deep national security experience.

40:20David:because the claim, the allegation, was that actually in his mortgage role, he'd been reaching into the mortgage system to pull out records of Donald Trump's political enemies. That was the allegation to be used against them, effectively, to start investigations against people on the Federal Reserve, the banking organisation, people in New York who've been prosecuting Donald Trump. So I guess the worry was that he would bring the same techniques into the even more sensitive world and mortgages of the intelligence community and reach into the intelligence community and kind of pull out information that could be used against enemies and also, I think, be a hatchet man in the sense of cutting the place and, you know, kind of going after and sacking enemies and sacking people with the intelligence world as well.

41:08David:So you can see with that why there'd be a bit of uproar, which there was.

41:12Gordon:There was. And then, so Trump then walks the policy domination back and says, well, he's just going to be the acting DNI until I find a permanent replacement. Now, Pulte could have been the acting DNI into January. And because there was so much concern on the Hill about Pulte's nomination, Trump eventually says, okay, wait, no, Pulte will not be the DNI, nor the acting DNI. I'll name this guy named Jay Clayton to be the DNI nominee. I also think another factor in this was that the House did not extend Section 702 of the FISA Act, which allows, we covered this in our Snowden episodes, but that allows the government to compel US tech companies and telecommunications companies to turn over communications from foreign nationals.

42:04Gordon:And there can be incidental collection of US persons under that. It's actually a very controversial authority. And the House decided not to extend that in part to put pressure on Trump to fully withdraw Pulte and to put another nominee in. And that's how you end up with Trump then nominating Jay Clayton to be the DNI. Now, Clayton is the US attorney for the Southern District of New York. It's one of the most powerful positions in the Department of Justice. He's also former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. And in that role, he'd overseen a number of high profile cases, including the prosecution of former Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro.

42:46Gordon:And it seems like CIA director John Ratcliffe is the one who suggested Clayton to Trump.

42:54David:Yeah, I read that, that John Ratcliffe had suggested him being the right person, which is very interesting because once again, it suggests that Ratcliffe behind the scenes is quite influential. And in this case has kind of extended his influence even to the DNI where there's been, I think we might come back to this, some tension between the Directorate of National Intelligence and the CIA over who's kind of top dog and who gets to pick who's chief of station in various overseas capitals. So it's interesting because this, you'll be pleased to hear, David, given your love of the organisation, is another win for the CIA is what it makes it sound like bureaucratically.

43:30David:It seems to be quite good at fighting bureaucratic battles. But I guess also, I mean, we should say with the fact Pulte was withdrawn shows to some extent some of the checks and balances of Congress do work. I mean, maybe only at the more extreme cases. But in this case, it does seem to have worked. Like the system kind of forced Trump to pull back from something which, you know, people said this is too far. Yeah, it is a seemingly kind of rare occurrence these days to have Congress actually flex

44:07Gordon:its muscles and put a check on the executive branch. But that's exactly what happened here. And I really do think there's the fact that the DNI, statutorily, it needs to be something someone who has a, quote, extensive intelligence or national security experience, which obviously -

44:25David:Bill Pulte didn't as a mortgage advisor?

44:27Gordon:Bill Pulte did not. Now, you could make the argument that Jay Clayton does not have that either, but Jay Clayton does not have the same reputation that Bill Pulte has for being essentially a political enforcer and for, as Pulte has, for there to be allegations swirling around him that he has misused or abused his powers as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for political ends. There's none of that swirling around Clayton. So even though Clayton, I think, would probably be, in terms of the intelligence and national security experience, probably the least qualified DNI that we've ever had in that respect.

45:10Gordon:He will not have the same aura as Pulte had. I mean, Pulte's nickname was literally Little Trump. So Clayton's not the same. But I think both Democrats and Republicans have expressed a desire to confirm Clayton really quickly as a result.

45:26David:Yeah. I mean, it's worth just maybe a quick moment just to say, for those who don't know what the DNI does, the Director of National Intelligence, part of the post 9-11 reforms. And they are the manager of the intelligence community. So they're not operationally running things like the CIA and Intelligence Collection or the NSA. But they oversee it, don't they? And they also lead the process of briefing the president and they often brief the president themselves. But also, I mean, it's been interesting to see the role evolve because we've had Tulsi Gabbard in it, who is, I think it's fair to say, was a controversial pick in her time and has not been particularly influential either.

46:03David:I mean, she was pretty much marginalized over Iran, Venezuela, a lot of the big events this year. She's not played a major role, which I think is one of the other reasons almost everyone thought she was on her way out. So it is interesting because it's felt like there have been instances of politicization and pressure, perhaps, but also of marginalization, different structures, a kind of fluidity to the US intelligence community under Trump, which this is another sign of. How worried do you think people are, people you speak to, about that, about the turnover, about who's getting these jobs, about whether they're political hatchet people or whether they're going to politicize the agencies?

46:49Gordon:I think the answer to that question depends a bit on where you sit, because I wouldn't want to create the impression that Tulsi Gabbard or more broadly, the way that the Trump administration has interacted with the intelligence community. none of those things have have prevented it across the board from doing its job it's not like it's all of a sudden not functioning and so when i talk to people who are who are still inside a lot of daily life it just goes on as it did before because these are really big bureaucracies I mean, there's 18 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, and the CIA has upwards of 20 ,000 employees, not to mention all the contractors.

47:39So these are big, big places that, to some degree, have an immunity to the whims of what's going on at the highest levels.

47:51Gordon:Right. That said, my sense is what's happening and you can kind of see this in the way that Trump has leaned on John Ratcliffe, for example, the CIA director, to be the guy in the room when they're making decisions on Iran, on Venezuela. Radcliffe is the one who's sharing the podium with Trump when that downed airman is rescued in Iran. And this interesting piece of CIA tech that we talked about is used to locate him. So Radcliffe is taking on this job as sort of the principal advisor to the president for intelligence. It's John Radcliffe. It's the CIA director. It's not the DNI.

48:33David:rather than the DNI. Yeah. The DNI role has, I think, turned into under Trump

48:42Gordon:a much more political job in which the role is to confirm the policy, to promote the policy, not to inform the policy. I think that is what's happened to the DNI role under Trump. And the DNI itself as an organization, we should say one of the failures, I think, of the post-9-11 intelligence reforms was the DNI was envisioned as the true leader of the US intelligence community with control over budgets and personnel. That never happened. So the DNI job turned into this kind of coordinating managerial layer that would sit notionally above all of these other agencies, but without any practical budgetary control, for example, over the CIA.

49:31Gordon:The DNI doesn't appoint the CIA director. The DNI doesn't appoint the chief of station overseas that is the chief US intelligence rep in a particular country. The DNI doesn't do any of that. And so what instead you have in the Trump 2.0 world, I think is a DNI that has sort of morphed into this increasingly kind of political, almost strategic communications role rather than someone who is, you have in the weeds advising the president on intelligence matters.

50:05David:Yeah. They're not kind of operationally managing the intelligence community. But you're right. It's interesting, isn't it? Declassification as a tool of politics and of communications, that's where the DNI has been used because you've seen these pushes to declassify lots of things. I mean, everything from, I mean, COVID-19, of course, we've been talking about lab leaks and things like that. We talked a little bit, didn't we, about how we've seen declassifications of that, JFK files, and of course, files on Trump-Russia investigation, also Havana syndrome, something I think we're going to look at soon on the podcast.

50:43David:These issues, which they basically want to declassify things to say, often the previous administration was wrong, was guided by its own politics, had politicized the intelligence community itself, kind of the sense of a deep state hiding things or twisting things. And now we're revealing the truth and we're going to declassify through the DNI. That seems to be the way in which it's been used primarily.

51:12Gordon:Exactly. And I think that the Trump administration has been pretty consistent on two big themes related to the intelligence community. One of them is that it's too big. It needs to be downsized. And you can see that impulse in the way Trump was talking about Pulte's nomination. Pulte was kind of there to further make cuts. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard herself had already cut the office of the DNI down considerably, it seems like. I don't know if this is going to be Clayton's mandate, but Trump wanted Pulte to do something even more drastic. You could see this when Trump took office with the attempt to basically offer a buyout to agency officers who wanted to leave, right?

51:52Gordon:To pay people to exit the organization in an attempt to make it smaller. But the other piece, the political piece, the second theme is that the intelligence community is in need of a cleansing, I would say. It's in need of a political correction that the intelligence community itself, whether it was, as we're talking about this week on the pod, whether it was its analysis on the COVID lab leak theory, whether it was its analysis on Trump and Russia, that the intelligence community was itself politicized and therefore is indeed of a political correction. And the declassifications that Tulsi Gabbard made this week about US funding for biolabs all over the world, and in particular in Ukraine.

52:41Gordon:The declassification is done exactly in that spirit of, this was covered up before, this wasn't released. I, Tulsi Gabbard, am now releasing this information. And so you have this very interesting circle where I think it becomes very hard to pin down. Did the politicization start inside the intelligence community and the administration is correcting that? Or is it in fact that the administration is taking a very political lens to the business of intelligence and infecting, at least right now, the kind of upper echelons of some of these agencies, in particular the DNI, with much more politics than we've seen over the past couple decades?

53:22Yeah.

53:23David:I mean, it does feel as if on an operational level, the impact isn't necessarily that big. And I've been speaking to people here in London and elsewhere who say on a day-to-day operational level, things are still going okay between, for instance, the UK and the US in the intelligence space. But they are worried. People are conscious of what's happening at the top. And I do think there is a point of which when the political headwinds get really strong and really difficult, that will feed down whether it's into morale, whether it's into staff retention and who stays, whether it's in whether I'm going to put my head above the parapet and say this is wrong or I think this is right when you know that the politics is heading in a particular direction.

54:09David:All those things, you can see the potential for it, even if we're not necessarily seeing, I think, a deep politicization at the day-to-day level at the moment. Do you think that's fair?

54:20Gordon:I think that's fair. I do. But I think it's interesting to maybe pull out one example of what I would argue is a pretty egregious example of politicization that occurred under Tulsi Gabbard and kind of look at this and maybe pull out some of the implications of it for some of the themes you just mentioned. because I think the best, the most egregious example that has kind of bubbled out into the open of politicization in this administration was an assessment that was done on Venezuela prior to the raid that captured Maduro. This is early 2025. There's an assessment produced by the National Intelligence Council, which is kind of the premier analytic body in the U.S.

55:14Gordon:intelligence community. They were looking at the connections between the Maduro regime and this transnational gang, Tren de Aragua. And the question was there because the Trump administration wanted to show that the Maduro regime had a kind of commanded control structure over top of this gang in order to be able to label the Maduro regime as a narco-terrorist organization and use that as the legal justification for a whole bunch of covert action programs then eventually to go and kidnap him and arrest him effectively in Venezuela. And the National Intelligence Council looks at this question and they conclude that any kind of coordination between the Maduro regime and Trent de Hidragua is pretty unlikely.

56:09Gordon:And that finding runs very contrary to the administration's narrative on the connections between Maduro and Chente Aragua. And internal emails later show that Tulsi Gavard's chief of staff had instructed the National Intelligence Council to revise the assessment so it could not be used against the DNI or against Trump. A revised version softens the language a bit, but it preserves the original analytic judgment, which is we think this kind of coordination is unlikely. Details then get leaked to the press. And in May of last year, this revised assessment ends up getting declassified and released through a Freedom of Information Act request.

56:54Gordon:So it's embarrassing because it shows that the intelligence community has said to the president, look, this is the reality of the situation. And the administration's talking points are totally contrary to that. Gabbard's, of course, furious. She fires the chair of the National Intelligence Council and his deputy. And then on social media, characterize the officials as Biden holdovers, which I find really particularly galling because I know both of these people. They were longtime and very well-respected analysts who had been at the agency since before I joined, right? I mean, so they had served multiple presidents of multiple parties.

57:36Gordon:It's like, it's crazy. And Tulsi said they were removed for politicizing intelligence, which is this kind of -

57:43David:Opposite of what they were doing in some ways.

57:45Gordon:Weird do loop of the politicization claims. Yeah. It makes it so hard to pin down what's going on. But then Tulsi moves the National Intelligence Council, which had actually sat at Langley at CI headquarters. She moves it out to a DNI facility and installs a kind of unspecified, somewhat amorphous review group that's going to have a look at these National Intelligence Council assessments before they go out. And I think this example is a great one because we've talked a little bit on the pod about how hard it is to pin down politicization claims. But I think here we have an actual fact base to show the mechanics of an egregious example of it happening.

58:24Gordon:And then you think about the implications of this. If you are commissioned to write a piece of analysis about how's the war going at Iran? Are we winning or losing? And now you're going to put that piece out. Do you want to put your head up and say we're losing and produce something that the administration doesn't want to hear?

58:48David:That is the question, isn't it? Is whether you've got people in the room who can speak truth to power, whether when there's a policy shift towards saying, you know, when the Iran war, the recent war was starting, is there someone in the room who can say, well, look, The intelligence assessment is the Iranians are going to shut the Straits of Hormuz and that's going to be a problem for you. If people aren't willing to put their head above the parapet because they know they're going to get sacked for doing it if they don't pursue the policy, then administrations, presidents make mistakes because they're not getting honest, unvarnished advice.

59:20David:So that's the risk, isn't it, with politicization, in a sense, is you lose what the intelligence community is there for, which is to give you an unbiased assessment of what might happen. I mean, just to finish up, I mean, with Pulte as D &I, that would have been maybe a worry. I mean, I don't know. Do you worry about it now? Is it an issue now with Clayton, with Ratcliffe? I mean, a little bit maybe, but not as much as it might have been, I suppose. But it's something to watch.

59:53Gordon:The way I would describe it is it doesn't seem like the intelligence community or the CIA. I think I might have a separate thought on the office of the DNI right now. But if you look at the actual agencies themselves, I would say that they don't seem structurally politicized. But there have been enough instances of political pressure and outright politicization where it's a growing risk. And there obviously have been cases in the second Trump administration of individual agency officers, as we just talked about in this example with the National Intelligence Council, losing their jobs over basically standing up and saying, this is the world as I see it.

1:00:41Gordon:and getting fired for it, pushed out. We had the examples early on of the administration of the officers who were doing, who'd been kind of seconded to work doing diversity, equity, and inclusion type roles who were basically taken out to the CIA visitor center and fired and told to leave. So you have examples of very significant consequences for people who find themselves standing kind of in an awkward and visible role that is politically contrary to what the administration wants. And I think that the effect of that can be very chilling and also very invisible because this Venezuela example is visible and there's a fact base to demonstrate it.

1:01:31Gordon:But a lot of politicization kind of it can come down to memos and pieces that are not written.

1:01:38David:Yeah, things which are not said as much as things that are said.

1:01:42Gordon:Things that are not collected on because they're not a priority.

1:01:45David:Because you don't want to risk the political heat that will come from it.

1:01:49Gordon:And if you walk it all the way upstream, it's the people who decide not to apply to the CIA or to the NSA or wherever because they see it as an increasingly political entity. And so I think you actually do have a real, there's a talent problem in here too, where you have people who don't apply or people, frankly, like, you know, I have friends who've done this who basically said, you know, they've been in for 15 or so years. This is an opportunity to just go do something else, right? And so they have all this experience. They've been trained by the agency. They're highly valued, you know, and valuable employees.

1:02:32Gordon:And they take that expertise elsewhere because they don't want to deal with it. They're never going to appear in a data set. They're never going to give an interview and say, this is why I left. They're just going to go and take a job at a contractor that pays them more money and they might not have to deal with this. So the problem is systemic in that way and it's not visible, which is why it's so hard to talk about.

1:02:53David:Yeah. Well, I think it's something we should keep an eye on for the future. We might come back to it, do some more of these extra newsy little episodes. and of course we've got a live show coming up September as well on the South Bank you can still get your tickets for that for us on the Friday and then I think with the mooch on the Saturday Bletchley Park tickets are on sale as well there's more information in your email so I'm going to let you go back to polishing your gold bars underneath the desk I'm wearing you know 10 of the Rolexes

1:03:30Gordon:Yeah, exactly. I got them on my person right now.

1:03:33David:Yeah, so you've got a busy day ahead. But anyway, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.