Transcript of Inside the CIA, the White House & the Intelligence Purges | Julia Curlee

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Yeah, absolutely. Hey everyone, I'm Jack Murphy. This is The Team House. And we're here with tonight's guest, Julia Curley. Julia served as an analyst first at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then at the CIA CIA, where she became a senior analyst and went all the way up to National Security Council level. She was the PDB, the Presidential Daily Brief— Briefer to H.R. McMaster and then Vice President Pence, and then served through the Biden administration and into the early Trump administration, second Trump administration, where she was purged essentially after being targeted by Laura Loomer. So we'll get into all of this sort of stuff. But I mean, you had a really interesting and long career at the agency and even up at the White House. So I really appreciate you joining us on the show, Julie.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

So you grew up in Hawaii, right?

Mm-hmm. Yep. Tell us a bit about that. Barefoot kid. Yeah. So my dad was in the 25th Infantry around Vietnam, and then he got out and he met my mom. And for some reason, I never left paradise. Yeah. So, I was born and raised in Kailua, which is a little beach town right next to Ke Bay for the Marines. And, I just ran around barefoot enjoying all there is with perfect weather and sunshine all year round. But, those planes came over the horizon and I always wondered where they came from. And so, I don't know what it was. I was probably about the age 7 where I thought about you know, what is it to be a person that gets to travel the world? And then I was probably ambushed at some point by the movie The Hunt for Red October, as often happens, uh, which I must point out is the movie where the analyst is the hero.

That's true.

Obviously. Uh, and so I, I started wanting to be a CIA analyst. I kept that, that little secret to myself because it was, you know, clear that it was a little weird for— for you.

That came out of you, like, from that early an age that this was something that you were interested in?

Yeah, I have no idea where it came from. It's just primordial Lou stuff. But yeah, it was just, you know, wanting to see the world, you know, and the attractiveness of the espionage business, the sexiness of it. I mean, I don't know where it came from, but it got me. And so I set my sights on getting to Washington, and I went to college in DC and got recruited by the intelligence community, and away it went.

Did you find a life— do you think part of why you kind of chose that direction was because— and I don't have any experience— was Hawaii, living on an island, was it kind of isolating and led to you kind of like wondering about the larger world? Is that where that came from maybe?

Yeah, there's a little bit of that. You know, it was also drilled into me from a young age that public service was expected. You know, my mom was a schoolteacher and my grandfather taught at the university. It was just sort of like, expect you're going to go, going to do something to serve the country. Um, you know, my grandfather was from an immigrant family, and that was it. It was, you know, uh, do your duty, the country will take care of you, and, and, you know, live a life that you can be proud of. Um, so it— I don't really have any memories of doubt of where I was going to end up, uh, until, until the recent unpleasantness. I've been on a pretty one-track— uh, path. Uh, so yeah.

So, uh, so getting off the island for you was, uh, enrolling in college?

Yeah. So I went to American University in D.C., uh, in the International Relations, uh, school. Uh, while most of my classmates went into peace and conflict resolution, I joined the U.S. Foreign Policy Program where we were talking about nuclear weapons. And, and at the time, uh, this was in 2000, uh, you know, like the debate was between, you know, do we get involved in nation building? Right.

In the '90s.

Yeah. And then 9/11 happened the second week of my sophomore year. And everything got real serious real fast. And suddenly now I drop all my Russian studies classes and I'm doing Middle East studies and the same plan just with a little deviation and studying Arabic rather than Russian. So here we are. So then the run-up to the war in Iraq. I was applying for— first I applied to CIA, and CIA rejected me, uh, which I, I never ceased to remind them of that fact. And then I got accepted by DIA, and DIA hired me right out of college, and, and that was it.

And what was the position that DIA hired you for?

Uh, to be an Iraq analyst. Uh, I mean, to be honest, at that point, you know, this was— the war had just, uh, been launched. in March of 2003. They were hiring anybody they could get their hands on at that point. So, they lowered the bar to get to me. And I was happy to join. And before long, I found myself at Fort Benning, learning to man a checkpoint, even though I was an analyst, learning to put on MOPP gear, prepare for chemical weapons, even though we hadn't found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it was my introduction to the world of government training requirements. So I spent a few, you know, months at Fort Benning prepping and, uh, living, living in 100-degree heat, uh, 99% humidity to prepare me for Iraq, I guess. Uh, and then they put me on a plane and away I went. And I arrived in, in Baghdad in, in March of 2005.

So this was your pre-deployment training, uh, which is sort of interesting because you're a civilian. You're not a member. Even the DIA is part of the military. They employ civilians.

And at that point in the war still, they put civilians like me into uniform. I don't know if it was for our own protection to, you know, not stand out from, from a crowd, or they just wanted to, you know, put us in our place so that we knew that we weren't that special. Or I'm not sure, but Yeah. They gave us a bit of basic training and taught me how to use an M16, which was a lot like the .22 rifle that my dad had taught me when I was growing up. And we were preparing for war because we certainly were in a raging insurgency at that point. The day I stepped off the plane in Iraq, March 22nd, 2005, I think there were 2 dozen Americans killed that day. And it was just, you know, it was bad and there didn't seem to be any way out. But it was the place I needed to be. And I was following the same path that had taken me from Hawaii. Yeah.

So Iraq in 2005 was seriously hot. There's a lot going on there during that time frame. What was, you know, I mean, if you could tell us a little bit more about your job as an analyst there and sort of what you were experiencing, what you were seeing in Baghdad during that timeframe?

Yeah. So it's probably a good example to start because I had a weird career for an analyst. Historically, whether it was CIA or DIA, these are quasi-academics. We write 100-page papers that are highly classified that nobody reads. And after 9/11, the life of an analyst was very different. And so not only was I sent to Fort Benning to learn to to put on chemical weapons gear. But the moment they threw me into the war zone, my job was to serve basically as the embedded intel in a hostage rescue task force. And we were mostly assigned to track down U.S. soldiers who had been separated and captured by the enemy. I was on the case of Sergeant Maupin, who was one of the US soldiers who had been kidnapped near Abu Ghraib. And so I was the lead intel officer, 23 years old.

Wow.

Working with a bunch of operators and driving up and down Highway 10 out to Abu Ghraib and spending the night in that lovely base that we had there at Abu Ghraib, trying to support the retrieval because we assumed that he had been killed at that point. And also other hostage rescue operations to try to save Iraqis who'd been kidnapped by the insurgency.

Uh, was that a successful recovery ultimately?

Ultimately, it was after I, I had left. Uh, unfortunately, it turned out that, that his remains were just right off the highway on the way to Abu Ghraib. Um, and we just needed to find the right Iraqi family that was willing to turn, turn over the, the remains and work with us for the right amount of money. And, um, you know, uh, it was, it was targeting intel work, right? It was, it was, you know, connecting the dots. It was supporting prisoner interrogations. It was, helping with source operations, being in the meetings with recruited assets. So, not the typical life of an analyst, but certainly after 9/11, a lot of us went down that road, and that was kind of the norm for us. And it followed me back to another tour in Iraq. Next time I finally got out of Baghdad, I was up in Kirkuk.

Kirkuk.

for a few months with DIA. And then on, I think it was Christmas Day, I emailed DIA my resignation and accepted the letter of offer from CIA that had arrived and started in early 2007 with CIA, working Iraq from just up the Potomac.

I wanted to touch upon something you said about you know, working these cases where Iraqis had been kidnapped.

Yeah.

And I mean, that gets into an entirely crazy thing in of itself that when we destabilized the country, it was like all these essentially mafia groups, you know, gangs and stuff, you know, kind of bubbled up to the surface. So there was like kidnapping for ransom left and right. But blended in there is stuff that has to do with terrorism. What was it like for you trying to navigate through those networks? And this is also the time where we're trying to chart out, you know, insurgent networks.

Right, right. Well, this was before the surge, you know, before really, you know, the Petraeus period where we took on a more population-centric approach to the conflict. And at the very beginning of my assignment, working the first tour, there was a real fight within the US military command of how much effort and attention should we be giving to rescuing Iraqis. To be exceedingly generous, you know, US persons were the priority, followed by, you know, the foreign nationals of our allies and partners. But it became very clear several things immediately, you know, one, the kidnapping for ransom networks are funding the insurgencies that are killing US soldiers every day. And 2, the Iraqi hostages are co-located with the foreign hostages.

Right.

And so we had to go through this massive process of reprioritization of the Iraqis, which, which was not the priority of the US military in 2005. And it was just a little microcosm of the slow shift in strategy. In 2005, you could buy a 50-inch flat-screen TV at Camp Victory, weirdly named, in Baghdad, but the Iraqi neighborhood outside the wall didn't have running water or power. So, we learned some hard lessons those years. And I got to be a part of the slow shift as we figured out—

Mm-hmm.

You know, that if we were ever going to fight our way out of this catastrophe, this debacle that, of course, we caused by invading, we needed a different approach. And fortunately, we finally did. And later work in Iraq, I got to work much more closely with the Iraqis, and it was immensely rewarding. I got to know a lot of people and, you know, learn much more about the culture and the food and a lot of good memories from that period. I mean, you know, it's good that war is so terrible we grow too fond of it. These were, these, these were some of the happiest. If you asked me right now, you know, what was the highlight of your career, I would tell you it was deployed supporting U.S. military hostage rescue operations.

Those Wild West years.

Yeah, absolutely.

Tell us a little bit about what it was like going up to Kirkuk, which was, you know, a long history there. But I mean, it's a Kurdish area. Saddam tried to Arabize it, but by the time you got there, the Kurds were in control, as I recall.

Yeah, 2006. Yep. Kurds firmly in control. I'm based at the airport where DIA had its compound at the time. And, you know, it was definitely a Wild West. But one of the craziest things at night, you know, the skies would light up with the red of the oil fires, which being a Hawaii kid reminded me of the volcanoes back home. But yeah, it was in that case. So I'd moved from working hostage rescue to doing the CT hunt for Zarqawi, who we killed that summer of '06. And I was working on the second, you know, how there's always like a second in command of al-Qaeda.

Yeah, right.

You don't last long in that position. But yeah, we were working very hard to decapitate that network and had a lot of success in, you know, in 2006 doing that. Again, a lot of You know, it was a horrible war. A lot of people were dying. But, you know, some of these memories, you know, I think I turned 24 sitting around the fire pit with a guitar, you know, watch— watching the outgoing illumination rounds, you know, thinking it really doesn't get any better than this, does it? But I guess I was just a kid, you know.

And that the hunt for Zarqawi was, you know, obviously this huge thing going on. That, that was the thing going on at that time. Yeah. What did you kind of see from your perspective and how were— how was the DIA and the military kind of like adapting to this new form of warfare? Like manhunting was still the sort of thing that was in development at that time.

Yeah, it was, it was amazing to see it develop like the art of high-value targeting. You know, without getting into too many specifics, even though God knows it's like almost 20 years old at this point. But we were really learning it on the fly, you know, and the effort to develop the ability to roll on a target in one night, get the, you know, pocket litter, and then hit the second target on the same night to surprise the— that was all so new. And then integrating visualization and multimedia tools, it seems so antiquated now, but it was all coming online to support special operations. So I got to, you know, I'm not, on the ground with the units, right? I'm in the air-conditioned office back in the rear. Hopefully, if the analyst is ever involved in a firefight, something has gone terribly wrong. But I got to be there to help them, you know, push off for the missions and support them and help them make sense of it afterwards and help prepare for the next target. And, you know, we worked 14, 15 crazy-hour days.

Yeah.

But you never knew it. You know, the days just flew right by.

Yeah, analyst burnout is a real thing.

Yeah.

So what kind of inspired you to submit your application to the CIA? It sounds like you were off to the races with DIA, like they had you doing stuff.

Well, they had me thrown into the war zone. The DIA at the time was, was a bit of a mess. And it, I mean, it's always had some cultural problems. It dates back to McNamara and Vietnam era and its founding. It's always been a beast that's neither fish nor fowl with these—

Right.

Snot-nosed 22-year-old college students like me answering to— our supervisors are all former NCOs who don't know what to make of us. And then their bosses are all either colonels in the military. And so, just this cultural clash all the way down. We talked back and we had crazy ideas like we were losing the war, which, you know, we were, and didn't follow orders very well. And I had a lot of conflicts with the way DIA was doing business at the time as an analyst. So, in one of the pieces that I wrote, I talked about politicization. And the anecdote that I lead the piece with actually comes from that first tour in Iraq, where as part of my work supporting the hostage rescue operations, I was also doing briefings for the commander, the 4-star at the time. And, you know, my briefing was that things were getting worse, and the trend lines were down, because the criminal activity was out of control. We didn't have enough forces to control the terrain, protect the people at night, especially. And so I wrote what I thought was going on, which was that the western districts of Baghdad were the Wild West and we're out of control and things were getting worse.

But the general, in seeing my presentation, ordered me to get out of my chair. Curly, get up. And when I did, he deleted the word minimal in front of progress. And the arrows that were going down were suddenly off the chart. And then he took the work and walked into the next room and briefed President Bush that things were going well and on the rebound. And the story I tell in that is that I didn't throw up my hands in protest and demand that he not do that. I just sort of stood. I printed it off for him. And I was 22 or 23. And in later years, I would learn that the business that we're in is deadly serious, of course. I learned that along the way, and that speaking truth to power is the fundamental of it. Or, you know, the whole country suffers, as we did through years of strategy that wasn't working in Iraq, built on bad information that was being briefed up to our leadership. So anyway, it was the Wild West, but I learned a lot from that experience. So I never had lost the desire to go work at CIA.

You know, the DIA's dysfunction was part of it, but, you know, that allure was still there, I admit.

Mm-hmm.

And they make movies mostly about CIA, not about DIA. I'm sorry, my colleagues over there. And so what had happened after that first tour is that CIA, unbeknownst to me, had sponsored a conference at the RAND Corporation about the state of the war. And for some reason, I was asked on behalf of DIA to give an afternoon comment of 10-minute discussion on the state of the conflict based on my recent deployment. And I stood up in front of the audience and told them we were losing the war and that the Iraqis that I worked with felt betrayed by the fact that we just turned our backs on them when, when we had the forces available to help protect them or rescue their loved ones because of our prioritization scheme. And, and I told the story of an Iraqi woman that I got to know, who I'd bought paintings from in Baghdad on the on-base bazaar, and who was then kidnapped and killed. And I still have those paintings in my house. But I said that as long as we're unwilling and unable to protect the Iraqis, we're going to lose this war. Anyway, thinking that my career was over because no one said a damn thing in response to that, this 6-foot-5, gentleman who looks like a linebacker walks up to me.

And I'm, you know, I'm 5'6. You know, I'm not a little person. And he, you know, puts his hands out and he says, how would you like— you know, have you ever wanted to work at the CIA? And he recruited me on the spot.

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That's interesting. And that's also unusual, isn't it?

I mean, yeah, I mean, we, you know, the CIA gets like, at the time, got 30,000 applicants a year. So that, that's not great odds. I think Harvard accepted better. But he just identified me as someone who was willing to tell a group of O-6s what I believed. And that satisfied him and the values of the organization that he taught me. And I subsequently went to work for him. And he was really, you know, he was my CIA dad for— I'm not going to say his name. But like, you know, I really had the opportunity to learn from some outstanding officers who who, you know, he served in Iraq. He served, he briefed senior officials and told them the ground truth. And the organization was exactly the kind of mission-driven, you know, all-in kind of, kind of, kind of job that I'd always dreamed of.

It's interesting that when you interview some of the old-timers, they'll tell you about how, like, one person I remember wrote a letter to the CIA like, oh, hey, I'm in college, I'm in law school, I want to join up. And he actually got contacted by an active CIA officer, come meet me in this cafe. Went and had a cup of coffee and he was kind of like recruited by hand. Yeah.

Yeah.

Which, as I understand it, nowadays it's like all electronic. It's like an HR kind of process. So it's interesting that they kind of plucked you right outta there.

It doesn't always work like that impersonal. And I guess it probably depends on the time.

Yeah.

We, you know, and in that time, we were hiring a lot of people. But in this case, it was, you know, he was a senior leader in CIA's Iraq shop. And here I was, a DIA officer, had served 2 tours in country and had a lot of experience. I'd hardly be walking off the street with nothing. And There I was, and the guy sent me to Iraq 2 more times after that.

So what was the difference when you applied to CIA? I guess because you're an analyst, you don't really have to go to the farm and do all that. But was there like a training pipeline or something that they had you go through?

Well, so the training pipeline for analysts, we— they send them to baby analyst school. It was, you know, 4 or 5 months, PowerPoint presentations, learning where the date goes in the sentence, you know, avoiding passive tense. at all costs. So that was pretty painful. But I got to correct you. So DIA had sent me to Benning, and then they sent me to a contractor in the middle of West Virginia to do more firearms training. And then CIA does the same for its officers before they go overseas, regardless of whether they're analysts or not.

Right.

And so I got to do all the fun stuff. I got to shoot and And scoot and learn how to drive fast and pit other vehicles and make it look like an accident. Maybe not that part, but, but, you know, it was, it was a lot of fun to, you know, crash cars and learn how to, how to defend myself if necessary. So I went through all that multiple times over the years just to refresh your certifications.

And so you are working specifically in the Iraq section after you finish that, and your linebacker boss knows exactly where you're— I mean, there's only one place you're going, right?

Yeah. Well, you know, you, you, you're right. Your, your, your, your job as an analyst is to write papers, right? And you're writing PDBs and, and, uh, the war is beginning to turn. Um, the surge is, is in full swing. the population effort to recruit Sunnis from within the insurgency to fight against other Sunnis in the, in al-Qaeda is working. You know, then the, even though we've deployed our forces now deep into the population, the, our casualties are dropping dramatically. So the strategy is working, and I'm, and I'm in the middle of it. And so I'd done the baby analyst training, and I'd done a year doing the normal analyst work of supporting the White House with PDBs and and other things. And then my linebacker boss taps me on the shoulder and says, you know, what are you doing in September? And he sends me on a— this was— I always get the dates wrong. This was 2008. So he sends me on my next tour to Iraq, and I'm back in Baghdad and Ramadi and other places. And then I come back after that tour of doing very similar work of of, you know, the forward analyst is, you know, you're briefing the ambassador, you're briefing the chief of station, but you're also then diving in to help the case officers and the other officers, you know, in the US military.

And then in— I always get the dates confused— 2009, I believe, in March, my boss taps me on the shoulder yet again and says, what are you doing in a couple of weeks? And he sends me out. And it turned out to be the Sadrists uprising. So over a 6-week period, beginning in March, we called it March Madness, the Sadrists just both rose in the south, they captured whole swaths of the southern parts of Iraq, Basra, Najaf, and Sadr City rose. And our compound was just Eating, you know, 107, 122 rocket fire. They had these 220s that could have killed all of us if they had just— one of them impacted across the street from our compound. It was pretty ugly. We had officers wounded. There was a rocket that went through a trailer about 30 feet away from me one night. It was pretty awful. We worked around the clock practically for 6 weeks. And then to give me an R&R, they sent me to Ramadi. They sent me to Anbar, the quiet spot.

I mean, how did you guys respond to dealing with essentially an insurrection in the country?

Yeah. Well, initially there was a lot of fear that— I mean, Sadr City was an urban jungle of a million people, and there was all this talk about having a march on the Green Zone and overthrow the government. and install an Iranian proxy. And we were very afraid of, of like, serious threat to the diplomatic area left and the Iraqi government, which was very, very still new and weak. And the Iraqi security forces who were very, you know, inconsistent in how successful they were in fighting the insurgency. And we're eating rocket fire all day long and all night. We're living in our office. We're just hoping to get through it. But the US military, God bless them, dives headlong into this urban hell. And in the largest urban battle since Fallujah, and then really since way back in Vietnam, like they fight door to door through Sadr City for weeks. And then I was involved in being, again, the intel support to US military operations going into the city, just to try to, in that case, to try to keep ourselves alive. to try to silence the rockets that were ranging into the Green Zone.

But it is, it is what, what we do.

Yeah.

In a war zone, in a station, you put aside the PowerPoint presentation and you get to work.

Can you describe a little bit more about that? About, you know, because I think people have— and you even said yourself, hey, I was in the, the operations center and the air conditioning. But being an analyst in a war zone is very stressful, as I understand it. You constantly have to be on top of everything. You're switched on 24 hours a day. I mean, can you tell us what that was like?

Well, yeah, I mean, that was particularly brutal, the March Madness run, because of the direct threat to us, to our living quarters. We couldn't stay in our pods anymore. We had to literally live in the office because there weren't enough hardened facilities there. And so, it was extremely stressful, family at home. I mean, this fortunately was before cell phones really became a major thing, but the communications by 2008, 2009 were enough that people could get a hold of you and be on the phone with a loved one and the rocket incoming. And you hear the rocket, rocket, stay away from the windows, fall to the floor. And you're like on the phone with your—

spouse, right?

So that was extremely stressful. And they're seeing CNN headlines every day of how bad it was. And again, where we were was in the most secure place in the country.

Right.

And we weren't the ones diving into Sadr City, but we certainly were there and tried to do our best to support the US military in what was at the time felt like the fight for the war. The Sunni insurgency had been largely quelled at that point. But here came, and we, you know, the new Obama administration at the time was trying to get us out of Iraq and dramatically draw down forces and pivot over to Afghanistan where we hadn't focused on it. And so we went, things went horribly awry, but it was clear that unless we fought off this uprising, there'd be no escaping. We'd end up with this Iranian proxy government.

And I don't want to use the word resolved because obviously this particular issue was never entirely resolved, but how was that vignette resolved as far as the actual combat?

Well, they— between the— I don't have the statistics in front of me, but dozens of US military died in the quelling of the Sadrists uprising, and hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were also killed in that And, you know, the enemy, you know, KIA would have been in the thousands. And they were suppressed. The Sadrists called for a ceasefire eventually. This was a movement, is a movement that goes in and out of violence, much like groups like Lebanese Hezbollah, to gain political advantage. And you have factions in the government that are sympathetic to the militia movements. And they use fighting and coercion as a way of gaining power, and it's still a very powerful part of the Iraqi political scene. But once that was faced down, you could see the— you could see the beginning of the end of the US operations in Iraq. And we were beginning to pivot to Afghanistan. I go back to DC, I became a manager in the office overseeing the conflict. So we're— I'm now running the teams that are producing the PDBs and producing the products for, you know, senior military commanders at CENTCOM or out in Iraq. Iraq about the state of the war as things are developing.

And of course, as people know, if you remember the war, the war wasn't over yet. That's when the rise of ISIS happens. Right. Yeah. And the Islamic State uprising happens while I'm back in DC running a team in the Iraq office. And that ignites the war all over again. And there's the Sadrists, excuse me, The Islamic State captures most of northern Iraq, including Mosul, one of the biggest cities, threatening to march on Baghdad again. And here again, it seems like the insurgency has risen from the ashes. They capture half of Syria. It was, it was definitely ruined the Obama administration's hopes to get us out of Iraq at that point, until the US again intervened with air power in support of the Iraqis who fortunately beat back the Islamic State. And then we supported the clearing operations back through all of those Iraqi cities once again for the next few years.

I, I know you made your way over to Afghanistan, but before we leave this subject, I want to ask you about sort of like the analytical view at CIA at this time as ISIS is starting to take over. You know, they take over a broad swath of Syria, bust across an international border, take over a good swath of northern Iraq and are moving into the Kurdish-held areas and they're moving south. And at the time, I mean, I've been told that there's a lot of denialism across the intelligence community that this was happening, people downplaying it. And I believe some of this even came out in the press where there were some whistleblowers and it might've been at DIA. I don't think it was CIA. People who came out and said, basically what you were speaking about earlier, that the truth is being suppressed. What was sort of your view?

Boy, I'll have to— I'm trying to remember the specific analytic lines at the time. It was certainly a surprise, no question. And, you know, the oldest analytic failure is past performance will equal future behavior. And we had had that. We'd fought through the insurgency at the beginning of the war through to 2008. '08 and '09, when casualties dropped to almost zero, and the Sunni population seems like it's been subdued and is accepting its fate with this Shia-led government in Baghdad. And yeah, it was a surprise when suddenly out of the rural areas of Iraq, this successor organization to al-Qaeda in Iraq founds its own branch of extremist Salafi Islam and becomes itself at war now with Al-Qaeda, but proclaiming an actual Islamic state with a caliph and a desire to unite all of the lands of the Middle East under its leadership. And it's conquering towns, and then it's conquering cities, and the Iraqi military is fleeing before it. And It certainly surprised most of us. I mean, we all knew about the rot within the Iraqi military, but it was the speed. And of course, for a person that later had to work Afghanistan, you know, I would just say that, you know, the intelligence community has a fairly terrible and unbroken record of not predicting the will to fight, especially of our allies and partners.

They often— it's like it goes in both directions, right? If you want to talk about Ukraine, Uh, while we did predict the fact that the Russians were going to invade, we, we also predicted that the Ukrainians were not going to fight. And here we are, um, years later. Um, so, uh, it's, it's a, it's a really difficult question, um, to predict. And, and, and I don't think we succeeded in calling the rise of ISIS, certainly. Yeah.

And then you get moved over to Afghanistan.

So, right. So I'm still working Iraq, uh, but they, they call me and they say, hey, we have a gap in the coverage for General Petraeus. I was a sufficiently senior person. I had served now multiple, you know, 4 tours in Iraq at that point. And so, I'm the one that said yes, because I'm a crazy person. And I soon found myself on an airplane to Afghanistan. I didn't know anything about Afghanistan. What I did know was the US military. And I did know what a war zone was like. And so, I gave myself a crash course on Afghanistan. and read, I think, 3 or 4 books in a week. And then I show up in Baghdad, and it's a— sorry, excuse me.

In Baghdad?

I show up in Kabul, and it's a blizzard, unlike anything I'd experienced in Iraq, God help me. And Kabul is in this bowl, and the smog sits in it. And I, you know, I'm driven to the compound to brief General Petraeus for the first time by allegedly a cousin of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who'd been the legendary Lion of Panjshir, who had worked with the CIA and had fought the Soviets during the first, you know, the Afghan resistance. And here I am confronted with David Petraeus, you know, who had been the commander in Iraq and And we were off. And then I spent a few months working for him in Kabul, doing a different kind of job. When I was in Iraq, I was more embedded in operations and supporting the US military. The Afghanistan job, I was attached to be the full briefer for the commander of US forces in Afghanistan. And so, my job at that point was was full-time supporting the general, his needs, his taskings at the end of every briefing back to Washington. Um, and so that was, that was another thrill, uh, even though Afghanistan was pretty— was, was ugly and getting uglier.

So this is, this is for the first few months of 2011.

Is your job in this role primarily looking at the different inputs that, you know, from the intelligence community and then distilling that down into a for, right, uh, the, the, you know, theater commander.

Yeah, so you're, you, you know, it's, it's a combination of liaison to the intelligence community so that, you know, the chief of station is, is counting on you to, to be a back and forth, uh, with the commander and then vice versa. But every day you're delivering the classified newspaper. Um, so headquarters is sending you articles that have been written by analysts the latest battle assessments and tactical updates. You know, obviously, he's getting it from the US military as well, but CIA has its own sources. And so I'm providing him those assessments. He's yelling at me about analysts back in Washington who keep assessing things about Afghanistan and asking me if these analysts have ever been to Afghanistan. And I'm the messenger being shot, as is often the case. And so I served for several months in that capacity. And that's similar to what I would then in the future do as a PDB briefer, where you're trying to distill this massive classified newspaper product of what the intelligence community is putting out into the fewest words possible, because these people's time is measured in 15-minute increments.

Right.

They're super busy. And they have a person like me who spends all night night trying to cram on the subject to distill it into as few words as possible so that they can get on with their day running the war.

Overall, how would you describe the relationship between the military and the CIA? Because they're 2 organizations that are just— they have totally different prerogatives, essentially.

Yeah, it probably depends which part of the CIA and who and what we're saying at the time. I mean, so that relationship at that time was pretty hostile. Because, you know, Petraeus was in Afghanistan to try to turn things around, being, you know, coming out of the miracle worker from Iraq is now being sent to Afghanistan to turn things around. And the CIA assessment is pretty bleak of where things are going as the Taliban rose and took greater and greater control of, of the countryside.

Right.

And drug revenues are pouring in, financing the insurgency. And they have a safe haven in Pakistan that we can't touch. Not easily. And so the message coming out of headquarters that I had to deliver in the morning was unrelentingly bad, which he didn't always appreciate. But you do your job, you deliver the mail, you argue for the positions that you've been sent, and then you take his guidance and feedback, colorful as it may be, send back to headquarters.

In time, Did you find that he was receptive to this information? It just took time to sink in, or was it really no?

I mean, David Petraeus was David Petraeus. He's a brilliant guy. He had been serving in Afghanistan, I think, for almost a year at that point. He was pretty sure, he was very confident that he was a better analyst about Afghanistan than certainly I was, because I hadn't worked it for very long, and for most of the analysts back in in Washington. But no, he was a— it was a great pleasure to work for. Not always the easiest customer. What I didn't know at the time was, of course, he was being vetted to become the next CIA director.

Yeah.

At that exact moment. And what I especially did not know at the time, because I was not read in for it, was that Operation Neptune Spear was on its Uh, you know, and Admiral McRaven was, was working his thing, uh, and shortly after I left, I can't remember exactly when it— when the raid to kill bin Laden happened, but, but it was— but they were working it while I was there. And, and I can, I can tell you I didn't know a damn thing. They certainly didn't want to tell the analyst.

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Mission accomplished.

Yeah.

So you get home. I guess it's 2011. The raid happened in 2011, as I recall.

Yep. Yeah. Later in the year.

And I mean, I feel like at this point we have to switch gears a little bit. It's kind of an important part of your story. If you tell us about what was going on with you personally at that time on a personal level and some of the things that you were struggling with that it bled into your job, it affected—

Yeah.

Yeah. Sorry. Absolutely. So we can rewind now.

Sure.

So, you know, alongside this unexplainable dream of wanting to become a CIA officer, I think at just about the same time, I can't tell you which came first, I'd had this unexplainable conviction since I was a kid that I should have been born a woman. And trying to make sense of my world, as you know, with that sense deep in my mind, um, was always a troubling thing. But what I did know, uh, with, with all the certainty, uh, that a, you know, a 7, 8, or 9-year-old can, can have is that that's not acceptable. Um, and in the world of the 1980s and '90s, um, I didn't have a word for, for what I felt. I certainly didn't have the ability to talk to anyone about what I felt. When I noticed people or images of people who seem to be like me on TV or in our world, they were considered freaks on television. They were on Jerry Springer.

Yeah.

They were circus acts for amusement. And then, in Hawaii, they were sex workers in Waikiki. And, I knew that that was not going to be compatible, that future, those futures could never be compatible with with my other dream of being, you know, getting off the island, of being a CIA officer, of seeing the world, of serving my country. Um, and so I suppressed it and locked it away and, um, assumed that it would go away. You know, there were— you know, again, I didn't have a word for it. I, I didn't meet the first trans person as an adult until I was 30. That's the first—

Wow.

I should rephrase that. I didn't mean by first adult trans person until I was 30. So like, the idea that a person could have a career and a family and a successful life and be trans, once I finally had the word for it, was just impossible for me to comprehend. So anyway, uh, this thing that had always been there, that had never been a problem, that had never come up because why would it? It's locked in my head. There's nothing to see. Finally, is beginning in my 20s through the wars, through, through these deployments. It's, it's growing. It is, uh, just, it's a bitterness. It, it begins eating away at my ability to live in the world. Um, and I had this sense that like something was just deeply wrong. And everywhere I looked, all I could see in front of me was this thing, this this, this fact that something was wrong with me. Um, and, uh, I thought, you know, okay, occasionally I entertained the idea that if I just deploy again, you know, if I just bury myself in the, in the work, which I loved, then this thing will eventually go away.

And of course, it never did. Uh, and so by the time I got to, to Afghanistan in 2011, I was starting to come apart. And, you know, it's not the right place to have a mental breakdown, Afghanistan. And, I managed to get through that deployment. But, once I got back and peace and, you know, and 12 boxes, 12 different kinds of cereal were available to me in this grocery store and like the— the fear of the next rocket attack was gone, boy, it just, it was all I could think about. I stopped being able to sleep and my life fell apart.

It's interesting that, you know, you talk about, you know, deploying to have to not deal with this. And, you know, war becomes an avoidance strategy for people who do this for a career. I mean, all kinds of different people. You know, your marriage is going south, like, oh, I just get back overseas, everything will be okay. Yeah, but obviously it's not. It gets worse.

No. And it's, you know, if you've seen Apocalypse Now, you know, you start sympathizing with Willard, with the Charlie Sheen character. You know, when you're back home, all you want to be is back in the war. That was my life. And going to serve was the best way to get away from it. And so anyway, it, you know, I It was, it was breaking me. And, um, eventually I decided that I was either going to be fired if I didn't tell them, because clearly I was hiding something, or I would be fired if I told them, because I was— I had no evidence that I could see anywhere that you could be a trans person and work for CIA. And, um, either way I would be fired, I feared, but at least I wouldn't be fired for a lie. And so I called up the security. I came out. I told them what, what had been, you know, lurking in the background in my mind since I was a kid. And that was the beginning of the next phase of my life, you know.

So how, how did, how did that, how was that message received? What was the— maybe you didn't know at the time, but I mean, what was the CIA's policy officially or unofficially about this?

So I learned subsequently that there was no policy. Okay.

Not really.

You know, this, this was 2011, which doesn't sound like that long ago, but my God, it was a long time ago in terms of public understanding, acceptance, and now unacceptance of trans people. And there was no guidance anywhere. The agency's LGBT group, which I did not know existed at that point, didn't have a T in its name. So it was, you know, I'm an analyst. I'm looking around for any sign that I can be this and not get fired and lose my life and my career.

Prior to this issue, I mean, the issue in the intelligence community was, you know, is this person a homosexual? Yeah. And in the past, everyone's closeted, essentially. I mean, being out was not really a thing. I'm just telling for the viewers because I read all of this in your article.

Right. The kids these days don't know what it was like. Yeah, but this is before Don't Ask, Don't Tell ends. So you can't be gay in the military. At least you can't tell anyone you're gay in the military. It's just, it's just a different time of level of acceptance and And, you know, we can't— there's gay people can't get married. I mean, it was just a different time and trans was like extra gay. It was like, it was impossible for people to comprehend still. And, all I knew is that I had to come out and then I did. And then, you know, the very first person I told was the linebacker who hired me for CIA, my CIA dad. Who told me that no matter what, no matter what I did, he would be in my corner and he would see me through this. And so, for not the first time, at least the second time, he saved me and saved my life, my career.

You wrote that he was like, oh, Jesus, I thought you had cancer.

Yeah. Because you go in and you're like, I, you know, and you're, you're trying to explain this thing. Um, and, uh, yeah, so I, I told him, and, and I, I realized that I couldn't run from this anymore. And they, you know, I, I— it became— first I learned the story, which was that there had been a trans person almost 20 years before who had come out, and it was horrible. They had been run out, basically. Everyone had had mistreated them. The leadership didn't support them. I mean, that was the '90s. It was even worse, obviously. Um, and that was it. And, and so, uh, but basically my leadership said to me, well, what do you need to do? And I said, I need to, I need to transition, um, because I can't, I can't run from this. Because the difference between being who I was and the difference between becoming Julia is life. And, I try to explain it to people. It's the difference between learning that you need glasses for the first time and like, who is keeping this secret from me all this time that the world is filled with color and definition?

And, it proved to be the thing that pulled away the darkness and it worked. Um, I— he, he— my leadership then said, uh, well, uh, this has never been done before successfully, because it hadn't. Um, and they picked a date which was a year away from that. And so for the next year, uh, I lived a double life as a CIA officer, maybe a triple life. I don't know what, what counts. But I was, I was my old, uh, sad sack male self at work, and then the moment I got of work, I got to be Julia. And those were the, you know, I lived the wild life of being Julia at the Safeway in the gas station.

I have to say that there is something like almost sort of poetic about being transsexual and working in the CIA as a spy, an organization where people pretend to be one thing that they're not. Yeah.

Right. I also had a fake name at the time.

Yeah.

I had a fake male name, a real male name, a female name that I couldn't use at work. It was getting a little bit crazy by the end, but I lived for about a year in this world as I prepared to transition at work and everything had to be invented. There had never been a procedure for changing a person's was a gender marker in the system. It was all the first time. And the organization supported me all the way up to the director who sent the word down, this is Director Brennan, that this will go well or else. So, it was like the wrath of God was sent down to the management chain that you will figure out a way to make this work. And there's a lot of fear about, you know, the reactions of my colleagues and how it would go down and people remembered the previous time. And then on June 12th, 2013, I walked in the door terrified that this would be my last days as a CIA officer. And, you know, the guard at the turnstile said, ma'am. And my office had left. They had bought— I've written about this.

They had bought me a gift card from the women's professional clothing store, Ann Taylor, And on the gift card they had written, Julia, no one liked you as a guy anyway.

So—

Is it one of those things where, like, almost everybody around you knows before you do?

Well, I had to— yeah, like that. We always knew something was weird with you. But as you can imagine, in the year leading up to that, you know, I was on hormones. I was growing my hair out. I was looking a little weird, I will admit. Um, and then when it finally came out, we're like, oh good, you don't have a life-threatening illness, it's only you're trans. Um, and, uh, it was, you know, the most terrifying day of my life, and that included all the war zones, that this coming to work as Julia for the first time. And, uh, it was a massive nothing burger, nothing significant to report. Uh, my colleagues who are, you know, these millennials, didn't care at all. I think really it was the least interesting thing that happened that day, uh, for them, uh, and then that was, that was it, kind of. I mean, I, I— It's incredible, really. I crossed the gender divide. I was the first person to successfully transition at CIA. Um, but for the most part, this is a story of, of the things that didn't happen. You know, no one complained, really. I went right back to work.

I mean, I, I really— I realize, you know, um, these are different things. But like, I've heard stories about how the CIA employs analysts that have like, like a dude that has an ocular implant, I think it's called, or a person that's in a wheelchair. It is really about like, can you do the job?

Yeah, right. And I mean, at that point I'd done, you know, 4 tours in Iraq and 1 in Afghanistan. I think I'd laid to rest the, you know, credentials. And so it was, it was But it was liberating for me. I mean, just that suddenly this massive thing that had drained my life was gone and my career took off because I'm suddenly a much better officer. I can focus even more on the work and even indulge all of my workaholic tendencies. And I travel the world and I discover what it's like to work while being female. You know, and having men talk over you in meetings, you know, traveling. The first trip I took was to Saudi Arabia, which, you know, no country has quite affirmed my gender identity like Saudi Arabia. When I was greeted at the airport with the abaya, you know, to immediately go into the covering. And, you know, I just kept serving and it never became a problem. And I went back to interesting places in the Middle East that I can't talk about. And again, no one cared. And just keep keeping going with the story. You know, I got I got the call after the after the Trump administration is elected.

I'm still working in the Middle East, and they send out a call for people to volunteer to go be PDB briefers. And you know, in my bucket list of CIA. Jobs, briefing the President of the United States or being, you know, working at the White House was always high up there of things I wanted to do. And when they sent out the call, when the first Trump administration took office, they had a hard time getting people to volunteer. The president had just called CIA officers Nazis or compared us to the Third Reich. And there was a lot of people that felt like they couldn't support or work for the new administration. I disagreed. I thought we serve regardless of party. And I raised my hand and I was picked initially to be the briefer for the Deputy National Security Advisor, where I also worked for H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor. And then a few months later, my boss tapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, Julia, what would you think about briefing the Vice President? And my response was, this Vice President? Because I was hardly unaware of Mike Pence and his in his public positions on matters like gay marriage or trans people.

But again, I don't, you know, we leave our politics at the gate, at the turnstile. And they thought I would be the best briefer for him based on my career. And there I was, you know, waiting in his driveway one morning, And he says, Julia, tell me something I don't know. And we were off. And I worked for him for over a year. And so I served the first Trump White House for almost 2 years, from 2017 to '19.

I'd like to ask about, you know, kind of your post-transition tours in the Middle East, because I think when we talk about— and this is an issue that gets discussed in regards to the military as well. Are trans people fit to serve? Can they be deployed overseas? And some, I'm sure that there's a lot of myths and things that just aren't true. But I'd like to hear, you know, what your experience— I mean, it sounded like for you it was rather frictionless, but I mean, what, tell us what's the real deal?

Yeah, well, I mean, I know a lot of trans people in the military who have been fired fired because of who they are. So I definitely have a perspective on this subject. Um, so I mean, the first thing to say is that trans people have been serving in the military and in war zones for as long as we've been here. They've just been in the closet, right? And so they've served. If, if you knew this, this question has been settled for a long time of whether trans people are capable of serving in war zones. You know, there's still questions about, I think, like whether a person mid-transition like, not yet stabilized in their desired or their identified gender is ready to go. And like, I totally would understand that when I was in the middle of my falling apart, um, you know, and the time it took to, to figure out life, uh, on the other side of that gender divide. I was in no condition to deploy during that. But it's like a category of person unfit to serve in a war zone.

Right.

I mean, people can believe what they want, but they already have. and to great distinction. Um, and we can talk about the issues on that, on that later, but just for the CIA, for other agencies I know, uh, trans people who've served in the intelligence community, I mean, this is just, this is just a settled issue. Um, and I hope people believe me. Um, I got the pictures. I can show you where they were taken, but I can tell you the, you know, it was never a problem.

What about actually, you know, the Middle Eastern countries that you visited? Because, yeah, you know, we're Americans, we're a little bit more open-minded, I hope, um, a little bit more respectful of people's civil rights, although not always. But, um, now when you discuss like going to a country like Saudi Arabia, like, okay, this is a country that is not cool with the LGBT community.

No, forget trans people, but they execute gay people in the square. That trip where I went to Saudi Arabia, we drove right by the square that they chop people's heads off in, you know, for being gay or lesbian. And, but what I'll tell you is that, you know, I'm not there to convince any of my foreign liaison counterparts to believe in gay rights.

Right.

I'm there as a CIA officer, and you better believe that's how they treated me. My gender was CIA officer when I walked in the door. And, you know, I led an all-female team in that trip on a tour of a couple of Middle East. And so, the main issue is when you're outside the room where all of the gender divide of the Middle East drops away when you're in a professional environment, in my experience, and especially in diplomatic engagement, You know, no one's wearing a headscarf. Everyone is just focused on the work. And certainly no one, whether or not they read me as trans, you know, I come across how I come across, which is a no-nonsense CIA officer. And no one made it a problem. And this, you know, I can't talk about this, too many specifics of where I was serving, but in austere environments, And not the work we do in the field, it just is irrelevant.

No, thank you. And to jump ahead a little bit to get back to your career timeline, I think most people probably know what the Presidential Daily Brief is, but I mean, I'd like to ask an actual expert that briefed it, what is the PDB? Um, what is its purpose?

Yeah, I mean, just imagine a, a, a super classified newspaper with a very small circulation. So everybody is out collecting information, you know, that's being processed into finished analytic reports. We're, you know, trying to make sense of multiple raw reports to provide recommendations. The analysts are writing the papers. You get in at midnight to, you know, and you've got all the world's intelligence, hundreds of thousands of reports the US has collected, and you've got to compile a briefing for some of the most powerful people in the morning, as soon as they get out of bed and get their coffee. And so, you work through the night compiling a set of topics or articles or briefing, depending on how your customer wants to take the briefing. Some presidents like President Obama were readers. They didn't They didn't want someone talking at them. George W. Bush was a verbal— he wanted to have a conversation about it. So, you would— and that was very much Mike Pence. So, you're preparing to deliver the contents of thousands of words in as few words possible for some of the busiest people on the planet. And so, you're working through that night in order to get to the dawn, like you're cramming for an exam.

And you've got a book of the compiled, just top for that day, most important pieces of information or papers that need to be delivered to your customer. You know, they whisk you downtown in a car, and I would often get to the Situation Room, and I would check in to see if anything had happened overnight or while I was in the car, God knows, so that the most accurate up-to-date information would be ready at the moment in which I delivered it, um, at the moment they get into the, um, the office. Um, when I was briefing the, the vice president, I would go to his house. I would kind of weirdly hang out in his basement with the Secret Service.

Um, did they have to set up like a SCIF in his basement?

Well, the whole— yeah, everything is— everything. Oh wow. Yeah, I mean, it's like the, the— without getting into too many details, but like, you know, these are the— these people And the places they go and the things they do. This is the top counterintelligence, what we would call counterintelligence. You know, all the intelligence agencies in the world would dearly love to see what's in these documents and what's being briefed to our highest levels of government.

I was told not so long ago that the PDB nowadays is actually like the whole thing is on an iPad.

Well, I can't talk about the specifics of how it's delivered, but But, you know, it's come a long way. Yeah.

Yeah, I imagine. And so you started off as the PDB briefer for McMaster.

For McMaster's deputy, and then worked for McMaster. I was in a rotation with the person who was permanently assigned to that.

And then get moved over to briefing the vice president. And, you know, it was very interesting reading, I believe it was your in The Atlantic about that experience. And you had some nice things to say about the vice president. There's sort of an, it sounds like an unexpected relationship there almost. And Pence, I have to say, I mean, he looks like a guy who was genetically engineered to be like a conservative politician. So just the fact that you guys got along, I think speaks to his character though.

Yeah. Well, so I'll say that by the time I got to brief The vice president. You know, I've been working for many months now for the Trump administration and for briefing H.R. McMaster and Ricky Waddell, who's the deputy. But I'm also serving as a backup for every other briefer because we're all working together to cover people. People have lives. And we also had to cover weekends in Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, depending on the time of the year, because the president traveled almost every weekend to his golf resort. reports. And on one of those, I got to brief Donald Trump on the plane, on Air Force One. And between him and all the other cabinet secretaries I briefed, by the time I get to Mike Pence, I've briefed almost every senior administration official in the White House. But obviously, Mike Pence is Mike Pence. So, you know, I've said this, you know, I don't know what his deepest heart of hearts and beliefs are. What I know is that how he treated me, which I try to report accurately, which is treating me with great respect. He took the briefing every day. He was a great customer of information.

He really was serious about the job, which in an administration at the time filled with a lot of amateurs, relatives, and others who did not take the job as seriously, who are more focused on Twitter. This was a guy who really did the work. And that's everything that a person like me, a briefer, wants to feel like they're really helping a senior US government official make good decisions or help the president make good decisions. And he was that. And whatever differences between us, it never ever got in the way of the work. And why would it? Why would would it even come up when we're too busy talking about, you know, the state of affairs in the South China Sea? I mean, it just— it was irrelevant. And, and, um, you know, when, uh, my, my wife and I, uh, uh, had a baby and, and, uh, they sent, uh, well wishes on the birth of our child, you know, they invited us to, to the Christmas party, you know, uh, my wife and I at Mike at Mike Pence's Christmas party. So they were kind to me and my family. You know, at the end of my tour, when my mom visits, you know, in his office down the hall from, from the Oval, he tells my mom that she should be really proud of her daughter.

So, you know.

Yeah.

Things that, you know, you always, you always pray that someone will tell your mom that. that they should be proud of you. So it's just like, it was an incredible experience. You know, if my wife wouldn't have left me, I would have kept doing it because, you know, it's really hard on families, the life of that. And honestly, that's a big part of the story for me, the thinking that after all I'd been through, you know, after everything in war zones, in serving in the Middle East after I had transitioned, CIA, working for Mike Pence. I really believed that we were— that, you know, a lot of problems left to resolve with trans rights. But, you know, I really thought we were there. I thought we had made it. And then I— and that proved to be very wrong.

So the National Security Council Director of Intelligence Programs, that was the next position you held. What was that?

Right. So one day I got a phone call back at the mothership headquarters for a year or two, paying my dues. And there's a position opening in the Intelligence Directorate in the National Security Council. And effectively, the NSC Intelligence Office oversees access to classified information for all of the executive office of the president. So everybody who works in the White House, And it's who gets what and who's cleared for what and making sure like the right people receive the PEB. That, that because you're working for the Office of the President, not for the intelligence community, making sure they're getting the kind of support that the White House needs from the, from the IC. And so my job there was to oversee intelligence programs. I was focused mostly on East Asia and ran policy process where, uh, I would work with various parts of other parts of the NSC to like make sure that in support of what we were trying to do on China or, or, uh, Southeast Asia, that the intelligence community was providing the kind of support that they needed to execute our policies and to get the kind of information. Um, and then other programs, the, the COVID action program that the White House oversees.

I was also overseeing them to make sure that they were working. And I did that for the Biden White House, working again, crazy long hours and working out of the Executive Office of the President, the EEOB building next to the West Wing.

Okay.

For 20 months until the new administration was going to take office when the vice president, Kamala Harris, lost the election.

I want to ask you, I know that there's restrictions on classified material, but even if you can speak broadly from your view and the access to all of this intelligence information that you had, what are some of the topics that keep you up at night?

In terms of world events? Yeah. I mean, the competition with China is is at the center of the, you know, I think will be the key challenge for the rest of our lives. And without getting into specifics, it's hard, or intelligence, it's hard, you don't need classified information to see that this is a generational challenge to the United States. We've even, even during World War II, we did not face an economic superpower that equals the United States nearly in in, in its, uh, production abilities, its technological prowess, um, and doing so in a system of government and, and ideology very much unlike ours, um, seeking power around the world, uh, in, in ways that, that will harm U.S. interests. Um, and so whether we can keep pace and, and stay ahead in vital technologies is still to be unseen. It's to be determined. Ultimately intervenes on Taiwan's behalf, this ultimately intervenes on Taiwan's behalf, this would be an economic catastrophe for the United States and the world. And not just because you won't be able to get your next iPhone because Taiwan produces the most sophisticated chips on the planet, but, but almost every modern electronic is running on electronics that were designed or produced in Taiwan or in the region.

which, if it turns into a war zone, will shut down travel and shipping for a vast percentage of world GDP. So, I worry about the adversary that does not mean the United States well and our policies, which are not up to the challenge at this point to maintaining US primacy.

I think I'll want to circle back around on that.

Sure. Sorry.

No, no, no, no, it's great. But at this point, I'd like to ask about, you stayed through the Biden administration into the second Trump administration. What was the feeling and what was the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2?

I mean, it's unrecognizable. It might as well have been a completely different president in my experience. I mean, obviously the man at the top is the same, But even he in his, you know, the way he's conducted himself, it just feels very different. So, I mean, just to give you, paint you a picture. So first term, we have General Kelly, we have General H.R. McMaster, I'm working for General Ricky Waddell, General Mattis is at the Pentagon. Like, these are serious people with extensive experience running major parts of our government. Running process, valuing expertise, demanding excellent support from their subordinates, and largely respected by the workforce for all that. And then even beyond the military people, you had CEOs of companies. These were serious people who, you know, believed that the United States has enduring interests. And there was a very strong sense that they served more than just the man, but also the office. and the Constitution rather than just the whims of a commander-in-chief. And so they did things like interpreting his guidance and trying to refine it and mitigate the bad and presenting him with other options. And I felt like it was an administration of adults, which included the vice president, who did their best.

This administration, this is unrecognizable to me. And I got a firsthand seat. So at the end of the Biden administration, All the politicals will leave, and they will leave behind the career detailees to the White House who will support regardless of political party. And despite the fact that most of us were warned to leave and to not stay because they feared— the outgoing officials in the Biden administration feared we'd be targeted by the incoming Trump team because of our association with the previous administration, or in my case, because I was trans. I felt very strongly that I needed to stay. And I was asked by our leadership in the outgoing administration to serve as the acting senior director of the office that I'd been working in, the Intelligence Directorate. My team stayed in place to a person. Everybody volunteered to stay. And then on the 3rd day of the administration, they summoned 160 career detailees. to a phone call. And then they fired all of them and gave them 15 minutes to get off the compound. And that's when the clown show began, because no one was there to pick up the pieces. There was no turnover.

I was suddenly without a staff, with an administration that could barely get onto the compound, barely get computer access, barely get access to intelligence. at the very point of the change of administration, they ripped the wiring out. And so anyway, I continued to serve the new Trump administration despite this incredibly self-defeating decision, and it's chaos. Like, we're— I don't know who's cleared to receive the PDB. There's no H.R. McMaster or General Kelly to call. And it's people filling those positions who have never served in any high level of responsibility in government or the private sector, who have been involved in real estate or personal family members of the president. And it was chaos for several weeks. Policy process did not restart. And then once we started to finally begin to resemble a normal group of policymakers who are trying to to meet the president's policy objectives, there was a whole new purge. And that's the April 2nd purge when Laura Loomer got a meeting with the president somehow. She doesn't work in the White House. She doesn't just walk herself onto the compound, but she showed up and got a meeting with the president with a list of names.

And it results in the firing of me, my boss, several other people, rock-ribbed Republicans in the NSC.

And we should point out, how does Laura Loomer have the names of CIA officials?

It is a good question. I mean, she doesn't—

Just throwing that one out there.

Um, but someone decided that the cleanest way to get rid of me— um, the fact that I was trans was not a secret. Um, I'd worked for Mike Pence, and many of the same people had come back to serve in the, in the second Trump administration. And, uh, you know, the director of the NSA is fired in that same, in that same purge. It was just a bloodletting of competent people. regardless of most of them being Republicans, actually. And then the people they subsequently hired to fill the detailee positions and bring people in that they had vetted, then in May they fire those people too. And eventually Mike Waltz is fired, Alex Wong is fired, the, the National Security Advisor and the Deputy. Policy is effectively shut down in the normal sense that the NSC would be convening, State, DOD, the intelligence community, in what we call the interagency process to coordinate the execution of the president's policies. And at the, the work, the senior working level, where really the rubber hits the road, um, it was, it was effectively ended, um, as a normal process. There's— the NSC got down to like less than 30 people, 36 people I think at one point, um, and it's just never resumed its role as either the primary staffer of the president on national security, presenting him with options and developing talking points for meetings with foreign leaders, or coordinating interagency process to execute and ensure that his will be done.

And that even if we make mistakes, we still plan for contingencies and address the problems. And I'm happy to talk about, you know, the series of failures that led to the Iran War, which I think is the best example of this. But it really all began with this self-inflicted wound early in the administration.

What do you feel was the intent behind these purges? Was it retaliation against the so-called deep state and these mid-level bureaucrats who were thought to be hijacking the government, essentially? That is one view goes. Or is this really about sort of the vertical integration of power into one person? And that one—

both. Yeah. I mean, you— because if you, if you like read Project 2025, they both identified the NSC as the deep state enemy within. I mean, they— it was an officer on the NSC who had been in on the phone call in the first term who had listened to the president solicit a bribe from the Ukrainian president saying that we won't provide security assistance to you without you helping me against my political opponent, likely political opponent, Joe Biden in the next election, which led to the impeachment. So they had identified a career officer who had been in the NSC as being that deep state enemy within that had brought down— that brought the president so much trouble. And they decided then, based on that example, to basically purge the NSC once they came into office. And that, um, in the end is, is the playbook that they followed. Um, I don't know if they planned on purging their own people, which, which, uh, turned the primary entity that enforces the president's policy objectives, that ensures that departments and agencies are following it, the hands, the eyes, and ears the president is the NSC. And in, in cutting off its own hands and gouging out its own eyes, it, it really serves to undermine its own ability to implement the president's goals, um, out of this misguided idea that the deep state is, um, embedded in, in the NSC and in the IC.

So after you left the White House, um, during this whole incident, you revert back to CIA headquarters, uh, the home station. And what kind of happened from there?

Uh, well, I initially had hopes that I could return to CIA and, and, and carry on and find valuable work, but unfortunately it became very clear real fast that that was not going to happen. Um, so for one thing, um, I am a human being. I do have biological needs. And the president on day one of the administration and had an executive order banning me from all women's restrooms. And that included the White House. And so for the 69, 70, 72 days that I served the Trump administration in the White House, I went across the street to use the bathroom because I didn't want to be fired for using the wrong restroom. And so that followed me back to CIA. And so every day, several times a day, I had to cross to the other side of the building to find the available, um, unisex restroom because I wasn't going to use the men's room. Um, and, you know, that was, that was humiliating. Um, and then, and then I feared being exposed to the leadership who made no bones about the fact that they disapproved of trans people as people. People were getting fired for being trans.

There was a whole purge of officers who had participated in this group chat, and all of them had been identified and then fired without any appeal. And so it was a really dark time, and I feared that any minute that that would be the last. And so I started to try to look for work outside the intelligence community very reluctantly and quickly discovered that I couldn't find a job either. Because if you knew I'd been Laura Loomered, you didn't want to hire me because you were afraid of courting the wrath of the administration. And if you didn't know who I was, then why would you hire me? So that went on for several months. And then I was fortunate to meet folks from Lawfare, where I work now. It's a publication that writes about national security. And I'm a public service fellow at Lawfare. And it gave me a home to write and think and try to serve the public in a different way. And that's where I've been since I resigned on May 29th, walked over the seal, and have gotten to work in a different way.

I wanted to ask, I mean, do you see a future for yourself personally, or for people like you in the intelligence community in the future?

I sure hope so. This is all I've ever wanted to do and be, and it would be tragic to give up on that dream. I said I had 2 dreams since I was a kid, and I got to do both for some time before they were taken away from me or made it impossible to continue. I think that At— sorry, do you hear that?

I, uh, is that okay?

Kids in the back. I could, I could try to get them to—

no, no, it's okay.

We're starting to run up on bedtime.

Okay, we'll try to wrap up.

Yeah, I'll give you a full answer though. Um, this is all I've ever wanted to do, and I want to keep serving my country. I just wanted to be treated as a person like anybody else. I'm not asking to be accorded any special privileges. I just want to serve. And I believe that, you know, in a new administration, especially one dedicated to rebuilding the intelligence community and undoing a lot of the damage that's been done to all the experts who have been driven out, I really hope that there's a role in bringing that knowledge and experience that I earned the hard way from 25 years of national security experience and bringing it into a future administration to help rebuild. So that's my hope. 2029 is not that far away, and I hope to use the next couple years thinking about how to rebuild. And to be honest, the intelligence community was not perfect before this administration came to power and needed a lot of thinking of both how to refashion itself for the competition with China and just modernizing for an entire new age. Many of our institutions were designed after 9/11 for a very different competition and threats that face the United States.

And so it's long overdue for revision. And I'm excited to get to work on that on the outside now and maybe get the chance to come back into the government in a couple years.

So I know if we're cutting into family time here, I'll try to—

The main thing is you're going to just— is I've got a little bit more time. It's just going to be hard to keep my 7-year-old old for making too much noise.

It's okay. Well, one thing I did want to touch upon is maybe as a case study about the politicization of intelligence is this war with Iran. And you've written some about it, and I was wondering if you could walk us through how this gutting of the intelligence community affects this war that we're in now that we're stuck in. become kind of a quagmire.

Yeah, well, just to speedrun it, there were a series of firings of senior officers in the intelligence community, primarily because they, they either delivered messages that the administration did not want to hear, that contradicted what they were saying in public, or the messenger themselves was the wrong kind of person, which is, you know, in my case, I was trans, but in other cases, there were people that had previously in their their past lives have been working on Russian interference in our elections. And for that sin of doing their job 10 years ago, they had their clearances stripped. And so there was clearly an enemies list that they were pursuing from the beginning. And the effect of this is what I'm trying to describe was, these were some of our best analysts. These were people that we all admired. And as baby analysts, we all looked up to. And when they were fired, fired for no reason given other than the obvious, and that they had crossed the administration somehow with what they had said. It sent a message to the junior workforce that, you know, what if that person can be fired, what hope do I have?

And it sent a chilling effect through the workforce. And so, you know, the flow of information breaks down in that environment. It was a structural feature of the organization that a GS-11, a GS-13 could tell a cabinet secretary that they were wrong, and they would not face any consequences for it. Maybe they would even be promoted for it, for speaking truth to power. It was the value of the organization. And within a few months in 2025, all of that died. And for junior officers across the building, The message went out, just avoid writing on anything related to Russia or what the president doesn't want to hear on China. And the organization just froze up. And it was a sad thing to see. People aren't reversing judgments, they're not lying, they're just avoiding anything that will get them into trouble. And the key warnings that should have been delivered In advance of this, of this war, which were entirely foreseeable about the Strait of Hormuz, about if you kill the Supreme Leader, he'll be replaced by the next Supreme Leader. If you retarget Iran, they will hit our bases. All of those things had been assessed many, many times.

And while I wasn't in the Oval Office and I can't verify to you that CIA never delivered the warning, my impression was that it was either not delivered or not heard.

It's incredibly petty and emotional too, because the president makes these decisions. He has that authority. The CIA doesn't make these decisions. Their analysts can come in and say what they want, but it's up to the president and the elected representatives to make these types of decisions. But I guess they're just so emotionally hostile to information that doesn't jive with their policies that that there's— they retaliate.

Or didn't see the value in, in objective analysis. I mean, you've seen this across our government, you know, the attacks on the, uh, you know, the Labor Statistics Agency so that the government is no longer putting out objective information. Yeah, on the economy. It's just like they don't want non-politicized sources of information that might suggest that what the president says in public is not true, or the promises that he made are not coming true. You know, that the 3-week war that we're now 6 weeks into, or 6 months into, has no end in sight. And they found these entities to be inconvenient or potentially hostile sources, as they had interpreted the first term. And you combine that with the destruction of the decision-making coordination body where a lot of that information would have been injected at a level in which planning can occur, and you have a recipe for disaster, which of course is what happened. You have, you know, why wasn't there an evacuation plan for half a million Americans stuck in the region in a war that we started when the British, the French, the Germans all were able to plan to evacuate their troops?

Somehow, somewhere, we didn't have a plan to get our people out. We advised people that they were on their own.

Or that, you know, that the White House seems like they were surprised that the Strait of Hormuz was closed down, our bases getting shellacked in the Middle East. But I mean, we had all these war games that showed like that's exactly what would happen. Like it was not an unknown thing at all.

I mean, we started this conversation with the tours of the Middle East and our tours there, and it's something something really depressing to be in your mid-40s and to feel like 20 years of war— To the country on the left. And the country on the left and the country on the right, blood, sweat, and tears, treasure untold. And we seemingly didn't learn anything, at least not, not enough to, to apply. Um, and we now can't open a strait with the most powerful navy on Earth on our side against an enemy that doesn't have a navy. And we're— and while we started this war on our terms at a time and place of our choosing, now we're basically waiting for the Iranians to let us sue for peace and give them a better deal than they had before the war. It's a depressing place to be as a person that worked on the Middle East for a long time. But it's a combination of hostility to expertise and for competent public servants.

And I guess I also wanted to ask you about, I believe you co-wrote a piece with John Seifer about Director Ratcliffe, and he's kind of an interesting character. As I understand it, he is at the White House all day. If you were to walk into the headquarters at Langley, people would be like, yeah, who's that dude?

Ratcliffe, not John Seifer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Sorry.

Sorry.

So it's very clear to me, and obviously I haven't been there in several months, that the director is focused on pleasing the president. It's really the only job security one can have as a senior official in this government, and is much less focused on the workforce, which is bleeding, you know, is just hemorrhaging a generation of talent on his watch that has been politicized at the direction of of either the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, thank God she's gone, but also the White House and the organization has been dragged under his watch into some truly terrible activities, which will be very difficult to walk back. And just to give a couple of examples, just 2 months ago, the president gave a speech to the country about the state of our election security, and he cited CIA products that had been declassified for the purposes of his speech, citing intelligence to say that, that our elections had been tampered with, they were illegitimate.

By the Chinese.

By the Chinese, um, which is the opposite of what CIA believes. Um, it's the opposite of what those documents say, and also some of the documents, yeah, that they released. Um, and, uh, I can hardly think of a worse abuse of the intelligence community than to be conscripted into a presidential speech using CIA as a witness, as a character witness, to say to the American people, to message the American people that their elections are being stolen. I mean, that's like, that's the kind of thing that the post-Nixon period was supposed to build a guardrail against. And I really worry going into things like the midterms, that on the eve of one of those, of a political contest, that the White House will, will again use CIA to try to send the message that, oh, this district, this district, this district over here that all happen to be, you know, razor-thin margins are all the ones that the Chinese are trying to manipulate. And so now we can seize ballots and break the chain of custody and interfere in local elections. And they've already declared the, the Chinese components in, in the voting machines to be this inherent threat, even though there's not really any evidence at all, uh, that it's a vulnerability, let alone—

Ping pong machine parts for the, for the voting machines, right?

I mean, every modern electronic that all of us have have Chinese components in it, but we don't just ipso facto assume that Beijing can manipulate it remote. Um, but it, it serves as a predicate that could be used anytime, um, for federal interference in local elections, which is citing intelligence, which is a terrifying abuse of the, of the agency. And so that was one of the main things that, that, um, the article called out. Um, and then the second thing, um, which the article talked about, which I think is important, um, is so, you know, an agency that can be told to tell the public what it doesn't believe is also an agency that can be told to participate in activities that down the road will be declared illegal, uh, and, and may or may not have been— probably were not legal at the time, even when people were told that they were. And so while I don't have any access to classified information on this subject, and I'm just going off of what I see in the newspaper around, but it certainly appeared from press reporting that CIA was being pulled into this boat strikes in the Caribbean and in the Eastern Pacific.

And if in fact, the agency is participating, in lethal activity targeting fishermen who may or may not be drug smugglers, but is a non-capital activity. When this is over, regardless of whether people have been told that, that killing people for engaged— engaging in non-capital activity, because smuggling drugs is not— is— does not in our country allow the death penalty, they're going to be accused of committing extrajudicial killings. And I really fear for my former colleagues. You know, the, the top-level politicals, we've seen this movie before. They will all get pardons. They'll all walk away fine. Exactly. Don't worry, don't worry about Stephen Miller.

But if you're some ex-Navy SEAL in MARBRANCH, you're not getting a presidential pardon. Sorry, man.

And, and even if you're lucky too, you're still going to get dragged into court, and you're still, you know, there's still going to be the investigations. People are going to pursue civil damages. Like, it's, it's, it's a nightmare. And, you know, I hope that in the future administration, the future rebuilding, where we put our emphasis will not be on punishing the career workforce for just following the, the orders they were given that they were told were legal. I really hope that that's not the focus. But I mean—

You also have to do something. You have to clean it up.

Right. But we've all, we've all been through this. If, uh, you know, for those of us served at CIA through, through the renditions programs and, and waterboarding, we know, we know what happens. And so I really fear for the organization, um, for what it may be being dragged into.

Tell us about where you are now. I mean, you mentioned it, Lawfare. Um, where can people go to find you and what, what do you do there?

Right, so my beat at Lawfare, uh, which is a kind of a, a wonky, unapologetically nerdy national security publication that looks at the intersection of national security and law and international relations. I mostly write on the intelligence beat, where it intersects with foreign policy. And I talk a lot about this issue that we've discussed today, which is that the attacks on our institutions and on our experts have combined to produce bad results in our foreign policy. And that largely the incompetence is what I am describing that has produced the debacles in places like Iran. And so the work I've done there, if you find me on Lawfare, walks through most of these things. I talk about the DNI being weaponized against the public. I talk about the politicization of CIA and the intelligence community. Under the administration. I talk about the destruction of the NSC. I've talked about the upcoming midterms and this attempt to lay a predicate for interfering in domestic elections. And so trying to apply the skills that CIA taught me all those years to foreign affairs, but also to try to chart a course to the repair. I don't want to spend the next 2 years looking backwards at I want to look forward at what we're going to do to rebuild these institutions that are so important.

Where can people find you? Are you on social media at all? Any group chats with Laura Loomer?

Oh, yeah. I haven't reached out to Ms. Loomer. I'm pretty sure she knows where to find me. Honestly, they're not that interested in me. I'm an ex. I've already been Loomered. I mean, what are they going to do? They've, they've already taken away most of what I had to lose, you know. And the fact that, that a trans woman not only worked in the second Trump White House, briefed President Trump, and was asked to stay by the second Trump White House and worked for Mike Pence, all of which without anyone caring, all of which in my mind disproves most of what they say in public to demonize and caricature trans people. they would prefer to just ignore that because it doesn't fit into their preferred narrative. So, I'm not on X. So, I avoid that. But I'm on Blue Sky on LinkedIn and I've got a Substack, but I'm out there. You can find me.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is the opportunity. Is there anything else you want to plug, the Substack or anything else, let people know about?

Yeah. I mean, those are the places where I post the analysis that that I, I, you know, that I write. I'm not, I'm not a take engine, and I'm not— I don't have a view on everything under the sun. I'm a, I'm a wonky intelligence officer, and, and that's, that's the lane I'm gonna stay in. Um, and so, uh, you can check me out on Substack and, and other, uh, you know, where we're all fine. Social media is sold, I guess.

We will, uh, have some links down in the description of this podcast also, uh, for people who are listening. Julia, thank you so much for doing this interview and walking us through your career and your life. I think it'll be an eye-opener for a lot of people. Is there anything, any final thoughts before we go? Is there anything you wish I'd asked that you'd like to cover?

No. I mean, one of the reasons why I'm coming forward, this question of why now and why I mean, I could be working at a defense contractor or another place and not having a public profile. But the 2 main things was one, someone needs to speak up for the officers who are still serving and trying to do the right thing every day who can't speak. Everything I've said in this podcast, you would hear in the Starbucks line at Langley. I mean, nothing I'm saying here will come as a revelation to anybody still working in the business, it's widely known just how much damage has been done. And then the second thing is people need to know that the caricature of trans people that they have been sold is a story that is as old as time. It's the demonization of a small minority who most people don't understand, who don't have daily—

Right.

Probably haven't had contact with in their daily life. And it's being used to divide and conquer and cover the broader failings of an administration that doesn't have practical solutions for people. And I've written this PDV about foreign countries— Iran, Russia, Hungary. This is what they do. I never thought I'd be the target of it. But the only thing I can do to fight back against it is to tell my story and to talk about my service and Um, this is not the picture that they would like you to see of what a trans person looks like or what, what a trans person has done, um, and how little they actually care, uh, when they have a trans person that they value. Uh, uh, it's only when it became public and politically inconvenient that they fired me and ended my career.

Well, Julia, again, thank you taking the time out of your evening. I know you said this is your 3rd interview today, so appreciate you standing by and going through with it. And for everyone else who's listening, thank you for tuning in tonight, and we'll see you guys next week. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. It's my pleasure. Appreciate it.

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