Transcription
Gabbard and her office failed to properly coordinate the move with the CIA before revoking the security clearances of the 37 current and former officials. It appeared that Gabbard and the office of the director of national intelligence were unaware of the CIA employees' covert mission.
It's K. Haral with the Midas Touch Network. I don't know whether to be more outraged at Tulsi Gabbard's politicization of the CIA or her utter incompetence. It appears, according to credible reporting, that she was completely unaware that one of the intelligence officers she outed by name in a post on Twitter was undercover. Apparently, there just wasn't the kind of coordination required beforehand to prevent this catastrophic leak.
Here's the thing. The primary job of the director of national intelligence is coordination across and within the agencies that make up our intelligence community. The incompetence of this administration is staggering. I wanted to talk to someone who knows the CIA from the inside. Alex Finley has been on this show before. She herself is a former covert CIA officer. For obvious reasons, Alex Finley is not her real name. But her warning about the damage being done to our intelligence community right now is all too real. Here's our conversation.
Welcome to the Ken Harbaugh Show. My guest today is Alex Finley. She's a former covert CIA officer turned author who mixes sharp analysis with plenty of humor to make sense of spies, politics, and power. Alex, welcome to the show.
Hi, Ken. Thank you for having me.
Well, usually when we're talking, it's because something really bad has happened. So, as much as I look forward to our conversations, there's that undercurrent. And this week, it's the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who we all warned everyone about, right? She outed a covert CIA officer by name on Twitter, on Twitter, along with 36 others, uh, who I don't believe were covert, but whose security clearances she pulled for purely political reasons. What do you make of this?
Yeah. Um, unfortunately, we, we have to say this. I would think it would go without saying. Um, that's bad. You don't, you don't want your top intelligence officer outing an undercover officer on social media. Um, the, there's, there's a number of dynamics I think at work here that are worth, uh, looking at. One, of course, is just the internal process. Um, according to the Wall Street Journal, Gabbard didn't know that this person was undercover. Um, that means that there was zero coordination inside the intelligence community about putting these names out there at all. The fact that that internal bureaucratic process never occurred, um, really makes you wonder, well, what else are they not, uh, coordinating on? And the entire purpose of the DNI is, is this coordination across all of the agencies. So clearly that's not happening. Um, and then, of course, there's this whole issue of, yeah, politicizing and, uh, and using intelligence for political purposes, which we have seen over and over from this administration.
Can you give us some highlights in that awful trend? Because we, we're actually seeing the truth-tellers paying the highest price. And I, I can't think of anywhere more dangerous than the intelligence community, the IC, for that to happen. Some of the people being punished are those who told the truth about the Iran bombings. Others are the ones who were involved in the, the Russia investigation and dared to tell the truth about that. And in some ways, I feel like up until this point, we have gotten really, really lucky as a country that the purging of the most experienced, most senior intelligence professionals, uh, because they have told the truth hasn't led to a catastrophe. That's got to be on your mind, yet, yet.
Yeah, it hasn't led to a catastrophe yet. Um, because exactly everything that you said, um, will eventually lead to some kind of a catastrophe, likely a national security catastrophe, which leaves the United States, uh, open and vulnerable in many ways, which I would say it, it already is because of a number of these things they're doing. So some specific examples of using intelligence in the wrong ways. Um, we can even go back to the first Trump administration. Um, John Ratcliffe, who is now director of CIA, he was acting DNI at that point, uh, at one point during the Trump administration, uh, the first one, and, uh, for example, he released a number of emails, um, which he said painted this picture that Hillary Clinton had created the entire Russia hoax. Uh, that's not the case. That, uh, those were emails that, uh, Russian intelligence had doctored and manipulated and played with in order to make the narrative that, uh, Hillary Clinton had done that. It was not true. But Ratcliffe presented it as if it were a CIA assessment. So that's bad. Um, and again, now we are seeing this exactly what you were saying. Uh, the arbiters of truth are the ones who are being, um, you know, who are having their security clearances taken. Uh, I've been calling it the inversion of truth, which this administration is very good at. People who were, we, we under normal circumstances would consider patriots and good people and arbiters of truth, uh, have become criminals and bad, uh, bad actors who are working against the country. Whereas people, for example, the January 6th, uh, criminals who ended up, you know, prosecuted by their peers, went through our normal constitutional process and were thrown in jail have now all been pardoned, and they are heroes. So the criminals have become heroes and patriots, whereas the patriots have now become the criminals.
Um, and I think it's also really important to understand it isn't isolated. None of these are isolated incidents. Gabbard putting these 37 names up is not an isolated incident. Listing 51 former intelligence officers and stripping them of their security clearances, uh, for having called out Russian disinformation before. None of these things are happening in a in a vacuum. The, the bigger point that I think that people really need to understand is in this global war between authoritarianism and democracy, in which we are now enmeshed, the information space is a central battlefield, and in that, words and narratives are weapons. And so like you said, listing these people who had said, uh, our bombing of Iran didn't do what the president said that it did, uh, calling people out for investigating Russian interference in, in American elections and in our, uh, democratic processes. These are creating narratives that Trump and the people supporting him want to use in order to consolidate their power and in order to change that information sphere so that we no longer know what's true and what's not. Uh, and it confuses us all, and we all withdraw from the democratic process. That's the key to all of this. That's what allows authoritarianism to thrive.
Hey, it's Ken Harbaugh. Quick break to say thank you to everyone who's been following and supporting this show and this channel. None of it happens without you. And if you haven't yet subscribed to my Substack page, I'd really appreciate the follow. It's a great way to make sure you never miss an episode. It's free to sign up. And if you're able to pitch in a few bucks, every dollar goes back into the show. Just search for the Ken Harbaugh Show on Substack or click the link below. Thanks.
Talk about hybrid warfare because it's not as if our strategic adversaries around the globe are sitting back and waiting for the dust to settle. The attacks are ongoing, and some places they're kinetic. They're actually killing dissidents in allied countries with, you know, poisons and actual nuclear weapons in one case, right? Radioactive weapons. And obviously, the front line in Ukraine is the epitomization of that. But America is not immune from that. We are being targeted right now, and the chaos within the IC is exposing us in ways that, that we haven't been exposed in a long time.
This is true. So first of all, I would say on the hybrid warfare thing, Russia is at war with us. Whether we accept that or not is, is up to us. But Russia, in its mind, is at war with us. Um, in 2024, for example, we have officials in Europe who have said on the record that Russia attacked us on a daily basis. Um, now, as you said, this is hybrid warfare. It's designed to be below the level, the threshold for a military or kinetic response, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. Uh, one of the plots that we uncovered was a plan to put, uh, bombs on DHL and other cargo planes. Now, when al-Qaeda was planning that same scenario, we called it terrorism, and we went out and we killed Bin Laden. We killed the people who planned the Bojinka plot. We, we did something about it. And here we're like, well, we're afraid to escalate with Russia. And I think that that's not a great way to do this because clearly, if we don't push back, Russia will keep doing these things. And again, it isn't, these aren't small incidents. Uh, you mentioned assassination plots and other things. Uh, Russia paid the Taliban to target Americans. They have been cyber hacking into our water facilities and causing problems with our water facilities and our dairy facilities and other food, uh, industry, uh, facilities across America. In Europe, they're hitting critical infrastructure. They just jammed the airplane, the navigation systems on the airplane that was carrying the president of the EU, Ursula Von der Leyen. Um, and not only is it affecting the, the leaders and hitting governments, but it's affecting people on a daily basis. I could give you a list of, um, attacks on water facilities, for example, that people think would probably and possibly carried out, uh, by Russian proxies, and 10,000 people had to boil water for three days. So, there's a real impact on citizens that we need to start understanding. This affects us as citizens. Russia is at war and is doing these things against us, and it's up to our, our intelligence community, and it's up to our political leaders to protect us from that, and they're currently not doing that.
We're going to post a link below to your Substack piece, "As Trump Courts Putin, Russians Keep Trying to Kill Americans," and you lay out the facts. It's, it's no longer a flare. It's no longer a warning. It's a reality. Last question. I would love your thoughts on how all of this, uh, is implicated in the new nexus alliance between Xi, Trump, and Modi. They just had this really alarming, uh, meeting of the minds in which they are mapping out a new alliance that I think is explicitly in opposition to American influence.
I think what's actually scariest about that is my guess is that Trump wishes that he were there. Wow. I mean, he, you know, he's, he's upset with Modi because Modi explained to him that, no, Trump doesn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for, uh, you know, for talking down Pakistan and India over their, their Kashmir conflict. He's mad at Putin because, you know, he hasn't rolled over and done the things he said and allowed him to get, allowed Trump to get his Nobel Peace Prize. And he, and I think he likes China, he likes Xi, he wants to do business with all of these people. Um, one of the main things I think we saw coming out of the Alaska summit where absolutely nothing happened. I mean, there was a lot of drama on stage, but, in the end, nobody was ready to actually do anything. The humiliation of America as a superpower, welcoming an American soldier on bended knee, rolling out a red carpet for Putin. I, I'll, I'll leave it there.
To welcome a, a war criminal. Absolutely. I agree with you. Um, but in terms of action on Ukraine, it didn't lead to anything. And in fact, what we learned weeks later was that Trump had already started discussing the, uh, normalization of business relations, uh, between the US and Russia. Exxon has already been carrying out, uh, discussions with Gazprom to restart projects over there. Trump, I think, really wants to get those, that business projects and those, uh, those relationships back on board. And I think that's what's most important to him. And so when he sees these guys meeting without him, like I said, my guess is he kind of wishes that he were there, too, because these are the people he wants to be doing business with.
You are observing all of this from afar. I'm not going to say where you are, but do you have a perspective as a former, uh, undercover CIA officer now overseas watching America from the outside in?
It's very sad. Honestly, it's, it's very sad. Um, not just for me, a number of people I know who, you know, spent careers and, you know, their entire professional lives, uh, serving the United States and serving for something that we believed in. Um, and seeing that, that, that it doesn't exist anymore. Uh, and that a lot of people aren't ready to fight for it also is, uh, is a bit, uh, deflating to see. Um, so those of us who are still ready to fight, we get up every day and we do what you and I are doing and, and hope that people will, will join us and we can overcome this.
That's right. Gear up. Thanks, Alex. Great having you. Let's talk again soon.
Thanks so much, Ken. Appreciate it.
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