Ousted transgender CIA officer warns White House politics undermining U.S. intelligence

Amna Nawaz:

Nearly 20 years of service in the intelligence community as a CIA officer ended for Julia Curlee. Curlee was the first CIA officer to transition openly and continue serving the agency, until she was fired abruptly early in President Trump's second term.

She writes about being targeted as a transgender woman in an essay for "The Atlantic" titled "The Wrong Kind of American," writing -- quote -- "When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them."

Julia Curlee joins us now.

Welcome. Thanks for being here.

Julia Curlee, Former CIA Analyst:

Thank you so much. Pleasure.

Amna Nawaz:

You were fired more than a year ago. You have said in part that you're speaking out now because of a palpable fear among some in the intelligence community, concerns over national security damage. What do you mean?

Julia Curlee:

Well, there's been serious damage to two key institutions that really keep us safe.

And so, on one hand, the people and the processes that the intelligence community runs on, the experts with decades of experience are being driven out. And they're being targeted either for who they are, like in my case, or for what they say if it doesn't agree with what the president wants to hear.

And then the second thing is that the institutions themselves, made up of those people, like the National Security Council, which was effectively neutered last year, so that basic coordination among departments and agencies like the Department of State and Defense and CIA effectively broke down after the White House fired a substantial number of the National Security Council staff at the very beginning of the administration.

Amna Nawaz:

We did reach out to the White House for comment on your essay, on the interviews you have given since.

Here is just part of what spokesperson Anna Kelly responded with. She said -- quote -- "President Trump is the duly elected president of the United States. He can remove any executive branch official at his discretion. Anyone who writes a 3,000-word op-ed bragging about themselves while attacking the president clearly doesn't belong in public service."

What is your response to that?

Julia Curlee:

The president absolutely has the authority to remove an executive branch official, especially one working at the White House, but they seem to be confusing the idea of personal loyalty or support for the president's political agenda with what an intelligence officer is supposed to be doing.

An intelligence officer is supposed to speak truth, provide factual information regardless of what the president would prefer to hear. And I'm sorry that they're shooting the messenger in this case. But that has been a real problem with the administration from the beginning, where, whenever there's been a prominent case of a piece of intelligence that stands in the way of a policy objective, they have gone after the individual, which is a kind of retaliation that we have not seen at all.

Amna Nawaz:

Well, I'm going to lean into your expertise as an intelligence officer here and in terms of what we're seeing now, the concerns you're raising about how the intelligence is being used or not used.

What do you make of how the president's handling the war in Iran? I mean, do you believe he's using the intelligence available to him to make decisions about this?

Julia Curlee:

No, it's been a debacle from the beginning.

I mean, so you could go back to the firing of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency when his agency disagreed with what the president would prefer to hear about the status of the Iranian nuclear program. You could look at the run-up to the war, where there was clearly a failure to plan for several very foreseeable outcomes, such as the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the decapitation of the regime resulting in the next supreme leader in line.

That had also been predicted, and the U.S.' inability to open the strait because of a lack of minesweepers. All of it is planning that could have been addressed in any interagency process. And I think most palpable for me is, we went into a war of choice that we started, but at the same time you saw half-a-million Americans stranded in the region.

We saw the dependents of State Department officers and families stuck with no way of getting out. All of these things would have been addressed in a normal NSC-led process that would have brought together Defense, State, and all the instruments of national power.

So, even if you made a bad decision, which I think this attack on Iran certainly was, you would at least have been able to address the worst outcomes, the worst consequences.

Amna Nawaz:

Julia, you said in a recent interview that the intelligence community has assumed for many years that the president isn't reading the PDB, the Presidential Daily Briefing. That's the highest-level top-secret information presented with every morning.

Why that assumption?

Julia Curlee:

Well, I'm not in the room, obviously, with the president, but it was widely believed going into early in his first term that he just simply wasn't reading the product. We weren't getting the normal feedback we would usually get.

And it is a real problem if this multibillion-dollar apparatus that we have built that is so expensive -- and people take such great risks to give the United States real secrets that give us decision advantage in the world if the ultimate customer doesn't bother to read the product.

Amna Nawaz:

Let me just back it up a little bit here, Julia, in terms of what got you into this work in the first place. You cited the influence of your grandfather, who was himself part of an immigrant community, and you have talked about this sense of duty of wanting to serve this country that's given you and your family so much.

Well, how did that lead you into intelligence?

Julia Curlee:

Well, at the root of what my grandfather was saying was that, in this country, unlike where our family had come from, a person can rise as far as their talents can take them, regardless of who they are.

And, in my life, I got to live a pretty remarkable situation where, despite being trans, despite being a part of a group that's widely misunderstood, I got to rise and work in the White House twice.

Amna Nawaz:

You rose to some of the highest levels there too. You were able to brief the president, to brief the vice president, Mike Pence at the time. But that was in the first term.

Coming into the second term, we saw a lot of anti-trans messaging from the campaign, the Trump campaign going into that. You stayed on.

Julia Curlee:

Yes.

Amna Nawaz:

Did you notice any change in how you were being treated in that second term?

Julia Curlee:

So what's strange is that I did not in the administration. I had thought coming into the second term, I had been Mike Pence's PDB briefer. I had briefed the president on Air Force One in the first term.

I really believed it was my duty to help with the peaceful transfer of power. And within those first few weeks, despite the chaos mostly induced by the early firings, I never was treated differently. I made every move I could to deny anyone the pretext of getting rid of me. I used the bathroom across the street from the White House.

But interacting, no, I was treated very well. And so, to me, what it underscored was, as long as it was secret, as long as it was in private, as long as they needed me, which they did after they asked me to extend, it was fine that I was trans.

Amna Nawaz:

If someone inside took that step, what does that say to you about the people around the president and who he's listening to?

Julia Curlee:

I don't know. It's clear to me that they're not prioritizing the national security interests of the United States.

There are so many decisions, such as my removal, that I really think can only be explained by a desire to play to a very small extremist part of the president's base, signaling to people on the Internet.

And there have been so many cases of senior officials, senior analysts who have been removed, despite being true experts in their field, because they don't give the president what he wants to hear, because the president's base is demanding vindication for some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories that have been festering on the Internet.

There's been this desire to generate a body count, a desire to purge visibly key parts of the national security system as a way of signaling to the president or to the president's supporters that they're finally rooting out this truly imaginary enemy within.

Amna Nawaz:

Since you have been speaking out, have you heard from any of your former colleagues inside the White House or at the CIA?

Julia Curlee:

Frankly, I have been overwhelmed with the number of people that have reached out who are glad that there's someone who can voice what -- if you stood in the Starbucks line at Langley at CIA, you would hear everything that I have said tonight.

You would overhear it by the person next to you. This is something that everyone knows, but no one feels like they can speak. And this is going to have generational damage to our intelligence community. Even if we're fortunate to rebuild in a few years, you're going to have people who have left the profession entirely.

And you just can't grow a 20-year CIA analyst overnight or a chief of station who served in multiple hard-target countries. And these are the people that are leaving in the hundreds of the intelligence community because they fear that, if they say the wrong thing, if they get on to someone on the Internet's radar, that they will be thrown out for the crime of just following the values of speaking truth to power that we teach all of our young officers.

Amna Nawaz:

Julia Curlee, we thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your story with us.

Julia Curlee:

Thank you.