Bulwark Takes - Ex–Trump Intel Official Sounds Alarm on Iran (w/ Sue Gordon)

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Sam Stein talks with former top intelligence official Sue Gordon to break down the fast-moving Iran crisis—and why the U.S. may not have the intelligence it needs for what comes next. Drawing on decades at the CIA, Gordon explains the growing intel gaps, the risks of escalation, and why bombing Iran is the easy part compared to what follows. As tensions rise and off-ramps shrink, the big question remains: is the U.S. prepared for the consequences of a conflict it may not fully understand?

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the bulwark. I'm Sam Stein, the managing editor at the site, and I am incredibly pleased to be joined by Sue Gordon, who is, if you don't remember, Sue, she was the deputy, or was my principal deputy, director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration. So you think you served in 2017 to 2019, correct me if I'm wrong about that. She is also, more importantly, the host of understandable insights, new podcasts that, or relatively new podcast that everyone needs to be following, what you're basically, explaining complex national security issues in ways that people can understand and get at the significance of why this stuff matters, right? Yep. Perfect. Hey, Sam. Great to be here with you. And I will know.

I'm going to note this. I don't want to bring it up, but she made me do it. She's wearing a Duke sweater, a proud alum, difficult night yesterday, but we're not going to talk too much about that. This is not a college basketball podcast. No, it is. It is not. Actually, I'm just, you know, I'm all about being true.

and Dukes my team, even though, oh, my God. You know, I'm really proud of the women. They went even further than you might have thought, but, boy, that was a tough loss. That was a tough loss to Yukon yesterday. But congratulations to the Huskies. They totally deserve the win. I act like I'm part of the team. I'm just a fan.

But no, it was a great game, not for you guys, but for us. We're going to be talking about serious matters today. We're going to focus, obviously, on what's happening in Iran. And, you know, I just want to level set with the game. the people who are watching because things are so dynamic. We are recording this Monday, March 30th, around 3.30-ish p.m. And we just don't know what's going to happen between now and when this gets published. Let's start with sort of credentials. So obviously, I gave your title from the Trump administration, but I think it's important to establish for the listeners and the viewers,

just sort of how you came about into this field, the time and effort you spent in the Intel community, and what expertise you've got through that on the situation in Iran. Thanks, Sam, and super important topic, and who knows. So the principal deputy director of national intelligence is perhaps the worst title in all the universe. I am, in fact, a career intelligence officer. I joined the CIA right out of college, spent 30 years there doing everything from analysis to Soviet weapons systems, so building collection systems to cyber to support. did logistics and finance and facilities, so know a little bit about that stuff.

Spent some time at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, so I understand about combat support and the value of time and space. And then my last gig was being an appointee of the first Trump administration. The way to think about the principal deputy is that is the career intelligence officer. Right. Right. So you have political appointees that are his closest advisors on his policy, but the structure that was put in place was really designed to make sure that you had somebody who understand the craft and discipline of intelligence. So that's, that's me. The important thing about that time at the DNI is for an intelligence officer to sit in the policy room to understand the decision making and to understand how intelligence

and other crafts intersect that and how those two things come together is, I think, something and it gives me a little bit of credence in this moment. Plus, the DNI particularly is responsible for the alliances and the partnerships and the sharing of intelligence, which, again, is modestly important or completely underused and squandered, depends on which administration. We are going to get to that later in the pod. I know this is an incredibly broad question, and obviously time, you know, we're now talking about six, seven years ago. But what was this sort of general consensus, if there was one about

the U.S. relationship to Iran during the First Trump administration? Obviously, there's always been an adversary relationship that spans across administrations. Different administrations have taken different approaches to that adversary relationship. But what was sort of the intelligence communities' understanding about the threat that Iran posed in the First Trump administration while you were there? Yeah, great question. So one, everyone knows, you know, for its entire history. And we had a little bit to do with the installation. We, the United States, had a little bit to do with the installation of this regime that has proven over years to be incredibly maligned. As the years went on, we believe it was incredibly important that they not acquire nuclear capability.

Because you have the great powers that kind of understand that and have come to an agreement and understand about when you don't bring it into play. And then you have a bunch of people like North Korea and Iran and you're like, are they really not going to use it? some casual way because they don't have the same global responsibility. So always malign. We've known that and really dedicated to not having them get a nuclear capability. Enter the Trump administration and there are two things that are true. Number one, JCPOA and all the intelligence community assessments was it was pretty effective at keeping them from. Just so people understand, JCPOA is the nuclear deal that the, the nuclear deal that the Obama administration

struck with Iran. It put some limitations on their ability to develop a weapon in exchange for some sanctions relief, and then obviously inspections were part of it, more or less. Right. And the general assessment, I remember the worldwide threat assessment of 2019, kind of the last thing that was briefed to Congress before I left was the intelligence community assessed, much as they did right before this war, that Iran was by and large not being constrained and not continuing to pursue.

the actual development of weapons different from was there different assessments of whether they were still working on a capability that could become that. So we come into his administration. There's always the worry of nuclear threat, but in general that agreement by assessment was largely constraining them because of the assessments. That said, the second thing that had happened is the money that had been provided to them as part of incentives to allow that. oversight. It became clear that they were using that to develop weapons capabilities and that in the first Trump administration, they started really Saberatling and with a lot of proxy forces were doing a lot of damage in the region, not just to our forces, but to others in the region. So those two things are true. The last thing I remember, no, I remember other things,

but the last thing that happened as I was on the way out the door was you basically had the killing of Soleimani was the last thing. And what proceeded that was Iran doing a lot of things in our estimation to try and suck the U.S. into a hot war with them. Our intelligence was so good that we, by and large, were able to stay ahead of them. and President Trump at that point kind of listened to the leaders he had in place and even when a drone was shot down, he did not attack disproportionately with overwhelming force.

And so that's where we leave it. You said something pretty, I guess, provocative for me just there. It was understood that Iran wanted to draw the United States into a hot war. Yeah. First Trump administration. Yeah, our coalition was fragile. there was huge economic impact

as the Trump administration walked away from the agreement. There was a lot of impact, and there always is disproportionate impact on Europe and European leaders about what they were going to be able to do in response to this. And one of the concerns was if we went in with that condition into super aggressive wartime activities,

that it would have impact that we couldn't necessarily like control, nor did we want, especially in light of how well we were able to counter the proxy forces at that time. Sure. But did the Iranian leadership want to have an engagement with the United States militarily? Because that seems almost counterintuitive, right? I mean, obviously our capabilities are much stronger than theirs. It's, you know, the brunt of it will be felt by them. Yeah. So great question.

Here's what I would say about that is the diplomacy game is always who's the good guy and the bad guy. Right. In those first years of the Trump administration, we were beginning to not always be seen as the good guy or working in partnership with our partners. So it could have been an equation that they thought that if they got us to do something was particularly difficult for our allies. That would weaken our ability to have a coalition and that would increase their position. So not that they thought then

that they could withstand the kind of massive power because no one can't. Listen, we're like parents with children. We can do an incredible damage to get the compliance we want. Because we're so powerful. It would be best if we left them liking us a bit so they take care of us in their dotage.

And I think that's the tension we're trying to run here. You're trying to turn this conversation onto my parental skills, and I'm not going to take the bait. Let me ask you about your sentence, because you made another point about the North Koreans and the Iranians and sort of the differentiation between those nuclear or wannabe nuclear powers and others and how it's hard to somewhat tell if they are morally serious actors on the world stage, more or less, if they take responsibility seriously. I don't have a really great sense of sort of the Iranian domestic political structure. But is there a sense in the intel community that there are people in the Iranian leadership or in the Iranian political system who are serious and who do want to be well-intentioned good actors, even if they do want to develop a nuclear weapon and that you can deal with them? Or are they all malignant and problematic? and we have to approach them with an adversarial bend of mind.

Yeah, so I love that statement. There are always good guys. Sure. It's levels of good, though, right? Yeah, I would say that this regime that is still in place in some construct has been in place for a long time. It is dogmatically aligned. There are most of the people in positions of power,

particularly with a massively violent, retrovutive regime, it would be unlikely that people who had an outwardly, completely different view of the world than the regime are in positions of power. That said, I think the public uprising, I think the conditions that were set economically that led to similar uprising in 2019,

one of the challenges that we have not met as a nation so far is what off-ramp do you give the moderates? What outcome do you give them that they could possibly accept to be able to find those people and develop it? So I suspect the people we're talking about were not in positions of power. I suspect that now that we have done such damage and created instability, the likelihood that moderation is going to be what we find. But that is in fact what you would have hoped we would have invested in before we took an action like this. Well, that was the, that was the conceit of the JCPOA, right? It's like if we give you some sort of diplomatic off-ramp and then we give you sanctions relief, you, the moderate leaders will be rewarded by your country because they would be more enriched, they'd be part of the global

community and there'd be a sort of secondary benefit to that. Right. And so the people, the people that are on two sides of this, and people would make the same argument about China and what Nixon thought is that if we welcome them into the global economy, they would somehow become not Chinese communist. And so the people on this isn't always happen. Right on. Right on. Right. And that's the work. That's the work of the institutions. What was the assessment of what, well, I don't know if they ran it in 2018, 2019, but there's obviously some papers, white papers that were done more recently, and including by ex-Trump officials about how Iran would react to military intervention by the United States.

What was your sense of sort of the war planning around that and what kind of likely responses the Iranian government would have to any sort of military intervention? Yeah. So remember, this is shocking to me that I've been out six years and I would never presume to know exactly what they're doing internally. But this is actually, in fact, the work you hope that they had been doing between 2019 and today. Right, right.

would have been to do this. I will, I will say that Iran is a patient adversary. What do you mean by that? They're not going away anytime soon. You're not going to be able to shock and awe of them into submission. You can't ask them to be who they're not. They are a regional power, different from Russia and China that tend to be more global. When they focus on the United States is to get them out of where of their region. So all, those things make them different than, say, Venezuela or others, this is a 6,000-year-old society. And I say society might even use country, but it sure isn't nation, because it's not people that just came together politically. This is a entrenched culture that for 46, 47 years have been

under the same leadership. They've never even transitioned. So I think my assessment and what I would have expected to see is that regime change might be the only thing that would work, but to affect regime change with this situation in this environment would have to be incredibly well planned and would not be affected simply by the overwhelming military power that we've displayed. I don't think there are many people that would disagree with that. No, I don't think so. It raises a sort of secondary question. question about what kind of limitations we might have with respect to our intelligence on the Iranians. Although you've said that we have fairly good intel developed over many decades.

But like, for instance, at one point I heard Donald Trump say that I'm paraphrasing here, that no one anticipated that they would retaliate against their Arab neighbors if the U.S. had struck them. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., the three of them, Kuwait, Bahra, Bahra. rain. They've been 100%. Now, in all fairness, you know, they could have gone the other way. They were surprisingly mistled. They were shot at. Nobody ever thought they'd be shot at. How can that be true? I mean, I feel like those, that and the straight of Hormuz being closed seemed to be very obvious outcomes of an invasion. And yet here we are. And we have an administration

and says, well, no one never anticipated this. If you can't get the intel right, how do you go about effectuating regime change. There are two chances that those two statements you just said are true are two, and Slim just walked out the door. Of course. Of course those things were known. I love your question on intelligence, though. And I think there are some signals that suggest that from an intelligence perspective, we don't have what we had in what I described 2017 to 19. Sure. Elaborate on that. And here are the signals. Number one, we don't have presence in the region that we used to. You know, a part of this administration, the first one, and then even continuing with Biden,

we basically pulled away from our physical presence. And as much as I love me some technical intelligence, because that's what I built, there is something to knowing the people, being local, hearing those things going on, particularly if you're contemplating something like regime change. So our posture probably, there are signals that it's probably not as strong. The second thing is the way you compensate is with what? Alliances, people with whom you're friendly. How are we doing on that front? Well, we don't have Greenland yet.

Yeah, not particularly well. And we have people who don't trust us to be as careful with their intelligence and consequently they're humans as we might have been in the past. And then I think the third signal that's worth looking at is actually including the Trump administration, there has been a move to using intelligence more openly than it's ever been. So remember when Russia poisoned the Skirpals back, right? The Trump administration released really sensitive information in order to make sure it could be penned on them and then go to the Ukraine war and Biden released information that showed. And that is preparing the battlefield

and preparing coalitions in advance, knowing that we're in an impossible information environment, and intelligence still has some. So I think there are some signals that say that we maybe didn't have all the information that we would have wanted to have. I will also say if we had it now, now's not the time when it's as useful as it would have been back when we were trying to make the argument about going in and affecting something like regime change. I don't know if that makes sense.

Well, I guess you're the expert, so this is like naive pushback. But it seems like now would be really important to have on the ground intel on Iran, right? Yeah, but if you didn't have it then, why are you going to have it now? I guess what I'm saying is I think there are signals that we don't have it. Like if there was some secret thing that the intelligence community had that said, well, that's how we know we're going to get an assessment. Now, maybe if we're going to go in and capture the uranium. Yeah, let me ask you this.

So what about the military operation that we've done so far, which is largely consisted from aerial bombardment, basically, as far as I can tell? What does that signal to you about what intel we actually do have? Oh, we're awesome. Our national security, understanding of strategic capabilities, understanding of the performance of weapon systems, understanding of locations is just so good and so breathtaking.

And it's actually only been enhanced by the advent of commercial capabilities that give us into even more insight than we need. And so I think the relative loss of life, and I'll say just conducting an operation of this magnitude, you lose people in training. So the president and the Secretary of Defense is, I think, right to laud that system, that capability in those women and men because it's awesome. and that is underpinned by intelligence. That said, what that is mostly based on is what we call foundational intelligence, things you know about capabilities and locations, and that is less requiring the operational intelligence

that tells you who's going to be where, when. The act on the leadership, pretty impressive intelligence operation. Right. The inability to have moderates lined up, evidence that we don't have all the same access that we might. Are we operating on the same intel pages of Israelis? Because it does seem like they have been taking out some of the people who we might want

to actually have stood up. You know, Israel is such an impressive partner. You know, if we had in the Asia Pacific a partner like Israel, it'd be amazing. And in so many cases we're aligned. But they're also a problematic partner because they have different interests from us. and they understand the policy process that we go through. And so there are times when they are neither going to ask nor are we going to be aware of the things they might do. And so more likely is that's what you're seeing.

Now, we can screw that up too. But I think that what you're seeing more when our partners might do something that is less advantageous to us, it's more likely that it was just different objectives, right? Israel has a much different problem than we do. If we were to decide somehow magically to withdraw now, we've left them in a world of hurt because you've kind of awakened the sleeping giant. They still have capabilities.

Israel is depleting their capabilities, and we've decided to get out. So when you see things like that, mostly what you're seeing are different priorities. Well, you raise the idea of getting out, and I think this is the most perplexing issue right now for everyone. It's like, what are the offering? ramps. If you had to outline them, I mean, how many are there? It seems to me there are three.

I'm not going to list them, but what are your versions of off-rams here? Damn it. That was going to be by tradecraft play to make you list them. I mean, I can if you want. You want to hear mine? Yeah, sure, go ahead. This is the unsophisticated Sam off-ramps here. One is just declare victory and say we're done, right? Like, just do that. The other is to put in troops, try to take over the straight, open the straight, establish some sort of presence there that you have to protect and then say you're done. And the third is to just basically have a long-term slog, like an absolute slog.

And I just don't see, first of all, I hope that doesn't happen, but I don't see the willpower for that politically anyway. So those are the options as I see. But I'm not an expert. You are? Are there other off-rams I'm missing? Yeah. So just remember I'm an expert in being annoyingly depressing.

That's what intelligence is. Okay, well, hey, welcome to the club. Every policymaker's shoulder slump because they're like, oh my God, you've just stolen my decision space. So, Ron has been really damaged. They have been stabilized. They're visiting, but they're holding a couple of cards. Number one is they can wreak havoc with the Strait of Hormuz and what they're able to do. That is not easily counted.

If we just walk out now and there's no solution. to that. And now that the Houthis are joined, you lose the 20% in the straight of our moves. You also lose the 12% of world's energy coming out of the Red Sea. That is really bad. So the idea of just walking out and doing nothing about that, I don't know how that's tenable. I don't care what you claim. You're stuck with that. Number two, that's related. And that is, boy, the Gulf states if you walk out are in a world of hurt. And so I expected that what the Gulf states are doing is they're now trying to lobby Trump, President Trump, to finish the job, because what the Iranians still have is the capability

to put pressure on them where they're destroying solidization parts. But if you destroy that infrastructure, that economic engine, while you've taken out two sea routes that are much more important than just prices, they're also about enabling technologies that the world, uses to make it run, you have just walking out does not fix either of those problems. And I would argue you've left enough there that they can affect that. So what about sending small forces in? Just for your listeners, let's compare numbers. First and second, Gulf Wars, which we can debate the success of those, you know,

strategically, diplomatically, geopolitically, but those numbers. for the first was like 500 to 7,000, 700,000 troops. And the second was, you know, three to five, 100,000 troops to affect that. So now you're going to send five to 10,000 troops into some of the most impossible geography that you can imagine to do what without damage for a war that you have not done any explaining to the American people about it? I think that's really hard. So then what's left?

You're going to have to do something. Really, all this left is regime change, but boy, I don't know that you've prepared to do that. Well, who takes over? I mean, we've killed everybody. Not everybody? No, they've got a lot of power there. Now, we've just stabilized it. We have, but we have also decimated their ability to be.

even a society and somebody is going to have to come in, I don't know, whether this sounds weird or not, I alone can save you. It will cost you doing it and who's better positioned to do this. This is not a society that is used to democratic processes to do things. Well, you also, I mean, you yourself just said earlier in this pod that when you spent weeks now, over a month now, bombing the hell out of the society, threatening to blow up their power plants and their desalination plants, it's very hard to imagine that a moderate force of the populace is going to rise up and demand liberalism, right? That just doesn't make sense to me intuitively. So we've not laid the groundwork. Yeah, so the problem with your setup, I don't think you've laid the groundwork, but I don't know

how the walkaway works. In other words, I heard this from someone, I'm stealing it, and I'm sorry who it is. It feels like I'm on the Titanic and there's an iceberg ahead and all we're doing is saying there's no iceberg there. It feels like we are incredibly boxed in here. I would love it if the president could just declare victory and walk out and all we had to suffer was bragging and celebrating our troops, which by the way we always ought to do. I think this is much more problematic than it is being made out to be even if. if our best choices walking away, we have left a very difficult economic and geopolitical situation. You were not wrong about being a bad aura when you walk into a room.

Jeez, that was harsh. Let me ask you then. If you had to put a crystal ball out, the next two, three weeks, what does it look like for you? I mean, we're seeing reports of Trump entertaining this idea of special ops going in, grabbing uranium, him getting it out as if that's just an easy grab and go. We've seen Trump this morning say he's had really great talks with new regime elements and they're going particularly well. I mean, how do you imagine?

You know that, I mean, you've worked with the guy. You know how he operates? What should we expect? One of the things that is true of Washington in general and this administration in particular is that it's easy to make an proclamation and to make an assertion. It is quite another thing for that to have. good strategic effect year over year. And President Trump is particularly noteworthy in my experience of not thinking of second and third order effects. If I were really glib, I would say you had a

great idea, a Ron's bad. But oh, you wanted it to work. You need to do these things. So here's the things, here are this set of things that I think he needs to do now. Number one is they may be talking to a lot of people that's lovely, but they are not close to a real agreement. And the way you can tell this is just because the two sides are too far apart. There's an old rule of truth, and that is the person who's really far ahead is never going to agree to the truth because why, but they give up anything that they think they've gained. And the guy that's losing, I can't agree to a truth because I can't afford to be left in this situation. So number one is you've got to do real work on the agreement and you have to find those people. We have a small problem in America right now is that we have simultaneously degraded our

institutions. So we don't have the same security professionals that are capable of going and doing that work from a policy statement from the president. But that's the first thing you've got to do. You've just got to do that. And you have to have pros from Dover and yay, if we can use our interlocutors in the Gulf State, but you have to do that. I think he has to talk to the American people because this is going to get uglier before it gets pretty from an economic perspective. Make your case, Mr. Right? Talk to the American people about why this is in their national interest and do it.

And then the third thing is, and I think this is the hardest, really think hard about the next military step and whether it is going to lead to agreement or whether it's still just, I think, I think, I think I can bomb him into oblivion because I think that has proven, if it were going to work, it would have worked. I think now you're going to have to be real states crafty. And it may be that you have to leave some part of a nuclear arsenal in some kind of control like we had with the earlier agreement. Getting everything we want on our 15 point list, vanishingly small. We're going to end up close to the JCPOA. It's just that's where it's going to end up. I think you have to. I mean, if you are in Iran's shoes, especially now, can you afford to give up that last piece? What gives you relevance in the region? The second part of the worldwide threat assessment in 2019 that

the president and President Trump also didn't like when we said was North Korea wasn't going to give up its nuclear capability. Because again, what makes North Korea relevant if they don't have that power? And so I think we are going to have to have some kind of agreement. The question is, how good are we at Statescraft? Well, that's the question also, how much of our reputation at Statescrafts have we burned, right? I mean, we're doing these negotiations with them ongoing prior to this and then just blew them up, literally. And so that kind of makes it a lot harder to get back to the table, I imagine.

Yeah, I think if you look at the worldwide threat assessment and if you look at the president's strategy and the way he's affected it in the first year and a half of administration, he is about power and scarcity and resources. Because he fancies himself a businessman. He thinks in economic terms, in terms of leverage and transaction. And there's a lot of goodness on this. I would say that in a digitally connected world, this is one that is much more about economic security than just mere might.

But that doesn't account for everything like deterrence, like alliances, that in fact are necessary in a multipolar world, no matter how much you wish you could just affect it. And two actions that we've taken that I think are the most damaging in this administration is one, the destruction of our alliances. Friends was one of the things that for my 30 years, I always said distinguish us from Russia and China, is that we had friends.

We have fewer. And then the second thing that I think we used to have is that an really incredible installed base of career professionals who once the policy would set could go and do cleanup on aisle line because as important as the president is in setting guidance, the backbreaking physical labor of national security is done by the women and men who serve professionally. we see the positive effect in the performance of the military. I think we're seeing the effects of the degradation in our other institutions. All right, Sue, thank you so much. I appreciate this. This was great. This was very informative.

You're never letting me come back in your room either. I can just feel. I am absolutely having you back. I don't care how depressing it gets, how gloomy it is. This was fantastic. You can wear as much Duke paraphernalia as you want. Everyone needs to go check out Sue's podcast. It's called Understandable Inslee.

sites. Sue Gordon, thank you so much for joining us on Bullwark Takes. You guys should subscribe to our feed. We'll get great conversations like this. Sue, I promise you, we will have you back if you will have us. Thanks, Sam. All right, take care.