The Rest Is Classified - 24. Trump vs The CIA: Purging the Deep State (Ep 1)

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

How do politicians control the CIA? What happens when politics affects the way it is run? And how often does the White House clash with Langley? Trump is trying to bring the CIA more directly under his control. He wants to reduce the size of it and re-order it's priorities. But he's not the first President to try to interfere at Langley. This week on The Rest Is Classified, David and Gordon look at Trump's CIA reforms but also take an eye to history to look at Jimmy Carter's CIA reforms that led to Halloween Massacre... ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The scene is January 21st, 2017. CIA headquarters at Langley. The original headquarters building lobby. I want to say there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community in the CIA than Donald Trump. There's nobody. Very, very few people could do the job you people do. And I just want to let you know, I am so behind you.

And I know maybe sometimes you haven't got the backing that you wanted, and you're going to get so much backing. Maybe you're going to say, please don't give us so much backing. Mr. President, please, we don't need that much backing. But you're going to say, please don't give us so much backing. Mr. President, please, we don't need that much backing. But you're going to have that. And I think everybody in this room knows it. No, I just want to say that I love you. I respect you. There's nobody I respect more. Thank you. You're beautiful. And now, fast forward to November the 9th 2024 in a video released just days after his re-election. Here's my plan to dismantle a deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all. First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order

restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively. Secondly, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives or the left's political enemies. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm not Donald Trump. I'm Gordon Carrera. Despite that just spot-on Trump voice, it is in fact Gordon Carrera and I'm David McCloskey. Yeah, and that was my attempt to be Donald Trump.

Which I didn't really prepare as much as I should have done for by watching videos for him. You'd think you could do the voice after years of watching him, but I feel I've still got a bit of work to do on that. Wasn't quite Oscar-winning performance. It's right up there with your French accent, Gordon. It's up there. Those two quotes from President Trump, I guess, are two faces of how the President of the United States, as he now is, views the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly. And that's what we're going to be looking at in this week's episodes, David.

Well, that's right, Gordon. I guess we're going to give, I guess we could say the rest is classified's take on the kind of transition into Trump 2.0 from the standpoint of, you know, the intelligence community and the CIA in particular. And I think what we're going to do is give some context on what's happening now and help listeners make sense of the news that's come out over the past couple of weeks about how the second Trump administration is really starting to take over the intelligence community and kind of put its own people in and what the relationship is starting to shape up to be between Trump and the CIA. And we'll also give some

context for what's happening through the lens of the last time an administration tried to really downsize the CIA. And that historical episode from the Carter administration, Gordon, has a wonderful name and agency lore. It has come to be known as the Halloween Massacre. And we're going to shed a light on today through the lens of some history from the Cold War. We're going to use the Halloween Massacre, I guess, of the CIA to look at some of the big questions, aren't we, which are how politicians try to exert control over Langley and the Central Intelligence Agency, how they try and deal with it, how they try and sometimes cut it, how they try

and impose their will on it, and what happens as a result of that, and how kind of politics and intelligence sometimes mix and rub up against each other. That's exactly right. And I think what we'll see as we go through this is that, you know, there are certainly some precedents historically for, you know, attempting to downsize the CIA in particular. And it's kind of an evergreen challenge, I think, for any president, regardless of who they are, to figure out how do they interact with the intelligence they're receiving? How do they get what they need or what they want from Langley? You know, these are issues that stretch all the way back to the founding of the CIA and Donald Trump, of course, you know, very unique president and has a unique and oftentimes very challenging relationship with the intelligence community. So maybe Gordon, that's where we start is to just give a bit of a refresh, I guess, on sort of Trump, the history of Trump's interaction with the intelligence community going back

to really his campaign and his first term, because I think that sets the table for what we're seeing today. Now, interestingly, Gordon, and I was not actually aware of this when I was at the CIA. The CIA publishes a book on intelligence community, what's called the IC, by the way, IC support to presidential transitions. And it puts this book out, I believe, every four years, it's available on the CIA's website. It's called Getting to Know the President, and I believe it goes back to the Eisenhower administration. So it is a record of sort of how the CIA has started off its relationship with incoming

presidents. How do you interact with them? What are they, you know, what is sort of the transition like? And it goes into pretty significant detail about how those transitions function. The Trump transition in this book is chapter nine, and it's titled Donald J. Trump, a unique challenge, which is literally, literally the title of it. And it really kind of, I think captures captures it all, right? I mean, the sort of bipolarity in some respects of the two quotes that you so eloquently and trumpily read at the top here, I think, capture some of those, I guess, contradictory, oftentimes confusing dynamics that really are at the heart of Trump's relationship with the CIA. Now, I will say, I mean, there's a whole sort of list, I think, of incidents over the course of the campaign and the first term that we

could bring up with respect to Trump's relationship with the CIA in particular or the intelligence community more broadly. One thing I will note is that just in having conversations with people, oftentimes quite working level at CIA who served in the first term, was I was out by then. One of the things that I do frequently hear, I am just kind of set the table before all this, is that there's a whole universe, thousands if not tens of thousands of people who work at kind of the lower levels of the building and who don't really interact with the politics day to day, right?

And so one of the things I kind of have heard, again, it's anecdotal, anecdata, was that a lot of the political noise happened kind of above the working levels where the espionage and the analysis actually occur, right? So I'm not going to diminish any of the things we're going to say to come here, but one thing to note is that, you know, there are plenty of people who are working on subjects that were sort of outside of maybe the realm of what Trump or the White House were particularly interested in, who would say, look, you know, sort of the place functioned as normal, right, for them.

Yeah, business went on. I mean, it's interesting because I visited CIA in 2018. So during that first Trump term, and I interviewed the then director, Mike Pompeo, we did an interview in the original headquarters building on a Saturday when, you know, less people around. And it was interesting because, you know, he he was a Trump man and I think he was there and very careful in his answers to show loyalty to the president. But he also felt he was able because of that to perhaps insulate it from some of the politics and flak that the FBI was taking, famously Comey at the FBI getting sacked. After Pompeo, you had Gina Haspel, who again had kept a very low profile and kind of to some extent protected the CIA, I think she saw it as her mission, didn't she, to avoid having it drawn into politics and to kind of provide it with some

kind of top cover. So you do feel like in that first Trump term, there was all kinds of stuff, you know, swirling around the intelligence community and talk about the deep state. But actually, the CIA maybe maybe more than the FBI, was to some extent insulated from that. Yeah, and I think that's an important point, Gordon, to just kind of frame what we're going to talk about here over these couple episodes.

Because we're decidedly not talking about the FBI, the FIBs, our friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What we're talking about here is sort of foreign intelligence, right, and in particular, the CIA. And I think the relationship was contentious, certainly at a high level from really the campaign forward, because I think it's fair to say, and Trump's, you know, then press secretary more or less said this, that, you know, Trump kind of came to believe that the CIA or elements of the intelligence community were kind of spying on his campaign, I think. I mean, he's made these allegations. He gave that strange rambling talk at CIA headquarters on day one of, I mean, literally

it was one of his first stops as the recently inaugurated president. And by the way, I'll say that anyone who wants to read the transcript of that talk, it is a wild rambling all over the place talk in front of the memorial wall at CIA headquarters. Now, the memorial wall is a marble wall in this lobby of the original headquarters building, a very kind of somber, really important place for the CIA because each of those stars represent an officer of the CIA who died in the line of duty. And some of those, you know, stars, there's a book that's up against the wall there that has the names of many of them. Many of them are now or are still classified. And so the names are not there. I believe there's 140 at last count, although I'll need to double check that.

So it's this very important place for the agency culturally. And I think there was a sense almost on day one among many CIA officers, not all but many, that those remarks were inappropriate to give in front of that wall. And that, you know, because Trump, you know, in his sort of very Trumpy way, mentions the size of the crowd during his inauguration, talks about people, you know, at his sort of very Trumpy way mentions the size of the crowd during his inauguration Talks about people, you know at CIA voting for him and interestingly enough and some of the reporting that's come out since it seems That during some of his meetings at Langley that day He apparently asked some CIA officers like in meetings if they had voted for him very Trumpy thing to do Inside the CIA and I think it's probably maybe hard to imagine this

or understand this if you haven't worked there. That kind of talk, that kind of political talk is really anathema to most CIA officers. You don't ask people how they vote basically. You don't ask people how they vote. The CIA is a very apolitical organization where you just don't ask those kind of questions of people, certainly from the politician asking that question

to someone at CIA. So there's a sense right off the bat, I think that you're getting off to this kind of rough and rocky start. And of course, John Brennan, the outgoing CIA director who served under Obama and then left as Trump was elected, is going to write on Twitter and in a bunch of editorials for the Washington Post that Trump has shown contempt for the intelligence community, for its independence and objectivity,

and he'll cite some of the behavior during the campaign, but also this talk at the memorial wall as one feature of that. Yeah, although it's interesting, isn't it? Because Trump is actually, for all the talk around the deep state and everything else at that point, he's praising them. He's backing them. He's saying, I've got your back. And on the whole, he kind of left the CIA alone.

Is that fair to say in that first term? I mean, there was definitely disquiet, I think, about some of the things that were going on in the wider intelligence community, some of the issues, some of the, you know, things that are going on with Russia, you know, some of the leaking of intelligence that, you know, that happened, or not leaking, but actually the use of intelligence by Donald Trump in that first term. And I think he reveals some in the Oval Office, doesn't he, at one point to the Russians. There's some things which clearly cause some tension or disquiet, but on the whole, there's not a purge, is there, in that first term?

There's definitely not a purge. I mean, that is important to state that there isn't, you know, he doesn't go in wholesale and schwack away portions of the, you know, agency workforce that he, you know, or his director deems politically sort of disloyal or on the wrong team. But I do think it is worth putting a point in this because it's incredibly important. Trump is a businessman. Most prior presidents, you know, would have had some interaction, be it in a congressional oversight capacity or something, some interaction with the central intelligence agency, with classified intelligence, how to use it, how not to use it. I don't think he had any of that coming in. And one of his first interactions with the CIA,

with the intelligence community more broadly, is when his campaign is getting these kind of transitional briefings, which by the way, we should note that a theme going throughout the first Trump presidency, and I bet it's the same today, is that Trump isn't really an avid consumer of much of what the intelligence community or CIA produce. George W. Bush had PDB, President's Daily Brief, briefings,

I think six days a week. It was always at the same time. He was really engaged and interacted with the intelligence. Obama was a big reader of the intelligence and would engage in kind of a similar structured national security briefing. Trump, not the case at all. And this is what you used to write for the PDB,

the President's Daily Brief. So the young McCloskeys that we once heard about, the kind of baby McCloskeys who followed in your footsteps, their stuff's not getting read unless they put it in diagrams and pictures. I think that's how it was best presented. So they've got to learn to draw rather than write if you're a young McCloskey. Trump was more of a consumer of charts and graphs and models. I think in one case, there

was an actual 3D model of a weapon system brought to him as a prop for a briefing and he would hold it during the briefing and ask questions about the model. I mean, Trump's PDB briefer, the guy who was briefing him during the transition, basically said, look, he doesn't really read anything. Now, I will say this element of being disengaged or disconnected from the world of secret intelligence does have real precedent. I mean, there's a great story. I think in 1994, during the Clinton administration, a Cessna plane crashes into the White House. And the joke that went around the agency at the time was that it was James Woolsey, who was the director, trying to get a meeting with Clinton

and trying to make a scene so he'd get some time. Because Clinton just didn't. His national security team would read it, but Clinton didn't have much interest in taking the briefings or really in reading much of what the CIA produced. So that is, I think, it's probably to a greater extent in the Trump administration,

but it's a similar dynamic. I think what is different though, and this is important to put a point in, is that some of the first interactions that Trump has with leaders in the intelligence community are during these transition briefings before he takes office for the first time. And one of the judgments that they come to him with,

an analytic judgment based on the intelligence, is that the Russians have interfered in the election to try to help him. And that's what that gets him mad. He doesn't want to hear it, right? Now, it's important to note, because we realize, we realize this is a very, this topic has become exceptionally political, right? In particular here in the States, what is important to note here is that these intelligence community leaders were not showing up with a claim that Trump was colluding with the Russians, nor that Russian intervention was decisive, eventually decisive, in getting him elected. They were merely stating that the foreign intelligence they were collecting from the

Russian perspective said that the Russians wanted and preferred that Donald Trump be elected. He does not want to hear this. This is the kind of the crux of so much of the drama that's going to come out of his claims around a deep state and his relationship with the intelligence community is a belief that his legitimacy as the president is being questioned by leaders of the intelligence community. And they've taken a side on that. And you're right, including the Brits in that case he worries about because of the famous Steele dossier. But that does set the tone, doesn't it, for that first term and some of the mistrust. If we wind forward then to today, as we said,

there'd been tension but no purges. But the question is, what's going to happen this time round? So we've got a new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who'd been an intelligence official at the Director of National Intelligence at the end of that first Trump term. He's not seen as Trumpy as, you know, Kash Patel at the FBI and some of the other figures and Tulsi Gabbard, the new Director of National Intelligence. So it is a different feel to it this time round, isn't there? There is a different sense about what might be happening compared to the first time. It's worth stating upfront that I think much of what we'll talk

about here over the next few minutes, it's early days, right? And we do not yet have a full picture of what Trump 2.0 intends to do with the CIA, or the broader intelligence community. I mean, we have, as we read up front, I mean, we've got quotes about him wanting to sort of purge the deep state or dismantle it. Does that translate into practical policy and real stuff happening out at Langley? I think that largely remains to be seen. But I do think that there are probably maybe three kind of themes, right, or three areas to really watch as Trump 2.0 starts to take over. And I think the first one

is a risk or a concern about deeper political control at Langley. And this point is absolutely crucial because it's, I think it frames, at at least for me what is probably the most significant risk of this administration which is do you push politics into an organization that is designed to be a political. I mean going back just for a second to the first administration I mean there was a bunch of reporting know, from the first four years of the Trump administration about this, that there was a lot of pressure from the White House, of course, because Trump didn't want to hear about Russian intervention or interference. He didn't want to hear about the 2016 election. There's a lot of concern about putting assessments in front of him that mention that or that talk about Putin's desire to have Trump reelected, for example, even though by the way, Putin has publicly said this, right? Unsurprisingly, in the classified intelligence, it's the same picture. And Trump didn't want to hear it. So you have this concern,

I think, around do the politics start to change the analysis or even change the collection, right? And do you push in more extreme scenarios, do the politics get pushed down further into the organization? Now, one thing to note here about the CIA is that there's only a handful of political appointees, right? Director, deputy director, you're not appointing people at kind of the upper mid level of the organization from the White House or from, you know, sort of political appointments, right? You are drawing from, you know, intelligence professionals because that work, it's really hard to sort of run and manage that work if you've not grown up doing it. It's very specialized and technical from, I think, both an analytic and certainly an operational standpoint. And there are some, you know, concerns that would Trump, again, this has not happened yet, but would Trump push political appointees further down to be running what are called like the mission

centers or the directorates, right? These are the parts of the agency that are focused on- China. So it's like a China mission center. China mission center, Near East mission center, the directorate of operations, the directorate of analysis, right? The Project 2025, which is the kind of heritage foundation blueprint for the presidential transition, which, again, Trump has this sort of complicated relationship with because sometimes it seems like he'll take talking points from it and other times he tries to distance himself. That document basically argued that there should be a sort of driving of appointees further down into the intelligence community.

And that would be a big change. So that's kind of one, political control. And then the other one, I guess, is what the CIA focuses on. What are the priorities? I mean, I've seen already that there's a talk that they wanted to focus it more, for instance, on counter-narcotics or Mexico. It's been talked that actually the CIA has been flying drones over Mexico in a more kind of aggressive way, which is part of this designating cartels as terrorist groups effectively, you know, that's part of a kind of shifting where the CIA looks and what it looks at and what it does. Yeah. And I think part of that is also potentially and again, early days, I mean, there's picking

up some rumors of this, but that, you know, Russia and China have been downgraded as Intel priorities. What exactly does that mean? There's really prioritization frameworks for both overall collection, for specifically human collection. Have they actually been pushed down on those scales or is this just the early days of new leaders at CIA rhetorically espousing their priorities as being immigration or counter-narcotics, I don't know. But I think that is a concern is maybe too strong,

but it's this idea of, well, this is a way that the Trump administration, 2.0 here, can kind of shape the sort of intelligence it's getting. You could downgrade certain things and say, look, from a policy standpoint, it's not as important to me to collect on Russia or China as it is on counter-narcotics, right? I mean another small, not small necessarily, but another case we're seeing here is, and it's made the news of course over the last couple

weeks, has been trying to eliminate and eliminating a lot of these DEI, you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion positions at CIA. Side note on that is these are all rotational positions, so you don't necessarily need to fire these people. You could just eliminate the position and send them back to be analysts or whatever they were doing prior. But that is a pretty bold and public thing that the administration has done right off the bat to eliminate those positions and done it by the way in a lot of other departments haven't they they've been that's basically been an order to all kinds of departments to do it but as you said it sounds like some cia officers who were just rotated into that are suddenly being told you know you got to resign or be fired because you

know your team is gone you know i saw a source saying you know this was a message the era of promoting left-wing political agendas is over. And it's about sending a message to the organisation. There was a source familiar with Ratcliffe's thinking, I think quoted on Fox saying, I'm sure it will rub some of the political activists burrowed in there the wrong way, but there are a lot of red-blooded mission-focused agency offices reading this and cheering him on, they said. I guess it's a political message to try and go, hey, you know, this was never that popular anyway. So you can see this political agenda. But as you said, this is playing out across the federal government and the CIA is really, you know, in some sense is no different for being targeted in that way for having those jobs being taken out. Although my PSA on this is somebody who has just

kind of been in the public service announcement. Okay, thank you. You must have those. It's like on the tube when they say, see it, say it, sort it. Yeah, that's a PSA. Okay, now I know. Showing off my London knowledge here, much like my accents, which are very native almost. My PSA, Gordon, is that you don't have to support the continuation of those policies and also think that those people should be fired because they are in almost all cases people who were asked to go into these jobs in a rotational

capacity, right? And frankly, I would wager that plenty of them would have preferred not to have taken these jobs and were asked to do them by leaders at the CIA and then who consequently, and this is another just a bit of kind of the inside baseball and how this has gone down, which I think is the sort of thing that makes people at Langley both angry and scared, which is they basically called all of these people out to the visitor's center at CIA headquarters within the last couple weeks and told them, gave them, by the way, being called out to the visitor's center is a very bizarre place to go, by the way. It's like the kind of gatehouse thing that you go to when you drive into the compound off of 123. And,

you know, these people are basically stood there and said, look, if you can retire, you can retire, you can resign or you can be fired. And that sort of, frankly, political point scoring, you know, was just, I mean, it's not necessary, right? I mean, you could say all of these positions are eliminated. And you could go back to being an analyst, you can go back to being a case officer, whatever, right? And still get the same headline that we're cutting all this DEI stuff out of CIA. So I think, you know, again, framing up this kind

of tense relationship between the incoming administration and some of these federal bureaucracies, in particular, the CIA. Yeah. So I guess the next question, though, that's a targeted thing against diversity, is the broader question of whether there is going to be a purge, you know, a kind of real slash of the CIA workforce, whether Elon Musk or someone else is going to get their Halloween style chainsaw out and cut through the bureaucracy. That is the thing I guess people must be watching for and wondering about. Yeah. No, and I think we've seen kind of an opening salvo in this story around the size of the

agency in that these eight eight month buyouts, you know, you can quit now and get eight months of leave and benefits. You know, initially there was a national security exemption to this, like the intelligence community wasn't gonna be included. And it seems like CIA Director Ratcliffe wanted the offer, you know, made available to the agency.

And there was a meeting in the bubble, Gordon, which is the CIA's auditorium. And by the way, that will play a role in the Halloween massacre to come. Radcliffe holds a town hall meeting in an auditorium at headquarters and basically says, you know, if you want to leave, you can leave. And it seems like at least from the reporting, you know, Shane Harris did some great reporting on this. The gathering was pretty uncontentious. And Radcliffe basically said, look, I wanted you guys to have the same opportunities that other federal agencies have. If you don't want to work for the Trump administration, you can take this buyout.

The other bit of this, though, is freezing hiring, it seems, and then even starting to look at some of these probationary officers. So people who've been in for less than two years and who are in other parts of the government easier to fire. Although the interesting thing about CIA is that the director can pretty much fire anybody for reason, for cause, or for no reason. So you don't really need to do that at the CIA. But there was that story that they'd sent the names of those probationers or at least part of the names, you know, to the

White House as when they were looking for cuts, which I think caused some concern, even if it wasn't the full name, still the idea that those are being circulated of people who are on probation, of agency officers is going to be kind of worrying to people. Yeah, very worrisome. I mean, it's also just, you know, you send the first name last initial of CIA officers down to the White House and something that is not, you know, classified,

right? Not secure. If you're the Russians or the Chinese, you have a very interesting data set now for potential targeting purposes down the line, because presumably some of these people might get fired. So that point with this question of whether you can use cuts, purges to not just bring about efficiency but also political control of the CIA, let's take a break and afterwards we'll look at how that's happened in the past, back in the 70s, with this spooky story of the Halloween Massacre.

Welcome back. We're looking at the sometimes complicated, difficult relationship between the CIA and its political masters and the questions of purges, what's going on at the moment under President Trump, but also looking at it through the lens of history and something which happens in the second half of the 70s, David called the Halloween Massacre. And this is a difficult period for the CIA, isn't it? The massacre itself is under President Carter, who comes in, but it comes after, I guess, the CIA's dirty laundry has been exposed. And no one likes having their dirty laundry exposed. You know, just cast out into the street for all to see. I mean, that really is what happens in the mid to late 70s for the Central Intelligence Agency because essentially, Gordon, what happens is that

the good old days of the 1950s and 1960s of the CIA operating really without any congressional oversight, without much insight into its budget, and, being run by and staffed by a group of people who spent the Second World War basically blowing things up in Germany and across Nazi-occupied Europe. It turns out with all of those things together, they get up to some crazy stuff. So what comes out over the course of the mid-70s, This article comes out in 74, I believe, about the CIA spying domestically, like looking at protest groups and kind of compiling records on Americans who they think could have some kind of counterintelligence risk. So that story comes out. President Ford commissions an inquiry into those allegations. And then from that, the Senate and

the House follow with a special committee that comes to be known as Church Pike. Now, what is going to come out over the course of the next few years is just a dirty laundry list of stuff that, you know, sort of if you're working at the central intelligence agency, you'd prefer would never come out. So domestic surveillance, right? The CIA had spied on Americans in the States. Plots had been hatched to assassinate foreign leaders. Castro and people like that, isn't it? It's the famous folks. Exactly. Not nice people. Yeah, let's be clear. Let's give ourselves some credit here. CIA formers were on the Watergate break-in team. Not current officers, but it doesn't look good.

Highly aggressive covert action to kind of destabilize or overthrow foreign governments was a hallmark of, you know, the agency's efforts in the 50s and 60s. Iran 1953, our opening episodes, a good example of that. Yeah. And sometimes very effectively, as we noted in those episodes. But supposed to be covert. And so suddenly, everything is being exposed. It's pretty dramatic at the time, isn't it? And pretty kind of disturbing, I guess, for the CIA to have everything thrown out there. It does create a kind of impression that it was slightly rogue out of control, perhaps. That's the impression. Yes. That's definitely the impression, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I guess any organization that's testing hallucinogens on, you know, sometimes unwitting participants, one of whom might

have jumped out of a window in New York to his death. I mean, these kinds of things are not, they're not the sort of stories you want running in the Washington Post and New York Times regularly for much of the 1970s, but that is what's going on. I mean, all great material for a podcast and for our podcast, but not necessarily great news if you're the CIA leadership at the time. That's right. And for those who've been listening to the pod, we should note that basically every bullet point I went through will probably be its own sort of show or set of shows on The Rest is Classified. Even though as a former CIA man, I don't love all this stuff getting out there.

I will say that now as a podcaster, Church Pike Commission, definitely sort of a friend of the show for bringing all this stuff out. So we'll turn it out into episodes, don't you worry. Will Barron You have this exposure in the mid-70s of all the kind of dirty tricks and things the CIA has been up to. And then you also have President Carter being elected in 1976, who I guess, you know, is an outsider. The famous peanut farmer from Georgia, Navy man, moralistic, a kind of serious Christian who's there from outside of Washington to change things. Obviously, in many ways, not Donald Trump. But there is a parallel in that sense of an outsider who's been brought in to kind of shake things up a bit after the Watergate years and after

a sense that the deep state might have got out of control. I mean, that's where the parallel is to some extent, isn't it? Yeah. And Carter is going to come in and take the proverbial giant bag of peanuts to the head of the Central Intelligence Agency because he will vow during the campaign to kind of tame this, what he'll call a rogue elephant in actually taking a euphemism for the CIA from Senator Frank Church himself. Carter accuses the CIA of plotting murder and other crimes. And he kind of talks, I think, more broadly about the US having gone through this ordeal of the last five years before his election

created by Vietnam, Watergate, and the CIA. So he's actually name checking his spy agency as a source of kind of instability and, you know, disturbance for ordinary Americans. And the parallel is interesting here, because it is that idea of a kind of deep state which is out of control. But in Carter's time, he was coming at it from the left, if you like, as having seen this as being a problem, as opposed to the Trump view of coming from the right. But there is a parallel there, and then wanting to impose his own people and control on the agency. Well, and one of the other interesting things, Gordon, is that it would have actually, and this is almost impossible to comprehend this today,

but it would have been normal for Carter to actually retain the incoming or existing CIA director, who at the time actually was George H.W. Bush, who had been Gerald Ford's CIA director. And later president and then father of the later George W. Bush, but then CIA director. Yeah. That's right. And if he were still alive, he'd be a friend of the podcast too. The role was just absolutely apolitical back then. I mean, when Carter took office, the last time an incoming president had appointed his own CIA director was Eisenhower, who had appointed Alan Dulles 24

years earlier. So there was this longstanding at that point precedent. I mean, the CIA is only 30 years old at this point, Gordon. And the last time an incoming president appointed a director was 24 years earlier, six years into the life of the CIA. So to give you a sense of, I think, Carter thinking differently about the place and wanting to assert more control, he doesn't keep George H.W. Bush on, and he decides to go with his own pick. Now, Carter's first pick turns him down. Carter's second pick for the CIA, who's a Kennedy staffer named Ted Sorensen, is seen as just too politically objectionable. I think he'd been a conscientious objector, like in the Korean War or something

like that, which turns out too much of a peacenik and a lefty. Too much of a peacenik to be running the Central Intelligence Agency, even under the Carter administration, yeah. So he bows out and then a man named Admiral Stansfield Turner is Carter's third pick to run the Central Intelligence Agency. They were classmates at the Naval Academy, so Turner is a Navy man, but they didn't really know each other well. And I think the classes were, you know, 800 plus at the time, so you wouldn't know everybody. Turner is confirmed by the Senate in a totally unanimous vote. So it's not a partisan pick in that sense, but he is very much imposed by Carter on the CIA.

He's a kind of intellectual, isn't he? A kind of serious person, Stansfield Turner, rather than if you like a classic shadowy CIA operator figure. That's right. He is a handsome old guy with a big jaw and a chest full of medals from his time in the Navy. He's very, very smart, it seems. He was an Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar. Must be smart. Must be. He must be. He must be smart to have gone to Oxford. A former CIA lawyer in his memoir describes Stan Turner as a starchy self-righteous man. Turner does not drink, he's a devout Christian scientist. It doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

Gordon takes a shot at Christian scientists. Sorry. No, well, I'm more starchy self-righteous. Oxford educated as well, I'm more starchy, self-righteous, Oxford educated as well. He sounds slightly, from what you're portraying, a kind of moralistic character. He's not the kind of wily, devious types you expect running something like the CIA, especially from the films. Yeah.

I think it's fair to say that he's suspicious of the espionage business, like human intelligence operations in particular. He kind of has this, to me almost this vibe of gentlemen don't read each other's mail kind of a thing. And it's a bit of a dirty business, I think, which some people do think, you know, it's a kind of, the whole business of getting people to betray secrets and people is a bit dirty. And they'd rather do it all through kind of satellites and technical collection rather than getting their hands dirty, which actually is what the CIA is supposed to do, is getting their hands dirty to some extent and recruit people, isn't it? Well, in one case, there was a briefing for him about an effort to recruit Soviet military officers and Turner couldn't get his head around this because as a Navy man, he just

couldn't imagine committing treason. He almost was sort of not supportive of this effort to learn more about the Soviet military because he didn't want the CIA to go through the effort of actually turning military officers, which is something he couldn't imagine doing himself. And you bring up Gordon, the point around this new world of technical collection that's really opening up in this period in the mid seventies, satellites, more signals, intelligence platforms. It's changing the game by the time Turner comes into office.

And this is a case where he's probably right that much of this tech is going to be the wave of the future for how you collect foreign intelligence, but the way it translates culturally at the CIA. And certainly I think in the way Turner communicated it was this is a guy who likes toys over spies. And it's someone who thinks that a lot of this technical collection could serve as almost a direct replacement to the dirtier world of human intelligence. That's not going to kind of ingratiate you to the people at the CIA, is it? No, no.

I mean, you imagine like some guy at the CIA who's been there for 25 years and graduated from Yale, you know, he was a skull and bones guy. And overthrew, you know, the Shah has been used to plotting poison wetsuits for capstro all this stuff. And then someone comes along and says, ah, just use some satellites to do all this kind of spying business. The guy in the Langley basement distilling shellfish toxin is looking at this guy, you know, Turner and saying, this guy's going to put me out of a job here. I don't like the sound of this one bit. And Turner also comes in and again hits on this theme of kind

of political control or influence at Langley. And Turner receives from Carter a sort of charge, a very vague charge. And apparently Carter in one of these meetings tells Turner, you know, when you come up with your plan to reshape the intelligence community, be bold. No specifics there, Gordon, on exactly what Jimmy Carter wants to accomplish. But I think Turner comes in with a cultural aversion to human espionage operations and a charge to really do something big at Langley to affect the president's agenda. So it certainly doesn't sound like he's going to be an easy fit at Langley, Stansfield-Turner. And he gets off to a bad start, I guess, when he turns up at CIA headquarters

right from the start. Yeah, he does. He writes in his memoir years later and he says, early in my 10 years, head of the CIA, I realized that managing the agency... Oh, and by the way, now I'm... This is David McCloskey talking here as a side note. Stan Turner, I read his memoir this past week in preparation for this and he doesn't capitalize the A in agency, Gordon, throughout the memoir, which is a mistake. Wow. Is that like insulting or demeaning somehow?

No, no, no. It's not insulting or demeaning. You guys are precious. It's just wrong, you know? So, he truly did not absorb the culture anyway. So back to the quote, I realized that managing the agency was unlike any management experience I had ever had or any I had studied at the Harvard Business School, which is a great reference there.

Really? You surprised me. Managing the CIA is not like managing a kind of widget making factory. It's a school of hard knocks, Gordon. That's what it is. So yeah, so Turner right off the bat, I think stumbles, right? And he'll say again in his memoir that he wasn't particularly impressed with the briefing books he was provided before his confirmation hearing.

We should also note the Stan Turner No Fun Zone incorporated, he would take all these briefing books home over the weekend and he would like mark them up and bring them back with feedback for the analysts at CIA, which as a former CIA analyst, the young McCloskey. You don't want that. You don't, you'd prefer to not have that. Right. Even if what they, you know, they're sort of edits or their markup is correct or insightful or whatever, you know, you'd prefer to not have someone editing your work.

So Turner, he's a big marker-upper of documents. Yeah, I guess this is another quote from his memoir. My first encounters with the CIA did not convey either a feeling of warm welcome or a sense of great competence. Ouch. Yeah, that's rough. That's mean. There's a style of CIA director who comes into the building, and it really could be irrespective of what the politics have been like on the campaign or in the broader society.

I'm actually thinking here of a director like Leon Panetta, who came in in Obama's first term. And Obama had not been, I would also say probably not particularly warm and affectionate toward the central intelligence agency. Panetta is coming in, Panetta is a government insider, but someone who at that point, I guess he'd been Clinton's chief of staff, but yeah, he had not occupied a position in the intelligence community or anything like that. And Panetta comes in and kind of quickly becomes a sort of stalwart defender of the central intelligence agency's interests or perceived interests in Washington.

Panetta is a bureaucratic knife fighter, par excellence, and then he goes out into the world and sort of defends the CIA and its interests. That's what they want. Yeah. That's what you want, right? That's what the central intelligence agency wants. And Stan Turner does not That's what you want, right? That's what the Central Intelligence Agency wants. And Stan Turner does not do that. The opposite, right?

The exact opposite of this. So he does something right off the bat, which makes everybody very angry, which is in his first month on the job, he fires two senior officers who'd been in contact with a former CIA officer who'd engaged in some shady dealings with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which sort of frowned upon in the 1970s or going forward really. And the details in this are not so important, but what matters is that basically everybody, Gordon on the seventh floor.

Which is also the title of a very good novel, I think, out now in all good bookshops, yeah? I can't quite remember the author. But anyway, basically everyone on the seventh floor tells Stan Turner, like, don't fire these guys. You know, they should be reprimanded or sort of pushed into some position where they don't matter, but don't get rid of them. But Turner, again, I think in his kind of moralistic streak here, he goes and fires them. And that is something right off the bat, I think, that previous directors had not done such things. There's, of course, counterintelligence risk associated with firing people. So he gets, he's cautioned against this. He does it anyway. So right off the bat, things are not going so well. Now, the deputy director,

Turner's deputy director, who had continued over from the HW Bush days at CIA, leaves four months into Turner's directorship and basically becomes this kind of like Thorn in Turner's side for the rest of the story because he leaves because of Turner, right? Turner notices some things right away and basically what these are going to sum up to is a list of ways in which the agency runs itself. So he comes in and thinks, hey, you know, I want to understand how the personnel system kind of functions. Basically all the kind of aides and staffers say, look, you know, it's not really your concern.

Chiefs of station, COSs are being appointed without, you know, consulting him. Budgets come up to the seventh floor and they have no idea what's in them. I'll say as a side note, the capital allocation process at the Central Intelligence Agency was always pretty stale. I don't have no idea what that means. Not a super dynamic or transparent process. The money gets moved around shadily. That's what you're telling me. No, no, no. I guess what I'm saying is that for a long time the budgets would just sort of be pretty constant, you know, for every part of the agency to kind of stay the same, right, as opposed to moving them around based on different priorities.

But the general picture you're giving me is of an agency which runs itself and which doesn't like to be told what to do by its bosses. So where, you know, the bosses might come and go, but we get on with what we do. And he doesn't like that. He's got this great quote in his memoir where he says, after a few months, he'd realized that running the Central Intelligence Agency was like, quote, running a power plant from a control room with a bunch of impressive levers that have actually been disconnected. So this idea of like Turner's up there in his seventh floor office, pulling these levers,

turning dials and literally nothing's happening. And I think the reality is these directorates, which are, you know, operations, analysis, science and technology, it was called something different back then, ran like their own fiefdoms. I mean, it was a kind of self-rule inside these different silos. Yeah, it's interesting. It's actually very similar to the way British prime ministers describe what happens when they take over the state and the civil service, that they start pulling the levers and they realize nothing's happening. But I have to say, he even takes a swipe at analysts in his memoir. Is that right?

He describes your former shop where you used to work, where the McCloskeys worked, as given to tweedy pipe-smoking intellectuals and having more PhDs than any other area of government. And yet for all that, they can be wrong. I mean, how does that feel? It didn't feel great. When I read that chapter, I took a personal affront at that. I would put my pipe down. You put your pipe down and took off your tweeds and just shook your head in disbelief. And then I just, I went about pacing my backyard, smoking my pipe. We did have, so I will say by the time the young McCloskey was at the Central Intelligence Agency, we did have some guys like that and there actually was a guy who would wear like tweed jackets and he had a gigantic

white beard and he smoked a pipe out in the courtyard on his lunch break and on the ten other breaks he took during the day to smoke his pipe. There were very few of those people left, unfortunately, by the time I was there. Still a lot of PhDs, still a lot of PhDs, but, the pipe smoking had gone by the wayside. But I didn't like that, Gordon. I took a personal affront at it. And, you know, I mean, I think we should say that this kind of siloed nature of it is probably the result of the CIA having grown really haphazardly over its then 30 year history and really without much oversight at all. And it's going through this shift in the 70s.

It's shifting from a very elite establishment institution to a much more frankly professional organization that's also much larger, more unwieldy. And also, I was shocked by this, Gordon, for about 20 of those first 30 years, because the agency is founded in 47, we're in 1977 in this part of the story. For 20 of those 30 years, it's been run by directors who came straight out of the operational directorate. Right. So they're covert operators, spies, yeah. Exactly. There has not been time for anyone else to exert much influence on the place. Yeah, it's been its own

little world. And so with Stansfield Turner brought into clean house with what his president sees as a bit of a rogue elephant, a rogue agency, next time when we come, we'll look at how that plays out with something darkly called the Halloween Massacre and what that tells us about the CIA and presidents today.