The Rest Is Classified - 25. Trump vs the CIA: The Halloween Massacre (Ep 2)

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

When the CIA is forced to downsize, who gets cut? What happens to the intelligence left behind? And how does political control change the way spies operate? In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s CIA director launched a brutal purge, firing hundreds of intelligence officers in what became known as the Halloween Massacre. Now, with Trump taking his own axe to Langley, David and Gordon ask: is history repeating itself? And what happens when America’s spies become the target? ------------------- 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

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there is a great deal of opinion that the Directorate of Operations is overmanned and has a lot of people who are underemployed. Let me emphasise that this reduction is an effort to be leaner and more effective. It will be carried out in as considerate a way as we possibly can. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And that was CIA Director Stansfield Turner, as you can probably tell from my accent, an admiral. Who's your Navy accent, Gordon? Navy accent, Oxford Road scholar accent.

And he was speaking in the CIA's auditorium, The Bubble, on August the 7th, 1977, announcing his reductions, or should we say purge, of the CIA. As we look at this story about purges and political control of the CIA in the context of what's going on today under the Trump presidency, but looking in particular back through the lens of history and what becomes known as the Halloween Massacre under President Carter and his CIA director, Stansfield Turner. And David, last time we looked at Stansfield Turner, this kind of slightly intellectual aloof figure coming into

the CIA, a culture clash, and he's going to kind of bring with him a desire for change, his own people and a desire to kind of cut the place down to size. Well, that's right, Gordon. And last time we talked about how one of the things he did when he arrived, which, you know, of course, in any organization immediately ingratiates you to the rank and file was he fired a few people who worked on the seventh floor, and it's off to just kind of this really rough, bad start with the CIA. Now, one of the things that Turner does that is going to really accentuate this clash is that he brings in outsiders to kind of staff his seventh floor

and to help him run the place. I'll say this is something that never ever goes well sits well at the CIA. Now there was a director of the CIA under George W. Bush named Porter Goss. He was very briefly the CIA director, and he had been a CIA case officer, I believe, back in probably this time in the 70s, early 70s or something like that. But he's brought in and he brings a bunch of people from his congressional office, because he was a congressman

by the time the early 2000s rolled around, and they get the nickname, the Goslings, and they run around in the place. And when I joined in 2006, there was still fresh sort of blood about Porter Goss. People hated the Goslings, hated these outsiders coming in. And this is exactly what Turner does in 1977 when he takes over. So the new deputy under Turner, because remember from last time,

the old deputy director kind of leaves in this huff over Turner taking over. So the new deputy is a career foreign service officer who'd been ambassador to Portugal, who Turner had gotten to know and respected. A Harvard academic is brought in to be the head of analysis, which would not sit particularly well with a lot of the analysts there.

And then he brings in a bunch of Navy guys, nicknamed the Gang of Seven, who are kind of aides and other commanders. So he had been commander of sort of Naval operations in Europe or in Southern Europe. He had been based in Naples. So he brings in a bunch of people from Naples to help him run the place.

He installs a non-operations guy as the DDO, the director of operations. Yes, that's a real sin. And then worst of all, he brings in a management consultant, Gordon. That lowest of species. The lowest. The lowest of low, David. The lowest thing on the evolutionary ladder. A management consultant.

We should just acknowledge that you may or may not have dabbled in that world as well in your time. That's why we're making fun of it. Sorry management consultants. The dark arts. The dark arts of management consulting. We should note here, Gordon, that given my background, both as a CIA analyst and as a management consultant, I sort of have a unique perspective on any story that connects the intersection

of the Central Intelligence Agency to firing people, which is a lot of what management consultancies do. Now, I didn't do much of that work, really at all when I was at McKinsey. But that is a lot of what what the firm has typically done in the past. Now, this management consultant, he's a special assistant to Turner and overall general bag man. His name is Rusty Williams, which I think is-

Good name. Great name, great name. And he comes in really for particular ire by the rank and file in the directorate of operations. So Rusty comes in and is charged right off the bat by Turner with basically looking into the Directorate of Operations to come up with scandals and controversies

and try to understand if the DO was being run ethically. Now, remember from our last episode, Turner's taking over in the wake of Church Pike and all of these revelations about, you know, sort of agency malpractice. And so what Rusty does is he goes and basically conducts a world tour to find instances of, I guess,

DO officers behaving badly, which of course is not popular in the DO. And one article said that Rusty was out running investigations on booze and sex play instead of foul play, and described his managerial practice as a vice squad approach to management. And in one case, Rusty goes out to the station in then Zaire, found that the COS was having an affair. The chief of station was having an affair with a Scandinavian flight attendant at an agency safe house. The COS is brought home and fired. So, you know, again, management 101, I guess here, like you're not really endearing yourself to the troops right off the bat.

Yeah, although it does sound like a little bit of bad behavior from the troops as well. What can you do about the troops, Gordon? The troops are the troops. You could make the case that there might have been the need for a little bit of clearing house and for the T total of Stansfield Turner to bring in a bit of order to this unruly shop of miscreants who are up to things with Scandinavian flight attendants in safe houses and using money, dare I say. But anyway, he's bringing in his outsiders, but he also wants to cut the place down in terms of numbers, doesn't he as well?

Yeah, that's right. Turner, again, in his memoir, wrote that, this is a great lie. He just felt like there were too many people, you could just walk through the halls at Langley and feel that there were too many people. And you know, I think the reality is, he was probably right, right. So the CIA in the late 70s is dealing with really a glut of officers who had come in or joined the agency sort of prior to and then during the Vietnam War, right? So there's potentially and we'll talk about this a little bit later in the episode, but you could sort of potentially see some connection or parallel to the post 9-11 kind of hiring binge that the CIA and a bunch of other national security institutions went on today, although we'll cover some of the discrepancies between then and now in a bit. So you basically have a CIA that is staffed up with a lot of people who had been working with the military overseas, you know, in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.

They had been on these kind of war zone tours, and there's not a war on anymore, right? So you have maybe up to a thousand operations and kind of paramilitary officers who had recently come back from the theater and who were more or less just kind of twiddling their thumbs. You have a lot of those people who are back, you have a kind of younger cadre of officers at CIA who have come in. You know not in the fifties and sixties but kind of in the seventies and who feel really stifled by all of these old timers really hanging on. There had been the year prior a very public resignation by a young CIA officer who'd actually announced his resignation in a public letter to the Washington Post in 1976.

And he had charged that, you know, the DO, the Director of Operations, is run by an old burned out clique of senior officers who've really sucked the dynamism out of the organization. He also makes a whole bunch of colorful claims about, you know, CIA officers misusing taxpayer funds and the fabrication of reports in Vietnam. So kind of more dirty laundry out there. But basically, it's a sense that there's just there's too many

people. And the CIA though, had been going through a kind of slow process of getting down to the proper size, there had been cuts back in the Nixon years. And when we say cuts here, by the way, we should note, God forbid, put my management consultant hat back on, most of what we're talking about here is cutting positions, right? It's not actually up to this point firing people and sending them out the door, right? So it's like someone retires out of a position and then the position isn't filled. So they've been kind of trying to bring it down gently rather than rapidly at this point. And I noticed in your notes that you use the phrase right sizing, which is a very

management consultant phrase. I feel like, you know, we all fear being right sized. Right sized. We just want the size to be right. Gordon, how could you always strangely enough smaller, but anyway, yeah, it is, it is rarely for growth. I do remember one of the first projects I was on as a management consultant. There was a guy on the team who was spending too much money personally.

And one of the associates on the team came up with a bunch of ideas and put them on a PowerPoint page for how he might get his personal finances under control, and one of the ideas said right size family. That was the that was the that was the That was the savings lever for my friend. I don't think he got on to right sizing his family. But basically what Gordon, without getting into too many of the numbers here, when Carter took office, the DO, the director of operations was maybe around 4,000 or so people. It was down from almost 8,000 at the height of the Vietnam War. And there had been a study commissioned by the DO itself on staffing levels, which called for a reduction of like another 1,300 positions over the next five

years. So there was even inside the sort of DO fiefdom, a recognition that they were still overstaffed when Stan Turner takes over and that they would try to get rid of another 1300 or so positions by attrition and retirement over the next five years. But what's crucial, I guess, is that Turner doesn't want to do it through that kind of gradual process of attrition. He's going to go for the kind of the purge, the kind of the slice in a sudden way of the CIA rather than what's been happening in the past, which feels like it's about cutting numbers, but also about a kind of ideological view that this place needs to be brought to

heel, I think. I think that's exactly right. I mean, George HW Bush had come in during the Gerald Ford administration and run the CIA. He had been presented with the same numbers and basically elected to do nothing with them because he felt like the CIA needed some help publicly. The last thing it needed was a director who was gonna come in and make a whole bunch of cuts.

Bush basically just ignores it. And by doing that kind of endears himself to the agency, right? Turner, he is very stubborn, and he wants to demonstrate that he can control the place as well. And so he decides that he's going to cut 820 positions, but not over five years over two years. And basically, the way the attrition is going to work, it's not going to be fast enough to accomplish that in two years. And so he is going to have to conduct a riff.

Gordon, what's a riff? A riff is this not a term? Why guitar riff? I think it's a reduction in force is is what it stands for. Oh, okay. Is what it stands for. And Turner calls it a bottom blow, which is a Navy term. People may interpret it as something else. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. What is it in the Navy? What is a bottom blow in the Navy? Usually you have to pay double for that, but it's a Navy term for when you clean out the boilers by getting rid of all the slag that builds up, right? Okay. So Turner is sort of committed to this idea. This agency is overstaffed. There's too many people there. Clean out the stables. And this is what's going to be the Halloween massacre, effectively. That's right. So Turner makes up his mind. He announces this in August, which is the

quote you read in your Navy accent at the beginning of the episode. And he'll say later on that basically between August and the end of October, no one at the CIA apparently counsels him against it. And it might be the case that nobody actually thought he was going to go through with it. They send out some memos over the course of that, it was kind of August, September period, offering full retirement benefits if senior officers retire early. And then it ends with this ominous line, this message, that the director, quote,

intends to recommend your separation pursuant to headquarters regulation. And I actually don't know the number because it's still classified. But your separation. But your separation, which sounds pretty ominous, right? And there's not enough uptake of this to cover the 820 positions. So then in October, the head of the directorate of operations sends out a memo to everybody in the directorate basically says, look, there's going to be a two stage purge.

That's going to reduce the DO's ranks by about 20% over the next 15 months. So you think, I mean, that's a pretty significant percentage of the workforce, right? People are terrified. And so we come up Gordon to Halloween. Basically, what Turner did was he came up with the number, the 820, and then he kicks it down to the DO and says, figure out how to make this happen, Figure out how to cut people in areas where we don't need them or cut low performers, but basically come back with the list of names, and positions to be riffed.

Now Turner importantly tells the DO to come up with the specifics of that plan by the 1st of November. And Turner specifically said, I do not want the names to go out on the 31st of October on Halloween. Does not want them to go out. Because he knows it's going to get, he can see what's going to happen. He can see it. And what happens? They go out on Halloween. Which is surely someone screwing him over basically. Somebody sends it out on Halloween. Which feels like people are trying to screw him over a bit inside the agency.

There's no evidence of that, but that seems like a reasonable hypothesis. And it is instantly like that day memorialised as the Halloween massacre. Because what seems to go out is a two paragraph note delivered by courier, it says, that basically says it has been decided that your services are no longer needed. You know, when you've probably been on the battlefield, as it were, for the CIA for many years and in dangerous hotspots around the world or doing whatever you've been doing for the CIA, including with flight attendants in Zaire, anyway, less about that the better, then to suddenly get a note like that, you're going to feel bruised, I think it's fair to say. And it's also fair to say that these are not people who take being fired like

that lying down, unless you're the, again, the guy with the flight attendant, but these are people who are, you know, they're not, they're not going to be happy. Gordon's mind is stuck in a Zaire safe house, Zaire safe house, 1976. I mean, so, I mean, even Turner will, even Turner will admit that the way the riff happened was unconscionable, is the line he actually uses in his memoir. He had assumed that because there had been downsizing done in the Nixon years, that there were methods and procedures for kind of doing this, right? But there wasn't, they didn't exist.

There had also been no consultation with any of the DO people who really did a lot of the budgeting and staffing work. So they were totally caught off guard. And in this case, I think it's really a lot of this is the how right? It's not so much that he's it's the brutal way it's done. It feels Yeah, that's right. I mean, including potentially station chiefs overbroad, it seems like a bit unclear, but there's some reports that London, Vienna, Bonn, Canada, Latin America, you know, these are senior people, aren't they, who are potentially,

it sounds like maybe being fired. It is, I think, fair to say that when these notices go out, the whole place kind of goes, goes bananas. And to your point on the, on the chiefs of station, I mean, I should note there is some contradictory reporting here because it came out that some of these COS chiefs of station were included in the purge, but Turner in his memoir insists that it was only headquarters staff that were cut. So it's hard to say, but I like believing that the chiefs of station were cut because one of the little anecdotes that has come out is that a chief of station who had been fired reportedly cables back to the director.

And here Callum, our producer, will need to get that bleep gun ready again because the cable is apparently two words and it just says, f*** you. And apparently the support officer who physically wrote the cable and sent it in Added a line at the end that basically said, you know, I know I'm not supposed to send this kind of language But the chief of stations making me he's making me it makes it sound like he's got a gun to his head

send this message to the director saying F you because That's not gonna shoot you when and bulletin boards at this time are a thing around the CIA. So these bulletin boards pop up with anti-Turner messages, cartoons, poems. There's a threat of class action lawsuit and a remarkable number of anonymous quotes are, you know, given to the press. He's fragmenting the agency. He's reducing morale. CIA can be quite good at briefing the press and leaking and offices when they've got something to

say. I would say as a journalist. Come now, Gordon. No, I would say they know how to play the dark arts of using the media to get their message out. I would suggest having seen a little bit of it myself. But Turner kind of fights back as you'd expect. I like it in an interview he calls the people crybabies. Crybabies, yeah. In one interview, he probably misspeaks relative to what he wanted to say and creates the sort of vibe that everybody at CIA is a crybaby. And then like a week later, he's seated for another interview and he singles out, he says, you know, there's the person here who's being a crybaby and the journalist who's

doing the interview sees a typewritten note in front of Turner that has a bullet point on it reminding him to say one crybaby, not a bunch of crybabies. You know, I mean, even there's t-shirts that are being printed at Langley at the time that say armchair Admiral out, you know, and being passed around. So there's like a modest rebellion at Langley after this. Then young analyst at the CIA, so not a young McCloskey, now an old McCloskey, but your predecessor, now a very old baby McCloskey said that he encountered a security officer

walking around the compound with a German shepherd, which is not really something you see all that much. And he told the analysts that we think the director doesn't trust us. He's afraid he'll be assassinated. Which again, it's like, I don't know if this is some kind of apocryphal thing or totally made up, but I will believe that it's true until the day I died that Stan Turner thought he was going to be like killed during a, you know, a leadership meeting by someone from the D.O. The way this massacre, it's interesting, has been reported down through the years is that he fired 800 plus people. So Turner claims that only 17 people from the D.O.

were actually fired. 147 were forced into early retirement. And then through normal attrition over the next two years, they got the remaining positions up to that 820 number. So, he's trying to say that not that many people were actually given their notice and fired. But, I mean, still in mythology, this becomes a thing, doesn't it? In terms of the anger and the breakdown between a leadership and the agency.

This does become a kind of really significant moment. And the fact is it's still kind of referred to and spoken about today because of the anger and the bitterness that this causes when you've got a director trying to kind of impose his will on what he sees as a recalcitrant agency. That's right. I mean, the place is overstaffed, but this is also an effort on Turner's part to kind of bring it in line, frankly, with the way he wanted to run it. As he says, you know, their empire, which was surrounded by a mode of secrecy, had been

invaded by an outsider who they believed would never understand or appreciate it and therefore could not properly change its ways. And so with the Halloween massacre having taken place, the chainsaw being taken to the CIA, its moat being breached. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll look at what that tells us about the CIA and President Trump and what might be happening today and in the near future. So welcome back. We've looked at the story of the Halloween massacre from the late 70s, a period where you had a president through his CIA director try and impose greater political control on a CIA which had been seen as a bit of a rogue elephant, a bit of a kind of

part of a deep state of its time perhaps, and a desire to kind of bring it down in size and bring it to heel. David, I guess the question that comes from that is how similar or how different do you think that is from what we've been seeing so far with the Trump administration. On the surface, there is a similarity, right? Which is you have a new president that is sort of trying to figure out how does it get a handle on Langley and get what it needs or feels like it needs from Langley. And you also have, I think, a president or a new administration coming in who thinks the federal government's

bloated today, right? And there need to be cuts. Elon Musk with his chainsaw. Yeah, Elon Musk with his chainsaw, you know, sort of applying and extending that to the CIA as well. So in the face of it, you definitely do have some real similarities, though we should note that it is early days in the second Trump administration and it very much remains to be seen to what degree John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, will try to cut maybe further beyond offering these buyouts. And by the way, I don't think we have any sense of how many CIA officers have taken these buyouts.

Which is a kind of redundancy package, isn't it? Yeah, right. The only people, to my knowledge, that have been fired from CIA so far have been those in those kind of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion positions, right? But there are, I think, anytime you're talking about establishing more political control over the CIA, or cutting positions, cut actually just downsizing, right? There are big risks to consider. There are things to think about here. And I think there's probably five big ones. And the first one, which is maybe obvious, but worth mentioning, is that if you, regardless of your thoughts on how big

the federal government might be, how bloated it might be, and whether that applies to the CIA. If you fire people with top secret security clearances, you are always going to run the risk of potential recruitment by foreign intelligence services. I mean, this is the reason why many very senior CIA officers that I know, they'll say over the course of decades long careers, I mean, they barely fired anybody. And the reality of that is that you run this tremendous risk of creating a recruitment pool for the Russians, the Chinese, anybody who is able to understand

who these people might be once they're let loose and to go after them for recruitment. Discuntlement plus top secrets equals danger. And I mean, I think both the CIA and actually MI6 have seen that in the past with some officers. So yeah, that's one. And I think they're, I mean, ought to bring up this list of probationary officers again, right? These are officers who are in the first couple years of their tenure at the CIA. that list goes down to the White House, it's got a first name and a last initial on it. If down the line, a number of those people are let go, let's say potentially hasn't happened yet, but it might. Well, if I were a Russian targeting analyst or a Chinese targeting analyst, you don't have to be that crafty or intelligent to come up with a way to sort of

connect. You could use LinkedIn, you can use other social media to sort of connect those names to find people like, oh, this is somebody who was fired from the Central Intelligence Agency, let's go see what they're up to, right? So that's one. I think two, and it's related to this probationary point, and also just stalling hiring is, when you do these kind of cuts, the CIA has this very sort of binge and purge relationship with hiring. I mean, we talked about it in the Halloween Massacre episode

with this absolute binge in Vietnam era hiring. And then all of a sudden, on the back end of it, you're left with a whole bunch of people, right? Well, the CIA kind of does something similar. And the reality is, if you start to cut, just like the incoming people, as an example, well, I mean, you're sort of cutting off your pipeline of fresh recruits, right? They bring a vitality and energy to the organization that you desperately need. You're not necessarily getting rid of the worst people, you're getting rid of the new people, which has definitely got risks.

Yeah. And it probably takes seven years, I mean, is what I think senior officers would say, seven years to get a new person in to be a full performing analyst or case officer. So you cut people off halfway through that process and leave a lot of people up kind of at the upper ends. You're not doing this in a targeted way. You could see a world where maybe some of your better talent actually gets let go, right? So that's, that's the second one. There is a third point here around morale, which is a big one, you know,

and it was, we saw with Stan Turner and the Halloween massacre. If you come in and you, you're sort of day one mission gets filtered down to the workforce as cutting staffing, you might be acting with the full support of the president, right? But from the standpoint of the CIA, I mean, this is this is going to absolutely kill morale. And there are a number of reasons for this Gordon, but you know, having conversations over the past couple weeks with people who are just left the CIA and some who are still in I mean, there's a real culture of kind of anxiety and fear that is developing there around the way that this agency will be will be treated in the second administration. second administration. And then what you get is you get a culture where people are spending their time worrying about their jobs rather than doing their jobs. So you know, it undermines performance in a way, doesn't it the anxiety, the amount of time you can spend

worrying about it. So yeah, totally see why that's a risk. Well, and I think the other one here, the fourth risk is the potential for losing support from or getting weaker support from key partners, right. And this is, I think, a maybe potentially very unique risk to Trump and the way he has handled classified information. I mean, we mentioned in the past episode, the incident in the first administration where I believe he ended up sharing

like Israeli liaison information on the Islamic State with the Russians. There's just sort of a more freewheeling attitude or sort of treatment, I think, on his part to classified information. And also we should say the way that, I mean, we're recording this in February of 2025, I mean, we are looking at a world where policy change on Russia Ukraine is pretty stark in comparison to well, let's say, Gordon, your government. And so what does that mean for kind of intelligence sharing with key partners like you know, our professional relationship on the day-to-day working relationship remains very strong with the Americans. But you can't help but think

that they will have to think about whether, you know, some of the most sensitive secrets they have can be shared if there is a risk, you know. I mean, they will always protect some secrets, even from your closest allies. But the boundaries of what you're willing to share, that might change as you've got more worries about what's going on in that organization. And particularly, I guess, when it comes to the issue of whether it could be handled stoppily or whether there's politicization. And I should note, I mean, before we get to the last one with which is politicization, I would say, for those listening who think Gordon and I are being sort of unfair or maybe hammering on too many of the risks

and not for the benefit. I would just say that these four risks we've outlined, the counterintelligence risk, the talent risk, what do you do, what happens to morale? I think it's possible to downsize or right size Gordon, to use the consulting, to trim a workforce in a way that mitigates those risks, right? I mean, you could conceivably manage this in a way that would actually potentially improve the effectiveness of the central intelligence agency, right? Because it would be my assertion that in any massive organization, any massive bureaucracy, and probably public bureaucracies more so than massive private corporations, that there is going to be a bunch of kind of waste and redundancy and things that don't

make sense, and that are out of step with the reality of in the CIA's case, the kind of mission in the world. So we're not coming out and saying, look, the CIA is at a perfect size, resources are being allocated perfectly. That's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm just saying is, anytime you're going to go and cut, you have to think about these risks and sort of mitigate them in order to do the cuts effectively. Yeah, but let's get to politicization, because I think

that's the real one that people are most conscious of rather than just the cutting of staff, which I guess does still have some risks. And that is the idea that what's going on is the agency is being brought to heel politically, not just in terms of size, but there is a message going out, you need to be loyal. And you know, the talk was that people were going around and being asked, what's your view of who won the 2020 election? What's your view of January 6? Are you on board politically? And that that is a different thing, which is a kind of a political control over the Central Intelligence Agency, which I guess is not what it's there for. It's there to kind of speak truth to power. Although also, as we've talked about in past episodes, it's also there

as the kind of arm of the president, isn't it to do things as well. There's maybe a tension between those two things. The politicization conversation is the hardest one to have, because I think the reality of how it happens is subtle. In many cases, it can be hard, very hard to really substantiate it. If you try to go back and prove that it happened. And also, I think weirdly, it is, of all the risks that we've highlighted,

probably the most insidious, right? Because if you go back to the Halloween massacre for a second, right? If Stan Turner had come in and said, look, there's a particular set of Carter policies that we're all going to get behind. And he had at the same time sort of dangled this threat of staffing reductions simultaneously. Well, all of a sudden you realize you've created a bunch of incentives inside the

organization to pull punches so that you're not seen as opposing the policies or contributing a piece of information that's going to make it harder for the president to implement their policy. So you have an agency that's going to be sort of fearful of actually communicating reality to to the president. And that is very hard to measure that. And it's the kind of thing where that kind of fear can get into the organization really, really quickly.

You get a kind of self-censoring partly, don't you, where people are not putting stuff up. Political pressure is very rarely someone saying, you will say this, but it's people not saying something that they could say. And it's also, I spent a lot of time looking at the Iraq WMD story in both the US and the UK. And there's a kind of parallel there, isn't there, where people knew the political direction of the administration and of the British government, which was to go to war and for Britain to go to war with them. And so they basically decided not to put up information which might challenge that and to look for intelligence which would support that policy. And so what you got was a kind of a groupthink and a lack of challenge around the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction

because they were following what they thought was a political direction. And again, it's your point about it being subtle, rather than people saying, hey, go make something up or go find me this to justify that. It's a slightly more subtle process, but it does kind of carry risks, particularly at the moment, I guess, when you've got a dangerous and uncertain world and you've got, you know, whether it's Russia, Ukraine, or whether it's kind of the Iran nuclear program and what's happening with that, where you can imagine there are political

priorities which people are going to be very aware of. And then their question is, you know, what kind of intelligence do they bring to the table, whether it supports that or maybe undermines that policy? We should be very clear that right now we're talking about the general risks of a new administration coming in and saying, look, we're going to get more political control over Langley, right? A risk of that is politicizing the intelligence. We as of yet, just a month into the second Trump administration, I don't think have a lot of crunchy information yet to suggest that there's sort of a full throated effort underway to do that.

But maybe just to kind of walk one of these cases through a bit, just to see how kind of damaging politicization can be, if it takes hold, is if let's imagine you had a CIA director who understood either implicitly or explicitly from the White House that there were certain types of information that they just weren't interested in seeing or interested in showing to the president. We've talked about Russia in this you know episode I think you could probably make the same case that there could be intelligence about Israel there could be intelligence about Saudi Arabia that just sort of doesn't jive with the way the president wants to think about or talk about the world, right? And oftentimes it can be an appetite that there not be bad news or complicating news brought into the White House that's going to mess up a policy or complicate a policy. You know, and the CIA director in this kind of hypothetical scenario could say, look,

I want to see everything on this subject before it gets disseminated, right? And then you sort of can push that down through all your various aides and staff and hangers on right to go out into the bureaucracy and to kind of make sure that as reports move through the organization, right, that it gets to senior officials on the seventh floor who can have a look at this stuff before it really gets disseminated. The really explosive stuff, right? The stuff that's going to mess up a policy or frustrate the president, right? As we talked about with that cable coming out about the Iraqi insurgency, I mean, that's going to send President Bush through the roof, right? And so get rid of this guy who's putting

this stuff out. Yeah, it gets filtered out and the people get moved out. In the CIA, it's called NDing something, non-decemming something. So you can have a source, the station, wherever they are, in Baghdad or in Moscow, put something out as a draft. And you could have a senior official look at it and say, oh, non dissent, this kind of stuff, right. So it doesn't take that much to kind of kill the stuff in a bureaucracy. And you can also imagine a world Gordon, where that stuff isn't even put

out to begin with, because you know, it kind of it's not going to make it through the chain. So why bother putting it out in the first place? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that you'll hear about the Russian system, interestingly enough, is that stuff doesn't get up to Vladimir Putin if it's going to upset him or if it contradicts what he thinks, for instance, about whether an invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was going to be successful or not. And the risks are you then make bad decisions because you have got imperfect information. I guess as we come to an end, we should say that we don't know quite what's going to happen next. It is early days and we're

going to be keeping an eye on it. And I'm sure we'll come back to some of the stories of the past that reflect on this like Iraq, WMD, and maybe Lab Leak and things like that, but also keeping an eye out for any news stories. And just a reminder as well to those listening that if you've got any kind of listening that if you've got any kind of questions, if you've got suggestions, things you want us to look at or talk about, please do get in touch. The rest is classified at GoalHanger.com. But I guess there David with the the chainsaw hovering ready to pull. Stan Turner's memorial chainsaw from his Halloween massacre. Ready to pull. Who knows whether it's going to be used by Elon Musk or someone else.

But with that, I guess we should say thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.