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- [00:00]
Julian Barnes
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- [00:31]
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- [01:50]
Jeff Stein
Hi there, I'm Jeff Stein.
- [01:51]
Karen Greenberg
And I'm Karen Greenberg and this is
- [01:55]
Jeff Stein
another edition of the Spy Talk Podcast. Mike Isikoff is off this week at the beach. Lucky him, and I hope to follow him as soon as possible. Lots of stuff going on in our intelligence world. A mess at the top of US Intelligence, you might say. At least statutorily, the the leadership of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is in play today. Bill Pulte, the housing guy who has made a career in the second Trump administration of going after Trump's perceived enemies and looking into their mortgage deals, is now the acting head of National Intelligence. Karen this is sad, isn't it? Sad, sad, sad.
- [02:41]
Karen Greenberg
Well, it's just such disrespect for the job itself and for what the intelligence community does. And in a way it depending on how long it Goes on. But it makes you wonder what is thought of as the job to start with. I mean, this is a job that was created after 9, 11, after the idea that the intelligence the United States had was not being shared across agencies. And so they created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to help administer and make sure information was shared, et cetera. So what does it mean to essentially say we don't need anybody who knows what the job is in the post, no matter how short the time it
- [03:21]
Jeff Stein
is, and actually is statutory again.
- [03:25]
Karen Greenberg
Correct.
- [03:25]
Jeff Stein
Prohibited from taking the job, although it's on an acting basis. That's the end run that Trump is doing. You have, the law says you have to have extensive national security experience, and he has zero. This is happening, of course, while we're still kind of at war with Iran, despite this memorandum, this vague memorandum of understanding and vague talks down the line. We don't know where that's going to go. Trump is threatening to bomb them again if we, if he, if he is not happy with them.
- [03:57]
Karen Greenberg
It's just so misunderstands the idea of the profession of intelligence, which you learn over years and years. You learn what are the signals of a threat, what, what doesn't amount to a threat, how you should think about it, who needs to talk to whom, what countries are involved. And the idea that there's nobody home or when a precarious situation, MOU aside, in a number of places, including most obviously Iran. It's very disconcerting.
- [04:23]
Jeff Stein
Yeah. And, and, you know, the job of the, one of the principal jobs of the dni, if the DNI is, is effective, is to referee disputes between the intelligence agents, not just strategically on their budgets and their missions and so on, but on a particular take on, say, what's going on in Iran today. The NSA may have a different take than the CIA or the geospatial intelligence age. See, the. The DNI supposed to bring people to the table and hammer out as clear a picture as possible of what our enemies are up to. And right now we're. We haven't got a leader. Even the guy in the wings who was supposed to take the job, Jay Clayton, he's been pushed aside for the moment. We don't really know. That's not really clear either. But even he does not have extensive national security experience. He's a prosecutor, top prosecutor in New York, in Manhattan, who, who previously was the head of the securities and Exchange Commission in the first Trump administration. So that's not good. What else is going on? The Kremlin was celebrating Tulsi Gabbard's exit from, from the dni. Why? Because she embraced a long, a long term Russian propaganda campaign, a conspiracy theory that the US Was developing biological warfare labs in Ukraine and elsewhere.
- [05:53]
Karen Greenberg
Yeah, I mean, this has been a long, when you read the reports that come out every year about what the threats are, Russia's been mentioned over and over and over as a threat in a number of levels. And so I, you know, that's not a surprise to you, right?
- [06:11]
Jeff Stein
Not at all. But the big show in US Intelligence is still Iran. It's going to be that way for a long time. What are your thoughts about that?
- [06:18]
Karen Greenberg
Oh, my thoughts are vast. First of all, we now have a memo of understanding. It seems that's for 60 days. Right. And presumably can be extended. Well, but kind of a back of
- [06:30]
Jeff Stein
the napkin kind of thing.
- [06:31]
Karen Greenberg
But what on earth does it say was accomplished? It seems that in many ways that there's a sense that, you know, Iran got, you know, wiggled out of most of the things of everything that Trump had said, whether it was regime change, whether it was getting rid of all their nuclear capacities, you know, et cetera. Plus it has put Israel in a very unique situation vis a vis President Trump in terms of what actually is going to happen with Lebanon. Now, there seem to be different understandings of the MoU from what we're hearing from Iran and what we're hearing from the White House. So there's murkiness, which does not surprising. But there's also a sense that any of the ideas that were out there for what this was all about, and not to mention the financial benefit and bonus that is going to go to Iran for all of this, what does this actually mean in terms of why did we do this war? What was accomplished? Is it actually over? We don't know.
- [07:27]
Jeff Stein
Well, for the immediate future, he brought up Israel. That's a really good, good point because even if Bibi Netanyahu wanted to stop bombing Hezbollah in Lebanon right now or bombing suspected places where Hezbollah is right now, a lot of civilian casualties, there's overwhelmingly popular support in Israel for continuing the campaign against Hezbollah until they are eradicated. A go be impossible. But it, it signifies a big split between the United States and Israel, which is not good for anybody.
- [08:03]
Karen Greenberg
And who knows what it is. We don't know about what went on. And that's always a problem.
- [08:08]
Jeff Stein
We're going to talk more about the US Intelligence and the Iran war and Israel and more than that with Julian Barnes today, who's the intelligence reporter for the New York Times scored a lot of exclusives with him and his colleagues. He's written about security issues for more than two decades. I've read him for decades. For much of that time, he covered the military and Defense Department working for U. S. News and World Report, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the Wall Street Journal. He did a stint covering international security matters based in Brussels, writing about terrorism. He covered Russia's first invasion of Ukraine and the north and the NATO. He joined the New York Times Washington bureau in 2018. He has a bachelor's degree in social studies from Harvard College. Not a bad subject to take up if you're going to be covering intelligence, where he was the editor of the Crimson. So he's, he's a real saving grace of Julian Barnes is that he's from Maine, where I am from. So without further ado, let's bring on Julian Barnes. Julian Barnes, welcome to Spy Talk. It's really an honor to have you on the show. I followed your reporting, your stellar reporting on national security issues, and of course, the Times, the intelligence issues for. For a long time, and admired your work. So first question is, what a fine mess at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I'm tempted to just say, what the hell is going on? Let me just narrow it down, say, so Bill Pulte, the housing guy who's made a career out of going after Trump's enemies and their mortgage arrangements, is walking in or has walked into the ODNI offices out in Virginia today. What kind of reception do you think he's getting?
- [10:20]
Julian Barnes
Well, I am sure that it will be outwardly polite, but inwardly quite nervous. Right. I mean, he is coming in with a mandate to shrink the office further and lots of suspicions that he is going to use the office to continue what he has been doing at the housing agencies. Right. Which is to further President Trump's retribution agenda.
- [10:54]
Karen Greenberg
Right.
- [10:55]
Julian Barnes
If you haven't been paying attention, and I'm sure most of your listeners have, Bill Pulte has been the person who dug out the mortgage information against Letitia James, which led to some unsuccessful trip to the grand jury for the Department of Justice. But also pointedly on Senator Adam Schiff, Right. Who's a longtime enemy of President Trump, who President Trump has had in his targets for a long time. And there is at least conceivably, some information about shift within the records of odni. And that has some people on Capitol Hill and some people at Liberty Crossing worried that this is the agency, the office is going to become part of the retribution agenda.
- [11:47]
Jeff Stein
For example, the Israelis say that they weren't spying on American phones. They gathered incidental intelligence by eavesdropping on the communications of Pakistanis and Iranians and so forth. And that's where they picked up what Witkoff and so on were saying. So do you think that there might be incidental conversations stored away at the NSA on Trump's enemies? Would they keep that? That would seem to be crossing a, a line.
- [12:19]
Julian Barnes
You have to remember, like Tulsi Gabbard has been very worried about, you know, disclosure of U. S. Persons in, in true in intercepts. Right. And unmasking. Right now, to a certain extent, the Trump administration is worried about their own people being unmasked as opposed to their political enemies being unmasked. But you're absolutely right. Within the records of the nsa, potentially within the records of the CIA, we don't know exactly what might be at Liberty Crossing itself. But you know, there could well be U.S. person information. Now one, somebody like Senator Schiff is probably not going to be in that kind of material. He is somebody who's been super careful and has had, you know, high ranking intelligence positions. But there's plenty of other Obama Biden era people who, who might well have been. You could have two Iranians talking about them.
- [13:29]
Jeff Stein
Right.
- [13:29]
Julian Barnes
We had that issue come up, you know, with Jared Kushner earlier this year. So.
- [13:36]
Jeff Stein
Yeah, revisit that. What happened with Kushner.
- [13:38]
Julian Barnes
Yeah, so we know that two, there was a intercept that the Israelis made and provided to the US which had two officials in the Middle east talking about Jared Kushner. It had some unverified claims in there. I mean, part of what it was was nothing surprising. It was these officials. This is about the last year before the nuclear strikes by the US on Iran while and before the Israeli 12 day war, there were people who were looking to make a peace deal. Like, could there be a peace deal? And you know, the chatter internationally was don't go to Wyckoff, you need to get to Jared Kushner. So that's in part what these two people were talking about. But there was other information, unverified information, what the administration has called gossip in this. And so Tulsi Gabbard locked it down. And then some people thought this was improper.
- [14:43]
Karen Greenberg
Right.
- [14:43]
Julian Barnes
That there was important things in here that more people needed to see. But that's an example of incidental collection. Nobody was listening to Jared Kushner, but some information through a partner came the way of NSA and then to ODNI and these things are extremely sensitive. And so, you know, if you had a different Director of National Intelligence, then there, who had a different agenda, looking for information, we don't know what that person might be able to find.
- [15:17]
Jeff Stein
He would be also required, I guess, to query the heads of NSA and CIA and FBI. So, of course, FBI is already under Cash Patel, carrying out its own campaign against Trump enemies or enemies as perceived by Trump. Do you have any feeling for how John Ratcliffe and the head of the NSA might react to any untoward requests like this?
- [15:43]
Julian Barnes
I mean, I think, you know, the track record from the first part of this Trump administration kind of gives us a guidepost. The, the CIA is largely not going to comply with a records request that they feel is inappropriate or crosses a line. The nsa, though, has, has generally complied with the orders of the dni, Right. Whether it is to fire people who have been saying inappropriate things in chat groups, or whether it is to restrict the distribution of documents or recall documents or stripping the clearance of high ranking NSA officials. So NSA has been forced to comply to DNI orders. You know, CIA would say that they have been perfectly cooperative with odni, but they have ways of slow rolling a request that they think is not appropriate on the Hill.
- [16:43]
Jeff Stein
There's bipartisan apoplexy about this acting position for Bill Pulte. Where's that going? Do you think they have the power to, on their own, without Trump's help to revisit this question of who's running dni? Or they cannot move forward without Trump putting a name forward, I guess.
- [17:07]
Julian Barnes
I mean, this is what was so fascinating about this week, right? Like the opposition to Bill Pulte is so bipartisan and so deep. You saw the Congress begin to suspend rules, fast forward reviews that normally take a long time. They were, you know, moving toward a Wednesday hearing for Jay Clayton and then potentially a Thursday confirmation of him. It would have been hard. We don't know that they could have done it. But, you know, as the week went on, it looked more and more likely that they would be able to do it, that, that there was this strong bipartisan will to do it. And so Trump's plan of having Pulte in there for at least a few weeks all of a sudden seemed like it was going to blow up. So he did the end run and pulled back, at least said he was pulling back the nomination and then told Clayton that he couldn't show up because, you know, Cotton said, well, I'm going to push forward with this. So.
- [18:18]
Karen Greenberg
So Julian just, I just want to ask you, when you say pulled back, do you mean pulled away and it's going to move on to another candidate? Do you think that it's just in pause right now until everything get. How do you, how do you see this? Well, what does this mean?
- [18:34]
Julian Barnes
That's a very good question. And let's be honest with everybody. I don't know. No one knows. Maybe Donald Trump knows. Maybe even he is not sure. And, but it was notable, right. Initially he did the social media post, but he didn't do, he didn't actually formally pull back the nomination.
- [18:55]
Karen Greenberg
Right.
- [18:55]
Julian Barnes
So then Cotton said to Clayton, we're going forward. Please come, Clayton. We don't know exactly what he said, but we think he said something like I have to ask the President. And the President said, no, do not go to that hearing. So it's not formally pulled back. However, you know, Trump's demands here are the SAVE act and getting someone through as the nominee for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and you know, Chuck Schumer make that easy.
- [19:34]
Jeff Stein
Poor J, Poor Jay has lost his job in New York already. I mean, Trump pulled up the drawbridge behind him. He's, God knows what he did wrong.
- [19:45]
Karen Greenberg
Julian, do you just, do you hear any other names being put forward of who it might be if, if it doesn't turn out to be Clayton? Have you heard any other names?
- [19:54]
Julian Barnes
I mean, there were a bunch of names that were floated before Clayton was put forward. Right. But none of them seem particularly, they seemed like trial balloons from people who were not deciding. Right. This is clearly something that some of them.
- [20:14]
Jeff Stein
Can you name some of them, Julian?
- [20:15]
Julian Barnes
Well, I mean, Michael Ellis, the deputy at CIA, was put forward. Obviously some people wanted Aaron Lucas, the principal deputy at odni, to get the job permanently, but Michael Ellis was not interested. Lucas doesn't, you know, probably. I mean, President Trump doesn't know him. Right. There were other names out there as well, but I, it didn't strike me as that they were particularly serious. I mean, what's interesting about Clayton is that there was broad. He doesn't have the deepest national security experience, but you know, the Southern District of New York handles terrorism cases and you saw people like Jim Himes, the, the chairman of the House Intel Committee, immediately come out with a very effusive endorsement. And what I was told by a couple people on Capitol Hill this week as the Clayton nomination was getting paused, derailed, whatever was that Democrats were too enthusiastic. Right. President Trump did not like the idea that he was not owning the libs and that the. He somehow had picked somebody that Mark Warner and Jim Himes thought was perfectly qualified.
- [21:37]
Jeff Stein
He doesn't know much, really, about a lot of things. I mean, the Democrats were embracing Clayton as the least bad choice. I mean, this guy, right, like you say, as the top prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, handles a lot of espionage, national terrorism cases, and so on. But that's not the same as running an intelligence organization. And the DNI presides over budgets and strategies for all these intelligence agencies, and you may not even know what they all do or who they all are, despite being a senior Justice Department prosecutor handling terrorism cases.
- [22:17]
Julian Barnes
I mean, the whole scenario reminded me, and I don't know if it reminded you of the whole Trump won dance between Ratcliffe and Rick Grenell, right, where John Radcliffe was kind of put forward as the nominee from odni, and there were some concerns within the Republican caucus about it. And then Trump pulled it back. He put in Rick Grinnell as a temporary person. Mr. Grinnell started declassifying things, really, like pursuing a pretty aggressive agenda.
- [22:55]
Jeff Stein
Russia. Russia, Russia, yeah.
- [22:58]
Julian Barnes
And then all of a sudden, Ratcliffe's name was. He was sailing through. And Ratcliffe actually won over a bunch of people with how he ran odni, especially within the Republican caucus. So this was a version of that, you know, oh, you. You hate Pulte, so you'll definitely like the next guy, just like you hated Rick Brunel, so you'll better like John Radcliffe. But, I mean, there's a case to be made that Trump said, oh, you so hate Bill Pulte that you would give me Jay Clayton. What else can I get out of you? Can I get my voter ID law that I want through? Can I. Can I get some other stuff? So he was like, oh, maybe I made too easy a trade. So, I mean, I don't know that, but it has the feel of that kind of scenario.
- [23:56]
Karen Greenberg
Can I just follow up on the first Trump administration versus the second Trump administration? There was a lot of talk among experts on the outside of government, some inside in the first Trump administration, that the institutions would hold no matter what, that there were enough institutionalists inside that you could fire people, you could decree policies this way and that, but that ultimately the backbone, the spine of the intelligence agencies and others, by the way, would hold fast. Are you hearing that now?
- [24:31]
Julian Barnes
I mean, this is an amazing, important question, right? And it's really one that runs through all kinds of coverage. Right? And, you know, I can make both cases. Right. I can tell you, you know, the CIA is still doing professional intelligence and is still producing clear eyed reporting about Iran. We've had the Washington Post, the New York Times has all reported about intel assessments of Iran that, that seem to bear fruit. Right.
- [25:11]
Jeff Stein
Trump was warned.
- [25:13]
Julian Barnes
Trump was warned that that category on the other hand, like look, Tulsi Gabbard has dismantled parts of the DNI that were really important and, and were doing good work. You know, top on that list is the Foreign Malign Influence center, right?
- [25:33]
Karen Greenberg
Totally.
- [25:34]
Julian Barnes
That that group and its predecessor organizations, you know, did important work in 2020. They did important work in 2024. We had both state and local officials, but also importantly the broader public who warned about different attempts by Iran, Russia, other countries to meddle in our election. They were quick to call out propaganda that was being injected into, to, to undermine confidence in election day. And that was really quite an important function of odni, something Congress has mandated. And Tulsi Gabbard slashed that down, folded it into the mission integration and, and really functionally eliminated it. And there are some other offices too along those lines, you know, and maybe
- [26:32]
Jeff Stein
DOJ's unit tracking foreign agents.
- [26:36]
Julian Barnes
Yeah, that's a good point, Jeff, because it was not just odni, Right. It was at FBI, it was at cisa, it was at the State Department. This was an across.
- [26:48]
Karen Greenberg
Well, is it all about elections? Is that.
- [26:50]
Jeff Stein
Yeah, my question is why would they do this? Strip the United States of important defenses against foreign subversion. Is there some magalogic to this?
- [27:05]
Julian Barnes
Yeah, the MAGA logic is this, that the people who were called out the most were right wing influencers who were taking talking points kind of unbeknownst to them from Russia. Right. And so Tenet Media was the group that was caught up in the indictment of Russia today in the Biden.
- [27:30]
Jeff Stein
So just to clarify. So it was Biden and during the Biden administration they were policing these subversive attempts at messaging, disinformation and so on. And they came up with a lot of right wingers who were knowingly or unknowingly purveying this. Russian, Chinese, et cetera, misinformation and disinformation.
- [27:52]
Julian Barnes
And to be fair, right? And when you talk to Biden era people, they repeatedly make this point. Now they made the point at the time that they were very bipartisan, that they were calling out and pointing out disinformation, whether it's benefited Trump or benefited Harris or denigrated Trump or denigrated. Denigrated Harris. The problem was from the most compelling evidence, the most, the stuff that kind of Broke through was the Russian backed information that, that was either sowing chaos writ large or denigrating Harris. Right. So there were other examples, but the most compelling ones were on one side of the coin and that's why Republicans felt targeted Biden. People would say we were not targeting Republicans, we were not abridging anyone's free speech. But the right wing influencers felt this was an effort to silence Republican criticism.
- [29:01]
Jeff Stein
Yeah, well, speaking of propaganda, Tulsi Gabbard gave a real gift to whomever, Maga, I don't know, QAnon, whoever, on the way out the door at Otni by embracing a Kremlin sponsored disinformation plan that's that accuses the US of overseeing biological warfare labs in Ukraine and elsewhere. What do you, what do you make of that?
- [29:34]
Julian Barnes
I mean, nothing surprises you. I mean, I do think that this was pretty irresponsible. Right. And plays into conspiracy theories. We were all writing, my colleague Ed Wong and many others wrote about how this was Russian sponsored propaganda during, right before and right after their invasion of Ukraine to justify their invasion to, to make it sound like NATO or the US were using Ukraine for improper things. And like gain of function research has become, you know, in the post Covid era, deeply controversial. But like this, the way that was declassified, the way that was pushed out, the talking points around it were really like fueling this Russian propaganda. This is like there's a debate to be had about what kind of research the United States should fund. But these biolabs were not what the Russians were claiming they were. These are legitimate research laboratories and there's, there's not a significant lab leak kind of allegation around them. They're not that kind of level labs by and large. And this was, you know, this was feeding conspiracy theories. But you know, I mean, Tulsi Gabbard is herself someone with a lot of space in her heart for conspiracy theories. We could see it with how the, a lot of space files were, were pushed out and, and what was highlighted out of them. It, you know, we, in recent years we've had governments that have tried to push down conspiracy theories. But you know, Donald Trump is not someone who stamps out conspiracy theories. He's somebody who stokes them, pours gas on them.
- [31:39]
Jeff Stein
Yeah, well, I want to talk more about John Ratcliffe actually, and how the CIA is going, but we have to step away for just a second.
- [31:49]
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- [32:17]
Julian Barnes
That's noblegoldinvestments.com Politics today feels like one endless shouting match. That's why I recommend the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode takes a major issue that's facing America and brings together two thoughtful voices from the right who see it differently. One might be more libertarian, one more conservative, but here's what sets it apart. It's not a debate. There's no interruptions. Each guest gets the space to explain their position and then you decide what makes the most sense. Check out Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcast.
- [32:51]
Jeff Stein
Okay, we're back. How is John Ratcliffe doing at CIA? Do you have any feel for that? Do they like him out there? Has he manipulated the responsibilities office to get into the election denial aisle? What do you think? Do you have an overall assessment or of how he's doing?
- [33:13]
Julian Barnes
I mean, we saw at the beginning, right when there were reductions in force and the DOGE people were going on, we saw, you know, the, the elimination of the officers who were working on diversity issues at CIA. And that was widely seen as very unfair. These were people who were, you know, experts at spying and, you know, tradecraft. They were not diversity experts. But this had been of a part priority both at ODNI and CIA under the Biden administration. And so very good officers got moved temporarily into these jobs. And so there was a lot of feeling of betrayal when those people were pushed out unfairly. That said, as time has gone on and people at CIA have looked over at ODNI and they've looked over at FBI, they have counted themselves very lucky. John Ratcliffe is a traditional Republican in many ways. The threats that he sees in the world, Russia, China, are broadly accepted in. They are in line with a traditional republican view of the world. They are not in out of step with traditional national security priorities of the United States. And so, you know, CIA people have been more pleased with that. You know, he has not always been able to defend his people from Tulsi Gabbard's stripping of security clearances. And there's been some frustration on that. But there's also understanding that, you know, nobody was able to stop that kind of stuff. You know, the NSA lost their most important AI scientist. Right. So, and you know, what do CIA People like, they like to be relevant and like the CIA director has a direct line to Donald Trump. He's got a good relationship with Donald Trump, he understands Donald Trump. And so he's getting their intelligence in front of Donald Trump. Right.
- [35:30]
Jeff Stein
So, but he always seems to be. Or someone over there is leaking. Maybe it's not coming from CIA, maybe friends on the Hill or somewhere, but someone is leaking these assessments that contradict what Trump is saying about Iran.
- [35:45]
Julian Barnes
Yeah, I mean, my sense is that John Radcliffe doesn't love that, but, you know, I don't think he ever wants to be publicly at odds with the President. But I think those assessments, you know, show that in some respects the system is working. Right. We don't know if Donald Trump is listening to them. He seems to have not listened to them. But the system is still producing intelligence that has warnings of what might come. It has warnings about what has been accomplished. It has warning warnings about what the Iranians might agree to. Right. Like we learned this week that the CIA had assessed that Iran was unlikely to make substantial concessions on their nuclear program on the follow on negotiations. Now that's not going to surprise any one of your listeners. They all know that. Right. Like anybody with a little bit.
- [36:58]
Jeff Stein
Everybody knows that.
- [36:59]
Julian Barnes
Yeah. On the other hand, like, does it surprise me in this era that given what the President has said about like the success of the war, that there would be, you know, institutional reluctance to speak truth to power. And, and yet that assessment was made. And so I think that does speak well of the CIA of continuing to function in a hard environment.
- [37:27]
Karen Greenberg
So it was Radcliffe that supported Clayton for the nomination to Trump, is that right? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think that's kind of interesting given what you just said.
- [37:36]
Julian Barnes
I think it's quite telling. I mean, I think it, I mean, obviously Radcliffe and Gabbard have very different worldviews. Right. Gabbard is a restrainer who is skeptical of overseas engagements. You know, Ratcliffe comes from a far more Marco Rubio, hawkish school of the Republican Party. And to me it signaled that Jay Clayton won't be a ideological opponent of John Radcliffe in this. Now, I don't know how.
- [38:13]
Jeff Stein
At least you get to choose your own boss.
- [38:17]
Julian Barnes
You know, I don't really think the ODNI Director of National Intelligence has been the boss of the CIA Director for a long time.
- [38:26]
Jeff Stein
Right.
- [38:27]
Karen Greenberg
And would you just, just, you know, just thinking about this again in the broader picture, which is whatever happened to the, you know, PDBs and you know, which is the ODNI is supposed to put out and always has since the office was established. And so the question is, are they. Do we just assume that that's gonna. Who's gonna do that now? Pulte? Yeah.
- [38:50]
Julian Barnes
So this is really interesting. And, you know, we haven't written enough about it because, like, in the first Trump administration, you know, I did three, four different stories about how the PDB was delivered. Right.
- [39:01]
Jeff Stein
The President's Daily Brief.
- [39:02]
Julian Barnes
Yeah, yeah. And in this administration, it's been quite different.
- [39:07]
Karen Greenberg
Right.
- [39:07]
Julian Barnes
We, we. There is a weekly intelligence briefing that ODNI briefers generally do. It happens most weeks and that's more of the traditional brief. And the briefers come in. Tulsi Gabbard is presumably there as well. The CIA director sits in, as would happen in other administrations. But that's a more. In Trump one that was three times a week, then it was twice a week, and then Ratcliffe just kind of
- [39:38]
Jeff Stein
took it over and it wasn't. I'm just recalling now that he liked to see videos rather than get written reports.
- [39:47]
Julian Barnes
Yeah. So Trump is not a reader. That's not going to surprise anyone. Right. You know, the. And intelligence. You know, we've all read some declassified intelligence reports. It's not the clearest writing. Right. Like on one hand. On the other hand, like, what do you think? Right. And it is. So it's not terrible that Donald Trump gets his information from an oral briefing. Some. That's how some people take in information. Right. And at one level, you could say, oh, well, he only does it once a week. On the other hand, John Ratcliffe is in there all the time. Right. And so he is giving a different kind of briefing. Now, what kind? Now how that differs from a PDB style briefing, we don't know.
- [40:35]
Jeff Stein
Yeah. Mr. President, you lost everything to Iran. You're a total loser. You know, you're not going to hear John Radcliffe say that. I know.
- [40:42]
Julian Barnes
And, and, but you know what I mean. If you talk to the briefers from the first Trump administration, like, that's just not the way you get through to President Trump. And like, honestly, when you talk to Democratic presidents true troop, you know. No, no BDB briefer insults the President and like, lasts more than one briefing. Right. Like, you got to have a little emotional intelligence, a little wisdom as you go in there if you want to come back for the next briefing. And you know, John Radcliffe at the end of the first Trump administration proved that he knew how to give President Trump information. Now we're just not in there. We just don't know if the full picture is being given or not, or how forcefully the dissenting views are presented. Right. And we can't know that. So it's a really good question.
- [41:38]
Jeff Stein
On the Iran talks, the agreement to have an agreement somewhere down the road, do you suspect that, I mean, Witkoff can't do this kind of stuff, Right. This gets into highly technical areas in terms of mechanisms for policing uranium enrichment and so on and so forth. Do you have any feeling for whether CIA is going to offer up a team and who's going to be running these technical talks with the Iranians if we ever get to them?
- [42:12]
Julian Barnes
That's a perceptive question. We know, right, that the CIA did provide technical expertise to Witkoff in earlier negotiations on various topics. So I would say I would be all but certain that they are going to. And like, look, Wyckoff, when he began this, knew nothing about nuclear enrichment. He knows a lot more now, but, you know, he's by far not an expert. The other thing to remember is the Iranians are expert at these negotiations. They are always playing for time. They are always delaying. They are always trying to water down. We saw even in this memorandum of understanding, you can see the wiggle words that Iran got in there on the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran will use its best efforts. How did that get in there? Who let that in there? Like, that's clearly some, like, little crafty Iranian negotiator who says, I don't really want to do this at all. So how about best effort, like, you know, give me a participation trophy.
- [43:23]
Jeff Stein
The.
- [43:24]
Karen Greenberg
The.
- [43:25]
Jeff Stein
So they've been doing it for 5,000 years.
- [43:27]
Julian Barnes
100%. Right. Like, we are up against people with deep negotiating prowess on this. People who are feeling emboldened by the end of this war.
- [43:39]
Karen Greenberg
So who in our team, who in our world, on our. In the United States, who are the chief negotiator teams behind that, who know, forgetting about the details of nuclear stuff. Who. Who understand Iran?
- [43:52]
Julian Barnes
Well, I mean, Good question. Yeah. I don't see them prominently with a seat at the table. Right. Because that's not how Trump works. Trump says, you know, Jared's my Middle east guy. Witkoff is my deal maker. You know, JD Has a. Has a hand in this. He is not somebody who says, oh, get me the best hawkish Iranian expert that I have and has not. Not cared. When, you know, they've had some relatively hawkish Iranian intelligence experts who've gotten, like, fired in some of these earlier things. The deputy head of the Nick in the Trenda Agua National Intelligence Council.
- [44:40]
Jeff Stein
Yeah. Fired.
- [44:42]
Julian Barnes
So, you know, there's still expertise in the United States government. I do not know whether it will be tapped for this next round or not.
- [44:52]
Karen Greenberg
I just wanted to ask a question about the office of the ODNI in general. It hasn't been, you know, it hasn't been there that long. A couple of decades. And I just really wonder, as we watch this come apart, if there is still a sense that we need an odni, or if you see this as something that could have a future where we go back to the pre ODNI days or do you think this is where we are, this is how we're going forward?
- [45:17]
Julian Barnes
This is what I've been working on. Right. Talking to people about this very question. Right. And there are people who do think it was a mistake to create this, that, you know, the, the CIA director used to do these functions and could do these functions again. The, the stove pipes before 9, 11 have been broken down. The culture has been changed. So do you still need someone to do this, but others.
- [45:46]
Jeff Stein
Well, a lot of people think that even, even those who like it. I think Tom Cotton is one of those who kind of like it, but he thinks it should be much smaller.
- [45:54]
Karen Greenberg
Yeah.
- [45:54]
Julian Barnes
So Cotton wants it down to 650 people. Move some of the centers back to the CIA, to the ODNI. The people who like it, though, say, look, its central function is to adjudicate between intelligence agencies when there are differences of opinion and not let those differences of opinion be swept under the rug. So when we have a National Intelligence Estimate or when we have an intelligence community assessment that the dissenting voices or the level of confidence differences or are noted. And so if the NSA has a different view than the FBI or the Department of Energy has a different view than the CIA, it should be noted. And that didn't happen before Iraq war, 2003, like. And it's important in intelligence to be objective. And the CIA director, if they are, if we go back to the pre 2005 method with a Director of Central Intelligence, they are always going to have a natural inclination to prioritize their own agency's work. It's just human nature. And so if you create, you need somebody who does not have their own collection, who can therefore be objective about what the different organizations are producing and then do a kind of. It may be a little slower, it may be a little more bureaucratic, but preserving the opportunity for dissent, allowing less powerful agencies to have a voice, those are important things. So the defenders of ODNI say we still need to do this, you might want to. You could get rid of the counterintelligence center or you could get rid of the counterterrorism center. Move those someplace else if you wanted to. But that core analytic effort that the national intelligence officers, the National Intelligence Council does ought to be preserved.
- [48:12]
Jeff Stein
Quick question about Ukraine before we go. As you know, Ukraine's not President Trump's favorite subject, not his favorite ally. He'd like to get out of the war. He's cutting back. There's a story today about cutbacks and with NATO and Hegseth was kind of gone crazy today in Europe about bashing NATO allies again and saying they're going to pull out jets and other defensive weapons. It's just kind of chaotic. But it's been said all along that CIA has retained or maintained it's important, critically important intelligence support to the Ukrainians who are now bombing a major oil refinery in Moscow. So do you get a sense that CIA level of. The CIA's level of help to the Ukrainians is as good as ever?
- [49:11]
Julian Barnes
Yes. And if your listeners haven't read Adam Entus's piece in the New York Times that appeared at the end of last year, it's worth going back and reading that lengthy piece. But read it all the way through. The last section of that really details what you were just saying, Jeff, about this deep cooperation between the CIA and the Ukrainians that continued into the Trump administration that in some ways went beyond what the Biden administration had done because there wasn't necessarily the same redline concerns, especially when we were talking about COVID assistance. And so it is my sense that the, the intelligence cooperation goes. And, and look, the war has surprised me over the last year, right. That between US Intelligence support and between Ukrainian ingenuity and ability to develop drones, like, they have done far better on the battlefield than I could have imagined and have really stopped the Russians from making the gains the Russians thought they were very quickly going to do. So. You know, I don't. I think you could, you know, I think the intelligence support and, you know, the financial support from the European Union to the Ukrainian industrial base are at this point more important than overt U. S. Militaries.
- [50:52]
Jeff Stein
So I guess the point is we try to filter out all the noise that's going on, going on at the, you know, Washington level or in various capitals that you can. We can be somewhat confident that the intelligence work is ongoing to protect this country from attacks and to help our allies.
- [51:13]
Julian Barnes
Yes, I think that's right. And it can be in this administration at this time. Helpful to have a agency that operates outside of the public eye who does not disclose everything it does to be the instrument of of assistance when the parts of the US Government are much more ambivalent than they once were.
- [51:42]
Jeff Stein
Okay, what a great discussion. Thanks so much, Julian for spending the time with us today. We appreciate it. We look forward to more of your excellent reporting at the New York Times.
- [51:51]
Julian Barnes
Thanks for inviting me today.
- [51:54]
Jeff Stein
And that's it for this week's Spy Talk. Be sure to check out our complete by podcast archive on Apple or wherever you get your podcast. And if you haven't already, do, Check out the SpyTalk Co news site on Substack where we offer steady diet of scoops and original analyses from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy and military operations. Just Google Spy Talk and you'll quickly find your way there. This edition of the Spy Talk Podcast was smoothly produced as always by Kanai and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media. That's it. See you around. I'm Jeff Stein.
- [52:33]
Karen Greenberg
I'm Karen Greenberg.
- [52:35]
Jeff Stein
Thanks for listening.
- [52:37]
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