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- [00:01]
David McCloskey
Oh sheet.
- [00:02]
Gordon Carrera
Honey, chill. It's just laundry.
- [00:04]
David McCloskey
Not that I'm talking about these Arm and Hammer Power sheets. All the power of Arm Hammer laundry detergent in a convenient tossable sheet.
- [00:12]
Gordon Carrera
Oh sheet.
- [00:13]
David McCloskey
That's what I'm saying.
- [00:15]
Gordon Carrera
And Arm and Hammer Power sheets deliver an effective clean at a great price. Think of all the laundry we'll do.
- [00:20]
David McCloskey
And all the money we'll save.
- [00:23]
Gordon Carrera
Oh sheet, Arm and Hammer. More power to you.
- [00:29]
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- [00:59]
Gordon Carrera
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- [01:36]
David McCloskey
The scene is January 21, 2017. CIA headquarters at Langley, the original headquarters building lobby.
- [01:50]
Donald Trump
I want to say there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community in the CIA. Thank 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 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.
- [02:26]
David McCloskey
And now Fast forward to November 9, 2024. In a video released just days after his reelection.
- [02:39]
Donald Trump
Here's my plan to dismantle the 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 rem 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.
- [03:21]
David McCloskey
Despite that, just spot on. TRUMP voice it is, in fact, Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.
- [03:26]
Donald Trump
Yeah, and that was, 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 fear I've still got a bit of work to do on that wasn't quite Oscar winning performance.
- [03:41]
David McCloskey
It's right up there with your French accent, Gordon.
- [03:44]
Donald Trump
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 episode.
- [04:04]
David McCloskey
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 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 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 in 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.
- [05:08]
Donald Trump
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 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.
- [05:35]
David McCloskey
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. With the intelligence community. So maybe, Gordon, that's. 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 sort eloquently and Trumpily read at the top here, I think captures 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, because I was out by then, one of the things that I do frequently hear and just kind of set the table before all this is that there's a whole universe of 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 anecdote, 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.
- [08:58]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [08:58]
Donald Trump
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 was a Trump man, and I think he was there and very careful in his answers to kind of show loyalty to the president. But he also felt he was able, because of that, to perhaps insulate it from some of the kind of politics and flack that the FBI was taking for. Famously, Comey at the FBI getting sacked after Pompeii, 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 more than the FBI, was to some extent insulated from that.
- [09:57]
David McCloskey
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 Phoebes, 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. Made these allegations. He gave that strange, rambling talk at CIA headquarters on day one of. I mean, literally, it was. 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 w. 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 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 is 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 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. That kind of political talk is really anathema to most CIA officers.
- [12:23]
Donald Trump
You don't ask people how they vote, basically.
- [12:25]
David McCloskey
You don't ask people how they vote. You know, the CIA is. Is a very apolitical organization where you just don't ask those kind of questions of people, certainly, you know, 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 CIA director, outgoing CIA director who served under Obama and then left as Trump was elected, is going to kind of write on Twitter and in a bunch of editorials for the Washington Post that, you know, Trump has shown kind of 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.
- [13:13]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [13:13]
Donald Trump
Although it's interesting, isn't it? Because Trump is actually, you know, for all the talk around the deep state and everything else, at that point, he's. 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, 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 tensional disquiet. But on the whole, there's not a purge, is there, in that first term?
- [13:56]
David McCloskey
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 disqual. 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 brief. And Trump. Not the case at all.
- [15:22]
Donald Trump
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 ready unless they put it in diagrams and pictures. I think that's, that's, that's how it was best presented. So they've got to learn to, to, to draw rather than write. If you're a, if you're a. If you're a young McCloskey, Trump was.
- [15:42]
David McCloskey
More of a consumer of charts and graphs and, you know, models. I think in one case, there was like a, an actual 3D model of a weapons system brought to him as a prop for a briefing. And, you know, he would hold it during the briefing and, you know, ask questions about the model. I mean, Trump's PDB briefer, kind of the guy who was briefing him during the transition, basically said, look, he doesn't, 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. So, you know, 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, trying to get a meeting with Clinton, you know, 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, you know, 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.
- [17:16]
Donald Trump
And that's what. That gets him mad.
- [17:18]
David McCloskey
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, you know, 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.
- [18:13]
Donald Trump
The intelligence community, that they've taken a side on that. And you're right, including the bricks 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.
- [18:57]
David McCloskey
It's worth stating up front 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. We've got quotes, you know, 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 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 apolitical? I mean, going back just for a second to the first administration, I mean, there was a bunch of reporting, you 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?
- [21:02]
Donald Trump
Yeah.
- [21:02]
David McCloskey
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 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.
- [21:45]
Donald Trump
So it's like a China Mission Center.
- [21:47]
David McCloskey
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.
- [22:13]
Donald Trump
Yeah. And that would be a change.
- [22:14]
David McCloskey
Right. And that would be a big change. So that's kind of one political control.
- [22:18]
Donald Trump
And then the other one, I guess, is what the CIA focuses on. You know, what are the priorities? I mean, I've seen already that there's a talk that they want to focus it more for Instance, on counter narcotics or Mexico, there's been talk that actually the CIA has been flying drones over Mexico in a more kind of aggressive way, you know, 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.
- [22:43]
David McCloskey
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? You know, there's really prioritization frameworks for both overall kind of collection, for specifically human collection. Have they actually been pushed down on those scales? Or is this just kind of the early days of, you know, new leaders at CIA rhetorically espousing their priorities as being immigration or counternarcotics? 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, you know, 2.0 here, can kind of shape the sort of intelligence it's getting. As if 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 of 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, you know, these are all rotational positions, so 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.
- [24:13]
Donald Trump
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've 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 organization. There was a source familiar with Ratcliffe's thinking, I think quoted on Fox saying, I'm sure it'll 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 is 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.
- [25:04]
David McCloskey
Although my, my PSA on this is somebody who has just kind of been in psa, the public service announcement.
- [25:10]
Donald Trump
Okay, thank you.
- [25:11]
David McCloskey
You must have those. It's like on the tube when they say, see it, say it sorted, you know, that's a, 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 on 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 visitors center at CIA headquarters within the last couple weeks and told them, gave them. By the way, being called out to the visitor center is a very bizarre place to go, by the way. Way. It's like the kind of gatehouse thing.
- [26:20]
Donald Trump
Yeah.
- [26:20]
David McCloskey
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 again, framing up this kind of tense relationship between the incoming administration and some of these federal bureaucracies, in particular the CIA.
- [27:03]
Donald Trump
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, 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. I mean, that is the thing, I guess, people must be watching for and wondering about.
- [27:25]
David McCloskey
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 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 going to 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 gathering, was pretty uncontentious. And Ratcliffe 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.
- [28:54]
Donald Trump
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 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, going to be kind of worrying to people.
- [29:11]
David McCloskey
Yeah, very worrisome. I mean, it's, 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.
- [29:32]
Donald Trump
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.
- [29:53]
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Gordon Carrera
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- [31:17]
Donald Trump
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.
- [31:46]
David McCloskey
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, of the 1950s and 1960s of the CIA operating really without any congressional oversight, without much insight into its budget, and frankly 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.
- [33:15]
Donald Trump
Leaders, Castro and people like that, isn't it? It's the famous.
- [33:18]
David McCloskey
Exactly. Not nice people. Yeah, let's be clear, you know, let's, let's give ourselves some credit here. CIA formers were on the Watergate break in team, you know, 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.
- [33:38]
Donald Trump
Iran, 1953, our opening episodes, a good example of that.
- [33:42]
David McCloskey
Yeah, and sometimes very effectively, as we noted in those episodes, but supposed to.
- [33:46]
Donald Trump
Be covert and so suddenly everything is being exposed. It's pretty dramatic at the time, isn't it? And pretty kind of, 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.
- [34:03]
David McCloskey
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.
- [34:26]
Donald Trump
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.
- [34:32]
David McCloskey
That's right. For those who've been listening to the pod. I mean, 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, you Know, I don't love all this stuff getting out there. I will say that now, as a podcaster, Church Pike Commission, you know, 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.
- [34:59]
Donald Trump
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, you know, the famous peanut farmer from Georgia, Navy man, moralistic, you know, a kind of serious Christian who's there from outside of Washington to change things. Obviously, in many ways, not Donald Trump, but. 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?
- [35:38]
David McCloskey
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'll 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.
- [36:22]
Donald Trump
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 kind of Trump view of coming from the right. But. But there is a parallel there. And then wanting to kind of impose his own people and control on the agency.
- [36:42]
David McCloskey
Well, and one of the other interesting things, Gordon, is that it would have actually, 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.
- [37:03]
Donald Trump
Director and later president and then father of the later George W. Bush, but then CIA director.
- [37:08]
David McCloskey
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 Allen Dulles 24 years earlier. So there was this long standing 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. You know, 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.
- [38:08]
Donald Trump
Of a peacenik and a lefty, too.
- [38:10]
David McCloskey
Much of a piecenik 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. And Turner is confirmed by the Senate in a totally unanimous vote.
- [38:39]
Donald Trump
So it's not a partisan pick in that sense. But he is very much imposed by Carter on 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.
- [38:54]
David McCloskey
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.
- [39:06]
Donald Trump
Must be smart.
- [39:07]
David McCloskey
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.
- [39:24]
Donald Trump
Doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
- [39:26]
David McCloskey
He's. Gordon takes a shot at Christian Scientists.
- [39:30]
Donald Trump
Sorry, more starchy, self righteous Oxford educated as well. You know, 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.
- [39:47]
David McCloskey
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that he's suspicious of the espionage business, like human, you know, 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.
- [40:01]
Donald Trump
That it's a bit of a dirty business, I think, which some people do think, you know, it's a kind of, kind of the whole business of getting people to betray secrets and people is. 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 to getting their hands dirty to some extent and recruit people, isn't it?
- [40:19]
David McCloskey
Well, in one case, there was a briefing for him about an effort to recruit Soviet military officers. And Turner, like, couldn't get his head around this because as a Navy man, he just couldn't imagine committing treason. So he almost was sort of not supportive of this effort to learn more about the Soviet military because he didn' 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-70s, 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, of human intelligence.
- [41:27]
Donald Trump
That's not going to kind of ingratiate you to the people at the CIA, is it?
- [41:30]
David McCloskey
No, no. I mean, you imagine like some guy at the CIA who's been there for 25, graduated from Yale, you know, he was a Skull and Bones guy, overthrew.
- [41:39]
Donald Trump
You know, the Shah has been used to plodding poison wetsuits for cats, stroh all this stuff. And then someone comes along and says, ah, just use some satellites to do all this kind of spying business.
- [41:50]
David McCloskey
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, you know, aversion to human espionage operations and a charge to, you know, really do something big at Langley to affect the President's agenda.
- [42:43]
Donald Trump
So it certainly doesn't sound like he's gonna 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 up.
- [42:55]
David McCloskey
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.
- [43:20]
Donald Trump
Wow, is that like insulting or demeaning somehow?
- [43:23]
David McCloskey
No, no, no, it's not insulting or demeaning. It's just wrong, you know, so he truly did not absorb. 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.
- [43:42]
Donald Trump
Really? You surprised me. Managing the CIA is not like managing. Managing a kind of widget making factory.
- [43:49]
David McCloskey
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, 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.
- [44:22]
Donald Trump
You don't.
- [44:22]
David McCloskey
You'd prefer to not have that, right? Even, even if what they, you know, their 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.
- [44:36]
Donald Trump
Yeah. And 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.
- [44:46]
David McCloskey
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, who 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, you know, par excellence. And then he goes out into the world and sort of defends the CIA and its interests.
- [45:49]
Donald Trump
That's what they want.
- [45:50]
David McCloskey
Yeah, that's what you want, right? That's. That's what the Central Intelligence Agency wants. And Stan Turner does not do that. The opposite. Right. The. The exact opposite of this. So. But he does something right off the bat which makes everybody very angry, which is, in his first months 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.
- [46:28]
Donald Trump
Also the title of a very good novel, I think, out now in all good bookshops.
- [46:32]
David McCloskey
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 H.W. bush days at CIA, leaves four months into Turner's directorship and basically becomes this kind of like, like thorn in Turner's side for the rest of this 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.
- [47:59]
Donald Trump
I have no idea what that means.
- [48:00]
David McCloskey
Not a super dynamic or transparent process.
- [48:04]
Donald Trump
The money gets moved around shadowy. That's what you're telling me.
- [48:07]
David McCloskey
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. It kind of stay the same. Right. As opposed to moving them around based on. Yeah. Different priorities.
- [48:19]
Donald Trump
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.
- [48:31]
David McCloskey
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.
- [49:08]
Donald Trump
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. He describes your former shop where you used to work, where the McCloskey's 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?
- [49:36]
David McCloskey
It didn't feel great. When I read that chapter, I took a personal affront at that I'd put my pipe down.
- [49:42]
Donald Trump
Yeah, you put your pipe down, that took off your tweeds, just shaking your head in disbelief.
- [49:46]
David McCloskey
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 10 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 yeah, 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 that 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 with. 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, you know, 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.
- [51:11]
Donald Trump
Right, so they're covert operators, spies.
- [51:13]
David McCloskey
Yeah, exactly. There has not been time for anyone else to exert much influence on the place.
- [51:19]
Donald Trump
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 back, 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.
- [51:47]
Al Murray
Hi there, I'm Al Murray, co host of we have ways of making you talk, the world's premier Second World War history podcast from Goal Hanger.
- [51:55]
Gordon Carrera
And I'm James Holland, best selling World War II historian. And together we tell the best stories from the war. This time we're doing a deep dive into the last major attack by the Nazis on the west, the Battle of the Bulge.
- [52:08]
Al Murray
And what's so fascinating about this story is we've been able to show how quite a lot of the popular history about this battle is kind of the wrong way around, isn't it, Jim? The whole thing is a disaster from the start. Even Hitler's plans for the attack are insane and divorced from reality.
- [52:21]
Gordon Carrera
Well, you're so right. But what we can do is celebrate this as an American success story for the ages. From their generals at the top to the gis on the front line, full of gumption and grit, the bold should be remembered as a, a great victory for the usa.
- [52:36]
Al Murray
And if this sounds good to you, we've got a short taste for you here. Search. We have ways, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks. Yeah.
- [52:48]
Gordon Carrera
Anyway, so who is oversturd Van Furer? Joachim Piper.
- [52:52]
Al Murray
But I see his jaunty hat and I just think skull and crossbones. Well, I see his reputation and I think, you know, you might be a handsome devil, but the emphasis is on the devil bit rather than the handsome.
- [53:02]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, be that is May. He's 29 years old and he's got, he's got a very interesting career really, because he comes from a, you know, a pretty right wing family. Let's face it. He's joined the SS at a pretty early, early stage. He's very. International socialism. He's also been Himmler's adjutant. Yeah, he took a little bit of time off in the summer of 1940 to go and fight with, with the 1st Waffen SS Panzer Division.
- [53:23]
Donald Trump
Yep.
- [53:24]
Gordon Carrera
Did pretty well. Went back to being Himmler's adjutant, then went off and commanded troops in, in the Eastern Front, rose up to be a pretty young regimental commander. I mean, there's not many people that Obersturm, Banfuhrer, which is sort of Colonel.
- [53:37]
Al Murray
Yes, I, you see, what must it have been like if you're in, if, if Himmler's adjutant turns up and he's been posted to you as an officer, do you think. Well, he only got that job because of, because of his connections. For Piper, it must have been always. He's always having to prove himself, surely, because he's, he has turned up. He's not worked his way through the ranks of the Waffen ss. He's dolloped in, having come from head office, as it were. It must be a peculiar position to be in. Right. He's got lots to prove. Right, right. That's what I'm saying.
- [54:05]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And he's, he, he's, he's from a sort of middle class background as well.
- [54:08]
Al Murray
Yeah.
- [54:09]
Gordon Carrera
But he's got an older brother who's had mental illness and, and attempted suicide and never, never really recovers and actually has died in of TB eventually in 1942. He's got a younger brother called Horst who's also joined the SS&TOTEN cop Verbanda and died in a never really properly explained accident in Poland in 1941. Right. Piper gains a sort of growing reputation on the Eastern Front for being kind of very inspiring Fe Obviously courageous, you know, all the guys love him, all that kind of stuff. But he's also orders the entire. The destruction of entire village of Krasnaya Polyana in a kind of revenge killing by Russian partisans. Yeah. And his unit becomes known as the Blowtorch Battalion because of his penchant for touching Russian villages. So he's got all the gongs. He's got Iron Cross, second Class, first Class Cross of Gold, Knight's Cross. Did very well at Kursk briefly in Northern Italy actually, actually then in Ukraine, then in Normandy. He suffers a nervous breakdown. Yeah. And he's relieved of his command on the 2nd of August and he's hospitalized from September to October. So he's not in command during Operation Lutech. And then he rejoins 1st SS Panzer Regiment as its commander again in October 1944. It's really, really odd.
- [55:19]
Al Murray
I mean, but isn't that interesting though, because if you're a lancer, if you're an ordinary soldier, you're not allowed to have a nervous breakdown. You don't get hospitalized, you don't get time off. How you could interpret this is, this is a sort of Nazi princeling, isn't? He is Himmler's adjutant. He's demonstrated the necessary Nazi zeal on the Eastern front and all this sort of stuff. It comes to Normandy where they, where they're losing. Why else would he have a nervous breakdown? He's shown all the zeal and application in the Nazi manner up to this point. And they're losing, you know, and because he's a knob, you know, because he's well connected, he gets to be hospitalized. If he has a nervous breakdown, he isn't told like an ordinary German soldier, there's no such thing is combat fatigue, mate. Go back to work.
- [55:57]
Gordon Carrera
Yes. And it's a nervous breakdown, not combat fatigue.
- [55:59]
Al Murray
Well, yes, of course, but, but you.
- [56:00]
Gordon Carrera
Know, what's the difference? Soldier said of him, Piper was the most dynamic man I ever met. He just got things done.
- [56:07]
Al Murray
Yeah.
- [56:07]
Gordon Carrera
You get this image I have of him of having this kind of sort of slightly manic energy. Yeah, kind of. He's virulently National Socialist. He's got this great reputation. He's damned if anyone's going to tarnish it. You know, he's a. He's a driver, you know, all those things.
- [56:21]
Al Murray
He's trying to make the will triumph, isn't he? He's working towards the Fuhrer. He's imbued with he. What's expected of him? Extreme violence and cruelty and pushing his men on. I mean, he's sort of. He's the Fuhrer Princip writ large, isn't he, as a. As an SS officer. Yeah, which is why cruelty and extreme violence are bundled in to wherever he goes, basically.