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Speaker 1: Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
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Speaker 2: We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around the world, and.
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Speaker 3: Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
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Speaker 2: Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of you may not have heard.
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Speaker 3: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
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Speaker 2: We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
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Speaker 3: Hey, everybody today, we're extraordinarily pleased and maybe a little intimidated to have with us as a guest. Julia Curley. Julia spent over two decades as a CIA analyst and was given the rear nod to be loaned by CIA to the White House to the staff of the National Security compl the NSC. The NSC, of course, it's the entity that a normal president might use to work out the King Sidney administration's broad policy guidance on the country's crucial national security efforts. Julia served in both the Biden and in the Trump administrations, and his insight into both. She was a Presidential Daily Briefer PDB briefer for a vice president and was a senior analyst in both China and in the Middle East. Julia has recently retired from government service. She's now a public service fellow at law Fair, a great national security publication that's unapologetically wonky. I hope I got that right. And perhaps maybe the most important thing to know about Julie is that she's a Hawaiian barefoot island surfer girl who is made good. Julia, before venturing out into the big rough and tubble espionage world, hails from a little beachside town on Wahoo called Kailua that has other eminent citizens such as Tulsa Gabbard and Barack Obama. So you're in good company, Julia. Welcome to Mission implausible.
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Speaker 2: Julia, I should have warned you that Jerry talks for a long time.
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Speaker 4: I know it's good led the night then I don't have to say as much. It's good hiding behind my doo colleagues.
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Speaker 3: You know, we do O operator guys. We have our We always try to pull our wiley ways with our analysts.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, I know you guys know where the cool spots to hang out are, so I always like to hang out with So.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a thrill to be here. Thank you. I've listened to your podcasts. It's been great.
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Speaker 4: And yeah, hail from little beach Town in Hawaii. For my heart still lives somewhere off of kou Kama Street, near the Island Snow down by kloppogal Eye Market where if I get back as soon as much as I can, but sadly not enough and.
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Speaker 3: Island Snow for insiders. That's Barack Obama's favorite shave ice place, by the way, Absolutely, Julia, for our first question, I think we need to start out serious. We need to come out of the gate. So, with all the US intelligence secrets that you've been exposed to, its CIA and at the White House over the decades, has anyone in the US government actually found out what's in spam that Hawaiians love so much? And can you get a decent spam masoubi in d C.
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Speaker 5: No, there's no decent spam. Must be God.
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Speaker 2: No.
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Speaker 4: I would not want to confirm or deny the presence of animal parts in that and the gelatinous meat product that our Hawaii status is known for. I don't think it's beef, but I would not want to wager too much. I don't put too much estimate of language behind which animal or which or more than one might inhabit.
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Speaker 3: The spam does sausage making the whole concept of it. Did that have you ready for working over at the NSC. Maybe you could tell us.
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Speaker 5: A little bit about Yeah, yeah, yeah, NC does.
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Speaker 4: Spam sam and the can I wish that the NSC could be shelf stable in the same way that spam apparently is.
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Speaker 2: For decades, guys are hitting it all the parts.
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Speaker 4: At times we've seen recently. It's a perishable product. It requires people to make the sausage themselves, and it doesn't it much like our the rest of our government. It doesn't self actually either the following of laws or the implementation of sound policy.
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Speaker 5: It needs humans in the mix, not in the spam.
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Speaker 2: Just to be clear, and in fact, you were there when the humans were fired from me, and I see, can you tell us a little bit about that?
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Speaker 5: Yeah?
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Speaker 4: When I just see the speed run the biography, that sure. Okay, So I spent twenty years at CIA. I spent a few years of the Defense Intelligence Agency before that. Sorry, after I came to college and Washington nine to eleven happens. Yeah, I gotta go where the wars are and followed it. So the basic sequence was the this is a transition of power. The new team is coming in, the old team goes out. All the politicals depart at the turn. There's about one hundred sixty two one hundred and eighty or so. I don't have the exact numbers of the former Biden administration. Detailees from departments and agencies to the States, CIA, DoD, Treasury, and others who stick around through a change of administration historically to make sure that the most powerful country on Earth has a government at twelve oh one on inauguration Day and does the handoff, and then the new team comes in and they bring in their own people, and that's just generally how it's run.
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Speaker 5: So I'm there.
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Speaker 4: I am the acting Senior director for Intelligence Programs. As it turns over, I am in the West Wing. When the new team arrives, I brief in Mike Waltz.
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Speaker 5: We have a full.
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Speaker 4: Briefing on everything under the sun. Because he needs to be read in for everything. Immediately as we turn over the reins of the government, things seem to be going okay. My team of ten still intact. Everybody wanted to stay on to be a part of a transition. And then on day three of the administration, I am in the office of the Deputy National Security Advisor, Alex Wang. I have a very good briefing. He asks me how much longer my tour is and I'm like, sir, I'm in my second year. I've got a family and home my wife doesn't want And he says, well, I don't know if that's going to work for us. We're going to need to keep you around and all that. So I walk out, and waiting for me right outside the West wing is my assistant who says to me, everyone's fired except for you and me.
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Speaker 5: We're apparently indispensable.
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Speaker 4: So that was kind of a problem because we hadn't yet stood up the new government of the United States. The White House had not fully like the new administration. Officials don't have badges yet, they can't get into their offices. They go to the bathroom, they get locked out. They don't have log in passwords, and like all the pieces of standing up a new White House are still in play, and they've just fired everyone else, including the reports officers who do the read ins for folks, and so everything just parallel. Paralysis ensues and for the next sixties I guess at that point sixty six days today, sixty nine, I served at the new Trump administration through all of the things that occurred in that period. The people holding principals levels meetings on their cell phones occurs while I'm there.
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Speaker 5: I was not part of that.
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Speaker 4: And then on day sixty nine, I am at a rib joint in Roanoke, Virginia, and I'm fired over the phone and the you know, I look down and the reason why it was that the internet influencer decided that the Biden holdovers needed to be ejected, and I was one of the last.
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Speaker 5: At that point, Laura Lumer, I assume, yeah, you know, lumored.
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Speaker 3: Have you?
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Speaker 2: She's now found God, She's decided that Ukraine is the.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, our lady in Kiev is like our new hero and exchanging love letters with mister Zelensky.
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Speaker 5: It's great. I think it's great.
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Speaker 4: I think it's so good when people finally see, you know.
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Speaker 2: What was there? What was her claim that just because you happened to you were Biden the like everyone in government did.
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Speaker 5: Uh yeah.
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Speaker 4: I'll have more to say on the details of this one in a bit, so sorry to chead you about it, but I'm hopefully going to publish something soon that we'll talk about this in more detail. But needless to say, from the beginning, there was a strong Internet based desire to eliminate all of the holdovers. They came into power with the idea that the deep state had embedded themselves in the NSC and that there was the true bastion of the president's enemies. And so there was a series of maneuvers even before they came into office where the first person that was supposed to be our new boss running the Intelligence director at the White House, one of the senior staffers from the Hill on the Republican side. That person was deemed insufficiently loyal and was purged before they could even get into the job. And then ironically that's what led to me being the senior of the acting senior director at the beginning, before they could bring in a new political appoint eee that could be selected by the National Securitydvisor. So they came in with this idea, idea that the deep state was in control of the NSC, and it was rooted in the first term where the impeachments had been initiated out of a White House phone call and n AC staffers like Alex Binman were involved, and just this impression that the NSC was the enemy. What they seemed to have failed to understand about that is that the NSC is the President's is the President's staff. It's the President's arms, hands and eyes and ears into the ender agency. And what I talk about more on the piece I wrote for law Fair was the effect of that evisceration, pulling the wire out of the National Security Council really just paralyzed the US government's ability to respond to this president's desires. He could want things, he could issue pronouncements via truth Social but there wasn't the committee and bureaucracy beneath him to make sure that things were implemented, wisely, planned well. And it hasn't recovered since, not certainly since after that period of in April of last year, when the real per the next levels of purgas went forward.
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Speaker 3: You mentioned a couple of terms, and I think they're important for the audience to have them straight in their heads. So one is the inner agency and the other's principles. So with inner agency, maybe you could give us an example like on how the different agencies coordinate amongst themselves and maybe use let's just run with the Iran war and the Yeah, the straight of horror moves or something like that, like who to thunk that they closed the straits of horror moves the Iris? Right, I mean, yeah, what agency might think that. So they take us through that real quickly. Principles and interagency and what the NSC actually does, the saut saipeties and all that.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, just structurally right.
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Speaker 4: So you have the National Security Advisor, who's the head of the National Security count staff, and they run this. They have two primary functions. First, to staff the president. You know, he needs talking points, he's going to go overseas he needs If he wants as a question to something, he can go to his own staff, who then farms it out to the interagency so State, CIA, DoD and the other departments of agencies who can come back with an answer to his question. The second and more important thing, in my view is the coordination of the instruments of national power of the United States, the defense, information, diplomatic, economic, all of the pieces of US power that can be leveraged to enact the president's will. Somebody needs to coordinate that, and there is a series of committees that historically have met since the modern nacy was formed under Scorecroft in the first Bush administration, and that is the prime had been the primary tool for incubating ideas, bubbling them up, baking options that the president could decide between a judication between different US interests. Sometimes you'd want to do something militarily, but they're economic and interests at stake. And historically, even in the first Trump administration, in which I was a PDB briefer at one point, it operated under kind of a normal bureaucratic hierarchical system that bubbled things up and then when taskings came down, experts would roll out and implement them. It turns out the president doesn't have omnissions, doesn't know how to implement his own policies at the working level, And so there are people.
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Speaker 3: You're not reading the same stuff in the Internet that I am.
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Speaker 4: No he is Jesus like perhaps maybe just a conceptual matter, whether do you think you're running a large corporation with lots of different parts with different expertise required for the implement Or is this a vertical Is this just the mouthpiece of the leader and its job is to take information from above and execute it below. As anyone who's ever worked on a complex organization, they know that's not how things work.
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Speaker 5: And for better or'se.
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Speaker 4: The US government is the most complex entity on the planet, and so it needs bureaucracy, It needs rules and predictability. And so to get to the point where the Iran case that we brought up, which I think is the most damaging example of this, so many pieces of this were predictable and had been predicted. As you mentioned the Straits of Hormus. In a dozen open wargames that have been conducted over the past decades, people have predicted that in a conflict, the Iranians would seek to close the strait. This was foreseen and there would have been. In any run up to a major conflict of which we've all been a part of since nine to eleven, you would have been planning for these contingencies, and Deity would have been at the table warning of this state would have been there, ready to do the evacuation planning. I mean the idea that the United States launched a war of choice but didn't have a plan to evacuate its own diplomats, and they have a million Americans from the region in a war we started. And so you know, you had friends of mine, maybe yours who were assigned in the region with their families and their pets, and they had to scramble under fire to find accommodate ways of getting out of the country in a war we started. And so that's just another of the examples. If in the Strait up Ourmu's case, to go back to that, if we as occurred, discovered we didn't have the mind sweeping equipment in order to address the very predictable Iranian mining of the strait, which they had done.
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Speaker 5: During the Iran Iraq War. For those that studied that, we.
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Speaker 4: Would have gone to our a lives and partners in advance of the conflict to ask them to loan us those capabilities. But of course we didn't ask them to participate in the discussion before the war, nor did we plan for that, and so instead we're in the middle of the war and we're berating their leaders to participate in something they had no say in, and so it's just whether you believe or not in the wisdom of the act, the execution it's of. It is a whole other thing that the United States has to do well for the President's policies to ever succeed, and eviscerating the NSC, I think is a pretty good place to start if you're trying to find the failure modes of this administration in the many instances in which US foreign policies.
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Speaker 2: I think you explained that very well. But Julia, let us move a little bit back to our comfort zone. We on this podcast often as former CIA officers on the clandestine service side of things, like to take shots at are analytical guns like Yeah, David McCloskey, I'm thinking of you. However, I have to say an amazing number of the recent disasters we've seen in the world by Putin in Ukraine, Trump and Iran, net Yahoo and Gaza and Iran were sort of built on the lack of serious analysis. It's almost as if these people thought that their door kickers and shooters were enough to overthrow enemies in tumble countries. So either they didn't pay attention to their analysts or they don't have a good analytic process behind them. So in this case, I don't think I'm going to take a full shot at you. They Actually I think we're learning that analytic capability is pretty important in running a government.
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Speaker 5: So on behalf of all analysts.
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Speaker 4: All ever, I accept the apology of the Directorate of Operations.
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Speaker 5: It's long overdue. Appreciate it. Glad you've seen the wisdom of your ways.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there are systemic failures in every level, and one of them is you pay people to make it their life's work to take raw reporting that may or may not be right, put it in context, provided in fancy graphics like CIA produces, and make it understandable to people who are often like lawyers or former radio talk show hosts or businessmen or people that ran a TV show. Right, that's not their life's work, Like our life work is to make things understandable, Like we was the office space, so we talk to the customer, right, we prepare it, we package it, we make it understandable. And if you throw that away, the last five yards of delivering the multi tens of billions of dollars worth of intelligence, like what was it all for? What did all these people take these risks for what people like you and your colleagues like. All of it was designed to help make American decision makers armed with the best information possible advantage over their foreign counterparts. And it's thrown away if we don't provide, if they don't listen, or if they don't even have a meeting in which they could listen, which is what happens when you eviscerate the interagency processes.
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Speaker 2: But from your experience with this administration, do they want to listen? Because it seems to me, based on Tulsa, Gabbert and Poulty and even Radcliffe and these others, that their goal is partisan, is political. They want to use whatever agency they're in to spin stories to help the president make a case to keep his followers angry and worked up and voter and attack the other party. So, if that's your view and your intelligence community is something you either want to eviscerate or just use for partisan purposes, maybe you don't. You don't want reality and truth to power.
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Speaker 5: They definitely don't, that's obvious.
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Speaker 4: The you know, to return to Hawaii's Least Favorite Daughter spam.
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Speaker 5: No to the one former d and I from.
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Speaker 2: Oh Gabbard, I'm sorry, Yeah, I have troubles just up the street.
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Speaker 5: To Mike Gabbard's daughter who from the Hawaii perspective.
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Speaker 4: Oh yeah, a local politician back when I was in high school, clearly was not super focused on her day job of running the eighteen agencies of the intelligence community. And it might be related to this, the way that the administration is governed in this term. In the first term, it's not as if it isn't really the government of the United States, like it's the government of just our hardest core supporters on the internet. I don't know, I can't look into their heads, but they're not acting like they're responsible for the store and it's and like it's performance and whether it sells it, you know, whether it's clean aisles, like they're just not. And so much of the apparatus of the government now and the second term has been turned towards optics and making it clear that shows of fealty towards the president are visible in public rather than the performance of your departments and agencies. And just one example, I have not to elevate this thing, but I had a post on LinkedIn the other day. This is my new job is linked. I used to brief presidents and now I'm putting out no offense.
00:19:51
Speaker 5: Now I'm not right and.
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Speaker 4: I'm posting, you know, my thoughts on the internet, and the executive director of the National counter Intelligence Center at the d and I decide to weigh in on a post of mine on a Tuesday on the internet, and maybe that's a good example of why the DNA doesn't need to exist or something like that.
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Speaker 5: I don't know if that's a.
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Speaker 4: But like, you've got a job, right, and it's not to argue with people on the internet. But you see this from the top from the Vice president getting into arguments with people on Twitter. And I would just submit that the primary job of the DNI is to oversee the eighteen agencies and the intelligence community. The primary job of the Director of the Central Intelligence is not to carry the president's water and generate intelligence that reinforces his specious claims about US elections being illegitimate. That it's supposed to be collecting information synthesizing it to help the president make good decisions. So I don't know what leads them to make this these other things a priority. Because I've had lesser jobs and it was an eighteen hour you know, it was a full time job doing the lower level stuff that I was doing.
00:21:03
Speaker 5: I don't know. I don't understand.
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Speaker 3: The NSC, I believe was disbanded because of a conspiracy. So there's a conspiracy that the deep state, which we ask you whether you think it exists or what they think it is, but the deep state conspired against the president. So my understanding is there was a conspiracy, a genuine one, or at least a plan to get rid of the NSC right on day one. Let's get rid of this thing. And what was it replaced with. I've heard that basically Stephen Miller now runs everything sort of himself with a few acolytes around the president. So if we don't have an NSC to the extent we're even doing interagency or coordination, just maybe that way, how is it happening now? Do you have a sense of that? Even poorly?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, so to be clear, just like technically, there's still a national intelligence culture that d and I, even though it's not ninety percent of its staff was dismissed a few weeks ago. There is a National Security Council. It is a it's a shell of its former self. It's below fifty staff for the first time since Eisenhower. It is still meeting at the most senior level, so at the deputies and principals levels above, so the in the you know, we've got the president having the real National Security Council of like with departments and agency heads. We've got a principals level where the vice president might participate, but is at the senior most level minus the president. You've got the deputies level, which is where really the hard work of the minutia policymaker has occurred at the sort of the lowest of the decision makers, and then below that has historically been the inneragency policy committee level.
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Speaker 3: And you've got Marco Rubio supposedly running who's got like six others.
00:23:01
Speaker 4: Supposedly among his twelve jobs, uning the National Security Council too, So there are meeting at the deputies and above level. My understanding, but as you saw in the signal Gate scandal, like if you just for the public available reporting, like it's a really surface level conversation. These are people who oversee cabinet agencies. They're not in the weeds on the details, and they shouldn't have to be. They have supports, they're not supposed to have the details like that. They're supposed to make big picture decisions, but if there's no committee structure below them really thinking about the implementation details at the assistant secretary level, which is where really the working happens at CIA, at the mission center level, where you might have either a DO officer or a DA officer who spent decades working on problems in that region, knows all the key players like they would be at the table at those interagency policy committees. But because none of that is happening, it's all happening at hoc at the lower level. The level quality of process is sorely deficients. To get to your question about what's actually happening, then, NSPD one, issued on the first DAI of administration, the sort of governing dot comment of the new administration's policy process, crafted probably by the Project twenty twenty five people, elevates the Homeland Security Council, which had not existed in this form, and the Homeland Security Advisor, who also happens to be the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House, Steven Miller, to a much more prominent, powerful position. They have a full staff, they are working, they've got their people in place, handpicked for political loyalty, and they move forward with velocity on things like what's happening in Latin America. While the NSC at that level, the IPC level of assistance, they couldn't even have meetings but for the personal approval of Steven Miller, the Homeland Security Advisor, And so that really did elevate one side of the White House one set of priorities, the counter narcotics effort, the counter migrant immigration effort. That structurally in the power of Stephen Miller's is you know, on day one, and it's only gotten stronger.
00:25:11
Speaker 2: Sense, But when somebody like that again, when you took that vertical top down, that person, as powerful as they might be, can't control everything. I mean, the Soviet Union tried to do five year plans and control everything from the Gremlin, and the country fell apart. What that leads to is these warlords that run these big organizations end up battling each other and probably hating each other to try to get their thing into the Presiden's here to get on the phone call with him.
00:25:38
Speaker 3: Just a little bit of a.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: Twist when I think when you were in the White House process or you were briefing, how would you deal with this thing that I just saw recently? So the Vice President of the United States just goes on the Joe Rogan Show and says that Epstein was probably handled by the CIA and the deep state, and most now he's the vice president, he can ask and find out if that is indeed true. Of course it's not true. But so what do you do when that happens. Does the director of CIA, because he's in charge of that just been slandered, try to go and fix it or are they afraid of the political process and they just shut up? Or do the people who are briefing when they go to brief somebody else and they ask them that question, do they just say, yes, whatever the Vice President says is true? Or do they say, sir, ma'am, what the Vice President said is not true. I mean put me. If you're in that process, what do you do in this world.
00:26:31
Speaker 3: And not get fired? Yeah?
00:26:33
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the thing.
00:26:33
Speaker 2: I well, you get fired. You know.
00:26:35
Speaker 4: There's like an air of unreality to it that he can just say things and it doesn't matter. He can accuse the CIA, who is being run by his friend who's going to sit across from him at the next meeting. He can accuse them of covering up a global pedophile scandal. And ah, you know always say on the internet like that's that's the quality of conversation. How do you pivot from that to making life or death decisions about the future of the country in the White House? I don't know. I don't know. What I do know is from the you know, I was only I was only a Trump administration official for all sixty nine days in that window. What I observed was that when things were said that were crazy, people didn't speak up because they feared for their jobs, and that included me. I didn't raise my hand saying yes, sir, invading Grainland is insane. You make these moment to moment decisions to save your fire for things that are more important. And I think we've all in our careers been in a place where we had to compromise on certain things. But at some point it just becomes impossible to stomach the truly vile or crazy. So we all have a different level. I finally reached mine. I wish I could have said I retired, but I really resigned because I just ran out of tolerance. For first time. I didn't resign from the White House. I was fired from the White House, but then from CIA. I just ran out of the ability to look at myself in the morning. What am I a part of? And part of it is where you are in life? I mean, I want our officers to stay if they can, to do their part, to fight the good fight, to live up to our values, to speak truth to power. I want that for anyone who can. I ran out of my ability to do that, and I hope that in my new capacity, I can play a different role to this different way of reaching the same objective.
00:28:27
Speaker 5: But it's really hard.
00:28:30
Speaker 2: You seem to be doing a good job with your writing. You've written about the NSC, You've written about the od and I. You wrote about the President's election related cherry picked information in his speech last week, and you talked about how China and American decision making now why they all in one way seem to be very different topics. It seems to me that you are essentially saying a common warning that it's running through all of your work that our greatest vulnerability, vulnerability isn't really a foreign adversary. But the erosion of institutions and processes that allow presidents to make decisions based on objective evidence rather than politics. Is that fair, you know?
00:29:07
Speaker 5: I think so.
00:29:08
Speaker 4: I only look out, I can't look back, and you're probably seeing me better than I can see myself at this point. Classic analytic rror, by the way, the yeah, I think I think that there is a common thread through it all. Certainly the institutional pieces that I've written all have the same theme, which is the war on expertise, the war on nonpartisanism, the war on the idea of a civil service, and like the denial that I think it's part of the deep state accusation. Like for years, we all laughed at this second, you know, like that because it's a Turkish first of all, let's get let's nerd out here for a second, Like the Turks and the Egyptians and like these autocracies in the Middle East. You used to love using this phrase about their own civil service, and we laughed at it, and then it saw it suddenly migrate itself into our system, and it didn't take it very seriously. Now it's deadly serious because it's it's leading to a war on the civil service. That is so critical to staffing the most powerful country on Earth, And so is there a deep state. No, there is a career civil service that develops a culture for better or worse of service of certain values. We often go to the same schools, we're trained in the same ways, and that's what they're describing. But what they really are not liking is the fact that we're not partisan warriors focused on fealty to the president, and we have.
00:30:32
Speaker 5: To follow the law, and we have to follow the law.
00:30:34
Speaker 2: So if they say something is against the law, we say, no, we can't do it.
00:30:37
Speaker 3: We took a pledge on the Constitution not to a president or political party.
00:30:41
Speaker 4: And the idea that was at the center of my decision to stay through administrations into the new Trump administration from the previous was that I served the man.
00:30:51
Speaker 5: I don't serve the man. I serve the office. When the outgoing and by.
00:30:55
Speaker 4: An administration was leaving, there was a lot of people that tried to tell us civil servants that we should leave to that we would be retaliated against. That the way that people had been treated in the first Trump term was a predictor of what would happen now, and that we really for our own good should get out, and like this went pretty high in the organization, and I was mad. I was furious with that because it's felt like a betrayal of all of the things that I had been taught about nonpartisan civil service. And now in retrospect, they were probably right. They were seeing the situation clearly, and I was the one who had the wool over my eyes.
00:31:34
Speaker 5: And what I have done.
00:31:36
Speaker 4: Anything differently, I still don't think so. But it's it's that we're even in this conversation where civil servants are going to have to think about that, do I continue to honor my oath and continue to serve regardless of party or when one party comes in? Do I really not, you know, because of how they will treat people like me and I have a family and a kids who need to go to college, So like we should never be there. And the strength of the United States has always been non partisan service. Our military has you know, we had this professional cadre of soldiers that are the best warfire in the world, that could go to Harvard and get advanced degrees into organizational theory and all that that makes us the best.
00:32:16
Speaker 5: Organization in the world.
00:32:17
Speaker 4: And why would we not want that, And it's going to take some time to build our way back to that.
00:32:23
Speaker 1: There is so much to talk with Julia about that we're going to have to return to this conversation next week on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible. It is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: Mission Implausible is now something you can watch. Just go to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts, or click on the link to our channel. In our show notes, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around the world, and.
00:00:30
Speaker 3: Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
00:00:34
Speaker 2: Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of you may not have heard.
00:00:41
Speaker 3: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
00:00:43
Speaker 2: We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
00:00:49
Speaker 3: Hey, everybody today, we're extraordinarily pleased and maybe a little intimidated to have with us as a guest. Julia Curley. Julia spent over two decades as a CIA analyst and was given the rear nod to be loaned by CIA to the White House to the staff of the National Security compl the NSC. The NSC, of course, it's the entity that a normal president might use to work out the King Sidney administration's broad policy guidance on the country's crucial national security efforts. Julia served in both the Biden and in the Trump administrations, and his insight into both. She was a Presidential Daily Briefer PDB briefer for a vice president and was a senior analyst in both China and in the Middle East. Julia has recently retired from government service. She's now a public service fellow at law Fair, a great national security publication that's unapologetically wonky. I hope I got that right. And perhaps maybe the most important thing to know about Julie is that she's a Hawaiian barefoot island surfer girl who is made good. Julia, before venturing out into the big rough and tubble espionage world, hails from a little beachside town on Wahoo called Kailua that has other eminent citizens such as Tulsa Gabbard and Barack Obama. So you're in good company, Julia. Welcome to Mission implausible.
00:02:22
Speaker 2: Julia, I should have warned you that Jerry talks for a long time.
00:02:24
Speaker 4: I know it's good led the night then I don't have to say as much. It's good hiding behind my doo colleagues.
00:02:31
Speaker 3: You know, we do O operator guys. We have our We always try to pull our wiley ways with our analysts.
00:02:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know you guys know where the cool spots to hang out are, so I always like to hang out with So.
00:02:41
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a thrill to be here. Thank you. I've listened to your podcasts. It's been great.
00:02:45
Speaker 4: And yeah, hail from little beach Town in Hawaii. For my heart still lives somewhere off of kou Kama Street, near the Island Snow down by kloppogal Eye Market where if I get back as soon as much as I can, but sadly not enough and.
00:03:00
Speaker 3: Island Snow for insiders. That's Barack Obama's favorite shave ice place, by the way, Absolutely, Julia, for our first question, I think we need to start out serious. We need to come out of the gate. So, with all the US intelligence secrets that you've been exposed to, its CIA and at the White House over the decades, has anyone in the US government actually found out what's in spam that Hawaiians love so much? And can you get a decent spam masoubi in d C.
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Speaker 5: No, there's no decent spam. Must be God.
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Speaker 2: No.
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Speaker 4: I would not want to confirm or deny the presence of animal parts in that and the gelatinous meat product that our Hawaii status is known for. I don't think it's beef, but I would not want to wager too much. I don't put too much estimate of language behind which animal or which or more than one might inhabit.
00:03:57
Speaker 3: The spam does sausage making the whole concept of it. Did that have you ready for working over at the NSC. Maybe you could tell us.
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Speaker 5: A little bit about Yeah, yeah, yeah, NC does.
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Speaker 4: Spam sam and the can I wish that the NSC could be shelf stable in the same way that spam apparently is.
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Speaker 2: For decades, guys are hitting it all the parts.
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Speaker 4: At times we've seen recently. It's a perishable product. It requires people to make the sausage themselves, and it doesn't it much like our the rest of our government. It doesn't self actually either the following of laws or the implementation of sound policy.
00:04:35
Speaker 5: It needs humans in the mix, not in the spam.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: Just to be clear, and in fact, you were there when the humans were fired from me, and I see, can you tell us a little bit about that?
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Speaker 5: Yeah?
00:04:44
Speaker 4: When I just see the speed run the biography, that sure. Okay, So I spent twenty years at CIA. I spent a few years of the Defense Intelligence Agency before that. Sorry, after I came to college and Washington nine to eleven happens. Yeah, I gotta go where the wars are and followed it. So the basic sequence was the this is a transition of power. The new team is coming in, the old team goes out. All the politicals depart at the turn. There's about one hundred sixty two one hundred and eighty or so. I don't have the exact numbers of the former Biden administration. Detailees from departments and agencies to the States, CIA, DoD, Treasury, and others who stick around through a change of administration historically to make sure that the most powerful country on Earth has a government at twelve oh one on inauguration Day and does the handoff, and then the new team comes in and they bring in their own people, and that's just generally how it's run.
00:05:36
Speaker 5: So I'm there.
00:05:36
Speaker 4: I am the acting Senior director for Intelligence Programs. As it turns over, I am in the West Wing. When the new team arrives, I brief in Mike Waltz.
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Speaker 5: We have a full.
00:05:48
Speaker 4: Briefing on everything under the sun. Because he needs to be read in for everything. Immediately as we turn over the reins of the government, things seem to be going okay. My team of ten still intact. Everybody wanted to stay on to be a part of a transition. And then on day three of the administration, I am in the office of the Deputy National Security Advisor, Alex Wang. I have a very good briefing. He asks me how much longer my tour is and I'm like, sir, I'm in my second year. I've got a family and home my wife doesn't want And he says, well, I don't know if that's going to work for us. We're going to need to keep you around and all that. So I walk out, and waiting for me right outside the West wing is my assistant who says to me, everyone's fired except for you and me.
00:06:34
Speaker 5: We're apparently indispensable.
00:06:37
Speaker 4: So that was kind of a problem because we hadn't yet stood up the new government of the United States. The White House had not fully like the new administration. Officials don't have badges yet, they can't get into their offices. They go to the bathroom, they get locked out. They don't have log in passwords, and like all the pieces of standing up a new White House are still in play, and they've just fired everyone else, including the reports officers who do the read ins for folks, and so everything just parallel. Paralysis ensues and for the next sixties I guess at that point sixty six days today, sixty nine, I served at the new Trump administration through all of the things that occurred in that period. The people holding principals levels meetings on their cell phones occurs while I'm there.
00:07:23
Speaker 5: I was not part of that.
00:07:24
Speaker 4: And then on day sixty nine, I am at a rib joint in Roanoke, Virginia, and I'm fired over the phone and the you know, I look down and the reason why it was that the internet influencer decided that the Biden holdovers needed to be ejected, and I was one of the last.
00:07:44
Speaker 5: At that point, Laura Lumer, I assume, yeah, you know, lumored.
00:07:49
Speaker 3: Have you?
00:07:50
Speaker 2: She's now found God, She's decided that Ukraine is the.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, our lady in Kiev is like our new hero and exchanging love letters with mister Zelensky.
00:07:58
Speaker 5: It's great. I think it's great.
00:08:02
Speaker 4: I think it's so good when people finally see, you know.
00:08:05
Speaker 2: What was there? What was her claim that just because you happened to you were Biden the like everyone in government did.
00:08:11
Speaker 5: Uh yeah.
00:08:12
Speaker 4: I'll have more to say on the details of this one in a bit, so sorry to chead you about it, but I'm hopefully going to publish something soon that we'll talk about this in more detail. But needless to say, from the beginning, there was a strong Internet based desire to eliminate all of the holdovers. They came into power with the idea that the deep state had embedded themselves in the NSC and that there was the true bastion of the president's enemies. And so there was a series of maneuvers even before they came into office where the first person that was supposed to be our new boss running the Intelligence director at the White House, one of the senior staffers from the Hill on the Republican side. That person was deemed insufficiently loyal and was purged before they could even get into the job. And then ironically that's what led to me being the senior of the acting senior director at the beginning, before they could bring in a new political appoint eee that could be selected by the National Securitydvisor. So they came in with this idea, idea that the deep state was in control of the NSC, and it was rooted in the first term where the impeachments had been initiated out of a White House phone call and n AC staffers like Alex Binman were involved, and just this impression that the NSC was the enemy. What they seemed to have failed to understand about that is that the NSC is the President's is the President's staff. It's the President's arms, hands and eyes and ears into the ender agency. And what I talk about more on the piece I wrote for law Fair was the effect of that evisceration, pulling the wire out of the National Security Council really just paralyzed the US government's ability to respond to this president's desires. He could want things, he could issue pronouncements via truth Social but there wasn't the committee and bureaucracy beneath him to make sure that things were implemented, wisely, planned well. And it hasn't recovered since, not certainly since after that period of in April of last year, when the real per the next levels of purgas went forward.
00:10:31
Speaker 3: You mentioned a couple of terms, and I think they're important for the audience to have them straight in their heads. So one is the inner agency and the other's principles. So with inner agency, maybe you could give us an example like on how the different agencies coordinate amongst themselves and maybe use let's just run with the Iran war and the Yeah, the straight of horror moves or something like that, like who to thunk that they closed the straits of horror moves the Iris? Right, I mean, yeah, what agency might think that. So they take us through that real quickly. Principles and interagency and what the NSC actually does, the saut saipeties and all that.
00:11:04
Speaker 5: Yeah, just structurally right.
00:11:06
Speaker 4: So you have the National Security Advisor, who's the head of the National Security count staff, and they run this. They have two primary functions. First, to staff the president. You know, he needs talking points, he's going to go overseas he needs If he wants as a question to something, he can go to his own staff, who then farms it out to the interagency so State, CIA, DoD and the other departments of agencies who can come back with an answer to his question. The second and more important thing, in my view is the coordination of the instruments of national power of the United States, the defense, information, diplomatic, economic, all of the pieces of US power that can be leveraged to enact the president's will. Somebody needs to coordinate that, and there is a series of committees that historically have met since the modern nacy was formed under Scorecroft in the first Bush administration, and that is the prime had been the primary tool for incubating ideas, bubbling them up, baking options that the president could decide between a judication between different US interests. Sometimes you'd want to do something militarily, but they're economic and interests at stake. And historically, even in the first Trump administration, in which I was a PDB briefer at one point, it operated under kind of a normal bureaucratic hierarchical system that bubbled things up and then when taskings came down, experts would roll out and implement them. It turns out the president doesn't have omnissions, doesn't know how to implement his own policies at the working level, And so there are people.
00:12:45
Speaker 3: You're not reading the same stuff in the Internet that I am.
00:12:47
Speaker 4: No he is Jesus like perhaps maybe just a conceptual matter, whether do you think you're running a large corporation with lots of different parts with different expertise required for the implement Or is this a vertical Is this just the mouthpiece of the leader and its job is to take information from above and execute it below. As anyone who's ever worked on a complex organization, they know that's not how things work.
00:13:14
Speaker 5: And for better or'se.
00:13:15
Speaker 4: The US government is the most complex entity on the planet, and so it needs bureaucracy, It needs rules and predictability. And so to get to the point where the Iran case that we brought up, which I think is the most damaging example of this, so many pieces of this were predictable and had been predicted. As you mentioned the Straits of Hormus. In a dozen open wargames that have been conducted over the past decades, people have predicted that in a conflict, the Iranians would seek to close the strait. This was foreseen and there would have been. In any run up to a major conflict of which we've all been a part of since nine to eleven, you would have been planning for these contingencies, and Deity would have been at the table warning of this state would have been there, ready to do the evacuation planning. I mean the idea that the United States launched a war of choice but didn't have a plan to evacuate its own diplomats, and they have a million Americans from the region in a war we started. And so you know, you had friends of mine, maybe yours who were assigned in the region with their families and their pets, and they had to scramble under fire to find accommodate ways of getting out of the country in a war we started. And so that's just another of the examples. If in the Strait up Ourmu's case, to go back to that, if we as occurred, discovered we didn't have the mind sweeping equipment in order to address the very predictable Iranian mining of the strait, which they had done.
00:14:44
Speaker 5: During the Iran Iraq War. For those that studied that, we.
00:14:47
Speaker 4: Would have gone to our a lives and partners in advance of the conflict to ask them to loan us those capabilities. But of course we didn't ask them to participate in the discussion before the war, nor did we plan for that, and so instead we're in the middle of the war and we're berating their leaders to participate in something they had no say in, and so it's just whether you believe or not in the wisdom of the act, the execution it's of. It is a whole other thing that the United States has to do well for the President's policies to ever succeed, and eviscerating the NSC, I think is a pretty good place to start if you're trying to find the failure modes of this administration in the many instances in which US foreign policies.
00:15:30
Speaker 2: I think you explained that very well. But Julia, let us move a little bit back to our comfort zone. We on this podcast often as former CIA officers on the clandestine service side of things, like to take shots at are analytical guns like Yeah, David McCloskey, I'm thinking of you. However, I have to say an amazing number of the recent disasters we've seen in the world by Putin in Ukraine, Trump and Iran, net Yahoo and Gaza and Iran were sort of built on the lack of serious analysis. It's almost as if these people thought that their door kickers and shooters were enough to overthrow enemies in tumble countries. So either they didn't pay attention to their analysts or they don't have a good analytic process behind them. So in this case, I don't think I'm going to take a full shot at you. They Actually I think we're learning that analytic capability is pretty important in running a government.
00:16:23
Speaker 5: So on behalf of all analysts.
00:16:25
Speaker 4: All ever, I accept the apology of the Directorate of Operations.
00:16:29
Speaker 5: It's long overdue. Appreciate it. Glad you've seen the wisdom of your ways.
00:16:35
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there are systemic failures in every level, and one of them is you pay people to make it their life's work to take raw reporting that may or may not be right, put it in context, provided in fancy graphics like CIA produces, and make it understandable to people who are often like lawyers or former radio talk show hosts or businessmen or people that ran a TV show. Right, that's not their life's work, Like our life work is to make things understandable, Like we was the office space, so we talk to the customer, right, we prepare it, we package it, we make it understandable. And if you throw that away, the last five yards of delivering the multi tens of billions of dollars worth of intelligence, like what was it all for? What did all these people take these risks for what people like you and your colleagues like. All of it was designed to help make American decision makers armed with the best information possible advantage over their foreign counterparts. And it's thrown away if we don't provide, if they don't listen, or if they don't even have a meeting in which they could listen, which is what happens when you eviscerate the interagency processes.
00:17:51
Speaker 2: But from your experience with this administration, do they want to listen? Because it seems to me, based on Tulsa, Gabbert and Poulty and even Radcliffe and these others, that their goal is partisan, is political. They want to use whatever agency they're in to spin stories to help the president make a case to keep his followers angry and worked up and voter and attack the other party. So, if that's your view and your intelligence community is something you either want to eviscerate or just use for partisan purposes, maybe you don't. You don't want reality and truth to power.
00:18:28
Speaker 5: They definitely don't, that's obvious.
00:18:29
Speaker 4: The you know, to return to Hawaii's Least Favorite Daughter spam.
00:18:37
Speaker 5: No to the one former d and I from.
00:18:41
Speaker 2: Oh Gabbard, I'm sorry, Yeah, I have troubles just up the street.
00:18:47
Speaker 5: To Mike Gabbard's daughter who from the Hawaii perspective.
00:18:50
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, a local politician back when I was in high school, clearly was not super focused on her day job of running the eighteen agencies of the intelligence community. And it might be related to this, the way that the administration is governed in this term. In the first term, it's not as if it isn't really the government of the United States, like it's the government of just our hardest core supporters on the internet. I don't know, I can't look into their heads, but they're not acting like they're responsible for the store and it's and like it's performance and whether it sells it, you know, whether it's clean aisles, like they're just not. And so much of the apparatus of the government now and the second term has been turned towards optics and making it clear that shows of fealty towards the president are visible in public rather than the performance of your departments and agencies. And just one example, I have not to elevate this thing, but I had a post on LinkedIn the other day. This is my new job is linked. I used to brief presidents and now I'm putting out no offense.
00:19:51
Speaker 5: Now I'm not right and.
00:19:55
Speaker 4: I'm posting, you know, my thoughts on the internet, and the executive director of the National counter Intelligence Center at the d and I decide to weigh in on a post of mine on a Tuesday on the internet, and maybe that's a good example of why the DNA doesn't need to exist or something like that.
00:20:14
Speaker 5: I don't know if that's a.
00:20:15
Speaker 4: But like, you've got a job, right, and it's not to argue with people on the internet. But you see this from the top from the Vice president getting into arguments with people on Twitter. And I would just submit that the primary job of the DNI is to oversee the eighteen agencies and the intelligence community. The primary job of the Director of the Central Intelligence is not to carry the president's water and generate intelligence that reinforces his specious claims about US elections being illegitimate. That it's supposed to be collecting information synthesizing it to help the president make good decisions. So I don't know what leads them to make this these other things a priority. Because I've had lesser jobs and it was an eighteen hour you know, it was a full time job doing the lower level stuff that I was doing.
00:21:03
Speaker 5: I don't know. I don't understand.
00:21:20
Speaker 3: The NSC, I believe was disbanded because of a conspiracy. So there's a conspiracy that the deep state, which we ask you whether you think it exists or what they think it is, but the deep state conspired against the president. So my understanding is there was a conspiracy, a genuine one, or at least a plan to get rid of the NSC right on day one. Let's get rid of this thing. And what was it replaced with. I've heard that basically Stephen Miller now runs everything sort of himself with a few acolytes around the president. So if we don't have an NSC to the extent we're even doing interagency or coordination, just maybe that way, how is it happening now? Do you have a sense of that? Even poorly?
00:22:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, so to be clear, just like technically, there's still a national intelligence culture that d and I, even though it's not ninety percent of its staff was dismissed a few weeks ago. There is a National Security Council. It is a it's a shell of its former self. It's below fifty staff for the first time since Eisenhower. It is still meeting at the most senior level, so at the deputies and principals levels above, so the in the you know, we've got the president having the real National Security Council of like with departments and agency heads. We've got a principals level where the vice president might participate, but is at the senior most level minus the president. You've got the deputies level, which is where really the hard work of the minutia policymaker has occurred at the sort of the lowest of the decision makers, and then below that has historically been the inneragency policy committee level.
00:22:58
Speaker 3: And you've got Marco Rubio supposedly running who's got like six others.
00:23:01
Speaker 4: Supposedly among his twelve jobs, uning the National Security Council too, So there are meeting at the deputies and above level. My understanding, but as you saw in the signal Gate scandal, like if you just for the public available reporting, like it's a really surface level conversation. These are people who oversee cabinet agencies. They're not in the weeds on the details, and they shouldn't have to be. They have supports, they're not supposed to have the details like that. They're supposed to make big picture decisions, but if there's no committee structure below them really thinking about the implementation details at the assistant secretary level, which is where really the working happens at CIA, at the mission center level, where you might have either a DO officer or a DA officer who spent decades working on problems in that region, knows all the key players like they would be at the table at those interagency policy committees. But because none of that is happening, it's all happening at hoc at the lower level. The level quality of process is sorely deficients. To get to your question about what's actually happening, then, NSPD one, issued on the first DAI of administration, the sort of governing dot comment of the new administration's policy process, crafted probably by the Project twenty twenty five people, elevates the Homeland Security Council, which had not existed in this form, and the Homeland Security Advisor, who also happens to be the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House, Steven Miller, to a much more prominent, powerful position. They have a full staff, they are working, they've got their people in place, handpicked for political loyalty, and they move forward with velocity on things like what's happening in Latin America. While the NSC at that level, the IPC level of assistance, they couldn't even have meetings but for the personal approval of Steven Miller, the Homeland Security Advisor, And so that really did elevate one side of the White House one set of priorities, the counter narcotics effort, the counter migrant immigration effort. That structurally in the power of Stephen Miller's is you know, on day one, and it's only gotten stronger.
00:25:11
Speaker 2: Sense, But when somebody like that again, when you took that vertical top down, that person, as powerful as they might be, can't control everything. I mean, the Soviet Union tried to do five year plans and control everything from the Gremlin, and the country fell apart. What that leads to is these warlords that run these big organizations end up battling each other and probably hating each other to try to get their thing into the Presiden's here to get on the phone call with him.
00:25:38
Speaker 3: Just a little bit of a.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: Twist when I think when you were in the White House process or you were briefing, how would you deal with this thing that I just saw recently? So the Vice President of the United States just goes on the Joe Rogan Show and says that Epstein was probably handled by the CIA and the deep state, and most now he's the vice president, he can ask and find out if that is indeed true. Of course it's not true. But so what do you do when that happens. Does the director of CIA, because he's in charge of that just been slandered, try to go and fix it or are they afraid of the political process and they just shut up? Or do the people who are briefing when they go to brief somebody else and they ask them that question, do they just say, yes, whatever the Vice President says is true? Or do they say, sir, ma'am, what the Vice President said is not true. I mean put me. If you're in that process, what do you do in this world.
00:26:31
Speaker 3: And not get fired? Yeah?
00:26:33
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the thing.
00:26:33
Speaker 2: I well, you get fired. You know.
00:26:35
Speaker 4: There's like an air of unreality to it that he can just say things and it doesn't matter. He can accuse the CIA, who is being run by his friend who's going to sit across from him at the next meeting. He can accuse them of covering up a global pedophile scandal. And ah, you know always say on the internet like that's that's the quality of conversation. How do you pivot from that to making life or death decisions about the future of the country in the White House? I don't know. I don't know. What I do know is from the you know, I was only I was only a Trump administration official for all sixty nine days in that window. What I observed was that when things were said that were crazy, people didn't speak up because they feared for their jobs, and that included me. I didn't raise my hand saying yes, sir, invading Grainland is insane. You make these moment to moment decisions to save your fire for things that are more important. And I think we've all in our careers been in a place where we had to compromise on certain things. But at some point it just becomes impossible to stomach the truly vile or crazy. So we all have a different level. I finally reached mine. I wish I could have said I retired, but I really resigned because I just ran out of tolerance. For first time. I didn't resign from the White House. I was fired from the White House, but then from CIA. I just ran out of the ability to look at myself in the morning. What am I a part of? And part of it is where you are in life? I mean, I want our officers to stay if they can, to do their part, to fight the good fight, to live up to our values, to speak truth to power. I want that for anyone who can. I ran out of my ability to do that, and I hope that in my new capacity, I can play a different role to this different way of reaching the same objective.
00:28:27
Speaker 5: But it's really hard.
00:28:30
Speaker 2: You seem to be doing a good job with your writing. You've written about the NSC, You've written about the od and I. You wrote about the President's election related cherry picked information in his speech last week, and you talked about how China and American decision making now why they all in one way seem to be very different topics. It seems to me that you are essentially saying a common warning that it's running through all of your work that our greatest vulnerability, vulnerability isn't really a foreign adversary. But the erosion of institutions and processes that allow presidents to make decisions based on objective evidence rather than politics. Is that fair, you know?
00:29:07
Speaker 5: I think so.
00:29:08
Speaker 4: I only look out, I can't look back, and you're probably seeing me better than I can see myself at this point. Classic analytic rror, by the way, the yeah, I think I think that there is a common thread through it all. Certainly the institutional pieces that I've written all have the same theme, which is the war on expertise, the war on nonpartisanism, the war on the idea of a civil service, and like the denial that I think it's part of the deep state accusation. Like for years, we all laughed at this second, you know, like that because it's a Turkish first of all, let's get let's nerd out here for a second, Like the Turks and the Egyptians and like these autocracies in the Middle East. You used to love using this phrase about their own civil service, and we laughed at it, and then it saw it suddenly migrate itself into our system, and it didn't take it very seriously. Now it's deadly serious because it's it's leading to a war on the civil service. That is so critical to staffing the most powerful country on Earth, And so is there a deep state. No, there is a career civil service that develops a culture for better or worse of service of certain values. We often go to the same schools, we're trained in the same ways, and that's what they're describing. But what they really are not liking is the fact that we're not partisan warriors focused on fealty to the president, and we have.
00:30:32
Speaker 5: To follow the law, and we have to follow the law.
00:30:34
Speaker 2: So if they say something is against the law, we say, no, we can't do it.
00:30:37
Speaker 3: We took a pledge on the Constitution not to a president or political party.
00:30:41
Speaker 4: And the idea that was at the center of my decision to stay through administrations into the new Trump administration from the previous was that I served the man.
00:30:51
Speaker 5: I don't serve the man. I serve the office. When the outgoing and by.
00:30:55
Speaker 4: An administration was leaving, there was a lot of people that tried to tell us civil servants that we should leave to that we would be retaliated against. That the way that people had been treated in the first Trump term was a predictor of what would happen now, and that we really for our own good should get out, and like this went pretty high in the organization, and I was mad. I was furious with that because it's felt like a betrayal of all of the things that I had been taught about nonpartisan civil service. And now in retrospect, they were probably right. They were seeing the situation clearly, and I was the one who had the wool over my eyes.
00:31:34
Speaker 5: And what I have done.
00:31:36
Speaker 4: Anything differently, I still don't think so. But it's it's that we're even in this conversation where civil servants are going to have to think about that, do I continue to honor my oath and continue to serve regardless of party or when one party comes in? Do I really not, you know, because of how they will treat people like me and I have a family and a kids who need to go to college, So like we should never be there. And the strength of the United States has always been non partisan service. Our military has you know, we had this professional cadre of soldiers that are the best warfire in the world, that could go to Harvard and get advanced degrees into organizational theory and all that that makes us the best.
00:32:16
Speaker 5: Organization in the world.
00:32:17
Speaker 4: And why would we not want that, And it's going to take some time to build our way back to that.
00:32:23
Speaker 1: There is so much to talk with Julia about that we're going to have to return to this conversation next week on Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible. It is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.
