Can Tulsi Gabbard Lead a Broken Intelligence Community?

There is a myth about the invincible character of intelligence agencies and spies propagated by the likes of Tom Clancy, James Bond, and all too many real ex-spooks who populate Washington and live to feed the notion that behind the veil, all is known. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, rubbish. The failures of American intelligence agencies alone could fill a medium-sized but embarrassing encyclopedia. Even before the CIA was out of its cradle, Soviet spies were stealing nuclear secrets from under J. Robert Oppenheimer’s nose. And every decade brought another humiliation: Soviet, then Chinese nuclear break-out, war in the Middle East, more war in the Middle East, India’s nuclear breakout, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons supply network, Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, Iran’s heavy water reactor, Iran’s centrifuge cascade, and don’t forget that “failure of imagination,” 9/11. How about the myth of Soviet invincibility? Or the estimate that Kyiv would fall to Vladimir Putin’s forces within days?  

Still, there is another side to this tale – the many victories unknown to the public, the incredible capture of Osama bin Laden, his successors, leaders of ISIS, the elimination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard honcho Qassem Soleimani, and many more we can only dream about. When the intelligence community (IC) is doing its best, it protects the American people from threats they never knew existed. But intelligence is a dicey business, and over much of the 21st century, that intrinsic difficulty has been layered with growing politicization and bureaucratization that are both anathema to successful tradecraft.

The IC has been focused on winning the last war for decades. After the humiliation of the 1991 discovery of Saddam Hussein’s largely unknown weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, the IC saw WMD behind every bush. After the humiliating failure to find Saddam’s WMD, the IC refused to see WMD anywhere, notably claiming that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program. All of these failures came at a terrible time for the intel folks, with mid-level and senior people heading for the exits after post-Reagan congressional interference became an impossible burden. (Many on the Left on Capitol Hill were offended by the idea that the CIA was working with bad actors, insisting that choir-boy types were better sources of human intelligence than crooks, creeps, spies, and traitors.)

The resulting cohort – with many exceptions, of course – is a group of people with little institutional memory and a hyper-politicized understanding of the events of 2001-2008. Analysts will firmly explain that the CIA warned there were no WMD in Iraq (they didn’t), warned of the country’s dissolution (not really), warned of the Arab Spring (ha!), and other and sundry ex-post facto cherry-picked leaks designed to burnish an agency that repeatedly needed to explain away its mistakes.  

In Barack Obama, the IC found its hero, bent on “ending” wars, moving away from counter-terrorism towards rapprochement with Iran, resetting with Russia, and infamously, “leading from behind.” And while some in the IC surely warned Obama of the danger of his and Joe Biden’s obsession with withdrawal from Iraq and the risk of a jihadist resurgence, none were able to persuade their leadership of the danger. Thus, Obama and Biden spawned the creation of ISIS. So determined were these two of the need to “pivot” away from the Middle East that neither war in Syria, the fall of the Egyptian government to the Muslim Brotherhood, nor the many other proliferating threats to the United States and its allies were addressed.  

Retreat from both the Middle East and Africa allowed jihadists – al Qaeda, ISIS, and their ideological brethren – to spread, taking land, toppling governments, and killing innocents. Sure, Bin Laden met his end under Obama, and various ISIS leaders were in the crosshairs under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But both Trump and then Biden were determined to cede Afghanistan to the Taliban and, consequently, to ISIS and al Qaeda.  

This is the world that greets Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s nominee to be Director of National Intelligence – the capo dei tutti capi of an IC alphabet soup that includes the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and 15 more intel focused agencies. What has happened since Washington took its eye off the terrorism ball? Iran is on its heels, largely because the Israeli government defied every single demand of the Biden administration to traffic with, cede land to, and otherwise coddle Iran and its proxies. Only the Houthis and Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces remain at strength. Would we say the same for the Sunni terrorists?  

In 2024 alone, ISIS-Khorasan – the Afghan iteration of ISIS – launched successful attacks in Russia, Iran, Germany, as well as hundreds in Africa, and its first attack in Oman. In some cases, the perpetrators were ISIS-inspired, like the New Orleans bomber. Brett Holmgren, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, remarked in November that, “Whereas in the past we focused mainly on monolithic groups like al-Qa'ida, ISIS and Hizballah, today’s actors also include transnational racially and ethnically motivated extremists, or REMVEs, anti-government and anti-authority groups, homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs, and Iranian-linked entities, in particular the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF).”

Setting aside the gobbledygook of euphemisms for “terrorist,” the fact remains that jihadis of all stripes are proliferating. In northern Syria, Americans and American-backed Kurdish forces are contending with 26 prisons holding 9,500 ISIS militants, and two camps – al-Hol and al-Roj – with 42,000 associated women and children. The odds of these terrorists’ escape or release have escalated dramatically as Turkey seeks to destroy U.S.-backed Kurdish forces and tip the balance in Syria to Ankara-allied Salafis.  

In the meantime, the United States has abandoned the idea of a coherent counterterrorism strategy, doing little more than killing terrorists one by one. There are no systemic programs to defeat ISIS or al Qaeda, no efforts to crowd them out of territory in much of Africa or elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, the result is that Salafi-jihadi groups are stronger than in many years, control land necessary to plot against us, and have gotten better at doing what they do, which is advancing the caliphate and eliminating Western values and power.  

Gabbard should know this well, having seen it firsthand while stationed in Iraq and Kuwait. The problem is that judgment and political agnosticism make a good leader and a wise steward in the IC. Gabbard apparently has neither. When Syria’s Bashar al Assad was murdering half a million of his people with the help of Russia and Iran, she visited with Assad. She announced that “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States." The fact that Russian forces had attacked U.S. troops in Syria was either irrelevant or unknown to her, as was the fact that Iran was using Syria as a proving ground for global terrorist operations.

Indeed, Gabbard professes a hard line on America’s adversaries but has regularly opposed efforts to push back against them. Trump’s decision to eliminate Qassem Soleimani in the wake of escalating attacks on U.S. forces in 2020 prompted a claim that Trump violated the U.S. Constitution. And in the wake of a series of pro-Moscow declarations (alleging, for instance, that NATO was the reason behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine), ex-Gabbard staff explained that the former congresswoman “regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT – formerly known as Russia Today – which the U.S. intelligence community characterized in 2017 as ‘the Kremlin's principal international propaganda outlet.’”

Gabbard’s inability to distinguish between American allies and adversaries, her credulous parroting of Russian propaganda, and her fringe views on everything from TikTok to alleged Biden-administration conspiracies against her and her husband were not how the ex-Representative began her career on Capitol Hill. Rather, she has slowly morphed from a steady-seeming military vet to a Tucker Carlson-esque friend to America’s enemies. Small wonder that members of Congress have doubts about her ability to lead America’s faltering IC in the battle against a rising ISIS, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the host, with Marc Thiessen, of the podcast What the Hell Is Going On? and the related Substack.