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(00:12): Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr.

Matt Fulton (00:36): Hi everyone, and welcome back to Secrets and Spies.

(00:39): Late last month, the United States joined Israel in launching the most significant military strikes against Iran since the Islamic Republic's founding 45 years ago, targeting key nuclear facilities deep inside the country. President Trump called it a total success, but early assessments from the intelligence community suggest otherwise. This week I'm joined again by The Atlantic's Shane Harris to break down what we actually know, the intelligence picture before the strikes, the fallout afterwards, and how Tulsi Gabbard, now six months into her role as Director of National Intelligence, is reshaping the community from the inside, for better or worse.

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Matt (01:44): Shane Harris, how are you, my friend?

Shane Harris (01:46): I'm good, man. It's good to see your face again. It's good to be back.

Matt (01:49): Yes, of course, of course. Let's start with the intelligence in the lead up to the strikes, what the US knew, what Israel believed and how we got here. But are we calling it the 12-Day War now officially? Is that official?

Shane (02:03): I mean, I am not, and I don't think that we are calling that at The Atlantic, but I don't know what we want to call it. I'm not sure I like 12-Day War, but yeah.

Matt (02:12): Do you get official editorial guidelines, like this is what you should refer to as?

Shane (02:17): Sometimes, yeah. Like, sometimes you will. Like, I mean, that's not uncommon in a newsroom certainly, but we haven't had any guidance on the recent obliteration of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Operation Obliterate.

Matt (02:32): The unaliving of the nuclear program, as the kids would say.

Shane (02:35): Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Matt (02:35): Okay. Well, let's back up a step. So before all this kicked off, what was the intelligence community's view of Iran's nuclear program and how did that line up with Israel's view in recent months?

Shane (02:48): Well, the US intelligence community's view has been remarkably consistent for many years, including back through Trump's first term and even before that, which is that Iran had not made the political decision to build a nuclear weapon, which is to say that a prohibition that had been put in place by the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, back in 2003. He hadn't lifted that. That's not to say that Iran wasn't developing the components and the ingredients that they would need to build a nuclear weapon, to include enriching uranium to a very high level. And they had done that, enriching about 400 kilograms up to about 60%, and you need about 90% to make a bomb. And while that might make it sound like it's two thirds of the way there, the jump from 60 to 90 is actually a lot shorter and easier than from zero to 60. So, US intelligence had been pretty aligned on that for many years and saying essentially that political decision to do this had not been made.

(03:54): The Israeli view of this was, I don't want to say it was entirely different, but I think that the Israelis read much more sinister intention into what Israel, or sorry, what Iran was doing with the enrichment of uranium, with the belief that they were dissembling about their program, even though there had been inspectors in some of these facilities. And Israel has just always taken the view that Iran even being close to being able to break out or to quickly develop a bomb was not a sustainable risk for them. So I think it's not so much that the intelligence was radically different. There were some tactical pieces. I mean, reportedly the Israelis had developed new intelligence that Iran was working on a trigger mechanism that would be used for a weapon. There was also reporting that the US was not terribly impressed with that intelligence. But Netanyahu has always taken this much dimmer view, I think, and belief that Iran's intention was in fact to get this weapon. And ultimately it seems, and we'll talk about this more, that Trump was, I think maybe to some degree persuaded by that, although I'm not really sure intelligence had much to do with his decision making on this one.

Matt (05:11): Yeah. So do you think following Hezbollah's decimation with pager attack last September, et cetera, Assad's sudden fall in Syria, that Israel, I'm not going to say Netanyahu, Israeli intelligence genuinely saw a shift on the nuclear issue? As you mentioned, the sort of detonator issue, there's also reportings about meetings being called together between the folks running the nuclear program and the ballistic missile folks, these sort of disturbing conversations happening in Iran that could have just been conversations, or was this maybe more about seizing a glaring moment of strategic opportunity?

Shane (05:54): I think they both go together, maybe actually to the extent that those conversations were happening. It's certainly worrying, and I think you're right to link that to on the Iranian side to them realizing that Hezbollah, their main proxy in the region, has been devastated. Hamas, another proxy has been devastated. Houthis are on the ropes, Syria is now no longer a place that they can move through with freedom. And all of that would presumably weigh on the Iranian leadership's minds of, "Hey guys, maybe we should be thinking about this remaining strategic deterrent that we have." But I think also to flip it around a bit from the US and the Israeli perspective, Iran has never been this week strategically and tactically. I mean, we will remember back several months ago when Israel did some strikes inside of Iran. I mean, they really took apart a lot of Iran's air defense capabilities.

Matt (06:49): Yeah.

Shane (06:49): So in addition to these proxy forces being really down and quite devastated, there also is now the ability for Israel, prior to the US strikes, to fly with total freedom all over the skies of Iran. And so this was a moment of really weakness in the regime, but also in the military, in the security apparatus that we've not seen for a long time, maybe ever frankly. And I think that for years there's always been this worry in the United States, justifiably, that if Israel or the US were to fiercely attack Iran, would Iran unleash the ballistic missiles? Would it reign fire down on Israel? And none of that happened every time that Iran was poked. I mean, our Gold, uh, Iron Dome held up very well. The Iranians were much weaker. And so I think both in Washington and in Jerusalem, there was this sense of, if we're going to do this, this is a perfect time to do it. And couple that with, we see the Iranians doing things that make us worry that their calculus is changing too.

Matt (07:53): Yeah. I think my sense of it being, I've studied this exact scenario, what it would look like potentially for many years for my own stuff. And I think that sort of apocalyptic, you could describe it, in the sense of how it was feared to look, that like three-front war that Israel would've faced in that scenario, the Israelis really kind of just chipped away at that, brick by brick by brick. And I think that's the reason that you didn't see that, that just was not, weren't the Iranians weren't able to marshal that response.

Shane (08:25): Totally. And I think if you even go back to, you know, sort of the, imagine a three-front war is kind of what I think what Yahya Sinwar, the now dead military leader of Hamas and Gaza who was behind the October 7th attacks, that it seems from intelligence supporting is what he was hoping to ignite, that he wanted Hezbollah and Lebanon and Iran to join with Hamas and attack Israel all at once. And that didn't happen. And as you point out, Israel then spent the next 18 months or so, whatever, we're now chipping away at every one of its enemies and the intelligence successes, which we've talked about on your podcast before, the military successes, the strategic successes, and frankly the political successes of Netanyahu getting Trump on sides. I mean, this will be studied for generations, by war planners and statespersons.

Matt (09:21): And Netanyahu himself politically surviving long enough to be able to pull this off, which I think that's sort of worked both ways there a bit. That's a different episode.

(09:32): So, before the strikes DNI, Tulsi Gabbard echoed the longstanding consensus of the community that Iran hadn't restarted its weapons program, then got thrown under the bus a bit by Trump in a press gaggle on Air Force One. Meanwhile, or maybe shortly after that, I believe it was, CIA director John Ratcliffe spun the same intelligence, but with an interesting football metaphor. What exactly was going on there? And we're going to circle back to her later, too.

Shane (09:58): Yeah. So the football metaphor that Director Ratcliffe has used in briefings including on the Hill, I think really is probably the most concise understanding of how the administration's thinking changed. And I think probably how the president's thinking on this has changed, which he said was like, "Look, if a team is on the field and they've gone 99 yards and now they're at the one-yard line, it is their intention to score a touchdown. It's not their intention to say, 'Okay, well we'll stop now and just pause here.'" And I think one of the big drivers in that rationale that he articulated is the fact that, and it is a fact that Israel, it's verified, that Iran had enriched this 400-plus kilograms of uranium to 60%. And I say that's confirmed, the IAEA inspectors were in nuclear facilities I think about two and a half weeks ago, as recently. And so they knew that material had been enriched. That wasn't a secret. And I think the director, and he's speaking for others and the administration, look at that and say, what else would they be doing with this if it wasn't for a bomb or to put themselves right on the edge of it?

Matt (11:08): Right.

Shane (11:08): That's always kind of been a fair point, I think. But the analogy that he used I think was trying to convey, and what I think he thinks and the president probably is too, is that this isn't just about having the option. This is them rushing the field. And so they see Iran actively pursuing it. If you take his football metaphor. And that really is, that's a subtle but very meaningful change in how you read the intelligence and it put the president in the position, I think, of then saying publicly, "We think they're trying to build it. We think they're trying to do it, and I'm not going to let them do it."

Matt (11:43): Right.

Shane (11:45): Build the weapon.

Matt (11:46): I mean, it seemed a bit like, I mean to use maybe a different sort of analogy. So it was that order to build a bomb was shelved in 2003. However, the, Khamenei wanted to keep the option open to potentially build a bomb in the future. Therefore, you have to keep the material, the expertise in place, and that results in a lot of different academic research and dual-use technologies. Weird stuff that you really wouldn't consider. The machinery that you'd use to make eyeglasses can be, also that can apply to the machinery that builds the explosive lenses in a weapon. Stuff like that. So they would march right up to the line but not say, okay, now we're going to build a bomb. So that other metaphor I was thinking of is sort of like an obnoxious kid in a car putting their finger right in front of their siblings eye and being like, "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you." It's sort of like that. They were playing with fire there.

Shane (12:40): I think there's an element of that for sure. And look, I don't think anybody buys the official Iranian line that this is all for civilian energy research purpose. That's preposterous. But the question always has been, what is the most effective way to stop Iran from building that weapon? And it's largely divided between two camps. One is bomb it and the infrastructure and physically put them back, and the other is negotiate. And that's how we got the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran nuclear deal in the Obama administration. And Trump has signaled that he would like to negotiate again, which is very interesting. I mean, I think that, look, he likes to, he calls himself a deal maker and he enjoys these bilateral agreements. But I wonder if that indicates to the president that you can't just keep bombing them. You can, but you're just going to have to keep doing it over and over and over again and that there might be some solution that results in security for everyone, prosperity for everyone. He's talked about it in those terms. The Iranians are a little more lukewarm to that, but they haven't said no either.

Matt (13:49): So you make a good point there. So Trump's instinct in the first six months here that he's been in office was to try to find a deal. He empowered Steve Witkoff to travel to Oman and all over the place to try to find a path forward. Did a bit of coercive diplomacy with the B-2 spring break in Diego Garcia a few months ago. But his instinct was always to sort of avoid the exact kind of conflict that we had. Bibi tried to persuade him during a Washington trip, I believe it was in April. However, it was sort of interesting that when the Israelis actually went and did the strike and started the thing, his, Trump's mood was sort of maybe he surprised himself, how he felt kind of differently about it was a bit of maybe the tail wagging the dog there, also, with Fox and everything. I was wondering if we could talk a bit more about that.

Shane (14:48): Yeah, it's so interesting. And you're quite right that Trump, I mean historically has been very reluctant to use force directly on Iran. I mean, famously in 2019, folks may remember that he called back jets when they were in the air and getting close to bombing targets in Iran in retaliation for Iran downing a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz. And he called them back reportedly because he said he thought that the casualty numbers would be too high. And now there were people who were advisors to him that was preposterous and really just felt like he got cold feet. But the point is is that he's always been reluctant to use military force in a way that would get the United States engaged in a long-term way without an outcome. And back, going to April, when Netanyahu was here and Trump got very angry at his then-national security advisor, Mike Waltz, because reportedly Waltz and Netanyahu were also talking about a strike. And Trump didn't want to do that. And furthermore, I don't think Trump likes people planning big things like that without telling him anyway. It's kind of like, I'm the president, it's my decision.

Matt (15:55): He's right to be annoyed by that.

Shane (15:57): Yeah, I mean, if you haven't told your national security advisor, please go plan with the head of a foreign country how we can attack someone, you probably have a right to be pissed off if he does it anyway. But I think in the moving forward, what's changed if we come into August, I mean obviously Iran has been significantly weakened, Hezbollah has been significantly weakened. And I think that you maybe, I think two things. One, I think Trump was persuaded that he could do a very, very big strike with these so-called bunker busting bombs and drop a ton of them and do significant damage to the infrastructure of the nuclear program, and that he could get them in and get them out. And the B-2s would be, they would face no resistance. So kind of a bit of a one-and-done kind of idea.

(16:52): And my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer have written about, sorry, Missy Ryan, have written about that this week in The Atlantic. But also I think what happened is you saw some of this frustration bubble over with Trump when he was getting ready to go get on Marine One, on the White House lawn, and he put this last week or so, and he put the ceasefire in place, then Iran and Israel were supposed to stop shooting at each other, but then they started shooting at each other again, and he got very furious and he came out and he said, "You've got two countries that have been fighting so long, they don't know what the fuck they're doing."

(17:24): And I think that that resonated frankly with a lot of people in the region who went like, yeah, he's right. And I think that's the level of frustration that he has is that this is endless. This is pointless. You're always at each other's throats. For God's sake, just figure it out. And I think that he might see dropping those bombs and doing that damage to the program, he has certainly said this to Iran, we can keep doing this if we want, or you can choose the path of peace and negotiation. So I think he saw that there was this window where he could get in, he could use massive force. It wouldn't necessarily entangle us in a costly war. Query whether that is actually true, we're going to find out. And I think that that was a lot of his calculation of why he did this and thought that he could potentially then force a negotiation where there hadn't been a strong incentive for one before with Iran. I think that's how he sees it.

Matt (18:19): So that was the picture before the first bombs dropped. But let's talk about what's happened since and what we actually know now or don't about their impact. So how is the intelligence community trying to assess the cumulative effectiveness of US and Israeli strikes -- especially on Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan -- without boots on the ground? US military boots on the ground, I should say?

Shane (18:40): Yeah. So the primary means are, one, is satellite imagery. So physically looking at the targets and what you can see from them, and the administration has put out some of these images, but folks listening at home should know that what you're seeing on TV, they have way more high-resolution stuff than just that, so they can really zoom in, if you like. So it's one, it's looking at the physical damage. And that's important, too, because the United States, they built these bombs for such a strike of trying to attack a bunker like this underground and have tested them before. So they will have a sense of the kinds of markers that they're going to be looking for to know did it go into the target? Did it hit in the place where we think we needed it to hit? Did it hit the right shaft, et cetera.

(19:26): So there's that. There's signals intelligence, which is intercepting the conversations of Iranians talking about what happened. And my friends at The Washington Post had a really interesting story this week that the US has some signals intelligence of Iranians saying, "Hey, we thought this would be a lot more damaging than it actually was", and the administration didn't like that and they shot back at that. And then there may be human reporting on the ground. I mean, the Israelis have utterly penetrated the Iranian security apparatus. So I think we can maybe speculate that they might have human informants who are telling them, here's what we have found out. And then there's other things like measurement and signals intelligence that get very, very technical that you try and essentially get a sense of what the damage was. But those are kind of all the INTs that they would be bringing to bear on this, which would be pretty standard issue stuff when you're trying to do an assessment of the damage that was caused.

Matt (20:24): Right. So we've seen conflicting takes. First, there was DIA's low-confidence assessment from that restrike report, I believe it was, the night of the attacks. Then CIA, and well, yeah, CIA said the program was severely damaged. Israeli intelligence has been pretty optimistic in their view about the damage, which somewhat surprises me. They have a lot of incentive to keep chipping away at this. And as you mentioned, that leaked SIGINT intercept reported over the weekend by your old colleagues at the Post. That's more in line with what DIA said originally. So what should we make of that split?

Shane (21:04): Well, I think that I'll talk about that and I might add my own reporting into this.

(21:10): I think that the big takeaway is, well, whether it's a split or not is an interesting question. That damage was done to these facilities I think is not in dispute. The question is there's one A, how much physically at those places? And that you're just simply not going to know that right away. So both when the president came out and said they were obliterated, and when the Defense Intelligence Agency said with low confidence, made it sound like, oh, we're not too sure, those are both arguably premature assessments. In the DIA's defense, by the way, they are tasked to do those things and no one is reading a low-confidence intelligence assessment by DIA as conclusive. Now, it got, obviously, when it was leaked and then reported in the press, it can lead people to think that it's conclusive and the fact that the administration absolutely took a flamethrower to it tells you that they're very, very sensitive to anyone deviating from the line that it was anything less than 100% obliteration, which is something in itself, right?

Matt (22:12): Yeah.

Shane (22:13): It tells you the story is more important than the damage in their mind. So I think though that yeah, physical damage was clearly done. The question though of whether or not the program was set back depends on, I think a little bit about what you mean by what is the program and what was set back. So I think there is widespread agreement, although the administration insists that this is not true, that stockpiles of uranium were removed from facilities prior to the strikes. I think you could even speculate about whether or not the administration, the president would've ordered those strikes if he thought there was any risk that the stockpiles themselves could be damaged and dispersed into the atmosphere and there's no indication that they were.

(23:05): So I have no reporting on that, but what I'm suggesting is that I think a lot of intelligence services will probably say we're pretty confident the Iranians moved a lot of this stuff before the attack and got it to a place where it's very, very deep underground, even maybe at sites that we don't know about. Now, does that mean it's easy to get to? Not sure. Do they have the centrifuges to enrich it from 60 to 90%? Really good question. The places where they would've done that are Fordo and Natanz, which are two of the facilities that were hit. And Natanz, there's also more damage assessment on that that says it was pretty brutally hit and the Israelis had struck that too. So if you don't have the centrifuges to do this kind of enrichment that sets the program back, right?

(23:52): Now, does Iran have centrifuges in other locations? That's a kind of big question mark that's been in the press. If US intelligence has information on that, I'm not aware of it, but they might. And so could they kind of start enriching again quickly, even in smaller amounts, even if they did that, they still would have to fashion it into a warhead that could be put on top of a missile that could survive launch or reentry. There's a lot of other components to this, which is true before the strikes. So it seems to me that the two pieces that were really, well, there are three that were really severely hit in the past several months really. One is the actual enrichment facilities, so you hit the centrifuge. Two is the ballistic missile program in Iran, which has been damaged by Israeli strikes. And three is the Israelis have killed a lot of nuclear scientists who actually know how to design the weapon. This is not rocket science anymore, but the people who would need to who know how to do this, a lot of them are dead.

(24:54): So I think you put all that together, and this program now has many more roadblocks in front of it. The big caveat I put on all this though, and I think it's not getting enough attention, and I was talking with a very senior Western diplomat about this the other day, is that could Iran fashion just a crude bomb that they could move someplace and ignite or drop from an airplane? Could they put less than 60% uranium enriched uranium even much, much lower, but still radioactive and contaminating into a drone and fly it over Tel Aviv and release it and blow it up? This is something that I think that no bombing campaign is going to be able to stop them from doing that these really sort of low-end kind of attacks that they could do. Now, that's not to say that they're going to do it, and they know that there would be unbelievable consequences if they tried something like that, but I think that we have to leave open that possibility that as we're talking about the nuclear weapons program, Iran also has other options for how to use this nuclear material that it has stockpiled and may still have control over short of putting it on top of a big missile.

Matt (26:12): Shortly after the strikes, Trump floated the possibility of releasing a few billion in frozen Iranian funds and helping with assistance for a civilian power program. Is there any sign that Iran might return to the negotiating table? Is the administration actively pursuing that, or does this make them more likely to go all in on a bomb?

Shane (26:32): I think there is a sign that they could return, the Iranians could return, because yesterday in an interview with CBS News, the Iranian foreign minister said, "We're not ready to negotiate." Which didn't say, we're not negotiating.

Matt (26:46): We need time.

Shane (26:47): Just not now.

Matt (26:48): We're still mad.

Shane (26:48): And I think. Exactly, we're still mad and may still be considering options. But the fact that he chose to give that interview and make that statement on a major American platform I thought was very telling. And Netanyahu and President Trump will be meeting I think next week. There is a lot of hope, I think, among officials certainly that I talked to in the region who would like to see a negotiation here. And Trump, to your point, has talked about it. And so it really is kind of in the Iranian's court at the moment. If suddenly they were like, all right, let's do it. Let's go back to Oman or let's meet in Qatar or someplace, Steve Witkoff would get on his plane and he would go. I don't think that, I haven't seen anything from the administration, the Trump administration, that would suggest there's no negotiating. I think that they are quite open to that, and I think the Iranians have not shut the door on it.

Matt (27:47): Trump's handling of the strikes' aftermath, posting on Truth Social, all caps, "Everyone, keep oil prices down. I'm watching," then the sudden ceasefire announcement demanding Israeli fighters turnaround mid-sortie, felt like the continuation of a theme of the president believing he can simply announce his current preferred reality and then yell at everyone, adversaries included, until they get the choreography right. But it seemed like Israel still at that time, that it seemed like Israel still had plenty of unfinished business inside Iran. Was there a process behind the ceasefire or was this him getting spooked about the risks, angering his base, summer gas prices, and trying to shut it down before the politics got too messy maybe?

Shane (28:30): No process that I'm aware of. I've seen more reporting that even his own aides were taken by surprise.

Matt (28:35): Wow.

Shane (28:36): It's important for people to remember too, that process is not a thing in the Trump administration. I mean, the Biden people processed everything, and then it came out the other end and the president made a decision. And with President Trump, he is the secretary of state, he is the director of national intelligence. He is the national security advisor, which I mean is not to say, by the way, I don't want to leave people with the impression that he doesn't take advice or listen to inputs from other people. He does a lot of that. He does a lot of onboarding of the idea and hearing from people, but he makes the decision and sometimes he makes decisions very quickly. And I think that the ceasefire is probably an example of him trying to go out and seize the moment, and as you put it, using this immense megaphone and this platform that he has to say, here's what we're going to do.

(29:25): Now, the Qataris also, I should say, did step in and help broker this. So there was some process. I don't want to make it, it's not, he did it all by tweet, but then when he comes out and he yells at the Israelis and the Iranians for seeming to violate the ceasefire and the math of it was very weird. It wasn't clear the hours was each side on the same hour. I was getting lost by it too. I think that though, is that where I was alluding earlier to the frustration that boiled over when he said, you know, these two countries don't know what the fuck they're doing. That I think is absolutely him trying to compel these people both through the force of his own personality and persuasion, but also it's the government of the United States, right? And he knows that and he's not afraid to put that weight behind it.

(30:16): So I mean, where I look at this and say the reality that he's trying to create is really how quickly he reacted to just scream and yell about the DIA assessment as if somehow the intelligence community had spoke with one voice and said, "You're wrong, Mr. President." I mean, that's not at all what that assessment said, and the fact that they jumped on it so ferociously, I think gives you a really good window into just how very, very sensitive Trump is about controlling the narrative and the perception of what happened and very well may feel. It may have felt that it was unfair and it was leaked against him for political purposes, which it obviously was, but that doesn't mean it was something that he needed to blow his stack over.

(31:07): So this is a guy who, he has this enormous, immense ability to persuade people, and when they don't do what he wants, he gets angry. And maybe they're not really persuading them, but he is just sort of telling them, and persuaded his voters certainly. But maybe the Iranians are looking at this and saying, we're not persuaded by you and your arguments, but we aren't persuaded that you would drop 10 more bunker busters on us, and maybe we do need to negotiate. I mean, I think that's kind of how he's probably betting on it. And he may be right in the end. I mean, we're going to see what happens as he likes to famously say, and he doesn't know either. I mean, trying to sort of rely on intelligence assessments to tell us, with precision, the exact state of the Iranian nuclear program right now, it's almost, from a policy perspective, it's almost the wrong question.

Matt (32:00): Yeah. We're going to be looking at it very strongly. We're going to be looking into that.

(32:03): Let's take a break and we'll be right back.

(32:21): Let's shift focus to someone who's been right in the middle of all this, Tulsi Gabbard. You had a wonderful profile on her in The Atlantic. Her role as DNI has raised eyebrows since her nomination, and this crisis may be the clearest view yet of her awkward fit in Trump's orbit. How would you describe her tenure as DNI so far?

Shane (32:44): She has both simultaneously been consequential and inconsequential, and I'll take the inconsequential part first, but it's been rocky. Let's just put it that way to be very clear about it. It's not great for Tulsi Gabbard, and I'm not sure how much longer she lasts. The inconsequential part of it is that she doesn't really have a lot of pull with the president. She's not part of his inner circle. She's not a person he turns to for key advice. She comes from, I think he looks at her as somebody who is representative of a particular part of the MAGA wing that doesn't like getting involved in foreign wars, that is against intervention, and which he ostensibly is too. But she is really a believer in that. And I think that he recognizes her political value, but on a policymaking value, he doesn't really listen to her. And she really pissed him off before the Iran strikes with this public service announcement she made about the danger of nuclear weapons after she made a visit to the nuclear memorial at Hiroshima in Japan, which if you've ever been there, I mean I can understand why she was so profoundly moved by it.

(34:00): It's an extraordinary place. It is both a overwhelming and sad and also very profound and poignant museum that they've done there. And you come out the other end of it thinking like she did, I think if you're a sane person, which is like, my God, we can never do this again. We should devote all of our resources to stopping this, and that's great if you are a private citizen or whatever. But when you're the director of national intelligence and member of the President's cabinet and you make a three minute video talking about, "We have to stop the war-mongering elite that will be thriving in their bunkers while the rest of us die from nuclear winter," and you work for the guy who runs the government that dropped that bomb 80 years ago and you sound like you're making policy, that's a problem. And Trump didn't like it. He thought it was strange. He dressed her down in the White House over it. So all of that just goes to her, she's not a player in this world, and I think she grates on him.

(35:01): Where she's also consequential is that she has introduced a degree of overt politicization of intelligence that is unlike any I have ever seen by an intelligence official in recent memory. The most potent example of that is there was an assessment that was being written by something called the National Intelligence Council, which is part of the DNI that kind of sits over all the analysis and the intelligence community and comes up with products or reports that reflect all of the different thinking and what's been collected. And there are emails that are public about this, but her chief of staff, key advisor, let's call him, a guy named Joe Kent, leaned on the analysts to change a particular assessment about Tren de Aragua and connections that that group had to the government of Venezuela because the administration was trying to use the intelligence to paint a picture that Tren de Aragua, this criminal gang, was effectively an arm or an instrument of the government of Venezuela, and to connect those to help justify the deportation policy that the administration's pursuing. So basically, we need the intelligence to say this thing to support our policy. And when it was saying the opposite, Kent was leaning on them to change it in ways that if, you can go read for yourself, but pretty clearly are politics trying to influence the outcome of the product. And then later, the guy who ran the NIC and his deputy were both fired when the report, I guess effectively didn't say what the administration wanted. Now, the administration says there were other reasons they were fired, just to get that clear. But that is a level of just weaponizing, to use the phrase that the president likes, of what should be an apolitical process. And that is the very thing that Tulsi Gabbard said she was going to try to root out when she became DNI. She said, there's too much politicization of intelligence. The intelligence community is filled with people who are lying to the American people, who are the part of the deep state. They're serving the ends of an elite that doesn't have your interest at heart. Okay, well, the answer to that can't be, well, then we'll go in and then we'll fire people or lean on them when the intelligence that we pay them to come up with in an apolitical way doesn't suit our ends. And that way I think she's sent a chill across the community, and I think that's made her rather consequential, but not for the best of reason.

Matt (37:40): You make a good point about her kind of driving the politicization of intelligence, but I noticed something that was sort of interesting. It felt like then the politicization of intelligence or that sort of then coming back to harm her in a way. So there was a quote in your profile that really kind of struck me. So it says, "'She touched the third rail. She testified that the intelligence community doesn't assess that Iran is sprinting toward a bomb,' a former US official who worked closely with Gabbard told us. 'It's hard to overstate how many people she angered by doing that and the amount of work required to get back into their good graces.'" And I just thought that is, what she said is objectively the consensus of the US intelligence community. And I know, I think Congress has stopped trying to make the executive branch respect them long ago, but it is still a crime to lie to them. It's just, I just find that odd that it's coming back against her now too.

Shane (38:32): Yeah, and this is a place where there's this weird dissonance where, on the one hand, the office she runs is trying to contort intelligence to make it say what the president wants. And on the other hand, she's going before Congress and testifying to what the intelligence has said for years, which is that Iran's not trying to build a bomb. Now, she could have not said that she could have just not read that part of the Global Threats Assessment, which is the public document that she was briefing in front of the cameras and in front of Congress. That she chose to say it is where this third rail idea is coming from, because Tulsi Gabbard has been really consistent about not wanting to get involved in wars. And when the president then came out and said, "I don't care what she said," essentially saying, I don't listen to the director of national intelligence on matters of intelligence, she came out and did a tweet of her own where she said, the media is misstating on purpose, what I actually said, and if you go back and you look, here's what I really said. And what she really said was exactly what she read. Now, there was this other piece where she said Iran was stockpiling uranium to a level that is unheard of for a state that's not pursuing a nuclear weapons program, which is a fairly obvious statement of fact, too. It doesn't mean they're trying to build a bomb. But then she scrambled to make it sound like, well, what I really meant was we can't trust the Iranians or the Iranians have sinister intent. So then you did see her start to start skewing in the direction of trying to make it work with the policy.

(40:04): And I think she's just like, Tulsi Gabbard has a really hard time getting on the same page with the White House here, and you see her floundering to try and do it. And I can't read her mind obviously, and she didn't talk to me and my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker for this story, but I do think that that reflects a sense from her that she is politically on the outs here. She is not singing in key with the administration. And I think that Director Ratcliffe has done a much better job of that, and notably has been able to do that, I think, without distorting the intelligence. Like, what he's being very careful to do here, maybe careful is the wrong word. I mean, he is giving a read of the intelligence. The president doesn't have to agree with it, and I don't think he's trying necessarily to persuade the president, but he is taking a view of this intelligence, which I mean is more to towards Iran may be in the direction of trying to build a bomb. And we should keep that in mind. And you saw Gabbard try to get on that same line with that tweet and it looked a bit desperate.

Matt (41:17): Yeah. My view here, I think she played an important role for him during the campaign, but she should not have come into the administration afterwards. I think she's just philosophically, temperamentally not, it would never have worked out out. And I think we're seeing that now to a degree.

Shane (41:36): Yeah, and I think that she, I agree with that, and I think that she has ambitions to run for president and taking a role like this, which is historically, DNI, not necessarily a very influential position, might be a weird springboard into the presidency, but I mean she has those ambitions, which I think the president also is very aware of.

Matt (41:58): Yeah. There's been talk that Trump is so fed up with her, he may scrap the DNI's office altogether. Is that serious?

Shane (42:05): I think it's serious that he's thinking, yeah, he's seriously thinking about it. And by the way, he would probably find a lot of other former presidents that would agree with them that maybe we don't need the ODNI. It's hard to remember now because that office is roughly 20 years old.

Matt (42:23): Came out of the 9/11 Commission.

Shane (42:24): Yeah, exactly. And it was an idea from the 9/11 Commission because the failure on 9/11 broadly was that all of these different components of the intelligence community that had all of the pieces of the puzzle weren't putting it all together. There was no one overseeing that. The CIA, which the director of the CIA used to be called director of central intelligence, was supposed to fulfill that function and really didn't.

Matt (42:53): Mm-hmm.

Shane (42:53): They thought, okay, let's do a new DNI. George W. Bush, who was president at the time, didn't want to do that. I mean, he was resistant to the idea. And it really, in large measure, I think, speaks to the effectiveness of lobbying, particularly by people whose family members were killed on 9/11, the so-called 9/11 families, who did get behind this anyway, it's never become the thing that it was intended to be. And people at the time were skeptical that it ever would and said, you're just adding another layer of bureaucracy onto this. And so if Trump decided to scrap ODNI, I don't think there'd be a lot of tears shed over that in Washington,

Matt (43:39): Hmm.

Shane (43:39): I think there probably are a lot of people in the intelligence community who would agree that it's not the worst idea and some who I think would advocate for it.

Matt (43:48): That's interesting. That's really interesting. Before we wrap, I want to zoom out for a second because at the heart of this is the intelligence community's integrity. When a president, any president, distorts intelligence to animate his Frankenstein's monster of a narrative rather than inform his decisions, what's the long-term cost? I mean, for the IC's internal health, its ability to speak honestly, recruit talent, and avoid being dismissed as just another political messaging tool.

Shane (44:16): I think it's all profoundly negative for all of those things that you cite. The modern intelligence community, and I kind of date that to the sort of post-Pike/Church Commission hearings, that exposed so many harebrained schemes and renegade operations and lawless behavior in the intelligence community, which lawmakers and policy makers of the day thought, we can't do that anymore because we want a professional intelligence corps with real democratic oversight. To get that, you need to have an apolitical system or as close as you can get to one. And that rests on credibility. It rests on the credibility of the information that's being provided. It rests on the men and women of the intelligence community being there to serve the policymaker and understanding that they're not the policymakers and all these things that are now embedded and take it as part of how we operate our intelligence system. It's never operated perfectly. I'm not saying that it has, and politics absolutely plays a role and affects it and inflects it. But I think what the risk that we have now with the president just so blatantly manipulating, not even manipulating the intelligence, but trying to spin what the intelligence is saying and insisting that the intelligence community be in harmony with what he insists the reality is and what his policy preferences are is dangerous for all the reasons that you said. Because we do need an intelligence community that tells policymakers what they think the truth is regardless of what they want to hear. And you can go back to 2003 in Iraq and see what happens when you have an intelligence process that's bending towards what the preferred outcome is. It can cause you to miss things. It can cause you to overvalue and put too much weight or credibility behind certain pieces of intelligence that trend in the direction you would like and to discount the ones that don't, even if the ones that don't are the ones you should be paying attention to.

(46:24): So in the extreme case, which we've seen, you can end up with really catastrophic decisions. And I think that the other part of this that's really terribly risky is that our allies watch this very closely and they see the way that the president is politicizing intelligence sometimes quite dramatically, and they wonder, "Can we trust the Americans? Should we share with them?" And there are potentially really bad downstream consequences to that because we do depend on our allies to tell us things about the world that we may not see and may not be collecting. What I don't want to see is the intelligence community turned into a propaganda instrument for the president's policies. Any president's policies. It needs to be separate and professional the way we want our military and our law enforcement communities to be. I don't think that's a controversial proposition. It's worked pretty well for the past 50-plus years, but this administration is testing that, and so far the results are pretty troubling.

Matt (47:33): Yeah, well, a lot to think about there going forward.

(47:38): Shane Harris, thank you so much for coming on, as always. For your attention to this matter. We'll have links to your social media in the show notes and a whole suite of reporting from The Atlantic over the past couple of weeks.

Shane (47:55): Great. Thanks, Matt. Always good to talk to you.

Matt (47:57): Thank you.

Announcer (48:31): Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.