Director of National WHAT?

When I was little, Allen Dulles was head of the CIA and hence much reviled in the Soviet press. When I left Russia in 1973, that organisation was run by Richard Helms, with James Jesus Angleton in charge of counterintelligence.

Somehow these three men stand out in my mind when I think of US intelligence, partly because their tenures coincided with landmark events in my own life. But not only for that reason.

All three were erudite, multilingual, highly intelligent and well-versed in the subtle arts of their profession. During the war Dulles, Helms and Angleton served in the OSS, precursor of the CIA, and amassed vast experience in international espionage and counterespionage.

All three went on to have distinguished careers in the CIA. They, especially Angleton, had their critics and detractors, but no one ever questioned their qualifications for the job. It would have been silly to do so.

The three men had something else in common, and here we approach my subject today. All of them occupied posts inferior to that currently occupied by Tulsi Gabbard.

Born in Samoa and raised in Hawaii, Miss Gabbard, 43, has had a military career followed by a stint as a Democratic congresswoman. In 2024 she switched her allegiance from the Democratic Party to… I almost wrote “the Republican one”, but then stopped myself. The statement wouldn’t have been accurate.

When in Congress, Miss Gabbard endorsed the candidatures of both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. One could argue that the latter was simply a demonstration of party loyalty: Biden was certain to become the Democratic candidate. Sanders, on the other hand, was strictly an outsider, firmly lodged on the leftmost margin of his party.

A woman who could find it in her heart to endorse Bernie may or may not have any principles, but whatever ones she does possess can’t possibly have anything to do with anything espoused by the Republican Party. No, the allegiance she pledged wasn’t to the Republicans. It was to Donald Trump.

Her reward for that principled stance was lavish. In spite of having no relevant education (not much of any education, truth be told) and not a day’s experience in intelligence work apart from a short time as junior officer in military police, she was appointed Director of National Intelligence. That put her in charge of not only the CIA but all intelligence-gathering agencies in the US.

Since Miss Gabbard is a woman and takes her oaths not on the Bible but on a copy of Bhavadat Gita, she’d definitely be described as a minority hire should her appointment have come courtesy of Biden.

But, to his credit, Trump doesn’t do minority hiring. His mental questionnaire demands different ticks. To his discredit, he doles out some vital posts to people whose sole visible qualification is canine devotion to him personally.

William Hague, former leader of the Conservative Party, has just returned from the US where he spent time with several members of the Trump administration, and it’s this feature that he highlights in his article.

Lord Hague writes about “an extraordinary level of loyalty, among Republicans in general and members of the new administration in particular, to Trump in person and every word he utters. It is part devotion, part fear of taking even a tiny step out of line, but it is intense.”

Trump runs a tight ship, and he brooks no disagreement, much less argument, as President Zelensky found out the hard way. Such docility seems to be his principal requirement and, on the evidence of Miss Gabbard, in some cases it may even be his sole one.

The other day she delivered a litany repeating word for word Trump’s mendacious diatribes against the Ukraine, which are in their turn verbatim reproductions of Putin’s propaganda. But let her speak for herself:

“You have the cancelling of elections in Ukraine. You have political parties being silenced or even criminalised or thrown in prison.

“You have the freedom of religion – churches being shut down. You have political opposition being silenced. You have total government control of the media. We could go down a whole laundry list of issues that are against the values of democracy and freedom.”

If she really believes that pack of lies, she is monumentally stupid and bone ignorant. If she simply parrots Trump by rote, she is even worse: suspending one’s own judgement negates the advantage of being human. In either case, she shouldn’t even be a typist to the DNI, never mind holding that post.

The three distinguished intelligence men I mentioned earlier were multilingual. By contrast, Miss Gabbard can’t even speak English properly, which too must have endeared her to her semi-literate boss. She continued in this vein: 

“So it really begs the question, as Vice President Vance said again in Munich, it’s clear that they’re standing against Putin. Obviously, that’s clear. 

“But what are they actually really fighting for, and are they aligned with the values that they claim to hold in agreement with us? The values that President Trump and Vice President Vance are standing for, and those are the values of freedom, of peace and true security.”

You might say that many illiterate people misuse ‘beg the question’ that way, and you’d be right. But this only proves that they are indeed illiterate.

What they are trying to say is ‘raise the question’. ‘Begging the question’ means something entirely different.

First described by Aristotle, begging the question is a rhetorical fallacy that usually goes by its Latin name petitio principii. It means assuming a premise that hasn’t been proved and using it to support a conclusion. One example of begging the question would be this sentence: “Because Tulsi Gabbard is intelligent, she deserves to be Director of National Intelligence.”

Even in Congress, Gabbard had form in regurgitating Putin propaganda, sometimes outdoing her future boss in that endeavour. Thus on the day Russia invaded the Ukraine (or was it the other way, Donald and Tulsi?), Gabbard declared that “this war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns.”

This is a line taken by the MAGA crowd and other Putin cheerleaders, including Trump himself. If I felt magnanimous, I’d describe it as ill-conceived (Russia has no ‘legitimate’ concerns in that area. She has evil designs to recreate the Soviet empire). As it is, I’d call it treasonous.

But in repeating Putin’s lies about the US running biological weapon laboratories in the Ukraine, Gabbard proved even more disingenuous than Trump: “I’m extremely concerned….,” she said. “The seriousness of this situation really can’t be overstated… We have these pathogens in the midst of a war zone [in] between 20 and 30 labs in Ukraine. This is a global crisis.”

The only global crisis currently unfolding is Putin’s criminal aggression against the Ukraine with Trump’s acquiescence and indeed support. As for Gabbard, if I were in charge of MI6, I’d think twice before sharing any intelligence information with any outfit she runs. It’s almost certain to be insecure.