Russian TV calls Tulsi Gabbard ‘our girlfriend.’ Can she keep US secrets?

Tulsi Gabbard was forced to grapple with the “unthinkable” one morning in 2018, she said, when a blaring emergency alert sent to cellphones and TVs in Hawaii warned that a ballistic missile was about to hit the island.

“Seek immediate shelter,” the message read. “This is not a drill.” 

It was a technical error corrected 40 minutes later, but Ms. Gabbard saw it as a “wake-up call.” 

“We have to work toward a future without nuclear weapons,” she told CNN the next day. “We need leaders who are committed to reducing those risks, not increasing them.”

Where Ms. Gabbard is likely to fall on that sliding scale of risk is the subject of sharp debate now that she is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence (DNI).

It will be her job, if confirmed, to coordinate America’s 18 spy agencies and decide what global security risks get highlighted in the president’s daily intelligence brief.

She will also be charged with nurturing the U.S. relationship with the “Five Eyes,” an intelligence-sharing group made up of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom – the closest of America’s close allies.

But she’s raised alarms at home and abroad with her take on Moscow, musing that freedom of speech “is not so different in the U.S. than in Russia”; and on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, questioning intelligence reports showing he used chemical weapons against his people. It hasn’t helped that a Kremlin-controlled Russian news channel called Ms. Gabbard “our girlfriend,” which in part prompted Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois on Sunday to call Ms. Gabbard “compromised.”

The wider churn of concern prompted President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, to urge reporters to “calm down” after she was asked whether Ms. Gabbard might make close allies reluctant to share intelligence. 

“There are thousands of people who work” in these agencies, and though the nomination is of “great concern,” cooperation will continue, she said. 

Yet such questions point to an underlying unease, analysts say, about whether the United States can still be trusted with secrets – and whether the intelligence community’s mission to use them to keep America and its allies safe is on solid footing.

“A chilling effect”

When the DNI position was created in 2004 after U.S. intelligence-sharing failures were laid bare in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, not all of America’s spies were thrilled with the idea.

The DNI job was designed to streamline and centralize oversight of the U.S. intelligence community, but many in the CIA and FBI bristled at the encroachment on their turf. 

At the other end of the spectrum were the complaints that the role was toothless and an unhelpful layer of bureaucracy. 

Then there was the matter of experience: With his diplomatic and political background, the first DNI, John Negroponte, was criticized as lacking the deep operational and technical know-how for the job.  

And nearly everyone seemed concerned about the potential for politicization. The DNI could be “subject to the whims of whichever party controls the White House,” then-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, warned at the time.

On these last two points in particular, Ms. Gabbard’s nomination has been subject to criticism. 

Though she and Mr. Trump differed on whether Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons – the president-elect called it “a disgrace to humanity” while Ms. Gabbard said, “We don’t know the full truth about what happened” – they have both been critical of U.S. involvement in Syria and the wider Middle East. 

They share similar views on Russia as well. Mr. Trump has criticized “Russia hysteria,” saying of the U.S., “We’re not angels, either.”  

Ms. Gabbard, with a false ballistic missile alarm perhaps top of mind, has warned against “escalating tensions with a nuclear-armed Russia. We need to work with Russia to prevent war, not provoke it.” 

More controversially, she has said the war in Ukraine could have been avoided had NATO not provoked Moscow, and she has praised Edward Snowden, who is now living in Moscow as a naturalized Russian citizen. 

This has rankled many in America’s spy community. If there are two things that friendly nations want from the U.S., it’s for it to stand up to dictators and to make sure secrets are kept secret, says a former senior intelligence official, who asked not to be named in order to speak frankly. 

For this reason, Ms. Gabbard’s appointment could have “a chilling effect on our allies’ willingness to share information with us,” the official adds. 

Taking aim at mass surveillance 

Equally troubling are Ms. Gabbard’s past efforts to repeal “the single most important operational statute for the U.S. intelligence community, period full stop,” says Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel at the National Security Agency.

This is a portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Section 702, passed in 2008. Ms. Gabbard has argued that it enables mass surveillance without proper oversight or due process, infringing on Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

The intelligence America’s spies get from that authority – the ability to spy on foreigners – accounts for 60% of the president’s daily intelligence briefing, Mr. Gerstell says.

“It’s giving us insight into North Korea, into Iran, into strategic competition with China, into what Russia is doing in Ukraine. It gives us the extraordinary ability to learn what our adversaries are up to.”

It’s no coincidence that since it was adopted, the U.S. has been free from major terrorist attacks, he adds.

Yet it’s fair for Ms. Gabbard to ask questions about matters that the intelligence community has long asked Americans to accept without reservation, says Michael DiMino, a former military analyst for the CIA. He suggests Section 702 has been, “frankly, misused.”

Office of the DNI transparency reports show that roughly 99% of applications for electronic surveillance are approved, he adds. “There are not very good guardrails when misuse occurs, and there are genuine needs for reform.” 

Mr. Snowden has spoken about National Security Agency colleagues snooping into the emails and private photos of friends, lovers, and adversaries and sharing their discoveries with office mates. “There’s a whole culture of it,” he said in 2013. 

Beyond this, any suggestion that America’s closest allies will stop passing intelligence to the U.S. if Ms. Gabbard takes over as DNI is “absurd,” argues Mr. DiMino, now a fellow at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank. 

That’s because the secrets allies share – and the secrets they are privy to in return – are vital to their own national security. “The only people that they would be hurting by doing that,” he adds, "would be themselves.”