Tulsi Gabbard fired about a hundred spies because they used a secure NSA service to make explicit, sexytimes comments to each other. She offered up the predictable reasons: they weren’t professional, it’s a danger to security, unsurprising stuff. In particular, though, the chatrooms were queer-friendly and it can be contextualized as an anti-DEI move.
Those of us who have watched intelligence agencies for a while? I’m pretty far from surprised spies used secure channels for explicit communications. In US intelligence, Allen Dulles, the fifth Director of Central Intelligence, routinely used his position in both the OSS and CIA to get some. While perhaps best known for his role in the 1953 coup in Iran, MKULTRA, and the Bay of Pigs, he also had a bunch of high profile affairs including Queen Frederika of Greece! Like, the guy sought a posting in Greece so he could bang a queen. Another one of his notorious affairs was with a Czech patriot while working in Switzerland. He handed her over to British agents because she might have been a double agent a few months after discovering her possibly being a double agent. Crazy stuff.
And, more generally, you read any book about spy agencies and the training of spies, well, the kind of people who get into the spy game tend to be hound dogs. After all, they’re being trained to lie and manipulate people, most of them having been pretty good at it even before they got into intelligence work. The sexual habits of spies are well-known. Suffice it to say that spies being horndogs is commonplace, and spies using official resources to be horndogs is also routine
Except, apparently, Tulsi Gabbard. Hand-wringing about spies – largely, queer and trans spies, or kinky spies – flirting and showing graphic pictures! This is hilarious, right? You take these people and their job is to lie to people, manipulate them, sometimes to kill them. Where a legitimate part of their job could be torturing people or overthrowing governments, who hire assassins or who are, in some cases, themselves assassins… and you’re upset over some polyamory?! (1)
Spying is a crazy environment. I was reading this non-fiction book (I’m pretty sure it’s Every Spy a Prince by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman but it might have been By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy) and the former spy was, like, “Oh, I worked with this guy and he had a glove modified to be like shears so he could just grab someone by the throat and kill them before they knew what was going on. He could almost decapitate people. He had very strong hands.” Could you imagine working with people like that? Even if you’re doing office work, these people are your peers. Guys who build gloves to rip open people’s throats and who have used the weapon! Your office mate!
And much of the work to flip foreign assets is just so disturbing! You’re looking to prey on their weaknesses. Do they have drug problems, sex problems, gambling problems? If so, you’re on! Now it’s your job to leverage the marital problems, crushing debt, and mental illnesses of other people to get them to become traitors. Oh. My. God. It’s such dirty work.
While, at the same time, okay, okay, at the same time, other spies are trying to do it to you! Sometimes, it works. The KGB turned a disgraced London Metropolitan Police officer, John Alexander Symonds, into a “Romeo spy.” The translation there is “male prostitute.” He’d seduce women working in Western embassies to give him information. He was never arrested for spying because of a plea bargain related to the corruption ring in the Metropolitan Police. I mean, like, this is nuts, right? This happened. A corrupt cop became a KGB fuckboy to steal secrets from lonely women working embassies and got away with both his corruption and his spying!
Or Aldrich Ames! He was an alcoholic and was definitely one of those guys who fooled around on Uncle Sam’s dime, including a beauty pagaent winner in Istanbul, and at least three women in Mexico City, including a woman working for the Columbian embassy who was also one of his informants. Remember, fucking people for the good of your country is part of spying! It’s a normal thing to do! He was banging beauty queens for AMERICA! Still, his wife wasn’t happen and divorced him, and the KGB saw all they needed and recruited his alcoholic, womanizing, broke ass. And, boy, his Columbian mistress was super-expensive. She liked to shop and he needed money, so he started ratting out agents. The KGB killed them. But, gosh, group sex parties!
What I’m saying is that intelligence work is batshit crazy. It’s unlike anything else. You’re preying on human weakness, but at the same time, the vultures are circling. All of that is awful, but you know what, in my opinion, might be the worst part of it? You live this crazy, sick, evil life in secret. You can’t tell anyone what you do. So, if you’re looking for connection, where can you go? Other agents are almost the only human beings who can understand what you’re going through. Sure, it’s all toxic. They’re, overwhelmingly, toxic people working in a toxic environment for toxic ends. Still, obviously, agencies who intentionally staff themselves with manipulative liars are filled with sex. They have almost no peers, they’re under incredible pressure, they’re doing horrible things, and having horrible things directed at them, in a life of secrecy and lies, surrounded by people whose job it is to prey on human weakness!
But there were some dick pics in a chat room! Gotta get rid of that! Trump’s people, amirite?
And here’s the real hell of it, the stupid, incompetent, fucked up thing about what just happened. What happens when you take a hundred spies and shitcan them for no reason? For doing what spies have been doing probably as long as there have been spies. Worse, your moral handwringing is essentially anti-queer, kink-shaming bullshit used to rationalize purging intelligence of queer agents and these people are absolutely savvy enough to see through it. Is that best for national security? Is it best to have a hundred-ish angry intelligence operatives fired for bullshit reasons by queer-phobic assholes?
And what about the agents still working, who didn’t use that system? They also see the writing on the wall. They just saw their boss purge queer agents. Great for security and morale, absolutely! Perfect score! Nothing but net!
Some of you – the dozen or so who’ll read this, anyway – might wonder, “Is Tulsi Gabbard a Russian agent?” No. But she might be a Russian asset. There’s a difference! Let me explain it to you. An agent is a traitor who takes money to betray their country. They know what they’re doing. An asset, on the other hand, is someone who is manipulated by foreign agents to benefit the agent’s bosses. Is Tulsi Gabbard a Russian agent? No. Is she an asset…? Ehhhhh… maybe? Regardless, America’s enemies and rivals are drooling at what she’s done and I guarantee they’re trying to turn her into an asset, trying to run psyops on her to make more mistakes like this one. She’s their kind of useful idiot.
It’s tragi-comedic. Gabbard – in her zeal to grab her ankles for Trump – has made US security worse. She could have just ignored all of that crap, as others before her have done, because intel is just a weird, wild place and a few sexytimes – queer, kinky or otherwise – posts don’t mean anything to anyone in that radical, extremophile world. But, no. Let’s purge them for bullshit reasons, instead! Hilarious but also allow me to cry.
Notes
(1) I hope no one confuses me with someone who supports intelligence work! I think the CIA should be disbanded and its leaders charged with crimes against humanity. The NSA is a criminal organization that spies on the whole planet. I consider almost nothing intelligence agencies do to be vaguely legitimate and think they should be shut down with prejudice. Torturers should go to prison for long stays, assassins, too. But their work is their work and think people should talk openly about what they do and the kinds of people who do it.