Inside the CIA, the White House & the Intelligence Purges | Julia Curlee

The Team House

Julia Curlee recounts her 25-year career in U.S. intelligence, from DIA and CIA deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan to briefing senior White House officials like H.R. McMaster and Vice President Mike Pence. She details her personal

Key takeaways

• Julia Curlee served as a PDB briefer for H.R. McMaster and Vice President Mike Pence during the first Trump administration, noting Pence's professionalism despite his public stances on LGBTQ+ issues.
• After successfully transitioning at the CIA in 2013, Curlee continued to serve in austere Middle Eastern environments without operational friction, challenging claims that transgender individuals are unfit for combat or intelligence roles.

Main topics

• Intelligence community career & deployments
• Transgender transition in government/military

Notable quotes

"Speaking truth to power is the fundamental of it."

Conclusion

Curlee's account provides a critical insider perspective on how political loyalty and

Transcript preview

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I see it all the time. I was like so amped that he came up with that. Yeah, it's nice. I really Speaker 3 (2:31) like the like Speaker 2 (2:32) nice big watch face. You can find them at VareWatches.com slash the team house. That's V-A-E-R Watches.com slash the team house. And if you use our link, you'll get a free watch roll with $59 with your purchase. Also, Vare does offer a 20 % discount for... active duty military veterans and law enforcement and first responders. So you could check that out at any time if you are any one of those. Yeah, I'm excited about the sponsorship. So I really hope people go and check out there. Speaker 1 (3:02) Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 3 (3:05) Hey, everyone. I'm Jack Murphy. This is the team house. And we're here with tonight's guest, Julia Curley. Julia served as an analyst first at the Defense Intelligence Agency and then at the CIA, where she became a senior analyst and went all the way up to National Security Council level. She was the PDB, the presidential daily brief briefer to H.R. McMaster and then Vice President Pence. And then served through the Biden administration and into the early Trump administration, second Trump administration, where she was purged essentially after being targeted by Laura Loomer. So we'll get into all of this sort of stuff. But I mean, you had a really interesting and long career at the agency and even up at the White House. So I really appreciate you joining us on the show, Julie. Speaker 1 (3:59) Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Speaker 3 (4:02) So you grew up in Hawaii, right? Speaker 1 (4:05) Mm-hmm. Speaker 3 (4:06) Yep. I was a barren kid. Speaker 1 (4:09) Yeah, so my dad was in the 25th Infantry around Vietnam, and then he got out, and he met my mom, and for some reason never left Paradise. Yeah, so I was born and raised in Kailua, which is a little beach town right next to Cay Bay for the Marines. And, you know, I just ran around barefoot. Speaker 1 (4:31) enjoying all there is with perfect weather and sunshine all year round. But those planes came over the horizon and I always wondered where they came from. And so I don't know what it was. I was probably about age seven where I thought about, what is it to be a person that gets to travel the world? And then I was probably ambushed at some point by the movie, The Hunt for Red October, as often happens. uh which i must point out is the movie where the analyst is the hero that's Speaker 3 (5:01) true Speaker 1 (5:01) obviously uh and so i i started wanting to be a cia analyst i kept that that little secret to myself because it was you know clear that it was a little weird for for you that Speaker 3 (5:12) came out of you like from that early in age that this was something that you were interested in Speaker 1 (5:17) yeah i have no idea where it came from it's just just primordial lose stuff but yeah it was just a you know i wanted to see the world you know, the attractiveness of the espionage business, the sexiness of it. I mean, I don't know where it came from, but it got me. And so I set my sights on getting to Washington and I went to college in D.C. and got recruited by the intelligence community in a way it went. Speaker 3 (5:44) Did you find a life? Do you think part of why you kind of chose that direction was because was and I don't have any experience with Hawaii living on an island? Was it kind of isolating and led to you kind of like wondering about the larger world? Is that where that came from? Maybe? Speaker 1 (6:00) Yeah, there's a little bit of that. You know, it was also drilled into me from a young age that public service was expected. You know, my my mom was a school teacher and my grandfather taught at the university. It was just sort of like, you're going to go, you're going to do something to serve the country. And my grandfather was from an immigrant family. And that was it. It was, you know, do your duty. The country will take care of you and, you know, live a life that you can be proud of. So I don't really have any memories of doubt of where I was going to end up. Speaker 1 (6:36) Until the recent unpleasantness, I've been on a pretty one-track path. So getting Speaker 3 (6:44) off the island for you was enrolling in college. Speaker 1 (6:50) Yeah, so I went to American University in D.C. in the International Relations School. While most of my classmates went into peace and conflict resolution, I joined the U.S. Foreign Policy Program where we were talking about nuclear weapons. And at the time, this was in 2000, you know, like the debate was between, you know, do we get involved in nation building? Right, Speaker 3 (7:15) in the 90s. Speaker 1 (7:17) yeah and then 9 11 happened the second week of my sophomore year and everything got real serious real fast and suddenly now i drop all my russian studies classes and i'm doing uh middle east studies and uh the same plan just with a little deviation and and uh studying arabic rather than rather than russian so here we are so uh then the run-up to the war in Iraq, I was applying for, first I applied to CIA and CIA rejected me, which I never ceased to remind them of that fact. And then I got accepted by DIA and DIA hired me right out of college and that was it. Speaker 3 (7:57) And what was the position that DIA hired you for? Speaker 1 (8:01) I had Speaker 3 (8:01) to Speaker 1 (8:01) be an Iraq analyst. I mean, to be honest, at that point, you know, this was the war had just been launched in March of 2003. They were hiring anybody they could get their hands on at that point. So they lowered the bar to get to me. And. I was happy to join, and before long, I found myself at Fort Benning, you know, learning to man the checkpoint, even though I was an analyst, learning to put on mop gear, prepare for chemical weapons, even though we hadn't found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it was my introduction to, you know, the world of government training requirements. So I spent a month at Fort Benning. prepping and living in 100 degree heat, 99 % humidity to prepare me for Iraq, I guess. And then they put me on a plane and away I went. And I arrived in Baghdad in March of 2005. Speaker 3 (8:57) So this was your pre-deployment training, which is sort of interesting because you're a civilian. You're not a member. Even the DIA is part of the military. They employ civilians. Speaker 1 (9:08) And at that point in the war still, they put civilians like me into uniform. I don't know if it was for our own protection to not stand out from a crowd or they just wanted to put us in our place so that we knew that we weren't that special. I'm not sure. But yeah, they gave us a bit of basic training and taught me how to use an M16, which was a lot like the... the 22 rifle that my dad had taught me when I was growing up. And, you know, it was, we were preparing for war. And because we certainly were in a raging insurgency at that point. The day I stepped off the plane in Iraq, March 22nd, 2005, I think there were two dozen Americans killed that day. And it was just, you know, it was bad. And there didn't seem to be any way out. But it was the place I needed to be. And I was following the same path that had taken me from Hawaii. Speaker 3 (10:12) Yeah. So Iraq in 2005 was seriously hot. There's a lot going on there during that time frame. Speaker 3 (10:21) What was, you know, I mean, if you could tell us a little bit more about your job as an analyst there and sort of what you were experiencing, what you were seeing in Baghdad during that time frame. Speaker 1 (10:31) Yeah, so it's probably a good example to start because I had a weird career for an analyst. Historically, whether it was CIA or GIA, these are like quasi-academics. We write 100-page papers that are highly classified that nobody reads. And after 9-11, the life of an analyst was very different. And so not only was I sent to Fort Benning to learn to put on chemical weapons gear, but the moment they... threw me into the war zone, my job was to serve basically as the embedded intel in a hostage rescue task force. And we were mostly assigned to track down U.S. soldiers who had been separated and captured by the enemy. I was on the case of Sergeant Maupin, who was one of the U.S. soldiers who had been kidnapped near Abu Ghraib. And so I was the lead intel officer, 23 years old, working with a bunch of operators and driving up and down Highway 10 out to Abu Ghraib and spending the night in that lovely base that we had there at Abu Ghraib, trying to support the retrieval, because we assumed that he had been killed at that point, and also other hostage rescue operations to try to save Iraqis who'd been kidnapped by the insurgency. Speaker 2 (11:52) Was Speaker 3 (11:52) that a successful recovery, ultimately? Speaker 1 (11:56) Ultimately, it was, after I had left. Unfortunately, it turned out that his remains were just right off the highway on the way to Abu Ghraib. And we just needed to find the right Iraqi family that was willing to turn over the remains and work with us for the right amount of money. And, you know, it was targeting intel work, right? It was, you know, connecting the dots. It was supporting... prisoner interrogations. It was helping with source operations, being in the meetings with recruited assets. So not the typical life of an analyst, but certainly after 9-11, a lot of us went down that road and that was kind of the norm for us. And it followed me back to another tour in Iraq. Next time I finally got out of Baghdad, I was up in Kirkuk for... a few months with the IA. And then on I think it was I think it was Christmas Day, I emailed the IA by resignation and accepted the letter of offer from CIA that had arrived and started in early 2007 with the CIA working Iraq from just just up the Potomac. Speaker 3 (13:11) Just I wanted to touch upon, you know, something you said about, you know, working these cases where Iraqis had been kidnapped. And I mean, that gets into an entirely crazy thing in of itself. That when we destabilize the country, it was like all these essentially mafia groups, you know, gangs and stuff, you know, kind of bubbled up to the surface. So there was like kidnapping for ransom left and right. But blended in there is stuff that has to do with terrorism. What was it like for you trying to navigate through those networks? And this is also the time where we're trying to chart out, you know, insurgent networks. Speaker 1 (13:48) Right. Right. Well, this was before the surge, you know, before. really the Petraeus period where we took on a more population-centric approach to the conflict. And at the very beginning of my assignment, working the first tour, there was a real fight within the U.S. military command of how much effort and attention should we be giving to rescuing Iraqis. To be exceedingly generous, you know, U.S. persons were the priority. followed by the foreign nationals of our allies and partners. But it became very clear several things immediately. One, the Kidnapping for Ransom networks are funding the insurgencies that are killing U.S. soldiers every day. And two, the Iraqi hostages are co-located with the foreign hostages. And so we had to go through this massive process of reprioritization of the Iraqis, which... you know, was not the priority of the U.S. military in 2005. And it was just a little microcosm of the slow shift in strategy. You know, in 2005, you could buy a 50-inch flat-screen TV at Camp Victory, weirdly named, in Baghdad, but the Iraqi neighborhood outside the wall didn't have running water or power. So we learned some hard lessons those years and I got to be a part of the slow shift as we figured out that if we were ever going to fight our way out of this catastrophe, this debacle that of course we caused by invading, we needed a different approach. And fortunately we finally did. Speaker 1 (15:29) later work in Iraq. I got to work much more closely with the Iraqis and it was immensely rewarding. I got to know a lot of people and learn much more about the culture and the food and a lot of good memories from that period. I mean, you know, it's good that war is so terrible, we'd grow too fond of it. But these were some of the happiest, if you asked me right now, you know, what was the highlight of your career, I would tell you it was deployed supporting U.S. military operations. Speaker 3 (16:00) Those wild west years. Speaker 1 (16:01) Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 3 (16:03) Tell us a little bit about what it was like going up to Kirkuk, which was, you know, a long history there. But I mean, it's a Kurdish area. Saddam tried to Arabize it. But by the time you got there, the Kurds were in control, as I recall. Speaker 1 (16:16) Yeah, 2006. Yep. Kurds firmly in control. I'm based at the airport where DIA had its compound at the time. You know, it was it was it was definitely a wild west. And but one of the craziest things at night, you know, the skies would light up with the red of the oil fires, which being a Hawaii kid reminded me of the volcanoes back home. But yeah, it was it was in that case. So I'd moved from working hostage rescue to doing the CT hunt for. Zarqawi, who he killed that summer of 06, and I was working on the second. You know how there's always like a second in command of, you know, last long in that position. But yeah, we were working very hard to decapitate that network and had a lot of success in 2006 doing that. Again, a lot of, you know, it was a horrible war. A lot of people were dying, but, you know. some of these memories you know I I think I turned 24 sitting around the fire pit with a guitar uh you know watch watching the outgoing illumination rounds uh you know thinking it it really doesn't get any better than this does it uh but I guess I was just a kid you know Speaker 3 (17:35) that the hunt for zarkawi was you know obviously this huge thing going on that that was the thing going on at that time yeah um What did you kind of see from your perspective and how was the DIA and the military kind of like adapting to this new form of warfare? Like manhunting was still this sort of thing that was in development at that time. Speaker 1 (17:59) Yeah, it was amazing to see it develop like the art of high value targeting. Without getting into too many specifics, even though God knows it's like almost 20 years old at this point. But we were really learning it on the fly, you know, and the effort to develop the ability to roll on a target in one night, get the, you know, pocket litter, and then hit the second target on the same night to surprise the... That was all so new. And then integrating visualization and multimedia tools. It seems so antiquated now, but it was all coming online to support special operations. So I got to, you know, I'm not... on the ground with the units right i'm in the air-conditioned office back in the rear hopefully if the analyst is ever involved in a firefight something has gone terribly wrong but i got to be there to help them you know push off for the for the missions and and support them and help them make sense of it afterwards and help prepare for the next target um and you know we worked 14 15 crazy hour days but you never knew it you know the days just flew right by Speaker 3 (19:07) Yeah, analyst burnout is a real thing. Speaker 1 (19:11) Yeah. Speaker 3 (19:13) So what kind of inspired you to submit your application to the CIA? It sounds like you were off to the races with DIA, like they had you doing stuff. Speaker 1 (19:24) Well, they had me thrown into the war zone. DIA at the time was a bit of a mess. And I mean, it's always had some cultural problems. You know, it dates back to McNamara and Vietnam era and its founding. it's always been a beast that's neither fish nor fowl, you know, with these Speaker 2 (19:46) snot Speaker 1 (19:47) -nosed 22-year-old college students like me answering to, our supervisors are all like former NCOs who don't know what to make of us. And then their bosses are all either, you know, colonels in the military. And so just this cultural clash all the way down. And we talked back and we had, crazy ideas like we were losing the war which you know we were um and uh didn't follow orders very well and i i had a lot of conflicts with the way dia was doing business at the time as an analyst so um in one of the pieces that i wrote that talked about politicization um and the anecdote that i lead the piece with actually comes from that first tour in iraq where as part of my work uh supporting the hostage rescue operations i was also doing briefings for the commander, the four star at the time. And, you know, my briefing was that things were getting worse and the trend lines were down because the criminal activity was out of control. We didn't have enough forces to control the terrain, protect the people at night, especially. And so I wrote what I thought was going on, which was that the western districts of Baghdad were in the Wild West and were out of control and things were getting worse. But the general, in seeing my presentation, ordered me to get out of my chair, curly, you know, get up. And when I did, he deleted the word, you know, minimal in front of progress. And, you know, and the arrows that were going down were suddenly off the chart, you know. And then he took the work and walked into the next room and briefed President Bush that things were going well. Speaker 1 (21:32) rebound. And the story I tell in that is that I didn't throw up my hands and protest and demand that he not do that. I just sort of stood, I printed it off for him. And I was 22 and 23. And in later years, I would learn that the business that we're in is deadly serious, of course. I learned that along the way. And that speaking truth to power is the fundamental of it. Or you know the whole country suffers as we did through years of strategy that wasn't working in iraq built on bad information that was being briefed up to our leadership um so anyway it was it was the wild west but i learned i learned a lot from that experience so i i never lost the desire to go work at cia Speaker 1 (22:21) You know, the DIA's dysfunction was part of it, but, you know, that allure was still there, I admit. And they make movies mostly about CIA, not about DIA. I'm sorry, my colleagues over there. And so what had happened after that first tour is that CIA, unbeknownst to me, had sponsored a conference at the Rand Corporation about the state of the war. And for some reason, I was asked, on behalf of DIA to give an afternoon comment of 10 minute discussion on the state of the conflict based on my recent deployment. And I stood up in front of the audience and told them we were losing the war and that the Iraqis that I worked with felt betrayed by the fact that we just turned our backs on them when we had the forces available to help protect them or rescue their loved ones because of our prioritization. scheme. And I told the story of an Iraqi woman that I got to know who I bought paintings from in Baghdad on the on base bazaar that they and who was then kidnapped and killed. And I saw those paintings in my house. And I but I said that, like, as long as as we're unwilling and unable to protect the Iraqis, we're going to lose this war. Anyway. thinking that my career is over because no one said a damn thing. In response to that, this six foot five gentleman who looks like a linebacker walks up to me and I'm five foot six. I'm not a little person. And he puts his hands out and he says, how would you like, have you ever wanted to work at the CIA? And he recruited me on the spot. 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Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. We thank Blue Chew for sponsoring the pod and your bedroom. That's interesting. Speaker 3 (26:49) And that's also unusual, isn't it? Speaker 1 (26:52) I mean, yeah. I mean, the CIA gets like, at the time, got 30,000 applicants a year. So that's not great odds. I think Harvard accepted better. But he just identified me as someone who was willing to tell a group of 06s what I believed. Speaker 1 (27:14) satisfied him and the values of the organization that he taught me. And I subsequently went to work for him and he was really, you know, he was my CIA dad for, I'm not going to say his name, but like, you