The United States has 18 intelligence agencies. All of them are located in Washington and its surroundings. Now, with Donald Trump's appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as National Intelligence Director, one might wonder if it wouldn't be more effective for the management of these 18 institutions to move to Moscow. That way, at least, the transfer of information to the Kremlin would be more immediate.
Gabbard's appointment would be considered excessive even in a Hollywood script that repeated the story of 'The Manchurian Candidate,' a 1962 film by John Frankenheimer in which the Soviet Union and China brainwash a US Army officer played by Frank Sinatra to assassinate a presidential candidate without being aware of it. Because, in the film, the soldier Raymond Shaw does not announce loudly that he is going to kill a presidential candidate at the party convention in New York's Madison Square Garden.
However, Gabbard has been much more open about showing her sympathies for Russia. The most extreme example came on March 13, 2022, when, three weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the former Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, former Democratic congresswoman, and former US presidential candidate, posted a two-minute video on Twitter denouncing the existence of between 25 and 30 US biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and demanding their immediate dismantling.
If she had followed the script of the most reactionary Kremlin media - not just 'RT' or 'Sputnik,' but something more primitive and intended for internal consumption, like 'Pravda' - Gabbard could not have done better. The notion that the US and Ukraine were collaborating in the production of biological weapons in the territory of the latter country, and that the Covid-19 virus originated from these facilities, was one of the theories that the far-right and far-left Putinism had a strong affinity for in the early months of the war. Not only has there been no data to justify such a claim, but no conspirator has yet explained why the US would engage in producing deadly viruses... in Ukraine, a country at war with Russia and in the middle of Europe, when it could have done so in Alaska or any remote Pacific island, far from the skillful minds of conspiracy theorists. Nor has it been clarified what Ukraine's life sciences industry has that makes it a leader in that field.
Nevertheless, Tulsi - as she is popularly known in the US as the head of the spies - put forward the theory, which was echoed by Republican Senator Rand Paul, of whom his late colleague and former presidential candidate John McCain said in a session that "he now works for Putin". Faced with the uproar that ensued, Gabbard had to backtrack. But it was already too late. Ultras around the world were pleased that Russia was destroying "Covid labs." In any case, the former congresswoman from Hawaii, who is ethnically Samoan - a community of just over 200,000 people in the entire US - maintains the usual Kremlin positions on Ukraine, namely: that the blame for Russia's invasion lies with NATO, and that the "Washington war makers" want to keep the conflict alive, instead of letting it fall into the peace of the graveyards, as the Kremlin proposes.
That March 2022, Gabbard was inspired. In an interview with the Trumpist television network Fox News, she declared that freedom of speech "is not so different in the United States than in Russia."
Her statements were reminiscent of those of Trump himself, who in 2017, in his first televised interview after taking office, responded to a question about human rights violations and the most basic freedoms in Russia with a "we are not angels either." The future head of the spies is also a staunch supporter of the pro-Russian Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, whom she visited in 2017 when the US was supporting the Syrian opposition forces and Russia, with tens of thousands of soldiers, was backing the Damascus government. During the trip, Tulsi rejected the notion that the Syrian government was using chemical weapons against populations in rebel-held areas. The only country that seems to have the unwavering support of this Army captain born in Hawaii is Israel, whose policy in the current Gaza and Lebanon war she has always defended. Once again, this is another area where the former congresswoman aligns completely with Donald Trump.
Gabbard, who is 43 years old, has made the journey from the Democratic Party, where she was a congresswoman for Hawaii from 2013 to 2021, to the strictest wing of Trumpism. Her main area of interest has been foreign and defense policy, perhaps due to her experience as a soldier in the Iraq War, which she also attributes to the tensions that eventually led to the breakdown of her marriage to fellow soldier Eduardo Tamayo.
Tulsi's resume goes beyond politics. According to several members of her family, she is a member of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), a quasi-secret organization in Hawaii, whose founder, Chris Butler, is revered as a divine figure by his followers - which could put Gabbard in a bind given that Donald Trump sometimes seems to make similar demands of his collaborators - and has tried, unsuccessfully, to enter politics on numerous occasions. The almost certain future National Intelligence Director has never confirmed or denied her membership in that organization, despite being raised by parents who are members of it, but she has acknowledged that Butler is her spiritual guide. The SIF combines yoga, Buddhism, and vegetarianism, has strict sexual morals that prohibit extramarital relations, and also does not allow its members to drink coffee. Its total opposition to homosexuality could explain Gabbard's stance on that issue, as she has gone from rejecting same-sex unions to restricting gender reassignment surgeries, although her political career is full of contradictions in this regard.
Apart from Gabbard's conspiracy theories and the fact that they always mysteriously align with the most pro-Putin sectors, or her connection to the SIF, there is one last element that adds uncertainty to her appointment: she has no experience in the field. In her eight years in Congress, she did not play a prominent role in the Intelligence, Defense, or Foreign Policy committees, and only in her last term did she try, unsuccessfully, to advocate for a pardon for Julian Assange - the founder of WikiLeaks, the website that leaked a series of US secret documents and is linked to the Kremlin - and for Julian Assange, the American spy who provided a vast amount of information to WikiLeaks about Washington's Intelligence activities before fleeing to Russia, where Putin granted him political asylum. By then, Tulsi was already leaning towards Moscow.
This lack of knowledge of the Intelligence world may prevent her from making a mark in a community that employs over 100,000 people with a secret but unimaginable budget in Spain, as evidenced by the fact that just the largest of these organizations, the CIA, has a budget equivalent to two and a half times that of the Spanish Ministry of Defense. Hopefully, the example of Chris Butler and his meditation and vegetarianism will enlighten Tulsi. As long as her inspiration does not come from Putin, the world can breathe easy.