The Tucker Carlson Show
Bernard Hudson: New Orleans Attack, Cybertruck Explosion, CIA Corruption, & Tulsi Gabbard
Fri, 03 Jan 2025
Permanent Washington is trying to prevent Tulsi Gabbard from becoming Director of National Intelligence. Bernard Hudson ran counterterrorism at CIA, and says the country needs her. (00:00) Life in the CIA (07:00) The Invasion of Iraq Was a Complete Disaster (20:00) Why the Establishment Fears Tulsi Gabbard (35:44) The Unchecked Power of Our Intel Agencies (44:20) Are the Most Powerful People in DC Being Blackmailed? (58:16) Why Won’t the Intel Community Declassify the JFK and 9/11 Files? Paid partnerships with: PureTalk: Get 50% off first month at https://PureTalk.com/Tucker Levels: Get 2 extra months free at https://Levels.Link/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What insights can you share about life in the CIA?
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1989.
And what did you do, roughly speaking, for CIA?
So I was a case officer.
Yes.
Which means my job was I was focused on foreign governments and foreign posts where you're trained up. given language skills, given set of skills to manage what we call trade craft, how to operate clandestinely and safely overseas. And then you're assigned undercover to an embassy. And that sort of becomes your career with stints back in what we call headquarters in Virginia.
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Chapter 2: What was the impact of the Iraq invasion?
So I served throughout the entire Middle East. I was in Iraq. I was in Africa. I was in the Levant. I was in Pakistan. Where in the Levant? Jordan.
Interesting. What was Pakistan like?
So Peshawar, Pakistan- You were in Peshawar? Yeah, but before 9-11 was the most alien place that I've ever gone. I wasn't there permanently. I was just, I would go in for business, but that was an alien place.
You think? I was there two weeks after 9-11. I've never seen anything like that.
Yeah, it's even alien. Even Pakistanis who live in Islamabad or Raupindi or Karachi, when they go into Peshawar will remark, This is a different country. This is really Afghanistan. It just happens to be inside Pakistan's borders.
It's a cool town, don't you think?
It is very, if you like that sort of man who would be king vibe.
The Flashman Hotel is there.
If you like the Flashman Hotel, if you like that sort of British late colonial chic. Totally. It's the place to go.
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Chapter 3: Why do establishment figures fear Tulsi Gabbard?
And then it went and I won't call it an identity crisis, but certainly a change in its character as the United States sort of moved into the peace dividend era, say sort of 91 when the Soviet Union is no more and NATO starts expanding westward. In that period, you know, you had a lot of basically a struggle to figure out what does the agency really want to focus on?
And it never really came to a clear answer until Tuesday morning, 11 September. And then it became the third agency that I served in. Where were you? So that morning, I was at home. I was in an apartment getting ready to go to an assignment overseas during my final preparations. I saw that the news had said a plane had just struck a building in New York City.
I thought, you know, that was pretty weird. Clear day, you know, a little suspicious. Jump in my car to go to CIA headquarters. On the radio, I hear that they had just hit the second tower. And I get into the parking lot, and there's, you know, a lot of things going on.
A woman tells me, I didn't know this person, but they said, you know, in the way things had happened on that Tuesday, people would talk to you who didn't normally talk to each other. Hey, somebody just blew up the State Department. Now, that was obviously a garble of the plane hitting the Pentagon. So, I went into the building. Went to the Near East Section, which was my home division.
Your home office was called the division in those days. And at that point, there was a report that there was a missing fourth plane headed to Washington. And the director of CIA probably smartly decided to evacuate the building because he didn't know where the target for the fourth plane was going to be. But when you're young and aggressive, I decided I wanted to ignore that order.
And so sort of enlisted a friend of mine who was, you know, as we were being told by the, they were called security protective officers, who basically the guard force and the security force inside the agency were telling everybody to leave.
It was the first time I'd ever directly disobeyed an order in CIA and instead got a friend of mine to go with me over to what was called the Counterterrorism Center, where a friend of mine who I'd worked for before was the director and said, listen, you know, this is why I joined the CIA. You know, I joined it to be ready to do something for my country when that time came.
And you never really know when that time is. And that for me and for everybody else who was in the CIA in those years, that became the dominant mission. You know, prevent another 9-11. Yes. Figure out, you know, what the real threat is, find, fix that threat, and then, you know, do something to make sure it doesn't ever happen again.
So where did you go from there? So you're on your way somewhere. Did you change destinations?
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Chapter 4: How do intelligence agencies wield unchecked power?
I think there was, I mean, I think what's unclear and what probably has to happen when something that egregiously wrong goes, occurs, there's gotta be a public facing piece of this. I think that was absent in the post-2003 environment. I personally believe that this was the greatest intelligence failure of the American intel community, certainly in my time in government.
Well, sure, and a million people died, and it reset. It changed so much that I don't understand why they couldn't find somebody to say, we're going to punish this person.
a guilty person one would hope so what tends to happen in a modern bureaucracy at least in the american version of it is those type of mistakes are considered i'm not saying this is proper but this is sort of how they approach it it's a systemic problem and so we're going to take all these steps to change the things that we think led to this it is not including firing the leaders of that system i notice
That is true in the 2003 example. What you don't have is what you might have in, say, a private sector company where you get something really, really wrong. It's hard to compare the magnitude of the 2003 mistake on Intel with anything a private sector company would do.
But you got bureaucratic reform out of it, but what you didn't get, and it's fair to say this, is you didn't get, say, 20 identified people who were told, you know, you have to leave now.
yeah because i mean it's you made the point by implication earlier that one of the reasons countries participated in the global war on terror with the united states helped the united states was because they had the example of countries that refused to participate or who worked against our interests and they got overthrown so there's something sort of instructive about punishing someone because it teaches everybody else not to do that thing right
Well, I think in the case of counterterrorism and the cooperation we got after 2001, I think the reason these countries cooperated is their own fear that radical Islamic terrorism was a threat to them as well. What I think disturbed them after 2003 wasn't that anybody lamented the Saddam Hussein regime going away. It's...
Here's the United States, the global remaining superpower, getting something so tragically wrong, where along the way, many of the countries that are allies of the United States were cautioning, are you really sure that you've got this story right?
I think what happened, what you start to see the glimmers of in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion is sort of that deference to American foreign policy begins to be questioned. And I think in the immediate years after 2003, Russia and China are still not peer rivals of the United States at that point. But the repercussions, the ripples that came out of the Iraq invasion
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Chapter 5: Are powerful figures in Washington being blackmailed?
in regards to American's alliance system and how countries view it, I think underwent another change, certainly by 2015, 16, with the rise of China's economy and the return of sort of a more confrontational Russian policy in Syria.
Within CIA, was there anyone who said, you know, wait a second, we should figure out exactly how this series of intel assessments got to the president and policymakers? And, like, how did we do this and anyone who participated in it should be fired? Or did anyone say that?
So, certainly, many people said all of the points you made up to firing people, right? There were some people who said that, you know, there needs to be accountability, personal accountability to named individuals. The decision essentially was that we would hold the system accountable and they introduced a number of reforms.
One of them was to create a director of national intelligence, which didn't exist before 9-11. I mean, 9-11 is actually when they created it, but it was empowered by what happened in 2003. So, you know, if you were looking for, you know, a single event where somebody could say, you know, these people are personally held accountable, that did not happen after the Iraq invasion.
And it's not just the WMD intel that remained unpunished. It's like everything since then, every disaster since then has been without an author, I notice.
Again, the way America— Yeah. So, I mean, again, the way it tends to work in an American bureaucracy is you get sort of collective punishment, if you will, or collective change.
It's like systemic racism. Everyone's against it, but no one can quite describe what it is.
Yes. Or, you know, you don't point out a particular individual. Right. Exactly.
So, the DNI is one of the... one of the bureaucratic bolt-ons, one of the responses to the obvious intel failure in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
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Chapter 6: Why won't the intelligence community release JFK and 9/11 files?
As it is lived, you know, there are issues that some people have and questions people have raised over the years about why does the DNI need to be as large as it does? It doesn't collect unique information. Unique information is collected by the 17 other agencies that are out there. But it collates it. It collates it.
The one thing that some folks have talked about, a role that the DNI could do, but it hasn't to date, is a more aggressive assessment of how each of the agencies really contribute to the overall IC mission, essentially grading the homework.
Can you list the 17 other members of the intelligence community?
For points, I guess I could probably do it. So nine of them are within the Department of Defense. Nine? Nine of them. So Army Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence. Don't forget the Air Force.
You have the National Security Agency, which is part of DOD, the National Geospatial Agency, which is an agency that looks at exploiting imagery and making sense of pictures. If you think of the Cuba Missile Crisis, And the analysts who are looking at crates and boxes to determine, is that just a crate or is that a crate carrying a Russian missile?
That's the modern version of where those people went. It's a very little known agency, but it actually has a really important mission. The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages America's satellite system, Then you have seven agencies that are part of other government cabinets level agencies. So for example, Treasury's Intel section, the Department of Energy's got an Intel section.
The State Department has something called the Intelligence and Research INR. You've got the Coast Guard and you have Department of Homeland Security.
Why would the Department of Energy have its own Intel component?
So, unique to the American Intel community, the Department of Energy has got a bunch of authorities dealing with nuclear weapons and the design of nuclear weapons, both in the United States and what we need to know about potential adversary or partner countries that have nuclear weapons. And so they have a very small, it's a very small office inside the Department of Energy.
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