Hurricane Tulsi

by J.P. Atwell, Island Intelligencer, November 25, 2025

It’s that season again here on the Orchid Isle. As I survey my storm stock of Spam and toilet paper, I cannot stop myself from comparing the severe weather systems that may strike our shores and the cyclone moving through the US intelligence community. Isolated in Paradise, it is easy for us to miss (or purposefully ignore) significant events in Washington, DC, that affect our national security, including the strategic safety of our islands, so let’s go holo holo through some important recent developments.

In the eye of the storm sits our girl Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, herself facing a tsunami of criticism by intelligence professionals, current and retired, who continue to take issue with her lack of experience and express concern over initiatives that seem to second thoughtful planning of intelligence community change to loyalty to the person of Donald Trump. Examples? Look at events in September alone.

Gabbard canceled the Global Assessments report, a review of long-term threats to the nation that has come out every four years since 1997 to inform the White House under both parties. She then disbanded the National Intelligence Council Futures Group, which has produced the report for nearly two decades. Why? Many commentators noted that the historical findings of the report, and the work of the group, are “inconvenient” for a number of policies of the current administration. In the minds of many observers, ODNI communications about this, and other actions, that cite unspecified past abuse and unfounded allegations of past politicization will continue to ring hollow in the absence of any hard proof.

Just prior, she drew heat from her task masters at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for blindsiding them with the unilateral revocation of security clearances for 37 national security players, including top deputies of Trump appointee CIA Director Ratcliffe and key congress people. The purge included one of the nation’s foremost intelligence community experts on Russia, publicly outed an undercover officer, and complicated the Justice Department’s criminal probe of former CIA Director and Trump enemy John Brennan by killing the accesses of potential witnesses.

The same month, her earlier announced plan to downsize offices focused on counterintelligence and counterterrorism, in line with POTUS’s focus on fulfilling campaign promises to shrink government, came under fire from seasoned national security personalities for making the nation more vulnerable. Meanwhile, her unusual retraction of an intelligence report on Venezuela drew additional insider criticism and left her office scrambling through excuses, like barefoot keiki walking over ʻaʻā, to placate public concern over the politicization of intelligence from the highest intelligence post in the land. Quite a month.

Gabbard hasn’t fed the squall alone. In late August, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, without explanation, fired Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse, who you may remember as former Indo-Pacom Intelligence Director and a Camp Smith resident as late as 2019. The move was widely perceived as retaliation for DIA’s release of a standard, objective, preliminary bomb damage assessment of U.S. strikes on Iran that did not align with the public proclamations of SecDef and the Commander-in-Chief, televised boasts that left seasoned military leaders and intelligence analysts wincing (they were premature, by all accounts).

Some of the intel community tempest was whipped up by POTUS himself. In late August, he signed an Executive Order quietly declaring NASA an intelligence agency, leaving many intel professionals, university professors of intelligence studies, and foreign allies scratching their heads. In April, he abruptly fired NSA and Cyber Command Director Air Force General Tim Haugh and his deputy for lack of loyalty…not to nation or constitution, but to the personality sitting behind the Resolute Desk.

Pan over to the J. Edgar Hoover building. Recent revelations that FBI will now hire some agents who lack college education have raised concern about how these men and women will go toe-to-toe with the brightest minds in the Russian and Chinese intelligence services—many of whom are graduates of U.S. universities. Will they be able to draft a FISA warrant or an intelligence report using professional (college-level) English? As of this writing, about one-quarter of agents across the country—the people we rely on to catch spies, terrorist, and organized crime figures—are reassigned to immigration enforcement (the number breaks 40-percent in some of the largest field offices).

What to make of all this? I’ll withhold judgement for now. I will share, however, that I recently watched a video program in which several analysts in Russia who specialize in U.S. national security matters discussed how these events in our intelligence community track with the interests of former KGB officer and Russian President Putin more so than with the national security interests of the United States.

Ouch.

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(Originally published in the Hawaii Tribune Herald on 25 November 2025; reprinted here with permission.)