Ex-CIA officer says Trump purge crippled national security apparatus

Fired trans analyst details Iran war intelligence failures

Julia Curlee, a former senior CIA officer who served across three administrations, said in an interview with the Guardian published Tuesday that the Trump administration’s purge of national security staff and its anti-trans policies left the US government “crippled” at senior levels, contributing to failures in the war with Iran. Curlee, who was fired from her National Security Council role in March 2025 after being publicly identified by far-right influencer Laura Loomer, spoke weeks after coming forward in an Atlantic essay.

“Sometimes you have to scream, ‘this is not normal. This is not acceptable,’” Curlee said.

After serving in Iraq with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Curlee joined the CIA in 2007, fulfilling a childhood dream, and went on to complete multiple tours in the Middle East and South Asia. In 2013, she came out as trans. In 2017, she penned an anonymous essay encouraging other trans people to apply to the agency. She joined Trump’s first administration later that year, even as the president moved to ban trans people from the military, briefing Trump on Air Force One and serving as Vice President Mike Pence’s daily briefer, in what she described as a close, respectful working relationship.

Curlee was serving as a director for intelligence programs on Biden’s National Security Council when Trump was re-elected in 2024. Her superiors advised her to step down, knowing how she could be personally targeted, she recalled, but she stayed. Maintaining her role as Trump took office, Curlee and other remaining NSC staff helped onboard new officials and bring them up to speed on highly secretive programs. She led Situation Room sessions, reminding incoming officials not to bring cellphones into secure facilities and that Signal was not appropriate for sensitive discussions.

At the same time, she began leaving the White House to use a bathroom across the street, since she was banned from entering women’s restrooms under Trump’s day-one order.

On day three, chaos erupted. Curlee recalled leaving a briefing with a deputy national security adviser when her assistant intercepted her, telling her: “Everyone’s been fired except for you and me.” The administration had sidelined 160 NSC staffers — career public servants on loan from the CIA, State Department and other agencies — telling them not to return to the White House.

“It was a dumpster fire — I think that’s the technical term,” Curlee said. The administration had not considered basic questions of how it would absorb the losses, she said: people needing computer logins or access to secure rooms had no technical staff to help, and there was no process to determine which officials had clearance to receive the presidential daily brief, the most senior-level intelligence product. At times, Curlee said, she had to withhold information to ensure she was not committing a felony by sharing it with an unauthorized person.

“People who are supposed to be running policy, overseeing critical national programs, are unable to get access to information,” she said. “It would not have been impossible to imagine that a foreign adversary of the United States would see that as a window of opportunity to do something. And they would have found a government crippled at the senior most level by its own decisions.”

Curlee pleaded with some of the ousted NSC officers to return. “I’m saying, do it for me. We’re drowning here. And they all came back, all the people they humiliated, because we’re public servants. That’s what we do,” she said. Senior officials continued to tell her she was “indispensable” — until she wasn’t.

Back at the CIA, Curlee watched as the administration’s shunning of intelligence experts played out in Iran. “Most of what has gone wrong was foreseeable and had been previously assessed as a likely consequence for any war with Iran,” she said. The administration lacked an evacuation plan for the half a million Americans living in the Middle East when strikes began in February 2026, she said, and appeared unprepared for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz. When the US asked European nations for help reopening the strait, those nations refused, Curlee said, because the administration had done little to consult allies before the war.

“When you tell our allies and partners, we don’t care, we don’t need you and we insult them and their leaders, then we launch the war and it turns out we need their help, it’s the worst possible sequencing,” Curlee said.

It could get much worse, she warned: “An administration seeking to salve the humiliation of losing a war with the Iranians, which we are doing, could try to find some new conflict they can engage in to bolster the president’s ego or his odd expansionist inclination. So I’d be very concerned with where they start a conflict next, in our hemisphere especially.”

Curlee continued her White House work even as Trump’s anti-trans orders stripped her of insurance coverage for estrogen and revoked her passport with a “female” marker. In February 2025, more than 100 intelligence officers were fired over their participation in a group LGBTQ+ chat, including two officers who had previously told her they had joined the CIA because of her anonymous essay presenting the agency as trans-friendly.

In March 2025, Loomer posted about a “transgender, Biden holdover” still working in the NSC. Curlee was fired. It was reported soon after that Loomer had met with the president and urged him to fire “disloyal” intelligence officials, and the National Security Agency head was subsequently removed, the Guardian reported. Loomer did not respond to an inquiry.

Curlee returned to the White House on the Monday after her firing to help finish a budget and prepare others to take over her portfolio. “It was absolutely not a problem for this administration to rely on and ask a trans woman who they knew was trans to continue serving them in a capacity of great sensitivity at the highest levels, including briefing this president, as long as it was secret,” she said.

Asked whether she felt moral conflict about working for Trump, Curlee said: “Every day was hard. I won’t lie. I thought about it a lot. But at the time, I still felt it was my duty to serve and try to prevent the worst from happening, and it was just our culture.”

After Curlee returned to the CIA, the attacks on intelligence officials escalated. In May 2025, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired the two highest-ranking National Intelligence Council officials after the council released an assessment on a Venezuelan gang that contradicted the president’s narratives, Curlee said. Last August, Gabbard ousted one of the CIA’s senior Russia experts who had reportedly been involved in a decade-old assessment on Russian election interference.

“It’s an attack on the messengers,” Curlee said. “You had a purge of a currently serving officer who was one of our best, for simply having had the integrity to speak the truth a decade before. If that person can be purged, what hope do you have if you’re a junior officer?”

This politicization of intelligence went beyond a president cherrypicking assessments to match policy aims, Curlee said: “This was direct retaliation against the officers.” The impact, she said, was experts leaving government or self-censoring. “Shooting the messenger results in the message not being delivered,” she said.

The administration’s war on “DEI” had pushed out women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people and was part of a broader “desire to purge from government service people who are the wrong kind of person,” she said. “The chilling effect includes cis people saying, ‘This isn’t the kind of place where I want to spend my life and risk so much, because this is a place that is persecuting some of my colleagues for who they are.’”

Curlee left the CIA in May 2026. The government would only issue her a “male” passport, making work overseas untenable, and the restrictions on her bathroom use had become intolerable, she said. She is now a public service fellow at Lawfare, a nonprofit publication focused on national security.

Curlee said she felt an obligation to come forward to expose the administration’s national security failures. “Thinking back to myself as a kid, what a tremendous difference it would have made to know someone like me existed, who could have a big, amazing life with a family and brief presidents,” she said. The administration was attacking trans people as a “small enemy within” in an effort to distract from Trump’s failures, she added: “The only thing I can do to help fight this caricature … is to tell my story, which I think shows the lie of what they’re saying.”

But months after her departure, the administration continues to honor Curlee’s legacy. Inside the museum at CIA headquarters, a photo of Curlee still remains on the walls. It hangs above a bathroom that Curlee was banned from using.

The White House responded to Curlee’s claims with a brief statement, calling her a “Biden-era appointee” whose end date was scheduled for mid-2025. “President Trump … can remove any executive branch official at his discretion,” wrote spokesperson Anna Kelly. “Anyone who writes a 3,000-word op-ed bragging about themselves while attacking the President clearly doesn’t belong in public service,” Kelly said.