Tulsi Gabbard has five puppet masters. Worry most about the first

Gabbard’s tragedy is that striving to think freely does not mean succeeding. It requires the courage to reject the conventional wisdom around you. Photo: Reuters

It was Tulsi Gabbard herself, in a surprising rhetorical feint, who during her senate hearing provided the tersest case against her nomination for director of national intelligence. Her critics, she said, trying to sound derisive, are "accusing me of being Trump's puppet, Putin's puppet, Assad's puppet, a guru's puppet, Modi's puppet, not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters." But is that really so absurd?

Here are those putative puppet masters in order: First comes President Donald Trump, who wants Gabbard to coordinate and oversee all 18 agencies in the sprawling bureaucratic tundra called the "intelligence community." Next on the list is Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose propaganda — especially regarding his war of aggression against Ukraine — Gabbard has often parroted. Third is Bashar al-Assad, the former dictator of Syria and Putin ally who has tortured, gassed and killed his own people, and who also won odd helpings of sympathy from Gabbard, who even visited him a couple of times.

The guru in fourth place is Chris Butler, a former surfer, yogi and devotee of the Hare Krishna movement, who in the 1970s founded his own Hindu-inspired spiritual sect in Hawaii, Gabbard's home state. Like her parents and husband, Gabbard belongs to that movement and reveres Butler as "guru dev" (divine teacher), even if she won't go as far as other members who apparently sprinkle his toenail clippings into their food. Thanks to that Hindu connection, she's also close to Narendra Modi, the hyper-nationalist "Hindutva" prime minister of India, who rounds out the list of puppet masters.

All that makes for an eccentric resume, at least when compared to the type that usually interviews to be America's spy chief. But should it cast a pall over Gabbard's other accomplishments? She was also (at age 21) the youngest ever state legislator in Hawaii, and later a Congresswoman. In the military, she did a tour in Iraq, witnessing one of those "regime-change wars" that she so decries — a war, no less, that was based on faulty intelligence. She remains a lieutenant colonel in the army reserve.

If you ask her detractors — most famously Hillary Clinton, who faced her when both sought the Democratic nomination for president — all of that is beside the point, because Gabbard could be a Russian asset. Why else would she have regurgitated so many conspiracy theories that one usually hears on Russia Today? Several senators, Republicans as well as Democrats, pressed her to explain why she so often chose to believe America's adversaries over America's spies, the ones she would oversee.

Allow me to come to Gabbard's aid by invoking a variant of Hanlon's razor, an adage in the philosophical tradition of Murphy's Law: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by naivete. Gabbard, it seems, has spent her life trying to be a free thinker. That may be why she's never been comfortable as a member of a tribe: As a Democrat, she once endorsed Bernie Sanders; now she's gone Trumpy — try to match that.

What made me think that she's authentic, albeit often misguided, was the sore subject of Edward Snowden, which dominated the hearing more than any other controversy. He's the former intelligence contractor who leaked reams of secret documents showing that the US practiced mass surveillance in ways that were at times unethical or illegal, but also exposing American agents and endangering their lives. (Snowden is now in Russian exile and has become a citizen there.)

To some, including Gabbard in the past, those leaks made Snowden a whistleblower and a hero. To others, including virtually everybody in the intelligence community and on both sides of that committee, Snowden committed high treason. In tense stand-offs, senators wanted Gabbard to retract the adjective "brave" with which she has described Snowden and to brand him a "traitor."

She held firm, not retracting but acknowledging that what he did was illegal and that she must prevent it from ever happening again, by ensuring that whistleblowers have legal channels that they can trust. That is a mature answer, because both can be true at the same time: Snowden did put lives and national security at risk, which is criminal; he was also brave, because he felt that he had no other choice in exposing overreach.

Gabbard's tragedy is that striving to think freely does not mean succeeding. It requires the courage to reject the conventional wisdom around you. That's hardly a bad thing in a spy agency. The downside is that running away from groupthink sometimes also means running into the arms of quacks and demagogues, including wannabe tsars or gurus.

This raises a question, which wafted through the room in this as in other hearings of Trump nominees who are flagrantly unqualified (while Gabbard was being grilled, Kash Patel sat in another senate room, defending his nomination to lead the FBI). As one Democratic senator put it, turning from Gabbard to his committee: "Can't we do better?"

Gabbard is an interesting and talented woman. She could be serving in the army, advocating for Hawaii or chanting Sanskrit mantras somewhere, in which case I'd join her out of curiosity. But you wouldn't normally pick her to decide what classified information the president hears, and what gets shared with which allies. Ask yourself whether MI6, the BND or the DGSE (the British, German and French spy agencies) would feel more or less comfortable giving their tips to the US if Gabbard became DNI.

That brings us back to puppet master number one. If Trump had wanted to find the most qualified spy chief in the country, there were plenty of candidates he could have picked. That may not be his objective, though. He seems to view the intelligence community as he regards the rest of the executive branch: as a redoubt of the deep state which needs maximal disruption, and indeed chaos, at the end of which every organ of state does his bidding and goes after his enemies, foreign or domestic. Gabbard could fit the bill.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.