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Allies, Intelligence, and a Fraying American Center

Transcript – assisted by AI

[00:00:00]
Lauren Anderson: Something is changing in our country. And most people feel it before they can explain it.
[00:00:12]
Lauren Anderson: Welcome to The Steady State Sentinel. I’m Lauren Anderson. I served nearly three decades in the FBI, focused on national security in both operational and executive leadership roles at home and overseas. I now work in geopolitics and governance with a focus on institutional integrity.
So, as we get into tonight’s episode, if you haven’t had the opportunity to listen to our recent episode on why an apolitical FBI is vital to national security, I’d encourage you to do so. It provides important context for tonight’s conversation.
And my guest is Phil Gurski, and I am delighted Phil is here. He is our first international guest. Phil is a former senior strategic analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He is the president of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting.
[00:01:06]
Lauren Anderson: And host of the podcast Spies Like Us, where I was honored to be a guest late last year to talk about the FBI. Phil is the author of multiple books on terrorism and intelligence, including a forthcoming book marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
Bill and his colleagues hosted me in Ottawa last fall at the Pillar Society, and we’ve had quite a few candid conversations since then. We both know that alliances between the U.S. and other countries aren’t abstract. They’re built over years, and they can be strengthened or weakened by who’s in the room and who’s no longer in the room.
Today, we’re going to ask a hard question during this conversation: when America’s closest allies look at the United States right now—at our institutions, our intelligence and law enforcement communities, and our leadership—what do they see, and what are they assessing?
[00:02:00]
Lauren Anderson: So, Phil, I’m delighted that you are with us today. And before we get into our present discussion, I always love to start and say to everybody: what drew you into your work in the first place? Why did you want to do this?
[00:02:00]
Phil Gurski: Well, first and foremost, Lauren, thank you so much for inviting me onto your podcast. You were a wonderful guest here in Ottawa last October. We’ve got nothing but rave reviews for your candor in talking about what’s happening in your country right now in the security, intelligence, and law enforcement community. We’ve become friends, which is great. You know, life takes amazing turns sometimes.
So I began my career actually not with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but with Communication Security Establishment, or CSE, which is the Canadian signals intelligence organization, the equivalent of NSA in your country.
[00:02:52]
Phil Gurski: And a long time ago—decades and decades ago—I was at university in my hometown of London, Ontario. It was during the early 1980s recession, which I’m sure you remember was not a great time in the West. Interest rates were through the roof. I think my brother once signed a mortgage for 22 percent on his house.
I was an arts graduate from Western University, and jobs were not plentiful at the time. Somebody graduated with a master’s in Spanish. It didn’t look good. And I was despairing for what to do. I had a part-time job at the local YMCA, which kind of put me through university. But I decided that, you know, staring at wrinkled old men naked in the shower for the next 25 years was not going to be an excellent career choice.
[00:03:38]
Phil Gurski: And so I decided to look for further work. And lo and behold, in the student placement office up on campus, there was a very plain, no-logo sort of piece of cardboard that says, “Department of National Defense wants you.” It’s almost kind of like “Uncle Sam wants you,” right? But without the fancy graphics.
And one of the categories they were hiring for was linguist. Well, I was a linguist. I studied five languages at Western. I was taking linguistics courses. So I thought, wow. And the summer before, I worked as a student translator in Ottawa from Spanish to English. I thought this is a great opportunity.
And so I won’t bore you with the details, but I applied. And after, of course, a long process of being vetted, security clearance, etc., etc.
[00:04:24]
Phil Gurski: I showed up in Ottawa, what I thought was National Defence, and I get this indoctrination briefing by this big bear of a man who was a former RCMP officer, scared the living daylights out of me. And he basically said, “We’re not D&D, son. We’re signals intelligence,” to which my response was, “Excuse me? First of all, what is signals intelligence?”
Because, of course, this is pre-internet days, Lauren. CSE did not exist on paper—well, I’m sorry, did not exist in the public mind—in 1983. And so I entered the world of intelligence purely through dumb luck. And I spent 17 and a half years with CSE as a multilingual foreign intelligence analyst, working in about 10 different languages, and then got an opportunity to move to the security service,
[00:05:15]
Phil Gurski: again, serendipitously, as an Iranian specialist back in 2001. And then nine months later, 9/11 happened. And because I also had Arabic and I had a good background in Middle Eastern history and culture, I quickly morphed into a jihadi specialist, which is what I spent my career doing at the security service.
You know, you can’t plan these things sometimes. I think it’s a little easier now in both of our countries in the sense that our agencies are a little more out there in terms of their recruiting campaigns. There are websites, there are places to go. But way back then—and I’m sure you had a similar experience when you joined the Bureau—
[00:06:06]
Phil Gurski: they weren’t obvious. It wasn’t quite as secretive as the old British method of tapping you on the shoulder at Cambridge or Oxford and saying, “We might have a job for you.” But I ended up in Ottawa and spent 32 and a half years with a career that, in all honesty—and I say this to this day—I had the luckiest job on the planet. I had a job that I couldn’t wait to get to every morning because it was so exciting and it was so important.
[00:06:06]
Lauren Anderson: It truly is. And you’re right about how agencies were at that time. I mean, NSA in the United States was always known as “No Such Agency” for a long period of time because for a long period of time, you had to operate that way. And, you know, I think we could probably both argue the merits of having that kind of discretion as it was then.
And now, sometimes, you can’t even stay on top of things because there’s so much information out there. And I think it’s tough to manage because I think we’d both argue too that there are
[00:06:45]
Lauren Anderson: certain kinds of information and intelligence that need to stay hidden, need to stay quiet.
[00:06:45]
Phil Gurski: I think, you know, I hold to the maxim that you don’t discuss sources, you don’t discuss methods. Those are sacrosanct. I even worked as a cryptanalyst for a year, and I will never talk about what systems we were working on and what systems we successfully were able to read, because that betrays a very, very sensitive series of operations, similar with your career with the Bureau. You never disclose your sources, unless they end up testifying for the prosecution in a criminal trial—that’s a different matter.
But if it’s not sources and it’s not methods, I think there’s a lot of benefit to talking about our careers and what our agencies did.
[00:07:24]
Phil Gurski: First of all, it can help attract really good Canadians and Americans that want to do similar jobs. And secondly, you talked about the information flow. There’s so much crap out there, disinformation, about what we do and why we do it, that formers such as ourselves—if we convey stories about what we did—it can help dispel a lot of the disinformation and misinformation.
I’m not saying it’s going to solve it, because that’s a huge problem. But I do think that our citizenry has a right to know some of it. I mean, we are civil servants. We are paid from the public purse. And we are doing the best job we can to help keep our nations and our allies safe.
[00:08:01]
Phil Gurski: And so I think coming out and playing with some information—again, not compromising sources or methods—is, in the end, a positive outcome and a positive change we’ve seen over the past couple of years.
[00:08:01]
Lauren Anderson: I completely agree with you. And it is a careful balance. And that’s actually a perfect segue, because a lot of people think that, out in the Canadian public, the American public, that we operate within our agencies, and I think they don’t really appreciate and haven’t had the opportunity to learn about the importance of those liaison relationships.
And you spent decades inside CSIS, deeply integrated into what we know as the Five Eyes partnership, and particularly with the U.S. So for our listeners who may not be familiar with that concept or the absolute criticality of our relationships,
[00:08:51]
Lauren Anderson: can you briefly explain what Five Eyes is and why it matters?
[00:08:51]
Phil Gurski: Thank you. Coming out of the Second World War, not surprisingly, there was a very strong Western alliance that fought the Axis powers—so Japan, Italy, and Germany—and we were victorious by, you know, May of ’45 against Germany and August of ’45 against Japan.
And, of course, those alliances were very strong. I mean, you look at D-Day, for example. It’s not a coincidence that the three armies that landed on the beaches in Normandy were Canadian, American, and British. The plans had gone through years of preparation in England. And, you know, you’ve probably seen all the movies I’ve seen too—the landing at the beaches and the number of soldiers that we lost.
[00:09:35]
Phil Gurski: But at the end of the day, that was the turning point of World War II, and those alliances were strengthened that day. And so, as a consequence, the alliances went forward.
And it should be mentioned, Lauren, that even during the war, before the creation of the Five Eyes itself, Britain, Canada, and the United States shared some very sensitive intelligence on our adversaries, primarily the Germans and the Japanese. In fact, there was a sort of incipient signals intelligence unit in Canada called the Examination Unit that was working on German and Japanese cipher. And of course, everyone knows about Bletchley Park—the famous Enigma breaking by the Polish mathematicians working with Alan Turing. But both our countries, too, had a major role to play in that.
[00:10:15]
Phil Gurski: So after the war, the immediate, I think, logical alliance was between your country and the United Kingdom. So there was an agreement that came out shortly after the war. We joined that alliance, I believe, if my memory serves me correctly, in the early ’50s, I think 1952 officially. And then eventually, two other countries, Australia and New Zealand, were brought in, and it’s now called the Five Eyes.
It’s a logical pairing. First of all, A, we’re all English-speaking, although in Canada, of course, it’s both English and French. But we have similar culture. We have a similar history. We have a similar worldview. We fought on the same side in two world wars. And there’s a sense of community, I think, amongst those partners that is very strong.
[00:10:59]
Phil Gurski: And that led to, I think, a level of trust that we could share very sensitive intelligence amongst those five partners. And for your listeners, we do share very sensitive intelligence—signals intelligence, human, imagery, you name it—amongst the five partners.
Now, there will always be intelligence that’s too sensitive to share. You guys call it “no foreign.” We call it “Canadian eyes only.” There are other terms, I’m sure, in the other three partners. But in my time in SIGINT and HUMINT, I was always very impressed with the sheer volume of information that was shared. And that sharing enabled us to work on investigations, to produce intelligence that, at the end of the day, protected our interests and, in some cases, protected public safety.
[00:11:50]
Phil Gurski: I call it the gold standard of sharing, Lauren. And you know from your time with the Bureau, and my time with CSIS, there are other partners besides the Five Eyes. We work a lot with Western European partners, even partners in Africa and Asia as well, depending on the circumstances. But those relationships will never be as close, I don’t think, as the Five Eyes partnership has.
And again, it speaks to a shared vision of what we want the world to be. We want the world to be free. We want it to be democratic. We want it to be liberal in outlook. And these intelligence agencies, they work very hard to provide decision-makers and policymakers with the information required to help protect that kind of world.
[00:12:29]
Phil Gurski: And it’s worked very well.
[00:12:29]
Lauren Anderson: And it—
[00:12:29]
Phil Gurski: Yeah, it has. Until recently, maybe.
[00:12:29]
Lauren Anderson: Until recently. Yeah. No, no, no, I agree with you. In fact, I would argue that all of our countries—and the world writ large—is much safer because of these relationships that we’ve had for so many decades now. I think that’s something that, until you’re inside, you don’t appreciate. And that’s something that I kind of love to stand outside and holler out to the world, is we are so much better when we’re together.
[00:13:18]
Phil Gurski: And it’s funny, Lauren—maybe it’s not so big in your country, but it’s obviously an issue here. I know it’s an issue in academia in the United States—this whole anti-colonialism and talking about colonial powers and people trying to cling to the past kind of thing and laying all the ills of the world on colonialism.
Yeah, a lot of bad things happened under colonialism. But, you know, we’re not the source of all evil in the world. And the Five Eyes is not an effort to recreate colonial powers in parts of the world. It’s an effort to share information that can keep us collectively safer.
And I have no tolerance for people who say, well, you know, you shouldn’t be sharing with these countries because of what they’ve done historically. I’m saying I’m sharing with them because of what they’re doing now, and the fact that we rely on you, you rely on us, we rely on the Brits, et cetera, et cetera. This is a really good development. This is a good club to be in.
[00:13:57]
Phil Gurski: Being on the outside would, I think, make us collectively weaker. And so I would hope that the leadership within the Five Eyes—at least, put it this way—I know that within the intelligence and law enforcement community, the relations are still very, very strong. My concern is at the political level. And I’m sure we’re going to get into that. But I think that operationally, it’s pretty strong.
[00:13:57]
Lauren Anderson: Yeah, I agree. And we are going to get into that. And I just have one more bit of a kind of a layup question for everybody to understand. And that is, we do have these great relationships, but one place where Canada is different is Canada does not have an external intelligence service modeled on MI6 and certainly the CIA.
[00:14:39]
Lauren Anderson: I wonder, when you look at that, as we move into talking about the relationship, how has that framed—if it has—your relationship with the United States in the intelligence world?
[00:14:39]
Phil Gurski: It’s a great question. So to bring your listeners a bit of background as to why we don’t: the security service, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, was created in 1984. It used to be part of the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was called the Security Service, kind of like MI5, within the law enforcement organization.
For reasons I won’t get into because it’s very complicated, it was decided to carve that function out of the RCMP and make it a civilian agency as opposed to a law enforcement organization.
[00:15:20]
Phil Gurski: And so CSIS saw the light of day in June of 1984. I started at CSE in July of ’83. So I was there at the birth of CSIS and worked very closely with them right from day one.
The powers that be at the time decided that they wanted to basically replicate the security service and give it a foreign intelligence mandate, but very limited in scope. So it’s actually a misconception. CSIS is also a foreign intelligence organization.
Great point.
The mandarins at the time, when they drafted legislation, put this really bizarre clause in the CSIS Act. It’s called Section 16. CSIS has the authority to collect foreign intelligence, but wait for it—only within Canada, which kind of sounds like an oxymoron if you think about it.
[00:16:09]
Phil Gurski: How can it be foreign if you’re collecting it within Canada? Well, there are ways, and I won’t get into the details. But it’s important to realize that, from a security intelligence perspective, CSIS has no barriers. It can go anywhere in the universe to collect security intelligence. We’re not constrained to Canada. It’s only with respect to foreign intelligence that we can’t collect outside of Canada.
And of course, the signals intelligence organization is by definition a foreign intelligence organization, albeit signals, not human. And so, you know, it does collect foreign intelligence.
I don’t think it complicates matters. I mean, my dealings with the CIA only stem from my time at CSIS. I was very familiar with NSA for 17 and a half years. And then, when I joined the security service, of course, that was 9/11.
[00:16:48]
Phil Gurski: And, you know, again, the sharing of information—the floodgates had opened. We were all sharing in real time because we had to. You can’t let 3,000 people die in your closest friend and neighbor and not help them figure out who’s who in the zoo and try to go after these people, right?
So I don’t think that the lack of a dedicated foreign human service has jeopardized our relationship with the Five Eyes. And you’re right, we are the only one. Even the Kiwis have one. Their service is a hybrid. There’s ASIO and there’s ASIS in Australia. There’s MI5, MI6. And of course, there’s the Bureau and the Agency.
There’s still a debate now, Lauren, on whether we should create one. You don’t create these things overnight.
[00:17:30]
Phil Gurski: You see academics and policy wonks talking about this periodically. I think you should just remove the “within Canada” clause from CSIS and make it a hybrid service. We’re already good at recruiting human sources. That’s what we do for a living. So you’ve got half the organization working on foreign intelligence and half working on security intelligence. It’s not complicated. It makes sense.
[00:17:30]
Lauren Anderson: And another part of the relationship, I think people may not recognize, and as we start talking about what’s going on today, is that also overseas, you know, the FBI has positions called legal attaches, including in Canada and in over 50 countries around the world. And similarly, your folks are deployed as well. So we’re not only working together in the United States and Canada, but those relationships become
[00:18:15]
Lauren Anderson: important because it’s another trusted partner in third countries around the world. And I think that’s also been a very successful partnership.
[00:18:15]
Phil Gurski: I recall one story. When I arrived at CSIS in 2001—this was prior to 9/11—I attended a presentation by a dear friend of mine, who worked for the RCMP and then for the Security Service and then for CSIS. He was in Nairobi in 1998 when the attack took place—that was the al-Qaeda attack against the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
And he was actually in a meeting with his CIA counterpart at the time when the bombs went off. And he tells this story about how they were blown across the room from the shock wave. And then basically his job was to do anything possible to help your embassy and the staff and other Americans in Kenya
[00:19:02]
Phil Gurski: get to the bottom of what happened, provide any assistance possible—medical, whatever it took—to try to get over this.
So yeah, those trusted relationships, as you said, work right across the world. And they work because of the Five Eyes alliance. And they work because we know each other. We don’t always agree on things. There was a lot of disagreement. Canada did not go into Iraq in 2003 under President Bush. We were the one that did not agree to go in. The Brits went in, the Australians went in. But overall, we share the same goals. We share basically the same training. I mean, we cross-train all the time, right? In each other’s organizations, we have secondees. We even have people who get married in other organizations.
[00:19:45]
Phil Gurski: I know of at least two examples of Americans and Canadians in SIGINT that ended up marrying each other.
[00:19:45]
Lauren Anderson: There you go.
[00:19:45]
Phil Gurski: And we share values.
[00:19:45]
Lauren Anderson: Absolutely.
[00:19:45]
Phil Gurski: We share values as humans and we share values as democracies. And I think that’s really important.
And I, you know, to pivot a little bit about today—and you and I have talked about this on multiple occasions over the year-plus we’ve known each other—is when you look at what’s happening right now in the United States broadly, and then of course with the agency that you’ve had most of the work with over your career, what do you see? What does this mean for you? What do you think it means for the relationship between the United States and Canada in the intelligence and law enforcement sector?
[00:20:28]
Phil Gurski: Okay, it’s a great question. So as I said earlier, I’ve been assured by my contacts who are still within the security and intelligence community that at the operational level, it’s the status quo. Everything is working fine, because we know each other, we share briefs, we’ve had cases.
About a year and a half ago, there was a Pakistani student on a visa here in Canada who tried to cross the border into New York State. He wanted to go to New York and carry out an attack against Jewish targets in retribution for what Israel was doing in the Gaza Strip. And the FBI and CSIS and the RCMP shared intelligence information all the time, and the guy was arrested at the border. So he never got anywhere near New York City.
[00:21:05]
Phil Gurski: That shows that at the operational level, things are working well.
[00:21:05]
Lauren Anderson: Right.
[00:21:05]
Phil Gurski: The problem is—and it’s not just in your country—what worries me is what we call the politicization of intelligence.
You know as well as I do that we’re messengers. We’re advisory bodies. We collect information. We process it. We assess it for veracity. We assess it for reliability. We analyze it. We bring in other types of information. We put it through the blender. We figure out, you know, what does all this stuff mean? And then we send it up the line to senior people so that they can be in the know as to what’s happening on X, Y, or Z. We can’t tell them what to do with it. We can’t tell them to use it, not use it, line your birdcage with it.
[00:21:51]
Phil Gurski: That’s not our job. We’re the messengers. We’re not the implementers of the intelligence.
What I have noticed—and again, it’s not just in your country—is that there are times where people in very high positions don’t like the message and then attempt to shoot the messenger. I’ll give you a couple examples, one from my country and one from yours, if you’re familiar with it.
We had an inquiry a couple years ago into Chinese interference in our federal elections. And my former organization, CSIS, has been warning for 40 years about this. Forty years about this. And somebody—we don’t know who—leaked a very sensitive intelligence summary to The Globe and Mail, which is a main newspaper in Toronto, saying this is happening. And it caused a big scandal.
[00:22:39]
Phil Gurski: Why was this leaked? What are they saying? And the first thing that came out from the prime minister’s office was, “We don’t want our security intelligence service to be spreading anti-Asian racism in Canada.”
We thought, this has nothing to do with anti-racism. We’re talking about a foreign power trying to influence our elections, in much the same way the Russians sought to influence elections in your country in 2016 and 2020.
Then we had a big inquiry into this, and it turned out that several intelligence reports that had been sent up the line were sent back for rewording because the message was uncomfortable, because they didn’t want to hear what China was up to. And yet we’ve been saying this, again, since the ’80s—that they’ve been up to this.
[00:23:21]
Phil Gurski: Similar in your country, you’ve got agencies like the National Security Agency, the DIA, talking about, for example, bomb assessments after the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites last year. The White House said “complete obliteration.” They said, “Excuse me, sir, we looked at the imagery and we’ve got intelligence on the ground. We don’t think that the obliteration is as complete as you said.”
[00:23:21]
Lauren Anderson: Thank you.
[00:23:21]
Phil Gurski: And what was the immediate reaction? “Well, what do you know?” In other words, the White House decided—
[00:23:21]
Lauren Anderson: Because it’s politically inconvenient.
[00:23:21]
Phil Gurski: That’s right. The White House had a firm position that the airstrikes had destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, and to have your intelligence services say, “Well, that’s not what the evidence shows, sir,” was frankly inconvenient.
[00:24:02]
Phil Gurski: And then, given, I’ll leave it this way, the mercurial personality of your president, he rejected the message completely. And that’s really scary.
Like I said, intelligence agencies are there to provide really good information that can help us figure out who’s who in the zoo and what we should do about it. We’re not decision-makers.
[00:24:02]
Lauren Anderson: Right. And the other—
[00:24:02]
Phil Gurski: I’m sorry. Go ahead.
[00:24:02]
Lauren Anderson: No, I was going to say, what we don’t do is craft our product to suit a particular individual or a particular political party. We are neutral intelligence gatherers, law enforcement gatherers. We provide the best product possible.
[00:24:53]
Phil Gurski: And as I wrote in an op-ed piece, I said, you know, if I write a report, this is not Phil Gurski’s report. This report goes through umpteen levels of verification. In fact, when I used to write things on counterterrorism, it went right back to the investigators themselves. If I was misrepresenting what they thought or what their sources were telling them, I wanted to find out. And so it went through many levels of checking before. And when it went out of the building, it went out of the building with a CSIS crest on it, not Phil Gurski’s photo on it. It was the best product available from—
similar with the FBI. If the FBI stamp’s on that, that’s the FBI’s position on X, Y, or Z. You’re not writing it to please somebody. You’re writing to inform somebody.
[00:24:53]
Lauren Anderson: You’re right.
[00:25:29]
Lauren Anderson: And the other thing that you mentioned that I really want to go back on, because I think it’s really important for people who are trying to understand more about how we operate, is that partnership between you as the analyst and the expertise from your role, and me sitting on the operational side.
And I think this is sometimes not clearly understood—how much more effective we are when both those pieces are together. And I think, when we look at some of the hollowing out that’s going on in the FBI right now, how troublesome that is, because we also know that in the work that we lived in, it takes a long time to get good at what you’re doing.
[00:26:06]
Lauren Anderson: It takes at least five years to really get your legs under you when you’re talking about the intelligence world and counterterrorism. So I wonder if you could comment on that a little bit, expand upon that, because I think that’s a really important point.
[00:26:06]
Phil Gurski: Yeah, I’m glad you raised that. So as you mentioned, I mean, I was a foreign intelligence analyst, then I became a counterterrorism analyst when I joined the security service. So I was not an intelligence officer. I didn’t go recruit human sources. I didn’t run investigations. But one of the things I was grateful for were the people with whom I worked at CSIS. They saw my background. They saw my specialization. My knowledge had been built up over more than two decades.
[00:26:44]
Phil Gurski: And they said, “You know your stuff.” And so I was one of the very few analysts that was regularly invited to source debriefs. So they would say, “Okay, I’m going to debrief my source in this place at this time. I want you there because I know you can ask questions that I can’t.”
So I’m not sure how it works in the Bureau, Lauren, but in the security service, most of the investigators are what we call generalists, which means you’re hired, you’re taught how to run a source, recruit a source, do an operation, but you might work China for two years and then work Russia and then work organized crime for two years.
[00:27:26]
Lauren Anderson: That’s true. That can shift around. I will say that in the Bureau on the counterintelligence side, people often tend to stay there, and counterterrorism—
But your point is so well taken because back decades ago, I was really fortunate to be part of a team involved with debriefing a terrorist who agreed to cooperate. But I couldn’t have done it without the analyst. Her name was Theresa Felix. I will forever be indebted to her.
But to have her in the room along with this terrorist we were debriefing, and another agent, and a translator, was so important because she, like you, was able to sit back and say, “You know what, Lauren? I heard him say this, and I think this means this, and I think tomorrow, when you go back, you need to probe a little bit further in this area so we can build upon that.”
And that relationship, to me—
[00:28:10]
Lauren Anderson: anybody who doesn’t see the value in it is missing the point and is not going to be as effective as he or she could be.
[00:28:10]
Phil Gurski: That’s so true. I mean, I was even brought in to train human sources. So if we wanted to run somebody into what we called “thought of terrorism” cells, I was brought in to say, “Okay, this is how you talk. This is what you look like. This is what you say. This is what you believe. This is the ideology you want.”
Because again, the investigators, in some cases, were quite junior and didn’t have that knowledge. I was brought in to do debriefings of terrorists in prison who claimed, “Oh, I’ve de-radicalized. I’ve changed my ways. Can you let me out of prison now?”
[00:28:43]
Phil Gurski: Well, no, we can’t, because you haven’t changed your ways.
I was even brought in to interview the moms—the moms of dead terrorists—which I must say, in all of my career, you sit across the room from a mother and you see in the background she’s got photos of her kid in elementary school and secondary school, and now her kid is dead as a terrorist, and he’s killed people somewhere abroad, and now she’s the mom of the dead terrorist.
And you’re talking to her, trying to understand: what happened to your son? When did this start? When were the changes occurring? How did they occur? What did you notice? What did you not notice? Who did he hang out with?
You know, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
[00:29:23]
Phil Gurski: And these poor women are trying to keep it together, right? Because not only have they lost their sons, but they know their sons have taken part in heinous acts of terrorism that have killed innocent people.
But I was very fortunate in that sense. And I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s a team effort. We would also bring in, as in your case, we’d bring in the linguists, the people that we would hire, and they would go through intercepted communications under—we would have to get a federal court warrant to intercept communications, obviously, in a different language. And the linguists, they got to know the targets as well as anybody else did. And you want them there because they can detect those subtleties
[00:30:00]
Phil Gurski: that other people can’t, because it’s almost like you’re listening to your family members after a period of time.
[00:30:00]
Lauren Anderson: It’s absolutely true. You can’t function if you don’t have that entire team together and understanding a threat.
So, considering all that, and considering a little bit of what we’ve talked about, what worries you the most right now about the path that the FBI is on, that the CIA is on? What does this portend for the relationship with Canada and with other allies, and what worries you about it?
[00:30:45]
Phil Gurski: A couple of things. So strictly internally, I read more and more reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post, that the FBI has fired, dismissed, whatever, sidelined X number of people because of whatever.
The most recent one is a whole bunch of people that—I believe this was a Washington Post article—that I shared with you. The director fired a bunch of people who were working on Iran, so the possibility that Iran might have agents in your country that will retaliate because of the bombing going on right now in that country. They’re all fired because they worked on the Mar-a-Lago investigation a couple of years ago where the president was alleged to have had classified documents that he shouldn’t have had in his house.
And that’s pure vindictiveness. There’s no just cause for doing that.
[00:31:25]
Phil Gurski: So I worry about the bleeding of expertise. There’s one thing that I know that, you know, when I worked in counterterrorism, we would meet regularly. In fact, I spearheaded a brand new group amongst the Five Eyes to look at radicalization patterns. What did we learn from our investigations? What were the behavioral indicators?
And we were having experts. We’d get together two, three days—once in Ottawa, once in Washington, once in Canberra—and we’d sit around a couple of days and we would just go through what we knew. And having those experts in the room with you—good God, I learned so much. Well, I had my own sort of narrow view on what the Canadian landscape was like. Now I have the British landscape and the Australian landscape and the American landscape. And it made me a better analyst.
[00:32:06]
Phil Gurski: Because now I could see things more clearly, because they’d experienced things that I hadn’t seen.
What worries me is if those experts are all fired for reasons that don’t make any sense, that kind of exchange ends. So that’s very worrisome.
The other thing, of course, is that, you know, what, a year ago or so, there were rumors—and I forget the individual’s name, some minor figure in the Trump administration—even threatened to kick Canada out of the Five Eyes. It was a completely offhanded remark that came completely out of left field. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever. And of course it was denied and hushed up later on, kind of thing.
You know, if we’re going to have this politicization of intelligence and intelligence sharing get that much worse—
[00:32:47]
Phil Gurski: I mean, first of all, I don’t know how you kick somebody out of the Five Eyes. I don’t think there’s any protocol for doing that. But certainly, the United States could choose to turn the tap off. You did it against New Zealand in the ’80s, when there was a controversy over a U.S. warship that was docking in Auckland, and the policy was, you know, don’t ask, don’t tell about nuclear weapons on board, right? And the Kiwis said, “Well, you’re not docking until you tell us.” And the Americans said, “We’re not telling you. We’re going to cut off intelligence.” And they did for a period of time.
If we were to lose that access to American intelligence, it would have a tremendous impact on our ability to inform our decision-makers.
[00:33:19]
Phil Gurski: I mean, we have our own intelligence, and we still get it from the Brits and the Aussies and the New Zealanders. But the bottom line, Lauren, is Canada, given our size, is a net importer of intelligence, whereas I think the United States is a net exporter of intelligence. So losing that access would have a deleterious effect on our understanding of the situation around the world.
And at that point, it could start to affect joint operations as well. And, you know, we’ve bragged now for over a century—well, two centuries now—that we have the world’s longest undefended border. Until recently, people crossed pretty easily. I’m not going to cross anytime soon, for reasons I won’t get into.
[00:34:01]
Phil Gurski: I remember as a kid with my dad going to see the Tigers play in Detroit. And basically it was a wave and a smile at the border. That’s all you had. No passports, no ID, nothing.
So we do share information that keeps the border safe for both of our countries. And if this is going to be jeopardized because of the politicization and because of the vindictiveness of certain officials, it’s going to affect both of us. It’ll affect us because we’ll be missing the intelligence that you share with us. It’s going to affect the Americans because there’ll be a greater reluctance to share what we know with our American counterparts because, well, you’re not sharing with us, so why in heaven’s name—
[00:34:36]
Phil Gurski: It’d be like tariffs, right? You put tariffs on us, we’re going to put tariffs on you.
[00:34:36]
Lauren Anderson: Right. Well, and the thing is, everybody suffers with that.
[00:34:36]
Phil Gurski: Thank you. When that happens.
[00:34:36]
Lauren Anderson: And I think that’s the key point because we both know that political leaders come and go, and hopefully they come in with the best of intentions about what they want to do. But at the end of the day, the jobs that you and I had and the people that still do those jobs on a day-to-day basis do it out of patriotism, do it because they love their country, they want to make their country safe. And we both know that the people doing the job on the ground are not paying attention to the politics.
[00:35:15]
Lauren Anderson: They’re about getting the mission done. And so, as we’ve often said—and I think I shared with you when I was in France—the French didn’t agree with the choice to invade Iraq either, and I was so worried that they would stop sharing information. And it was the best feedback because what they said to me is, “Don’t worry. That’s the politicians. We still have a job to do in keeping the people in our countries and around the world safer. We’re going to continue to focus on that.”
And I think, if we can do that, that’s what keeps everybody in a better place. And I think, hopefully, hearing from you too is really important because it allows people to understand the mechanism and the importance of those relationships.
[00:35:58]
Phil Gurski: And it’s also unnecessary. I mean, the system was working fine. You know, again, I’ve seen incredibly sensitive source intelligence being shared back and forth over three decades. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Again, we’re going to have our disagreements, but it’s such a fluid relationship that we have. It’s almost seamless. You know, again, we have our liaison people in each other’s agency, but we also have people working in each other’s agencies and even working on files that normally they wouldn’t have access to because there’s that trust factor that’s there.
[00:36:46]
Phil Gurski: And even with you and I.
[00:36:46]
Lauren Anderson: Even with you and I, Phil, because we came from the environment we came in. Although we didn’t know each other personally while we were still working for our respective governments, we knew people in common. So that trust always is there. We inherently said, “I’m trusting him. I’m trusting her.”
[00:36:46]
Phil Gurski: Thank you.
[00:36:46]
Lauren Anderson: Because we spent so long recognizing that we were better together. And we assume that trust is there for the good until there’s a reason not to. And I think that’s an important point also, and a through-line that will continue for us probably for the rest of our lives.
[00:36:46]
Phil Gurski: I couldn’t agree with you more. I still have very close friendships with colleagues in Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States, even in some of the Western European partners with which I worked in counterterrorism over the years. They weren’t just colleagues. They became friends.
[00:37:36]
Phil Gurski: And, you know, those friendships are lasting. It’s because it worked well. And, you know, trust is earned. And this trust has been earned over the better part of almost—well, it’s not quite a century now—since the end of the Second World War.
You know, for three countries that died together on the beaches of Normandy to free Europe from tyranny—similar in Afghanistan, you know, when the president talked about nobody else was on the front lines in Afghanistan—I mean, people were justifiably angry. I mean, 164 Canadian soldiers died in Afghanistan. That’s not a small number for a country our size. To have that ignored and have that sort of poo-pooed or dismissed, it really hurts.
Americans, Canadians, Brits, Australians—we all fight together in those various wars.
[00:38:24]
Phil Gurski: And to insult the memory and the sacrifice that was made—
But, Lauren, it’s so unnecessary. I mean, there are other ways to score cheap political points. And you know as well as I do, that’s what politicians do. They want to score cheap points, right? But why in heaven’s name would you score cheap points when it comes to multilateral intelligence and military and law enforcement alliances? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
It’s almost like an own goal. Like you’re just cutting off your nose to spite your face in this regard. I hope this too shall pass. I don’t know. The alliance is far too important to founder. I hope we can get to the point where the trust levels are going to be re-established.
[00:39:14]
Phil Gurski: Like I said, at the ground level, the coalface level, I’m not too worried about that. It’s the higher levels that I think are going to take time. And as my prime minister said, if you break trust one day, it doesn’t reappear the next day. It’s going to take some time to rebuild that.
I have confidence, though, in our alliance. I have confidence that, as I said, as neighbors, as friends, we’ve been very close for—well—since the last time you tried to invade us in 1812.
[00:39:14]
Lauren Anderson: Well, I think that’s a perfect segue. So we want to start wrapping this up. But if you could build on that just a little, what, Phil, would you like to leave our listeners with?
[00:39:54]
Lauren Anderson: Is one thing or a couple things that you would really want people to understand about the importance of the liaison relationship and the alliances between the United States and Canada and with others?
[00:39:54]
Phil Gurski: Okay, I’ll put it real simple. The United States has no better or closer friend and ally than Canada. That’s been the case for centuries. We have our disagreements. There always is a latent anti-Americanism within Canada. It’s only because I think a lot of us, you know, we see you as a major power that we’re not. We’re very much a middle power.
But we visit each other’s countries. We do vacations in each other’s countries. You know, Canadians flee to Florida and Arizona when it’s minus 145 million degrees up here in wintertime, like it has this winter.
[00:40:41]
Phil Gurski: Although that too has been affected over the past couple of months, unfortunately.
But why would you want to harm such a close, mutually beneficial relationship? Whether we’re talking trade, whether we’re talking the military—I mean, look at NORAD, right? North American Air Defense. I mean, this has been around since the Cold War. And it’s jointly commanded by a Canadian and an American.
Why would—again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This alliance has stood the test of time. We have shown through blood and treasure that we’re on the same side. And moving on, I hope we can get back to that sense of trust and mutual respect.
I’m hopeful. Again, with the average American, the average Canadian, we get it. And I think that it’ll be a rather rapid reestablishment of that relationship once the current
[00:41:36]
Phil Gurski: political shenanigans—
And so I’m confident in that regard. I just wish we weren’t going through this rather hard patch right now.
[00:41:36]
Lauren Anderson: They are tough. They are tough. Phil, I am so grateful. Thank you for taking the time to come on here with me, talk about this. I mean, we have our own great new friendship forged over the last 14 months or so, which is wonderful, but I value—we value—hearing from you as our partners, as our friends to the north. You’ve always been there. I hope it always stays.
I’m very grateful for you sharing your time, your wisdom, and your views on things because it matters. And so thank you so much for that.
[00:42:22]
Phil Gurski: Oh, thanks for having me on.
[00:42:22]
Phil Gurski: Even though you won both gold medals in ice hockey at the Olympics, we will forgive you.
[00:42:22]
Lauren Anderson: Well, thank you for that. And thanks for everyone for tuning in for this episode of The Steady State Sentinel. This is Lauren Anderson, still standing watch.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to The Steady State Sentinel podcast. Don’t miss out on more insights and exposes from America’s premier global security experts. Also, subscribe to our Substack at substack.com/@steady-state-one. Follow our social media and join us right here next week for another exciting edition.
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By hollowing out the State Department and replacing expertise with loyalists and dealmakers, Donald Trump has turned American diplomacy into an echo chamber, with dangerous consequences.

For most of American history, presidents have understood a basic rule of foreign policy: surround yourself with people who know more than you do.

The world is too complex and the stakes too high for improvisation. That is why the United States built a professional diplomatic corps and placed it inside the U.S. Department of State, an institution designed to provide presidents with regional expertise, institutional memory, and an understanding of how foreign governments actually operate.

Donald Trump has taken the opposite approach. In his effort to ensure loyalty across the government, Trump has systematically hollowed out America’s diplomatic institutions. Career experts have been pushed aside or fired outright. Senior positions once filled by professionals are now dominated by politically appointed loyalists.

The consequences are predictable. The Department increasingly resembles an echo chamber rather than a source of independent advice. Experienced diplomats are trained to question assumptions, test strategies against regional realities, and warn when policies are likely to backfire. Loyalists, by contrast, tend to tell leaders what they want to hear. Given this transformation, mistakes are not just possible. They are inevitable.

The Iran Miscalculation

The most dangerous example may be the administration’s war with Iran.

From the outside, the conflict appears to have been launched without a clear strategic objective or a realistic political end state. There is little evidence of a coherent diplomatic strategy or serious planning for how Iranian politics might respond.

Instead, the conflict appears to have strengthened exactly the forces it was meant to weaken. Hardliners continue to wield power in Tehran, while the regime’s security establishment, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, remains firmly in control. Emerging leadership figures appear younger, more ideological, and even less inclined toward compromise with the West.

Rather than weakening the regime, the war risks entrenching it, and the wider conflict that began with the U.S. and Israeli attacks threatens to destabilize the entire region. This is precisely the kind of strategic miscalculation experienced diplomats exist to prevent.

Hollowing Out Crisis Response

The consequences of dismantling expertise are also visible in more immediate ways. After purging large numbers of consular professionals responsible for crisis response and evacuations, the United States found itself scrambling when tensions escalated across the Middle East.

Former State Department employees who had been RIFed or laid off reportedly offered to return temporarily to help evacuate American citizens from the region. They were turned away. When institutions built to manage crises are hollowed out, the result is confusion, delay, and Americans left to fend for themselves. That’s exactly what happened.

Diplomacy Is Not a Business Deal

Part of the problem is that the administration increasingly treats diplomacy like a business negotiation. Trump’s preferred envoys (figures like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff) approach international disputes with the instincts of dealmakers rather than diplomats.

But geopolitics does not operate on a balance sheet. Authoritarian regimes in places like Russia, Iran, or China are driven primarily by power, ideology, security fears and domestic political survival, not by investment opportunities or financial incentives.

While the Trump family’s global business interests continue to expand, the costs of this approach are borne elsewhere: by Americans placed at risk overseas, by allies who increasingly question whether Washington’s commitments can be trusted, and by a global order that depends (whether we like it or not) on competent American leadership.

Strategic Contradictions Everywhere

At the same time the administration is escalating conflict with Iran, it is simultaneously weakening other pillars of U.S. strategy. Washington is moving to ease sanctions on Russian oil even as Vladimir Putin’s government assists Tehran with intelligence and targeting of U.S. personnel! Meanwhile, American support for Ukraine continues to slow despite the fact that Ukrainian forces are fighting for all of us, to stop Russian expansionism on Europe’s frontier.

The contradictions are difficult to miss. Relieving pressure on Moscow while confronting Tehran without a clear strategy. Weakening Kyiv while claiming to defend the international order. This is not strategic statecraft. It is improvisation.

Sadly, None of this is Accidental

Authoritarian leaders deliberately weaken professional institutions because expertise creates independence. Experienced diplomats ask difficult questions. They warn about unintended consequences. Loyalists do not. When foreign policy becomes an echo chamber, the leader hears only what he wants to hear, and decisions are shaped less by national interests than by personal instinct, political loyalty, and sometimes even financial opportunity.

That is how democracies drift toward the model long favored by autocrats: government not as a system of institutions, but as a personal instrument of the leader himself.

Bruce Berton served as a U.S. diplomat for over three decades, ultimately rising to the senior ranks of the Foreign Service, including two years as Ambassador and Head of Mission at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a native of the Pacific Northwest and a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 390 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

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