A bipartisan political movement is urgently needed to fight back against the CIA
On November 4, Abigail Spanberger, a CIA case officer in the Middle East from 2006 to 2014, was elected as Virginia’s 75th governor.
A Democrat who served in Congress from 2019 to 2025, Spanberger mixed criticism of Donald Trump on the campaign trail with the advancement of a positive program to support better public services, including in the realm of education and health care.
In her victory speech, Spanberger emphasized that Virginia was where American democracy had been born—”where James Madison built the framework of our Constitution to protect us from tyranny [and] where Washington and Jefferson fought to establish a government by and for the people.”
Spanberger’s CIA background and record in Congress does not inspire confidence that she will actually advance Washington, Madison and Jefferson’s ideals.
While the CIA may not have directly assisted her campaign, which would be illegal, her election can still be considered a violation of constitutional principles mandating a separation of powers given her presumed loyalty to an Executive Branch agency—the CIA.
In 1997, CovertAction Quarterly ran an article about CIA employees working as congressional lobbyists and aides, which quoted Catherine Rudder, the executive director of the American Political Science Association, stating “assigning paid agency employees to work in congressional offices potentially jeopardizes the integrity of the relationship between the legislative and executive branches.”[1]
Spanberger’s election has definitively breached that integrity.
John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who lives in Virginia, stated that “Spanberger’s election as governor of Virginia is a real positive for the CIA, in that the CIA has countless facilities across the state and will be assured of continued cooperation with the Governor’s Office. With that said, every Virginia governor, of both parties, has kowtowed to the CIA over the years, so don’t expect any changes.”
Geoff Young, who ran as an anti-CIA candidate on the Democratic Party ticket in Kentucky in 2022 and is running again next year as an independent, stated that Spanberger was “morally unfit to hold any powerful position in the U.S. because she was officially a case officer in the CIA from 2006 to 2014. Unofficially, almost no one who works for the CIA ever completely leaves it….In view of the fact that the U.S. invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003 was totally illegal aggression, Spanberger’s decision to join the CIA in 2006 is evidence that she has no objection to U.S. imperialism and endless wars…”
Young continued: “She will do everything she can to make sure that nothing interferes with the ongoing operations of the CIA and the American Empire. She never objected to the principle of American exceptionalism, which holds that the U.S. and its allies have the right to attack any country and overthrow any government that the military-industrial-intelligence complex claims is threatening our national security. [Also], as the Governor of Virginia, she could order state law enforcement officials to cooperate with the CIA, FBI and other federal ‘security’ agencies.”[2]
Will She Enable Greater CIA Penetration of Virginia Universities?
On November 11, The New York Times ran an article about Spanberger and how she was intent on pushing back against the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the state’s universities, including by cutting back on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The same article noted that, as governor of Virginia, Spanberger has the power to appoint the board members—at the University of Virginia, George Mason University, the College of William & Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Virginia Military Institute—who oversee Virginia’s public universities.[3]
While the replacement of conservatives appointed by soon-to-be former Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin may be welcome, Spanberger’s CIA background raises concern that she will appoint people who will advance the CIA’s interests and agenda and those of other U.S. intelligence agencies and, in turn, enable greater CIA penetration of higher education.
The latter is already a big problem, with the CIA planting professors, setting up journals and carrying out recruitment on many campuses, and even running covert operations through them.
Embellishing CIA exploits
Retired CIA operative Sam Faddis wrote a substack column suggesting that Spanberger has embellished her exploits in the CIA by giving the impression that she was a “high speed-low drag” operator on the cutting edge of counterterrorism operations and national security.
Faddis consulted with CIA case officers with direct knowledge of Spanberger’s work with the Agency who said that she never carried out any dangerous field work but spent most of her time in an office sitting at a computer as a “newspaper clipper girl.”
The latter is a derogatory Agency term (used by both males and females) intended to imply that Spanberger acquired essentially no classified intelligence and handled no sources of value, but attempted to pass off open-source information readily available in the local press as intelligence to give headquarters and her superiors the impression that she was doing something of importance.[4]
Serving the “Deep State”
Spanberger is predominantly conservative on economic and criminal justice issues, though liberal on social-cultural issues—which is in line with the interests of the CIA and plutocratic elite that uses it as an instrument.
To head her transition team as Governor-elect, Spanberger appointed a number of lobbyists, the CEO of Richmond’s realtor association, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN for management and reform[5] who has raised alarm about China filling the world leadership vacuum as a result of Trump’s “America First” policy, and others with deep ties to the Obama and Biden White Houses.
Among the latter is Yohannes Abraham, a former chief of staff and executive secretary of the White House’s National Security Council under Joe Biden and aide to Barack Obama who helped to advance a hostile policy toward China in Southeast Asia and worked for the trillion-dollar Wall Street investment fund, The Vanguard Group, and Paladin Capital Group, another major investment fund.
Since her election, Spanberger has garnered criticism for her appointment as Virginia’s Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security of a former FBI agent, Stanley Meador, who headed the FBI’s Richmond office that released a memo linking certain Catholic groups to violent extremism that resulted in an FBI agent going undercover in a church. Meador’s overzealous policing methods may have been a relic from his time spent working for the FBI in the Middle East on the front-lines of the War on Terror.
In Congress, Spanberger used her position to defend the intelligence agencies and to accuse Donald Trump of being a Russian agent, which helped drum up liberal support for the war in Ukraine. In February 2023, during Joe Biden’s term in office, Spanberger signed a letter advocating that President Biden give Ukraine F-16 fighter jets.
She also a) voted for massive military aid appropriations to Ukraine; b) pushed to have Russia designated as a state sponsor of terrorism; c) attacked Donald Trump when he visited with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un; d) supported the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites; e) supported sanctions against Russia, Syria, Venezuela and other countries that took a devastating humanitarian toll; and e) expressed vocal support for Israel as it was carrying out genocide in Gaza and bombed Syria, Iran and Lebanon.
Additionally, Spanberger tried to block the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, stating that Gabbard was “ill-prepared, unqualified,” “traffics in conspiracy theories,” and “cozies up to dictators like Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.” None of the latter were actually true.
Part of Wave of CIA Democrats
When Spanberger was first elected to Congress in 2018, Patrick Martin of the World Socialist Web Site put out a pamphlet entitled “The CIA Democrats” in which he wrote that “an extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democrat candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in political history.”[6]
As it turns out, some 30 of these candidates, including Spanberger, won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won in the general election.
For Martin this trend signified the complete abandonment by the Democratic Party of the working class and move to the right of its upper-middle-class base that has enthusiastically supported the military-intelligence apparatus.
A key member of the CIA Democrats class of 2018 was current Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin. She is a former CIA officer with three tours in Iraq who was charged with providing assistance to Ukraine as acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs following the U.S.-backed Maidan coup in 2014 that triggered the current conflict.
A conservative Democrat endorsed by Liz Cheney (R-WY), Slotkin hyped threats to public safety from domestic extremists and alleged foreign terrorists as chair of the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Subcommittee within the House Committee on Homeland Security, and pushed for ever more draconian anti-terrorism legislation than what was already on the books.
Slotkin’s category of domestic extremists included people who opposed pandemic restrictions, along with those whom she branded as “conspiracy theorists”—a term that was made into a pejorative by the CIA in the 1960s in order to try to validate the corrupt Warren Commission Report and its false conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of JFK.
A super-hawk on Ukraine, Slotkin supported a bill that aimed to expedite security assistance to Ukraine after Russia launched its special military operation in February 2022 and, in August 2025, introduced hard-hitting Senate legislation to expand sanctions on Russia—which was already, with Cuba, the most sanctioned country in history at that point.[7]
Another Class of 2018 CIA Democrat, Andy Kim, now a senator from New Jersey, was an adviser to former CIA Director David Petraeus and director for Iraq on Barack Obama’s National Security Council (NSC).
A member, paradoxically, of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Kim has been a staunch supporter of massive U.S. weapons supplies to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and received a 93% approval rating from the pro-imperialist think tank Foreign Policy for America.[8]
The first person of Korean descent elected to the U.S. Senate, Kim voted for a congressional bill declaring that the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is anti-Semitic and, in another CIA talking point, referred to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny as a “murder”—absent any proof that this was the case. (U.S. intelligence agencies ultimately concluded that murder was unlikely.)
Predictably, Kim adopts alarmist rhetoric regarding North Korea that could lead directly into a war. He claimed that “there’s a madman with his finger on the button that can send nuclear weapons to annihilate my family.”
However, it is the U.S. that precipitated the development of North Korea’s nuclear program as a security blanket after it nearly bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age during the Korean War and has tried for decades to overthrow its government.
Additionally, the U.S. is the only contry to actally deploy nuclear weapons, with Harry S. Truman fitting Kim’s designation of a madman far more than Kim Jong-Un.
A CIA Republican Too
Will Hurd was a CIA Republican who represented Texas’s 23rd District in Congress from 2015 to 2021.
A throwback to the moderate Republicans of the 20th century, Hurd was a CIA clandestine officer who served tours of duty in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India during the first decade of the Global War on Terror, and as a CIA briefer in Congress.
Hurd’s appointment to the House Select Committee on Intelligence was a blatant conflict of interest in light of the fact that this committee was set up to investigate wrongdoing by the CIA.
With people like Hurd on it, it has done exactly the opposite.
A hawk on Libya and Syria, Hurd advocated for stronger investment in cyber-security and opposed the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA). He also advocated for a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy directed against Russia and opposed U.S. normalization with Cuba.
These are all positions opposed by CovertAction Magazine, as should all progressive-minded people.
Where Is the Alternative-Liberal Media?
Liberal outlets like Jacobin and The Nation gushed over the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York but did not provide any critical coverage of Spanberger’s election—nor of New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill (D), who has a background in naval intelligence and, during her stint in Congress (2019-2025) helped boost funding for the Picatinny Arsenal—a major military research and manufacturing facility in her district.
Alternative media outlets across the internet—ranging from CounterPunch to Democracy Now to Consortium News to AlterNet, The Nation, Jacobin, The Intercept, Z Net, and Truthout—also did not provide critical coverage of Spanberger and Sherrill’s election victories and what the duo represents for the evolution of the Democratic Party.
For years, critical coverage of the CIA—especially including its interference in domestic politics—has been almost completely absent in the above-listed media.
Jeff Martin’s pamphlet on the CIA Democrats, for example, received no attention. The MAGA movement, for its part, has been very skilled in channeling wide popular skepticism and disdain for the CIA into support for Donald Trump and the GOP.
MAGA media outlets like Alex Jones’s InfoWars have raised alarm about the CIA and a “deep-state conspiracy”—but want people to believe that Donald Trump is its primary target, and that Trump is standing up to them.
Let’s Build a Bipartisan Movement for a New Church Committee
CovertAction Magazine is the one progressive, left-leaning media outlet that has been trying to raise awareness about the growing CIA interference in U.S. politics and negative consequences of it.
Founded by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, the magazine has a long history of exposing CIA abuses and its threat to constitutional principles and U.S. democracy.
Urgently needed at this time is a political movement that pushes for a new Church Committee-like hearing to expose illegal covert operations carried out by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Led by Frank Church (D-ID), the original Church Committee hearing in 1975/76 exposed a litany of CIA abuses, ranging from illegal drug testing to involvement in political assassinations to illegal coups.
It succeeded in building momentum for various reforms that included the establishment of congressional watchdog committees that were designed to safeguard against abuses.
Over time, unfortunately, those watchdog committees were co-opted by the CIA and now serve as rubber stamps for expanded CIA covert operations.
A new Church Committee could help to expose the breakdown in the system originally envisioned by Frank Church and his supporters, and pave the way for a brighter future where the Spanbergers, Slotkins, Sherrills, Kims and Hurds of the world could not get elected dogcatcher.
Jeremy Weir Alderson, “Spooks and Brass Work the Hill,” CovertAction Quarterly, Summer 1997, 57. ↑
Spanberger’s husband Adam is a software engineer at L3Harris, a leading military contractor. ↑
Stephanie Saul, “Virginia Democrat’s Hopes of Depoliticizing Higher Ed May Prove Tricky,” The New York Times, November 11, 2025, A14. ↑
Much like Barack Obama, another politician with a CIA background, Faddis suggests that Spanberger is an “empty suite, spouting lines written by political consultants and the major donors who own them.” ↑
Chris P. Lu was a Harvard classmate of Barack Obama who served as acting chief of staff in Obama’s Senate office in the U.S. Senate and became Executive Director of the Obama-Biden presidential transition in 2008. He remained heavily involved thereafter as a DNC superdelegate and was chairman of Tom Perez’s transition committee. ↑
Patrick Martin, The CIA Democrats (World Socialist Web Site Pamphlet, 2018). ↑
Slotkin’s bill was backed by the most reactionary senators in Congress, such as Tom Cotton (R-AR), Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Mark Wayne Mullin (R-OK), along with Russia hawk Adam Schiff (D-CA) and fake progressives like Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Adopting the playbook from the John Birch Society, a Cold War-era intelligence front, Slotkin attacks Donald Trump ridiculously from the right for “parroting Russian propaganda.” Slotkin also sponsored the DICTATOR Act, which called for an investigation of China to see whether it assisted Putin’s government in evading sanctions. Additionally, she voted to spy on U.S. citizens without warrant and for unconstitutional vaccine mandates, and favored deployment of yet more draconian military surveillance technologies at the U.S.-Mexico border, among other horrific policies she has supported. ↑
Foreign Policy for America has former top Biden and Obama era officials on its board, including Jake Sullivan, Wendy Sherman and Ben Rhodes, along with other former Pentagon and State Department officials. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
