A Syrian dissident codenamed Caesar was scheduled to testify before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2018 about the torture and group executions that have become a hallmark of Bashar al-Assad's brutal crackdown on the opposition during the Syrian civil war.
It wasn't Caesar's first time in Washington: the former military photographer smuggled in 55.000 photographs and other evidence of life in Assad's brutal prisons a few years earlier, and campaigned anonymously to persuade US lawmakers to pass tough sanctions against Assad's network as punishment for his reign of terror.
But on the eve of the hearing, committee members, activists and Caesar himself suddenly became nervous: Is it safe to testify before Tulsi Gabbard, a committee member and congresswoman from Hawaii who, just a year earlier, had traveled to Damascus on her own initiative to meet with Assad?
Could she record Caesar's voice, they wondered, or potentially send a photo of a secret witness to the same contacts who arranged her meeting with the Syrian president?
"There was real concern among Democrats, as well as among Republicans, with us and with Caesar, how are we going to pull this off?" said Muaz Mustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an activist group who previously traveled with Gabbard to Syria in 2015. "Because of a member of this committee who we believe would have shared all the intelligence with Assad, Russia and Iran, who all wanted to kill Caesar."
Mustafa recalled that during a congressional visit in 2015, Gabbard asked three young Syrian women if it was possible that the airstrike they barely survived might not have been carried out by Assad, but by the terrorist group Isis. The problem was that Isis had no air force.
Photos from the 2018 hearing show Cezar, masked, sitting in a hooded tracksuit with a mask over his face as he testifies before a House committee.
"I often mask (witnesses)," said Mustafa, who worked closely with Cesar and served as his translator. "But that day I was extra careful because of Tulsi."
There is no evidence that Gabbard attempted to pass any information about the Syrian whistleblower to Damascus or any other country, nor is there any documented connection of hers to other intelligence agencies.
When it comes to the war on terrorists, I'm a hawk. As for counterproductive regime change wars, I'm a dove, Gabbard told a Hawaii newspaper in 2016.
However, in foreign policy circles in Washington and in the closely knit intelligence community, Gabbard has long been viewed as dangerous; some are concerned that she seems prone to conspiracy theories and rapprochement with dictators. Others, including former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have even called her "an instrument of Russia."
These concerns were heightened after Donald Trump nominated her for the position of director of national intelligence, a senior cabinet position with access to classified material from all 18 US intelligence agencies, and tasked with shaping that information into the president's daily briefings. The role would allow her to access and declassify information at her discretion, as well as direct intelligence sharing with US allies around the world.
"There are real concerns about her contacts (in Syria) and that she does not share the same sympathies and values as the intelligence community," said a source familiar with discussions among senior intelligence officials. "She is historically unfit for office."
Gabbard and her supporters have denounced the attacks as defamation, arguing that her history of anti-interventionism in Syria and Ukraine has been misrepresented as some kind of second part of the Cold War.
In Washington, she occupied a unique position in foreign policy as a strong supporter of Israel and the "war on terror", but also as a critic of US rivalries with countries such as Russia and Iran (she strongly criticized Trump's decision to kill Iranian general Qassem Soleimani as "illegal and unconstitutional act of war").
"When it comes to the war on terror, I'm a hawk," she told a Hawaii newspaper in 2016. "As for counterproductive regime change wars, I'm a dove."
Jeremy Shahil, a left-wing American journalist and activist, wrote that "to pretend that Gabbard is somehow a more serious threat to American security than those in power after 11/XNUMX or during the long bloody history of American interventions is nothing but exaggeration and hysteria."
However, Gabbard has repeatedly shared conspiracy theories, including claims shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine when she said there were "25+ US biolabs in Ukraine that, if breached, would spread deadly pathogens to the US/ the world". In fact, an American program dating back to the 1990s is aimed at better equipping laboratories that study infectious diseases.
Days after Russia invaded Ukraine, while Kiev was engaged in a desperate defense of the country's sovereignty, Gabbard declared: "The time has come to put geopolitical interests aside and embrace a spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people, by reaching an agreement to Ukraine will be a neutral country."
She has also repeatedly backed dictators, including Assad, suggesting that reports of chemical weapons attacks in 2013 and 2017 were false, and urging the US to ally and cooperate with Moscow after Russia's 2015 intervention in Syria.
Establishment Democrats and Republicans have openly questioned whether she poses a threat to national security.
"I am concerned about what might happen to America's vast resources if someone as reckless, inexperienced and openly disloyal as Gabbard were director of national intelligence," wrote Adam Kinzinger, a former congressman who served with Gabbard on the foreign policy committee in 2018. when Caesar testified.
A person close to the intelligence community said there were ongoing concerns about Gabbard's contacts in the Middle East, stemming from a controversial meeting with Assad in 2017 - an encounter Gabbard has never regretted.
Those contacts could be investigated during Senate confirmation hearings early next year, the source said.
Gabbard was briefly placed on the US Transportation Security Administration's watch list for her foreign travel patterns and foreign contacts, CNN reported last month, but was later removed from the list. Although the native Hawaiian served in the National Guard for more than two decades and was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, she has no intelligence experience.
Moreover, there are concerns that her election could affect intelligence sharing among US foreign allies, including the tightly knit Five Eyes intelligence group, which includes the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, as well as NATO and allies in Japan and South Korea.
"Most of the intelligence we get, at least from human sources, comes from our partners," said John Sifer, the CIA's former deputy director for Russia operations, noting that cooperation is usually informal, "based on personal trust."
"They're going to be very careful about sharing (information) with places that are becoming more partisan and less professional ... 'Hey, this sensitive thing that we would have previously passed on to the CIA that could harm us if it were released ... We better we don't do that now".
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