RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from The Atlantic — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 4 sourcesEditor’s Note: Read Julia Curlee’s full essay here .
When Julia Curlee was a kid growing up in Hawaii, she dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer. In 2007, when she took her oath standing on the marble CIA seal, she achieved that goal. But she had another childhood dream too: She’d always had “an unshakable belief that I should have been born a woman.”
In 2013, Julia Curlee became the first CIA officer to transition openly and keep serving the agency. She felt more effective at her job living as the person she always believed she was— and years ago wrote about her experience under a pseudonym in The Atlantic. Her performance proved her effectiveness: She became the daily intelligence briefer for Vice President Pence during the first Trump administration and a director on the National Security Council in both the Biden administration and the second Trump term.
Less than 70 days after the president returned to office in 2025, Julia was fired from the White House without explanation. She returned to the CIA and, over time, began to feel a lack of support at the agency in an administration that was openly hostile to transgender people. Julia left her dream job with the federal government earlier this year. This week, she is telling her full story for the first time—in an Atlantic essay she wrote and in a conversation with Radio Atlantic .
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Julia Curlee: After everything I had been through with my service to the former vice president, my briefing for this president in the first term, and my war zones, my 20 years, all of it, “Be discreet” meant We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here .
Adam Harris: As a high-level CIA officer, Julia Curlee had the ear of one of the most powerful politicians in America: the vice president of the United States. He relied on her to let him know what was going on in the world each day. She held prominent intelligence positions during the last three administrations: Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2. She is also a transgender woman.
For a long time, Julia had two dreams: to be a CIA officer and to be her authentic self. She realized the first in 2007, when she took the oath on the agency seal; the second in 2013, when she transitioned.
She made a promise when she did: never to hide who she was. Yet in 2017, she wrote two stories for The Atlantic under a pseudonym. She wrote about her experience; she wrote about what it meant for the intelligence community to accept people like her. The agency used it to help recruit on college campuses. Julia was using the discretion that came naturally for a CIA officer.
Now, after being pushed out of the White House and leaving an agency where she no longer felt supported, Julia is telling the rest of the story as herself.
I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic , and today: a conversation with Julia Curlee.
Let’s get to questions.
Julia, welcome to the show.
Julia Curlee: Thank you, Adam. Thanks for having me.
Harris: Absolutely. So Julia, you served the United States for more than 20 years in intelligence positions. What was it that drew you to public service?
Curlee: Well, I grew up a barefoot kid in Hawaii, and I always wanted to see what was over the horizon and see the world and all that. And then, at some young, impressionable age, I was ambushed by The Hunt for Red October and the analyst as hero, getting to save the day. And, I don’t know, it sort of came out of nowhere and it sort of bubbled up in my life. And my parents definitely instilled in me a desire to serve our country, and intelligence just caught something in me and I wanted to be a part of it.
Harris: When you joined, was it everything you imagined?
Curlee: Oh, many more late nights and long PowerPoint-presentation sessions.
Harris: So not quite like the movie?
Curlee : Not so much, yeah. I didn’t call in many drone strikes on my way to the PowerPoint presentation that you would sometimes see in the movies. Did not repel off a helicopter into a submarine too many times.
But it was an amazing and wonderful career. I got to travel to 35 countries. I briefed several presidents. It was just all I wanted to do, and I desperately wish I was doing that now. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do and it was the only plan I ever had.
Harris: And today you’re writing in the pages of The Atlantic , telling your story for the first time under your own name. Why now?
Curlee: Well the institutions that I served through my adult life are under assault. The ability of officers to speak truth to power, to inform policy making so that they make the best decisions on behalf of the United States—that is being eviscerated. And the officers who deliver that, who spend their lives learning about foreign countries, learning how to systematically understand multiple sources of intelligence, convey uncertainty—all of that is being destroyed by an administration that wants to both cherry-pick the intelligence to only receive what they want to hear, and to punish the officers who have the courage to speak that truth to them, to do their jobs and to live up to the values that we inculcate in all of our officers. And so the only way to do that was to leave and to begin to tell my story.
I also felt like I needed to tell the other part of my story, which has nothing to do with my substantive experience in the world, and that’s being a trans person. And I know that the sustained assault on people like me is a part of a broader campaign to try to define who gets to be in public spaces, who gets to have positions of honor.
Harris: I want to talk about that service and about your transition while you were in the service. You transitioned in 2013, and did you have concerns when you were transitioning? What was that first day going into the office like?
Curlee: Well, it was the most terrifying day of my life. And that was in the wake of several war-zone assignments and being r...
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.