White House trusted a transgender CIA briefer with the most sensitive secrets until her identity went public

Julia Curlee spent nearly two decades carrying the country’s secrets.She worked in war zones, traveled to 35 countries, briefed presidents, and boarded Air Force One with the President’s Daily Brief. She was trusted to decide what some of the world's most powerful people needed to know before beginning their days.But in a remarkable first-person account published Monday by The Atlantic, Curlee describes how the second Trump administration came to view something else as dangerously sensitive: the fact that one of its most experienced intelligence officials was a transgender woman.Her identity was never a secret inside the government. Trump officials had known about it during his first term, when Curlee briefed senior White House officials and became Vice President Mike Pence’s daily intelligence briefer. It became intolerable, she writes, only when the public might learn about it.Related: Meet an Officer Who Transitioned at the CIA“The White House had needed me,” Curlee writes. “Trump officials had known I was trans from day one.”Curlee joined the CIA in 2007 and became the first officer at the agency to transition openly and continue serving. She had dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer since childhood. Her other lifelong conviction — that she should have been born a woman — seemed, for years, incompatible with that calling.She transitioned in 2013. Her first day at work as Julia passed without incident. Four years later, she wrote about the experience in The Atlantic under the pseudonym Jenny Hall, explaining how living openly had made her a more effective intelligence officer. The CIA later used the essay in college recruiting, according to Curlee.Then came an assignment to prepare and deliver the President’s Daily Brief during Trump’s first administration. The work required arriving around midnight, studying intelligence through the early morning, and entering the West Wing before dawn.Related: Tulsi Gabbard purges intelligence office