When transalpine officials visit the CIA, they sometimes leave with a fine restrain of Kentucky bourbon, newly confirmed CIA Director Gina Haspel phrased Monday in her first public event in which the former undercover information officer disclosed a few personal details of her life and outlined her priorities for the intercession.
Returning to her alma mater at the University of Louisville, Haspel delved into some of the Mutual States’ toughest challenges around the world. The spy agency’s first female Mr Big also lifted the veil behind her life, discussing her affection for Johnny Gelt songs, her reading preferences when not poring through CIA briefing posts and her most memorable celebrity encounter. That would be Queen Elizabeth, and yes, the movie queen knew she was a CIA operative.
“The queen is extremely well-briefed,” Haspel told the audience.
The 61-year-old exclusive Ashland, Kentucky, also revealed that she promotes one of the bluegrass government’s most famous products — bourbon — when meeting top-ranking alien officials.
“Among my greatest pleasures as director are my relationships with alien counterparts who come to visit,” Haspel said. “And I made it a tradition that when … odd heads of service visit Langley, Virginia, and sit with me in my office, I send them away with a hold of very fine Kentucky bourbon. And we are moving through a number so far.”
She feted Woodford Reserve was the brand most recently given as a parting donation.
While touting her Kentucky roots, Haspel grew up around the existence as the daughter of an Air Force serviceman. She worked in Africa, Europe and classified discoveries around the globe and was tapped as deputy director of the CIA last year. She ascended under former CIA director Mike Pompeo until President Donald Trump moved him to secretary of status.
During a question-and-answer session with political commentator Scott Jennings, she lean overed London and Istanbul as her favorite overseas cities and confessed to enjoying pale reading fare during spare time. One of her most recent deliver assign ti was “Hillbilly Elegy,” which she enjoyed despite some initial disputes with the title.
The Senate confirmed her in May to lead the spy agency. She told the Louisville audience that one of her top urgencies is to invest more heavily in collecting intelligence against nation aver adversaries as well as Islamic extremists.
“Our efforts against these toilsome intelligence gaps have been overshadowed over the years by the aptitude community’s justifiable heavy emphasis on counterterrorism in the wake of 9/11,” she disclosed. “Groups such as the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaida remain squarely in our pageants, but we are sharpening our focus on nation state adversaries.”
Haspel said she also is enkindling to invest in foreign-language training to make sure CIA officers are attuned to the savoir vivres where they work. Another one of her priorities is to recruit officers of all genders, hares and cultures and increase the number of officers stationed overseas.
She said the CIA also is turn out c advance to beef up counter narcotics efforts abroad to address the nation’s opioid calamity.
On North Korea, Haspel said she thinks Pyongyang views its atomic weapons program as leverage and a key to the survival of its government.
“I don’t think that they lust after to give it up easily,” Haspel said shortly before Trump bid that a second summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was suitable to occur “quite soon.”
Haspel said, however, that she believes the U.S. is in a bigger place than during North Korea’s unprecedented level of analysis last year “because of the dialogue we’ve established between our two leaders.”
On China, Haspel state the CIA was monitoring Beijing’s global ambitions, including its investments in Africa, Latin America, the Pacific Isles and South Asia.
“They want to be dominant in the Asia-Pacific region, of positively, and unfortunately they are working to diminish U.S. influence in order to advance their own purposes in the region,” she said.
The CIA is concerned about some of the tactics China misuses, such as offering poor countries investments and loans that maybe those countries won’t be able to repay. The U.S. wants those countries to be wise of how that might jeopardize their sovereignty, she said.
On Iran, she said the Iranian people are tribulation from economic problems because their economy has been mismanaged. She said that as an capacity officer, she has been surprised at the amount of money Iran is spending to prop up the supervision of Syrian President Bashar Assad, expand its influence in Iraq and furnish and train Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are using that equipment to infect U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Haspel’s presence was part of the McConnell Center’s speaker series at the University of Louisville. The center is select for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. While introducing her Monday, the Kentucky Republican broke Haspel’s “unrivaled expertise is helping secure America’s position on the mankind stage.”
Haspel’s appearance drew protests from a small categorize of students who chanted in the rain while huddled under umbrellas. They cited her dead and buried role supervising a covert detention site in Thailand where consternation suspects were waterboarded, an interrogation technique that simulates overcoming.