It is not exotic like a dusty cafe in Karachi. It isn’t as chic as an art gallery in Shanghai. All the same, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, or AFK as aides now abbreviate her name, is happy with her new post.
“I like to be in the plumbing,” says the daughter-in-law of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Once the youngest female CIA officer at 22 and whose memoir of a life spent undercover was optioned to Hollywood, she adds, this place “is where you can have the most impact.” She is speaking from the Office of Management and Budget across the alleyway from the White House where, during her first interview since joining the new administration, the ventilation system can be heard kicking on and off.
The onetime spy is now the associate director for Intelligence and International Affairs at OMB, a first-of-its-kind position and an assignment that is as influential as her path to it is ironic.
President Trump had considered Fox Kennedy for CIA deputy director. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, chairman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, intervened. Lawmakers worried that if given that role, AFK might shatter America’s premier espionage agency. Their fears were not entirely unfounded. Since leaving the agency in 2010, she has become a prominent CIA skeptic. She has made the declassification of the JFK assassination files a personal mission. She managed the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last year as he promised to renew the work of his late uncle, President John F. Kennedy, who once vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
Any attempts to assuage concerns failed. Her call, and a subsequent call from the White House to set up a meeting with Cotton, went unanswered. She was torpedoed behind the congressional curtain.
Rather than working inside just one three-letter agency to reform it, the director of the Office of Management and Budget asked, why not bring the entire espionage apparatus to the president’s heel? Fox Kennedy accepted. Passed over for a job at CIA, she now oversees the entire CIA budget as well as the budgets for the 17 other agencies that collectively make up the intelligence community.
This makes her the tip of the fiduciary spear, so to speak, in the ongoing White House war against what they see as a “woke and weaponized” government security establishment. The budgets, like the ones collecting dust next to her desk, and other bureaucratic authorities known only to the nerdiest of wonks, Fox Kennedy insists, are the very best tools “to put the Leviathan on the chain.”
All of this delights Vought, who calls her addition to OMB “a huge deal,” a step toward policing the shadowy corners of the federal government he described as “nearly untouchable.” No clandestine budget or compartmentalized program will be beyond her purview. Instead, AFK will be free to follow the money. “The federal government has been weaponized against the American people, including our president, in ways most Americans have yet to realize,” the budget chief told RCP before likening the enterprise to “our own Church Committee within OMB to end the weaponization for good.”
But what would you say you do here exactly? “My job is to arm Tulsi and John,” AFK replies, referring to Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, like old friends, “and all the amazing men and women in the intelligence community with everything they need to do their job – to do it safely and efficiently, protect this country, and execute the president’s agenda.” She continues with standard boilerplate about ensuring that “not a penny of taxpayer dollars is wasted.”
A wonk would talk about the efficiency of government systems, while a spook would say something about an attempt at omniscience. She talks that way, too, to be sure, but AFK is unusual in that she attempts to humanize budgetary questions of national security. Every taxpayer dollar that comes through the door, says the mother of three, is a dollar that will not go to “a family’s vacation” or “someone’s kid’s ballet lessons.” Misuse of those funds, she has concluded, is nothing short of “a sin.”
While she can sound a little like Marianne Williamson, the gadfly guru and perennial presidential candidate, years spent undercover while living as an art dealer abroad and recruiting arms dealers as assets has given AFK a hard edge. She reserves a special derision for those in intelligence who see themselves as separate from, and unaccountable to, civilian control.
“Even when I was there,” she recalls of past colleagues at the CIA, “they would talk about both Democrats and Republicans, whoever was in the White House, as the temps. ‘Oh, we don’t want to bother the “temps” with that – they’re going to be gone in four years.’” As a result of that attitude, there were entire departments and “parallel command structures,” AFK reported, “that ‘the temps’ have never been allowed in.” Now, as a political appointee and a temp herself, her mandate is to break down those doors.
“You can’t fund anything like the lawfare and weaponization President Trump encountered in his first term without a firehouse of money,” she said, adding that there was initially “a learning curve in the first administration around how to put the Leviathan on the chain and keep it there.” As a result, AFK continued, “the Leviathan made damn good use of that time. It had a head start.”
Not that long ago, liberals lambasted the security state while conservatives rushed to its defense. But those roles have been entirely reversed during the Trump era. From the surveillance of the first Trump campaign and the Steele dossier to the dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop as “Russian misinformation” and the subsequent social-media censorship, it is a story that has played out for the better part of a decade. “You realize the exact same offensive playbook that we used against people who were killing Americans, and were our greatest adversaries,” she said, “we are using it against the elected representatives of the people in this country, or against any American protected by the Constitution.”
This sentiment makes Fox Kennedy at home in MAGA world and a pariah to Democrats. She comes most recently from the “Make America Healthy Again” wing of the GOP, a coalition where anything big (Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Tech, for instance) is viewed with skepticism. She still sticks out. Republican hawks are not known for looking to Sufi mystics for inspiration or talking about the need to root out terrorism by first acknowledging the humanity of the terrorist, as AFK has done. She possesses an undeniably different outlook on the world and a particular set of skills.
The CIA assigned her a “nonofficial cover,” sending her abroad with a false identity but without any diplomatic protections. She learned beforehand, like all agents do, to lose a tail, break out of handcuffs, and in the worst-case scenario, to shoot her way out of a bad situation. That kind of training isn’t likely to come in handy at the White House. A career in analysis and human intelligence will.
She first came to the attention of the CIA while in graduate school after developing a predictive algorithm to pinpoint where terrorist cells were most likely to develop (the ratio between hookah bars and madrassas was key). The career that followed took her from the Middle East to Asia, including a stint in Shanghai where she posed as an art dealer and, per her memoir, discovered that her housekeeper was keeping tabs on her family for Beijing. While AFK has become increasingly critical of the CIA, particularly with the counterterrorism measures deployed after 9/11, she still loves the agency.
“The intelligence community, when the cancer of political weaponization and censorship and domestic propaganda is removed, I’d fund it all day long,” AFK insists, calling it “the most cost-effective, efficient, humane way to avoid war – 10 times out of 10.” The former agent says she just wants reform, specifically a return to an apolitical mission, which AFK insists yields better results anyway.
She argues that human intelligence capabilities have been diminished in recent years as the intel agencies pursue priorities contrary to their core mission. “The majority of useful information that comes out of the intelligence community, for policymakers,” she said, came from other sources and methods. Recipients of the presidential daily brief, or PDB, a summary of intelligence and analysis presented in the Oval Office each morning, AFK reported being told is “basically” the same kind of information that can be read “in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and the New York Times.”
A senior administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, did not dispute that characterization, telling RCP that both Democrats and Republicans have complained that in recent years the PDB intel has grown “stale.”
Reform isn’t welcome in the intelligence community, especially when those three-letter agencies are predisposed to doubt the intentions of the reformer. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said as much when he seemed to warn Trump before his first inauguration not to pick a fight with spooks. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community,” the Democratic leader told Rachel Maddow of MSNBC in 2017, “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
One question is whether the Trump administration’s approach to the IC, generally, and AFK’s appointment, specifically, indicate a willingness to exact payback.
“I think her intentions, at least from my point of view, are probably not all that wonderful,” said Loch Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia whom the New York Times once dubbed “the dean of American Intelligence Scholars.” He sees an administration motivated not by good government, but by an appetite for “revenge more than anything else.”
Legally and constitutionally speaking, Johnson told RCP, there is no doubt AFK “has a right to go out to the CIA and look at their budgets up and down.” Comparisons to the Church Committee, though, the Senate select committee that famously called the intelligence agencies to the carpet in the 1970s, may be premature.
“The Church Committee was bipartisan, fact-driven and with strict adherence to the law,” said Johnson, who served as the top aide to the late chairman of the committee, Idaho Sen. Frank Church. “So no, I don’t think this is like it.” What Johnson thinks is all but certain is a clash.
“You’re going to have Fox and others making public charges against these agencies, and that’s when they better have their facts right because the CIA and FBI – I don’t think this is inappropriate – have their own professional contacts on Capitol Hill,” Johnson concluded. “They will seek recourse.”
The White House has already started its long march through the federal bureaucracy. Elon Musk shuttered USAID. Ratcliffe thinned the CIA herd of recently hired officers, though AFK predicts that only a “very small portion” of federal employees in the intel agencies, those who “allowed their trade craft to be turned inward against Americans,” will end up “on the chopping block.”
When Trump clashed with Volodymyr Zelensky, warning the Ukrainian president he was gambling with another world war by demanding a U.S. security guarantee, AFK was on her feet across the street from the White House in the Eisenhower Office Building, cheering. “He was like Aslan,” she said, referring to the lion and protagonist of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books.
Even in an administration defined by skepticism of foreign intervention, AFK stands out. She has been vociferous in her condemnation of what she sees as a proxy war with Russia. The sentiment most in fashion during the previous administration, that the U.S. stood with Ukraine, she wrote on social media last year, was “simply a jingle.” While that country burned, she argued, “the war hawks and the bankers” prospered.
If and when that conflict ends, conservatives will clamor for an audit of the billions in financial and military aid sent overseas. David Sachs, Trump’s crypto czar, expressed such an appetite recently, telling Fox News that Ukrainian oligarchs had been “feasting” on that assistance and alleged that American weapons meant for the frontlines had been resold on the black market. A fledgling democracy, Ukraine struggled with endemic corruption even before the war, and while allegations of widespread black-market sales are yet to be substantiated, the Zelensky administration uncovered massive fraud to the tune of $40 million in weapons procurement. AFK was not surprised.
“It’s like shipping a pallet of money,” she said of weapons sent overseas, “and walking away from it and then coming back two years later being like, but do you have proof that it’s not there?”
The administration will soon resume weapons shipments to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after Zelensky agreed to a 30-day ceasefire with Russia on Tuesday. Anything approaching an audit will likely have to wait. AFK, meanwhile, focuses her attention stateside.
Hollywood had considered adapting her life into a screenplay. Apple was reportedly developing a TV series based on her memoir. Brie Larson was set for the starring role, with Fox Kennedy as an executive producer. The project has stalled since AFK entered politics, and her newest chapter, overseeing a sprawling intelligence apparatus from a quiet corner of the Office of Management and Budget, is not exactly glamorous. No one can argue that it isn’t influential.