From CIA station chief to AI chatbots to Trump-adjacent lobbying
Enrique de la Torre announced his new role as vice president at the lobbying firm of Trump's former Ambassador to the Organization of American States early Sunday morning.
7:50 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, January 20, 2025: Marco Rubio is now confirmed as the new U.S. Secretary of State.
After more than eight years at the CIA, former station chief Enrique “Rick” de la Torre is now a vice president at a Florida-based lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump administration and which recently picked up Google Cloud as a client. Mr. De la Torre spent roughly the last two months as a director of the information technology arm of the U.S. weapons industry giant General Dynamics and boasts of “over 20 years of experience in intelligence, national security, and covert action” with a “particular focus on Latin America and emerging technologies.”
According to chat messages obtained by the author, less than twenty four hours before publicly announcing his departure from General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) on Sunday morning, Mr. De la Torre posted to a large group of other technology-focused former U.S. Government officials and corporate executives that the CIA’s recently promoted Large Language Model (LLM) for profiling world leaders was “a POS [piece of shit] system,” and that he had pitched “a more robust and accurate option” while working at GDIT. (The author published an investigation roughly nine months ago, based upon a slew of corporate slide decks accidentally published by a Pentagon contractor, on how the U.S. military was beginning to use similar technology.)
Upon being asked for more details by a colleague, De la Torre hedged that he only “suspected” that the CIA’s LLM technology was a “POS,” arguing that: “My understanding is it wasn’t as interactive as anyone liked and the information and data that provided [sic] these chat bots seem to [sic] outdated and suffered from many of the same problems that early ChatGPT used to suffer from. Hallucinations, wrong dates getting mixed up.” (When reached for comment, Mr. De la Torre stated this his “understanding” in this statement derived from the Times article under discussion.)
GDIT was concluded to have itself engaged in lacking security practices by a Pentagon audit, as first reported by Reuters in June based upon statements from an anonymous senior U.S. Defense Department official. According to Reuters, GDIT “employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts” it created as the primary contractor on a Pentagon campaign, which evolved from countering alleged Chinese disinformation on COVID’s origins into distributing its own disinformation meant to discourage usage of China’s Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines.
In a LinkedIn posting which went public by early Sunday morning, Mr. De la Torre announced that: “After an incredible journey at GDIT, I am excited to announce my next chapter as Senior Vice President of Strategic Risk and Intelligence at Continental Strategy.” Formed in 2021 by Carlos Trujillo following his nearly three years as President Trump’s Ambassador to the Organization of American States, POLITICO reported in December that Continental was having a “Trump bump,” including through retaining Google Cloud on November 15, just nine days after the U.S. presidential election was called in Trump’s favor. One of Continental’s most lucrative technology clients prior to Google has been the Virgin Islands-based cryptocurrency firm Tether, for which Continental registered $600,000 in lobbying during 2023.
When reached for comment, Mr. De la Torre replied that: “Regarding the LLM, my original comment was rushed and inaccurate. My revised comments on the LLM were speculative as I noted. I have no insights into the agency’s roles in acquiring AI or LLM. Refer you to them for comment. As for GDIT their work in AI is available on their website. The pitch I was referring to was internal to my team and never got out the gate while I was there since it was all aspirational. I will say that I’d love to see the IC [Intelligence Community] embrace new technologies in an effort to combat our enemies.”
The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment; any subsequent response will be added into this article post-publication.
De la Torre’s role at Continental will be far from Google Cloud’s only connection to the CIA. Beyond the company being one of five confirmed participants in the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) follow-on to Amazon’s recently completed Commercial Cloud Services (C2S), Google Cloud announced the addition of Dawn Meyerriecks, a former head of the CIA’s Directorate of Science & Technology, as a board member of Google Public Sector in May 2023. (As noted by a recent New York Times article on the CIA’s incorporation of AI, Meyerriecks was tapped by Director William Burns to review the agency’s adoption of AI shortly after he took charge.)
In a post on Sunday to the same technology-focused forum in which he criticized the CIA’s LLM technology, De la Torre pitched his new services: “With the new administration in place, we have a unique opportunity to leverage key relationships and expand our reach. I am particularly eager to engage with companies in the technology and defense sectors, offering our expertise in lobbying and strategic advocacy.”
Perhaps the most consistent theme in De la Torre’s public advocacy prior to joining Continental has been hawkish views on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, particularly in Cuba and Venezuela. Six days ago, De la Torre published an article on his personal website, headlined “A Gift to the Cuban Dictatorship,” which opened with the statement that: “The Biden administration’s decision to remove Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism is a catastrophic misstep.” Five days earlier, he published an article on Venezuela entitled “Maduro’s Playbook: Intimidation, Silence, and Detention.”
In another nod towards a national security-focused U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, De la Torre publicly applauded Donald Trump’s December 10 nomination for Ambassador to Mexico of a former member of the Latin America-focused 7th Special Forces Group, Ronald D. Johnson. Johnson transitioned from the Green Berets to a second career in the CIA circa April 1998, where he participated in military operations around the globe before becoming a liaison between the CIA’s science and technology directorate and U.S. Special Operations Command. (Johnson then transitioned to his third career by becoming Trump’s Ambassador to El Salvador from September 2019 into 2021.)
As noted in an October profile in The New Yorker, Continental founder Carlos Trujillo has been a long-term associate of the presumptive incoming Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, due to both men serving in the Florida House of Representatives and hailing from the same Miami community (for which, Continential has lobbied). The former CIA station chief Enrique de la Torre advertised his new allies on Sunday, publicly posting a picture of himself standing next to Rubio, wearing a small CIA pin on his lapel.