Did they?The CIA denied him.
If so, it would have to be an awfully big oooooops. Whoops, the elite educated son of one of our own agents (in an agency notorious for nepostism) somehow gets passed over and becomes the most successful and influential television news host. Project Mockingbird Fail.
What I heard in Putin's comment was a lighthearted accusation that Tucker is *in* the CIA.
Tucker: Who destroyed the Nordstream pipeline?
Putin: You did.
Putin: Of course not you, personally. But CIA did.
Tucker: Nervously sweats.
Did anyone else catch that?
Anyway, there are SO many agencies today (aren't there 18 US spy agencies?), and so many pseudo-governmental groups, things like the "world economic forum" that you could easily be under the influence of one of these directly, or even indirectly and not even realize you are under gonvernment influence. That is to say, Tucker may not be an actual agent, who reports in to a guy in a felt hat and writes up weekly intelligence reports, but he could be very much controlled and had his entire career manipulated. Either way, I'm very hesitant to trust a millionaire son of a CIA agent.
This reminds me of an excellent tv series HBO Hungary did on the overthrow of the Communist government installed in 1956. A Besugo (The Informant" tells the story of a college student who is reluctantly recruited to inform on fellow students with subversive sympathies by the Communist government. At the very end, an American agent appears and reveals himself to have been secretly monitoring and encouraging one of the smart and successful students, not in the Democratic side, but in the *Communist* side. (Of course Soviets and Americans were both encouraging Young Communists and Young Democrats respectively, but this showed much deeper propagandistic goals).
Obviously a Communist sympathizer is not going to *directly work* for such an agency, but he instead offered this student a 4 year fully paid scholarship to America (where said student would either be removed from Hungary, depriving them of a bright mind and natural leader for a time, or could possibly be indoctrinated to beome an American leaning dissident. America does this kind of stuff all the time. The point was the whole time this Young Communist was being monitored and encouraged and groomed by Americans for years, they had no idea.
What would be far more surprising than the CIA intentionally turning down an influential applicant, is if someone made it to the top of one of the top 2 news networks and was NOT somehow controlled. Maybe Tucker realised this, and left. Maybe he mostly told us the truth. But it's pretty clear he was told or influenced in what stories he could cover. He believes in Space Aliens and Chinese Spy Balloons and I just don't buy it. Do you have any idea how many admitted US spies openly work at CNN? Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mate talk about this a lot.