The son of a senior CIA official has been confirmed killed while fighting for the Russian Army in Ukraine. Michael Gloss, 21, son of CIA deputy director for digital innovation Juliane Gallina Gloss, was killed in April 2024 while participating in fighting in Donetsk Oblast.
Gloss became radicalized while attending College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, which offers exactly one degree program called Human Ecology. He was arrested during climate change and pro-abortion protests. His Instagram page features an American flag burning.
According to Gloss's father, Larry, a Navy veteran, Michael had dropped out of college, stopped taking medication for his psychiatric problems, and decided to backpack around Europe. The website iStories documents his travels as part of a hippie-like group called the Rainbow Family.
He was drawn to Russia "believing that only in Russia could he realize his dream of building a water purifier to help people who didn’t have access to clean water." Apparently, he wanted to become a Russian citizen and may have thought that serving in the destruction of Ukraine was an easy way of achieving that end.
Michael entered Russia in August and by September 5 his name appears on a list of foreign volunteers at the main induction center in Moscow. There, he became one of at least 1500 young men from at least 48 countries who've volunteered for the Russian Army. His parents had tracked his iPhone and saw it was located near a military training center. They called and questioned him about his location, but he denied being at the training center. He is in the opening frame of this TikTok video created by a fellow enlistee (rear left) and seated on the right side of the bench in the second scene.
@nabaraja4 #💘💘🇳🇵🇳🇵 ♬ कहाँ बाट जिन्दगीले - Surendra Manandhar
In December 2023, he called his Rainbow Family members and left a voice message saying he was still in Russia, but he did not tell them he was in the Russian Army: “Hey fam, I’m in Russia. Yeah, I’m working here. I’m trying to get a passport and money, you know, so I can travel across Africa because I also like the warm weather. It’s like negative 10 here. It’s crazy. There’s so much snow. It’s, like, as tall as I am. But yeah, things are good. Despite the cold and the fact that I don’t see the sun for like a month. but it’s fun. I have lots of friends that I’m learning Russian things are good.”
In late December, Gloss's unit was sent to the front. He was killed in action on April 4. The news of his death was delivered to his parents in person by a State Department consular affairs official in June, but the body was not repatriated until December.
Not everything is politics. Michael Gloss came from a solid upper-class home. His parents were veterans; his mother was the first woman to command the brigade of midshipmen at the US Naval Academy. He had a privileged upbringing and participated in Boy Scouts and high school athletics. And yet, he became virulently anti-American, converted to Islam, though nothing in his writing would indicate it was a deep conversion, and believed he "might have just incarnated in time to defeat mortality AND the military industrial complex.”
How did he come to thoroughly reject his parents's values and embrace a radical leftism? How did he abandon his own professed antiwar ethos and decide to join in the aggressive war waged by Russia against Ukraine? How did he completely reject American society and government as hindering freedom and head to one of the most repressive countries in the Northern Hemisphere?
This is the kind of thing that should keep parents awake at night.
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