Conspiracies and cosying up to dictators Why intelligence experts are spooked by Tulsi Gabbard

In 2018, a Syrian dissident with the codename Caesar was set to testify before the House foreign affairs committee about the torture and summary executions that had become a signature of Bashar al-Assad's brutal crackdown on opposition during Syria's civil war.

- Guardian international staff

It was not Caesar's first time in Washington: the ex-military photographer had smuggled out 55,000 photographs and other evidence of life in Assad's brutal detention facilities years earlier, and had campaigned anonymously to convince US legislators to pass tough sanctions on Assad's network as punishment for his reign of terror. But ahead of that hearing, staffers on the committee, activists and Caesar himself suddenly became nervous: was it safe to hold the testimony in front of Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii congresswoman on the committee who just a year earlier had travelled to Damascus of her own volition to meet Assad?

Could she record Caesar's voice, they asked, or potentially send a photograph of the secret witness back to the same contacts who had brokered her meeting with the Syrian president?

"There was genuine concern by Democrats in her own party, and Republicans and us and Caesar, about how were we going to do this?" said Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an activist group, who travelled with Gabbard in Syria in 2015. "With the member sitting on this committee that we believe would give any intelligence she has to Assad, Russia and Iran, all of which would have wanted to kill Caesar."

During a congressional trip in 2015, Moustafa recalled, Gabbard had asked three young Syrian girls whether the airstrike they had narrowly survived might not have been launched by Assad, but rather by the terrorist group Isis. The one problem? Isis did not have an air force.

Photographs from the 2018 briefing showed a heavily disguised Caesar sitting in a hoodie and mask giving testimony before the House committee.

"I often disguise [witnesses]," said Moustafa, who had worked closely with Caesar and served as his translator. "But that day I was especially wary of Tulsi."