Radicalized Son of CIA Director Killed Fighting for Russia

A 21-year-old American man who was killed in the Ukraine in 2024 while fighting under contract for the Russian military has been identified as the radicalized son of two members of the American security apparatus, including a deputy director of the CIA.

His mother, Julianne Gallina, is a graduate of the US Naval Academy who served as a Navy cryptologic officer. She was appointed deputy director for digital innovation at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in February 2024; prior to that she was the Chief Information Officer for the Agency.

His Instagram makes it clear he was radicalized in college; in 2019, he is posting pictures of himself taking the field at a high school football game.

In 2021, he enrolled at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Just prior to his enrollment in College of the Atlantic, he posted a picture in which he describes having little knowledge of himself.

When Russia invaded the Ukraine, students at the college took part in a demonstration in support of the Ukraine, but by the beginning of 2022, Gloss was posting memes about “late stage capitalism.”

By spring of 2022, he is posting videos of radical graffiti stickers about burning detention centers and deporting the government, which he captions “just some anti fascism things” with hashtags including “statism kills,” “anarchy,” and “1312,” which is code for ACAB - All Cops are Bastards.

Included in the same post is a video of him burning an American flag. By June, he is protesting “fascism” and “theocracy” and “the fall of democracy” following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade and kick the issue of abortion back to the individual states.

By the next year, he has dropped out of college and is travelling the world dressed as Obi Wan Kenobi, having joined the Rainbow Family.

Although the counter-culture group began in the United States just after Woodstock and Altamont, the Rainbow family is now an international affair.

They are a loose coalition of counter culture members; an outgrowth of the anti war and hippy movements, it describes itself as “the largest best coordinated nonpolitical nondenominational nonorganization of like-minded individuals on the planet.”

Later that same year, around the same time that he made his way to Russia, he was declaring that NATO are Nazi’s while also praising Stalin and the USSR.

After he arrived in Russia, he attended a music festival in the Moscow Oblast, according to a source interviewed by iStories, an independent Russian investigative journalist media organization who broke this story.

Michael arrived at the festival without a tent and built himself a hut out of branches, over which he raised a Soviet flag someone had given him.

On September 1, Gloss wrote in a Rainbow Family chat that his visa would expire in a week. On September 5, a record for Michael Alexander Gloss appeared in the EMIAS database, a component of Moscow's unified healthcare platform.

His address was listed as a Russian Defense Ministry contract recruitment center in Moscow, and his “apartment” was a medical examination room with the number 302.

On VKontakte, a Russian online social media outlet, Gloss describes himself as “a supporter of the multipolar world. I ran away from home. traveled the world. I hate fascism. I love my homeland.”

VK groups that Gloss joined include: “Romance of Russian Villages”, “We are from the USSR”, “USSR Lenin Stalin Marxism Communism Communists”, and “Islam”.

He had apparently decided he was Muslim, at least according to a dating app that iStories found his profile on. On his VK page, he published a video titled “Putin declared the need for an independent Palestine”.

He also posted a conspiracy video related the October 7 pogrom in Israel, “How the Israel Defense Forces shelled Israeli civilians in Kibbutz Be’eri with tanks!”, on which he commented, “This is the closest picture we have to the truth about the victims of October 7 🇷🇺🤝🇵🇸.”

This is a reference to hostages killed in the battle against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists who were slaughtering Israeli civilians as well as using them as human shields.

Terror in Israel Leads to War on Hamas

After two weeks of training, Gloss was taken by bus to a military unit in September of 2023, where he was enlisted in Russia’s 137th Ryazan Airborne Regiment, according to the iStories investigation. Gloss was sent to the front lines in December of 2023.

Gloss in November 2023

Michael Alexander Gloss died on April 4, 2024 in “Eastern Europe”, according to an obituary published by his family which has now been removed from the internet.

For now, it remains available on the Wayback Machine at the Internet archives, which is where we got this excerpt:

With a tremendous love of music, Michael had wide-ranging taste in artists. The Beatles were his gateway band, which led to a love of Bob Dylan’s protest rock and many other artists. He decided to play the guitar and gathered the Christmas money given from close friends to buy his own instrument. Just weeks later and with no formal instruction, he was eking out songs. He loved to serenade family and his college classmates with love songs and classic acoustic rock. He regretted not being able to carry his guitar with him on his adventures overseas, and instead of carrying his own, he opened himself to the music of friends from all over the world. He joined the Rainbow Family in Türkiye who welcomed him with love, kindness and generosity.

Michael was fascinated by the hero’s journey and loved JRR Tolkien and his depiction of fellowship among heroes. He equally loved Adventure Time and the adventures of Finn and Jake, who were equally just in their quest for simple truth. With his noble heart and warrior spirit Michael was forging his own hero’s journey when he was tragically killed in Eastern Europe on April 4, 2024.

The obituary his family published and then retracted doesn’t mention what he was doing when he died, and paints a picture of Gloss as a sort of humanitarian; a hippy balladeer traveling the world to help the less fortunate.

Although they touch on the “warrior spirit” that led to him “forging his own hero’s journey,” they highlight that he, “he built houses in Honduras, he restored buildings in Türkiye destroyed by earthquakes, he worked on farms in Italy learning sustainable agriculture.”

His death was confirmed by the New York Post, who spoke to his father, Larry Gloss, a Navy veteran who now works as a Vice President for the National Interest Security Company (NISC).

NISC calls itself “a leading provider of innovative information technology, information management, and management technology consulting services and solutions in support of national interest and security initiatives for the Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security,…” and other agencies.

Larry Gloss told the Post that his son had a fixation on water purification and suffered from mental illness.

Michael told a member of the Balkan Rainbow Gathering that he joined the army to get a Russian passport as a pathway Russian citizenship, which he said was supposed to help him fulfill his “life’s purpose.”

Gloss said this was to…

“…build supercritical water oxidization infrastructure. In order to end ecological pollution and pollution related illness and death i.e: cancer, lymphoma, and all the hormonal problems related to microplastics and estrogenics in the water.”

“One of the manifestations of his mental illness was grandiosity,” Larry Gloss said. “He always cared about the environment. He always wanted to take care of those disadvantaged, less able.”

“In Michael’s thinking, which I now conclude largely as a function of some text exchange he’s had with comrades before his demise, he thought the best way of realizing his dreams of water purification would be as a citizen of Russia. And the quickest way to get there, the quickest way to Russian citizenship, would be through serving [in the Russian military].”

According to the Post, Larry Gloss said that he was under the impression that his son was serving in a support unit, not fighting on the front lines.

A Telegram channel of the Russian 106th Airborne Division, which includes the regiment Gloss belonged to, paints a different picture of his final moments.

On the day Gloss died attached to a paratrooper unit, according to the Russian military, they were conducting an offensive “despite difficult terrain and unfavorable positions” in which they would “sneak into enemy lines in small assault groups, relay coordinates to the artillery, and strike the Ukro-fascists. Then they clear the fortifications.”

The exact circumstances of his death remain unknown, and it is also unknown how Russia made contact with two high ranking members of the American security complex.

Based on Rainbow Family chats, his family was contacted by the Russian government about six months after his death. His funeral was held in the United States on December 21, 2024, eight months after his death.

According to iStories, a friend he stayed with in Istanbul said that he “was always talking about doom and gloom — poverty, the collapse of civilizations.”

According to the friend, Gloss was convinced (presumably by Russian propaganda) “that Western hegemony was coming to an end and that BRICS would take its place.”

BRICS is an economic alliance of nations that takes its name from the first five nations involved (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Other countries that have become involved in what is commonly referred to as BRICS+ include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

In 2022, BRICS proposed a new reserve currency to challenge the status of the US dollar as the world reserve, combining BRICS currencies, and backed by precious metals.

The Reserve Bank of India Governor said that de-dollarisation was not the objective of the Indian central bank, and that the BRICS reserve currency was part of a “derisking” of Indian trade, as dependence on a single currency like the dollar might prove “problematic.”

Another acquaintance in Turkey recalled that Gloss was angry at the United States over Palestine: “He was usually watching videos about Palestine and was so angry at America. He started thinking about going to Russia. He wanted to war with the USA. But I think he was very influenced by the conspiracy theory videos.”

The story of how the son of two top-ranking members of the American security apparatus died fighting for Vladimir Putin presents a unique window into how the nature of the idealistic naivete of youth, combined with increasing radicalization fueled by the internet, present a unique danger to society.

The CIA said in a statement, “Juliane Gallina and her family suffered an unimaginable personal tragedy in the spring of 2024 when her son Michael Gloss, who struggled with mental health issues, died while fighting in the conflict in Ukraine.”

“CIA considers Michael’s passing to be a private matter for the Gloss family — not a national security issue. The entire CIA family is heartbroken for their loss. Juliane and her husband shared that ‘we adored our son and grieve his loss every moment. We appreciate privacy at this difficult time.”

The CIA is wrong; the radicalization of American youth is a huge national security issue, which is why it’s impacted a deputy director at the CIA and the Vice President of a company who provides technology solutions for defense agencies.

Curiously, the CIA also seems to think the CIA is wrong. In 2024, the Western “Five Eyes” security alliance published its first and only public paper in which it warned of the increasing number of western children being radicalized online by violent extremists.

The CIA is one of the intelligence agencies that represents the United States within this alliance; the paper called for a “whole of society” response to this imminent threat to the safety and stability of western countries.

Although his parents seem to suggest that mental illness was the culprit here, there is no empirical evidence that substantiates a connection between extremism and psychiatric issues.

Studies do show that children of high-achieving parents are more likely to experience psychiatric issues as a result of both excessive pressure to achieve as well as literal and emotional isolation from parents busy with other things.

According to the study linked above, “1 of every 10 teenagers in this cohort exhibited high levels of behavior disturbances across multiple domains.”

In a 2021 interview with Thirdway Solutions, Julliana recounted a difficult decision she made, at one point leaving the CIA to spend more time with her kids, joining a private company before returning to the agency.

“I had been traveling a lot, working on a cool project, and so wrapped up in myself.” She started to feel increasingly out of touch with her kids and felt like she needed a “course correction.”

She told Thirdway, “I can use my experience to help my children find a path… whatever path that is.”

Michael wasn’t Facebook friends with either of his two sisters or his father; his mother doesn’t appear to have a Facebook account. They also don’t appear to have followed him on Instagram or vice versa, but he did follow himself.

In a Crime Culture Media exclusive, we uncovered his second Instagram account. That’s where the picture we posted of Gloss from November 2023 came from:

His parents wrote that with “…his noble heart and warrior spirit Michael was forging his own hero’s journey when he was tragically killed in Eastern Europe on April 4, 2024.”

Let’s take a look at the heroes journey.