Intelligence community, or IC, leaders again find themselves being weighed and measured by the public they serve. There are two reasons this time.
First, there are charges of politicization over that letter — the one signed by 51 former senior IC leaders that conjured Russian covert influence specters from Hunter Biden’s laptop during a contentious national election, orchestrated by former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who recently admitted partisan motivation.
Second, there is that 30-plus-count indictment for Espionage Act violations committed by, unprecedentedly, a former president. (“How will IC leaders stop such mishandling of national secrets?,” people ask me.)
What, in the name of Maui, do we make of this? I don’t have authoritative answers, but can provide an insider’s perspective and recommend extracurricular reading to the truly curious.
Let’s start with the letter.
As a college intern, I worked in the same office as young Morell, albeit in a different division. I did not know him personally. His reputation (“hall file,” in agency parlance) included being “akamai,” “analytically savvy” and “ambitious.”
His rise to the seventh floor (Langley’s C-suite) may be evidence of these traits and, in line with that last one, some online pundits say the scandalous letter represents his angling for a post-agency political appointment. (I’m not so sure.)
Irrespective of motive, his personal actions further obscured the image of political neutrality required of intelligence professionals in a healthy constitutional republic, and they affected the post-retirement work of others.
“Was CIA involved?”
On an organizational level, unlikely. Today, there are too many internal checks and balances, too much external oversight (Congress, the director of National Intelligence), resulting from historical mischief. That said, organizations consist of individuals.
A better question is, “Did current CIA employees aid Morell?”
Possibly. A congressional committee investigation into the matter surfaced claims implicating an element in the CIA’s Pre-publication Classification Review Board, the body that screens my writing for accidentally included classified information before print (a life-long requirement for former officers.) CIA Director Burn’s silence on the issue fuels speculation (he was appointed by Hunter’s father).
Concern over politicization in the intelligence world is nothing new. Most recently, there was Morell’s 2016 letter in the New York Times endorsing Hillary Clinton, leveraging the mantle of his former position. (Unprofessional behavior for a career intelligence officer, in the view of many; patriotic alarm-sounding about the “national security threat” of a Trump presidency, according to others.)
Under CIA Director Gates in the early ‘90s, when I was a newbie, politicization was the topic du jour at headquarters. In the Directorate of Intelligence, producer of the President’s Daily Brief and National Intelligence Daily (a classified newspaper of sorts for government, military and law-enforcement leaders), we received formal instruction on preventing partisanship from affecting assessments; they had to be purely objective, informative, not leading in anyway. (For more on this, read former Agency analyst John Gentry’s newly released book “Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Longterm Consequences.”)
Let’s shift gears. “So, why can’t the IC stop presidents from mishandling classified information?”
Good question. You’ve now wandered into legal territory — constitutionally defined presidential authorities and the century-old Espionage Act — which fall outside the domain of intel agencies. Our judicial system appears to be doing its job (with Trump’s indictment), but it will be up to Congress to introduce any new laws governing presidential handling of classified, if the current Espionage Act is deemed insufficient.
Mind you, while in office, Trump signed a law elevating the mishandling of classified from a misdemeanor to a felony offense, making his later behavior all the more puzzling.
In closing, I’ll note that elected officials newly arrived in Washington who are granted security clearances to execute their public duties are not professional intel officers with security consciousnesses honed for years through counterintelligence briefings and working in secure areas patrolled by security officers and protected by extensive checks-and-balances. Their security mindset is different, and efforts to tighten things in the IC, like the Pentagon’s newly announced strictures in response to National Air Guardsman Texiera’s leaks, do not necessarily affect congressmen, cabinet members and presidents.
J.P. Atwell is a former senior CIA operations officer. His two-decade career began as an intelligence analyst and took him to every continent, save Antarctica. He now calls Hawaii Island home. He welcomes your comments at island.intelligencer@gmail.com.