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Author Topic:   Classified Material on Human Intelligence Sources Helped Trigger Alarm
teasel
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posted August 26, 2022 11:02 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for teasel     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Documents related to the work of clandestine sources are some of the most sensitive and protected in the government. F.B.I. agents found some in boxes retrieved from Donald J. Trump’s home.

http://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/politics/trump-affidavit-intelligence-spies.html

quote:

WASHINGTON — They risk imprisonment or death stealing the secrets of their own governments. Their identities are among the most closely protected information inside American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Losing even one of them can set back American foreign intelligence operations for years.

Clandestine human sources are the lifeblood of any espionage service. This helps explain the grave concern within American agencies that information from undercover sources was included in some of the classified documents recently removed from Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of former President Donald J. Trump — raising the prospect that the sources could be identified if the documents got into the wrong hands.

Mr. Trump has a long history of treating classified information with a sloppiness few other presidents have exhibited. And the former president’s cavalier treatment of the nation’s secrets was on display in the affidavit underlying the warrant for the Mar-a-Lago search. The affidavit, released in redacted form on Friday, described classified documents being found in multiple locations around the Florida residence, a private club where both members and their guests mingle with the former president and his coterie of aides.

Nothing in the documents released on Friday described the precise content of the classified documents or what risk their disclosure might carry for national security, but the court papers did outline the kinds of intelligence found in the secret material, including foreign surveillance collected under court orders, electronic eavesdropping on communications and information from human sources — spies.

Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.

“HCS information is tightly controlled because disclosure could jeopardize the life of the human source,” said John B. Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration. “It would be reckless to declassify an HCS document without checking with the agency that collected the information to ensure that there would be no damage if the information were disclosed.”

C.I.A. espionage operations inside numerous hostile countries have been compromised in recent years when the governments of those countries have arrested, jailed and even killed the agency’s sources.

Last year, a top-secret memo sent to every C.I.A. station around the world warned about troubling numbers of informants being captured or killed, a stark reminder of how important human source networks are to the basic functions of the spy agency.

During the early part of last decade, the Chinese government dismantled the C.I.A.’s network of sources within China — crippling the agency’s spying operations in the country for years. Source networks in Iran and Pakistan have also been compromised, prompting the agency to ask its case officers and analysts to redouble the efforts to protect the identities of spies and informants.

Even a single source, if well placed, can be of amazing importance to the spy agency. When one informant, critical to the intelligence assessment that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump, had to be extracted and resettled in Virginia, the C.I.A. was, for a time, left somewhat in the dark about senior levels of Kremlin decision-making.

In 2010, when WikiLeaks and several news outlets, including The New York Times, published thousands of American diplomatic cables from State Department employees posted around the world, the greatest concern among American officials was the possibility that foreign sources aiding the United States might be identified by name in the documents.

When F.B.I. agents in May went through the 15 boxes of material turned over to the National Archives by Mr. Trump in January, a year after he left office, they quickly determined that they contained 184 documents marked as classified, including some labeled HCS — an especially troublesome revelation in the eyes of intelligence experts.

“It is among the most sensitive information relating to human intelligence sources and very tightly held at the C.I.A.,” said George Jameson, a former senior C.I.A. officer and lawyer. “A compromise could result in harm to the source and the source’s information.”

An intelligence document marked HCS will contain details about the source of the information. Often such descriptions are very general, noting if a “clandestine source” has direct or secondary knowledge of the intelligence presented. But sometimes there are more direct descriptions to help policymakers properly assess the information, details that could allow people reading the document to identify the source — a prime reason the spy agency seeks to tightly control HCS documents.

The HCS designation is “used to protect exceptionally fragile and unique” human intelligence operations and methods “that are not intended for dissemination outside of the originating agency,” according to a 2013 directive from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

According to former officials, documents marked HCS have special handling requirements to make sure they are stored properly and not reviewed by people who are not cleared to see them.

“Although the president generally received finished intelligence that included HCS reporting, this would include source descriptions and context to establish the information’s reliability, details that would enable an adversary to narrow down from whom, and where, the secrets came,” said Douglas London, a former C.I.A. officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the Trump administration. “The more sensitive the information, the fewer the suspects or technical vulnerabilities for the adversary to investigate.”

In addition to the HCS markings, some of the documents were marked FISA, indicating information collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“What this tells us is that there was possibly something from human beings, from spies, possibly something involving foreigners who are the only ones targeted under FISA and potentially there is very sophisticated sensitive information involved here,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, the former general counsel of the National Security Agency.

Ultimately, Mr. Gerstell said, understanding how sensitive any of the documents are, and what sources might be compromised, requires the documents to be examined by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such an examination is one reason the Justice Department and the F.B.I. conducted the search at Mar-a-Lago to collect the material.

“One of the reasons they need to get these documents is to understand what is in there for the purpose of conducting a damage assessment,” Mr. Gerstell said. “We have surveillance tapes and we will see who had access. But the government also needs to see the documents so they can know what might have been compromised.”

The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have requested such a review, but it is not clear when the intelligence community will begin such an examination. On Friday, Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, reiterated his call for an assessment of the damage the mishandling of the documents may have caused.

“It appears, based on the affidavit unsealed this morning, that among the improperly handled documents at Mar-a-Lago were some of our most sensitive intelligence,” Mr. Warner said.

Until more about the nature of the documents is publicly known it is impossible to tell what, if any damage was done. But former officials stressed that counterintelligence experts often will take measures to protect sources or change collection methods if they believe a classified document could have been viewed by people not authorized to see it.

“It is a principle of counterintelligence that when you believe a code or classified material has been possibly compromised you have to assume the worst,” Mr. Gerstell said. “It is a powerful reason to know what is in the documents and who had access.”

Adam Goldman contributed reporting.


I've just seen someone suggest that we might have actually reached the lowest that rumpy could go, but I doubt it.

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teasel
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posted August 26, 2022 11:10 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for teasel     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Remember that meeting with Putin, when Trump refused to have any other official witnesses in the room?

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teasel
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posted August 26, 2022 11:15 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for teasel     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/575384-cia-admits-to-losing-dozens-of-informants-around-the-world-nyt/


Leading counterintelligence officials issued a memo to all of the CIA’s global stations saying that a concerning number of U.S. informants were being captured and executed.

The CIA’s counterintelligence mission center investigated dozens of incidents in the last few years that involved killings, arrests or compromises of foreign informants. In an unusual move, the message sent via a top secret cable included the specific number of agents killed by other intelligence agencies, according to The New York Times.

Officials said that level of detail is a sign of the significance of the cable. Announcing the specific number of killings is rare as that figure is typically held under wraps from the public and even from some CIA employees, the Times noted.

The cable, which also cited the issue of putting “mission over security,” comes amid recent efforts by countries like Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan to find CIA informants and turn them into double agents, the Times reported.

The memo also noted long standing issues like placing too much trust in sources, a speedy recruiting process and inadequate attention to potential intelligence risks among other problems.

The uptick in compromised informants highlights the more sophisticated ways in which foreign intelligence agencies are tracking the CIA’s actions. These mechanisms include artificial intelligence, facial recognition tools and other hacking methods, per the Times.

The New York Times also reported that CIA case officers were sometimes promoted for recruiting spies often regardless of the success, performance or quality of that spy.

“No one at the end of the day is being held responsible when things go south with an agent,” Douglas London, a former CIA operative who was unaware of the cable, said to the Times. “Sometimes there are things beyond our control but there are also occasions of sloppiness and neglect and people in senior positions are never held responsible.”

People who have read the cable added that it was intended for the officers who are most directly involved in enlisting and vetting potential new informants, the Times reported.

The CIA declined to comment on the matter.

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jwhop
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posted August 26, 2022 11:20 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Utter and total bullshiiite.

President Trump had the unqualified right to declassify any document or information in the US inventory of documents or inventory.

You and your idiot leftist fringe communist socialist progressive cadres can wheeze, whine and snivel but you won't overcome US Supreme Court decisions or the statutory laws of the United States.

Now leftists, take a hike.

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Randall
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posted August 27, 2022 04:49 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Randall     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
“If the President does it, it isn’t a crime” applies to declassification. He is the Executive branch. He answers to no one as it relates to declassifying documents. Period. This is just another disappointment for you. Russia Russia Russia!

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Belage
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posted August 27, 2022 05:03 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Belage     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
teasel, ALL the former US presidents have taken classified material with them after they left. That is one of the prerogative of the job of POTUS. Please stop being a stooge and learn to think for yourself.

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Randall
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posted August 27, 2022 09:00 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Randall     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
The POTUS is literally the third body of government. As Commander-in-Chief, he alone has sole discretion.

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teasel
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posted August 31, 2022 09:19 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for teasel     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
He claimed he wasn’t using any of the files, that they were in storage. Why were some of them found in his desk drawer???

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teasel
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posted August 31, 2022 09:19 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for teasel     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
He is a grifter, a con artist, and a Putin puppet. All of his supporters sold out this country, along with him.

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Randall
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posted August 31, 2022 09:27 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Randall     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Still deluded, I see. Russia Russia Russia!

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jwhop
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From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
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posted August 31, 2022 11:22 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by teasel:
He is a grifter, a con artist, and a Putin puppet. All of his supporters sold out this country, along with him.

Congratulations to the perpetuated deluded. That's you!

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