Three points from this week’s pod with ex-CIA ops officer Marc Polymeropoulos:
The bigger problem with the Discord leak isn’t the intel leak, it’s the revelation that the intel community doesn’t pay attention to chat groups, gamers etc.
The media reaction to the leak was disproportionate to the intel revealed.
There’s too much classified information, and too many people with clearances. Reform is needed.
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Some disagreement characterized the podcast discussion this week: were these leaks a substance problem (details about Ukraine, Russia, China, intel about allies, estimates about the course of the war) or a form problem (the leak of highly classified information by… a kid)? There’s room for disagreement about whether any of the real intel — and of course, there were some forgeries among the trove of documents — was explosive or not. But there’s no room for disagreement about the danger of such leaks in general, the lives it can put at risk, and the operational security that is compromised.
If you’re interested in the “calm down” view, here’s a great piece by Noah Rothman at National Review. If you’re more inclined to light your hair on fire, read… everything else.
But on the problem of leaking in general, we can understand how this kid got a fancy, high-level clearance. Even the most secret activities require IT support. What we can’t understand is how he brought a camera into a secure facility. How he was a gamer on a sketchy site, and none of his superiors knew. How the documents he splashed online to show off to his cronies just sat there until they were found by Russians and others. All of this is a massive government fail.
Part of the problem is the security clearance process itself, which remains mired in the 20th century. Both of your hosts have gone through the clearance process; this week’s guest had the highest of clearances in the CIA’s directorate of operations, the spies. The questions that get asked of candidates for clearance do not get to many of the risk factors for young people in 2023. Are you a member of a chat room? A gamer group? On the dark web? Do you have an online presence we don’t know about? Maybe your faithful WTH folks don’t know the latest clearance routine, but Jack Teixeira’s access would suggest it’s not where it needs to be.
Remember, this isn’t just about the secrets. This is about how we get the secrets. Sure, some of the leak was signals intel — which we get via technical means; but some was human intelligence. How eager would you be to confide to your friendly CIA spy if that meant risking your identity to your country? How eager will anyone be to share intelligence with the United States knowing that some kid can share it to enhance his gangster (his word) status with other kids? Yeah, not very eager.
An additional note: We went off-topic to talk to Marc Polymeropolous about his Havana Syndrome. We’ve done an entire pod on the topic, and we make our views pretty clear: People who serve the United States and continue to suffer from the aftereffects of brain injuries likely inflicted by hostile foreign power deserve our support, our compassion, and most importantly, the loyalty and aid of the United States Government. Are they getting that? Not even close.
HIGHLIGHTS
First impressions?
MP: I think that for me, what is most interesting about this is of course how a young 21-year-old would have access up to essentially what is an update for senior US military leaders. And thinking about it and working through it, first of all, in the US military, there's 19-year-olds who take care of nuclear reactors on nuclear attack subs. There's 20-year-olds who work at the National Security Agency. So age to me was not the issue.
It's more two things: One is the background investigation, what happened or didn't happen. And then the ability of someone who essentially is a systems administrator to access all this classified information, where they have to work on systems, but often they do have access to this. So I think that's where this is really going to go. It's restricting access to those without the need to know, but also the background process on individuals who, again at young age are given responsibilities.
Isn’t part of the problem that so much is classified?
MP: I think one of the things that this has brought out into public, and a lot of us, and certainly you all have I'm sure thought a lot about this too, is this massive over-classification issue in the US national security structure. And I think I saw a figure there's over a million people with top secret clearances, and anything that the US government does get stamped with some kind of classification.
When I started it 26 years ago, the ratio or the balance between the secret world and the open source world was probably what... if you really wanted to understand something, maybe it's 80% classified information. This is signals intelligence, human intelligence, imagery, and then 20% open source. But it's flipped right now. And so the fact of the matter is one can follow the war in Ukraine, for example, with the tremendous explosive growth of open source or commercially sourced intelligence in the sense where I think that the classified world is only this small niche that's really going to help us. Penetration of the Russians. What is Vladimir Putin really thinking? That's still critically important. But I've raised this all in that I think that we probably certainly... we certainly do over-classify things and that should be looked at.
But of course, the blame isn’t on the classifiers here…
MP: This is about the, I'm going to be dramatic here, but the frailty of the human condition. This was a flawed individual. Someone who again, if you read and if you believe some of the press reporting on this, was almost in these Discord chats, he was acting almost like a cult figure, obviously showing off to his friends who revered him. That's a little different, as we look at the motivations particularly of spies over the years. Perhaps it's ideological or it's for monetary gain. This is not a spy. This is someone who was leaking information. But I don't think when the counterintelligence staff and the various organizations, I'm not sure how much they take someone like this into account. And I think they should.
Critical lessons learned?
MP: I think there's going to be a lot of lessons learned. So for example, when you remember you were getting your security clearances, they ask you questions such as, are you a Communist or are you a terrorist? I mean, I'm being very basic on this stuff. They didn't say, what gaming rooms are you involved with? And so I think that's interesting. The last part too is I saw yesterday that I think the intelligence duties of this wing out at the Massachusetts Air National Guard has been suspended because I suspect there's going to be some pretty basic security requirements that weren't met. So for example, the ability somehow he was taking photographs. Obviously, you're not supposed to bring your cell phone into a skiff, a classified area.
So now what's going to happen is we're going to get into a situation where can we, or do we have our counterintelligence, or security folks have the ability to monitor and employee's use of something like social media? There are huge privacy concerns in this. And so I wonder how we even do that when you apply to one of the three-letter agencies or the military. And then as you have continued access to classified information, do you have to give them not only your Twitter handles, because they will monitor this anyway, but in terms of your handles for some of these chat rooms. And then the next part of the question is on some of these things such as Discord and others, should the US counterintelligence staff of various agencies be kind of searching the dark web for such things?
What the hell is wrong with us that this intel can sit on the internet for months without any counterintelligence people seeing it?
MP: It's a really good question, but I think that one of the things I think they'll look at, is there more of this happening? The notion that it's been out there for months is of course embarrassing to the Department of Defense. There's no doubt about that. But the next step on this, you always try to fix things. So how does one in the national security world, in a security world monitor chat rooms like this? Should we have people searching the web for such gaming rooms or other things? These are pretty weighty questions, particularly when, let me just throw on top of this all, I write on, and think about national security all the time. I'm critical of the intelligence community when it needs to be.
The background process in getting security clearance, sorry to say, ain't that impressive. You give your five best friends who they'll go talk to, who all of them are going to say, "Yeah, Marc's a great guy." But I was never impressed with that they dive so deeply in... the Agency, of course relies on the polygraph and your financial disclosure forms. But in terms of the background process itself, it never was all that impressive to me. So I think even that has to be tightened up.
A lot of the “revelations” in this Discord dump weren’t really revelations, it seemed?
MP: The media reaction was hysterical. And there's a lot of people, and this goes from kind of the Fox National Security set to the New York Times, to the Washington Post National Security sets, all really good journalists. But I think they lost their minds, I really do. And it's almost the sense of a scandal is good because we can write on it. Literally, people who I really respected were saying, "This is worse than Snowden." And I sat back and I really thought about this a lot, because that made no sense to me.
The other part, which I think the media got wrong, and again, they were talking about outrage amongst allies. And my response to that, frankly, is, "Bullshit." U.S. embassies overseas, and I served at many, we develop bilateral relationships to weather storms like this. And so, are there going to be difficult conversations perhaps with U.S. ambassadors or station chiefs or the defense attaches with their counterparts? Sure. And then, you get back down to business, because what do you have? You have the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. Our intelligence sharing is not going to stop. That was another kind of comment. That's crazy.
And then there’s the fact that some of the “intel” was fake…?
MP: This is kind of the part that really I start scratching my head, some of the content, the substance of it was wrong. "Bakhmut is going to fall," it never happened. Or the notion of Mossad officials — and I worked in the Middle East, I worked with the Israelis a lot — the notion that Mossad officials somehow were helping foment political unrest in Israel is insane. And so, there was no outrage amongst Israeli officials.
Clearly, I follow Israeli politics, and I remember in late February, and this was publicized in the Israeli press, that the Mossad senior leadership said, "Look, we are okay with our rank and file, if they want a protest, to go out in the street." That's wildly different than what was in these disclosures, that somehow the Mossad senior leadership was trying to undermine the Israeli Prime Minister. Knowing Mossad, it's an apolitical organization, that just doesn't happen. And so, it wasn't met in Israel by outrage. It was met with, "What the hell are they talking about?" They were mocking us a bit. So my point is, on the bilateral relationships, manageable. We'll work through it, but not outrage.
And then, the final point is, are the Ukrainians going to alter their offensive, their war plans? The answer is no. Unnamed news organization had an anonymous quote from a Ukrainian official, "We're changing our war plans." Well, no they're not. I was one of the lone voices, kind of screaming out there, saying, "Everyone, please calm down."
So what happened with the forgeries that are now circulating?
MP: My understanding is that the material, after it [had] gone through several iterations of these chat rooms, at some point, the Russian channels got it and they certainly altered the casualty figures for Ukraine. But I think that we have to really let this investigation go forward. You could see how a hostile service would want to sow discord between allies.
Obviously, DoD will have access to what actual, some of the true content was, and to see if it was manipulated at all. And one of the questions I think we really should focus on, and again, I don't know the answer, is within this Discord discussion, were there personas who joined in who perhaps were not who they said they were, perhaps they were members of a hostile service? Ultimately, did the Russians use a fake persona to gain access to this? I think that's what we'll see in the days and weeks to come.
How has the public response been?
MP: Someone asked me, "How does one handle these things?" And it's the old kind of intelligence community saying, "Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter-accusations." So the Ukrainians just came out right away and said, "This is all crap. End of the story," and they moved on. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I think that certainly is going to be a line that's taken, and that's done for public consumption in their countries.
Another topic: You were struck with Havana Syndrome… how’s the response to that?
MP: The [US] intelligence community's response to this ... I'll say the Agency in particular has been ... Well, I'll say this generously, has been very mixed. While Bill Burns deserves a lot of credit for, first of all, looking in the past, in terms of an Inspector General report, which is not out, it's not publicized, I haven't seen it, but I've heard quite a bit about it. And it's a pretty honest assessment of how the agency really mishandled this.
And then the next part is getting people healthcare. And that, to me, I think they've gotten a lot better.
Where I think they've failed massively is on the attribution piece. And that intelligence community product recently put out makes no sense to me, because how is it where you have congressional legislation signed by the president in which those victims of Havana Syndrome were compensated by the US government after ... And I was, after my doctors at Walter Reed said, "Marc suffered a traumatic brain injury, that's not a preexisting condition, it's from an external event, and it was in the line of duty," and I was in Moscow in 2017. So the US government's paid out a lot of money to us on this. Which, actually, it's not a lot, but it's still the right thing to do with all the own personal costs that we've had to incur.
But how do you rectify that with then a statement saying it's basically nothing? And so the agency, to me, it's really disappointing. For my former colleagues, it's pretty painful. I mean, I feel a pretty big kind of notion of betrayal.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Pentagon leaks are ‘unfortunate but not catastrophic’ (The World, April 14 2023) [AUDIO]
Leaked Pentagon documents show U.S. spying on Russia (MSNBC, April 10 2023) [NEWS CLIP]
Criminal Complaint Filed Against Jack Teixeira (NYT, April 14 2023)
Vast Troves of Classified Info Undermine National Security, Spy Chief Says (WSJ, January 27 2022)
Pentagon Document Leak: What We Know So Far and the Biggest Takeaways (WSJ, April 17 2023)”
Overall media coverage:
Discord Leaks Show the Perils of Over-Classification (Bloomberg’s Editorial Board, April 18 2023)
The most shocking intel leak reveals new Chinese military advances (Washington Post, April 2023)
Leaked Pentagon documents provide snapshot of US intelligence officials watching China (CNN, April 2023)