Trump's Classified Toys

May 17, 2017 Topic: Presidency Intelligence Region: United States Blog Brand: Paul Pillar

Trump's Classified Toys

Intelligence rests on trust, and on the confidence of the provider of the information that whoever receives that information will safeguard it.  Such confidence is important at the level of individual spies, who take great risks to their own safety, sometimes in direct betrayal of their own countries, and need to believe that the information they provide and everything having to do with the relationship will be kept secret.   The confidence also is important at the level of governments and intelligence services.  A service sharing information with a foreign counterpart needs to believe that the partnering government will keep secret the information and everything about the sharing relationship.  There needs to be trust that the recipient government will not compromise any of this to the public or to other governments, and certainly not to any states regarded as adversaries.

President Trump’s reported sharing with the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador of intelligence that a friendly foreign service had given to the United States was a flagrant betrayal of this trust.  It was highly irresponsible handling of valuable information.  The resulting damage is likely to be significant, starting most directly with reluctance of the originating foreign service to share similar information with the United States in the future.

Although what Trump did in his session with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak does not evoke memories of any comparable incidents in earlier U.S. presidencies, we can get some idea of the probable damage from experience with the more common type of leak in which an anonymous leaker gives secret information to the press.  I recall such episodes from my 28-year career in U.S. intelligence, and specifically from the substantial portion of it spent working on counterterrorism.  In one instance, a piece of intelligence that a foreign partner service had given us leaked and appeared in U.S. newspapers.  Understandably and unsurprisingly, the foreign service suspended its sharing of information with us.  In a later meeting with a foreign counterpart in that country—a senior intelligence official with counterterrorist responsibilities—I had the task of apologizing for the leak, expressing my own government’s regret that such leaks occur, offering assurances that we would do our best to prevent a recurrence, and asking the foreign service to please resume the sharing of information.  Eventually the sharing was resumed, but only after a hiatus in which we had lost the benefit of timely intelligence on terrorist threats.

That was the consequence of a garden-variety leak, which only requires one bad apple to overcome the security consciousness of an entire service and an entire government.  The reaction of a foreign service to willful disclosure by the president of the United States is likely to be stronger.  Every foreign government knows that the president can have access to anything he wants and to the most sensitive of secrets.  Probably most shocking for the foreign services is the willful disregard by the man at the top for safeguarding sensitive information, and the bad example that this sets for everyone below him.

The damage is not limited to the one foreign service that originated the information that Trump divulged.  Every other foreign intelligence, security, and national police force with which the United States has an information-sharing liaison relationship—and it has many—is taking notice.  They are worrying about the political consequences of their intelligence relationship with the Americans becoming a headline item.  They are worrying even more about the safety and willingness to cooperate of their own human agents, on whom they rely for intelligence that is critical for their own country’s security.  There will be greater reluctance, as a result of what happened in the Oval Office, among many of these other foreign services to share information with the United States.

The reluctance extends as well to the level of would-be individual spies, including our own.  Every such agent or potential agent must be thinking extra thoughts about the extra dangers of working clandestinely for a government headed by someone who treats the resulting information so carelessly.  This incident involved reporting from a foreign service, but the impact also will be felt in what U.S. intelligence services can collect.   

The information that Trump reportedly conveyed to the Russians involved terrorism.  There is no other topic on which the United States is more heavily dependent on information shared by friendly foreign services.  Those services are on the front line in confronting many of the terrorist groups and extremists that also are worries to the United States.  Some of the countries concerned have been working hard longer against these targets than the United States.  Besides having the experience, they have the local knowledge, cultural familiarity, language ability and other attributes that give them a better chance of penetrating and collecting against such groups and cells than the United States has.

Counterterrorist intelligence is unlike some other topics such as, say, a foreign nuclear program, in which the intelligence service with the most powerful satellites and most sophisticated technical collection systems may have a leg up on everyone else.  Intelligence work on terrorism is a much more granular, close-to-the-ground effort, requiring as many participants as possible who are familiar with that ground, to identify the terrorist needles in an endless haystack of extremists.  America’s dependence on the cooperation, and the confidence, of its foreign partners is thus heavy and inevitable.

The White House’s attempts at minimizing the significance of Trump’s action miss all these points, and other important ones as well.  National security adviser H. R. McMaster made a statement that “at no time were any intelligence sources and methods discussed.”  Well, if such sources and methods had been discussed with the Russians, the incident would have been unbelievably egregious rather than merely seriously damaging.  The sources and methods involved in the information divulged may in fact be in jeopardy; the Russian services are probably at least as capable as anyone else at reverse engineering the provided information to narrow down how, where, and by whom it was collected.  Analysts at the SVR and FSB are undoubtedly digging into what must have been for them an especially interesting cable from Ambassador Kislyak.  Even if the specific sources and methods are not compromised, however, the main issue remains the loss of trust.

McMaster was trotted out before the cameras to make that statement, but he and other senior aides with any national security experience certainly realized immediately the significance of what Trump had done.  This was indicated by the scrambling, especially by assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism Thomas Bossert, to expunge from internal memos the relevant part of the President’s conversation with the Russians and to limit severely the distribution of transcripts from the meeting.  It is once again, as Trump might say, sad that capable people who do know something about national security are drawing fine lines in defensive statements and performing other clean-up duty to try to cover for the mistakes of a boss who doesn’t seem to know much about national security.

Those aides will be critical players as the intelligence community continues to adjust to serving this unique president.  The community cannot, and will not, deny this or any other president access to sensitive information because of a fear of further damaging disclosures.  But Trump’s lack of appetite for consuming a large volume of intelligence may help in the adjustment.  Some pieces of intelligence that in a previous administration may have gone all the way to the president may instead go no higher than to officials such as McMaster and Bossert, and to Secretary of Defense James Mattis—to whom Trump has delegated more authority for the final say in military operations than was the case in previous administrations.  This is not a matter of denial of information to the president, but rather of directing the intelligence to where it can do the most good.

As for what this episode says about Donald Trump, we have many of the same things we already knew all too well about him, including the impulsiveness, the indiscipline, the refusal to admit mistakes, and the inexperience of having come into office not only with no exposure to national security matters but also no public service at all.  Another attribute comes through in the reportedly boastful nature of the way Trump spilled the information to Lavrov and Kislyak, bragging about the great intelligence he is able to get every day.  It also comes through in Trump’s subsequent tweet that “As President…I have the absolute right” to share such information with Russia.  The resulting image is of a kid in a roomful of new toys, and now that they are his toys he believes he has a right to do whatever he wants with them.  David Brooks, in a column evidently written largely before the intelligence disclosure, perceptively captures this quality in describing Trump as an “infantalist” who has several of the attributes of a “seven-year-old boy”.

That brings to mind an earlier president who was the polar opposite of Trump in how he would have handled intelligence and the Russians: George H. W. Bush, who not only had an astute and successful foreign policy but also, as a former director of central intelligence, was the most sophisticated consumer of intelligence of any president in memory.  But Mr. Bush did have a thing about broccoli.  “I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it,” he declared, “and I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!”  Letting one’s inner little kid out when the only consequence is banning a cruciferous vegetable from the White House dining table does no harm to the national interest.  Letting it out the way Trump has done inflicts significant harm to the national interest.