Tag Archives: CIA

No, Hillary, 17 U.S. Intelligence Agencies Did Not Say Russia Hacked Dem E-mails

Hillary Clinton in last night’s presidential debate tried to avoid talking about the substance of the damaging WikiLeaks disclosures of DNC and Clinton campaign officials by claiming 17 U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia was responsible for this. After Clinton made this claim, she scolded Trump for challenging U.S. intelligence professionals who have taken an oath to help defend this country.

What Clinton said was false and misleading. First of all, only two intelligence entities – the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – have weighed in on this issue, not 17 intelligence agencies. And what they said was ambiguous about Russian involvement. An unclassified October 7, 2016 joint DNI-DHS statement on this issue said the hacks

. . . are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europa and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

Saying we think the hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts” is far short of saying we have evidence that Russia has been responsible for the hacks. Maybe high-level officials would have authorized them if Russian hackers were responsible, but the DNI and DHS statement did NOT say there was evidence Russia was responsible.

My problem with the DNI/DHS unclassified statement is that it appeared to be another effort by the Obama administration to politicize U.S. intelligence. Make no mistake, U.S. intelligence agencies issued this unprecedented unclassified statement a month before a presidential election that was so useful to one party because the Clinton campaign asked for it. The Obama administration was happy to comply.

Clinton tried to defend the DNI/DHS statement by repeating the myth that U.S. intelligence officers are completely insulated from politics. She must think Americans will forget how the CIA crafted the politicized Benghazi talking points in 2011 and how SOUTHCOM intelligence analysts were pressured to distort their analysis of ISIS and Syria to support Obama foreign policy. And that’s just under the Obama administration. Politicization of intelligence goes back decades, including such blatant efforts by CIA officers to interfere in the 2004 presidential election that the Wall Street Journal referred to it as “The CIA Insurgency” in an August 2004 editorial. I discussed the problem of the politicization of U.S. intelligence and the enormous challenge a Trump administration will have in combating it in an August 18, 2016 National Review article.

Maybe the Russians are behind the WikiLeak hacks of Democrat e-mails, possibly to influence the 2016 presidential election. I’m not convinced of this. I’m more concerned that these constant leaks of Democratic e-mails demonstrate that Democratic officials appear to have no understanding of the need for Internet security. This makes me wonder if John Podesta’s e-mail password is “password.” These are the people Clinton will be giving senior jobs with high-level security clearances. That is the real security scandal that no one is talking about.

Trump Will Face a Huge Challenge with U.S. Intelligence If He Wins

Before his classified national-security briefing yesterday, Donald Trump said he didn’t trust U.S. intelligence. His comments attracted the expected condemnations and ridicule from the media pundits and foreign-policy experts. However, based on my 25 years working in U.S. intelligence, I believe Trump’s concerns are well-founded.

On Wednesday, Trump received the intelligence briefing traditionally provided by the U.S. Intelligence Community to newly nominated presidential candidates. This briefing was preceded by calls from the Clinton campaign, other Democrats, and, privately, by some intelligence officials that Trump be denied these briefings because, they claim, he can’t be trusted to protect classified information.

Harry Reid, the top Democrat in the Senate, actually asked intelligence analysts to give Trump fake briefings.

The Washington Post’s intelligence reporter Greg Miller reported on July 28 that a senior intelligence official told Miller privately that he would refuse to brief Trump because of concerns about Trump’s alleged admiration of Russian president Putin and because “he’s been so uninterested in the truth and so reckless with it when he sees it.” Reuters ran a similar story on June 2, reporting that eight senior security officials said they had concerns about briefing Trump; Reuters did not indicate how many of the officials cited were intelligence officials or Obama appointees.

These calls to deny intelligence briefings to a presidential candidate are unprecedented, but they also reflect a serious problem within the U.S. intelligence community that awaits a possible Trump administration: the politicization of American intelligence by the Left.

I saw this constantly during my 19 years as a CIA analyst. CIA officers frequently tried to undermine CIA directors Casey and Gates because they disagreed with President Reagan’s policy goal of defeating the Soviet Union. Several testified against Gates’s nomination to be CIA director in 1991 by lodging false claims that he and Casey had politicized intelligence. Former senator Warren Rudman, a moderate Republican who headed President Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, described these attacks by CIA analysts as “an attempted assassination, an assassination of [Gates’s] character . . . McCarthyism, pure and simple.”

The liberal tilt within the CIA, especially in the Directorate of Intelligence (the analysis office), grew worse during the Clinton years as personnel were hired and promoted to support Clinton-Gore policy objectives. These included wasteful initiatives such as the DCI Environmental Center, launched at the same time the CIA was dangerously downplaying counterterrorism analysis.

Unfortunately, the intensified liberal tilt at the CIA during the Clinton years was not reversed by the George W. Bush administration. Bush kept on Clinton’s CIA director, George Tenet, who had no interest in cleaning house or taking steps to ensure that CIA analysis would be balanced and not politicized. When his successor, Porter Goss, tried to clean up the agency, CIA careerists fought back aggressively by leaking to Congress and the media, eventually forcing Goss out.

As a result, intelligence careerists often paid no price for engaging in blatantly political activities to undermine the Bush administration. One officer in the CIA inspector general’s office was fired after she admitted she’d leaked classified information on Bush counterterrorism programs to a Washington Post reporter. In 2005, several intelligence officers attempted to sabotage John Bolton’s nomination to be U.N. ambassador — an act of political skullduggery for which they were never punished.

The most notorious example of partisan political activity by U.S. intelligence officers occurred just before the 2004 presidential election when Paul Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, while giving a speech at a dinner on September 21, criticized President Bush and CIA director Tenet for ignoring critical intelligence that he claimed might have prevented the Iraq War. Incredibly, CIA management had cleared Pillar’s comments, saying that the substance of his remarks, but not the speaker or the audience, could be disclosed. The late columnist Robert Novak, who attended the dinner, sparked an uproar when he reported Pillar’s identity and the dinner anyway. Clearly, Pillar’s presentation was intended to affect the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

The Wall Street Journal condemned such political activities by CIA officers in a scathing September 29, 2004, editorial titled “The CIA’s Insurgency”:

It’s become obvious over the past couple of years that large swaths of the CIA oppose U.S. anti-terror policy, especially toward Iraq. But rather than keep this dispute in-house, the dissenters have taken their objections to the public, albeit usually through calculated leaks that are always spun to make the agency look good and the Bush administration look bad. . . . Yet what the CIA insurgents are essentially doing here, with their leaks and insubordination, is engaging in a policy debate. Given the timing of the latest leaks so close to an election, they are now clearly trying to defeat President Bush and elect John Kerry.

Politicization of America’s intelligence agencies by the Left has grown worse during the Obama years. Recall that the CIA drafted the politicized (and later discredited) 2012 talking points on the Benghazi terrorist attacks. Additionally, the agency now uses racial, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion, socioeconomic status, and other quotas for CIA hiring and promotions.

Significant examples of politicization in other intelligence agencies since 2009 include the congressional testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. During a briefing to the House Intelligence Committee in February 201, Clapper tried to downplay the Muslim Brotherhood as a radical Islamist group, saying: “The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”

And in 2015, as widely reported, more than 50 U.S. Central Command intelligence analysts lodged a formal complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general. In the complaint, they alleged that their intelligence assessments were being intentionally manipulated by senior officials to downplay the threat from ISIS and the al-Nusra Front (the al-Qaeda branch in Syria) in order to support the Obama administration’s claim that the U.S. was making progress in defeating these Islamist terrorist groups. A recent congressional task force concluded this month that these complaints were valid and expressed alarm that nothing has been done to improve CENTCOM intelligence analysis in response to them.

In light of this history, it is no surprise that Democrats, intelligence officers, and the liberal media urged that Trump be denied an intelligence briefing as the GOP presidential candidate. Naturally, they did not raise similar concerns about briefing Hillary Clinton, although the FBI director determined she was “extremely careless” in handling classified information as secretary of state, even sharing classified intelligence with people who had no security clearance. Comey also stated that due to this carelessness, it’s possible hostile actors have gained access to the highly classified information that traveled through the multiple private servers Clinton used.

It’s true that intelligence briefings to presidential candidates are offered at the discretion of a sitting president. But calls to deny these briefings to Trump or to give him fake briefings are an affront to the American tradition of peaceful transfer of power and could undermine his presidential transition if he wins the election.

It is not up to Senator Reid or U.S. intelligence officers to prevent a duly elected major-party presidential candidate from receiving intelligence briefings because they don’t like him or because he is from the wrong political party. Of more concern is whether some intelligence personnel, out of political bias, would refuse to provide a President Trump with the intelligence support he would need to protect American national security.

Trump may have been too hard on U.S. intelligence agencies when he said that they got it wrong before the Iraq War; and perhaps he was unfair to lambaste Obama’s dismissal of ISIS as the “jayvee” team. Intelligence agencies must be held accountable for their work, but their analysis will never be 100 percent accurate. In addition, intelligence agencies only advise policymakers. They cannot force a president to use their analysis.

I was pleased to hear that Trump realizes he will have a lot of work ahead of him to fix the U.S. intelligence community if he becomes president. To get the objective, accurate, and hard-hitting intelligence support he will need if elected, Trump must name strong, decisive leaders — including good managers from the business community — to top intelligence posts. He must hire people who understand that America’s intelligence agencies do not work for themselves, for either party in Congress, or the foreign-policy establishment; they work for the president. Any U.S. intelligence officer who is not prepared to loyally provide whomever wins the presidency with his best efforts should find another job.

Holder’s Dangerous Ignorance About Snowden

Many regard Eric Holder as one of the most incompetent and partisan men to serve as attorney general in U.S. history.

Holder’s record as attorney general included proposing to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Manhattan court room, failing to seriously investigate IRS targeting of tea party and other conservative groups, monitoring American journalists and the “Fast and Furious” operation cover-up.

Congress held Holder in contempt of Congress in June 2012 for refusing to hand over documents on the Fast and Furious operation. Senator Ted Cruz called for Holder to be impeached for the way he handled IRS targeting of conservative groups.

Holder’s recent comment about Edward Snowden adds to his record of ineptitude.

Last weekend, Holder said former NSA technician Edward Snowden, who stole over 1.7 million highly classified documents, leaked many of them to the news media and sought refuge in Russia, performed a “public service” by triggering a debate over surveillance techniques by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Holder also said: “Now I would say that doing what he did — and the way he did it — was inappropriate and illegal” and conceded that Snowden damaged U.S. national security.

Holder added: “He harmed American interests. I know there are ways in which certain of our agents were put at risk, relationships with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised.

“There were all kinds of re-dos that had to be put in place as a result of what he did, and while those things were being done we were blind in certain really critical areas. So what he did was not without consequence.”

Nevertheless, Holder also stated that Snowden performed a public service and believes a judge in his trial should take into account the usefulness of the debate Snowden initiated about U.S. surveillance methods. Holder urged Snowden to “get lawyers, come on back, and decide, see what he wants to do: Go to trial, try to cut a deal.”

Holder did not comment on reports that Snowden may have been working for Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies and provided all of the classified documents he stole to the Russian government.

Holder’s comments about Snowden were embarrassing and dangerous for three reasons.

First, it is not true that Snowden kicked off a legitimate debate about NSA spying on Americans. The intelligence collection programs he compromised were carefully monitored by the courts, the Justice Department and Congess.

By leaking partial details of these programs out of context, Snowden set off a firestorm of controversy against valuable intelligence tools that successfully protected our nation from terrorist attacks.

One of the most controversial intelligence programs compromised by Snowden was the NSA metadata program which collected and analyzed phone records for ties to terrorists.

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell wrote in a December 27, 2013 Washington Post op-ed that if the metadata program had been in place before September 2001, “it would likely have prevented 9/11” and “has the potential to prevent the next 9/11.”

Newsmax reported in September 2014 that terrorist groups like ISIS took steps to improve their communications security due to Snowden’s leaks and, as a result, have become harder for U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey believes the ISIS terrorists who committed the November 13, 2015 Paris terrorist attacks concealed their communications based on what they learned about Western counterterrorism surveillance programs from the Snowden leaks. For this reason, Woolsey has called for Snowden to be convicted of treason and given the death penalty.

Second, Holder’s comment questioning “the way he did it” ignores that most of the huge number of classified documents Snowden stole reportedly involved foreign intelligence collection and had nothing to do with alleged NSA spying on Americans.

Third, Holder’s comment that Snowden did a public service by stealing and leaking huge numbers of classified documents was dangerous and irresponsible. I wrote in National Review in 2013 that there are numerous legitimate avenues Snowden could have used to air his alleged grievances without endangering U.S. national security.

By making comments which imply Holder believes Snowden had well-intentioned motives for compromising U.S. national security information, he may encourage other U.S. government employees who hold security clearances to take similar action.

No U.S. official — current or former — should make excuses for Edward Snowden’s criminal behavior. Snowden betrayed his country by leaking extremely sensitive intelligence information that has seriously undermined U.S. national security and benefited America’s enemies, including Russia, China, ISIS and al-Qaida.

Holder should take back his reckless comments and join Ambassador John Bolton and former CIA Director Woolsey who believe Snowden’s crimes are so serious that he should be tried for treason and given the death penalty.

(This article was submitted to and reviewed by the CIA Prepublications Review Board for classification reasons.)

The Feckless Mismanagement Of John Brennan, CIA’s Captain Unreality

Hotels.com has an amusing TV character called “Captain Obvious” who makes humorous commercials by saying clearly obvious things. The CIA has a director who is the exact opposite — a “Captain Un-Reality” — who constantly makes absurd claims contrary to facts and common sense.

During an National Public Radio interview last month, for example, CIA Director John Brennan made what may be the most bizarre statement ever by an U.S. intelligence official: “We don’t steal secrets,” he said. “Everything we do is consistent with U.S. law. We uncover, we discover, we reveal, we obtain, we elicit, we solicit.”

This was a ridiculous statement. Although the CIA is required to comply with U.S. law, one of its core missions is stealing secrets abroad through a variety of means that blatantly violate the laws of other nations. This is the nature of intelligence collection.

That this CIA director would say something so preposterous is symptomatic of the damage the Obama administration has done to our national security with his assistance. It also is not the only example of Mr. Brennan’s denying the obvious.

He has repeatedly echoed President Obama’s refusal to use the terms “jihadist” or “Islamist” to describe members of Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qaida and ISIS.  He explained this in a 2010 CSIS speech by disputing ties between these groups and Islam.

Brennan also said in this speech that we should not label “our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself of one’s community.”

Brennan had a controversial tenure as President Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism in the National Security Council.  He played a role in the administration’s decision to read Miranda rights to Umar Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber” who tried to destroy a civilian airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

Brennan also was widely criticized for defending this decision by falsely claiming that the Obama administration had continued a Bush administration policy.

While at the NSC, Brennan also was involved in editing talking points drafted by the CIA on the 2011 attacks on the U.S. consulate Benghazi which said, contrary to available intelligence and State Department reporting, that the attacks were in response to an anti-Muslim video and were not a pre-planned terrorist attack.

Reports of Brennan’s ineptitude have grown since he became CIA director in 2013.

Brennan hurt his credibility in December 2014 when he responded to a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic members by straddling the fence on the CIA enhanced interrogation program — by saying this program may have produced “useful information” but claimed the cause-and-effect relationship on whether the interrogations produced useful information “is unknowable.”

This wishy-washy statement played into the hands of Senate Democrats and contradicted what three former CIA directors said about the program.

Brennan needlessly damaged relations with Congress in 2015 by the clumsy way he handled the theft of CIA documents and the hacking of a CIA computer system by Senate Intelligence Committee staff members during their investigation of the enhanced interrogation program.

Although the CIA had the legal right to investigate this incident by auditing agency computers used by the Senate staffers, this course of action caused a predictable uproar from Senate Democrats and sparked false charges that the CIA spied on Congress.

Brennan should have instead privately raised this issue with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein.

Recently there were reports that Brennan has put diversity above national security with a new plan to base CIA recruitment and promotions on racial, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status and other quotas.

Brennan began a massive reorganization of the CIA last year to place analysts and operations officers working side-by-side in “mission centers” dedicated to specific threats or geographic areas.

I fear this reform will undermine CIA’s efforts to protect sensitive sources and methods, and exacerbate a growing problem of analysts emphasizing quick-turnaround assessments and support to paramilitary operations over objective and innovative analysis.

The nonsensical comments and mismanagement by the CIA’s “Captain Unreality” director are disturbing signs that the lack of national-security-mindedness of this administration extends to the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s vital that the next president name competent managers to top intelligence posts prepared to enact significant reforms to undo the damage done by Brennan and the Obama administration to U.S. intelligence agencies — so they can produce the hard-hitting intelligence that U.S. officials need to protect the security of our nation.

The Obama CIA Is Putting Diversity above National Security

America’s intelligence agencies have a serious and difficult mission: protecting our national security from a world of diverse and changing threats. These include nuclear, military, terrorist, and economic threats from nation-states and non-state actors. China is a rapidly growing intelligence, military, and cyber threat. Russia has exploited a power vacuum in the Middle East caused by President Obama’s failure to exercise leadership in the region. ISIS, which did not exist in 2009, is now a global threat and could be planning new terrorist attacks with chemical weapons and dirty bombs.

Protecting our nation from such threats requires extremely competent and capable individuals to conduct intelligence operations and write analysis in challenging security and legal environments. This means the intelligence profession needs officers who will speak truth to power, obey the law, and resist pressure to politicize analysis.

CIA Director John Brennan apparently believes otherwise and that advancing President Obama’s political and social agendas should be an important part of the CIA’s mission. This may be why Brennan recently announced his “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (2016–2019)” to make the CIA more diverse and politically correct. Brennan says in the introduction to this strategy:

Diversity at CIA is defined as the wide range of life experiences and backgrounds needed to ensure multiple perspectives that enable us to safeguard US national security. It encompasses the collection of individual attributes that together help Agencies pursue organizational objectives efficiently and effectively. These include but are not limited to characteristics such as national origin, language, race, color, disability, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic status, veteran’s status and family structures.

Brennan has mandated “diversity and inclusion performance objectives for all CIA managers and supervisors and ultimately [for] the entire workforce,” so that CIA personnel must weigh diversity and gender figures in making key assignments and senior-level promotions. Brennan’s plan also includes agency-wide “unconscious bias” training.

I support a fair and equitable workplace at CIA without any form of unlawful discrimination. But this as a dangerous development because Brennan is creating diversity quotas for hiring and promotions instead of promoting a work environment that prioritizes competence and achievement.

Brennan is doing this in response to President Obama’s efforts to create a more diverse federal work force. While there may be merit in this for many U.S. government jobs, hiring and promoting intelligence officers based on diversity quotas will not, as Brennan claims, better enable CIA to safeguard our national security. The CIA’s mission is too serious to be distracted by Obama’s social-engineering efforts meant to redress real and perceived injustices in our society.

It is not unjust to hire a white male with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a background in nuclear science to analyze the Iranian nuclear program over someone with weaker credentials who is a member of a racial or gender minority. Altering the rules so the latter candidate will win a competition for such a job is not in our national interest. Adding such considerations to CIA promotion rules will further complicate the agency’s management, which is already suffering from politicization and political correctness. This is why in the CIA Directorate of Intelligence, where I worked for 19 years, many highly qualified officers refuse to apply for management jobs — or they last in them for only a few years before returning to analyst positions.

As a former CIA officer, I believe one of the worst signs of how backward the agency’s personnel system has become under Director Brennan is that his diversity plan lists Maja Lehnus as the agency’s new “Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer.”  I was stunned when I read this. Ms. Lehnus served as director of the CIA Weapons Intelligence and Nonproliferation Center and the director of the National Intelligence Counterproliferation Center (NCTC). According to the NCTC website, Lehnus worked for 20 years in a wide range of CIA technical and management positions on counterproliferation and weapons of mass destruction.

At a time of growing WMD threats from North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and ISIS, why is this brilliant WMD expert being moved from such a critical intelligence mission to a position overseeing diversity quotas?

There are two discernible reasons for this.

First, this is just the latest evidence that the Obama administration is not serious about protecting U.S. national security. We know this already, given its “leading from behind” and “strategic patience” approaches to foreign policy and constant leaks of sensitive intelligence to advance their political agenda. It therefore is not surprising that Obama would make diversity and political correctness at the CIA a higher priority than improving its analysis and operations. The fact that the administration would move one of the agency’s leading WMD experts from a senior job in her area of expertise to heading Brennan’s ludicrous diversity program is a clear sign of the CIA’s distorted priorities.

Second, there are many signs that the work of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has been thoroughly politicized by the Obama administration. CIA Director Brennan has been criticized for doctoring White House talking points on the 2011 terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate to favor the Obama administration misrepresentation of this attack. Brennan also has straddled the fence on the legality of the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation program, probably due to pressure from the White House and Senate Democrats.

In recent years, we’ve also seen strong evidence that the White House has exerted political pressure to conform intelligence analysis to meet its agenda. More than 50 U.S. intelligence analysts working with the U.S. Central Command filed complaints with the Pentagon inspector general last year, claiming that their analyses were manipulated by senior officials to downplay the threat from ISIS and the al-Nusra Front (the al-Qaeda branch in Syria). I witnessed similar politicization of analysis at CIA last August when I attended an unclassified briefing by a senior CIA WMD analyst on the nuclear deal with Iran; the official’s assessment sounded as if it had been directly drawn from White House talking points.

The United States urgently needs intelligence agencies that are effective and innovative, and that will speak truth to power. While many of the U.S. intelligence community’s problems predate this administration, they have gotten much worse since 2009. It is vital that the next president name strong and decisive leaders to top intelligence posts. Our next commander-in-chief must stand by their efforts to conduct major reforms that will reverse the nonsensical initiative of the Obama years and improve the ability of America’s intelligence agencies to counter the national-security threats facing our nation.

These reforms should promote fair hiring and promotion practices but should not undermine the CIA’s effectiveness with politically correct schemes that will only lower standards and create quotas. Due to the life-and-death nature of CIA’s mission, it is vital that its officers be hired and promoted on the basis of competence and achievement, not misguided social-engineering schemes.

CIA Director John Brennan: more attacks forthcoming

In a sobering assessment of the Paris attacks, CIA Director John Brennan spoke yesterday at the Global Security Forum, calling for increased surveillance capabilities, bemoaning the restrictions on intelligence collection promoted by privacy advocates, and warning that “this is not the only operation” the Islamic State has planned.

While calling for increased cooperation and information sharing among government intelligence agencies, he acknowledged that practically this task is difficult due to each government having their own priorities, sources, and methods.  This is just one of the many obstacles hampering the fight against the jihadist organization and declared caliphate known as the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

While much has been written about the sophisticated propaganda and social media presence of the caliphate, the fact remains that an increased reliance on electronic surveillance, data mining, and analytics has undermined human intelligence collection efforts.

As the reporting on the presumed mastermind of the Paris attacks Abu Omar al-Baljiki makes clear, he managed to travel to Syria, back to Belgium, and escape to Syria again despite his photo and name being made public, featured on newscasts, and known to Belgian intelligence.  The fact that he was able to cross borders undetected, with the presence of CCTV cameras, facial recognition software, and databases elucidates the fact that while technological advances have been crucial in foiling terrorist plots in the past, a determined adversary can and will find ways to stay one step ahead of technology.

Brennan said as much yesterday, pointing out that the attacks were “carefully planned” and that “We had strategic warning. We knew that planning by ISIL was underway.”  The failure to stop the attacks, he said, were due to a combination of factors, including the ability of European intelligence to monitor individuals traveling to Syria being under strain due to the sheer volume of them, increased operational security by the jihadists, who are skilled at adapting to circumstances and in effect becoming “early adopters” of secure encrypted communications, and “unauthorized disclosures” (Snowden most likely) along with “policy and legal actions” by governments that have resulted in the CIA and other services’ ability to uncover and dismantle terrorist networks becoming increasingly difficult.

The CIA’s response to these challenges has been in part, the creation of the Directorate of Digital Innovation.  Calling it “the biggest change to the CIA’s structure in five decades” Brennan announced that the recently created department is tasked with “accelerating the integration of our digital and cyber capabilities across all our mission areas – espionage, all-source analysis, open-source intelligence and covert action.”

While the focus on preventing information dominance by the jihadists is to be commended, the fact remains that reliance on technology can lead to disastrous consequences.  Satellite and drone surveillance can track a jihadists’ movements, but they are incapable of infiltrating networks, spying, and collecting information.  A dedicated human intelligence effort is urgently needed to stop an organization that long ago ceased to be a “JV team” if it ever was one.

About Those 50 Centcom Whistleblowers — Where Are All the Others?

More than 50 U.S. intelligence analysts working with the U.S. Central Command have filed complaints with the Pentagon inspector general, claiming that their analyses were manipulated by senior officials to downplay the threat from ISIS and the al-Nusra Front (the al-Qaeda branch in Syria), according to a recent Daily Beast story. The journalists reported that authorities have altered intelligence to bolster the Obama administration’s claim that the U.S. is making progress in defeating these Islamist terrorist groups.

Although these are serious complaints that merit an investigation, this story may well be the tip of the iceberg; I believe there is a broad pattern of distorting intelligence analyses to support Obama-administration policy. The real question is why we are not hearing from more whistleblowers.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, was accused of politicizing intelligence analysis in February 2011 when he said, during a congressional hearing: “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella term for a variety of movements — in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”

Many members of Congress were outraged by this statement, which Clapper later had to walk back. But Clapper was speaking from prepared remarks that conveyed the consensus views of the U.S. intelligence community. Why did no intelligence analysts come forward to allege that the intelligence community was playing down the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood?

The CIA’s official comments on the September 2011 Benghazi terrorist attacks are another example of deliberately skewed talking points. Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee accused acting CIA director Michael Morell of doctoring his statements to promote the Obama administration’s line that the Benghazi attacks had nothing to do with terrorism. Committee Republicans also accused Morell of lying to Congress about his actions. Given this strong criticism of Morell, why did no CIA whistleblowers come forward about this affair? 

The most disturbing example of politicized intelligence analysis during this administration concerns the Iranian nuclear program. I have witnessed several instances of this, but two stick out in my mind.

Just before a hearing on the Iranian nuclear program in 2009 to the House Intelligence Committee (where I was serving as a staff member), one of the CIA witnesses took me aside to lecture me on my disagreement with the CIA’s analysis. This official, who headed the CIA’s Iran Issue office, demanded that I stop disputing the agency’s analysis of the Iranian nuclear program. She also told me that as a former CIA analyst, I should be supporting the agency’s analysis. 

I responded by telling this agency official that I thought the CIA’s analysis of Iran’s nuclear program was dead wrong and politicized, and that I had a responsibility to say this to the committee members. I also said that while I no longer worked for the CIA and therefore was not obligated to support the agency’s take on Iran, I was worried about what kind of pressure CIA management must be putting on current analysts to stick to an analytic corporate line if it was pressuring former analysts such as myself to do so.

And the second striking example of blatant distortion I witnessed came last month, during an unclassified presentation at CIA headquarters by a senior official who works in the agency’s nonproliferation-analysis office. The official began his remarks by saying he and his office took no position on the nuclear deal with Iran, but he proceeded to give a 25-minute talk that sounded as if it were directly drawn from White House talking points. There was no mention of criticism of the Iran deal, the secret side deals, or how sanctions relief could be used to fund terrorism.

This presentation also included misleading and technically inaccurate statements previously made by White House and State Department officials on uranium enrichment and plutonium production; no arms-control expert should have given voice to these errors. Three other former CIA arms-control analysts who attended this talk agreed with me that it was a one-sided and extremely biased presentation. One of these former analysts was quite angry about the talk and accused the CIA official of crossing the line by promoting policy — a cardinal sin for intelligence analysts.

This presentation was consistent with other reports I have heard from intelligence and congressional sources that the Obama administration has been using the U.S. intelligence community to promote the nuclear agreement with Iran. Given the sharp divisions over the Iran deal in Washington, why have we not heard about complaints to inspectors general about this politicization of intelligence?

I can cite many other examples of politicized intelligence analysis during the Obama administration, including the intelligence community’s altering of terrorism terminology to conform with the Obama administration’s agenda. Analysts must now use the term “home-grown violent extremists,” for example, instead of “home-grown terrorists.” Intelligence agencies never use the terms “radical Islam” or “Islamist.” When referring to ISIS terrorists in Syria, the intelligence community’s 2015 worldwide threat report repeatedly refers to them as “Sunni violent extremists.”

This kind of obvious manipulation for political advantage should have led large numbers of intelligence analysts to complain about politicization. Why has this not occurred?

There are at least three reasons for the relative dearth of whistleblowing complaints by intelligence analysts during this administration. They point to political and systemic problems in the U.S. intelligence community that the next president must address.

First, it’s instructive that it was Defense intelligence analysts — probably mostly from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — who recently lodged complaints of politicization and leaked them to the press; DIA has a history of resisting the consensus-based approach to intelligence analysis that has dominated the U.S. intelligence community in the aftermath of the Iraq War. Former DIA director General Michael Flynn has been clear that he thinks intelligence analysis of terrorism has been distorted for political purposes, and he recently said that DIA analysis of extremist groups in the Middle East and North Africa has “typically been more hard hitting” and has not tried to paint a rosy picture. Flynn reportedly was forced to retire in 2014 because he refused to go along with intelligence-analysis groupthink and other efforts to politicize intelligence.

Second, the problem of liberal bias among U.S. intelligence analysts goes back many years. John Ranelagh documented this in his authoritative 1986 book The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. In this, he wrote that CIA Vietnam analysts during the Vietnam War “especially wanted to maintain their image with academia, where they one day might seek future jobs.” Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt drew a similar conclusion in a 1995 article, asserting that U.S. intelligence analysts “who have any intellectual pretensions do not wish to be seen as ‘Neanderthal’ or ‘out of it’ by those in the much more prestigious realms of academia or the mainstream, national-level media.” Shulsky and Schmitt concluded that “this tends to reinforce a tendency toward the ‘conventional wisdom,’” and that “it is distressing how often highly classified assessments of political issues closely resemble op-ed pieces.”

These observations by Ranelagh, Shulsky, and Schmitt are important because they help explain why intelligence officers sometimes try to undermine Republican administrations but never try to undermine Democratic presidents. The Wall Street Journal famously threw the limelight on CIA officers who were turning against a Republican president in a September 29, 2004, editorial — “The CIA’s Insurgency” — that described how a small number of agency officers resisted the Bush administration’s anti-terror policy and tried to prevent President Bush’s reelection.

The third reason we see few whistleblowers is that — as I know from 19 years’ experience as a CIA analyst and from CIA sources — agency management sometimes pressures analysts to support analytic corporate lines, especially on controversial matters and issues related to presidential policy. Analysts who promote the corporate line get promotions, bonuses, and better assignments. Analysts who don’t are sidelined and can fare much worse.

The bottom line is that analysts’ recent complaints about politicization are a symptom of a much larger problem. The next president needs to take steps to ensure that intelligence is objective and nonpolitical. This should include appointing the best possible managers from outside government to top intelligence jobs to take on the intelligence culture, demand accountability, and reward analysts for challenging conventional wisdom. This will not be easy, as CIA director Porter Goss learned when he attempted such reform efforts, only to face a public onslaught against him by agency officers. Goss failed because the Bush White House did not back him up. The next president must do better.

The CIA should return to Director William Casey’s model of “competitive analysis” and jettison the current practice of consensus analysis by committee. “Red Team” analysis (analyses of alternative scenarios) also needs to be expanded and its products widely disseminated. We also must find better avenues for intelligence whistleblowers so they can raise their concerns without fear of retaliation.

We should also do away with, or drastically cut back, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). In attempting to coordinate all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, DNI has added a thick layer of bureaucracy that only dumbs down intelligence. The Wall Street Journal made a similar point in its editorial September 18:

 

The general intelligence practice is to produce “estimates” that amount to the lowest-common denominator of agreement among more than a dozen separate intelligence agencies. That these estimates are overseen by a Director of National Intelligence who is close to the president often serves to sanitize them further — another reason we feel vindicated for opposing the Bush administration when it created the DNI in the wake of 9/11.

 The 9/11 Commission cited a lack of imagination as a reason intelligence agencies failed to produce analysis that could have prevented the terrorist attacks that day. I fear we are further from fixing this problem than we were in 2001. Over the past seven years, we’ve seen a sharp increase in politicized, consensus-based, and unimaginative intelligence analysis written to promote Obama foreign-policy objectives. The next president must understand that objective, “outside the box” intelligence analysis is crucial to protecting our nation from new and evolving national-security threats, and she or he must exercise the leadership to ensure that America’s intelligence community starts producing it.

The Obama Administration’s Huge Nuclear Concessions to Iran

On June 11, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) released a report on a stunning new concession offered by the Obama administration to break a deadlock in the Iran nuclear talks.

The deadlock stems from Tehran’s refusal to permit inspections of military facilities or answer questions about past nuclear-weapons-related work (known as “possible military dimensions” or PMD in U.N.-speak). With the clock ticking down on a June 30 deadline for a nuclear agreement, the refusal of Iranian leaders to budge on these issues has become a political problem for President Obama, who said in April that Iran has agreed to “the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has said the nuclear agreement will allow “anytime, anywhere inspections of any and every Iranian facility.”

Several U.S. organizations, including the Center for Security Policy (my employer), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the bipartisan Iran Task Force, have made anytime, anyplace inspections and resolving PMD questions red lines for a nuclear agreement with Iran. French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said late last month that France will not sign off on a nuclear deal if Tehran rules out inspections of military sites.

According to the MEMRI report, the Obama administration proposed the following to resolve the deadlock over inspections of Iranian military facilities, undeclared nuclear sites, and past nuclear-weapons-related work:

• The United States has proposed to close the International Atomic Energy Agency’s PMD dossier and forgo actual IAEA inspections of suspect Iranian nuclear facilities.

• Instead, the IAEA would conduct token inspections of a handful of nuclear sites — including two military sites — and question several senior Iranian military officials.

• Inspections of Iranian nuclear sites after the token inspections would be limited to declared facilities.

• Undeclared and suspect nuclear-weapons sites would be monitored through intelligence means.

MEMRI, a well-regarded think tank in Washington, D.C., sourced its report to statements cited in the Iranian press from Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and head nuclear negotiator, and Hamid Baidinejad, another Iranian nuclear negotiator. Araghchi reportedly said the Iranian negotiating team agreed to the proposed U.S. concession, but the plan was subsequently rejected by Supreme Leader Khamenei and triggered harsh criticism of Iranian officials in the so-called pragmatic camp. Baidinejad claimed the Iranian negotiating team rejected the proposed U.S. concession but agreed to an American request to present it to Khamenei anyway, who rejected it outright.

MEMRI believes CIA director John Brennan was secretly dispatched to Israel in early June to convince Israeli officials (and EU officials via Israel) that intelligence monitoring of PMD-related sites was sufficient, and actual investigation of these sites could be waived. My guess is that Israeli officials reacted to Brennan’s presentation with laughter and derision.

This proposed U.S. concession is appalling, because it would allow Iran to shield military and undeclared sites from IAEA inspectors. Obviously, if Iran is engaged in nuclear-weapons work, the work is not being conducted at declared sites. Given the poor track record of U.S. intelligence agencies in discovering covert nuclear facilities in Iran and North Korea, the idea that intelligence is an adequate replacement for inspections of military and suspect nuclear sites is absurd.

Iran agreed in late 2013 to resolve an IAEA list of PMD-related issues in twelve areas. Iran has resolved questions in only one of these and is refusing to address the rest. Resolving questions about past Iranian nuclear-weapons work is important to set a baseline for verification, since IAEA inspectors need to know what nuclear research Iran has been engaged in and where this work has been conducted. Closing the IAEA’s PMD dossier would seriously undermine efforts to verify a nuclear agreement and would be another instance of Iran getting a pass for cheating on international agreements.

I’ve written previously in NRO that in their desperation to get a nuclear deal with Iran, which they hope will bolster the legacy of the Obama presidency, Obama officials are pursuing a policy of containment of an Iranian nuclear bomb. President Obama has in effect decided to concede the nuclear bomb to Tehran. In such a context, the latest proposed Obama-administration concession to Iran makes sense. Since the nuclear agreement is all about the Obama legacy, and not about stopping or slowing Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, Obama officials will make almost any concession to Iran to get a deal. Iranian leaders know this and are holding out for further and more generous U.S. concessions.

Congress must put a stop to this madness. If a nuclear agreement is concluded with Iran, Congress must reject it on a bipartisan basis. Congress also must restore a responsible U.S. foreign policy on Iran by passing new sanctions requiring Iran to comply with all U.N. Security Council resolutions on its nuclear program.

Former CIA Analyst Slams Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats Over Bogus Claim That CIA Spied on Congress

Below is a letter that my colleague Fred Fleitz wrote in response to a May 8 letter to the CIA signed by Senate Intelligence Committee members Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Heinrich (D-NM) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) demanding an apology from CIA Director John Brennan for the Agency conducting an unauthorized and illegal search of Senate files during an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff of the CIA enhanced interrogation program.  This led to a firestorm of criticism last year that CIA had spied on Congress and tried to sabotage the committee’s investigation.

Fleitz explained in an in-depth February 2, 2015 National Review article, Who Oversees the Overseers, that the charges of CIA misconduct in this case are utterly false and the real misconduct was committed by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff.  He noted that this misconduct included removing classified documents from a CIA building without authorization, smuggling a camera into the CIA, and hacking a CIA computer system to access documents that the staff were not authorized to read that were protected by attorney-client and executive privileges.

In his letter to the three Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Fleitz calls them out for repeating this false charge against the CIA and calls on them to repair the damage done to the trust between Congress and the U.S. Intelligence Community by investigating the staff misconduct and holding them accountable.

It is unfortunate that these three senators are trying to revive this false story by writing to CIA and circulating their letter to the news media.  Hopefully Fleitz’s letter will help defuse this story by providing the press and members of Congress a more accurate account of this affair and the damage it did to U.S. intelligence oversight.
CIA Letter

Letter attachment:  “Who Oversees the Overseers?”  

Who Oversees the Overseers?

Many in Congress and the news media were surprised by a recent CIA Accountability Board report that cleared CIA personnel of wrongdoing in last year’s spying-on-Congress scandal, a finding that contradicted a July 2014 report by the CIA Inspector General. However, a close reading of both reports — which were released in unclassified form last month — indicates that the fault in this affair lies almost entirely with the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose staff appeared to have engaged in serious misconduct, including trying to smuggle a camera into a secure CIA facility, hacking into a CIA computer system, and stealing and misusing classified documents subject to attorney-client privilege.

The CIA found itself in hot water last March after Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, alleged that the agency had illegally monitored and removed information from computers being used by committee staff members investigating the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation program, a program its critics claim included torture. This $50 million, six-year investigation had produced a controversial 6,000-page classified report in December 2012. A declassified version of the report’s 499-page executive summary, along with additional views by Democratic and Republican members, was released in December 2014. Copies of these documents can be found here.

In response to Feinstein’s charges, CIA officials claimed they had done nothing wrong and were trying to address possible misconduct by Senate staff members. As I explained in an NRO article last August, the computers in question were not Senate computers; they were CIA computers in a facility that the CIA made available to the committee staff for the enhanced-interrogation investigation.

The dispute was triggered by the use in the investigation of restricted CIA documents that the committee staff was not supposed to have, and the staff’s removal of the documents from the CIA facility in violation of an agreement between the committee and the agency.

Not only did Democratic committee staffers bring these documents to the committee’s offices without telling CIA officials, they also failed to provide copies to their Republican counterparts, a violation of the committee’s rule that any classified materials provided to the committee by the executive branch must be shared with both sides.

The documents in question, known as the Panetta Review, constitute a draft account of the enhanced-interrogation program that reportedly differs from the agency’s official account. After CIA officials realized the Democratic staff had these documents, the agency audited the staff computers and made a referral to the Justice Department. I wrote in my August NRO article that this was a mistake by CIA director John Brennan that unnecessarily infuriated Feinstein, who had been one of the agency’s strongest Democratic supporters. Brennan should have worked out this matter with Feinstein and should not have made criminal referrals against Senate staff members.

Feinstein’s denunciation of the CIA over the computer monitoring led to an uproar in Congress, including claims by Democratic members and some Republicans that the CIA was out of control — that it had violated the Fourth Amendment by conducting an illegal search and seizure, and had violated the separation of powers. Feinstein also asserted that the CIA was trying to interfere with the enhanced-interrogation investigation and intimidate the investigators.

Feinstein jumped on the findings of the classified report from the CIA Inspector General issued last July, which concluded that CIA personnel improperly accessed agency computers being used by the Senate staff, that they accessed e-mails written by committee staff members on the agency computer system, and that the referral of Senate staffers to the Justice Department was inappropriate. Brennan apologized to Feinstein in response to the IG report. A declassified version of this report was released last month.

Although Feinstein maintained that the IG report supported her charges about agency misconduct, it left many questions unanswered. For example, the report looked at the conduct of CIA personnel only and said “the activities of SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] staff members were deliberately excluded from the investigation.” The IG report mentioned uncertainty about the ground rules on access to the CIA computers and allegations by CIA officials that the Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff exploited a software vulnerability to bring CIA documents that they were not cleared to view across a computer-system firewall.

A second, more in-depth investigation by the CIA Accountability Board was begun in response to the IG report. This five-member board was headed by former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh. A declassified version of that report was also issued last month.

Although the AB rejected many of the IG’s findings and cleared the CIA employees in question of wrongdoing, I believe both reports suggest six major conclusions as to what really happened in the so-called spying-on-Congress scandal.

1. The CIA assumed responsibility for the security of the computers used in the investigation only after the Intelligence Committee refused to do so.

The AB found that the committee and the CIA had sparred over the ground rules on access to the CIA computers and were forced to rely on oral, ad hoc agreements because they could not reach a formal agreement. The committee demanded a stand-alone system that only committee and CIA IT personnel could access. The agency refused to agree to this. The committee also said it would own any documents provided to the investigation by the CIA, a demand the agency rejected.

Both the IG and the AB said the CIA was in charge of security for the computers. Both reports noted that the Senate staffers were reminded of this every time they logged on to these computers, because logging on required them to click an “OK” button acknowledging a banner warning that read:

This is a U.S. Government computer system and shall be used for authorized purposes only. All information on this system is the property of the U.S. Government and may not be accessed without prior authorization. Your use of this system may be monitored and you have no expectation of privacy. Violation of system security regulations and guidance may result in discipline by the Agency, and violators may be criminally prosecuted.

A memo by the agency’s general counsel released with the IG report revealed that the Intelligence Committee failed to take any steps to secure the computers, while also objecting to the CIA’s doing so. An exasperated general counsel wrote:

SSCI has never attempted any sort of security protocols or monitoring over the system. To my knowledge, no SSCI security officer has ever accessed the system or requested permission to do so. If SSCI is right in claiming that CIA lacks the authority to maintain security of the system and its compliance with Agency regulations and applicable law, then we have created a system in which no one has that responsibility. Even the Director lacks the authority to establish a system for maintaining extremely sensitive, classified documents and exempt it from all security monitoring and compliance.

2. The Senate Intelligence Committee knew about the CIA’s computer monitoring.

The AB found that the Intelligence Committee and its staff knew the agency had full access to the computers in question and was monitoring them. In fact, the AB report said committee staff members on several occasions asked the CIA’s IT staff to scan the committee’s side of the computer system to find documents they had lost track of.

The AB also cited an incident in 2010 in which the CIA removed 926 documents accidentally placed in a committee-staff database because they had not been screened for executive privilege. According to the board, this incident reflected an agency and White House view, known to the Intelligence Committee, that the Senate side of the CIA computer system “was non-inviolable.”

The CIA eventually returned most of these documents after the White House reviewed them for executive privilege, but it withheld several subject to the privilege. Feinstein objected at the time to the removal of the documents, and the White House acknowledged her concerns, said the documents should not have been removed without notice, and said no such removals would occur in the future. However, neither the CIA nor the White House agreed that the CIA could not monitor the computers for security or privilege reasons.

This incident is important because it demonstrates that despite Feinstein’s accusations that the CIA violated the Fourth Amendment and various laws, she and the committee staff had been aware of CIA monitoring of the computers and tolerated this since at least 2010. If Feinstein actually believed this arrangement was illegal, she should have ordered her staff years earlier to cease using these computers until formal access rules could be negotiated.

3. CIA computer monitoring uncovered misconduct by Intelligence Committee staff members.

According to the Accountability Board report, agency computer monitoring discovered in 2010 that a Senate staff member had brought a camera into a secure room in the CIA facility being used for the enhanced-interrogation investigation. There is blacked-out text in the report that appears to indicate that computer monitoring had detected another security violation by this individual in 2009. According to the report, this person was removed from the SSCI team after these incidents were reported to the CIA Counterintelligence Center’s Counterespionage Group.

The AB also reported that computer monitoring detected in 2010 that a committee staff member tried to bypass a computer-system restriction in order to print a sensitive document after the CIA refused to provide a printed copy. The CIA responded to this incident by reminding the staff to respect the security of sensitive documents.

4. An Intelligence Committee staff member hacked the CIA computer system.

The CIA’s strong reaction to the acquisition of the Panetta Review documents by the Senate staff was due to evidence indicating that in 2010 a committee staff member had exploited a software vulnerability “numerous times” to move 166 classified documents from the CIA side of a firewall to the Intelligence Committee’s side. This staff member later shared these documents with four other staffers.

On January 9, 2014, the CIA Office of Security began an investigation of the alleged hacking. Brennan issued a stand-down order to the investigators on January 14. (As I discuss below, some Office of Security officers did not get this order for several days and continued the investigation.) On January 15, Brennan briefed Feinstein on the alleged hack by the committee staff member and the agency’s investigation of this matter. Brennan invited the committee to conduct a joint forensic investigation of the hack, but it declined to participate.

5. Misuse and theft of classified, attorney-client-privilege documents.

As bad as the above alleged misconduct by the Senate staffers appears, I believe the theft and use of classified documents subject to attorney-client privilege is a far more serious matter.

Both the IG and the AB reports said the Panetta Review documents were privileged. According to the IG report and a December 2014 CIA response to a Freedom of Information Act request, each of these documents was stamped “Deliberative Process Privileged Document” at the top and had this language on the first page:

This document also contains material protected by the attorney-client and attorney work-product privileges. Furthermore, this document constitutes deliberative work product, protected by the deliberative-process privilege, and is not a final, conclusive, complete, or comprehensive analysis of DRG-RDI [CIA Director’s Review Group for Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation] or CIA.

I spoke about this with an experienced Washington attorney who told me that when, during a lawsuit or investigation, a lawyer comes across a document that belongs to the other side and is marked “Deliberative Process Privileged Document” or “protected by the attorney-client and attorney work-product privileges,” he or she cannot use the document and is ethically bound to immediately return it to the other side.

In this case, the Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff members did not inform the CIA when they acquired these documents in 2010, removed them from a CIA facility in violation of the committee’s agreement with the agency — an action that Republican members of the committee claim amounts to theft — and used the documents as part of their investigation.

By contrast, the committee’s Republican members, who did not learn about the Panetta Review documents until January 2014, said in their “additional views” appendix to the enhanced-interrogation report that at no time had a Republican member of the committee or staff member handled these documents or reviewed their contents because of the CIA’s repeated assertions of privilege.

The Democratic staff member who headed the enhanced-interrogation investigation in 2010 was Alissa Starzak, an attorney. She was named last summer to be the next general counsel of the U.S. Army but did not receive a confirmation vote before the end of the last Congress. Some Republican senators have called for Starzak’s nomination to be defeated or pulled because of her involvement in the use and theft of the Panetta Review documents.

I believe this is a scandal that goes beyond Starzak, because the Intelligence Committee’s Democratic members are experienced legislators who obviously understand what attorney-client privilege and deliberative work process mean. What did these Democratic senators know about CIA documents used in the enhanced-interrogation investigation that were covered by attorney-client privilege, and when did they know it?

6. The CIA made mistakes but did not try to interfere with the investigation.

Two of the most damning accusations made against the CIA in this affair are that CIA officers read the e-mails of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers and that the CIA tried to interfere with the committee’s investigation.

Both the reports found that CIA Security’s access to the committee staff’s classified e-mails occurred because it took several days for some CIA Security personnel to be told about the stand-down order by Brennan. The Accountability Board faulted the CIA over this but said it occurred through a communications mix-up and was limited to five e-mails that were not related to the substance of the committee’s investigation.

Neither the IG nor the AB concluded that CIA officials were trying to interfere with the committee’s investigation. The board report noted that CIA management tried to limit its investigation to how the committee staffers accessed the Panetta Review documents and tried to avoid conducting a “fishing expedition” in the committee’s files.

Although the IG faulted CIA personnel for improperly accessing the Democratic staff’s shared drive on the computer network, the AB disagreed, noting that this was an extraordinary situation with no easy answers, because of the CIA’s interest in ensuring the security of a computer system containing a substantial amount of sensitive material, while also trying to safeguard the prerogatives of the Senate.

Conclusion

The lack of clear ground rules on security and access to the CIA computers virtually ensured blowback for the agency. But the controversy was not caused by these uncertainties. It resulted from blatant disregard of established security regulations and ethical practices by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic staff members. The controversy was made worse when, instead of holding the committee staff accountable, Senator Feinstein leveled false charges against the CIA.

Feinstein’s assertion that the CIA spied on Congress in violation of the Fourth Amendment was especially damaging to the public’s confidence in the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community at large in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks. I believe this irresponsible charge — which Feinstein knew was false — is a stain on her career as a public servant.

The enhanced-interrogation report hurt congressional oversight of intelligence because the report was partisan, was poorly written, and failed to include interviews. However, I believe the bogus CIA-spying-on-Congress scandal will cause more serious and long-lasting damage because of what this affair says about the ethics, trustworthiness, and honesty of the congressional overseers of intelligence.

If the intelligence committees will not police themselves and hold their members and staffs to high ethical standards, intelligence oversight will suffer because intelligence agencies and personnel will scale back their cooperation. Such a situation could damage U.S. national security by distracting intelligence agencies from their mission and further demoralizing intelligence officers.

The lesson from this story is clear. Congress needs to find a way to oversee its intelligence overseers.