Leaks are the currency of politics. They come in many flavors,
but they all have one thing in common. There has never been a leak
that was not motivated by the thought that, by breaking a
confidence, a leaker could help himself or his political allies
achieve a political or monetary goal.
Big leaks can change the course of world events. The leaker
behind the Washington Post story identifying nations in
which the CIA had secret prisons to hold and interrogate captured
terrorists sought to thwart those nations’ cooperation and some of
those nations chose to close those prisons. The leaker — or
leakers — behind the New York Times story on the National
Security Administration’s secret interception of terrorist
communications succeeded in causing a political firestorm around
the NSA program, causing new limitations to be imposed on it. The
leaker behind the New York Times story showing that a
consortium of European financial institutions — the “SWIFT”
consortium — was helping us trace and interrupt terrorist
financing was trying to end that cooperation.
The flood of leaks coming out of the Obama administration are
aimed at our intelligence capabilities and at Israel.
Obama and his team are leaking — and apparently planning to
leak — information that has already damaged our national security
and those of our allies. And they are both adept and reckless in
their leaks, pursuing some anticipated electoral advantage by their
maneuvers.
The principal example was in the rush to announce the killing of
Osama bin Laden a year ago. Within a day of the operation that
succeeded in killing the world’s most-wanted terrorist, the
president was on television announcing it. Contemporaneously,
administration officials were telling the press that we’d seized an
enormous trove of intelligence in the bin Laden compound in
Abbotabad, Pakistan. But why the rush?
Intelligence information spoils like raw meat in the hot sun.
The fact that we had killed bin Laden was big news, but it
shouldn’t have been announced so quickly. And having the
information we’d seized — and by then we didn’t know how much we
had or what it was worth — was a fact that we should not have
disclosed at all. Had Team Obama chosen to keep secret that we’d
seized a trove of documents and computer hard drives, the
information they contained could have at least been analyzed
quickly and possibly used to plan more successful “capture or kill”
missions against other al Qaeda leaders and operational terrorists.
But by immediately telling the world that we had the information,
the Obama administration destroyed its value. Al Qaeda is evil, not
stupid. Every one of those leaders and terrorists must have run
from their hiding places to new ones we didn’t know about.
Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee, said last week that an administration leak of the
identity of a Pakistani doctor who cooperated with the CIA in
verifying that bin Laden was in the Abbotabad compound led directly
to the Pakistanis’ arrest of Dr. Shakil Afridi, who was sentenced
to 33 years in prison by a Pakistani court last week. How many
other people will cooperate with the CIA in counter-terrorism
operations after that?
Now, according to several reports, we know that many classified
details of the bin Laden operation were revealed to a Hollywood
team producing a movie on the raid. Hollywood shouldn’t be privy to
intelligence sources and methods or the methods Dev Group (a.k.a.
SEAL Team Six). The only possible explanation of that apparently
massive leak of highly classified information is that the Hollywood
folks will be grateful enough for the leak to portray Obama
heroically just before the election. It’s corrupt: bribery by
leak.
The leaks pouring out on the bin Laden mission are shocking
enough. But they are a commonplace in Obama’s pursuit of his
reelection.
Last March, Mark Perry’s
article in Foreign Policy divulged — on the basis of
administration leaks — that Israel had a secret agreement with
Azerbaijan to base aircraft there, giving the Israelis a huge
advantage in a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The
motivation is all too clear. Obama wants to postpone the hard
decisions any American president would have to make if that attack
were made. By leaking the alleged Israeli agreement with
Azerbaijan, Obama may have precluded Azerbaijani cooperation with
Israel and possibly forced Israel to delay any action against Iran
until after November.
The Israelis have been unwilling to assure Obama that they would
not attack Iran before or after the election. Now the plans for the
inevitable attacks may have to be changed, delaying them an unknown
amount of time.
March was a big month for leaks, or plans for them. Pentagon
official Brad Roberts told the House Armed Services Committee that
the Obama administration was planning to release classified
information on our missile defense system to Russia, saying
“…cooperation could be well-served by some limited sharing of
classified information of a certain kind if the proper rules were
in place to do that.”
The planned cooperation was so well-served that, two months
after Roberts’s testimony, Chief of the Russian General Staff Gen.
Nikolai Makarov threatened a pre-emptive strike to destroy American
anti-missile systems deployed in Europe. That was a bluff intended
to compel Obama into giving Russia the information it wants. And it
will succeed because Obama — if he’s reelected — can share the
information without suffering political damage this year.
Most recently, another leak — again, alleged to have come from
the Obama administration — revealed the identity of an agent
inside al Qaeda. In its zeal to claim credit for stopping another
underwear bomber attack, the administration revealed the identity
of the man who penetrated al Qaeda and posed as a willing bomber —
apparently a British operator, not one of ours. The Brits are
reportedly furious, as well they should be. Why should they share
secrets with America when those secrets are to be used politically,
the Obama administration claiming credit for stopping the
attack?
Every leak that involves another nation — be it Israel or
Britain or Iran or Russia — is aimed at changing that nation’s
behavior. Every leak (or announcement) claiming credit for killing
a terrorist or thwarting an attack has to be judged in the context
of the intelligence information connected to it and how our
intelligence community is helped or hurt by it. The Obama
administration’s practice is to disregard the effects on our allies
and our intelligence community.
The job of assessing the effects of the Obama administration’s
leaks has to be left to historians because those effects can’t be
foreseen, and many will be hidden (barring more leaks) in the
shadow world of intelligence. Some may become apparent soon, as
when the Israel-Iran war erupts. Others may remain classified for
decades.
But we can judge now that the Obama administration is adept at
claiming credit and inept in ignoring the effects of its leaks.
It’s all about November, and the president is unconcerned about
anything else.
