State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies by Robert David Booth

Author:Robert David Booth [Booth, Robert David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781612542379
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Published: 2014-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

A little historical background is necessary to understand just how common unauthorized disclosures are and the national security ramifications they entail. Leaking of sensitive information by State Department employees to foreign diplomats and domestic journalists is not a recent phenomenon. In practice, the press always reads gentlemen’s mail every chance it gets.

The origins of the United States Department of State are found in an act of Congress that created the “Department of Foreign Affairs” on January 10, 1781. In July 1789, President George Washington signed legislation that created “the secretary to the Department of Foreign Affairs.” These titles were changed in September to the Department of State with a secretary of state at its head. Shortly thereafter President Washington would have to deal with a secretary of state who was unable to keep sensitive information confidential.

Former attorney general Edmund Randolph replaced our nation’s first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, when he resigned in 1793. In August 1795, Secretary Randolph was summoned to President Washington’s residence without explanation. Standing before the president and several members of his cabinet, Secretary Randolph was handed a paper that he was instructed to read and explain. Apparently members of the British navy who boarded a vessel sailing to Europe intercepted a dispatch sent from Joseph Fauchet, the French minister assigned to the United States, to his superiors at the French Foreign Ministry in Paris. In it, the French diplomat analyzed private discussions between Washington and his cabinet in which Washington arguably was expressing an anti-French tilt. The French dispatch cited Secretary Randolph as the “source” of the French minister’s analysis of the so-called “privileged” information. President Washington invited Oliver Wolcott, the new treasury secretary, and Secretary of War Timothy Pickering to interrogate the secretary of state about his indiscretions. Ultimately Randolph submitted his resignation, which Washington accepted.

Secrets are created every day in Washington, DC, by the federal government—when personnel at the National Security Agency create codes, when CIA case officers talk to their foreign agents, when FBI agents debrief their sources, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff discuss troop movements. When these secrets are revealed to the press, they become media or news leaks. While the correct technical term is “unauthorized disclosure,” the terms are often used interchangeably. But not all leaks are created equal. Just as the motives for leaking differ, so do their intended and unintended consequences.

The first kind of leak is the approved or authorized leak. Truthfully most news leaks are orchestrated by the White House and its administration using an anonymous, ubiquitous “senior government official” to communicate specific policy views without having to go publicly on the record. Leaking is a method for advancing the US government’s political agendas and positions without attribution and blowback on the administration and its officials. Leaks serve to air potentially contentious policy issues beforehand in order to gauge reactions in the US and abroad. It’s simply a matter of discreetly floating trial balloons and testing political waters.

The second category of leaks is the unapproved or unauthorized disclosure of government information.

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