2. Spencer Ackerman, “Unfollowed: How a (Possible) Social Network Spy Came Undone,” Wired, August 28, 2011, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/unfollowed-how-a-possible-social-network-spy-came-undone/all/1.
3. Naadir Jeewa, “An Update: The Company behind the Twitter Spies,” Random Variable, April 30, 2011, http://www.randomvariable.co.uk/blog/2011/04/30/an-update-the-company-behind-the-twitter-spies/.
4. Marc Ambinder had a conversation with the sailor, who asked that his name be withheld; the author independently verified his identity.
5. Thomas Ryan, “Getting in Bed with Robin Sage,” 2010, http://www.privacywonk.net/download/BlackHat-USA-2010-Ryan-Getting-In-Bed-With-Robin-Sage-v1.0.pdf, 2.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Ibid., 4.
9. Shaun Waterman, “Fictitious Femme Fatale Fooled Cybersecurity,” Washington Times, July 18, 2010, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/18/fictitious-femme-fatale-fooled-cybersecurity/?page=1.
10. Ryan, “Getting in Bed with Robin Sage,” 5.
11. Archived screenshots of http://www.twitter.com/PrimorisEra.
12. Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 21, 2010, MM30.
13. Laura Emmett, “WikiLeaks Revelations Only Tip of Iceberg—Assange,” RT, May 2, 2011, http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-revelations-assange-interview/.
14. Matt Raymond, “How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive,” Library of Congress, April 14, 2010, http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/.
15. Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.”
16. Marine Administrative Message, “Immediate Ban of Internet Social Networking Sites (SNS) on Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN) NIPRNET,” U.S. Marine Corps, August 9, 2009, http://www.marines.mil/news/messages/Pages/MARADMIN0458-09.aspx.
17. William Lynn, Deputy Secretary of Defense Memorandum, “Directive-Type Memorandum (DTM) 09-026—Responsible and Effective Use of Internet-Based Capabilities,” February 25, 2010, http://www.defense.gov/NEWS/DTM%2009-026.pdf.
18. Nancy Gohring, “U.S. Defense Department OKs Social Networking,” PC World, March 1, 2010.
19. Personal email to Marc Ambinder, February 23, 2012.
20. Adam Rawnsley, “Hidden Bases, Secret Raids: WikiLeaks Reveals CIA’s Iraq Ops,” Wired, October 27, 2010, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/hidden-bases-secret-raids-wikileaks-reveals-cias-iraq-ops/.
CHAPTER 3
From Inception to Eternity
The two most sensitive documents produced by the U.S. government are not stamped Top Secret, have never been leaked, and have never found their way onto the Internet. One of these documents doesn’t really have an official name, but rather an obscure numerical designator that no one remembers. U.S. Secret Service agents simply call it a “Site Post Assignment Log.” Page 1 lists very basic information. The day. The date. The name of the event. Then it gets interesting.
Consider the atmospherics of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30, 2011. Present were the president and Mrs. Obama, twenty-six members of Congress, the attorney general, the treasury secretary, a half dozen governors, the mayor of the largest city in the country, the director of the CIA, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
So far as sites go, this was a big one for the Secret Service. Forget the symbolic resonance of the location: the Washington Hilton, also known as the Hinckley Hilton—the place where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. That irony is built into the price of securing an event here. And though agents learn from the past, they don’t dwell on it. The only mission that matters is always the one under way.
At the Correspondents’ Dinner, some of the most powerful people in the world are confined together in an underground ballroom for four hours on a date announced to the public months in advance. It is, in other words, assassin’s bait. The site report, which meticulously lists the location of every Secret Service post-stander, his or her duties, the moment-by-moment schedule for the event, and the protocols in the event of an AOP (attack on principal), therefore becomes a remarkably dangerous weapon—a twenty-page, 14-point Times New Roman weapon of mass destruction.
Those who’ve seen it (and know what it is) admit to having their eyes drawn to it. You know you’re not entitled to the information. You don’t “need to know,” but you really, really want to. And at any rate, events like these are as serious to the Secret Service as combat missions are to soldiers. It’s no place for curiosity, and even attempting to somehow talk your way into the Secret Service security room is a good way to get questioned, if not arrested.
In language that a ten-year-old can understand, the site advance report meticulously describes the methods that the Service will employ that night to protect the president. One paragraph instructs the agent manning the “Charlie” frequency console in the security room—that’s what the Service calls their command posts—to ensure that all post-standers are informed every time the president moves a few feet. “All posts on Charlie: Renegade and Renaissance are moving to the ballroom.”
The agent on the Charlie frequency is responsible for a common operating picture. His counterpart is monitoring the Oscar frequency and the Presidential Protective Detail (PPD). His job is to keep the designated president site agent fully informed of developments that other agents report on Charlie.
If an agent fails to respond to a radio call, the Charlie operator will dispatch another agent to check on his or her welfare. The agent manning Charlie at the Correspondents’ Dinner was on loan from the investigations division. Handsome, young, and easygoing, he looks a lot like Keanu Reeves. But he is one of the most ferocious polygraph examiners in the government.
About twenty minutes before President Obama’s motorcade was scheduled to arrive at the Hilton, an agent radioed in that a White House staffer had lost the PIN that gave her access to sensitive areas. Agent Keanu Reeves immediately radioed this out. “This is not good,” he said to himself. He made a note on a log, and his counterpart telephoned the information to the PPD advance agent. One PIN might seem like nothing, but a bad guy could pick it up, and catastrophe could ensue. But ten minutes later, the agent radioed back. The PIN was in the pocket of the staffer. Keanu rolled his eyes. “Attention all posts . . .”
Those are two of the least sensitive job descriptions. A “homicide bomber response agent” has some pretty scary responsibilities. There is an agent inside a presidential bunker very close to the Hilton. (Don’t bother looking for the bunker; you won’t find it.)
That night, three specialists from the White House Communications Agency hovered around, changing out radios with drained batteries and rekeying working ones. They were distinguishable by their military bearing and high-and-tights and their bright red identification pins.
The final pages of the site report describe the procedures involved in evacuating the president during an emergency. There are multiple options. One is an emergency motorcade. Another provides instructions to get to a presidential safe house. A map includes a yellow-highlighted path to the “hard room” where the president will be taken if he needs to be secured on the premises.
A sidebar summarized the resources the Service was using that night: the number of agents assigned to posts; the presence of countersurveillance and intelligence division agents; the classified equipment that will magically appear if all hell breaks loose.
This document is well protected. Armed special agents carry them. Another document, given to a larger number of people, provides a moment-by-moment schedule of where the president will be at what time and who will accompany him. Even his elevator rides are premanifested. Joseph W. Hagin, the chief of White House operations in the Bush administration, calls this the most sensitive document there is, but too many people need to know the information it provides. It cannot be classified. So instead it is “Sensitive But Unclassified.”
On the night of
the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama’s poker face onstage hid an even bigger secret—the biggest he’d ever known. At most, a half-dozen guests knew what the president did: that seventy-nine members of three U.S. Joint Special Operations Command task forces were in the final stages of preparing the raid targeting Osama bin Laden. This secret didn’t leak, which is remarkable for several reasons. Washington had recently seen its secrets revealed with strident disregard. And the whole purpose of the Correspondents’ Dinner is for journalists to ferret confidential information out of their dinner guests. (A few of the more egotistical journalists brought celebrities. The smarter ones invited people with security clearances.)
There was a close call that night concerning the raid. William Daley, the White House chief of staff, was a guest of ABC News, as was actor Eric Stonestreet, who won an Emmy for his work on Modern Family. Stonestreet had apparently arranged for a tour of the White House that next day but was suddenly told that it was canceled. Over salad, Stonestreet turned to Daley and asked, “So I was wondering. Was there any reason they canceled my tour?”
George Stephanopoulos’s head swung around, and he caught Daley’s eye. “You got anything going on there, Bill?” Stephanopoulos asked teasingly. A veteran of the Clinton administration, Stephanopoulos knows how the White House works.
Daley began to sweat, by his own recollection, and blurted out an excuse. “It’s something to do with the plumbing.” He added, “You know what, Eric? Stop by Monday and I will personally give you the tour myself.”
That answer satisfied Stonestreet, and more important, Steph- anopoulos, who returned to his original conversation.
Why were there no leaks that night? Because no one involved had any reason to leak, and because the U.S. Secret Service has a decent record of handling classified material. But very often in Washington, carefully leveraged secrets can elevate one’s status in social circles.
Leaks can be a deal with the devil, often nefariously targeted and driven by many motives not pure to principle. Since the dawn of formal journalism, or at least since the Progressive Era, when newspapers established their own counterestablishment voice, the public has generally trusted journalists to faithfully contextualize the common Faustian leak, understanding that the motives may be not be transparent. This implicit trust ended with the Clinton-era collapse of faith in the notion of journalists as gatekeepers, though it arguably remains in place when it comes to disturbing leaks about the conduct of other corporations. We still recognize some categorical distinctions. The whistleblower remains an archetype that draws sympathy, although one’s response to a whistle that has been blown depends on the partisan frame of reference of the hearer. We also react to official disclosures of classified information differently. The Bush administration had a case to make when they revealed some U.S. SIGINT capabilities in order to present a dossier to the United Nations in advance of the Iraq War. Likewise, in 1962, Adlai Stevenson’s dramatic presentation of imagery intelligence gathered by U-2 overflights proved that the Soviet Union was positioning missiles on Cuban soil. This intelligence was rushed into the sunlight before the CIA had the chance to assess whether the damage was worth the policy benefit. (Clearly, in retrospect, it was.)
Big fish usually get away with leaks, and easily. Minnows have to fight.
Modern presidential press management traces its lineage to the failure of Woodrow Wilson to tend to the journalists who followed him as he crafted the League of Nations Treaty in Versailles. The Bob Woodward of the time was a bombastic dandy named Herbert Swope, who wrote for the New York World. This was Swope’s first assignment, and he couldn’t comprehend the restrictions the White House had placed on the press corps—and why the press corps seemed so damned compliant.
The president was secretly negotiating a treaty that had, as a core principle, the provenance of openness and honesty. This irony would prove to be the treaty’s downfall. China knew about Wilson’s secret talks with Germany about annexing Chinese territory to Japan and leaked this language to a Chinese-American journalist who worked for the Chicago Tribune. Upon publication, it caused an outcry in the U.S. Senate, which hardened suspicions that Wilson was not being forthcoming. The secrecy itself wouldn’t have been a problem if Wilson had explained what he meant by “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” It didn’t really mean that every sensitive point of world diplomacy had to be in the open. Rather, according to the historian John M. Hamilton, Wilson meant that “no treaties would be created without citizens knowing that negotiations had taken place and having a chance to discuss the terms later.”1 Belatedly, as Wilson realized he was losing the battle of public opinion, he personally leaked a copy of the treaty provisions to Swope that involved reparations to Germany.2
Fast-forward to World World II. After the Chicago Tribune disclosed the Roosevelt administration’s war plans—with no less a provocative headline than “FDR’s War Plans!”—it was generally assumed that the press was flexing its independence. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, however, speculated that “the incident may have been the first instance of the executive using the power of secrecy for its own purposes by ‘leaking’ confidential information to the press.”3 (The authors would add “successful instance,” given Wilson’s ultimate failure.)
After intelligence confirmed the location of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a Daisy Cutter dropped from an MC-130 aircraft at six thousand feet could have obliterated the terrorist mastermind. Instead, U.S. commandos stormed the al-Qaeda figurehead’s compound and assassinated him with a “controlled pair” to the head. This decision was made in large measure to preserve photographic proof of his identity for the world.∗ Monitoring a live feed of the operation from the safety of the White House Situation Room, the Obama administration huddled in silence. A photographer captured the president’s foreign policy team in what has become the public image of the operation.
The Obama administration later decided—over objections from Leon Panetta, leader of the operation and director of the CIA—to withhold all images of a lifeless bin Laden. The official reason: the images were too graphic for public consumption. This explanation does not survive scrutiny. After the assault, bin Laden’s body was cleaned, autopsied, and given a proper Islamic burial at sea. At least one photograph of the most evil man in the world would have sufficiently sated a supposedly weak-stomached American public. After all, the Republic somehow hobbled on after release of grisly imagery of the bullet-riddled bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein and video footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging. By classifying photographs of a dead bin Laden, President Obama ensured that the defining image of the operation was his administration, resolute and astride armchairs. This politicization of secrecy will ensure a generation of bin Laden sightings, of conspiracy theorists, and of aggressive denial among the most hardened of Islamic terrorists.
When secrecy isn’t used as a bartering tool of the bureaucracy, as Moynihan observed, it is used as a form of coercion. The CIA fell under a barrage of negative press for “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the aftermath of 9/1l. Consequently, senior CIA officials leaked that it was, in fact, a top-secret military unit behind the lion’s share of the dirty work. This type of selective leaking is often chosen advisedly, as black operations military forces and the CIA work closely together in the field. But on a management and strategy level, the agencies compete for turf and operations. When, for example, the CIA wants more resources or wants “in” to certain areas like Yemen, senior operations officers will leak details to the press about the military’s large footprint there and the CIA’s lack of presence. The desktop snipers of the Defense Department’s black operations community are obliged to return fire. Within days, a competing newspaper will report how, for example, the CIA keeps corrupt members of the Afghan government on its payroll, completely undermining, at least in the eyes of the military, a counterinsurgency strategy that is predicated on building a transparent and viable government. Reporters work hard to g
et these stories, but timing and access to “senior administration sources” are almost always deliberate. Suddenly, intelligence community officials are willing to talk about previously off-limits subjects.
Many officials leak with an eye toward history. When things go right, nobody thinks of the intelligence community. When things go wrong, recriminations whisk by as though fired from machine guns, and good men and women who often did the right things and spotted the right signs and alerted the right people are drowned out of the conversation. These officials, hoping to set the record straight, sometimes find no alternative but to pass files to journalists. The CIA recognizes this as a dangerous game, and when certain officers and agents retire, they are given an office and kept on the payroll long enough to write classified memoirs for the agency archives.4
Leakers are not above manipulating the record for personal political gain or positive media coverage, especially after things get ugly. In his autobiography, former vice president Dick Cheney directly states that he pushed to have Secretary of State Colin Powell fired for leaking policy disputes to the press corps. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government.”5
To circle the square, sensitive information is not always leaked to damage political opponents. It is sometimes withheld for the same reason. After being pilloried for the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and the failure of enhanced interrogation techniques against 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Cheney pushed for the complete declassification of the program so that its successes might also be revealed. This request was denied, and the political motivations for its denial (as well as its request) are obvious. One Bush administration official, upon learning that waterboarding had been used on “only” three detainees, wondered how much embarrassment they could have been spared if that information was disclosed earlier than it was.
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