Happy New Year to one and all, especially the “essential” employees in the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security who continue to work without pay while the Congress and the White House fight over border security funding.
To start 2019 in the right frame of mind, here’s part two of our look back on the biggest national security leaks of 2018.
Winners never leak, and leakers never win
Like a moth to a flame, I keep getting drawn back into the strange case of Reality Winner, the former Air Force linguist who stole a Top Secret report while working as a contractor in Georgia. Winner sent the report on Russian activities during the 2016 presidential election to The Intercept, the online publication originally made famous for publishing Edward Snowden’s purloined information.
Last June, Winner pleaded guilty to the improper handling of classified information and was sentenced to 63 months in federal custody. She deserves every day she spends behind bars, and more. But despite the severity of her crimes, and the fact that she’s barely six months into a five-year stint, the public rehabilitation campaign has begun.
I will confess that I did not finish reading the fawning New York magazine article that beatifies Winner as a lover of the downtrodden and, quoting directly here, “an almost comically mature adolescent, intellectually adept, impatient with her peers, with a compulsive drive to improve herself she would eventually channel into an obsession with nutrition and exercise.” Plus she sleeps with a Pikachu blanket! How could such a sweet, innocent (dare I say pretty, white, and cute) little girl possibly be a threat to national security?
The article tries to hold her high school romance—where she apparently agreed to date “Carlos” only if he kept up his grades and got a job—up as an example of how she cared only about the betterment of others. What it tells me is that she’s always been a cold, calculating person. I do not have a hard time connecting someone who would turn a teenage romance into a contractual arrangement with someone who would give away state secrets over policy disagreements.
The article proves that there is something about the rarified air in Manhattan’s Upper West side that distorts reality, and proves that some public relations people are worth their weight in gold. I only pray that I have no more reason to mention this woman again until she is released in 2023.
CIA Leaks imperil U.S.-Saudi Relationship
Perhaps that’s not entirely accurate. The murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi did that all by itself. But a misguided leak from an anonymous source in Langley did not help matters. There’s no denying that Khashoggi’s death in the Istanbul consulate at the hands of a Saudi hit squad would have strained relationships under the best of circumstances. But the intelligence community’s role is to inform the decision makers, not to take matters into their own hands. That is what appears to have happened in this case.
Saudi Arabia has since admitted Khashoggi died in its custody, but little else. The leak, which revealed that the U.S. had intercepted the Saudi ambassador’s telephone conversations, helped bring about that admission. But they undermined relations with a key ally, not only in the war against radical terrorists in the Middle East, but in the ongoing, long-term competition with Iran.
The shape and direction of that alliance is the exclusive realm of the nation’s civilian political leadership, held accountable to the public every four years at the ballot box. Intelligence shapes policy decisions through quiet influence. The Washington Post and New York Times are not the proper forums for airing disagreements with the nation’s duly elected leadership.
There hasn’t been any public fallout over the leak; let’s hope that means CIA Director Gina Haspel managed to rein in the leakers and keep the rest of the episode off the front page.
Honorable Mention: Chelsea Manning’s Quixotic Senate Campaign
A year ago, we learned that the queen of leakers, former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, intended challenge Maryland’s Sen. Ben Cardin in the state’s Democratic primary. Many were surprised to learn that a felony conviction is not a legal bar to election to the Senate. It is, as Manning learned however, a practical one.
Manning never really had any chance against a man who has continuously held state and federal elected office since January 1967. Her radical platform of doing away with prisons, abolishing the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency, and providing free healthcare for all, was proof that she was really only running to keep herself in the spotlight, despite her protestations.
I make fun of my Maryland neighbors, the Massachusetts of the Mid-Atlantic, but even they had better sense. Manning raised only $80,617, a pittance for a U.S. Senate campaign. Much of that was from out-of-state activists donating through the online app ActBlue.
In the end, Manning managed to finish second in an eight-way primary held in June. That is the positive spin. The blunt reality is that Cardin got 80.3 percent of the votes; Manning’s 34,611 votes comprised only 5.8 percent of the total. Cardin went on to cruise to reelection with 63.9 percent of the total in November.
It’s a close call between Manning and Winner in the race for 2018’s biggest loser.
