Would you entrust your personal security to this man?
Following up on my post below, here is the front page of today’s New York Times. Among the concerns U.S. intelligence officials had concerning Donald Trump’s unauthorized retention of government documents is that they might compromise the safety of U.S. human intelligence sources — spies:
Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.
“HCS information is tightly controlled because disclosure could jeopardize the life of the human source,” said John B. Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration. “It would be reckless to declassify an HCS document without checking with the agency that collected the information to ensure that there would be no damage if the information were disclosed.”
C.I.A. espionage operations inside numerous hostile countries have been compromised in recent years when the governments of those countries have arrested, jailed and even killed the agency’s sources.
Last year, a top-secret memo sent to every C.I.A. station around the world warned about troubling numbers of informants being captured or killed, a stark reminder of how important human source networks are to the basic functions of the spy agency.
It is premature to connect official documents Trump took to Florida in January 2021 to the C.I.A. memo from the end of September that year. But one of the reasons federal authorities are so eager to get back the stolen documents is to assess “what might have been compromised,” Glenn S. Gerstell, the former general counsel of the National Security Agency, told the Times.
Until more about the nature of the documents is publicly known it is impossible to tell what, if any damage was done. But former officials stressed that counterintelligence experts often will take measures to protect sources or change collection methods if they believe a classified document could have been viewed by people not authorized to see it.
“It is a principle of counterintelligence that when you believe a code or classified material has been possibly compromised you have to assume the worst,” Mr. Gerstell said. “It is a powerful reason to know what is in the documents and who had access.”
Everything Trump touches dies, says Never Trumper Rick Wilson. Authorities worry that might apply literally to people Trump never met.
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