Loose List Sinks Spook

Over the weekend, the White House accidentally let slip the name of the CIA’s top official in Afghanistan in a list e-mailed to news organizations:

The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government. The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.

Jonathan Tobin expresses outrage, decrying what he sees as a partisan double standard:

Let’s remember that what occurred this past week was far worse than anything that happened to Plame. Plame was, after all, serving in an office in Virginia and, while classified, was no secret. By contrast, the CIA station chief whose name was released is in peril every day in Kabul. He is serving on the front lines of a shooting war and the release of his name in this indiscriminate manner may well have compromised his effectiveness if not his safety.

The White House has, in fact, ordered an investigation. And Ambers counters that, while the Plame leak compromised a number of vital intelligence operations, this one has less dangerous implications:

Station chiefs of major CIA stations are generally known, at least by name, often by sight, to rival intelligence agencies almost from the get-go. Certainly, the station chief, in working with a number of different agencies in Afghanistan, would have to accept that his degree of freedom to control his cover is probably tiny at this point. When the CIA appoints chiefs of stations, the agency generally understands and accepts the risk that the identity, and perhaps the person’s cover history, might be exposed. Occasionally, this can lead to compromised operations, although generally, enough time has elapsed between these officers having actively run agents and operations (as opposed to having managed them) that the risk is — again, to the use the word — acceptable. The more dangerous consequence is not so much that rival spooks figure out the name of the CIA’s man or woman in a certain country. It’s that the country or targeted entity can use this information to pin a target on the person’s back, which is exactly what elements of the Pakistani government did during a dispute about drones and intelligence-sharing a few years back.

Meanwhile, Jack Goldsmith finds it odd that the press has so far been scrupulous about not printing the station chief’s name, but is happy to publish classified information about intelligence and surveillance methods:

I believe the answer is that journalists still tell themselves that they will not publish a secret that, as Bart Gellman put it in a 2003 lecture (not on-line), “puts lives at concrete and immediate risk.”  And publishing the name of a covert operative may appear to put a life at concrete and immediate risk more obviously than publication of a method of infiltrating a communications system.  It is interesting that Gellman – who represents mainstream elite journalistic opinion on this matter – included in his 2003 list of too-risky disclosures not just the “names of clandestine agents,” but also “technical details that would enable defeat of U.S. weapons or defenses.”  I think it is fair to say that eleven years later, and post-Snowden, technical details concerning communications intelligence operations related to U.S. weapons or defenses are no longer considered remotely unpublishable.  I expect that journalists today would argue that such disclosures do not put lives at concrete and immediate risk. …

Let us concede for purposes of argument that Snowden-like revelations do not cause concrete and immediate risk to lives.  The real question is: Why privilege “concrete and immediate risk” to lives over diffuse and indirect risk to lives?  The harms to lives from disclosing communications secrets are harder to see because they are usually diffuse and probabilistic rather than concrete and immediate.  But they are no less real.