Mar-a-Lago and why intelligence agents matter to America – Washington Examiner

Why worry about former President Donald Trump's potential mishandling and possible exposing of "Human Intelligence Control System" information at Mar-a-Lago?

Well, because HCS information is considered extremely sensitive and highly restricted within the U.S. government. That's namely because it involves reporting from our agents in the field people from countries such as Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea whom the CIA has recruited to spy in service of the United States. These are the crown jewels of the CIA, our equivalent of the military's nuclear codes. We don't know that any HCS material was exposed, but we should absolutely want to find out.

I was a CIA case officer for many decades. There was nothing more sacrosanct to me than protecting my agent. Its the fundamental promise we make to another human being, who often is working for us at extraordinary personal risk to themselves and often to their families. Put simply, we absolutely need to figure out if Trump's document handling endangered any of our agents. No ifs, no buts. This is personal to me, as it is to any of us who "ran" agents overseas. Agents are the true heroes of the intelligence business, the absolute tip of the spear in defending America from our adversaries.

In my book Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA, I tell the remarkable true story of an agent of ours from the Middle East, who, during a training session on tradecraft before he went into the belly of the beast in a Middle Eastern nation, stopped me and looked me straight in the eye. He, in essence, said, Marc, my life is in your hands. These words stayed with me for the rest of my career. Thats the true bond we have with our agents. The responsibility is immense, and the price of failure can be awful. Tradecraft errors by a CIA case officer, moles within the U.S. government, and even the mishandling of classified information can all lead to the imprisonment or death of our agents. So I take this issue of the potential compromise of HCS information exceptionally seriously.

For very good reason, so does the U.S. intelligence community. We can expect Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, a well-respected national security official who enjoys broad support on Capitol Hill, to undertake a thorough and apolitical assessment of the risk to any human sources who may have been compromised in the documents found at Mar-a-Lago. Its also noteworthy that both Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have asked for a review of the specific documents. This is a bipartisan concern.

That said, there is far too much speculation in the media on the damage that may have been done. Some are calling this a cataclysmic breach. This "end of days" talk reached a crescendo this past weekend, with some on Twitter correlating the breach with the CIA's reported loss of Iranian and Chinese assets in recent years.

It is incredibly irresponsible at this point to make this link with no evidence to support such a charge. Is the Mar-a-Lago concern on par with the worst intelligence disasters in U.S. history? Is it on a par with hostile spies and leakers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, the Rosenbergs, Harold Nicholson, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hansen? These are people who caused irreparable harm to America, to include the loss of life of our agents. At this point, it is impossible to say. But the intelligence community's damage assessment must, in sober and systematic fashion, determine the degree of compromise (if any) to our agents and collection methods.

Still, those on the Right who say it's "only documents" show a juvenile understanding of the national security world. "Only documents?" Well, the Soviet Union ran spies in our midst and obtained "only" documents that allowed them to build an atomic bomb. The "only documents" crowd should probably take a knee now; theirs is a ridiculous retort. In the intelligence business, obtaining documents from an adversary is actually the apex of a collection operation. Documents can be studied and restudied, providing value that is both immediate and durable. Those who attempt to downplay the potential breach without even knowing what the documents contain are doing America a disservice.

Am I personally concerned over the possible risk to our intelligence operations? Absolutely. But the key point stands: We need to know what was in the documents. Then we can proceed from that established, fact-based understanding.

One final point: Veterans of the intelligence world should leave the issue of Trumps possible criminality to the Department of Justice. What matters most in the intelligence lane is the need to uphold that promise that every CIA case officer makes to their agent to keep them safe as far as it is possible to do so. The same promise I made to that agent decades ago in the Middle East applies today. Our current agents and prospective ones as well, those who must constantly decide on whether they should accept literally existence-defining risks to spy for us, are all watching.

Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. A former CIA senior operations officer, he retired in 2019 after a 26-year career serving in the Near East and South Asia. His bookClarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIAwas published in June 2021 by HarperCollins.

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Mar-a-Lago and why intelligence agents matter to America - Washington Examiner