By Deroy Murdock
Monday, February 01, 2016
Three veterans of American intelligence are horrified by
the havoc that they believe former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton
caused through her epic abuse of state secrets in the E-Mailgate scandal.
“If there really were SAP [special-access programs]
material on her server, consider the implications,” a former U.S. intelligence
officer tells me. He refers to the “several dozen” messages marked TOP
SECRET/SAP that I. Charles McCullough III, inspector general for the
intelligence community, reports were on the private server at Clinton’s home in
Chappaqua, N.Y., 267 miles north of the State Department. Special-access
programs are America’s most clandestine activities. Their revelation could
damage national security severely and possibly get people killed.
In the anonymous words of this one-time American
intelligence professional, here is some of the devastation likely caused by
Clinton’s exposure of SAP secrets:
1. Intel officers responsible for
those programs must be alerted.
2. Once alerted that SAP was
mishandled and on a system that has been attacked, it is only prudent to end
those programs.
3. What does ending those programs
mean? Depending on the SAP involved, it could mean redoing war plans, terminating
ongoing covert actions, rethinking how the exposed covert actions must be done
and executing on that new plan, or, if it reveals a source, removing that
source from his environment.
4. That has a significant impact.
Presume, if you will, that it was a source. If that source were providing intel
of such value that it rose to the SecState, now we’ve lost that source.
5. Intel officers care about their
sources, and for two reasons. One, we’re human beings. We don’t want those
assisting us and our country to be hurt, even though we recognize the danger
they are placing themselves in. Two, the business model doesn’t work very well
if sources think they’ll be outed. The US intel community already has so much
trouble in that regard due to Edward Snowden and Bradley [now Chelsea] Manning.
This just compounds it. Think about the next meeting between a prospective
source and a CIA case officer trying to recruit that source to risk his/her
life for the United States: “Are you sure a high-level official won’t out me?”
So, since Clinton and her illegal, off-site server
contained evidence of these beyond-top-secret initiatives, the safest course
for the CIA and other agencies is to assume that these efforts were compromised
and then to wind them down. Once terminated, these activities stop yielding
information that keeps America secure and Americans alive.
Intelligence agencies also would relocate and possibly
repatriate the relevant U.S. operatives whose covers Clinton likely blew. This
would affect their careers. Those whom Clinton’s crimes have unmasked would
become unable to serve overseas, lest hostile nations or actors find, exploit,
or kill them.
Also, if Clinton’s server contained the identities of
American agents, that could mean that, say, an undercover “diplomat” here and a
“businesswoman” there might be ordered back to the United States at once. While
these people might wind up stuck behind desks at CIA headquarters in Langley,
Va., at least they would be safe.
But how about their contacts in Somalia, Ukraine, or
Venezuela? The friends and associates of American agents exposed via Clinton’s
at-best gross negligence might awaken to loud knocks at their doors at 4:00
a.m., followed by one-way rides to Third World dungeons.
“To me, it’s offensive,” the former spook tells me. “If
it were really SAP, Clinton was undoing all the hard work that my friends were
doing. This is oftentimes intensive, painstaking, costly work, and her
carelessness has now undone it. That pisses me off.”
This source uses an analogy from American industry to put
Clinton’s misdeeds into everyday language.
“Imagine that you work at Pepsi, your 401K is tied to the
performance of the company, and that performance is inextricably linked to the
secret ingredient for Pepsi,” this intelligence specialist explains. “How would
you feel if one of your superiors were just casual with that most sensitive of
information? I think it would upset you. Now, for intel, multiply that by at least
ten. We can have arguments over whether confidential material is unnecessarily
classified; we generally don’t in mishandling cases, but I’d potentially be
open to it. But with SAP, no way. This is so grossly negligent that either it
is false or Hillary Clinton doesn’t care.”
Meanwhile, a veteran who worked in military intelligence
for more than 25 years thinks that this first source may be too optimistic.
“As for damage done, my suspicion is that it is much
worse than it looks,” he says, also anonymously.
“We need to consider that everything that was on that
server has been compromised. There isn’t an intelligence service out there that
isn’t interested in the actions of our senior people,” he continues. “Outside
the president, the two most important targets for collection are SecDef and
SecState. And that means everyone. Russia and China, certainly. Germany,
France, South Korea, Japan, Iran, and Israel — I would guess — would all be
interested as well. Very interested.”
The former military-intelligence man outlines how foreign
spy agencies would handle the most sensitive information, after capturing it.
“The SecState is seeing a whole bunch of stuff. Virtually
everything she does is classified — honest. There are all sorts of stuff that
would fit under the generic heading of SAP. . . . Let’s assume this is a
program about some particularly well-placed individual somewhere who is feeding
us information. If I were a bad guy, and I got hold of this kind of
information, the last thing I would do would be to roll the guy up.” He adds,
“If it were one of my people, I might start feeding him, the source, slightly
skewed information so as to mislead the U.S. But that is only the beginning. No
matter what, the last thing I want to do is let the U.S. know that I know of
this source. . . . So, from the U.S. side, everything that remotely touches
that material, from the date of the compromise, should now be considered
tainted.”
The former military spy echoes the first source:
Breaches, such as what likely befell Clinton’s private server, are not just
technical glitches. They hammer real people.
“More to the point, it affects other folks,” the
ex-military-intelligence operative tells me. “Everyone who was remotely
associated with the source is now on shaky ground. Compromises are expensive.
They mean everyone who was derived from one source is also tainted. If the
compromise happened a while ago, and we just found out, it could mean years of
not only being misled by some other organization, but by now virtually all of
the people in a given network have been compromised and either turned by the other
side or are under close observation, and they are waiting to roll them up when
we start acting. If this compromise, and it was a compromise, took place in
2012, then more than three years have passed since the compromise. That’s
really a mess.”
This veteran thinks that Hillary Clinton cannot have it
both ways: She’s either too brilliant to be as innocent as she asserts or too
innocent to be as brilliant as she professes.
“Secretary Clinton has been seeing this kind of thing for
a long time,” he says. “If she is competent to handle major decisions, if she
is the highly capable person she claims to be, she would know what all this
material was, without having some label stating it was secret.”
“If, on the other hand, someone could put reports in
front of her describing these various things, again and again, without the
appropriate labels, and she was not smart enough to recognize that this
material was from classified sources, then she isn’t competent to be the
president, or a departmental secretary. Or, of course, this is all lies. There
are no other options.”
One retired intelligence officer did comment on the
record — and how.
“I assume that the messages discussing SAP programs were
known instantaneously by the Russians and the Chinese and were likely shared to
some degree with other really bad actors — Iran?” Martha Sutherland tells me.
She spent 19 years as an operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency.
“The only saving grace, in some weird way, is that Bibi and the Mossad probably
had their eyes all over them as well!”
Sutherland is appalled by what we already know about
Hillary Clinton’s behavior.
“The fact that she had a completely separate system for
her chats with Sid Blumenthal and others is outrageous,” this former CIA agent
observes. “And then the tie-in to the Clinton Foundation and the quid pro quo
is another felony count. If I had cut and pasted classified documents and put
them in an e-mail on my unclassified server to avoid a written record, I would
have been frog-walked in handcuffs out of Langley, no questions asked.”
People keep demanding a smoking gun in this scandal.
Sutherland explains that Hillary’s unencrypted, do-it-yourself server is, ipso
facto, the smoking gun. It never should have been purchased. Its mere presence is the crime.
“It goes beyond having classified stuff without
markings,” Sutherland says. “It is the fact that she maintained a shadow
communications system, separate from the government mandated, secure system.
And she was the BOSS! Its existence, the now damning news of SAP info. on it,
and her continued denial that she did anything wrong are proof positive that
Hillary and the Clintons still think they are above the law! Enough already —
the BIG HOUSE for Hillary, not the White House, for goodness sakes!”
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