I haven’t paid excessively close attention to the leaked classified documents that have our government and intelligence agencies in a dither, but I’m not surprised to learn the suspected leaker, identified as “OG,” worked at a military base, and that the documents appear to be:
… near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a “military base,” which the member declined to identify. OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers. [link]
My suspicion, all along, has been that the leaked documents are assessments of military capabilities and key government/military leaders prepared by military attachés attached to American embassies overseas. Gathering that kind of intel and reporting on it is a key part of any attaché’s job — ours and theirs.
Moreover, if that kind of intel is available to U.S. military personnel, it comes from within the Department of Defense, probably the Defense Intelligence Agency, attaché reports being the likeliest source. The CIA or FBI wouldn’t share its intel with the military, after all. What surprises me, and maybe it shouldn’t, is how widely it continues to be shared within the DoD community.
In the 1980s I worked at two joint unified military commands, US Readiness Command and US Special Operations Command. In both assignments, I had access to assessment reports prepared by defense attachés around the world. My co-workers and I had top secret clearances, and the offices we worked in were SCIFs (secure compartmented information facilities). Classified information was stored in the open, and real-time defense attaché reports were constantly scrolling out of teletype machines. Anyone with the right clearance (which you had to have to be in the SCIF in the first place) could read them. I wondered at the time why such sensitive intel was so widely shared — my co-workers and I had absolutely no need to know any of it, yet there it was for any of us to study.
Fascinating stuff it was, too. Say an attaché assigned to our embassy in Tunis had attended a party the evening before. Say that at the party he’d chatted up the dictator’s deputy defense minister. The report the attaché prepared and sent the next morning, which I could read as it clattered out from a teletype machine in a SCIF at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, might include the attaché’s assessment of the deputy defense minister’s loyalties and how amenable he might be to sharing information with us in the future; any vulnerabilities he might have regarding affairs, gambling, alcohol, or drugs; gossip he may have shared about the dictator’s inner circle; a casual slip about supply shortages at a military base. Frank stuff and often very personal.
I have no doubt the reports our attachés prepare today are just as frank and personal. And still, it seems, available to military and civilian personnel who have no need to know.
How can this possibly be explained and justified? That it’s the way we’ve always done it? That military organizations are resistant to change? That institutional inertia trumps common sense?
Well, I’m sure heads will roll over this (only low-ranking ones, to be sure).