Allied tensions over Discord leaks hint at different intelligence community cultures
Tom Rogan
Recent leaks onto the Discord social media platform of top secret United States intelligence reporting — leaks likely propagated by a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman — have deeply embarrassed the U.S. government.
These leaks have not, as some have suggested, overly endangered Ukrainian plans for a counter-offensive against Russian forces. The basic principles of that counter-offensive were always obvious. As the Washington Examiner noted last November, the efforts will likely center on efforts to isolate Russian forces on the Crimean Peninsula.
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Instead, the central U.S. concern over these leaks is the effect they have had on allies. Namely, it destroys allies’ belief that the U.S. is good at mitigating the risk of individual traitors who have access to limited but significant pools of secret intelligence, but very bad at mitigating the risk of traitors who have significant technical (computer) access to large pools of secret intelligence.
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks of vast amounts of highly classified intelligence exemplify this concern. Snowden was not a front-line spy or a senior officer, but he was able to use his access to download all but the highest classification elements of the NSA’s reporting portfolio.
These latest Discord leaks play to a similar concern.
The British, for example, are angry that their significant special forces deployment to Ukraine, the details of which were first reported by the Washington Examiner last August, has now been confirmed by the leaks. This speaks to a broader issue.
Ask U.S.-allied foreign intelligence services what they like about the U.S. intelligence community, and they’ll offer some key points. These will include its unparalleled scale of intelligence collection and its willing, often with no strings attached, provision of exceptionally valuable intelligence to allies. Withholding details for national security reasons, in recent years, for example, the U.S. provided sustained but exceptionally valuable intelligence support to a close ally on a matter of great significance to that ally.
In this sense, the U.S. intelligence community is a diplomatic asset as much as a national security asset.
That said, ask allied intelligence services what they dislike about the U.S. intelligence community, and they’ll probably point to its extreme security protocols. It’s a largely collective view of close U.S. allies, a view shared by some in the U.S. intelligence community, that the latter limits its prospective talent pool by indirectly prejudicing against those with foreign upbringings (which makes it harder to conduct background checks).
Allied services also find it odd that the U.S. continues to rely almost fanatically on polygraph tests. Most allies do not use polygraphs as standard, believing they will prejudice applicants with OCD or anxiety disorders and the like.
The irony, of course, is that those polygraphs likely do screen out some deeply embedded traitors of the kind that France, Germany, and others have suffered in recent years. At the same time, however, polygraph tests cannot account for individuals who believe they are doing a patriotic service by leaking.
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Perhaps this applies to the leaker in this most recent case. Perhaps not — the U.S. military has polygraph standards different from the rest of the intelligence community.
In sum, the unparalleled capacity of the U.S. intelligence community to deliver new crown jewels for allies means that those allies will keep the faith. Still, the leaks speak to the allied fear that whatever they tell the U.S. might someday, for all of America’s extreme security protocols, end up somewhere on social media.