An increasingly common US tactic of declassifying intelligence with the aim of disrupting the plans of adversary powers can bring short-term gains, but risks creating long-term problems for the US intelligence agencies, two former CIA officials have warned.
In a new article in the journal Foreign Affairs, David Gioe, a former CIA analyst and operations officer, and Michael Morell, who was CIA acting director and deputy director, argue that the most serious risk is the politicisation of intelligence, if it is routinely shaped before publication to suit the purposes of the administration of the day.
Gioe and Morell say some “strategic downgrades” of intelligence material, allowing it to be published, are likely to have been effective, outmanoeuvring Russia and China on occasion. But they also list a variety of ways routine declassification could, over time, harm intelligence collection and the reputation of the agencies involved.
They argue that, as the trend towards more regular declassification is probably irreversible, there should be more thought put into establishing guidelines to mitigate any damage.
“The point of no return has been passed, and intelligence is being released faster than norms can be created,” Gioe and Morell write, adding that the US risks losing the qualitative advantage US intelligence has maintained over its rivals.
In the most noteworthy recent example of strategic declassification, the Biden administration published intelligence material on the Russian buildup leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and later revealed that the Kremlin was considering the use of chemical and biological weapons.
In August the same year, the national security council shared declassified details of likely Chinese actions in response to the visit by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan, and in February 2023 the administration disclosed how the US had been tracking a spy balloon that had overflown the US.
The same month, the CIA director, William Burns, declared publicly that China was considering sending weapons to Russia but had yet to do so.
Previous administrations have declassified material when they saw it was to their advantage, such as the spy plane photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba presented to the UN in 1962, or the debacle of the Bush administration’s presentation to the security council 41 years later, of spurious evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
However, Morell argued that under Biden, “strategic downgrades” had become far more routine than in past eras.
“Without a doubt that’s the significant change that’s occurred with this administration – from the one-off to the repeated declassifications on a single issue over an extended period of time,” he said. “Nobody’s ever done that before.”
Morrell, who was deputy CIA director from 2010 to 2013, and acting director for four months in that period, acknowledged there was reasonable evidence to suggest that at least some instances of targeted declassification had a positive impact. Publicising Russian plans to engineer false-flag atrocities to serve as pretexts for invading Ukraine may have put off Moscow from carrying them out, and Burns’s disclosures about possible Chinese arms supplies to Russia may have played a role in dissuading Beijing so far from following that path.
However, Gioe and Morell list all the things that can go wrong. Declassification can accidentally provide adversaries with clues on US intelligence sources and methods, though there are ways to mitigate that. Less well understood, the authors argue, are indirect impacts, for example making human sources nervous about passing on secrets that could end up in the public domain and perhaps give away their identity.
“Some assets have even walked away in the aftermath of prominent leaks or disclosures,” they said.
Furthermore, when intelligence made public turns out to be wrong, it can damage the reputation of the intelligence agency in question.
Gioe and Morell suggest the greatest risk is the politicisation of the intelligence that is made public, and they point as an example to Lyndon Johnson’s manipulation of the details of a naval confrontation between US and North Vietnamese naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, to persuade Congress to grant him boosted war powers.
Gioe and Morell do not accuse the Biden administration of such manipulation in the Foreign Affairs piece, nor do they mention the possible return to the Oval Office of Donald Trump, who claimed when president to have total discretion over declassification.
However, a former senior intelligence official said there were mounting concerns within the US intelligence community about how Trump could exploit the precedent Biden is setting.
“What matters here is the integrity of the people who are making the decisions about what to declassify,” the former official said. “You can either have an administration like this one who has handled it fairly well, or you can have another administration that doesn’t have that kind of integrity, and there’s a lot of people I talked to, who are concerned about that, as it relates to the Trump administration.”
