WASHINGTON - Some of the nation's
intelligence agencies raised alarms last spring as the State Department began
releasing emails from Hilary Clinton's private server, saying that a number of
the messages contained information that should be classified "top
secret."
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The diplomats saw things differently and pushed back
at the spies.
In the months since, a battle has played out between
the State Department and the intelligence agencies — as well as Congress — over
what information on Mrs. Clinton’s private server was classified and what was
the routine business of American diplomacy, according to government officials
and letters obtained by The New York Times.
At the center of that argument, the officials said, is
a “top secret” program of the Central Intelligence Agency that is anything but
secret. It is the agency’s long effort to track and kill suspected terrorists
overseas with armed drones, which has been the subject of international
debates, numerous newspaper articles, television programs and entire books.
The Obama administration’s decision to keep most
internal discussions about that program — including all information about
C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan — classified at the “top secret” level has now
become a political liability for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Some of the skirmishes over Mrs. Clinton’s emails
reflect the disagreements in a post-9/11 era over what should be a government
secret and what should not. Nonetheless, 22 emails on Mrs. Clinton’s server were held
back from a tranche made public last week. Those 22 emails were deemed so
highly secret that State Department officials in this case agreed with the
intelligence agencies not to release them even in redacted form.
The emails are included in seven distinct chains that
comprise forwarded messages and replies, and in most cases involved discussions
of the C.I.A. drone program, government officials said.
At a Democratic presidential debate in
New Hampshire on Thursday night, Mrs. Clinton dismissed the issue, as she has
in the past. She said the government was overzealously classifying information
after the fact, citing as evidence the State Department’s finding that
two emails sent to Colin L. Powell’s private email account and 10 others sent
to the personal accounts of aides to Condoleezza Rice when each served as
secretary of state should now be classified years after the fact. It is against
the law to have classified information outside a secure government account.
“This just beggars the imagination,” Mrs. Clinton
said, going on to argue that the issue was merely an extension of Republican
criticism over the attack against
the American mission and C.I.A. annex in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
It remains unknown what exactly the 22 emails contain,
given their classification as “top secret,” but the officials described them
generally, on the condition of anonymity. The officials included people
familiar with or involved in the handling of the emails in government agencies
and in Congress.
Document: Letter by the Intelligence Agencies’ Inspector General
Spokesmen and women for the State Department, the
C.I.A. and the intelligence agencies’ inspector general declined to comment on
the content of the emails.
Security Designations
Some of the emails include material classified at the
highest levels, known as Top Secret/S.A.P., according to a letter sent to the
Senate on Jan. 14 by the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence
agencies, I. Charles McCullough III. That designation refers to “special access
programs,” which are among the government’s most closely guarded secrets.
Several officials said that at least one of the emails
contained oblique references to C.I.A. operatives. One of the messages has been
given a designation of “HCS-O” — indicating that the information was derived
from human intelligence sources — a detail that was first
reported by Fox News. The officials said that none of the emails
mention specific names of C.I.A. officers or the spy agency’s sources.
The government officials said that discussions in an
email thread about a New York Times article — the officials did not say which
article — contained sensitive information about the intelligence surrounding
the C.I.A.’s drone activities, particularly in Pakistan.
The officials said that at least one of the 22 emails
came from Richard C. Holbrooke, who as the administration’s special envoy for
Afghanistan and Pakistan would have been intimately involved in dealing with
the ramifications of drone strikes. Mr. Holbrooke died in December 2010.
Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while
secretary of state was first disclosed in March, and since then the State
Department has slowly released 33,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton and her aides
determined were work-related. None of the emails sent through Mrs. Clinton’s
server were marked as classified, the officials said, and most were written by
her aides and forwarded to her. That is also true of the emails forwarded to
Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice, which until now have been in the department’s
unclassified archives.
The handling of classified information on Mrs.
Clinton’s server is now the subject of an investigation by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, as well as the State Department’s security and intelligence
bureaus. According to the law and security procedures Mrs. Clinton agreed to
follow when she became secretary, such material should not even have been sent
over the State Department’s official but unclassified state.gov server.
At the same time, the officials said, some of the
classifications being sought for the emails fall into a gray area between
public knowledge and secrecy. In such instances, the original source of the
information — and thus the level of its classification — can be disputed, and
has been, vigorously at times, they said. Other emails have been the subject of
rigorous debate over what constitutes a secret and what the nation’s diplomats
can say about intelligence matters as they grapple with international crises.
“While the secretary of state has a duty to protect
classified information, as all of us do in a position of trust, here she did
not have the benefit of six-plus months of interagency classification reviews,”
said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee. “The same information said by people in two different
positions may receive two opposite classification determinations.” Though the
State Department accepted the C.I.A.’s classification of the 22 emails, it has
also sought to challenge accusations that it was negligent in handling secrets.
During the review, the State Department has rebutted
claims by at least one intelligence agency that information in some of the
emails ought to remain classified.
Some of those include the emails that led Mr.
McCullough’s office to refer the matter to the Justice Department last summer,
prompting the F.B.I.’s investigation. Mr. McCullough made the referral based on
an assessment that four of 40 emails that it sampled early on in the process
contained “top secret” information.
DOCUMENT
Now, after months of review, only one of those four
turned out to be classified at that level. (The State Department counts that
email among the 22 of last week.) A second of the four emails has been
downgraded to “confidential,” the lowest level of classification. The third was
released last fall.
Different Sources
The fourth involved an email sent by Kurt M. Campbell,
the assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs, shortly after a North
Korean ballistic missile test in July 2009. The email has not yet been made
public, even in redacted form, but the State Department has challenged an
assertion from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which gathers data
through satellite images, that the email included information that came from a
highly classified program.
In a letter this past Dec. 15 to Senator Bob Corker,
the Tennessee Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, a State Department official said that the information could not have
been based on N.G.A.’s intelligence because Mr. Campbell did not receive any
classified intelligence briefings for what was a new job for him until a few
days after the North Korean test.
More broadly, the memo stated, diplomats working at
the State Department or in embassies around the world constantly receive and
pass on information from unclassified sources — so-called parallel reporting —
that can involve highly classified matters. That can make it difficult to
determine with confidence whether information in any single email came from a
classified source.
“When policy officials obtain information from open
sources, ‘think tanks,’ experts, foreign government officials, or others, the
fact that some of the information may also have been available through
intelligence channels does not mean that the information is necessarily
classified,” the department’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs,
Julia Frifield, wrote in the December letter to Mr. Corker.
Another email whose classification has been disputed
was dated April 20, 2011, and was among those that prompted members of Congress
and Mr. McCullough’s office to begin a review of the State Department’s release
of the emails by court order under the Freedom of Information Act.
It was from Timmy T. Davis, an officer in the State
Department’s Operations Center, and it conveyed to Mrs. Clinton’s senior staff
security concerns in Libya during the war against the country’s leader, Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi.
At the time, J. Christopher Stevens, the future
ambassador to the country, was secretly traveling there as an envoy to the
opposition leadership and had telephoned the Ops Center, as it is known, to
advise it about his situation on the ground.
Mr. Davis sent his message, marked “S.B.U.,” or
“sensitive but unclassified” to two of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides, Huma
Abedin and Jacob J. Sullivan, as well as to Alice G. Wells, an executive
assistant to Mrs. Clinton who is now the ambassador to Jordan.
At issue were two sentences in the email referring to
reports by Africom, the American military command for Africa, describing the
movement of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces near the city of Ajdabiya. In a letter on
Nov. 24 last year, Ms. Frifield detailed how the information in the email
differed significantly from the suspected intelligence source and could well
have been based on public briefings given the day before by NATO’s military
about the course of the war.
“The conclusion that the information in the email was
drawn from that intelligence product is unsubstantiated and on its face wrong,
given the differences between the information in the email and the information
in the product,” Ms. Frifield wrote.
Even in the case of the drone program, so much information
about the strikes has filtered into public view that the C.I.A. did not object
to every allusion to it, allowing at least vague references in the emails that
the State Department has released so far.
In late October 2009, as she prepared for a trip to
Pakistan, Mrs. Clinton asked her aides for good answers to questions she might
expect while in the country about Blackwater, the private security company that
Pakistanis had long suspected was secretly operating inside the country.
Ms. Abedin responded by email that the aides were
working on an “answer sheet” for the tough questions she might get on the
thorniest issues about American-Pakistani relations — including Blackwater, the
security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and drones.
“You will have tonite or tomorrow am,” Ms. Abedin
wrote.
The source: http://www.nytimes.com/
