There’s Nothing New About Stuffing Secrets Down Your Pants
The U.S. Intelligence Community obviously has a systemic problem with leaks, but we can only ameliorate this crisis if we confront it honestly
The ramifications of the Jack Teixeira intelligence leak debacle continue to fester for the Department of Defense. Last Friday, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman was arraigned in Federal court in Boston on serious criminal charges, including unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information plus unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents, relating to his theft of classified information, then posting it online in his Discord gaming group. It seems likely that Teixeira will wind up in prison, at least for a few years, given the blatant nature of his crime.
As this newsletter recently explained, in purely intelligence terms, there’s less to the Teixeira disaster than many in the media would have you believe. Although his compromise exposed very real Intelligence Community secrets, particularly relating to signals intelligence, there wasn’t much there that can be termed surprising to people in the know regarding real-world espionage. Moreover, the current upset on the part of certain U.S. allies who are miffed that the National Security Agency was snooping on their senior officials is temporary. This, too, shall pass, for the simple reason that NSA leads the Western intelligence alliance and if you choose not to participate you lose access to a lot of important secrets that aren’t obtainable elsewhere.
That said, the Teixeira case is genuinely embarrassing for the Pentagon, since an oddball young man possessing no great acumen nevertheless without much difficulty managed to steal and post IC secrets online without anybody noticing for a while. There are currently calls for the U.S. Government to monitor social media more closely, in the hopes of catching the next such online leaker earlier, but that sounds like another Beltway salve that could easily become worse than the disease.
A lot of average Americans, lacking any real-world experience with the military much less spy stuff, are puzzled that the National Guard has access to such secrets, and that such a young, low-ranking military member got his hands on TOPSECRET//SCI intelligence. In truth, there’s nothing unusual about any of that. I recently elaborated some of these basic realities about the National Guard and intelligence in a Twitter thread, for the curious.
Nevertheless, faux outrage surrounding the Teixeira case keeps spreading. For instance, there’s this piece that appeared yesterday in TIME, authored by three Yale professors, which proclaims: “The Discord Leak Has Shown Us Smart Ways to Fix Our Military Intelligence System.” That’s an interesting claim given that a look at the authors’ bios reveals no experience with military intelligence (although one author served for four years as an FBI Special Agent working counterintelligence, which has relevance here).
Let it be said that this article includes several common-sense recommendations on how to prevent the next Teixeira (or at least make his compromising-secrets hobby harder). However, the authors play up how allegedly shocking it is that a mere 21-year-old (in other words, a third-year Yale undergraduate) had access to TOPSECRET//SCI intelligence. As they put it:
Indeed, there is something that is ridiculously pathetic about this latest saga, almost too ridiculous to imagine up were it not true: somehow, this extremely junior enlisted barely old enough to drink alcohol, fresh out of high school, was able to obtain regular access to some of the nation’s most sensitive top-secret classified documents … Not only does it appear that one can have the résumé of a Walmart greeter and gain access to the country’s most sensitive information, but it seems Gmail does a better job of locking out unwitting users who have forgotten their passwords than the federal government seems to do of walling off highly sensitive information.
There’s speculation there since the Pentagon has told us nothing about Teixeira’s vetting process, how he got into SCI access, what’s called a Single-Scope Background Investigation, or SSBI in spook-speak. Perhaps Teixeira’s SSBI was a mess and obvious problems were missed – this happens sometimes – but it also may be that this misfit young man displayed none of the show-stopping issues that can derail an applicant’s SSBI such as criminal conduct, serious drug use, documented mental health problems or antisocial behavior, or advocating terrorism or the overthrow of the U.S. Government.
Moreover, in the real world of our military, there are thousands of young people, even younger than 21, holding TS/SCI clearances and therefore enjoying access to some of our nation’s most closely guarded secrets. How it generally works is a young person enlists in the military out of high school, and if their job in uniform is intelligence-related, they will submit their paperwork for their SSBI and let the vetting process begin. The idea is that, by the time the junior enlistee (whether active duty or reserve) completes basic plus advanced training – in intelligence areas that process can last over a year – if all goes well the SSBI will be successfully completed, and the newly minted secret squirrel will have TS/SCI in hand by the time he or she reports to the first duty station. There are plenty of 19-year-olds with SCI access who don’t leak secrets. Although the IC’s vetting process has its problems, maturity matters more than chronological age when it comes to protecting secrets.
Neither do we know exactly how Airman First Class Teixeira made off with all that classified information, which was stolen from a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or SCIF (pronounced “skiff” like the boat) which is a special enclosed area reserved for highly classified work, then posted on Discord. There are only four possibilities here:
1) He had access to the classified slides in the course of his work duties
2) He stole the slide print-offs, i.e. dumpster-diving with burn-bags
3) He illicitly used IT access to steal intelligence he did not have a “need to know”
4) He had helper(s).
The fourth option seems unlikely, based on Pentagon whispers. The third possibility cannot be ruled out yet. However, the most likely option is that the low-ranking Teixeira was handling classified slide print-offs while assisting a senior officer with daily intelligence briefings (a position jokingly known as “slide-b*tch” in military intelligence circles, it’s common duty for new junior personnel), and instead of disposing of that paper properly in a burn-bag, Teixeira stuffed the slides in his pants and walked out of the SCIF with them, apparently several times. This theory is bolstered by the crumpled appearance of the papers in the photos Teixeira took of them. Back to TIME for some more:
Teixeira allegedly smuggled classified printouts by folding them up to fit in his pant pockets, then taking surreptitious snapshots of them once outside sensitive compartmentalized information facilities (SCIFs). If it is really this easy for a guileless 21-year-old to smuggle classified papers out into the open, only to be discovered when the documents later circulated online, how many other individuals might have carried away classified documents—whether accidentally or intentionally—escaping all scrutiny? One cannot even walk out of a public library carrying library books this easily. There needs to be better guardrails and protections to ensure classified material stays behind closed doors. Some balance between stronger administrative procedures and stronger accountability for personal trust needs to be struck which is not overly reliant on either to the detriment of the other.
There’s a lot to chew on there. People have innocently taken classified information home with them: I know of several such cases. Once, when I was a little boy, I walked by a closed bathroom in our house and noticed the distinctive aroma of something burning. Both my parents were career NSA officers, and my dad accidentally took a piece of classified paper home with him, which he disposed of by burning it in a bathroom sink.
Other cases are less innocent. In the real world of the Intelligence Community, not only is sneaking secrets out of the office by stuffing them down your pants a known security problem, but it’s also happened quite a few times, including in some significant counterintelligence cases. To take an example that’s directly relevant, let’s look at Robert Lipka, an Army junior enlisted soldier who was assigned to NSA headquarters in the mid-1960s. Lipka showed up at Fort Meade, Maryland in 1964 at age 19, with TOPSECRET//SCI security clearances, and was sent to work in the Agency’s Central Reference Library. He was a file clerk, a low-level job, yet one with incredible access since his office was where all NSA intelligence reports were sent to be filed away for the future archives.
Before long, Lipka realized he had a potential goldmine on his hands, and he opted to cash in by selling American secrets to the KGB. He did this by regularly stuffing highly classified NSA reports and assessments, which crossed his desk all through the workday, right down his trousers. Sometimes, Lipka used rubber bands to ensure that the reports were securely fastened to his leg as he walked out of the office with them. Once he collected a stack of NSA intelligence, he sold it to the Soviets for cash. He did this many times.
This went on for the better part of three years, until Lipka left the Army and NSA in 1967 and went on with his life with college, career, and family. Out of nowhere, it all came crashing down for Lipka three decades later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Western intelligence got some access to KGB archives, which offered strong clues regarding a Soviet mole inside NSA back in the 1960s. A clever FBI false-flag counterintelligence operation unmasked Lipka as former KGB agent which resulted in his accepting a plea deal from the Justice Department on espionage charges. He served over a decade in prison for his crimes and died in 2013, a free man.
We never knew Lipka was a traitor until after the KGB’s downfall because he was never detected while smuggling a small mountain of highly classified intelligence out of NSA in his pants. We only discovered his betrayal three decades later, from counterespionage cold case leads derived from Soviet sources. Regrettably, there’s no easier way to sneak secrets out of a SCIF than by placing them in your pants, where security officials simply aren’t going to look without cause.
Let’s revisit TIME: “One cannot even walk out of a public library carrying library books this easily. There needs to be better guardrails and protections to ensure classified material stays behind closed doors.” Let me assure you that it’s rather easy to smuggle books out of the public library if you’re putting them in your underwear. Your public library doesn’t routinely execute strip searches and neither does the Intelligence Community. Although it’s standard for security to occasionally search the bags and personal items of IC personnel as they leave the building, nobody’s being asked to remove their pants unless security has a good reason to think there’s classified hidden in there. Do we really want our spy agencies to execute regular strip-searches of personnel to prevent the next Teixeira? That seems like a sure-fire way to make our spooks resentful and angry, with good reason. You may wind up creating more disgruntled employees, becoming turncoats thanks to workplace strip-searches.
Our intelligence system is based on trust, ultimately. As I’ve been pleading for years, the Intelligence Community is long overdue for a system-wide revamp of how it grants security clearances and protects its secrets. Some of those fixes can be technological, most are more cultural. We need to get serious about counterintelligence and until we do, these avoidable security failures will keep happening. The solution isn’t better monitoring of employees’ trousers, it’s inculcating an intelligence culture that takes counterintelligence and security seriously, not as afterthoughts and annoyances.