CIA chief cites leaker ‘worship’ as more secrets out
WASHINGTON — CIA Director Mike Pompeo said he thinks disclosure of America’s secret intelligence is on the rise, fueled partly by the “worship” of leakers like Edward Snowden.
“In some ways, I do think it’s accelerated,” Pompeo told MSNBC in an interview that aired Saturday. “I think there is a phenomenon, the worship of Edward Snowden, and those who steal American secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandizement or money or for whatever their motivation may be, does seem to be on the increase.”
He also said Russia “meddled” in last year’s presidential election as part of a decadeslong effort to “undermine American democracy.”
“I can’t talk about the details of the intelligence, but we have, the intelligence community has said, that this election was meddled with by the Russians in a way that is frankly not particularly original,” Pompeo said. It was his first interview with a news network since he became the agency’s director in January.
Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, said the United States needs to redouble its efforts to stem leaks of classified information.
“It’s tough. You now have not only nation-states trying to steal our stuff, but nonstate, hostile intelligence services, well-funded — folks like WikiLeaks — out there trying to steal American secrets for the sole purpose of undermining the United States and democracy,” Pompeo said.
Besides Snowden, who leaked documents revealing extensive U.S. government surveillance, WikiLeaks recently released nearly 8,000 documents that it says reveal secrets about the CIA’s cyberespionage tools for breaking into computers. WikiLeaks previously published 250,000 State Department cables and hundreds of thousands of U.S. military logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are several other recent cases, including Chelsea Manning, the Army private formerly known as Bradley Manning. She was convicted in a 2013 court-martial of leaking more than 700,000 secret military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. Manning said she leaked the documents to raise awareness about the war’s effect on innocent civilians.
Last year, former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, of Glen Burnie, Md., was accused of removing highly classified information and storing it in an unlocked shed and in his car and home. Court documents say investigators seized, conservatively, 50 terabytes of information.
Pompeo said President Donald Trump’s administration is focused on stopping leaks of any kind from any agency and pursuing perpetrators. “I think we’ll have some successes both on the deterrence side — that is stopping them from happening — as well as on punishing those who we catch who have done it,” Pompeo said.
Before Trump took office, the outgoing director of national intelligence released a report concluding that Russia attempted to influence last year’s presidential election under orders from President Vladimir Putin.
The White House has downplayed Russia’s involvement, even as multiple investigations look into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials to sway the election. As recently as last week, White House spokesman Sean Spicer declined to say whether Trump believes Russia interfered.
Trump, in a Twitter message Saturday, questioned whether his predecessor, Barack Obama, failed to act against Russian meddling to protect Trump’s opponent in the November election, Hillary Clinton. “Obama Administration official said they ‘choked’ when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election. They didn’t want to hurt Hillary?” he wrote.
Pompeo, 53, said it isn’t surprising that Russia would meddle in a U.S. vote.
“They’ve been doing this for an awfully long time. And we are decades into the Russians trying to undermine American democracy,” he said. “So in some ways, there’s no news, but it certainly puts a heightened emphasis on our ability to figure out how to stop them.”
But the spy chief said he couldn’t confirm whether Putin personally directed the plan.
On other issues, Pompeo said that North Korea poses a “very real danger” to U.S. national security. He said the North Koreans are “ever closer to having the capacity to hold America at risk with a nuclear weapon.”
Pompeo said U.S. national security also is threatened by Iran, which he described as the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.
“Today, we find it with enormous influence, influence that far outstrips where it was six or seven years ago,” he said. “Iran is everywhere throughout the Middle East.”