Why protection of ‘classified’ papers matters

In my role as an intelligence officer in the World’s Finest Navy, I spent many days paging through classified documents in a secure room full of specially designed safes. For some reason (probably because no one else would take it), the skipper also gave me the job of command security manager.

Whenever someone is granted access to classified material they are “read-in.” This means that the nature of classified information is explained to them, including how we get it, how hard it is to get, and the proper way to handle it.

The most important part of the reading-in is an explanation of why we classify things, and it goes more or less like this: Information is primarily classified to keep others from knowing that we know it.

Putin knows how fast his jets are. Kim Jong-un knows where his weapons systems are. Khamenei knows how close Iran is to building a nuclear weapon. ISIS is aware of their own plans.

These are not secrets we can keep from them, so we do not hide what we know to keep them from knowing it. We hide what we know because they do not know that we know it, and that is really important. It is like secretly knowing what cards your opponent is holding in poker.

The existence of our knowledge implies sources and methods, so once an adversary knows that we know their plans, planes, or locations, they will change their plans. They will adapt their planes. They will move their assets. They will seek to cut off our sources and methods or use those sources and methods to funnel misinformation to us.

In the worst cases, they will seek revenge against our sources.

Protecting our sources is the very “why” of why we classify things. Back in 2017, just a few months into his tenure as President, Donald Trump shared classified information with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak while they visited Trump in the Oval Office. That intelligence came from a foreign power, and while General McMaster went before the press to say, “at no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed,” that is not how it works. Knowing what is known is the first step in figuring out how it was learned. Trump exposed a friendly foreign asset to an adversarial foreign power.

We may never know how Trump’s blunder affected the flow of information from that foreign power, or what happened to that source, but most likely we received a lot less intelligence as a result.

This is not just a Trump problem. Most times that classified information is mishandled, it is by senior ranking personnel and elected officials. They assume that, by virtue of their rank or their elected position, they can decide how classified information should be handled and that they have discretion over with whom things should be shared. I saw, firsthand, cavalier attitudes about classified information at my squadron among the senior officers, and they were pretty low-ranking folks in the grand scheme of things.

In the present case, I cannot pretend to be surprised that some media outlets and public figures are attacking the Department of Justice. But I would like to point out that they are largely the same crowd that consistently villainized Hillary Clinton for having an email server in her basement and urged the DOJ to investigate her.

In February it was reported that some classified material that Trump had improperly taken to his home when he left the White House was returned to the authorities. If the FBI believed that more classified information remained at Trump’s residence in Florida, and Trump was not willingly handing it over, then that is a legitimate security concern. Whatever one thinks about the legitimacy of the election, the fact is that Trump is now a civilian with no need to know and, therefore, no security clearance at all.

We can also be sure that the required safeguards were not in place because, well, he lives at a country club.

I saw someone question whether if Trump was charged with this it would legally disqualify him from running for office again. I suspect the answer is, “No,” but Trump’s repeated demonstrations that he does not care about our intelligence community or national security should disqualify him from getting anyone’s vote.