Intelligence

Drones are an evolving security threat, from intel gathering to targeting individuals. Is the U.S. prepared?

Suppose, for a moment, that you are a young person with no more knowledge of what the world was like before you were born than most young people nowadays. And suppose, further, that out of idle curiosity you took it into your head to read a really old book like, say, Edith Wharton’s The Age of…

Two top intelligence chiefs appeared wary Tuesday about North Korea’s apparent willingness to engage in talks related to its nuclear program and to halt weapons testing while doing so.

It should have been a simple vote to reauthorize an important law, but ideologues allied with exhibitionists to turn it into a circus. Throw in a badly informed Trump tweet, and we had a carnival of folly—which is to say, an ordinary day on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives are expected to vote Thursday on whether to renew a controversial surveillance power that Trump officials say is vital for protecting against terrorism and other national security threats.

On the penultimate day of the Obama administration, less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office. “Closing the Book on Bin Laden:…

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went into full damage-control mode last week after NBC News reported he had called President Donald Trump a “f—-ing moron,” denying the allegation and insisting the president was “smart.” But Trump never forgets a slight—and sooner or later, he always hits back. In…

Ever since the Washington Post reported last week that President Donald Trump disclosed classified information in his meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, commentators have been debating how the revelation might affect intelligence gathering and sharing among America and its…

In an effort to debunk a story dogging him for the last several days, President Trump seems to have revived questions. The story is the report that Trump, in his May 10 meeting in the Oval Office with two top Russian government officials, revealed up-to-then classified intelligence from a foreign…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren reports on how the White House has responded to recent allegations that President Trump shared highly classified information with the Russians.

Watching the White House these days is like driving down an interstate, but every two miles you have to slow to a crawl as you pass yet another car crash. More than likely, the cause of the wreck is a reckless driver, but, of course, there are the innocent occupants in the other car. Trump's…

The White House national security adviser on Tuesday did not deny several reports that President Donald Trump disclosed to high-ranking Russian officials previously classified intelligence from a foreign intelligence service. Speaking to reporters at the White House, H.R. McMaster said repeatedly…

Washington is afire once again with a controversy pitting President Donald Trump against the U.S. intelligence community and the media. The allegations are deadly serious: In an Oval Office meeting, the president disclosed highly classified information from a friendly intelligence service to an…

A Republican congressman is calling on the White House to share with some lawmakers the entire transcript of a controversial meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian officials, during which Trump reportedly revealed highly classified information.

President Trump appeared to admit Tuesday morning that he did share sensitive information, which multiple news outlets have reported was classified, with Russian officials in the Oval Office.

If the Washington Post's bombshell report Monday is true, then President Trump has a big, big problem on his hands. As the Post reported, last Wednesday in the Oval Office Trump relayed what had been highly classified intelligence information related to ISIS to Russian foreign minister Sergei…

The Washington Post reports that President Trump "revealed highly classified information" to high-ranking Russian officials last week. According to the Post's sources, Trump disclosed to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak information about a source of…

The New York Times reports that two White House officials were involved in uncovering and distributing intelligence reports that wound up in the hands of House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes last week. "Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra…

In the time since President Trump's March 4 tweets alleging he had his "'wires tapped' in Trump Tower" shortly before last year's election by President Obama, there's been no evidence revealed that strictly supports his claim. Trump opponents view this lack of evidence as proof the president made…

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee accused the panel's Republican chairman Devin Nunes of "cancelling" an open hearing on Russian election interference on Friday. The rebuke came after Nunes said he was postponing the hearing until after the committee hears closed testimony from…

The top spokesman for President Trump declined to rule out that someone at the White House may have given or alerted the House Intelligence committee chairman about documents revealing intelligence collection involving Trump campaign associates. On Wednesday California congressman Devin Nunes…

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has "no idea" about findings his House counterpart presented Wednesday that Trump transition officials' communications were incidentally collected before the inauguration and potentially improperly disseminated.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD's editor at large Bill Kristol joined C-SPAN's Washington Journal Monday morning to discuss President Donald Trump's claim that his Oval Office predecessor ordered a wiretap of him as a candidate, as well as a special editorial the magazine published in response.

Secret intelligence captured during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound and withheld from the public by the Obama administration must be released, the House intelligence chairman told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

As journalistic bombshells go, CNN’s January 10 report on President Trump was explosive: "Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump,…

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released 98 additional items from Osama bin Laden's compound today. If the ODNI has its way, then these files will be the last the American people see for some time. The accompanying announcement is titled, "Closing the Book on bin Laden:…

President-elect Donald Trump is "troubled" by President Barack Obama's commutation of the sentence of former Army private Chelsea Manning, according to a spokesman.

It was an appropriate, if inauspicious, beginning to Thursday's confirmation hearing for Mike Pompeo that the lights suddenly went out during opening statements. The Kansas congressman is Donald Trump's selection to head the Central Intelligence Agency, which operates in the shadows. But even this…

In his first press conference since being elected president, Donald Trump thanked the media. He praised news outfits that didn't publish a story about a document that describes alleged Russian efforts to compromise him, even though many of those news organizations had the story for months and held…

Not long after CNN reported that top U.S. intelligence officials had briefed Donald Trump on a document that alleges the Russian government had "compromising personal and financial information" on him, BuzzFeed published what it claimed to be synopsised in the briefing under the dubious…

CNN reports that American intelligence officials have briefed Donald Trump on documents that allege the Russian government has "compromising personal and financial information" about the president-elect. Details about the existence of this compromising information have been circulating among…

President-elect Donald Trump said he has a "constructive meeting and conversation" with officials in the intelligence community Friday. Trump, who has recently cast doubts publicly about intelligence reports that Russian-supported cyber-attacks tried to influence last November's presidential…

The Obama administration announced an amendment to an executive order Thursday that introduces targeted sanctions on Russian assets here in the United States. The sanctions come in response to reported cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other groups by Russian-backed hackers.

Reports Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign to tilt the election in favor of Donald Trump have sown precisely the kind of confusion that American adversaries must have hoped for with their actions. In an effort to reach some sort of…

Three-term U.S. House member Mike Pompeo of Kansas has been selected by Donald Trump to head the Central Intelligence Agency. A cursory glance at his biography shows he's eminently qualified. Pompeo was first in his class at West Point, served as an Army officer during the cold war in Europe, and…

Uri Bar-Joseph is a professor of political science at the University of Haifa and a former intelligence analyst in the Israel Defense Forces. His just published book, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, is the remarkable story of how Cairo playboy Ashraf Marwan betrayed his father-in-law,…

Leaders of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) manipulated intelligence to make efforts against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq look more successful than they were in reality, according to a new report by a House Republican joint task force created to investigate the matter.

Among the many revelations that will emerge from the voluminous majority report of the Benghazi Select Committee when it is released Tuesday is this one: Barack Obama skipped his daily intelligence briefing one day after the Benghazi attacks on September 11, 2012. The president's briefer handed a…

Barack Obama says he wants the truth. On November 21, the New York Times reported allegations that military intelligence officials provided the president with skewed assessments that minimized the threat from ISIS and overstated the success of U.S. efforts against the group. The Times story was an…

Vienna

Republican members of the House intelligence committee say the Obama administration should release more of the one million-plus documents found after the 2011 raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The U.S. government released Wednesday morning an additional 86 documents from the vast collection of documents captured during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The new disclosures bring the total number of documents released to 120 – a tiny fraction of the more…

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz told Fox News' Megyn Kelly that knowing what he knows now, he wouldn't have supported going into Iraq. 

Sunday night, Stephen Hayes noted (via Twitter) a Times of Israel article that the 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Communities delivered annually by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to a Senate committee had "removed Iran and Hezbollah from its list of…

Jeb Bush, a probable Republican presidential candidate, defended the "hugely important" NSA data collection program in a speech today in Chicago:

A new book set to be released next week alleges that the CIA took steps to prevent anti-American tirades from Chinese Communist officials from being heard in America. The details are revealed in Michael Pillsbury's The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global…

Lt. General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, blasted the Obama administration’s approach to the War on Terror in a hard-hitting speech to a meeting of intelligence professionals. “The dangers to the U.S. do not arise from the arrogance of American power, but from…

An interesting interview with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell on the enhanced interrogation program from Vice News:

So where did it all go wrong for Obama. That’s the big question, asked by Amie Parnes of The Hill:

There is likely much gnashing of teeth in the intelligence community today in the wake of Obama’s interview with 60 Minutes last night. He laid the blame for the rise of the Islamic State at the feet of the intelligence community. “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has…

From Reuters:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper peppered his Thursday speech to an intelligence community summit with humor, drawing laughter from his audience nearly a dozen times. Clapper began his talk to the Intelligence National Security Alliance (INSA)/Armed Forces Communications and…

With lawmakers ratcheting up pressure on Obama to take action in Syria, few in the administration have been paying close attention to Libya, apparently. As Fox News's Jennifer Griffin reported last night on Special Report with Bret Baier, the United States was baffled for days as to who conducted…

As the world watches the strengthening of global jihadist movements – from ISIS to al Qaeda to dozens of affiliated and like-minded groups – one of those inside the U.S. government who was most vocal about the growing threats is leaving his position. General Michael Flynn served as head of the…

In line with President Obama's official proclamation of June as "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month," the banner headlining the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Wednesday proclaims the agency's celebration of the same, noting, "It’s also about…

For those of us who believe in the market system, there is something unsettling about the thought of the billionaire bosses of Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, two Disney subsidiaries, and Intuit sitting around a table and agreeing not to compete for staff. Facebook declined an invitation to join the…

Two leading Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say that Michael Morell, then acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, gave an account of his role on Benghazi that was often misleading and sometimes deliberately false.

A lawmaker at a Benghazi hearing stumped U.S. intelligence officials yesterday with this question:

In the wake of all the “leaks” by Edward Snowden of the National Security Agency’s collection programs and the resulting debate over those programs, one constantly hears from elected officials and the commentariat about the need to strike the right balance between privacy and security. More often…

Florida senator Marco Rubio says that "some" of President Obama's proposed changes to the way the NSA collects date "go too far."

Thankfully, President Obama is not a doctor.  If he was and you happened to visit him in his office and mentioned that you were worried about the potential for lung cancer, he’d immediately put you under, open you up, and pull out a lung—or, at least, that’s the logic that seems to be guiding his…

The office of the Director of National Intelligence released its interactive 2014 Counterterrorism Calendar this week on the website of the National Counterterrorism Center.  The map provided with the calendar contains an embarrassing error, misspelling the name of the U.S.'s closest ally in the…

For all those civil libertarians of both the left and the right who think we ought to thank Edward Snowden for his actions in revealing NSA’s secret metadata collection program—or, at a minimum, believe the U.S. government should show leniency toward him should he ever come back to these…

When the “President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology” issued its report (Liberty and Security in a Changing World) this past week, an honest and objective newspaper headline the next day would have read: “Rogue Panel Reports on Non-Rogue NSA Program.”

It is often remarked that espionage is the second-oldest profession. Written records from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Iran suggest that spying and civilization sprang up together. In antiquity, spies could be the hidden bureaucrats of tyranny or good governance (a ruler needed to know whether a satrap…

There is probably no harder beat in Washington than intelligence. 

A recent spate of newspaper articles suggests a concerted media campaign targeting Turkey’s foreign intelligence service, the MIT, its director, Hakan Fidan, and almost surely his boss as well, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a piece published by the Wall Street Journal and another by the…

John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent a letter to each of the CIA employees who were on the ground during the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012, inviting them to share information with Congress, according to three sources familiar with the missive. Brennan sent the…

Last Friday night, upper management of the country's national security establishment gathered for dinner, speeches, and an evening of conviviality at the annual banquet of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. The event followed hard on the heels of the revelations about the NSA's…

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper defends the recently revealed metadata mining government intelligence programs:

Over the past few weeks things cyber have blown up in our faces once again. While some of the media noticed, the gist of the reporting was on who was doing what to us now, not the growing scandal of our essentially supine reaction to it.

Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, added his rather important voice to the growing number of current and former officials who believe the Obama administration should expedite the release of some documents captured during the raid that killed Osama bin…

Nearly eight months after terrorists killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration still has not explained who, exactly, was responsible.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with William Kristol about Stephen F. Hayes's new piece, The Benghazi Talking Points. 

After being read Miranda rights, the Boston bombing suspect in custody, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has stopped talking to authorities, officials tell the Associated Press.

Top U.S. intelligence officials revealed new details about the exploitation of Osama bin Laden’s extensive archive during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday. The officials revealed that at least several hundred intelligence reports have been generated based on an analysis of bin…

During the House Intelligence Committee hearing today on “Worldwide Threats,” Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper said that he has recently had conversations about releasing more of the documents captured in Osama bin Laden’s compound. More of the documents should be released,…

The U.N. wants to use drones, the French news agency Agence France-Presse reports. "The United Nations wants to use drones for the first time to monitor fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where Rwanda has been accused of aiding rebels," says the report, quoting U.N. officials.

Ambassador Susan Rice has finally explained, in her opinion, why she misled the country about what happened during the September 11 terror attack against Americans in Benghazi, Libya. According to Rice, all the blame should be given to the intelligence community for her misleading comments made…

This past weekend, Congressman Mike Rogers, who is chairman of the House intelligence committee, said that the talking points used to explain what happened in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012 were changed by political appointees in the Obama administration. Rogers pointed specifically to the…

During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Congressman Mike Rogers, who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, accused political appointees in the intelligence community of spinning the September 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi.

According to this Fox News report, intelligence professionals are unable explain why the Benghazi intelligence downplayed the role of al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the attack.

The Obama administration appears to be mounting yet another version of its campaign to push back on claims that it misled on the intelligence related to the attacks in Benghazi on 9/11/12. But the new offensive by the administration, which contradicts many of its earlier claims and simply…

Ahead of what is sure to be a contentious presidential debate focusing on foreign policy on Monday, anonymous “intelligence officials” have decided to update the Benghazi story. “No evidence found of Al Qaeda role in Libya attack,” a Los Angeles Times headline reads. A Washington Post headline…

Mark Steyn, writing for National Review Online:

Danville, Kentucky

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained this new political ad that knocks President Obama for saying the al Qaeda terrorist attack in Libya is a bump in the road:

At the Washington Post this morning, Glenn Kessler posts a collection of the Obama administration’s evolving statements on Libya and some important reporting of facts surrounding the attacks.

In at least four recent instances, specific actions by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney have moved President Barack Obama in a new, different direction. It's a trend worth noting, showing that Romney's positions have (at least some times) helped shaped Obama's. 

At the White House briefing today, press secretary Jay Carney seemed confused when talking about how often and where President Obama's receives the presidential daily briefing:

During his acceptance speech last night, President Obama claimed, “I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and we have.”

Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in the Wall Street Journal: 

President Obama at a press conference this morning insisted that high-level national security leaks are not coming from the White House. "The notion that my White House would purposefully release classified information is offensive," President Obama said. 

Texas senator John Cornyn is targeting classified leaks being released by the Obama administration. "The leaks appear to have formed the basis of two New York Times reports about the White House’s role in classified national security efforts, one detailing the use of cyber warfare against Iran, and…

Senators Dan Coats, Richard Burr, and Marco Rubio urge the Obama administration to stop leaking sensitive intelligence information to the press: 

Osama bin Laden was killed by an elite group of Navy Seals one year ago this week. And bin Laden’s files, a massive trove captured in his Abbottabad, Pakistan safe house, have been the subject of various articles since. Now, the Obama administration has reportedly decided to release “some” of the…

The politicization of intelligence by the Obama administration continues apace. 

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons program lives on in the imagination of some government officials. At the end of a lengthy piece by James Risen in the New York Times this past weekend an anonymous official claims: “That assessment holds up really well.”

The Obama administration is politicizing intelligence on Syria. What does “politicizing intelligence” mean? Using intel, or more often partial intel, to produce an effect in line with White House policies rather than giving a full picture of a particular situation.

In October, an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. was disclosed by the United States government. And as the means was to be a bomb in a Washington restaurant, it is reasonable to assume Americans dining nearby would have been wounded or killed. In November, a new IAEA…

During an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer shortly before the Super Bowl on February 5, President Obama was asked about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the possibility of an Israeli airstrike. “I don’t think that Israel has made a decision on what they need to do,” Obama said. “I think they, like…

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Air Force general Michael Hayden is by all accounts a good man and a good officer. He has certainly done yeoman’s work since leaving government in defending controversial Bush administration interrogation and detainee policies. He didn’t…

Bob Woodward’s recent piece in the Washington Post argues that the debacle of the Iraq-WMD case should have made the Bush administration more circumspect about intelligence—and that everyone understood this lesson except the vice president. He offers the Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by the…

I worked with Bob Woodward when serving as a press officer at the National Security Council during President George W. Bush’s first term, and I believe him to be one of the fairest and the most thorough journalists in Washington. Nonetheless, his recent piece in the Outlook section of the…

Jonah Goldberg wrote a column about the recent attacks on Rick Perry, arguing that identity politics on the right are "intensely wearying" and "conservatism needs to spend less time defending candidates for who they are, and more time supporting candidates for what they intend to do." Of course,…

The New York Times has published a remarkable article on the murder of Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad. It is not the story’s central allegation that makes the piece remarkable – it is all too believable that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate had Shahzad killed. The…

Today's New York Times has a blockbuster story about how the cellphone of Bin Laden's courier, which was seized in the raid that killed the terrorist mastermind, contained "contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency." That group is Harakat ul Mujahedin…

The AP reports that the Navy SEALs' raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan has resulted in a "trove" of actionable intelligence:

Even before the successful raid against Osama bin Laden was announced, news that America’s most admired general, David Petraeus, would take the helm at the CIA while CIA director Leon Panetta would become secretary of defense had induced much discussion about the intertwining of the CIA and…

On Friday, President Barack Obama will visit the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia to thank intelligence professionals for helping to kill Osama bin Laden. According to practically all news reports detailing the operation earlier this month in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the CIA was integral in providing…

In May 2010, in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of Times Square by a jihadist with ties to the Pakistani Taliban, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave an interview to 60 Minutes and made a startling claim about the government in Pakistan. “I’m not saying that they’re at the highest…

A lot of parties inside the American government, from President Obama on down, will rightly claim credit for the demise of Osama bin Laden. But one party, in particular, deserves mention because its members have been repeatedly demonized in the press: the Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO). 

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Judicial Watch, a conservative foundation that seeks to improve government transparency, has obtained two important Guantanamo-related documents from the Department of Defense via a Freedom of Information Act request. One of the documents is a draft presentation dated February 4, 2004. Reading…

President Obama’s apparent frustration that he and his senior policymakers were taken by surprise with recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, reminds us of Yogi Berra’s famous line, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Some momentous event occurs on the world scene—whether it’s the Soviets putting…

In THE WEEKLY STANDARD and on this blog, we’ve taken note of the ongoing Justice Department investigation involving the disclosure of classified information by James Risen in his 2006 book, State of War. The case finally seems to have resulted in an indictment of a former CIA officer:

Little did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper know that when he and two of his Obama administration colleagues sat down to discuss the terror threat with ABC’s Diane Sawyer earlier this month that his appearance would be the source of controversy. As has been widely reported, Clapper…

The New York Post editors write:

“Portions of this article were deleted by the Israeli Military Censor.” So begins a fascinating article, “Spies Like Us,” by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv in Tablet. It goes into considerable detail into the U.S.-Israeli intelligence relationship over recent decades. The story is one of friendship and…

In the past couple of days we’ve learned more about the intelligence that allowed Western authorities to neutralize the threat posed by two bombs shipped from Yemen via cargo plane. (Other bombs may still be in play, according to press accounts, but that is not a certainty.)

We are six years out from one of the most far-reaching reforms of U.S. intelligence in its history. In 2004, Congress passed legislation that created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to oversee and coordinate the sprawling collection of agencies that act as our nation’s…

Today is the tenth anniversary of al Qaeda’s October 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Three thoughts come immediately to mind.

Late last month, EU Home Affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced the resumption of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP), under which American counterterror investigators have consulted and analyzed selected data on international bank transactions originating in Europe. (Note that…

Since last year, Hezbollah has been rounding up Lebanese who are believed to be spying for the state of Israel. Just yesterday, a senior official at a Lebanese telecommunications firm was arrested, making it the fourth this year. The arrest is part of broader campaign that has led to some 50…

Yesterday’s confirmation hearing for Lt. Gen. James Clapper, who is poised to take over as the new director of National Intelligence, highlighted a fundamental challenge facing America’s intelligence community (IC). How much, and in what ways, should the sprawling intelligence bureaucracy be…

Lt. General James R. Clapper, Jr., the president’s nominee for director of National Intelligence, is taking a hard line on information security, but only where it counts.

The first installment of the Washington Post blockbuster, “Top Secret America,” by Dana Priest and William Arkin, two years in the making, is finally out today. It paints a surprisingly unsurprising picture of duplication and triplication in the intelligence world.