OBAMA ADMINISTRATION PLAYING A DANGEROUS GAME WITH INTELLIGENCE LEAKS
FOXNEWS.COM
Senator McCain and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney traded insults this week over intelligence leaks – McCain called the Obama White House “grossly irresponsible” to leak classified information for political gain, while Carney called McCain “grossly irresponsible” for even suggesting it.
I’ve been in three presidential administrations, and frankly, leaks are par for the course.
Some insiders leak to make themselves look good, others to curry favor with the press, still others because they disagree with a policy decision and want to expose its flaws. And sometimes it’s vengeance, pure and
When a president orders an investigation to uncover a leaker, he usually ends up regretting it.
I was in the White House when the President Nixon ordered the wiretapping of key members of his staff and the Washington press corps to find out who had divulged secret information about the Vietnam War and later when he later tried to find out who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers. These investigations set in motion the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up and ultimately led to President Nixon’s
A decade later, when I was a Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Pentagon we wanted to turn a new page after the Vietnam-era and wanted to work with reporters about how to keep details of upcoming or
We organized a small dinner, and posed the problem to some of the fabled reporters and photographers from WWII, the Korean and Vietnam wars. We asked the reporters who were with the troops that stormed the beaches at Normandy whether any of them would have scooped the story of the Invasion. To a man they said no, doing so would have endangered Allied war efforts and risked American lives.
The question we never thought to ask them was what if an administration deliberately leaked classified information that risked exposing intelligence operations.
