Spies Like Us, Con't

When Donald Trump went after musician John Legend and his wife, model and activist Chrissy Teigen, on Twitter last night, it was a dead giveaway that some news outlet called the White House late last night for a comment on a story being run today, putting the Narcissist-in-Chief in a lousy mood and leading to his latest lash-out to try to cover-up coming bad news.

This afternoon we know what that story was: CNN is reporting that in 2017, the CIA yanked a high-level covert spy from Russia's government because then-director Mike Pompeo was worried that Trump was going to blow the source's cover.

In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN. 

A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy. 

The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel. 

The disclosure to the Russians by the President, though not about the Russian spy specifically, prompted intelligence officials to renew earlier discussions about the potential risk of exposure, according to the source directly involved in the matter. 

At the time, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo told other senior Trump administration officials that too much information was coming out regarding the covert source, known as an asset. An extraction, or "exfiltration" as such an operation is referred to by intelligence officials, is an extraordinary remedy when US intelligence believes an asset is in immediate danger. 

A US official said before the secret operation there was media speculation about the existence of such a covert source, and such coverage or public speculation poses risks to the safety of anyone a foreign government suspects may be involved. This official did not identify any public reporting to that effect at the time of this decision and CNN could not find any related reference in media reports. 

Asked for comment, Brittany Bramell, the CIA director of public affairs, told CNN: "CNN's narrative that the Central Intelligence Agency makes life-or-death decisions based on anything other than objective analysis and sound collection is simply false. Misguided speculation that the President's handling of our nation's most sensitive intelligence—which he has access to each and every day—drove an alleged exfiltration operation is inaccurate." 

A spokesperson for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined to comment. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said, "CNN's reporting is not only incorrect, it has the potential to put lives in danger."

Now the White House is screaming at CNN right now about "putting lives in danger", but that only tells me the story is true.  Trump opened his mouth and blew the cover of the CIA's top asset in Moscow, or came close enough to it by revealing information that the US should not have had to Sergey Lavrov, that the CIA made the decision to pull the plug on the mission and exfiltrate the source.

And this of course was a massive loss for our intelligence, a massive loss to Russia, another in a string of catastrophic, generational losses to Putin in the last few years that began with Snowden and has hollowed out the CIA's Russia desk ever since.