Considered opinion: Sources and methods“The day that we can't protect human sources”: The president and the House Intelligence Committee burn an informant
It wasn’t that long ago that both the executive branch and the legislature considered the protection of intelligence sources a matter of surpassing national importance. In 1982 Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which criminalized the knowing and intentional outing of U.S. covert operatives and intelligence sources whom the government is taking active steps to protect. So what happens, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write in Lawfare , “when the intentional outing of U.S. intelligence assets is the province not of rogue insiders, not of foreign hackers or foreign agents, not of people who end up spending the rest of their lives as fugitives, but of senior officials in two branches of this country’s government who are most responsible for protecting those assets” — and “when they do so for frankly political reasons?”
It wasn’t that long ago that both the executive branch and the legislature considered the protection of intelligence sources a matter of surpassing national importance.
During the 1970s, a renegade former CIA officer named Philip Agee went on a campaign of outing agency sources and covert operatives. In 1975 he published he memoirs, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, in which he identified 250 CIA officers and agents. MI6, the British intelligence service, accused Agee of exposing several of its agents in Poland, two of whom were executed by the communist government. Agee’s U.S. passport was revoked in 1979, and he was expelled from several European countries. He spent the 1980 in Granada and Nicaragua, when both were under left-leaning regimes, and from 1990 until his death in 2008 he lived in Havana.
In 1982, responding to Agee’s conduct, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which criminalized the knowing and intentional outing of U.S. covert operatives and intelligence sources whom the government is taking active steps to protect.
Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write in Lawfare that “More recently, a lot of people, including one of the current authors, objected strenuously to the activities of Edward Snowden. Snowden didn’t disclose the names of human sources—just programmatic intelligence information. Yet he has been camped out in Moscow since the leak, unable to return to the United States for fear of the prosecution that would surely await him. Similarly, Julian Assange does not leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London for fear of arrest over his own activities. While both men have their supporters, we have never considered their jeopardy an injustice.”
