The CIA's Plan to Put an End to Their Leaking Problem
The agency's new campaign to stop leaks...was leaked.
The CIA's new campaign to prevent leakers among its ranks might have a ready-made starting point after a memo outlining details of the "Honor the Oath" campaign was "obtained" by the Associated Press. The inference that the memo may have itself been leaked is lending itself to some instantaneous and rather glaring irony:
CIA memo vowing crackdown on leaks leaked to AP http://t.co/mkVn9bZo3i via @trevortimm
— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) June 26, 2013
The new campaign comes straight from CIA Director John Brennan, who himself has an allegedly interesting relationship with leaks of classified information. He, some have argued, played a secondary but important role in steering journalists towards the classified tactics behind a foiled al-Qaeda plot in 2012, when he was Obama's counter-terrorism advisor. Incidentally, that's the same plot that probably prompted the DOJ to secretly obtain phone records of Associated Press reportersafter they wrote a story on it, in an attempt to identify their source or sources. The White House, in a Reuters piece chronicling Brennan's possible role in the classified information leak, strongly denied that Brennan had anything to do with conveying classified information to the AP or anyone else.