Agencies Battle Over What Is ‘Top Secret’ in Clinton’s Inbox Clinton Lobbied on Health Care as Secretary of State, Emails Show Document: Letter by the Intelligence Agencies’ Inspector General
At the center of the argument over Hillary
Clinton’s emails, officials said, is a Central Intelligence Agency
program that is anything but secret — its effort to kill suspected
terrorists with drones.
Agencies Battle Over What Is ‘Top Secret’ in Hillary Clinton’s Emails
Photo
Hillary Clinton appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2013, when she was secretary of state.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON
— Some of the nation’s intelligence agencies raised alarms last spring
as the State Department began releasing emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server, saying that a number of the messages contained information that should be classified “top secret.”
The diplomats saw things differently and pushed back at the spies.
In
the months since, a battle has played out between the State Department
and the intelligence agencies — as well as Congress — over what
information on Mrs. Clinton’s private server was classified and what was
the routine business of American diplomacy, according to government
officials and letters obtained by The New York Times.
At
the center of that argument, the officials said, is a “top secret”
program of the Central Intelligence Agency that is anything but secret.
It is the agency’s long effort to track and kill suspected terrorists
overseas with armed drones, which has been the subject of international
debates, numerous newspaper articles, television programs and entire
books.
How Does the Government Classify Secrets?
An explanation of the classification system that the government uses to protect information it deems critical to national security.
The
Obama administration’s decision to keep most internal discussions about
that program — including all information about C.I.A. drone strikes in
Pakistan — classified at the “top secret” level has now become a
political liability for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Some
of the skirmishes over Mrs. Clinton’s emails reflect the disagreements
in a post-9/11 era over what should be a government secret and what
should not. Nonetheless, 22 emails
on Mrs. Clinton’s server were held back from a tranche made public last
week. Those 22 emails were deemed so highly secret that State
Department officials in this case agreed with the intelligence agencies
not to release them even in redacted form.
The
emails are included in seven distinct chains that comprise forwarded
messages and replies, and in most cases involved discussions of the
C.I.A. drone program, government officials said.
At a Democratic presidential debate
in New Hampshire on Thursday night, Mrs. Clinton dismissed the issue,
as she has in the past. She said the government was overzealously
classifying information after the fact, citing as evidence the State
Department’s finding
that two emails sent to Colin L. Powell’s private email account and 10
others sent to the personal accounts of aides to Condoleezza Rice when
each served as secretary of state should now be classified years after
the fact. It is against the law to have classified information outside a
secure government account.
“This
just beggars the imagination,” Mrs. Clinton said, going on to argue
that the issue was merely an extension of Republican criticism over the attack against the American mission and C.I.A. annex in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
It
remains unknown what exactly the 22 emails contain, given their
classification as “top secret,” but the officials described them
generally, on the condition of anonymity. The officials included people
familiar with or involved in the handling of the emails in government
agencies and in Congress.
Spokesmen
and women for the State Department, the C.I.A. and the intelligence
agencies’ inspector general declined to comment on the content of the
emails.
Security Designations
Some
of the emails include material classified at the highest levels, known
as Top Secret/S.A.P., according to a letter sent to the Senate on Jan.
14 by the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence agencies, I.
Charles McCullough III. That designation refers to “special access
programs,” which are among the government’s most closely guarded
secrets.
Several
officials said that at least one of the emails contained oblique
references to C.I.A. operatives. One of the messages has been given a
designation of “HCS-O” — indicating that the information was derived
from human intelligence sources — a detail that was first reported by Fox News. The officials said that none of the emails mention specific names of C.I.A. officers or the spy agency’s sources.
The
government officials said that discussions in an email thread about a
New York Times article — the officials did not say which article —
contained sensitive information about the intelligence surrounding the
C.I.A.’s drone activities, particularly in Pakistan.
The
officials said that at least one of the 22 emails came from Richard C.
Holbrooke, who as the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and
Pakistan would have been intimately involved in dealing with the
ramifications of drone strikes. Mr. Holbrooke died in December 2010.
Photo
People gathered at the site
of a missile attack in the village of Tappi, Pakistan, near the Afghan
border, in October 2008. The C.I.A.’s drone program remains classified,
though its existence is widely known.Credit
Haji Mujtaba/Reuters
Mrs.
Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state was
first disclosed in March, and since then the State Department has slowly
released 33,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton and her aides determined were
work-related. None of the emails sent through Mrs. Clinton’s server were
marked as classified, the officials said, and most were written by her
aides and forwarded to her. That is also true of the emails forwarded to
Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice, which until now have been in the department’s
unclassified archives.
The
handling of classified information on Mrs. Clinton’s server is now the
subject of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as
well as the State Department’s security and intelligence bureaus.
According to the law and security procedures Mrs. Clinton agreed to
follow when she became secretary, such material should not even have
been sent over the State Department’s official but unclassified state.gov server.
At
the same time, the officials said, some of the classifications being
sought for the emails fall into a gray area between public knowledge and
secrecy. In such instances, the original source of the information —
and thus the level of its classification — can be disputed, and has
been, vigorously at times, they said. Other emails have been the subject
of rigorous debate over what constitutes a secret and what the nation’s
diplomats can say about intelligence matters as they grapple with
international crises.
“While
the secretary of state has a duty to protect classified information, as
all of us do in a position of trust, here she did not have the benefit
of six-plus months of interagency classification reviews,” said
Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee. “The same information said by people in
two different positions may receive two opposite classification
determinations.” Though the State Department accepted the C.I.A.’s
classification of the 22 emails, it has also sought to challenge
accusations that it was negligent in handling secrets.
During
the review, the State Department has rebutted claims by at least one
intelligence agency that information in some of the emails ought to
remain classified.
Some
of those include the emails that led Mr. McCullough’s office to refer
the matter to the Justice Department last summer, prompting the F.B.I.’s
investigation. Mr. McCullough made the referral based on an assessment
that four of 40 emails that it sampled early on in the process contained
“top secret” information.
Now,
after months of review, only one of those four turned out to be
classified at that level. (The State Department counts that email among
the 22 of last week.) A second of the four emails has been downgraded to
“confidential,” the lowest level of classification. The third was
released last fall.
Different Sources
The
fourth involved an email sent by Kurt M. Campbell, the assistant
secretary of state for Asian affairs, shortly after a North Korean
ballistic missile test in July 2009. The email has not yet been made
public, even in redacted form, but the State Department has challenged
an assertion from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which
gathers data through satellite images, that the email included
information that came from a highly classified program.
In
a letter this past Dec. 15 to Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee
Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a
State Department official said that the information could not have been
based on N.G.A.’s intelligence because Mr. Campbell did not receive any
classified intelligence briefings for what was a new job for him until a
few days after the North Korean test.
More
broadly, the memo stated, diplomats working at the State Department or
in embassies around the world constantly receive and pass on information
from unclassified sources — so-called parallel reporting — that can
involve highly classified matters. That can make it difficult to
determine with confidence whether information in any single email came
from a classified source.
“When
policy officials obtain information from open sources, ‘think tanks,’
experts, foreign government officials, or others, the fact that some of
the information may also have been available through intelligence
channels does not mean that the information is necessarily classified,”
the department’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs, Julia
Frifield, wrote in the December letter to Mr. Corker.
Photo
A television broadcast in Seoul, South Korea, of a North Korea missile launch missile in July 2009.Credit
Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press
Another
email whose classification has been disputed was dated April 20, 2011,
and was among those that prompted members of Congress and Mr.
McCullough’s office to begin a review of the State Department’s release
of the emails by court order under the Freedom of Information Act.
It
was from Timmy T. Davis, an officer in the State Department’s
Operations Center, and it conveyed to Mrs. Clinton’s senior staff
security concerns in Libya during the war against the country’s leader,
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
At
the time, J. Christopher Stevens, the future ambassador to the country,
was secretly traveling there as an envoy to the opposition leadership
and had telephoned the Ops Center, as it is known, to advise it about
his situation on the ground.
Mr.
Davis sent his message, marked “S.B.U.,” or “sensitive but
unclassified” to two of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin and
Jacob J. Sullivan, as well as to Alice G. Wells, an executive assistant
to Mrs. Clinton who is now the ambassador to Jordan.
At
issue were two sentences in the email referring to reports by Africom,
the American military command for Africa, describing the movement of
Colonel Qaddafi’s forces near the city of Ajdabiya. In a letter on Nov.
24 last year, Ms. Frifield detailed how the information in the email
differed significantly from the suspected intelligence source and could
well have been based on public briefings given the day before by NATO’s
military about the course of the war.
“The
conclusion that the information in the email was drawn from that
intelligence product is unsubstantiated and on its face wrong, given the
differences between the information in the email and the information in
the product,” Ms. Frifield wrote.
Even
in the case of the drone program, so much information about the strikes
has filtered into public view that the C.I.A. did not object to every
allusion to it, allowing at least vague references in the emails that
the State Department has released so far.
In
late October 2009, as she prepared for a trip to Pakistan, Mrs. Clinton
asked her aides for good answers to questions she might expect while in
the country about Blackwater, the private security company that
Pakistanis had long suspected was secretly operating inside the country.
Ms.
Abedin responded by email that the aides were working on an “answer
sheet” for the tough questions she might get on the thorniest issues
about American-Pakistani relations — including Blackwater, the security
of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and drones.
“You will have tonite or tomorrow am,” Ms. Abedin wrote.
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