(Credit: Yahoo News)
(…) At the end of July — not long after WikiLeaks had dumped over 20,000 stolen DNC emails before the Democratic convention — it had become obvious to Brennan that the Russians were mounting an aggressive and wide‑ranging effort to interfere in the election. He was also seeing intelligence about contacts and interactions between Russian officials and Americans involved in the Trump campaign. By now, several European intelligence services had reported to the CIA that Russian operatives were reaching out to people within Trump’s circle. And the Australian government had reported to U.S. officials that its top diplomat in the United Kingdom had months earlier been privately told by Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. By July 31, the FBI had formally opened a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump’s campaigns ties to Russians, with sub-inquiries targeting four individuals: Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman; Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief who had led the crowd at the Republican convention in chants of “Lock her up!”; Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser who had just given a speech in Moscow; and Papadopoulos.
Brennan spoke with FBI Director James Comey and Adm. Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA, and asked them to dispatch to the CIA their experts to establish a working group at Langley that would review the intelligence and figure out the full scope and nature of the Russian operation. Brennan was thinking about the lessons of the 9/11 attack. Al-Qaida had been able to pull off that operation partly because U.S. intelligence agencies — several of which had collected bits of intelligence regarding the plotters before the attack — had not shared the material within the intelligence community. Brennan wanted a process in which NSA, FBI and CIA experts could freely share with each other the information each agency had on the Russian operation — even the most secret information that tended not to be disseminated throughout the full intelligence community.
Brennan realized this was what he would later call “an exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive issue.” Here was an active counterintelligence case — already begun by the FBI — aiming at uncovering and stopping Russian covert activity in the middle of a U.S. presidential campaign. And it included digging into whether it involved Americans in contact with Russia.
While Brennan wrangled the intelligence agencies into a turf-crossing operation that could feed the White House information on the Russian maneuver, Obama convened a series of meetings to devise a plan for countering whatever the Russians were up to. The meetings followed the procedure known in the federal government as the “interagency process.” The protocol was for the deputy chiefs of the relevant government agencies to meet and hammer out options for the principals — that is, the heads of the agencies — and then the principals hold a separate (and sometimes parallel) chain of meetings to discuss and perhaps debate before presenting choices to the president.
But for this topic, the protocol was not observed. Usually when the White House invited the deputies and principals to such meetings, they informed them of the subject at hand and provided “readahead” memos outlining what was on the agenda. This time, the agency officials just received instructions to show up at the White House at a certain time. No reason given. No memos supplied. “We were only told that a meeting was scheduled, and our principal or deputy was expected to attend,” recalled a senior administration official who participated in the sessions. (At the State Department, only a small number of officials were cleared to receive the most sensitive information on the Russian hack; this group included Secretary of State John Kerry; Tony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state; Dan Smith, head of the department’s intelligence bureau; and Jon Finer, Kerry’s chief of staff.)
For the usual interagency sessions, principals and deputies could bring staffers. Not this time. “There were no plus ones,” an attendee recalled. When the subject of a principals or deputies meeting was a national security matter, the gathering was often held in the Situation Room of the White House. The in‑house video feed of the Sit Room — without audio — would be available to national security officials at the White House and elsewhere, and these officials could at least see that a meeting was in progress and who was attending. For the meetings related to the Russian hack, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, ordered the video feed turned off. She did not want others in the national security establishment to know what was under way, fearing leaks from within the bureaucracy.
Rice would chair the principals’ meetings — which brought together Brennan; Comey; Kerry; Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; Defense Secretary Ash Carter; Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson; Treasury Secretary Jack Lew; Attorney General Loretta Lynch; and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — with only a few other White House officials present, including White House chief of staff Denis McDonough; homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, and Colin Kahl, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser. (Kahl had to insist to Rice that he be allowed to attend so that Biden could be fully briefed.)
Rice’s No. 2, deputy national security adviser Avril Haines, oversaw the deputies’ sessions. White House officials who were absent from the meetings were not told what was being discussed. This even included other NSC staffers — some of whom bristled at being shut out. Often the intelligence material covered in these meetings was not placed in the President’s Daily Brief, the top-secret document presented to the president every morning. Too many people had access to the PDB. “The opsec on this” — the operational security — “was as tight as it could be,” one White House official later said. (Read more: Yahoo News, 3/9/2018) (Archive)