Episode 8: Decoding Trump's Classified-Documents Indictment

Why is it so important to keep the country’s secrets secret? And what does the alphabet soup of national security-related acronyms in the indictment against the former president actually mean? Three intelligence professionals with more than 80 years of combined experience explain what’s involved in collecting and protecting the people, methods and information in classified documents— and the potential consequences of their exposure. 

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Doug London: Raheem was an individual that showed up in the country where I was posted. Important facilitator for al-Qaeda. And a facilitator is an individual who's not necessarily a trigger puller or someone who blows up bombs, but he's the one that buys the guns, the bullets, the bombs, provides the logistics, enables an operation, and he was very good at it. And with what we were hearing from al-Qaeda chatter and such, there was expectation that he was there to launch or direct a terrorist operation.
I had to bump him in a particular way where he'd be willing to talk to me. And trust me enough to share what he knew about al-Qaeda and what their operations were.

Peter Bergen: How did you do it?

Doug London: I led him to believe that he had been arrested by the local government. He was in what we made to look like a police prison. It actually wasn't, we had fabricated it out of an old unused police station.

Peter Bergen: What was your pitch to him?

Doug London: My pitch wasn't terribly kind, the initial one. The initial one was, I gave him an opportunity to use my help to keep this government from sending him away by cooperating with me. I can keep you from being sent away, but I could also help out your family because this guy was very much a family man and a very devoted family man. And we had identified that through our collection against him, and I used my understanding of his humanity really to try to leverage that. So it’s a risk I had to take and there wasn't a real high probability he was gonna say yes, but I guess, over time, I was able to establish that trust because I took care of his family, who needed some medical assistance.
They needed some financial assistance. I kept all my promises, which you have to do as a case officer, turned into one of our better penetrations of al-Qaeda.

That CIA case officer who “kept all his promises” to the foreign agent he calls “Raheem,” … that’s Douglas London.

Doug London: I'm retired from the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine service, where I served as an operations officer for 34 years.

Peter Bergen: How do you assure 'em that their identity will remain a secret?

Doug London: Well, they have to not only trust the case officer, they have to trust the institution, because they not only have to believe in you, in your word, you'll deliver. But they know they're working for an organization, they're working for a government, so they have to have some confidence that the institution as well will protect them.

One way the institution — the United States government — protects agents like Raheem is by keeping their identities a very closely guarded secret. Their value to national security is so high — and the consequences of their exposure so significant — that strict controls govern who can and cannot have access to their information … and how documents with this information should be handled.

With former president Donald Trump under indictment for allegedly breaching these strict controls… a breach that, quote, "could put at risk the national security of the United States”... I wanted to find out just what that potential risk is…. Not only personally for someone like Raheem if his identity were to be compromised… but for CIA efforts to recruit new foreign agents in the future.… And what impact all this might have on the United States’ ability to gather intelligence, to understand the threats its rivals pose, and protect its interests.

[MUSIC]

The indictment unsealed last week specifies 37 counts, including concealing documents, making false statements, obstructing justice, and 31 counts of quote "willful retention of national defense information." It lists documents found at Trump's home in Florida that are labeled “Secret” and “Top Secret.” The category “Top Secret,” is the highest category of classification, which means that releasing the intelligence would do quote “exceptionally grave” damage to U.S. national security. The brief descriptions of the classified documents in the indictment are a bewildering alphabet soup of acronyms to anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time in the U.S. intelligence community.

Doug London: HCS-

Alma Katsu: Five Eyes, NOFORN-

Doug London: SI Signaling,

Alma Katsu: SIGINT-er.

Doug London: IMCON -

Alma Katsu: Secret Level SCIF.

Doug London: SCI.

Alma Katsu: Top Secret -

Doug London: - and confidential.

So today, you're going to meet three former U.S. intelligence officials with collectively more than 80 years of experience. They can tell you what the counts in the indictment mean, what the story is behind those acronyms, and how threatening — or not — all of this is to U.S. national security.

I'm Peter Bergen. And this is a special bonus episode of In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC]

To understand how classified U.S. government intelligence is normally handled, you need to know about something called a SCIF.

Mark Stout: It's spelled S-C-I-F. It's a sensitive compartmented information facility.

That's Mark Stout.

Mark Stout: I'm a former U.S. intelligence officer, and these days, I'm an intelligence historian.

And this is Alma Katsu.

Alma Katsu: Hi!

She worked at the U.S. National Security Agency which listens in on “signals intelligence” from countries around the world. She also worked at the CIA in an intelligence career that lasted three and a half decades.

Alma Katsu: SCIFs are protected enclosures where you can discuss and retain classified information.

Mark Stout: They're uninteresting to look at. They look like any other office space, you know, lots of boring cubicles. What makes them special is literally the walls and the doors. The walls are protected against radiation leaking out, there's a combination lock on the door. They are basically vaults.

Alma Katsu: All SCIFs are not the same. You know, like a secret level SCIF is a little bit easier engineering wise and to get permissions and all that.

Mark Stout: So in order to get into a SCIF, you have to be able to demonstrate that you have the proper security clearance to be in there, or be escorted.

Alma Katsu: You know, there's not a lot of SCIFs out there. They might produce one for the director of central intelligence to have in his house, to safeguard documents or something like that.

Mark Stout: And in some agencies, if a visitor who doesn't have the clearance level is brought in, they will literally shout out, “uncleared coming through” or words to that effect. And sometimes even have like a little, rotating red, flashing light in the ceiling. So that people will know, like keep your conversations particularly discrete because there's an unclean person in here at the moment.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF MAR-A-LAGO RESORT: CROWDS, MUSIC]

Mark Stout: Mar-a-Lago is not a secure location by any stretch of the imagination. Absolutely not. This is a pretty much the epitome of, you know, the kind of place that you shouldn't have classified materials.

Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985. It’s a 20-acre property right on the ocean, which he got at the firesale price of $5 million. At the time, he and his then-wife Ivana weren't exactly welcomed into the local Palm Beach country clubs, reportedly because their garish display of wealth clashed with the town’s decidedly more discrete sensibilities. Trump turned the sprawling private estate into his own club, where he was in charge of who was in and who was out. Mar-a-Lago has all the distinct hallmarks of Trump style — glitzy chandeliers and lots of gold trim — quite the opposite of a "uninteresting to look at" SCIF. The club's security … is also a far cry from a SCIF.

Even during Trump's presidency, members could just walk right up to him in the buffet line. Guests have included true Trump believers like Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, celebrities like Alex Rodriguez and Celine Dion, well known criminals like Jeffrey Epstein … and a steady stream of Trump fans.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF VISITORS GREETING THE PRESIDENT, TAKING PHOTOS WITH HIM, ETC.]

ARCHIVAL Mar-a-Lago Visitor: It's a party for the president. The president would never do a party that wasn't the best.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We look forward to seeing you inside. Come on along.

At least a few unwanted visitors have also made their way inside Mar-a-Lago while Trump was president and also in the years since:..

a scammer posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: She was able to go there and just breeze right past security. No questions asked. She didn't show an ID according to her lawyer.

…and a Chinese national who entered the club while Trump was president with a thumbdrive containing malicious malware.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: She gave different excuses at three security checkpoints for why she was at Mar-a-Lago. Including once saying she was there to use the pool, even though she was wearing an evening gown.

She lied about why she was trespassing at Mar-a-Lago, she was then jailed and later deported back to China.

The parade of visitors continued as usual, after Trump arrived with boxes of classified documents in January 2021.

[MUSIC BRIEFLY INTENSIFIES]

Peter Bergen: When you read in the indictment, there were about 150 events with tens of thousands of guests at Mar-a-Lago, in the context of these documents being stored willy-nilly in the bathroom and in a ballroom. What did you think?

Doug London: Well, my first thought is as a predator, as a spy. How would I have accessed those documents were I, the Russians, the Chinese, or the Iranians.

That’s former CIA officer Douglas London again. He served in the CIA from the early 1980s until 2019. So he understands how spies think.

Doug London: You know, you have to think about how am I going to attack a target if I wanna know about a particular program or issue or operation? You try to find the easiest way.

One way to make it less easy for an enemy to get intelligence about “a particular program, or issue, or operation” … is to closely guard access to it. By classifying the documents that contain the intelligence.

Doug London: Documents are classified to protect the means of collection, essentially to protect the sources so that we can continue collecting that information and protect the sources who are doing it. The sourcing and the collection technology is usually the most sensitive aspect, not the information itself.

Alma Katsu: The actual secrets itself generally have a short shelf life. It's about a particular event that's gonna happen.

Doug London: So if you find variously out about Iranian war plans, Russian war plans, Chinese war plans, you know, how many planes, tanks, and where they might attack. But the way you collected it is what's most sensitive. The only reason we would know about Iranian war plans is because we're collecting it through sensitive means.

Alma Katsu: if it's a human source, you wanna protect their identity. If it's a technical source, you don't want it to be discovered. You want it to go on tomorrow and be fruitful. If it's a particular method, you know, same thing.

[MUSIC BRIEFLY INTENSIFIES]

Peter Bergen: Is there a process for classification? I mean, is there some person or office that sort of makes these determinations.

Doug London: There is a standard classification process and anyone who has a clearance has to yearly take an annual reminder of the declassification process. So there's actually a limited number of classifiers, so generally the president and agency heads, and they then delegate that authority down to classify.

Peter Bergen: You would've thought that in the digital age, there'd be a better way to track all these documents. Why are we still printing these out and losing track of these kinds of sensitive documents?

Doug London: Well, you know, that's the rub of it. The person with the most sensitive job has the least controls. That's the president. I would tell you, every United States intelligence community agency does in fact audit all their documents. Every time you open one up, every time you print one up, there's a track record. That's how they found Mr. Teixiera, the airman who leaked all those documents in Discord as quickly as they did. So, you know, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy, wonderful controls. You get all sorts of audits. Not so for the president, the president can print out whatever he wants or have his aides print out, and there's not the same system. Because that's the president. The president could do as he or she would wish.

Peter Bergen: Are there objective criteria for classification?

Doug London: It is objectively classified in terms of the amount of damage that could be caused the United States government. I could tell you from reading over the, the headings and the classifications, each one of these 31 documents could do significant damage if exposed.

Aside from the different levels of classification, the indictment is full of those confusing acronyms. If you’re a member of the intelligence community and know what they stand for… they provide a lot of clues about what exactly was being protected in the decision to classify the documents Trump allegedly kept in his personal possession. Some of them are pretty intuitive …

Doug London: SI is signals intelligence. That's, cell phones, telemetry, uh, radio.

Others, not so much.

Doug London: TK is talent keyhole,

Yeah, he said: “talent keyhole.”

Doug London: That's our satellite capabilities…

Okay…

Doug London: IMCON is imagery of some sort, it could come from, unmanned aerial platforms or other, sensitive technology. ORCON is originator control. That means whoever produced this document, who produced the information, before another agency or organization can further disseminate that or share it to either another U.S. government agency or a foreign government partner they would have to go back to the originator for their approval to do so.

Clearly a lot of thought and energy has gone into this classification system. And a lot of rigor. Maybe even a little TOO much rigor. It’s been reported that on average in the United States three records are marked as classified every second… and intelligence agencies have sometimes been accused of over-classifying materials — hiding too much from the public. But in the case of the 31 classified documents that are specifically mentioned in the charges against Trump, there’s no question they deserved to be classified, according to the three former U.S. intelligence officials we spoke with.

Mark Stout: As somebody who, you know, I believe that the government over classifies a lot of things, but there are also very legitimate secrets that we need to keep. And just looking at the description of these documents here, that's in the indictment. Yeah, this is pretty clearly secrets we need to keep.

Mark Stout served for more than a decade as an intelligence analyst at the U.S. State Department and at the CIA. He’s particularly concerned about six of the documents mentioned in the indictment, all of which are marked "Top Secret” and “Special Handling,”… and all of which are described as being about “White House intelligence briefing.”

Mark Stout: I think that's almost certainly a reference to either the President's Daily Brief, or to documents given to, or briefed to President Trump during the President's Daily Brief. And yeah, you don't want to foreign powers to know what the intelligence community is telling the president in a very closed meeting in the Oval Office. Right, that's just, it shouldn't be, shouldn't be out there.

Peter Bergen: And, and just so we're clear, the President's Daily Brief is sort of the crown jewels on a certain level. I mean, you're not bringing it to the president, unless it's important.

Mark Stout: Absolutely. That's right. Yeah. You can think of it as a very highly classified newspaper. Somewhere maybe on the order of eight or 10 pages. And you really have to have a high priority issue in order to make it into the President's Daily Brief. It's either gonna be an article about something you know the president is interested in already, or that the president doesn't know about, but his hair is gonna be on fire when you tell him.

[MUSIC BRIEFLY INTENSIFIES]

I wanted to go through the list of items that concern him in detail, so he could shed some light on the clues in the descriptions.

Peter Bergen: So, if you look on page 32, item 24, “Top Secret,” “HCS-P/SI,” so that would mean top secret human source, right?

In one instance, the document involves some sort of signals interception or cyber collection of information… as well as human intelligence, meaning espionage, identified in the document with the term “HCS.”

Mark Stout: It's only the most sensitive espionage operations that get put under the HCS channel. A lot of, much more, I hesitate to use the word, but more vanilla reporting from espionage is not an HCS, so this is the good stuff, if you will.

Peter Bergen: And this document concerns the quote, “military activity of a foreign country.” Not clear where, where it is, what it is, but this is not, just some tidbit that is unimportant to American national security.

Mark Stout: No, absolutely not. And the fact that this information about the military activity of a foreign country is classified among other things in HCS channels means that there is some person or persons out there in that country presumably, or at least working for that country's government, who are selling us secrets and are doing so at a particular risk to themselves.

Peter Bergen: What risk would that be?

Mark Stout: Well it depends on what country we're talking about. If you're a North Korean for instance, and you're convicted of espionage, you're gonna be executed and your family is probably gonna be sent to some reeducation camp. If HCS information gets into the wrong hands somebody's gonna be sent to prison if they're not shot.

Aside from the obvious ethical implications of blowing the identity of a foreign agent, there are other considerations: for starters, it takes an enormous amount of time and effort to recruit new agents. One of the most demanding jobs in the world is getting someone to betray the secrets of their country to the CIA. As Douglas London knows, from decades of doing it, cultivating these sources is really hard.

Doug London: That's why there aren't a lot more spies in the world running around. So basically you're, you're playing a bait and switch with someone who you have to approach under one guise, usually, a false pretension of interest because you need an opportunity to assess their access to sensitive information and their willingness to betray it to the United States government, and then you have to cultivate a relationship with them in which you're manipulating that which you find out about them, ideally their hopes, their dreams, their interest, and, ideally there are concerns with their own government in order to share that with the U.S. government. That takes a relationship that's, you know, akin to a confessional where someone has the confidence in the case officer, as if a member of the clergy to whom they could share their greatest secrets, their greatest concerns, and not have fear of, of consequence, cuz they know the risk of doing so.

Peter Bergen: I know you can't get into details of particular names and particular places, but how does this work? I mean, you're at a cocktail party, you kind of have a casual conversation.

Doug London: Well, it's called a bump.

Peter Bergen: It's called a bump.

Doug London: The bump. It's the process of doing target analysis on whom you're pursuing so you, Peter, for example, I would try to find out what hobbies do you have? Where do you go? Do you have brunch every Sunday at a particular restaurant? And find a reason to be there. But I also have to think out. When I go up to you, what is it I'm going to say that's going to make you go, “Oh, please have a seat” and not just brush me off.

The goal is to be able to secure a relationship which will be clandestine concealed, that no one will be aware of it. So there's much less of bumping into people, at receptions and cocktail parties, and more targeting them to try to find a secure opportunity at which you don't have to worry about a digital footprint, about people seeing you, about phone calls, about emails.
You have to, like a salesman doing an elevator pitch, find some reason that they're going to be interested just to talk to you about anything, whether it's about fly fishing or studying butterflies or, whatever it is you've contrived.

And then having established the basis of that relationship on whatever that pretext is, slowly bringing them out of their shell where they're confiding into you, what they really do, what they know and their concerns, and perhaps their needs and, perhaps their grievances as it would be the case with a good number of Russians or Iranians or Chinese these days who have grievances against their governments, who are concerned about the future of their families and are willing to provide sensitive information about those countries thinking that the United States can use its leverage, its influence to impact some change. That's quite a process with a great deal of risk for mostly the would-be agent and somewhat the case officer as well.

Peter Bergen: So what are you looking for when you're recruiting somebody?

Doug London: Well, the most important thing is access. Do they have access to secrets? The secrets that you need? You know, spying, I'll tell you, candidly, is fun. I enjoyed it. It was, it was great scheming and, and capers here and there. But you don't do it for fun, because of the risk involved. You do it to answer a question or questions that are of the greatest need to U.S. policy makers.

Peter Bergen: It sounds, pretty difficult work.

Doug London: It's, it's difficult because of the level of responsibility that you have and the level of investment. It's 24/7. You're always on, you're always situationally aware because any slip up you make could roll back and compromise one of your agents. So it's a stressful job, but, it's well worth it in my mind. Because of the rewards of tangibly seeing the ends of what you have done. You know, getting handed a manual of the latest weapon of your most challenging adversary and deconstructing it. Finding out about a terrorist operation that you are able to disrupt, able to tangibly think of the lives that have been saved. There's no other reward I see where one individual has that kind of outsize impact for so many.

It's not just human assets that require a huge investment to develop… there's also the technology used in collecting intelligence from things like cell phones and satellites. That’s known in intelligence parlance as — here comes another acronym — SIGINT or signals intelligence.

Alma Katsu: A lot of SIGINT collection, signals intelligence, is extremely difficult and very fragile. And if sources knew suddenly that we were collecting on them, for instance, those would dry up and you don't reconstitute that overnight.

Alma Katsu worked for the U.S. National Security Agency in SIGINT for decades. She was what's known as a SIGINTer.

Alma Katsu: For me, as a SIGINTer, knowing what goes in, to be able to put a collection system in place that can get you those very closely held secrets of, leadership, to have those just destroyed overnight on a whim, it's, it's unconscionable actually.

Peter Bergen: And obviously if you are eavesdropping on a particular foreign leader, the methodology for that itself would be highly classified.

Alma Katsu: Extremely classified. I know it takes a little bit of a leap of imagination to think, especially in this day and age where there's so much public surveillance going on. You might think it's a trivial thing, but it's not. I mean, both the technical and physical gyrations you have to go through in order to access those communications are enormous. And, you go through that amount of effort in the hope that, it's gonna pay off for years, right? When it's destroyed, it takes a long time to reconstruct, if ever.

So there is A LOT at risk with former president Trump having boxes of classified documents unsecured in his busy residence… Risks to methods of intelligence gathering, to human assets, to technological secrets…and then there's some nuclear stuff …allegations in the indictment that Trump had kept at least one document relating to U.S. nuclear secrets.

Mark Stout, who’s not only a former U.S. intelligence analyst, but also an intelligence historian...says under the law nuclear secrets are required to be handled differently from other classified information. Trump has argued that as president he had the right to declassify all the documents found at his home — and therefore he couldn’t have broken the law by having them in his possession. That could be a hard argument to win in court unless there’s proof he declassified those documents while he was still president. But according to Stout, it would be impossible to prove in the case of any document containing U.S. nuclear secrets.

Mark Stout: Everything we've just been talking about comes ultimately out of executive orders. And the first executive order laying out, more or less, today's classification system was signed in 1951 by Harry Truman. Quite a few of the presidents since have sort of amended it a little bit. But basically Truman put into place the system for most classified information.

However, things relating to nuclear weapons are classified in statute, in law, not an executive order, and what's interesting about this is that anything that's classified under the executive order, the president does in fact have unilateral authority to declassify. There's supposed to be a process that goes with that, but he has the unilateral authority to declassify it because the classification is in an executive order.

The president does not have the unilateral authority to declassify nuclear weapons related information that's classified under the provisions of the Atomic Energy Act that requires the concurrence of the Secretary of Energy and, in most cases, the Secretary of Defense.

And I think it's meaningful that a document classified in the DOE system is on this indictment because, president Trump cannot, claim to have declassified that because we know. There's no paper trail, it would've involved going to the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of Defense and saying, would you please sign this piece of paper that says this thing is declassified. And as far as anybody knows, there ain't no such piece of paper.

Peter Bergen: Sort of devil's advocate, you know, all have a pretty good sense of former President Trump as a person.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.

Peter Bergen: He likes to brag. He likes to show off.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: I understand money better than anybody. I know more about drones than anybody. I know about every form of safety that you can have. Nobody knows the system better than me. I know words, I have the best words.

Peter Bergen: That tendency to brag notwithstanding… there doesn't seem to be any evidence that any of these documents ended up in the wrong hands, even though certainly he was talking to people who weren't cleared about some of this information. How do you respond to that?

Mark Stout: Yeah, so, as you were just saying in your question, he showed it to at least a handful of people who didn't have security clearances. Well, by definition, that is the wrong hands. They may not have been foreign spies. I rather imagine they weren't. But that's not really the issue or that's not the entire issue, let's put it that way. The ramparts are defended far away, you know, at a great distance around classified information because this is something you really, really don't want to take any risk at all, in getting it out. So just the alleged fact that he showed it to a political aide and some journalists, that's bad in and of itself, even if it turns out — which we can never know for certain — but even if one turns out that it never made its way to Chinese spies or Russian spies or whoever.

I played devil’s advocate with Douglas London too, pointing out that the indictment reads: "The unauthorized disclosure of these documents COULD put at risk the national security of the United States.” Putting the emphasis on COULD, I asked him if he’s seen any evidence in the indictment that Trump actually did anything to compromise national security?

Doug London: I'll give you at least just one concrete example. So from the indictment, we see the president held discussions of these sensitive documents in unsecure spaces. Whether it was his office, whether it was, a golf course or wherever or in New Jersey at his facility there. You know, Peter, you and I live in Washington DC. The amount of microwaves and radio energy from collection devices that the Russians, the Chinese are using. Phenomenal. Think about what they're aiming at the former president. So if he's not in a SCIF, where signals cannot emanate, they cannot penetrate in either direction, so you could have a secure discussion. But he wasn't having these discussions in secure rooms. He was having them in golf carts, in hotel rooms, in public facilities where you could have a line of sight device, which I'm sure they did cuz we run into them all the time, with a technical surveillance team pointing things his way. And it sounds like it's the movies, but it's really true. Collecting conversation, collecting signals emanation. So at a minimum his conversations, his cell phone emanations, the cell phone emanations of those with whom he was speaking outside of controlled spaces could have been intercepted.

I asked all three of these longtime intelligence officials what their reaction was when they first read the indictment.

Mark Stout: So I, I find it, I'll go with appalling.

Alma Katsu: Gut-wrenching nausea.

Doug London: Well, you know, understanding it as an intel officer means this doesn't tell the whole story of the potential damage. This is an indictment. So this is what the Department of Justice is bringing forward, that it believes it can prosecute and that it believes it can expose in the court process. We don't know, just from the indictment, the full extent of the damage. We just know what the Department of Justice believes It has the confidence it can prosecute.

The indictment outlines two events in detail in which Trump allegedly discussed classified information and showed a classified document to other unauthorized individuals; one occasion was a discussion with a writer and a publisher, and the other was with a member of a Trump political action committee.

Doug London: So if those are the two cases they have confidence they could prosecute, how many other cases are there where the president shared sensitive information with who knows who, that it could have been then further disseminated to hostile adversaries who would use that information to compromise our sources and our capabilities?

And that’s basically the whole point of keeping secret documents under tight control. Once it's beyond that tight control, it's anyone's guess who might get a hold of it and how they might use it.

At the heart of the case of “United States of America v. Donald J. Trump”are the 31 classified documents that Trump allegedly kept at his Mar-a-Lago club. Trump has denied all the charges against him. But as you’ve heard from three longtime U.S. intelligence officers and analysts, … based on what can be gleaned from the indictment, those documents contain some of the most sensitive secrets gathered by the U.S. intelligence community. And as someone who has covered U.S. national security for decades, one thing I know for damn sure is the men and women who work in the U.S. intel community take extraordinarily seriously their duty to protect the nation’s secrets.

[MUSIC BRIEFLY INTENSIFIES]

For someone who aspires to be Commander in Chief again — a role whose first duty is to the nation’s security — Trump’s alleged behavior strongly suggests he either doesn't understand or doesn’t care about this fundamental duty.

If you are interested in knowing some more about the issues and stories we discussed in this episode we recommend: Douglas London’s The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence;

Mark Stout’s forthcoming book, World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence;

The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, edited by Julian Zelizer;

And Red Widow, a novel by Alma Katsu that draws upon her long service in the U.S. intelligence community. You’ll hear much more from Katsu in an upcoming episode on what’s true and what’s not in great spy novels.

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