Elon Musk's takeover of federal agencies is a counterintelligence crisis. [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/doge-intelligence-agencies-harm/681667/

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https://archive.li/DGw97

“Having the best spies, the best collection systems, and the best analysts will not help an intelligence service if it leaks like a sieve,” the former CIA speechwriter Charles E. Lathrop remarked in The Literary Spy, a book of quotations about espionage that he compiled. Lathrop, who wrote under a pseudonym, was making a point about counterintelligence—the flushing out of enemy spies and leakers who might compromise a spy agency’s precious secrets. Counterintelligence, Lathrop observed, “is the kidneys of national security: necessary, but unheralded until something goes wrong.”

These days, something looks to have gone very wrong—with the kidneys and maybe with the brain, too.
To protect secrets, people who will be handling classified information or assuming positions of trust within intelligence agencies are vetted, often by law-enforcement agents, who interview friends and co-workers, review travel histories, and analyze financial information to determine whether someone might make an attractive recruit for a foreign intelligence service. Perhaps he’s in debt and would be willing to sell sensitive information. Or maybe she harbors some allegiance to a hostile country or cause and might be willing to spy for it. Looking for these red flags is counterintelligence 101, an imperfect, laborious, and invasive process that American presidents of both major parties have nevertheless accepted as the cost of doing intelligence business.

But the legion of Elon Musk acolytes who have set up shop inside federal agencies in the past few weeks do not appear to have been subjected to anything approaching rigorous scrutiny. President Donald Trump has also nominated to key national-security positions people whose personal and financial histories contain at least caution flags. This deviation from past practice has created a new kind of counterintelligence predicament, officials and experts have told me. Rather than staying on high alert for hidden threats, the counterintelligence monitors have to worry about the people in charge.

The public knows very little about how, or if, staff at the new Department of Government Efficiency that Musk runs were vetted before they obtained access to the Treasury Department’s central payment system or the files of millions of government employees at the Office of Personnel Management. These two databases could help U.S. adversaries uncover the identities of intelligence officers and potentially their sources, people with knowledge about how the systems are set up told me.

*snip*