The counterintelligence exemption
=================================

The counterintelligence exemption is the carve-out John Kiriakou says removes an entire class of CIA operations from congressional oversight.

The rule

Counterintelligence cases are run by the agency's counterintelligence centre, and "counterintelligence cases are the most highly classified cases that the CIA handles. They're so highly classified that they are the only cases that don't have to be briefed to the House and Senate oversight committees."

The justification he gives for the exemption is internal to the logic of a mole hunt. "Counterintelligence usually means that you're working for a foreign power, a foreign government. Well, if the CIA is investigating a mole, who's to say that the mole maybe isn't the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee? Or the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee? So those are all held internally."

How Kiriakou says it was used

His point is that the category can be entered by describing a target in the right words. A couple of days before the reported plot against Julian Assange became public, Mike Pompeo had called WikiLeaks "a hostile, non-state intelligence service." Kiriakou's reading: "those words were very carefully chosen, because if WikiLeaks is a hostile, non-state intelligence service, that makes this whole case a counterintelligence case."

The consequence is the point of the exercise. Had the operation been carried out under that heading, "all anybody would know was that Julian Assange tried to leave the embassy, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and he was shot dead, period. And that's the end of the story."

Kiriakou rejects the characterisation itself: WikiLeaks "is not" an intelligence service, "it's a transparency and journalism outlet, but that's what they don't want people to think."

See also

- Mike Pompeo
- Julian Assange
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- Covert action programs
