By admin 
Just in time for the nation’s semiquincentennial, President Donald Trump has issued what might be the most bizarre order of his presidency—a high bar to cross. In fact, if we were on the eve of April Fools’ Day, not the Fourth of July, I’d guess that the few news stories about the order were pranks.
Read more All The President’s Money
But the story was first revealed by the New York Times (a paper not known for high jinks), and other outlets have since confirmed it, so we must assume that Trump has indeed ordered his acting director of national intelligence to assemble a “master spy list.”
As the Times describes the order, he wants the intelligence agencies to “turn over the names” of all foreign spies, “including suspected spies and potential recruits” on a single all-in-one-place list.
The dangers of such a list existing should be obvious. Foreign intelligence agencies, notably Russia and China, would likely pay billions of dollars for such a list. They would certainly hunt valiantly for some American official who has access to the list and enough need or greed to sell it to them for mere millions.
It brings to mind the story of Aldrich Ames, the CIA counterintelligence officer who in the 1980s gave his Soviet handlers the names of over 30 spies working undercover for Western agencies, leading to their executions and the shutdown of 100 clandestine operations. If he hadn’t died in prison earlier this year, one could imagine him sighing that his acts of treason, which involved a lot of time and trouble, would have been a lot easier if there had been a single master list.
The Times quotes officials justifying the order by saying it would reduce duplication of effort; our own spies wouldn’t bother recruiting someone if they knew he or she was already an agent. This is ridiculous. Maybe this would save the agencies a few hundred thousand dollars—hardly worth the risk. Another official said Trump has promised the American people “transparency.” This makes even less sense. The business of recruiting and safeguarding spies is among the government’s most secretive activities. The information is kept highly classified and intricately compartmentalized. Nobody expects otherwise.
I should say, this order is probably dead on arrival. The CIA is the agency chiefly involved in spies and counterspies. According to one insider, CIA Director John Ratcliffe deliberately avoided sharing some sensitive secrets with Tulsi Gabbard when she was director of national intelligence, mainly because he didn’t trust her. He would almost certainly resist sharing the names of spies and possible recruits—among the “crown jewels” of intelligence secrets—especially with the likes of Bill Pulte, the recently appointed acting DNI, who as director of a federal housing authority (which he still heads) spent much of his time targeting Trump’s political enemies with mortgage fraud investigations.
Read more A Clarence Thomas Protégé Defied a Landmark Supreme Court Ruling. His Mentor Would Be Proud.
The 2005 law creating the DNI’s office required that the director have “extensive national-security expertise.” Pulte has none. Does he even have a security clearance? There hasn’t been enough time for him to go through the normal process for someone whose job involves exposure to the highest levels of classified information. By law, the president has the right to declassify whatever he wants. He can also give anyone a security clearance with the stroke or a pen—though Congress can object. Is anyone objecting about Pulte getting the sort of clearance that lets him review the names of foreign spies?
Back to the mystery: Why did Trump issue this order? What’s his motive? Why would he want such a list? I asked one former senior CIA official. He replied, “I’ve been asking myself the same question.” A longtime intelligence consultant said explicitly what the former official was only hinting at: “There is no reason. I can’t imagine it would serve any useful purpose.” Another former intelligence director replied, simply, “It’s nuts.”
But Tim Weiner—the author of acclaimed books on intelligence (Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, and Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy)—has a theory.
“A list of recruited foreign agents from Russia and Ukraine would be catnip for Trump,” Weiner told me in an email. Trump has been on “a long crusade” to discredit the charge that the Kremlin helped him win the 2016 election; he calls it “the Russia hoax.” He has tried to get the DNI to help him root out who—among U.S. and Russian agents—spread the story. The list would help root his enemies out. Weiner added, “Any list of this nature in Trump’s hands is a counterintelligence nightmare.”
Still, this doesn’t explain why Trump feels a need to lay out the networks of spies and potential recruits worldwide. Does he just want to destroy the intelligence apparatus of the United States?
Twice in the past year-and-a-half, I’ve written Slate columns that begin, “Donald Trump probably isn’t a Russian agent, but he wouldn’t be behaving much differently if he were.” Consider this the third column.
Read more The Supreme Court Gave Us All One Big Win This Term