![]() has selectively declassified and leaked intelligence for as long as it has collected it, but the Biden Administration’s secret-sharing program is new in several ways, current and former intelligence officials say. “I hope they never put it back in the bottle.” has declassified intelligence to blunt Chinese saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait, to pressure Iran to stop supplying weapons to the Houthis attacking shipping vessels in the Red Sea, and to counter Hamas’ false claims about Israeli strikes. Strategic declassification has denied Russian President Vladimir Putin “false narratives,” Burns said in a speech last summer, “putting him in the uncomfortable and unaccustomed position of being on his back foot.” The effort has expanded beyond Russia. The motivation behind the program, the officials say, is that it works. Read More: China’s Ambitions, Russia’s Nukes and TikTok: Spy Chiefs Talk Biggest U.S. “The ultimate decision on whether to green-light or red-light a given piece of information rests with the professionals in the intelligence community,” Sullivan says. ![]() Intelligence officials at the NSC send requests to the ODNI, which processes them, agreeing on cleared language with those who created the secrets to begin with. About once a week, White House officials see intelligence that they want to make public and get approval from Sullivan to try, more than a dozen current and former White House and national-security officials tell TIME. More than two years later, the White House has built a broad program to share secrets when it serves strategic goals. “We were sitting on this troubling information,” says Maher Bitar, NSC coordinator for intelligence and defense policy, “and we needed to get ahead of what the Russians were going to do.” spies became convinced Russia was preparing to invade, Sullivan worked with Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns to “downgrade” classified details of Moscow’s moves. The declassification and release of the Serbian troop movements is one example of a novel White House approach to using intelligence that has grown out of the U.S. Within days, Serbian troops were pulling back. announced an additional troop deployment to Kosovo. in applying new diplomatic pressure on the Serbs, and the U.K. As coverage spiked, European countries joined the U.S. 24 attack on the Kosovar police officer and broke the news of the latest Serbian deployment, revealing that it included advanced artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry units. Kirby gave new information about the Sept. 29, after a two-day scramble to clear the declassification, NSC spokesperson John Kirby convened an unscheduled Zoom call with members of the White House press corps. Then it shipped the request to the office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in Northern Virginia via classified email. The NSC Intelligence Directorate edited the secret details of the buildup to obscure the sources and methods behind the intelligence. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan approved a request from his Europe team to declassify elements of the Serbian buildup for public release. So as part of an effort to pressure Serbia to back down, U.S. In Washington, attention was focused on chaos in Congress in much of Europe, the top priority was marshaling continued support for Ukraine. Diplomatic efforts by the U.K., Italy, and other countries with troops on the ground in Kosovo had failed to calm the situation. Months of mounting tensions in a remote corner of southeastern Europe had not received much attention in the media. ![]() ![]() ![]() “We were very worried that Serbia could be preparing to launch a military invasion,” says one National Security Council (NSC) official. Now Serbia was deploying heavy weapons and troops. Three days earlier, more than two dozen armed Serbs had killed a Kosovar police officer in an attack. Serbian forces were massing along the length of their country’s border with Kosovo, where NATO has kept an uneasy peace since a bloody war of secession in 1999. 27, a Balkans expert at the White House got a disturbing call from a U.S. SHARE Illustration by Javier Jaén for TIME Mass surveillance and social media are changing the spy game. ![]()
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