← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
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Welcome to the watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. Today we're talking about when personal choices become national security risks. This is about what happens when someone in a position of national security trust starts living a lifestyle they didn't disclose and maybe are even unable to defend. Because when you hold a top secret clearance, your personal life is no longer just personal, it becomes a piece of a broader threat landscape. And the question isn't, did he or she do something wrong? The question becomes, can they be compromised? So we had a couple situations that came up in the last week that fall into this category and we're going to walk through them. So the first case was of Julia Varro and she was the Assistant Secretary for counterterrorism in the Department of Homeland Security. We heard about this case because she was put on administrative leave pending a review. So what we heard and what came out in these public allegations against her, and they came from a former partner that she met on an online site. It was seeking.com where young girls look for kind of men in sugar daddy or wealthy roles. It came out that approximately 30 to $40,000 of financial support went to her. There was luxury travel, hotels, dining, high end purchases. There was requests for additional financial support, including rent assistance. There was allegations of drug use. Multiple times drugs were used. There were claims of different financial dependencies and then preferential treatment that this official use when in certain locations using kind of under her DHS official title. So she's denied any wrongdoing. But when we're talking about being a senior leader on something like counterterrorism, the question really isn't about this kind of messy story or the relationship. It's whether this exposes other pathways to compromise. Because remember, that's the question we care about. When someone has top secret clearance, can they be compromised? Because adversaries don't look for perfect targets, they look for usable ones. So when you have a top secret clearance, I want to explain what this means. It's not like some credential. This is a trust agreement that continuously runs. So you're expected to disclose any financial relationships that create dependency or influence. You have to report any personal relationships that introduce and bring in risk. You have to avoid any sort of drug use or substance related vulnerabilities, obviously, like heavy drinking. You need to avoid misuse of your position or authority. And, and you need to maintain continuous, not selective disclosures. One of those key ones is of course any extra finances you have coming in from outside activities that of course add to your base pay. They want to see all the dollars you have to continually submit, financial disclosures, you have to share so many things about relationships you're in. And this is the life you chose. You sign on the dotted line to do this and not stop doing this. And to be a part of the system. Anytime you get into like a difficult situation, let's say maybe it's your finances or you start this drug use, it might not even be relevant the second, but there could be a bad actor that finds out that you're in, let's say, a sugar daddy relationship. And they can manipulate you, blackmail you, and use it against you even in the future. That's why the government continuously collects this, because you might not be compromised or a threat today, but six months from now, you might be an insider threat. And they're constantly looking for this and monitoring this. If you're like me, you've probably had days where your energy just feels completely off. 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Again, it's drinkltv.com watch. You can also find the link right here below the video. Go give it a try. So when we're speaking in intelligence terms only, like a vulnerability isn't exactly some moral failure. It is some sort of access potential a bad actor can take advantage of. I mean, even having potentially a very ill child who might need specific treatments that they can only get overseas and that are very expensive could be a vulnerability. So it's not always like some negative, horrible thing like, you know, you're just, everyone's strung out on drugs. If they have this Vulnerability, that's just not how it works. There's so many different ways we can be exploited. So it's got like a consistent structure around it. So it's if there's any sort of financial dependency, because that of course creates an obligation to someone, right? If you're taking money from someone, there is something expected in return. It's just pretty general. Another thing is any sort of obligation to another person and you're not disclosing it, then you're falling into this category of concealment, right? You're not sharing what's occurring here and you're already kind of withholding information. You promise not to withhold another one. Then is that concealment creates leverage. It creates leverage potentially for some outside body to take advantage of the situation and to compromise you. That leverage is the exploitation opportunity that our government tries to prevent from even happening. They want to stop you from ever getting to that point. If they have someone going down these trajectories to that point, they don't even want you anymore to have a top secret clearance. They want you gone because you are going down this pathway to potentially being compromised. Now, once somebody starts hiding things, that's kind of it. Like the system's no longer gonna want to keep evaluating your behaviors and hope you get better. Like that's already been done, right? You made a promise, you broke the promise, you kept something hidden and now you're a counterintelligence concerning. You can't walk that. And I think a lot of people outside the system don't understand that. But you go in very clearly knowing these rules and agreeing to them. Now when we talk about counterintelligence, it's a word a lot of people say, but they don't exactly understand what it means. And in this case, you don't want a foreign actor using or exploiting your vulnerability to get information. You know, a really famous case was of course Christine Fang. And she was involved in a lot of long term relationships, some personal, some sexual, in US political ecosystems. And she really targeted California in our representatives in California, her name, Christine Fung.
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And according to an Axios investigation, a suspected Chinese intelligence operative who targeted up and coming politicians from 2011 to 2015. It began years ago, it is alleged, through charm and campaign fundraising, hoping to
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gain people's trust so that she could perhaps in the future help them change their mind on China policy and just generally give the Chinese government close insight.
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Axios reporting that Fong even wound up in romantic or sexual relationships with two Midwest mayors.
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So as they looked further into what she was doing. There were some major red flags and they put surveillance on her. And that's when they picked up some of her sexual activities and realized that she was getting close to some politicians.
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But the biggest fish she targeted, according to Axios, California Congressman Eric Swalwell.
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With Christine, she wasn't exactly like stealing government secrets or recruiting our senior officials to be like intelligence spies. She was focused on access. She was to be an access agent into this political sphere in the United States. So of course some of the connections we know of very famously is Eric Swalwell. At the time, he was a rising politician in California and then a U.S. house member. There were other California elected representatives at both the city and the state level. There was a lot of political fundraising networks. She got involved in community and civic organizations and then she even engaged with these emerging political staffers. So these young people who would rise up and become things like chief of staff. So it was a really broad net she threw out there. And again, it makes sense because her job was access. So what did she gain from this? So she built long term social proximity inside these very affluent political networks. She engaged in fundraising related activity both at kind of the federal level and at the community level. She positioned herself near individuals who were likely destined at the time for higher offices. And she leveraged just normal interactions with them to maintain this long term access. So the key was she was to be used in the future. She was building the access now and in the future she would take advantage of it and hope would also learn vulnerabilities of these individuals that she could leverage. So this matters because Fang is the modern intelligence model of things. There's not like an initial theft of secrets. They position themselves for future access to this ecosystem. This episode is brought to you by Pocket Hose, the world's number one expandable hose. I used to spend more time messing with the hose than actually watering. Last summer I decided to clean up the patio cuz some friends were coming over. And the hose kept twisting up on itself. And what should have been a 5 minute job turned into a 20 minute hose headache. That constant kinking and twisting, that's what Pocket Hose Ballistic was built to solve. It's reinforced with a liquid crystal polymer, the same used in bulletproof vests. So it makes the anti burst sleeve incredibly tough. That same fiber is actually five times stronger than steel, so it's built to last. It also features the pocket pivot that swivels 360 degrees and with a steady flow, also reducing frustration. And when you're done there's no wrestling with the hose. It literally shrinks down to pocket size for easy storage. Plus it's backed by a 10 year warranty. And now for a limited time, when you purchase a new pocket hose ballistic, you'll get a free 360 degrees pocket pivot and a free thumb drive nozzle. Just text watch to 64,000. That's watch to 64,000 for you. Two free gifts at purchase. Watch to 64,000. Message and data rates apply. Obviously the intelligence community has had failures. Learn from them. And there's almost like a playbook they look for to know who is likely going to be vulnerable. Financial vulnerability really came out in the Aldrich Ames case and that's kind of where they built all the tradecraft against it. And then when we talk about like concealing a lifestyle, especially at a high level, a lot was learned with the David Petraeus case, right? He had a compromising relationship, right. He had this mistress. But then it went a step further, further where he was sharing classified information with her. And again, you know, none of this was disclosed in the way it should have been. And of course, you know, it caused a lot of issues and then it changed the way too. They also look for compromises of people. Now the other case that came up in this last week is kind of this operational misuse of access for personal gain. Now I know everybody says Congress does insider trading and they do and they should be charged and it's wrong, but it doesn't mean it's okay for everyone else to do it. So in this case we had a US Special forces soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, and what he reportedly did is he made a bet using and knowing classified information related to what was going to be the upcoming Nicholas Maduro op. And he put forward, sounds like about 33,000 on Polymark and ended up winning $400,000 because he obviously had inside information on it.
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That's like Pete Rose betting on his own team. It's a little like Pete Rose. Pete Rose, he kept him out of the hall of fame because he bet on his own team. Now if he bet against his team, that would be no good, but he bet on his own team. I'll look into it.
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This isn't kind of like espionage, but of course it's the leaking of classified information. You know, he violated, you know, access, consent, concealment and his promise to protect this information. But what nobody is really talking about is that dollar amount and that spike on that day. Right. If the adversaries are monitoring it, they could have taken that as a sign they could have increased their security posture, made changes, et cetera. And it really could have put the teams that went into the objective under greater danger. It could have led to the deaths of Americans. That's why this one is so critical. So everybody's like, he shouldn't be charged. Congress does that every day. No, Congress does not put their brothers and sisters in arms, in danger, in a real life environment, purposefully. And that's what happened here. He chose to gain financially from a situation and he broke probably five or six promises under his top secret clearance. So yes, we want also the other people in the administration, the people in Congress who are doing these type of things to be charged. We want equal application of the law. But you don't get to say, well, he can get away with it because other people are doing it. No, no, no. We just also need to charge the other people that are doing it. And again, we cannot be light on somebody who potentially put an operation at risk, especially one at this level. We know it was the polymarker thing, but just in general, if you're taking classified knowledge and you're putting it out externally and you're using it to make different decisions, right. Insider training is a big one. You create signals and there's signals the enemy can exploit. So if he had done this multiple times, it might not have been the FBI that saw it. It could be a foreign actor. So you get some sort of timing indicators that come up. You get behavior anomal. And then of course, these are data points someone can track, flag and analyze. So if the enemy would have found him first, they potentially could have went to him and blackmailed him. Right. He now potentially could be compromised. So that is the issue and the problem when we allow this to occur now in the case of Maduro, any kind of info that spiked these signals could have of course revealed the operation was imminent, which we didn't really want. Narrowed the window of execution. Someone could say, oh, I think it's now happening within this gap because someone made a bet on it. And then as I already said, increase the adversary's alert posture. And that's what we never want, right? We want to go in as a surprise. We want to do the best we can to protect the people. We send in our troops on the ground. The few cases we talked about, the one at a dhs, we brought up Petraeus quickly and then obviously Van Dyke here, this really shows how personal decisions can actually translate into operational risk. I know if you're not in this world, it doesn't clearly come out. And that's why I'm trying to walk through it today, so you can put yourself in the shoes of someone who's not just protecting the state secrets of this country, but they're protecting the people that go out and collect these secrets. Now, these aren't the only cases. They just obviously made it to the top of the news cycle. So other issues that are occurring that I want to talk about is there are more situations here where we have these financial dependencies that haven't been disclosed. Right. A foreign government might be giving someone money to say certain things almost in a lobbying role in these people aren't filling out the paperwork to say they're doing this work on behalf of a foreign government. Huge problem. And we need to go strong at those people as well. Another thing is there's this issue of any sort of drug use in these sensitive access roles. It is zero tolerance. So we do have issues where this comes up. In this case, obviously, with the woman out of dhs, she reported reportedly used drugs several times. So we can't have that situation because the people who saw her know she did drugs can tell others, and it creates a vulnerability, as you can imagine. Again, the drugs alone is a reason to get your security clearance suspended. We don't even have to add on any of the other parts of this story. Another issue here is kind of this misuse of a position for kind of a benefit or convenience. So there's a couple pieces in the stories we talked about. We have the misuse of a position, of course, by the soldier because he had access to the operation and got a financial benefit from it. And then we had a couple sides of the coin, you know, with the DHS officer. One was, you know, she basically used her position to like, kind of bypass lines at the airport and reportedly maybe get, you know, some other benefits. Also we have unanswered questions, questions. She was not the only person in this relationship. So the gentleman in the relationship with her basically owned a company that did contracting with the US Government. So we have a potential issue there too, depending on which parts of the government he does contracting with. Was she able to affect the contracts in any way? It's a very concerning thing that of course, has to be looked at. And then anytime we have someone that fails to disclose, I guess you would call them like secrets in their background, you always have problems. One of the big issues I saw when I was in the government was just relationships. So people would fall in love overseas. And now in your relationship with A foreign individual, I mean, that of course has to be reported, but it gets a lot more complicated when you go to marry them. So I did know one person when I was at the CIA when they put the request in prior to their wedding, the CIA said, we will not approve for you to marry this person. We think they're a risk. So they had to make the decision between marrying them and leaving the CIA. There was no option B. So you are making real commitments when you choose to sign on to this life because you're doing very valuable work that saves a lot of people. And of course, it's kind of like this outer layer that really protects our country from all these bad actors who are always trying to harm it. Now in the story today, we had two officers, well, three, because Petraeus as well, who had roles in counterterrorism. And so these weren't kind of low level, generic roles. Right. We had a person who was leading counterterrorism efforts for our homeland security. We had a gentleman kind of in the task force system. We have another issue here where they have access to active threat intelligence. They can coordinate across other agencies, intelligence agencies. They are involved in different operational decision making under pressure, and they're making decisions that inform real world decisions by our senior leaders. So now we have a situation where people are doing things that don't align with their top secret clearance, but you're supposed to trust them and rely on them to do the job well. On a topic as important as counterterrorism, right. At a point when Al Qaeda's resurge, ISIS has resurged, we've let in all these individuals into this country we were unable to vet. And then we have a huge problem where percentage of our country is being inspired in some way. People are leveraging Islamist views, radicalization pipelines to harm our country further. So there is so much operational risk in this situation, I think that distinction matters. A lot of people have kind of like pooh, poohed looking at any of these individuals. And it's the fact that they don't understand that they have vulnerabilities now that can be exploited. And they've already shown that they will misuse their access. You don't get like one, two, three tries at this. You are trusted. And when you break that trust, it's over. Now, of course, there's institutional questions that come up in cases like these. So let's just walk through them. The biggest one is, were there indicators that this could happen during vetting? Because if that's the case, the government Hired bad. So we have to fix where the hiring issue was. And there might be some hiring issues with this Assistant secretary for counterterrorism because she does not seem to have a work background of any form in counterterrorism and was given a senior level position. Another thing is, did these behaviors change after the clearance was granted? So that's an important thing to know. Like, was she also doing these activities prior to getting this job? Why was that not disclosed or noticed? Another thing is, were the financial disclosures that are mandated complete and continuous? So did these individuals in this case fill out their financial disclosures? Were they accurate? Was it continuous monitoring of their finances? Because in this case it doesn't sound like the female reported the 40,000 plus or that the gentleman who did the poly market reported the 400,000. So if they're not on the forums, we have an issue. And then a very important question is, was the oversight sufficient for the level of access involved? Do we have proper oversight over her position in DHS and other people in the same kind of Assistant Secretary roles, and did we have proper oversight of the individuals and the task forces who were involved in the Maduro raid? These are important things to talk about because a clearance isn't something static. We constantly, constantly have ongoing assessments to protect top secret material, but to also essentially make it so the system can't be compromised in some way. So we have to do risk assessments and mitigate what went wrong. In these situations, you don't just remove a person. You figure out, are there other things where now we have 10 other people in the organization with that same vulnerability because we missed it. When we talk about when personal choices become national security risk, this isn't about one person. We're not going to team up and blame one person. There's hundreds of these cases across the government. Just only a couple pop to the top because they're a little shiny. The press runs with them. But these standards exist, you know, for a very valid reason. When you hold a top secret clearance, you're not just trusted with information. You're trusted to be unexploitable under pressure. So that means some very important things first. You will disclose things that others will likely hide. You avoid conditions to create leverage. Right? You will not be in that position in the first place. You report vulnerabilities well before they come risks, right? You can see where it's going. And you maintain transparency even when it's incredibly uncomfortable. You gotta go tell your boss you made a mistake or you accepted some money, or in some people's cases. I got in a relationship with a foreigner overseas that is all very uncomfortable, but you were hired because you can handle uncomfortable, and you will do the right thing and you will make sure you don't put yourself in these situations. And when you do make mistakes, you will cop up to them, and then you will get it fixed. So kind of this whole national security system is really based on one key assumption. People can be targeted not because they come into this situation or this system and they want to or intend to cause harm, but because what they do in their daily lives can literally create leverage. And that leverage gives the enemy a foot in the door. And when you work on key issues could be counterterrorism, counterintelligence, that leverage can be so much more impactful, and it can affect real lives and lives of those who serve this country. The standard here isn't just about professionalism, even though we expect professionalism from people in, you know, these public trust roles. And it's kind of frustrating to watch again and again that there's problems just in that basic ask. But we also have to have a situation where it's total transparency under scrutiny. When you're holding a top secret clearance, you know, this life is not for everyone, and that's okay. But when you do hold the clearance, you don't get to say, well, I occasionally follow the rules. No, it is a constant commitment. And again, I told you, it's this relationship of trust. Because in this case, there is no real standard of whether you broke the law. It's the standard of whether you can be trusted completely. And the moment that trust becomes uncertain, you're no longer an asset. You are a risk to this country. Thanks for being here today on the watch floor.