Kimberly Dozier: Spies Live in Fear of Trumps Next Tweet
NCOMING
Spies Live in Fear of Trump’s Next Tweet
Washington’s national security professionals are bracing for the president’s next Twitter storm, and frantically subscribing to @realDonaldTrump alerts so they can manage the fallout from his latest rage tweets.
Kimberly Dozier
03.10.17 1:13 AM ET
As Friday evening draws to a close around Washington, D.C., the city’s tight-knit and secretive national security clan goes to sleep with a new unease. It’s not Syria or Iran or even North Korea they’re most worried about. They’re uncertain just what President Donald Trump may tweet in the wee hours before they wake, and what they’ll have to do to manage the fallout.
“It’s accurate that we don’t always know what’s coming,” one senior U.S. official said with a shrug, as the weekend approached. “We are making sure we are following the president’s tweets because it’s often the first place we hear things.”
In a community that once shunned social media for fear it would damage careers or threaten security clearances, spooks, spies, and special operators are now are signing up for Twitter accounts and setting up @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS alerts so they can find out the inner thinking of their commander in chief, and protect their own bosses from fallout.
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But ask military, intelligence, or law enforcement officers charged with defending the nation’s security what they think of Trump’s out-of-the-blue weekend tweets, and you get grimaces, shakes of the head, and even physical cringing. Verbal responses range from “I wish he would just stop” to “Not helping. Just… not… helping.”
Multiple national security professionals interviewed—both in the administration or in uniform—said they are also concerned over what they perceive as a lack of emotional and intellectual discipline they believe is behind the tweet rage.
“National security professionals value orderly process for decision making,” said Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, and a former CIA officer. “They abhor unpredictable and rash impulses. Twitter temper tantrums undermine process and create wasteful distractions at best and unnecessary wars at worst.”
What Trump tweets is also the kind of information foreign intelligence agencies devote legions of spies to uncover. Now, there’s almost no need. Sign up for Twitter, and any user has a view into what the president is thinking, and feeling about an issue—that which is often hardest to gage for an intelligence officer.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/10/spies-live-in-fear-of-trump-s-next-tweet.html
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