As a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer, I was struck by three things about the recent Discord leaks of classified information. First, that top secret information is far more widely distributed than it was 25 years ago, and second, that the claim that “our government is lying to us” about the situation in Ukraine is wildly overblown. And lastly, that we barely dodged a bullet.
As with the accused 21-year-old leaker of military secrets, I too had a top-secret clearance at the age of 21 in 1983. I had the clearance because I was an enlisted intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army Reserve. Without qualifying for the clearance, I wouldn’t be able to continue to work in that military occupational specialty (MOS). Once I graduated from college two years later, I was commissioned as a military intelligence officer.
I maintained my top-secret clearance for 24 years until 2007. During that entire time, there were only three periods when I had access to anything approaching the depth and breadth of the recently leaked information. They occurred during the years when I worked as a Reagan appointee in the Pentagon when I was assigned as a U.S. Southern Command regional analyst in Panama, and during Desert Storm when I was the all-source intelligence chief for the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin.
In each case, the information I was granted access to was restricted to my need to know, and in the first two instances, it consisted entirely of paper that never
