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“I need a favor,” said the senior State Department official in a 2015 phone call, to which his FBI counterpart on the other end of the line replied, “Good, I need a favor. I need our people back in Baghdad.”
So began the latest controversy dragging U.S. national security officials into the middle of a hyperpartisan presidential campaign in ways that could have troubling repercussions long after the election. In this most recent case it was revealed that Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy asked the FBI for help in declassifying a Hillary Clinton email, and former FBI Deputy Assistant Director for International Operations Brian McCauley requested that the State Department restore two spots for special agents at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. After McCauley learned that the subject of the email involved Benghazi, he shut the discussion down. The email was not declassified, and the FBI slots in Iraq were not restored.
Because it represents an irresistible stew involving a classified Clinton email, Benghazi and alleged FBI “collusion” in protecting the Democrat, the simple exchange has taken on nearly mythic dimensions. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump described it as “criminal,” “illegal” and on par with the Watergate scandal. Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the purported “quid pro quo” between senior State Department and FBI officials. “Under Secretary Kennedy’s attempt to barter away American national security interests for plainly political purposes is appalling, and may rise to the level of a federal crime,” Goodlatte wrote in a letter.
The controversy over the newly revealed exchange is telling, though not for the reasons the political partisans have argued. The fact that McCauley’s request to the State Department in the alleged “quid pro quo” was largely ignored is arguably the real scandal. It indicates a return to the kind of petty interagency squabbling and lack of collaboration that the 9/11 Commission concluded kept the U.S. government from possibly thwarting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
After the Islamic State (ISIS) advanced to the Sunni belts around Baghdad in 2014, McCauley and FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano pulled the FBI team out of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on the advice of a senior military officer at U.S. Central Command, who noted that the embassy protection force was made up of foreign contractors of dubious capability. The move apparently angered then-U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Stuart Jones, however, who didn’t want to give the impression to the Iraqis that the U.S. was retreating in their hour of need. Once the situation had stabilized and additional U.S. security forces were deployed to Iraq, Jones steadfastly refused to allow the FBI team to return to the embassy despite numerous requests from the bureau. Whatever capability the FBI special agents brought to the embassy team was apparently less important than the supposed damage done to the embassy’s image.
Demonstrators chant pro-ISIS slogans as they carry the group’s flags in front of provincial government headquarters in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014. (Photo: AP)
The State Department has reportedly still not acquiesced to the FBI’s request for a return of its complete team to the Baghdad embassy, according to a recent article on the current controversy in the Washington Post. Both the State Department and the FBI declined to confirm that fact when contacted, though both insisted once again that there was no “quid pro quo.” Meanwhile, with the battle of Mosul already begun and many of the foreign fighters who joined ISIS looking for a way out of the noose closing around the group, it is not clear that the FBI team responsible for tracking Americans who joined ISIS is yet at full strength in Baghdad.
“The best place for us to track the Americans who joined ISIS was from Baghdad, but my arguments to that effect in several conversations with Ambassador Jones and the deputy chief of mission fell on deaf ears,” said McCauley in an interview. “They never came out and said the refusal traced back to their ire over how we pulled the team out of the embassy. The comment I recall from those conversations was ‘We don’t need the FBI here to work “art theft” cases with the Iraqi police.’ To my knowledge they still have not let our full team back into the embassy. That’s not the way the FBI has worked successfully with other agencies for years to thwart terrorist attacks on the United States.”
State Department spokesman John Kirby denied McCauley’s assertion that FBI staff were intentionally kept out of the Baghdad embassy. “In June 2014, Embassy Baghdad significantly reduced staff working in the greater Baghdad area due to security threats posed by the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),” he wrote in an email. “This was done after extensive review across the Administration to ensure the safety of Mission staff. Once the immediate threat to the Embassy and the International Zone receded, personnel, including the FBI, began to return starting in the Fall of 2014.” Yet many months later, in the spring of 2015, then-FBI Assistant Director for International Operations McCauley insisted that his requests to return a full FBI contingent to Baghdad, to include the legal attaché, or the most senior bureau official in-country, were repeatedly rebuffed, as implied in the telephone exchange at the center of the controversy.
Beyond the disagreement over FBI staffing levels in Baghdad, the attempt by congressional leaders to criminalize crosstalk between two national security agencies on a matter of counterterrorism is also alarming. Not to be outdone by the House Judiciary Committee chairman calling for a criminal investigation of the exchange, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, called the interaction between Kennedy and McCauley “stunning.” “The fact that they’re even having this discussion is potentially a violation of law,” he told the Washington Post. “I do give [the FBI] credit for ultimately saying no, but why were they talking to these people?”
At the time of the conversation in the spring of 2015, however, the FBI had not yet launched its criminal investigation into whether Clinton and her aides had mishandled classified information. The State Department was reviewing Clinton’s emails for release under the Freedom of Information Act and had passed a number to the FBI for review. A back-and-forth over the correct designation of the emails as classified, redacted or releasable was not only permissible, it was routine business.
“Discussions like that over whether something was classified too high, or not, happen all the time, and at first glance I frankly didn’t understand why the email was classified,” said McCauley. “It was only after I talked to an FBI official in records that I realized it was about Benghazi, and then I thought, ‘No way!’ I called Kennedy right back and said, ‘I can’t help you.’”
An Iraqi soldier stands guard in 2013 at the crossed-swords monument in Baghdad inside the fortified Green Zone that is home to the U.S. Embassy and several government offices. (Photo: Karim Kadim/AP)
The contention by leading congressional critics that State and FBI officials had no business even talking to each other — in this case on issues involving terrorism — and that a commonplace favor swap in “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” fashion somehow amounts to illegal “collusion” is also perplexing. It was the failure of interagency collaboration and an unwillingness to routinely share information and intelligence that the 9/11 Commission Report singled out as a chief cause of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“Current security requirements nurture over-classification and excessive compartmentalization of information among agencies,” the 9/11 Commission concluded. “Each agency’s incentive structure opposes sharing, with risks (criminal, civil and internal administrative sanctions) but few rewards for sharing information.”
Like many senior national security officials, McCauley learned to overcome those interagency barriers in the crucible of war. As the legal attaché in Kabul, Afghanistan, for more than two years, he traded sources, swapped favors and worked as a team with other U.S. intelligence, law enforcement and military agencies. He worries that the hyperpartisan political climate in Washington is eroding those collaborative instincts and creating a chill that will impede future interagency deliberations and cooperation.
“What we learned working in joint interagency task forces in the field was that we have to constantly talk to each other and work together, because no one agency working alone can keep the nation safe and thwart the next terrorist attack,” said McCauley. “So when I hear political leaders say we shouldn’t be talking to each other or exchanging professional favors to accomplish our missions, I don’t understand how that can work.”
As an example of the kind of cooperation that was typical in the relationship with the State Department, McCauley pointed to the 2013 massacre at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, by the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabab terrorist group. The FBI wanted to send a large contingent of investigators to Kenya, but it needed rapid State Department approval for the deployment. Undersecretary Kennedy quickly arranged the approval, and the bureau used its own funds to charter a military aircraft. To return the favor, the bureau made seats available to State Department officials on the flight to Kenya and back.
“We swap professional favors like that all the time, and I was happy to have the State Department guys along for the ride because I knew they brought a good skill set and knowledge to the mission,” said recently retired FBI Special Agent Rich Frankel, who led the FBI’s rapid response force to Kenya. That’s not collusion, he argued. “That’s both of us doing our jobs.”
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James Kitfield is a longtime national security correspondent and author of the forthcoming book “Twilight Warriors: The Soldiers, Spies and Special Agents Who Are Revolutionizing the American Way of War” (Basic Books).
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