June 8, 2011 – A Clinton/Blumenthal email reveals a detailed intelligence report on Sudan

(…) The latest court-ordered dump of her email, just placed online by the State Department, brings more troubles for Team Hillary. This release of over 3,000 pages includes 66 “Unclassified” messages that the State Department subsequently determined actually were classified; however, all but one of those 66 were deemed Confidential, the lowest classification level, while one was found to be Secret, bringing the total of Secret messages discovered so far to seven. In all, 1,340 Hillary emails at State have been reassessed as classified.

“But the biggest problem may be in a just-released email that has gotten little attention here, but plenty on the other side of the world. An email to Ms. Clinton from a close Clinton confidant late on June 8, 2011 about Sudan turns out to have explosive material in it. This message includes a detailed intelligence report from Sid Blumenthal, Hillary’s close friend, confidant and factotum, who regularly supplied her with information from his private intelligence service. His usual source was Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official and veteran spy-gadfly, who conveniently died just before EmailGate became a serious problem for Hillary’s campaign.”

However, the uncredited June 8 memo, which Mr. Blumenthal labeled as “Confidential”—his personal classification system, apparently—but which the State Department has labeled Unclassified, doesn’t appear to be from Drumheller, whose assessments were written just like CIA intelligence reports. This is not.

Remarkably, the report emailed to Hillary by “sbwhoeop,” which was Mr. Blumenthal’s email handle, explains how Sudan’s government devised a clandestine plan, in coordination with two rebel generals, to secure control of oil reserves in the disputed region of Abyei. This is juicy, front-page stuff, straight out of an action movie, about a region of Africa that’s of high interest to the American and many other governments, and the report is astonishingly detailed.

Its information comes from a high-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and Mr. Blumenthal’s write-up repeatedly states the sources—there turn out to be more than one—are well-placed and credible, with excellent access. It’s the usual spytalk boilerplate when you want the reader to understand this is golden information, not just gossip or rumors circulating on the street, what professionals dismiss as “RUMINT.” Needless to add, this is generating a lot of talk in Sudan, where the media is asking about this shady affair—and how Mr. Blumenthal, who’s not exactly an old Africa hand, knew all about it.

But the most interesting part is that the report describes a conversation “in confidence” that happened on the evening of June 7, just one day before Mr. Blumenthal sent the report to Secretary Clinton. It beggars the imagination to think that Mr. Blumenthal’s private intelligence operation, which was just a handful of people, had operators who were well placed in Sudan, with top-level spy access, able to get this secret information, place it in a decently written assessment with proper espionage verbiage, and pass it all back to Washington, D.C., inside 24 hours. That would be a feat even for the CIA, which has stations and officers all over Africa.

In fact, the June 8, 2011 Blumenthal report doesn’t read like CIA material at all, in other words human intelligence or HUMINT, but very much like signals intelligence or SIGINT. (For the differences see here). I know what SIGINT reports look like, because I used to write them for the National Security Agency, America’s biggest source of intelligence. SIGINT reports, which I’ve read thousands of, have a very distinct style and flavor to them and Blumenthal’s write-up matches it, right down to the “Source Comments,” which smack very much of NSA reporting and its “house rules.”

But is this an NSA assessment? If so, it would have to be classified at least Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, a handling caveat that applies to most SIGINT, and quite possibly Top Secret/SCI, the highest normal classification we have. In that case, it was about as far from Unclassified as it’s possible for an email to be. (Read more: The Observer, 1/09/2016) (Archive)

June 2011 – Hillary instructs Jake Sullivan to send docs marked classified info to her private server: “strip them, turn them into non-paper and send” via a nonsecure channel

“Republican investigators are raising the alarm over a newly released Hillary Clinton email that shows the former secretary of state directing a top staffer to send sensitive information on an unsecured network for convenience.

In a June 2011 email exchange, Clinton told her top policy staffer Jake Sullivan to send a talking points document — which was scheduled to be forwarded over State’s secured network — over a nonsecure fax line after “stripping” some information from them. The messages were included in a large batch of Clinton emails released around 2 a.m. Friday morning.

Her instructions came after staffers said they were having problems with the secure fax machine and therefore couldn’t get Clinton the documents she was asking for.

“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton wrote. “Non-paper” is a diplomatic term for a discussion draft or memo that does not represent the official position of a government or negotiator.

(…) An earlier exchange between Sullivan and Clinton also included a discussion of State’s secure email system. Sullivan told Clinton in February 2010 that he couldn’t send her a Mideast peace-related statement by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Clinton seemed irritated: “It’s a public statement! Just email it,” she wrote.

Sullivan responded by explaining it was impossible to send her the information she wanted because it was stuck in State’s classified system: “Trust me, I share your exasperation. But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can’t even access it,” Sullivan wrote.” (Read more: Politico, 1/6/2017)  (Archive)