The Central Intelligence Agency is conducting an assessment of their own security after a White House email about civil service layoffs appeared to compromise the names of certain undercover officers, reported CNN on Monday.
This damage control, reported CNN, is "just one of multiple aftershocks from President Donald Trump’s push to take a jackhammer to the federal government — including the CIA. The administration’s efforts to cut the workforce and audit spending at the CIA and elsewhere threaten to jeopardize some of the government’s most sensitive work, current and former U.S. officials familiar with internal deliberations say."
The CIA first began discussing layoffs amid tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force and its rampage through agencies across the executive branch, originally billed as a mass buyout that would infuse "renewed energy" into intelligence operations.
However, chaos erupted after the White House sent an email over an unclassified server suggesting the layoffs of a number of CIA employees who were on probationary status due to being recent hires — which may have included the first and last names of some undercover agents.
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Making matters worse, said the report, "some U.S. embassy positions that are actually filled by CIA officers under cover may now be at risk of being revealed — potentially angering the host nation and exposing companies or endangering CIA assets who are known to have met with past occupants of the role."
One former CIA operative told CNN the following hypothetical: “Your predecessor was in that position, as were the five officers before them. Now the host country and adversaries know this person going to this position in the embassy is agency. They now assume the predecessors were the same [and] work backwards and find out their collective footprint. The position is now burned.”
This is far from the only security risk that these intelligence layoffs potentially pose, said the report.
In particular, another risk is that "mass firings and the buyouts already offered to staff risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service."