An explosive report from the New York Times claims that an executive order from President Donald Trump may have resulted in the outing of multiple agents at the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to the Times, the CIA "sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force," which could lead to all the agents listed being compromised.
According to the report, the email listed the agents' first names and the first initials of their last names, which means that identifying them in full would likely not be difficult for sophisticated foreign intelligence operations.
"The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss," reports the Times. "It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking them to identify them."
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Sources who spoke with the paper said they feared that the list could wind up in the hands of Elon Musk's minions in his Department of Government Efficiency, while one former agency officer told the Times that sending the agents' names in an unclassified emails was a "counterintelligence disaster."
The Times' reporting suggests that the Trump administration is trying to undo some of the emphasis on hiring agents from more ethnically diverse backgrounds, which was something that former CIA Director William Burns argued would give America an advantage in gathering intelligence from foreign nations where American agents would otherwise be at a linguistic and cultural disadvantage.
"Any large-scale culling of more recent hires could have a disparate impact on Mandarin speakers and technology experts, along with the agency’s minority work force," writes the Times. "But current officials said the C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, was prioritizing China and did not want to see any mass exodus of people with expertise in that area."
