http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/intelligence-professionals-tell-obama-off
Few people really know what triggered the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Most believe it was the random discovery of the sites in aerial photographs taken by high-flying U-2 aircraft over Cuba.
But the U-2 flight was ordered after a “leak.”
Two-and-a-half weeks before the flight, an undercover CIA agent overheard a conversation in a bar in Cuba involving Fidel Castro’s personal pilot. He bragged the island nation would soon have nuclear weapons.
The agent’s subsequent report of this to Washington prompted U.S. President John Kennedy to order the U-2 flight that revealed solid evidence as to what the Soviet Union was doing.
During World War II, the phrase “Loose lips sink ships” evolved within the U.S. military to remind those entrusted with classified information not to talk about it.
Obviously, Castro’s pilot had never heard the expression. His loose lips would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. Although the end result proved beneficial to U.S. national security interests, the Cuban pilot’s lack of operational security — opsec — cost his country a nuclear weapons capability.
For as long as there have been military secrets to be kept, history is replete with examples of enemies eager to learn them. The United States has been victimized at times as there have been those guilty of failing to observe opsec, endangering the country’s national security, either through lax security or a personal need to promote themselves as knowing what others do not.
But it is inexcusable when it is our own leaders, with access to all our national security secrets, who violate opsec for political gain, endangering our national security in the process.
This is the clarion call of a recent documentary entitled “Dishonorable Disclosures: How Leaks and Politics Threaten National Security.” The film reveals concerns by retired military and intelligence professionals who have come together to emphasize the personal risks to our warriors involved in conducting classified operations and opportunities lost to use the intelligence those operations yielded as a direct result of leaks made by our own president — leaks members of both political parties agree endanger our national security interests.
The documentary cites several examples: