Warning our adversaries about a terrorist attack has its advantages.
A woman stands at a makeshift memorial in front of the Crocus City Hall in Moscow on March 29, 2024. | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty ImagesMarc Polymeropolous served 26 years at CIA in a variety of operational and management field and headquarters assignments. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an adjunct professor of intelligence studies at the Citadel.
Many people might be shocked that the U.S. government would go out of its way to share sensitive intelligence with some of its sharpest adversaries and alert them of impending attacks, but it’s actually part of an official policy known as a “duty to warn.” In addition to the federal policy of a “duty to warn,” there are ethical, moral and even practical reasons for sharing information about potential threats. Not only is it the right thing to do to prevent foreign civilians from being harmed, but American citizens could also be impacted if they happen to be in the vicinity. Further, sharing information with other countries helps to keep crucial intelligence channels open that can help bolster U.S. national security.
The process itself includes first scrubbing intelligence and protecting sources and methods, especially important in cases where the U.S. is passing sensitive intelligence to an adversary. The goal of such a scrub would be to provide enough actionable intelligence to help thwart an attack but not enough so U.S. adversaries would be able to reverse engineer the source of the information.
One lesson for Moscow might be the dangers of the Kremlin believing its own propaganda. For those of us who have dealt with the Russian security services, their level of paranoia, xenophobia and distrust of their American counterparts is glaringly obvious at all times, so much so that it can be difficult for them to fathom that the U.S. is acting in good faith. Such thinking would apply to Iran as well. Don’t forget, the U.S.
Yet even when the U.S. intelligence community passes information to our enemies, the process is rarely, if ever, reciprocated. Some point to the example of the Russians sharing the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an American citizen whoin the spring of 2012 and went on to perpetrate the Boston Marathon bombings along with his brother Dhozkar. But even in this case, the Russians merely passed along Tsarnaev’s name and suggested he was dangerous.
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