December 31, 2021
Two years after then-President Trump tweeted a classified photo of an Iranian rocket launch pad without first getting authority from the CIA, US intelligence officials are still arguing over how much, if any, damage Trump did to the United States, Yahoo News reports.
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On the morning of August 30, 2019, Trump received an intelligence briefing with a select group of senior national security officials, including CIA Director Gina Haspel, national security adviser John Bolton and other top aides.
US officials at the meeting were delighted. The previous day, Iran had attempted to launch a satellite into space, but the launch had failed spectacularly, with the rocket exploding on the pad.
Included in that morning’s briefing materials was a classified photo, taken by satellite, of the botched rocket launch, showing extensive damage to the site.
The president was taken by the image. “Trump thought this was very neat, and asked if he could keep it,” said a former Trump Administration official. “And after some hesitation, the intelligence briefer said, ‘Yes.'”
Officials had been nervous about leaving the image with the president, according to the former official, who attended the meeting. “Gina [and other intelligence officials] may have said something like, ‘Well, don’t do anything with it, don’t show it to anybody.’ But I think he just blew them off. He said, ‘I just want to look at the picture.’”
About an hour later, Trump tweeted the photo.
Some officials worried that Trump’s decision to release the image compromised a key US spy capability, potentially giving Iran a leg up in concealing its nuclear and missile programs. Others who talked to Yahoo News were not so concerned.
“Any effort the US or our allies are taking to disrupt or monitor” Iranian satellite launches “should have been held in the utmost secrecy,” said Michael Mulroy, who served under Trump as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from 2017 to late 2019.
One thing is certain: President Trump’s decision to release the classified image was anything but conventional. Trump could not attach the photo to a tweet digitally, since the electronic devices some use to access their classified daily intelligence briefs are cut off from the open Internet. So, Trump had an aide take a photo of the picture from the hard copy of Trump’s daily brief and post it online, the former Trump Administration official told Yahoo News.
The Trump text with the photo said: “The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV [satellite launch vehicle] Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.”
Presidents have unlimited authority to declassify information, but the decision to release this image from a US spy satellite — without interagency discussion or first degrading the image quality, and on such an expedited timeline — was likely unprecedented, according to former officials.
Academic analysts, using commercially available imagery, had already exposed the failed launch before the president’s tweet, so the issue wasn’t the fact of the missile exploding but the quality of US satellite photos.
Although US spy satellites’ orbital paths are widely known — to adversarial intelligence services, academic researchers and amateur astronomers alike — images from these satellites are generally highly classified, as they reveal the satellites’ precise resolution capabilities, which are superior to commercially available technology.
The intelligence community was “extraordinarily unhappy” that Trump released the image, said the former Trump Administration official, adding that a senior intelligence official called him after the tweet asking “what the f*** was going on” at the White House.
The tweet of the image was “incredibly stupid and ridiculous and damaging,” said a former senior official at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency responsible for building and operating US spy satellites.
Some Trump-era officials recall the president’s decision differently, Yahoo News said.
Trump brought up publishing the image at the morning intelligence meeting, said a former senior White House official who also attended the meeting. And while CIA Director Haspel and other intelligence officials were opposed to the idea, “they didn’t blow a gasket over it,” said the former official. In fact, this person recalled, the image was only classified at the “secret” level.
There was little pushback from top intelligence community and Pentagon officials about releasing the photo, according to multiple Trump Administration political officials. “It wasn’t a crown jewel, by any stretch of it,” says the former senior White House official. And in any case, say Trump era officials, advances in commercially available satellite imagery meant that the picture that the president released wasn’t much better than what was widely publicly available.
Not so, said the former senior NRO official, who was not a political appointee. The image Trump released was classified at the “top secret codeword” level — that is, the highest possible level of secrecy, said this former official. The image was taken by a KH-11 series reconnaissance satellite — among the most sensitive employed by the US intelligence community, according to former officials.
The tweet cost “billions” in damage, estimated the former senior NRO official. “The gift that [the Iranians] were given was, ‘Oh, the Americans have this capability with this satellite series, now we know,’” said the former senior NRO official. “It’s because they saw the resolution” the satellite was capable of, added this official.
At the NRO, officials worried about what their platforms might now be missing, since Iran and other US adversaries — newly aware of US spy satellite powers — would likely change their behaviors. “It degraded our confidence in that capability to pick up things that we might otherwise have picked up,” said this former official.
The image revealed US spy satellite resolution capabilities that are three times better than the best commercially available imagery, says Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and expert on satellite imagery. “Mathematically, it’s not an order of magnitude better, but analytically, it was an order of magnitude better.”
Lewis found the image highly instructive. “As an outsider who tries to keep very close tabs on what the US intelligence community is doing on the classified side,” the image “was a goldmine, and I learned a lot,” he says.
Lewis believes that the release of the image likely “had an impact on intelligence communities around the world.”
“I don’t want to exaggerate how bad it was,” says Lewis, who notes he is generally an advocate for greater government openness. “It’s not that the satellites stopped working. It’s just that it aids countries in deceiving those satellites.”
Lewis said Iran has introduced new measures to make satellite-based analysis of their launch activities more difficult, which he attributes to a mix of what the Iranians learned from the image released by Trump, as well as the increased public scrutiny from open source analysts like him. What precisely caused the change in Iranian behavior is “hard to disentangle,” Lewis says.
