CNN
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Foreign adversaries including Russia and China have recently directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of US federal employees working in national security, targeting those who have been fired or feel they could be soon, according to four people familiar with recent US intelligence on the issue.
The intelligence indicates that foreign adversaries are eager to exploit the Trump administration’s efforts to conduct mass layoffs across the federal workforce – a plan laid out by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this week.
Russia and China are focusing their efforts on recently fired employees with security clearances and probationary employees at risk of being terminated, who may have valuable information about US critical infrastructure and vital government bureaucracy, two of the sources said. At least two countries have already set up recruitment websites and begun aggressively targeting federal employees on LinkedIn, two of the sources said.
The adversaries think the employees “are at their most vulnerable right now,” another of the sources said. “Out of a job, bitter about being fired, etc.”
“It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that these cast aside federal workers with a wealth of institutional knowledge represent staggeringly attractive targets to the intelligence services of our competitors and adversaries,” a third source familiar with the recent US assessments told CNN.
CNN has reached out to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as well as the embassies of China and Russia in Washington for comment.
The intelligence seems to confirm what was previously a hypothetical fear for current and US officials: that the mass firings could offer a rich recruitment opportunity for foreign intelligence services that might seek to exploit financially vulnerable or resentful former employees. The Justice Department has charged multiple former military and intelligence officials for providing US intelligence to China in recent years.
Career officials at the CIA have been quietly discussing that risk and how to mitigate it in the recent weeks, current and former intelligence officials previously told CNN. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard earlier this week suggested that those discussions represented a “threat” made by disloyal government employees — rather than a clinical warning of the potential risks posed by President Donald Trump’s aggressive cost-cutting strategy — and that those involved should be penalized.
“I am curious about how they think this is a good tactic to keep their job,” Gabbard told Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Tuesday. “They’re exposing themselves essentially by making this indirect threat using their propaganda arm through CNN that they’ve used over and over and over again to reveal their hand, that their loyalty is not at all to America. It is not to the American people or the Constitution. It is to themselves.
“And these are exactly the kind of people that we need to root out, get rid of so that the patriots who do work in this area, who are committed to our core mission can actually focus on that,” she said.
Multiple current officials across national security agencies who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity expressed frustration at the administration’s response to what they see as very real warnings — not partisan swiping.
“Employees that feel they have been mistreated by an employer have historically been much more likely to disclose sensitive information,” said Holden Triplett, who served as director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council in the first Trump administration and is a former FBI attaché at the US embassies in Moscow and Beijing. “We may be creating, albeit somewhat unintentionally, the perfect recruitment environment.”
“This isn’t reality TV,” said another former intelligence official. “There are consequences.”
The CIA and Defense Department are weighing significant staff cuts. The Pentagon said in a memo last week that over 5,000 probationary employees, who in most cases have been in their job a year or less, could be fired in the short term. And the CIA has already fired more than 20 officers for their work on diversity issues, many of whom are now challenging their dismissal in court.
The CIA may have already inadvertently put some American secrets within the grasp of foreign spies and hackers. In an effort to comply with the executive order to downsize the federal workforce, the CIA earlier this month sent the White House an extraordinarily unusual email listing all new hires that have been with the agency for two years or less — a list that included CIA officers who were preparing to operate under cover — over an unclassified email server.
Some of those officers, who have had access to classified information about the agency’s operations and tradecraft, may now be terminated as part of the layoffs.
CNN’s Sean Lyngaas contributed reporting.