Rare News Desk
Head of the National Clandestine Service for the CIA is an elegant, diplomatic title roughly translated as the agency’s top spy boss for agents overseas — think ‘M’ from Ian Fleming’s ‘James Bond.’ But whereas the job used to bring public praise, its latest appointment is shrouded in the secrecy of a presidential administration becoming known for redacting the book on secrets.
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Well, attempted secrecy at least, as Newsweek’s Jeff Stein reported Thursday. The president’s new top spy made it almost a week after assuming the job in May before being outed — on Twitter, no less.
“It was pretty obvious who he was. It took me about five minutes to find out. It wasn’t secret, nobody leaked it,” Columbia University journalism professor and former NPR News managing editor John Dinges told Mashable.
Francis Archibald is a 30-year agency veteran with “rich substantive and operational experiences worldwide” and still officially “remains undercover” according to CIA spokesperson Jennifer Youngblood. Unofficially, Archibald – who prefers “Frank” – is a is 57-year-old former Clemson University football player with a bit of a weight issue, and you can find a picture of his Virginia home on Google Earth.
Dinges, who has written highly-publicized books about CIA operations and relations in South America, tweeted Archibald’s identity — complete with preferred nickname — after The Washington Post and The Associated Press released descriptions of Archibald as “a longtime officer who served tours in Pakistan and Africa and was recently in charge of the agency’s Latin America division, according to public records and former officials,” and “once ran the covert action that helped remove Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power.”
According to Dinges, agents running operations within a given region become “pretty well known to the local officials” in the field, which shortened the list of possible candidates considerably.
Outing an undercover agent can be a felony if one has access to classified information, as was demonstrated in the previous Bush administration when Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a high-level adviser for former Vice-President Dick Cheny, was prosecuted and disbarred for revealing the identity of an operative married to a journalist critical of the administration.
But some in the CIA itself question the necessity of the administration’s secrecy when for 50 years the agency has publicly identified about two dozen National Clandestine Service heads, including Archibald’s predecessor John D. Bennett in 2010. The highly decorated yet subtle, scandal-free record of an officer like Archibald could actually be a boost to the agency’s image after former Director David Petraeus resigned amid allegations of an extramarital affair last November.
Not only that, for an “undercover” appointee the job is pretty public, and includes regular meetings with intelligence leaders abroad, heads from agencies including the FBI and NSA, and testimonies before congressional oversight committees.
A former Marine, Archibald handled weapons in the special activities division of the CIA during the war in Bosnia, served as station chief in Pakistan, and ran a now infamous agency operation to peacefully oust former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 amid the fallout of Yugoslavia’s breakup, and subsequent Yugoslav wars.
In an administration with a highly-developed penchant for unnecessary over-classification and “secret” keeping, shedding light on an unassuming smooth operator with a record like Archibald’s could do a lot to brighten an image mired in questionable NSA surveillance, Benghazi talking points and journalism espionage.
If anything, Archibald is just the latest Obama administration outing in a year full of them, but with the contrasting potential to do some good.
With a record like that, chances are it is going to come out anyway.
Giuseppe Macri is a national political correspondent for Rare. Follow Giuseppe on Twitter @GDMacri.
Related articles
- The CIA Has A New Top Spy, But They Won’t Tell You Who He Is. We Will. (mag.newsweek.com)
- Snowden meets with other US leakers (rinf.com)
- CIA suspected Edward Snowden was trying to break into files (rawstory.com)
