Contact: Rob Ostrander 202.224.7627 Shana Stribling 202.224.0309
Thursday, February 2, 2006

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Kit Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, today expressed strong concerns to top American intelligence officials that recent leaks regarding intelligence methods were severely hampering efforts to gather intelligence in the field.

Bond, who recently returned from a trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he met with military and intelligence officials, said field intelligence officers in those countries expressed “grave concerns” over recent public disclosures and newspaper articles on detention and interrogation techniques and surveillance programs.

“The disclosure of the NSA terrorist surveillance program has caused our leaders in the field to question the support that they believed they once had in Washington to act aggressively to pursue every lead that will help defend ourselves against the next terrorist attack,” said Bond at today’s Intelligence Committee hearing focused on world-wide terrorist threats.

“Make no mistake the rampant leaking and uncertainty over detainees and intelligence techniques has shaken the confidence of our intelligence operators in the field. It is my belief that these recent developments have significantly degraded our intelligence capabilities and thus made America measurably less safe.”

Bond said the intelligence operators told him about the difficulty they faced in assuring their intelligence sources that they and their families would be protected, particularly in view of the perception that the United States is a nation that has little regard for classified information and that information concerning them will be leaked to the media.

“It is abhorrent to me that while we have men and women putting their lives on the line in the field, that some are content to play politics with our national security,” said Bond. “While some are thinking about scoring political points or trying to make the current Administration look bad, I believe we should be thinking about giving the best tools to our people in the field.”

At the hearing today, Bond called on Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and CIA Director Porter Goss to support America’s intelligence leaders in the field to give them the confidence the need to vigorously pursue intelligence efforts and to prevent a return to the risk-averse culture that has proved costly in the past.