CIA Director Mike Pompeo made a blunt declaration Tuesday: "We are back in the business of stealing secrets.”

The remark from Pompeo, made to a small group of reporters on Tuesday, was a tacit jab at his predecessor. Former agency director John Brennan turned heads in March of last year when he told National Public Radio that the U.S. doesn’t “steal secrets.”

“We uncover. We discover. We reveal. We obtain. We elicit. We solicit -- all of that,” Brennan said at the time.

Pompeo's apparent swipe at Brennan came on the same day that his predecessor testified to a Senate committee about Russia's interference in the 2016 campaign. Brennan told senators he came to fear Russian agents tried to compromise President Donald Trump's campaign.

Brennan's remark about the agency's covert intelligence collection rankled some agency veterans, several of whom came forward to say that stealing secrets is precisely what the CIA does — or what it’s supposed to do. They worried Brennan’s comments would dissuade the nation’s covert operatives from doing their jobs and deter the foreign sources they work with from cooperating with them and breaking the laws of their own countries.

Pompeo said his goal as director is to be more aggressive in the realm of covert intelligence collection; he pointed to notoriously impenetrable North Korea as a particular target.

“The president has put in place a set of requirements that will require the CIA to be more aggressive,” Pompeo said.

Tensions between the U.S. and the hermit kingdom have flared since Trump’s inauguration in January, and virtually all of the administration’s top national security officials, including Pompeo, have visited South Korea since then. The North Koreans last weekend launched a medium-range ballistic missile that landed in the Sea of Japan.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — whom the president has reportedly referred to as a “madman with nuclear weapons” — has vowed to develop a nuclear missile that can strike the U.S.



[POLITICO]