You are not safer

There are many cock-eyed things about the travel alert the State Department has issued, along with the embassy and consulate closings it has ordered:

1. They cover a very wide swath of the Middle East and Africa (19 countries, down a few from the original) and now a full week, making the travel warning essentially useless to anyone wanting to avoid an attack.
2. The people the closings are supposedly intended to protect are those who serve abroad, most of whom live in well-known compounds often less well protected than the embassies and consulates they work in.
3. It would presumably take little for the planners of an attack to postpone for a week or two.
4. The warning itself is causing a good deal of the harm that an attack might cause–disrupting American diplomatic operations, convincing Americans on the home front that their government can’t protect them, casting doubt in the minds of our friends and allies about whether we are prepared the run the risks engagement on their behalf entails.

It makes me wonder:  did this intercept pick up a communication Al Qaeda wanted to be heard, so as to cause damage without having to bother with all that messy bombing, maiming and killing?

Before you reject that hypothesis out of hand, consider this:  Islamic terrorism had a busy month in July, but not much success against American targets.  That doesn’t mean the jihadis aren’t anxious to give it another try, but it also suggests they might like some low-hanging fruit.  Spinning up the Americans with an intentionally planted conversation is not beyond Ayman Zawahiri’s imagination.

But let’s assume the conversation was real and the plot is real.  Should the State Department have issued a warning, in particular one so general as unlikely to be of value to anyone?

The short answer is no.  The longer answer is that present law and policy make it virtually impossible for it to do anything else.  State is not allowed to issue warnings to its own people without informing the general public.  Public notification tips off terrorists that Washington knows what they are up to.  That is valuable information, but we give it away for free.

Why?  Because once upon a time, after the 1988 downing of Pan Am 103, it was discovered that Embassy Moscow had warned its personnel.  It turned out that the warning was based on a hoax that had nothing to do with Pan Am 103, but it happened to coincide with a real attack.  The commission that investigated the Pan Am 103 disaster recommended that warnings be closely held, not publicized, but that policy was never adopted.

Would it have been better in this instance to keep the warning secret?  The value of publicizing it is clearly minimal.  Had it been closely held, it is not beyond imagination that loose lips (which sink ships) might have remained loose and enabled the National Security Agency to track the evolution of the plot.  Or enabled the listeners to determine that it was a plant.  That would have been far better than alerting the terrorists to what we know and giving them a chance to tighten their security procedures.

Secrecy has a role in intelligence and foreign affairs.  It is a serious tradecraft error to let the enemy know what you know about them.  If you don’t know enough to save lives, best to stay silent.  While Al Qaeda’s reach seems less than it once was, Snowden’s revelations, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and now the mishandling of this travel warning are not making America safer.

PS:  This morning’s much more focused warning about an attack in Yemen, and evacuation of non-essential diplomatic and consular personnel, is much more useful than the general travel warning and closings.