Adversaries of the United States, particularly China and Russia, are telling their intelligence services to boost their efforts to recruit disgruntled U.S. federal national security employees who have been fired or could lose their jobs soon, according to sources familiar with U.S. intelligence on the issue.
The sources said that the adversaries believe the mass layoffs laid out by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this week will leave the former or soon-to-be former workers vulnerable enough to spill information, reported CNN Friday.
Russia and China, in particular, are focusing on fired employees who have information about government bureaucracy and vital critical infrastructure, as well as probationary employees.
At least two countries have set up websites to recruit people and are targeting federal employees through LinkedIn, two of the sources said.
"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 told CNN.
U.S. officials have been saying for some time that the mass firings could provide recruitment opportunities for foreign intelligence services, and in recent years, the Department of Justice has charged several former military and intelligence officers with providing information to China.
Earlier this week, though, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the talk of recruitment was a "threat" from disloyal federal employees and not a real warning and that penalties should be invoked against those involved.
"I am curious about how they think this is a good tactic to keep their job," she said in a Fox News interview this week. "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."
But current officials speaking to CNN on the condition of anonymity said they are frustrated that the administration is accusing them of crying wolf.
"Employees that feel they have been mistreated by an employer have historically been much more likely to disclose sensitive information," Holden Triplett, the director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council in the first Trump administration and a former FBI attache at the U.S. embassies in Moscow and Beijing, commented. "We may be creating, albeit somewhat unintentionally, the perfect recruitment environment."
Last week, the Pentagon said that more than 5,000 probationary employees could be fired, and the CIA has already dismissed more than 20 officers after their work on diversity issues.
A former intelligence official pointed out that the CIA seeks out disgruntled government employees in other countries "all the time," including releasing recruitment videos to persuade Russians to spy for the United States.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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