Remember When Mike Pompeo Loved Wikileaks?

Now the head of the CIA wants to get tough on the “non-state hostile intelligence service.” That won’t be so easy.

Last July,  Rep. Mike Pompeo spotted an article on the conservative website RedState about Wikileaks publishing more than 19,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. The Republican from Kansas rather gleefully retweeted the story, adding, “Need further proof that the fix [for Hillary Clinton’s nomination] was in from Pres. Obama on down?” Yet nine months later, Pompeo, now director of the CIA, took the stage at a prominent Washington, D.C. think tank to denounce the radical “transparency” organization and its founder Julian Assange. “We at CIA find the celebration of entities like WikiLeaks to be both perplexing and deeply troubling,” he said. The days of using “misappropriated secrets…ends now.”

That same urge that led Pompeo to tweet last July shows why it won’t be so easy.

In a wide-ranging discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday, Pompeo declared Wikileaks to be “a non-state hostile intelligence service” aided by Russia, a connection that was already well-known to the cybersecurity community last summer. He added that the CIA would start aggressively and publicly pushing back against Wikileaks and other sites that attack the CIA and other Western targets using stolen information (or information that leakers claim is stolen.) He also said that the agency was already working to improve its counterintelligence efforts — that is, stopping insider threats and finding ways to make leaks less harmful.

Pompeo was responding to Wikileaks’ March 7 dump, which the organization said contained hacking tools stolen from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. Researchers around the world pored through the documents and largely concluded that the dump was much ado about not much. Belying the organization’s claims, the tools did not allow the CIA to remotely hack into all sorts of devices and services, nor did the dump reveal wrongdoing or domestic spying. Wikileaks had oversold its goods.