Former CIA analyst Sarah Carlson could be forgiven in this case because she's in a fairly unusual position - she's in the middle of a lawsuit with the CIA over its decision to stop her from publishing a manuscript about her time in the agency and her first-person account of a particularly dramatic incident.
Carlson declined to identify the incident in a recent interview with RealClearLife, and the suit is intentionally vague on that front, saying only that the book "Describes her time serving in and escape from a devolving hostile environment in a country on the African continent. It focuses primarily on the final crisis situation and emergency actions taken to reach safety and save American lives."
Carlson's specific role in all this is not clear as pointed out by The Daily Beast which first reported Carlson's legal action, last year she published - with the CIA's approval, she said - an essay for RealClearDefense in which she's identified as having "Served at the U.S. Mission in Tripoli, Libya, and helped conduct the full-scale U.S. evacuation." In that essay, she described the operation as a "Harrowing, all-out, 26-hour" affair.
The CIA declined to comment for this report, but Carlson said there are two differences between the latest version of the manuscript that was rejected by the CIA's Publication Review Board and the previous ones that were approved: the addition of some biographical details about Carlson's career and her take on a previous "High-profile attack" in North Africa - likely a reference to the Benghazi terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2012.
Carlson only filed the lawsuit against the CIA two weeks ago, so the agency still has a few weeks to formally respond in court and it could be much longer, if ever, before the agency explicitly says what they find objectionable in the book.
Bradley Moss, an attorney representing Carlson, told RealClearLife he suspects the government could bring up national security concerns over what he called the "Whole mosaic concept." That's when the government fears that America's adversaries could connect a myriad of individually innocuous details about Carlson's career to uncover secrets about American intelligence operations.
Would Carlson's book solve the mystery, three years later?
http://www.realclearlife.com/books/the-desert-escape-and-the-book-the-cia-doesnt-want-you-to-read-sarah-carlson/
Carlson declined to identify the incident in a recent interview with RealClearLife, and the suit is intentionally vague on that front, saying only that the book "Describes her time serving in and escape from a devolving hostile environment in a country on the African continent. It focuses primarily on the final crisis situation and emergency actions taken to reach safety and save American lives."
Carlson's specific role in all this is not clear as pointed out by The Daily Beast which first reported Carlson's legal action, last year she published - with the CIA's approval, she said - an essay for RealClearDefense in which she's identified as having "Served at the U.S. Mission in Tripoli, Libya, and helped conduct the full-scale U.S. evacuation." In that essay, she described the operation as a "Harrowing, all-out, 26-hour" affair.
The CIA declined to comment for this report, but Carlson said there are two differences between the latest version of the manuscript that was rejected by the CIA's Publication Review Board and the previous ones that were approved: the addition of some biographical details about Carlson's career and her take on a previous "High-profile attack" in North Africa - likely a reference to the Benghazi terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2012.
Carlson only filed the lawsuit against the CIA two weeks ago, so the agency still has a few weeks to formally respond in court and it could be much longer, if ever, before the agency explicitly says what they find objectionable in the book.
Bradley Moss, an attorney representing Carlson, told RealClearLife he suspects the government could bring up national security concerns over what he called the "Whole mosaic concept." That's when the government fears that America's adversaries could connect a myriad of individually innocuous details about Carlson's career to uncover secrets about American intelligence operations.
Would Carlson's book solve the mystery, three years later?
http://www.realclearlife.com/books/the-desert-escape-and-the-book-the-cia-doesnt-want-you-to-read-sarah-carlson/
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