Obama upset over U.S. intelligence leaks: intel chief

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama is upset over a rash of intelligence leaks in Washington, the U.S. intelligence chief said on Wednesday, excoriating officials who "get their jollies" from talking to reporters.

The comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, follow days of nonstop coverage about U.S. intelligence on a European terrorism threat, even though much of the details of the threat are still secret.

The State Department issued an alert on Sunday acknowledging an increased risk of terrorist attack in Europe.

"I was at a meeting yesterday with the president and I was ashamed to have to sit there to have to listen to the president express his great angst about the leaking that's going on here in this town," Clapper told a conference on intelligence matters in Washington.

"And particularly when it's widely quoted, amorphous, anonymous senior intelligence officials, who for whatever reason get their jollies from blabbing to the media."

Clapper, who took the top U.S. intelligence post in August, did not say which leaks the president complained about.

"I'm not criticizing the media at all -- you're doing your jobs," Clapper said, addressing a conference by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center.

"But I am criticizing people who are allegedly government officials in responsible positions who have supposedly taken an oath to protect this country."

Speaking later at the same event, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, also criticized leaks. He said any disclosures beyond the State Department's alert, which was extremely vague, made his job more complicated.

U.S. officials have warned that public revelations about intelligence information can have unpredictable consequences, potentially undermining efforts to monitor and disrupt militants plotting attacks.

"And as the president remarked, the irony here is people engaged in intelligence who turn around talk about it publicly," Clapper said.

WIKILEAKS

Leaks of classified information extend well beyond traditional media. Clapper separately pointed to the fallout from website WikiLeaks' release of more than 70,000 secret military files on the Afghan war in July, one of the biggest security breaches in U.S. history.

Leaking classified information is a felony in the United States. The U.S. Justice Department has filed charges against two people this year in cases involving information passed to reporters. It has won one conviction against an FBI linguist who gave information to an Internet blogger.

WikiLeaks has threatened to publish thousands more documents, and Clapper predicted that the group's actions would have a "chilling effect" on intelligence sharing within the U.S. intelligence community.

"I would observe that the WikiLeaks episode of course represents what I would consider a big yellow flag. I think it's going to have a very chilling effect on the need to share," Clapper said.

Clapper is tasked with promoting greater cooperation within the U.S. intelligence community, an effort given greater urgency after a failed car bombing in New York's Times Square in May and a botched attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day last year.

But he suggested the excessive leaking in Washington had made it clear that sharing could only go so far,

"In this day and age, with the hemorrhage of leaks in this town, I think compartmentation, appropriate reasonable compartmentation, is the right thing to do," Clapper said.

Paul Pillar, a former U.S. counter-terrorism official now at Georgetown University, said Obama's complaint was "a powerful incentive for (Clapper) to swing the pendulum back in the direction of restricting rather than sharing information."

(Editing by Philip Barbara and Cynthia Osterman)