A UN ambassador, at best, is a secondary or tertiary intelligence consumer. In other words, intelligence is not gathered to meet her needs anywhere or anytime. Her official duties don’t include making decisions based on intelligence. She is under the direction of the secretary of state and the president. If neither of them required the unmasking of the names, she clearly had no job-related reason to do so.

What little intelligence information was passed to Powers as UN ambassador would have passed through the president’s office and the secretary of state’s office. If they didn’t need the names to be unmasked to understand the information, neither did she.

We don’t yet know how many of Powers’ requests for unmasking were complied with or whose names were divulged. More importantly, we don’t know what for what purpose the unmasked intelligence information was used.