Learning to Keep a Secret

What was lost in Iran, and why it won't happen again

After the cheering stops over the return of the hostages from Iran, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee plans to open hearings later this month to determine the lessons that the U.S. should learn from the crisis. Sooner or later, questions will be raised about what vital intelligence secrets were lost and how such breaches of security can be avoided in the future.

Some of the answers have been pieced together by U.S. officials with the help of information supplied by the hostages during their debriefings. It has been confirmed that as the militants stormed the embassy, U.S. officials managed to destroy most, if not all, of the sensitive communications equipment. No codes were compromised; indeed, none could have been because encoding is done by computers that, in effect, change their combination every one hundred-thousandth of a second.

The contents of most safes were also destroyed by fire-producing grenades. But not all. Those in the offices of Charge d'Affaires Bruce Laingen, the embassy's highest ranking official, and Michael Me-trinko, a political officer, were captured intact. As a result, the militants gained a treasure trove of information. It included several compromising documents that, according to State Department officials, should have been shredded soon after Laingen received them.

One of the documents indicated that two U.S. officials, William Daugherty and Malcolm Kalp, were CIA officers. In addition, a notation ("Show to Tom A.") in the margin was taken by the militants as evidence that another embassy official, Thomas Ahern, was also connected with the agency. The three Americans suffered harsher treatment than most hostages.

Kalp was beaten twice and kept in solitary confinement for 374 days.

These documents did not disclose the identity of any local CIA agents. The reason is that such names are stored only in a computer at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. But embassy files did contain records of Iranians who called at the embassy on commercial or cultural business. U.S. officials believe that many of these people were arrested, interrogated by the revolutionary komitehs and, in some cases, executed. Indeed, some U.S. officials are surprised that the Iranian militants did not make more use of the sensitive information that was known to be in Laingen's safe.

One of the reasons may be that some militant clerical leaders also had incriminating files in the embassy. Among them were Ayatullah Mohammed Beheshti, head of the Iranian Supreme Court, and Seyyed Ali Khamene'i, a leader of the Islamic Republican Party, who both had numerous contacts with the embassy before and after the fall of the late Shah.

Perhaps even more serious was the loss of sensitive papers in a U.S. helicopter that was abandoned after the unsuccessful rescue attempt in April 1980. Following that debacle, the U.S. had to make urgent efforts to get some undercover agents out of Iran. Says a senior U.S. official: "We were really scrambling for a while." The documents in the helicopter also provided locations of safe houses, procedures and codes for use in making contact with local agents and secret escape routes. These codes and operation plans were quickly changed.

Congress has appropriated $35.8 million to improve security at U.S. embassies, chiefly in the Middle East and Central America. The money is being spent on advanced communications systems that will allow most secret data to be stored in Washington, yet still be almost instantly available to embassy officials when needed. Bars and shatterproof glass are being installed in the windows of many embassies, and vaults for sensitive documents that must be kept on hand are being reinforced. One of the most important steps, obviously, will be to ensure that secret documents that are supposed to be destroyed actually are destroyed. Thus, one esoteric idea under consideration is a system that would slow attackers by flooding embassy rooms with an aqueous foam laden with tear gas. Says a State Department official: "We're looking into all kinds of schemes, starting with banana peels in the parking lot."

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