Missing secrets

Red faces at Foggy Bottom

Get this: the intelligence branch of the U.S. State Department loses a safe full of top-secret documents and doesn't even know it. Eleven weeks later, the unlocked safe turns up in a prison, of all places; the warden returns it to State. Then a police informant confides that more documents are still inside the prison, but the Government doesn't believe him. Some of the documents later show up in the hands of a convict and a local TV news station.

Embarrassing? The Secretary of State certainly thought so. Filled in by phone last week while traveling to Japan with President Reagan, an irate George Shultz immediately ordered a full-scale investigation. Of paramount concern was not just how the security breach occurred, but how far it went: the State Department could not guarantee that every scrap of secret information had been recovered.

The tale of the missing documents began last summer, after the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research decided to refurbish six safes--actually bar-lock file cabinets that are kept in a vault. Their contents were to be transferred to microfilm, and the empty safes sent to Lorton Reformatory, a maximum-security prison in Virginia that had contracted to fix up Government furniture.

The safes were taken to a Government warehouse in Virginia in August, then moved to Lorton. On Oct. 25, prison authorities found that one safe had "inadvertently" been left unlocked and unemptied. Among the documents inside: several binders stamped TOP SECRET containing the Secretary of State's morning summaries of embassy reports and other overseas intelligence from January to March 1983.

Shocked State Department officials raced to Lorton and, after a quick investigation, determined that all the missing papers had been retrieved. So convinced was the State Department that it discounted a police informant's warning that more documents remained at Lorton. Four days later, WTTG in Washington, D.C., reported that top-secret documents were circulating among prisoners. An obliging inmate had slipped copies of the documents to a WTTG-TV reporter. The station then passed them on to Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland, who returned them to red-faced State Department officials.

The FBI was called in to scour Lorton. Meanwhile the State Department launched an urgent "damage assessment" to figure out if any U.S. secrets had been compromised. The problem is, because no microfilm records had been made, authorities could not be sure exactly what top-secret information the mislaid safe originally contained. In fact, the only certainty last week was that, in the words of one State Department official, "there sure as hell were lapses all over the place." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.