Why the Ship of State Leaks

By Evan Thomas

Americans cannot keep a secret. Or so it increasingly seems to frustrated Government officials who decry what retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former deputy director of the CIA, terms the "hemorrhaging" of classified information. The experts have no trouble identifying the reasons: "Too much, too many and too little," says Senator William Roth of Delaware, too much classified information, too many people with security clearances to look at it and too little investigation of those getting the clearances. The Walker case has stirred demands in the national security establishment to patch up the storehouse of Government secrets, but an open society makes the cure elusive.

At least 4.2 million have security clearances, most of them civilians who work for the Pentagon or defense-related industry. About 920,000, including 121 Soviet emigres, have access to classified documents all the way up to top secret. The number of security clearances has increased by more than 40% in the past five years.

As the Walker scandal reverberated last week, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger vowed to cut the numbers back. But he may find the task difficult. During his tour as director of the CIA for the Carter Administration, retired Admiral Stansfield Turner tried to put a freeze on the number of clearances granted, "but the pressure became so intense that after three years I had to relax it," he ruefully admits. "In many cases people kept their clearances just as a matter of prestige."

A multitude of different agencies hand out security clearances, usually after the most perfunctory record check for convictions and firings. "It's harder to get an American Express card," says Senator Roth. Of the 200,000 clearances requested last year, only about 160 were denied. Christopher Boyce, now serving a 40-year sentence for selling codes to the Soviets that he stole as a low-level clerk at TRW, a CIA contractor, noted that his sister was required to take a polygraph test to get a job at a 7-Eleven convenience store, but that investigators took no notice of his own counterculture life- style before letting him handle some of the nation's most sensitive secrets. Reclearance, mandated every five years for those approved for access to top- secret information, is even more haphazard. The feds currently have a ten- year backlog. During the 15 years Jerry Whitworth is accused of having spied for the Soviet Union, the Navy twice reinstated his clearance to handle top secrets.

Defense contractors and high-tech firms have been notorious for lax security. At TRW, according to Boyce, "security was a joke." He and his co-workers used the code-destruction blender in TRW's ultrasecret "black vault" for mixing banana daiquiris. The Boyce scandal forced TRW to tighten up, and other firms as well are becoming more careful, contend authorities in Silicon Valley. The military is also lax. Says retired Admiral Clarence Hill: "When I was a sub commander in World War II, we never sent anything over four lines. Everything had to be coded and decoded by hand. Now they think nothing about sending three or four pages, and many of these are being sent just because you can send them." Admits Turner: "There is no question that our entire procedure for handling classified documents in this Government is sloppy." Horror stories abound. Turner recalls that, when CIA Clerk William Kampiles sold a classified manual on satellite surveillance to the Soviets (for $3,000), the CIA checked and could not find 13 other authorized copies of the same document.

There may just be too many secrets to keep. It has been estimated that there are 19.6 million authorized copies of classified documents. That, of course, does not take into account the photocopier. "The Xerox machine is one of the biggest threats to national security ever devised," says retired Admiral Thomas Moorer. "Even if documents are numbered and accounted for, it is easy to slip one out over lunch and copy it quickly."

Other technological breakthroughs have made secrets harder to keep. Most phone messages now pass through the airwaves rather than over wires, which facilitates interception by the microwave gadgetry atop Soviet consulates and in offices. Sophisticated laser devices can eavesdrop on conversation in a room by picking up the vibrations from the windowpane. The most insecure place to store information is probably a computer. A study by the Department of Defense Computer Security Center in Fort Meade, Md., concluded that only 30 out of about 17,000 DOD computers are even minimally secure against intrusion by clever hackers. Though no one has ever been caught doing it, the mere thought of Soviet intelligence plugging into Defense Department computers, particularly the ones that command the American nuclear arsenal, is the stuff of Hollywood chillers.

The Pentagon this week will announce steps to eliminate leaks, including cutting back on both the number of security clearances and the number of classified documents. "If we don't do these things and do them soon," warns Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, "we're going to have a lot more Walker cases in the future." But no one is suggesting the kind of drastic steps that would protect state secrets as securely as they are held, say, in the Soviet Union. Says John Martin, chief of the Justice Department's Division of Internal Security: "You've got to maintain an open society, or you're no better than your adversaries."

CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE

With reporting by David Beckwith/Washington