Washington's Master Leakers

By Laurence Zuckerman

Jesse Helms was making a familiar charge: the Soviets, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last March, are lying about the number of intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at Western Europe. To back up his claim, Helms distributed a chart showing missile estimates from the State Department, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. The figures all conflicted, but they had one thing in common: they were highly classified. "They were code-word, code-level items," declared Democratic Senator Brock Adams of Washington, meaning that the documents were restricted even beyond top secret. Yet as committee staffers fanned out to retrieve the missile chart from reporters, Helms insisted that the information was either unclassified or had appeared in news reports. A few days later, a memo written by Senate Aide David Sullivan attributed the most sensitive figures to a series of articles in the New York City Tribune, the Washington Times and other newspapers.

But TIME has been told that the source for at least some of these stories was Sullivan himself. The Senate Republican aide, in other words, had leaked information for articles that he then cited when publishing the classified figures in an attack on the INF treaty.

A month earlier, Michael Pillsbury, an aide to Republican Senator Gordon Humphrey, used similar back-channel methods to influence the Afghanistan peace talks. On a visit to Pakistan, Pillsbury met privately with Maulvi Khalis, the leader of the mujahedin rebels, and reportedly told him that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had signed a "secret protocol" at the rebels' expense. "What Pillsbury did was scandalous," says Under Secretary of State Michael Armacost, who heard the story from Pakistani officials. "If there isn't a law against it, there ought to be."

There are laws against leaking classified information, but they are difficult to enforce. While politically motivated leaks are an old Washington tradition, few people have used the technique as audaciously and with such impunity as Sullivan and Pillsbury. For a decade these two conservatives have moved in and out of the different branches of Government, relying on a network of contacts in the bureaucracies and the press to undermine proposals they disagree with. Both are motivated by deep mistrust of the Soviet Union. Sullivan has been an inveterate opponent of arms-control agreements, while Pillsbury has largely directed his efforts toward support of anti-Soviet guerrilla groups.

Both men have a long history of antagonizing officials with their methods. In 1978, when Sullivan was in the CIA's Office of Strategic Research, he became convinced that the agency was suppressing a study he had written based in part on National Security Agency reports he was not authorized to see. So he gave the document to Richard Perle, then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, later an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration. "The study contained some very sensitive intelligence," recalls former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, who forced Sullivan to resign from the agency. Hardly slowed by the episode, Sullivan moved to Capitol Hill as an aide to Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas.

Pillsbury was ousted from the staff of the Senate Budget Committee in 1978 for criticizing U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield during a meeting with Japanese officials in Tokyo. While holding a high-level job in the Pentagon from 1984 to 1986, he frequently appealed to friends on Capitol Hill when he felt that the Reagan Administration was not sufficiently supportive of anti- Communist movements in Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

Sullivan and his current patron, Helms, oppose the INF agreement because, they say, the Soviets may be hiding a secret arsenal of SS-20 missiles. The Reagan Administration contends that even if this is true, the missiles could never be tested and would quickly become unreliable. Articles comparing Soviet SS-20 figures with much higher, classified Defense Intelligence Agency estimates began showing up in conservative newspapers last winter. Citing these reports, several conservative Senators requested a special closed-door session to resolve the issue before bringing the treaty to the Senate floor for debate.

Sullivan denies being the source of any of the leaks. "The allegation is categorically, simply, flatly not true," he told TIME. Nevertheless, officials on Capitol Hill point to further indiscretions. One states that Sullivan has repeatedly used secret material on arms control in letters written for Helms and other Senators. "He's got a reckless disregard for the proper handling of classified information," says the official. Sullivan says there is no truth to these allegations.

Michael Pillsbury responds to his critics with a spirited defense of congressional oversight. "They continually malign 'renegades' who come up and work for the Senate," he says of Armacost and others in the Administration. "What they are really saying is they don't want a Senate."

But Pillsbury displayed the same penchant for pursuing a private agenda when he was in the Executive Branch. As Deputy Under Secretary for Defense, he was credited by some with initiating the effort to obtain Stinger antiaircraft missiles for the mujahedin. In April 1986, however, Pillsbury lost his job after he was suspected of leaking word to the Washington Post that the Administration had finally approved Stingers for rebels in Afghanistan and Angola. Although Pillsbury denies being the source of the leak, an Administration official familiar with the case says Pillsbury failed three lie-detector tests given by the Defense Investigative Service. "The only thing Pillsbury came out clean about was his name," the official said. Pillsbury says a later FBI polygraph cleared him. But authoritative Administration sources flatly contradict his claim.

Officials say Pillsbury was the suspected source for an April 1986 Washington Post story revealing that a U.S. embassy official arrested and tortured by the Ethiopian government two years earlier had been a CIA agent. The story may have endangered the lives of the CIA officer's Ethiopian contacts.

Pillsbury's final offense was to cross swords with the President. While lobbying for military aid to the Nicaraguan contras, Reagan struck a gentleman's agreement with Democratic Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona that Stingers would not be dispatched to Central America. Opposed to the deal, Pillsbury contacted his conservative Senate backers and, say Administration officials, lobbied against it. When the White House learned of Pillsbury's meddling, he was declared persona non grata; the Pentagon began an investigation of his suspected leaks and he was soon fired.

But like Sullivan, Pillsbury quickly recovered from his breach of faith. Within two months, he was back on the Hill working as an adviser to a group of conservative Senators. No sooner had he settled into his new job, he says, than "phones here all lit up. It was my old friends ((inside the Government)) saying, 'Let's go to lunch. We have so much to tell you.' "

With reporting by Jay Peterzell/Washington