By Paul Redmond
Wall Street Journal, Friday, June 23, 2000
Here we go again, with another vintage American uproar over a security flap. It Is not yet clear whether the recent case of the two lost-and-found hard drives at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is merely one of poor security and malfeasance, or one of espionage–or even some obscure combination of both.
What is clear from the politicians’ reactions, as well as in the resultant media coverage, is that we are witnessing, yet again, the standard, high-decibel Beltway outrage over the poor protection of our national security secrets.
The uproar is justifiable. The recurrence of these events isn’t. In fact, it is incomprehensible.
Learn From Experience
Why do we not learn from experience? The history of this country is chock-full of damaging spy cases. There were the so-called atomic spies, personified by the Rosenbergs. Many other spies are mentioned in the National Security Agency’s decryption of Soviet intelligence messages.
This data, known as the “Venona” material, reveals two striking facts. At one point during his tenure as President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, there was no one in Henry Morganthau’s immediate entourage who wasn’t working as a Soviet spy. And had Henry Wallace, not Truman, become president on Roosevelt’s death, he might have appointed Lawrence Duggan, a Soviet agent, as Secretary of state.
During the Cold War, there were dozens of important spy cases:
- Jack Dunlap,
- William Martin and Bernon Mitchell at NSA;
- the Walker family, who compromised U.S. naval communications to the KGB;
- the Szabo-Conrad ring In the U.S. Army’s V Corps that sold U.S. military plans as well as details of our capabilities in Germany to the Soviets, via the Hungarians;
- Aldrich Ames, who betrayed all of the Central Intelligence Agency’s principal Soviet human intelligence sources; and
- Steven Lalas, a State Department communications officer who spied for Greece, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally.
.
Spies have been uncovered in every agency Involved in U.S. national security, as well as in all branches of the military except the Coast Guard. At least one member of Congress is known to have been a spy, and many major defense contractors have been penetrated.
Since 1975 alone, there have been more than 75 noteworthy spy cases. During the late 1980s, about 50 countries were known to be trying to steal our secrets, many with success. This list Includes not only the usual suspects such as Russia, Cuba and China. It also comprises France and Israel, two allies; South Korea, a state that depends on the U.S. for Its very existence; and one country with a per capita gross national product of about $300 (I can’t tell you which one; that’s classified).
This catalog shows we are fair game, even easy prey, for the world’s spies. Nonetheless, we persist in ignoring the facts and indulge in a willful disdain for the requirements of counterintelligence and security. This phenomenon is a function of American history and culture.
Not since the War of 1812 has the U.S. been seriously invaded. Given our friendly neighbors to the north and south, we have enjoyed a comfortable terrestrial margin of national security. Except in times of war, we assume a casual, complacent attitude toward the imperatives of national security, which include protecting our secrets. We see ourselves as an open society, and the effects of this attitude include a strong’ distaste for espionage and secrets.
After he closed down the State Department’s code-breaking office in 1929, Henry Stimson, Hoover’s secretary of state, declared loftily that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
In 1936, William Bullitt, President Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow, wrote in a telegram to Washington that: “We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union. There is no weapon at once so disarming and effective in a relationship with the Communists as sheer honesty.” (By then, Bolshevik espionage organizations had been operating in the U.S. for about 15 years.)
But we needn’t go that far back time for examples of aversion to espionage. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been quoted as saying “secrets are for losers.”
One director of the CIA tried, during the middle of the Cold War, to stop an espionage operation because he didn’t believe that a particular foreign official should spy for us–apparently because he was a senior military officer and, presumably, a gentleman.
In the 1990s, the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency once demanded that we apologize to Moscow for a CIA attempt to recruit a Russian military intelligence officer as a source.
The U.S. is the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council that doesn’t view espionage as a valid, fully justifiable, and effective means of protecting and furthering its national Interest. This antipathy to espionage leads Americans to ignore the reality that other countries routinely engage in spying because it is in their interest to do so.
This national capacity for naïveté has caused us to let down our guard all too often in peacetime. In 1920 the War Department closed down the counterespionage service. Why? Since World War I was over, the Germans were no longer a problem; the threat from “Red agitators” in the military could be dealt with “through the vigilance of noncommissioned officers.”
We have dropped our guard once again since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Defense Intelligence Agency actually issued “no-escort” passes allowing known Russian military intelligence officers to traipse around the Pentagon.
President Clinton’s prior energy secretary, Hazel O’Leary, changed the name of the Department of Energy’s “Classification Office” to the “Declassification Office.” To eliminate the appearance of discrimination among employees, Ms. O’Leary also required that security access badges at the nuclear weapons laboratories be of uniform color, regardless of the employee’s level of security clearance.
This compounds an already severe problem: Security and counterintelligence at Energy Department labs constitute a very hard sell because scientists there tend to view such apparently mundane requirements with disdain. They are motivated by a sincere faith in the need for the free flow of Information and ideas. Such faith is laudable, but when it isn’t balanced with reasonable security, it can lead to disaster. Ms. O’Leary seemed to nourish this disregard for security, creating fertile ground for incidents such as that of the lost hard drives at Los Alamos.
No ‘Gentlemen Out Here
These fallings reveal once again our inability to tolerate the exigencies of security and counterintelligence in peacetime. This luxury will surely turn sour. Someday, the actions of a spy will ground us grievously again. There are no “gentlemen” out there, even when the world isn’t at war. But we continue to believe in gentlemen and openness. This is a function of American culture and experience, made all the worse at this point in history by our self-indulgence as the dominant world power.
Mr. Redmond, who retired in 1998, is a former head of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency.