Spy Cases Under Study in Effort to Guard Secrets

U.S. intelligence agencies, reeling from security lapses revealed in an unprecedented series of espionage trials, have begun a review of at least eight spy cases in a major effort to remedy admitted “serious problems” in their counterintelligence strategies, government sources said this weekend.

The review, which sources said began late last year, will examine the cases as a whole to determine how a parade of foreign agents penetrated U.S. security measures with such apparent ease and why those spies escaped detection for so long.

Agencies involved include the CIA, the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Naval Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

As part of the study, the CIA also began a long-delayed “estimate” of American counterintelligence abilities and needs similar to the agency’s periodic estimates of U.S. espionage requirements.

Years of Complaints

The reviews appear aimed at addressing years of complaints, from inside and outside the community of intelligence officials, that the United States has moved too slowly to catch foreign agents and to limit access to classified information.

“I think there’s a recognition now that we have serious counterintelligence problems,” one official said. “It only depends on how you treat it--agency by agency, or on a more comprehensive basis.”

Some U.S. intelligence officials are said to have resisted a comprehensive look at the problems, arguing that they have already repaired most flaws in their counterspy and security operations. Some argued that an overall review of the spy cases would do little more than reopen old wounds.

“You’re dealing with large bureaucracies that resist finger-pointing as a matter of course,” one official familiar with the review said.

Other opponents have long warned that strengthened counterintelligence and domestic security programs could one day lead to curbs on ordinary Americans’ civil liberties and their legitimate access to government information.

But CIA Director William J. Casey, acting in his capacity as chief of all U.S. intelligence operations, nevertheless ordered the review, which began well before he entered the hospital last month for brain surgery.

Pollard Case

Casey was said to have been swayed by the case of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the former civilian intelligence analyst for the Naval Investigative Service who pleaded guilty June 4 to conspiring to deliver defense secrets to Israel.

“The focus of attention has been on this guy spying for our ally, Israel,” one source said. “What’s really significant is the unbridled access he had to top-secret and sensitive compartmented information (SCI) and how he was able to abuse that access.”

Another knowledgeable official said the rapid discovery of Pollard and other unusually devastating spying operations in late 1985 quickly ended years of debate over the need to strengthen U.S. counterespionage abilities.

“The catalyst was the ‘year of the spy,’ ” that official said. “It wasn’t until these glaring cases occurred that there was enough support to initiate reforms.”

The string of espionage scandals that shook the intelligence community began with the cracking of ex-Navy officer John W. Walker’s Soviet spy ring in May, 1985. Walker, his brother Arthur, his son Michael and a friend, Navy radio communications expert Jerry Whitworth, later were found to have played principal roles in an 18-year espionage plot believed to have devastated Navy operations in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Other Spying Charges

The breakup of the Walker ring was followed by a drumbeat of spying charges: Pollard for the Israelis, ex-CIA translator Larry Wu-tai Chin for the Chinese, ex-National Security Agency analyst Ronald W. Pelton and fired CIA agent Edward Lee Howard for the Soviet Union.

Pollard awaits sentencing. Chin committed suicide in his jail cell last February, shortly after being convicted of giving the Chinese access to virtually every top-secret U.S. document on the Far East since the mid-1970s.

Pelton, who compromised a multibillion-dollar NSA electronic eavesdropping program code-named “Ivy Bells,” was sentenced to life in prison last fall.

Howard gave the Soviets a chapter-and-verse lecture on CIA activities and contacts in Moscow, leading to the execution of at least one of the CIA’s prime Soviet contacts. Howard escaped an FBI tail in September, 1985, and fled to the Soviet Union, where he turned up on Moscow television last fall.

Most of the details of those espionage plots themselves are classified, including explanations of how U.S. counterintelligence operations detected most of the agents. So it is not known what failures Casey and others believe may be uncovered through a review of those cases.

Similarities in Incidents

However, a number of the cases contain obvious similarities, led by the ease with which the spies were able to browse unmolested through some of the country’s best-kept secrets. U.S. intelligence officials are known to be distressed by their agencies’ inability to spot “problem employees” who are potentially vulnerable to recruitment by enemy powers.

Information is classified “top secret” if its disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security. Only a small fraction of people with top-secret clearance also have SCI access, which is limited in theory to people with a clear need for information who meet even tougher security standards.

Sensitive compartmented information, among the most secret, includes details of sophisticated technical systems for collecting intelligence and the information these systems produce.

In a sentencing memorandum on Pollard submitted to a federal court here last week, the government said: “Because of the extremely fragile nature of SCI--the compromise of a technical corrections system is much like a loss of a network of agents--strict security criteria have been established for access to SCI.”

Problems of Spies

Yet Pelton was in severe financial distress and filed for bankruptcy while at the National Security Agency, and he became a drug abuser after resigning from the NSA in 1979. Howard admitted to drug and mental problems before leaving the CIA, and Chin was a Las Vegas high-roller during the days that he worked for the CIA at a comparatively modest salary.

Despite those traits, all three men apparently could have continued their spying careers for years more, had they not been turned in by defectors from the Soviet Union and China.

Pollard, who held top-secret and SCI clearances, is reported to have temporarily lost his access in 1981 for exhibiting “bizarre” behavior. Background checks apparently failed to turn up frequent bragging to friends that he was an agent for Israel.

Moreover, sources and court documents attest, Pollard apparently had few problems obtaining access to the most sensitive military data, even when the data fell well outside his area of responsibility.

Limited Need for Data

Pollard was assigned to the Naval Investigative Service’s anti-terrorist alert center in Suitland, Md., where he worked on the Caribbean-continental U.S. desk. His “need to know” was limited to data on terrorist developments in those areas.

Under a practice that one source said has since been altered, Pollard and other intelligence analysts worked under an “honor system” in which they were expected to voluntarily limit their access to information.

Yet Pollard could “routinely access and obtain classified data relating to the Middle East and other geographic areas remote from his assigned area of responsibility,” using access codes that allowed him to view data banks and files totally unrelated to his work, the sentencing memo stated.

By doing just that for about 18 months, the government stated, Pollard compromised more than 1,000 classified documents, most of them detailed analytical studies made up of technical calculations, graphs and satellite photographs.

Pollard has admitted providing his Israeli co-conspirators 17 months of daily cable traffic, including details about U.S. ship positions, aircraft stations, tactics and training operations.