Security Officials Decide That Sex, Nuclear Secrets Are Explosive Mix

The Department of Energy is asking its employees to kiss and tell.

A notice sent out recently requires 67,000 workers cleared to handle defense secrets to tell counterintelligence officers about romantic or sexual liaisons with people from countries thought to be developing nuclear weapons.

Those countries include all former Soviet republics, China, Israel, India, North Korea, Cuba and Taiwan.

Employees also are expected to report friendships or professional relationships with any foreign nationals if they spend “private time” together--even on the Internet--or if they share information about personal or professional lives.

Foreign intelligence agencies sometimes use young women to tease secrets from American scientists during pillow talk or other romantic liaisons, said Ed Curran, counterintelligence chief for the Energy Department.

“This is done on a daily basis today,” Curran, who wrote the Aug. 17 memo, was quoted as saying in a story published Wednesday in the Albuquerque Journal.

Top-security workers don’t have to report onetime sexual contacts with foreign nationals from listed countries if their sex partners are not prying for classified information.

Curran lamented that “common sense doesn’t prevail” at the labs, and he said that in the past there had been almost no control “over who was talking to whom.”

Similar reporting policies are in place at the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense.