Another Casualty of the Information Age: Secrets

CIA director George J. Tenet insists that the cases of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee and former CIA chief John M. Deutch, both of whom were caught with highly sensitive government secrets in their nonsecure computers, are not parallel.

Perhaps so, but the two examples of officials mishandling classified documents illustrate a larger problem: the increasing difficulty government faces in trying to keep secrets in the computer age. One big reason is that large amounts of data can now be stored on small tapes, Zip disks, floppy disks and cards. The technology has created a nightmare for security and counterintelligence mavens, because in trying to protect secrets, they face a new element: portability.

In the old days, a spy could perhaps stuff a document or two under his shirt and hope to walk out of the CIA or the Pentagon without being caught. Now the same employee may be able to slip a tape or disk in his pocket containing literally thousands of top-secret documents. Or more boldly, he or she may download secrets onto a laptop and stroll out with a cheery wave to the security guard.

Lee, the Taiwan-born Los Alamos nuclear scientist, was indicted in December, arrested, jailed and charged with transferring classified files into his unclassified computer and downloading critical nuclear secrets onto tapes, seven of which prosecutors claim are missing. The government has not charged Lee with espionage, but it says he removed secrets “with the intent to injure the United States” and to help “a foreign power.” Lee first came under investigation when the CIA learned that China had acquired secrets of the W-88, the nation’s smallest nuclear warhead, which arms the missiles carried by Trident submarines. He has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer says he has been singled out because he is a Chinese American.

When Tenet testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, he said that Deutch, his former boss at the CIA, had no “intent to do harm to the United States.” Deutch, who lost his CIA security clearance, got off with a slap on the wrist from Tenet, and the handling of his case clearly showed that the old-boy network at CIA is alive and well. The agency sat on the affair for more than a year before it got around to mentioning it to the Justice Department, which has decided not to prosecute the former director. Even though the cases may be different, as Tenet has contended, Deutch’s transgression has caused vast embarrassment for the prosecutors in the Lee case and has delighted his defense attorneys.

The Deutch fiasco is another blow to the CIA, an agency seemingly never free of self-inflicted wounds. One can hear Tenet complaining to Deutch, in the immortal words of Oliver Hardy to Stan Laurel: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Deutch, who is teaching chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first came under investigation late in 1996, as he was leaving the CIA after a year and a half as director. According to a classified report of the agency’s inspector general, portions of which were leaked to the press, Deutch had put on computers in his home the most sensitive documents he had worked on while director. Among the 17,000 pages of classified documents were top-secret files, and others classified even higher with code words that are themselves secret. The documents included data about covert operations, as well as voluminous diaries of Deutch’s daily activities in the government. Because Deutch’s home computers were connected to the Internet, his files were vulnerable to theft by electronic intruders.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the case is that Deutch is reported to have used unclassified Macintosh computers throughout his tenure at CIA because he feared that other CIA officials would read what he was writing. The director of the CIA, in other words, was worried about his own colleagues looking over his shoulder. Presumably, a CIA director would also be concerned about Russian spies gaining access to his secrets.

When Deutch was leaving the CIA, he asked to keep his CIA-owned computers and was told he could do so if he continued to work for the agency as a consultant. Deutch then arranged a no-fee contract with the CIA that allowed him to keep the computers. When an agency security official went to Deutch’s home to check the computers, he found the classified documents. Deutch then began deleting files from his computer, as Lee had done at Los Alamos.

CIA security sleuths tried to find four portable computer cards that contained some of the files from Deutch’s computers. The cards turned up in the safe of Michael O’Neill, then the agency’s general counsel and a veteran congressional intelligence staffer. According to the inspector general’s report, O’Neill initially refused to surrender the cards, holding them in his safe for about three weeks. Last August, Tenet suspended Deutch’s CIA security clearance, although, as it later developed, Deutch held on to his clearances at the Pentagon, where he had been deputy secretary of defense earlier in the Clinton administration. Last Tuesday, Deutch asked the Pentagon to revoke those clearances.

With nuclear and CIA secrets floating around on tapes and disks, the government today faces a daunting task to protect its classified documents. The Aldrich H. Ames case provided a dramatic example of the problem. The computers in the CIA’s directorate of operations, where the spies work, have no floppy drives, the idea being that DO employees cannot just download classified documents onto a disk. In 1991, Ames, already under investigation as a Russian spy inside the CIA, was transferred to the CIA’s Counternarcotics Center, where the computers did have floppy drives. To his delight, Ames discovered he could tap into the DO computers through a local-area network and download secrets. Ames, who was paid or promised $4.6 million by the KGB and its successor, the SVR, downloaded 300 to 400 documents, secret DO cables from all over the world, onto three floppy disks.

Cyberspace presents other problems for the keepers of secrets. Last October, officials acknowledged that hackers had broken into Pentagon computers and stolen sensitive data. “The intrusions appear to have originate in Russia,” FBI agent Michael A. Vatis testified to a Senate panel. One teenage hacker managed to alter Web sites used by NATO and Vice President Al Gore, among others. Even the FBI had to take down its Web site for a time last year after a hacker attack.

The government classifies far too many secrets. Wielding a classification stamp makes bureaucrats feel important, and stamping a document SECRET may be the only way to get one’s boss to read it. The same government officials who complain about leaks of secrets to the press often, when they leave government, turn around and sell them to us between hard covers in their memoirs. As the latest incidents suggest, secrets these days may not even hold that long.