Leaked Secrets at Justice Raise Troubling Issues

Four years ago, a senior Justice Department official quietly acknowledged to the department that he had revealed secrets about a New York City anti-terrorism operation to the authors of an upcoming book.

Despite an in-house call that the official should be disciplined, he escaped formal punishment.

But now, amid stepped-up concerns about how the government protects its secrets, the case of Richard Scruggs is drawing new scrutiny because of some troubling questions.

First, did the Justice Department go easy on Scruggs, a friend of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno from her days as a prosecutor in Florida? And perhaps just as worrisome, did Justice Department officials mislead U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth--head of one of the nation’s most powerful and secretive courts--by not disclosing their findings to him?

The material that was leaked in a book and an abridged magazine article detailed how federal authorities spied on a group of Japanese cultists in New York City who were suspected of possible terrorist links. The officials acted under authorization of the top-secret court, established by the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978.

‘More Than an Ordinary Leak’

“This was more than an ordinary leak,” said John L. Martin, who headed the Justice Department espionage investigations unit at the time. “This was a horribly egregious offense, and it goes to the very heart and essence of how you operate in combating terrorism and how you handle secret information.”

By allowing such secrets to become public, “you’re giving the playbook to the other side,” he added.

Such issues have taken on newfound resonance in recent months because of the cases of two other federal employees who allegedly compromised government secrets: Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear scientist charged with downloading massive amounts of classified data onto an unsecured computer, and former CIA Director John M. Deutch, who used several unprotected home computers to write confidential memos to President Clinton and for other highly classified work.

Key Differences in Cases Seen

Some officials see key differences in the Lee, Deutch and Scruggs cases. But others believe that all three train a troubling spotlight not only on how the government protects classified information but also on how it investigates and punishes such cases.

Sometimes that is very differently.

In Lee’s case, the Taiwanese-born scientist sits in a jail cell in New Mexico, awaiting trial on a 59-count felony indictment for allegedly mishandling classified information.

In Deutch’s case, the Justice Department declined to prosecute the former CIA director, but he was forced to give up his security clearances and has been publicly upbraided by members of Congress. On Thursday, the Justice Department said that it is reexamining his case.

But the Scruggs case has remained largely under wraps. Scruggs said that he was simply told he had used “bad judgment” in discussing a secret U.S. anti-terrorism operation, and he remains a top federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.

“I don’t know how you square this with actions taken in the case of Wen Ho Lee and Deutch,” said a former Clinton administration official who was close to the investigation of the leak. “This was highly classified information.”

At the center of the Scruggs case is a book called “Main Justice,” published in 1996. Written by journalists Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, it details the inner workings of the Justice Department.

The book, along with a shortened adaptation published in the Washington Post Magazine a few months earlier, focused in part on the increased use of secret wiretaps by federal authorities. These wiretaps were authorized by the secret court headed by Lamberth. Meeting in secret, it has the power to permit federal prosecutors and FBI agents to sidestep normal constitutional protections when they undertake wiretaps, surveillance and searches against suspected terrorists or agents of a hostile foreign government.

McGee and Duffy disclosed in the book and the magazine article that, in the wake of a deadly sarin gas attack in 1995 on a Japanese subway, U.S. authorities sought and secured authorization from the secret court to bug and search the apartments of New York City residents who were members of the same Japanese religious group thought to have staged the gas attack on the subway.

There was no evidence that Aum Supreme Truth cult members in New York had done anything illegal, McGee and Duffy wrote, but federal authorities were worried about the threat of an attack in the United States. So sensitive was the surveillance operation against the cult members that, five years later, most U.S. officials familiar with it still refuse to discuss it.

Scruggs, formerly head of the Justice Department’s office of intelligence policy, acknowledged in an interview that he assisted the authors as they were preparing their book. He said that he spoke with McGee about the surveillance of Aum Supreme Truth members in New York and how federal authorities handled it.

But he insisted that he was not the original source of the leak and that, in disclosing details of the incident to McGee and Duffy, he was only trying to “correct misperceptions that [they] had.”

In investigating the workings of the Justice Department’s intelligence operations, the authors were under the mistaken impression that “we sat on things and didn’t do anything,” Scruggs said, and he found that “troubling,” so he corrected it.

Scruggs said that, before the article or book was published, he reported his dealings with McGee to a fellow Justice Department official. He was later given a letter criticizing his “bad judgment” in the matter, he said. He refused to release the letter.

“It was not a reprimand. As far as I’m concerned, it is settled,” Scruggs said. “Nobody knew anything until I told them.”

Justice Refuses to Discuss Case

The Justice Department refused to discuss any aspect of the case, citing privacy restrictions governing personnel matters. But sources at the department disputed Scruggs’ account, saying that he admitted having divulged information only after a departmental inquiry cast suspicion on his role.

In fact, one official who asked not to be identified said that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommended harsh sanctions against Scruggs. But that recommendation apparently was rejected, based in part on the belief that Scruggs’ long record of strong service should mitigate any offense, sources said. Reno recused herself from the case because of her friendship with Scruggs, this official said.

Suspicions over who leaked the secret information generated debate at the top levels of the Justice Department, the FBI and the federal judiciary.

“Where [the information] came from I have no idea,” said James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI’s New York office at the time of the Aum Supreme Truth operation. “But what everybody was upset about was the fact that the process may have been compromised.”

As in the Deutch and Lee cases, government officials said they were unable to pinpoint any damage actually caused by the breach. But the potential was there, said Martin, the former counterespionage chief, who was not involved in any review of Scruggs’ role in the matter.

Martin said that, if he were a member of Aum Supreme Truth at the time the information was published, he would have made sure to comb his office for bugs, change his phone lines, move from his apartment and “do everything I had to do to counter the measures I’d read about.”

At the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act Court, headed by Judge Lamberth since 1995, the judges were equally concerned.

Lamberth recalled in an interview that he was shocked when he first saw in the McGee-Duffy book what were purported to be details on the secret workings of his court. It marked “an apparent breach. . . . It was obvious that someone from inside [the Justice Department or the FBI] had to be giving out classified information. I didn’t understand that.”

Troubled, Lamberth said that he contacted the Justice Department to find out what had happened. He never heard anything back, he said, and “as far as I know, they were never able to determine the source.”

If Justice Department officials did in fact determine the possible source without taking proper action--or without telling the court--”that would be troubling,” he said. “Just philosophically, I think when you identify someone who has been improperly leaking protected material, you’ve got to deal with it.”