Report Faults State Department for Lax Security

State Department security officials failed to sweep scores of rooms for bugging devices and repeatedly failed to account for highly classified documents, according to an audit by the department’s inspector general.

The inspector general said lax security procedures plagued the department’s handling of “sensitive compartmented information,” or SCI, the government’s most sensitive intelligence reports. The report said 140 offices handling those materials had never been swept for listening devices.

The report said that 239 of 1,890 SCI reports distributed from the super-secret National Security Agency’s Cryptological Support Group had not been returned to the group’s secure facility inside the State Department between August and October 1998.

“The department is substantially not in compliance with the director of central intelligence’s directives that govern the handling of SCI,” the inspector general, Jacqueline Williams-Bridger, said in the report.

The report, completed in September but kept largely confidential, was ordered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1998 after an earlier seventh-floor security breach. That year, a man strolled into the executive secretary’s office and helped himself to classified briefing materials.