Albright Lashes Out at Staff for Security Lapses

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chastised her headquarters staff and the entire U.S. diplomatic corps Wednesday for a recent rash of security scandals in a tongue-lashing beamed to American diplomats around the globe.

Albright said that she was both humiliated and infuriated by the series of security breaches, including the disappearance earlier this year of a laptop computer containing top-secret data. Some staff members said, however, that the secretary’s top aides are partly to blame.

“I don’t care how skilled you are as a diplomat, how brilliant you may be at meetings or how creative you are as an administrator. If you are not professional about security, you are a failure,” Albright warned the 22,000-member department in a first-ever “town meeting” devoted to security.

But some of those who attended the hourlong session fired back, complaining that Albright’s own aides and other Clinton administration appointees regularly shrug off security rules and regulations. Several cited a culture in which, they said, whistle-blowers face reprisals, violations are ignored and few are held accountable.

“I’ve had political appointees who say, ‘The rules don’t apply to me,’ ” said Cari Eggspuehler, who has helped teach computer security to hundreds of ambassadors, consular officers and other senior diplomats over the last two years.

Albright’s scolding appeared aimed, in part, at blunting mounting criticism in Congress. The House International Relations Committee has scheduled hearings on May 11 on the security lapses. Albright has been invited to testify but has yet to respond, a committee spokeswoman said. The House Intelligence Committee also plans hearings.

Lawmakers have sharply criticized Albright for the still unexplained disappearance of a Dell laptop computer that contained thousands of pages of top-secret data about arms negotiations, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and intelligence sources and methods. Some of the files had “code word” classification, which is higher than top secret.

The laptop vanished from a supposedly secure conference room on Jan. 20 after the door was propped open, officials said, but the State Department did not notify the CIA or the FBI until late March. A senior State Department official said Wednesday that the Diplomatic Security Service and the FBI are interviewing everyone with access to the room, including the cleaning staff and contractors. He said that espionage has not been confirmed.

“It could have been stolen, it could have been misplaced, it could have been taken home” by someone who didn’t realize that it held classified material and now is afraid to return it, he said.

As fallout from the investigation, Albright last month temporarily reassigned two senior supervisors from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and stripped the bureau of its security responsibilities.

The incident came after the discovery last year of a sophisticated Russian eavesdropping device in the molding of a top-floor conference room used by senior diplomats. A Russian Embassy diplomat was expelled in December after he was arrested while monitoring transmissions from the “bug.” The FBI has yet to determine when it was placed or by whom.

That case followed a 1998 incident in which a well-dressed man entered an office six doors down from Albright’s suite and--despite the presence of two secretaries--picked up and walked out with sheaves of classified documents. The man was never identified and the documents were not recovered.

An audit by the State Department’s inspector general last year said that lax security plagued the handling of “sensitive compartmented information,” the government’s most sensitive intelligence reports. The department repeatedly failed to account for highly classified documents, the report warned.

“Security is a joke here,” a mid-level State Department official, who asked not to be identified, said in an interview. The official said that he recently found documents stamped “top secret,” including CIA materials, improperly mixed with unclassified material.

“The Gap makes sure a buzzer goes off if you try to walk out with a pair of jeans,” he added. “But nothing stops you from walking out of the State Department with a laptop.”

Several staff members confronted Albright in the auditorium to complain that rules on classification of documents are vague, that security procedures are often ignored and that discipline is rarely enforced. “It’s hard to hold anyone accountable,” one official told Albright.

Eggspuehler, who heads the computer security awareness program, was the most outspoken. She told Albright that “our upper-level management” routinely flaunts regulations to protect classified materials on computers. “They say, ‘This is not my problem,’ ” she said.

Albright appeared nonplused. “I think maybe some of the senior people are embarrassed” to seek help with computers, she replied. “It’s a generation problem, I can assure you,” she said to laughter.

But Eggspuehler stood her ground. “If they’re not held accountable, why do we do what we do?” she asked.

In a later interview, she said that security “is constantly an uphill battle” at the State Department. “I have yet to see anyone held accountable for flagrant disregard of security,” she said.

The State Department has enhanced physical security at home and abroad since the terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Concrete barriers and other obstacles now ring the once-open headquarters complex, for example, and locked doors now block many of the maze-like corridors in the block-long building.

In her remarks Wednesday, Albright said that the department has hired more guards, strengthened computer protection, provided hundreds of security briefings and required escorts for State Department visitors. She added that the FBI, CIA, Secret Service and Pentagon are helping review the department’s security practices.

“I will be frank and say that some of these reforms have been resisted,” she said. She urged staff members to watch one another and report any violations. “This is one area where we must each be our neighbor’s keeper,” she said.

“Forget that the Cold War ended,” she added. “Spy novelists may have trouble thinking up plots but our nation still has enemies, our secrets still need protecting. And the threats we face are more varied and less predictable than ever.”

Hundreds of diplomats and other staff members packed the Dean Acheson auditorium to hear Albright, while others gathered in hallways, offices and the cafeteria to watch her speech on closed-circuit television.