An ‘Environmental’ Disaster: Clinton Insecurity Policies Are Creating Conditions That Invite Intelligence Fiascos

This is the sixth in a series of
Center for Security Policy Transition
Briefs intended to
identify critical, looming challenges
to U.S. national interests. The
Center believes that these issues
must be given immediate
attention by President Clinton’s new
national security team and by the
Congress that will be asked to
confirm his senior appointees and
oversee their activities.

(Washington, D.C.): The cascading
revelations that a senior U.S.
intelligence officer is alleged to have
engaged in acts of espionage for Moscow
put into sharp focus for the second
time in a week the dangerous
information and personnel security
environment created by the Clinton
Administration. Just last Thursday, the Washington
Times reported that the Assistant
Secretary of State responsible for
intelligence matters, Toby Gati, and her
husband, Charles, are being investigated
by the State Department Inspector
General. The inquiry is said to be
focused on their alleged unauthorized
sharing of intelligence information with
foreign nationals (including the
Russian Foreign Minister and individuals
associated with Hungarian intelligence).

Now, Harold Nicholson

Within days, the FBI arrested Harold
James Nicholson, a career employee of the
Central Intelligence Agency whose career
involved several stints as the chief of
important Agency stations in Asia and
Europe and responsibility for training
new covert agents. These positions
enabled him to have access to a variety
of secrets of great interest to the
Russians, in particular concerning U.S.
human intelligence assets and operations.
He has been charged with the unauthorized
sharing of such intelligence information
with foreign nationals (notably,
agents of the former KGB which has,
incidentally, long exercised considerable
influence over Hungarian intelligence and
which serves (at least selectively) the
Russian Foreign Ministry.

Arguably, the most extraordinary
aspect of these two developments is the
fact that, while Mr. Nicholson is
in jail at this writing, Mrs. Gati
continues to work at the highest levels
of the Department of State! In
fact, as State Department spokesman Glyn
Davies put it on 14 November 1996, the
day the Washington Times broke
the Gati story: “Mrs. Gati
remains a valued and important member of
the secretary’s foreign policy team…[who]
continues to perform her functions with
all of the clearances and authorizations
and permissions that she needs to serve
as the Secretary of State’s advisor on
intelligence matters.”

These scandalous developments prompt
two observations: First, the
kid-glove treatment being granted Clinton
political appointee Gati is clearly wrong.
And second, it is but the latest
evidence of the contempt this
Administration has repeatedly shown for
the most rudimentary procedures required
to protect U.S. classified information.
The predictable — and predicted —
result has been: to make a sieve of some
American intelligence operations; to
complicate enormously the task of
counter-intelligence personnel; and
perhaps even to invite acts of
“intelligence-sharing” like
that of which Harold Nicholson stands
accused.

The Bottom Line

To be sure, some will argue that the
fact that Nicholson was arrested is
evidence of improvements in American
counter-intelligence since the disastrous
Aldrich Ames affair. Unfortunately, it
remains to be determined just how long
the accused agent may have been spying
and with what cumulative effect href=”96-T116.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾;
as a result many horses may have been let
out of the barn long before it was
closed. What is more, even if someone
like Nicholson were apprehended
immediately after he first turned over to
the Russians names of U.S. covert agents,
businessmen who passed on valuable
information or trainees bound for
overseas assignments, the damage to
American intelligence might still have
been appreciable.

More to the point, these
improvements seem clearly insufficient to
overcome the effects of the environment
of intelligence insecurity
fostered by Clinton Administration
officials, an environment in which the
sharing of American intelligence and the
thoughtless declassification of sensitive
information have become the norm.
Indeed, some like Tobi Gati and Madeline
Albright⁽²⁾
seem to regard such benighted steps as an
act of U.S. noblesse oblige required
to advance an “aggressive
multilateralist” agenda.

The Gati and Nicholson affairs
demonstrate anew that U.S.
intelligence remains a target of
penetration by foreign intelligence
services. As a result, the new
Clinton Cabinet — and the Congress that
will consider their nominations and
oversee their actions in office — must
give utmost priority to ferreting out
such penetration and making it vastly
more difficult in the future. At the
very least, relevant congressional
committees must promptly hold hearings to
determine the myriad ways in which the
first Clinton Administration’s policies
have contributed to the present,
disastrous intelligence environment and
to institute measures needed to prevent
still worse damage down the road.

– 30 –

1. An article in
yesterday’s Washington Times
entitled “Officials Fear Nicholson
May Have Betrayed U.S. Earlier,”
notes that “some CIA officials
suspect Harold James Nicholson began
spying for the Russians while he was the
agency’s station chief in Romania — several
years earlier than first believed….If
the spying began during that posting,
from 1990 to 1992, the damage
could be considerably greater
than the CIA’s initial assessment.”
(Emphasis added.)

2. See the
Center’s Transition Brief
entitled Secretary
‘Halfbright’? Hard Questions For
Madeleine Albright, Her Promoters
(No. 96-D 114,
14 November 1996).