CLINTON’S NATIONAL INSECURITY POLICIES ARE A TICKING TIME-BOMB

(Washington, D.C.): There is a ticking
time-bomb — one that may well explode on
the watch of the next President of the
United States. While it is difficult to
say with certainty at this point
precisely where and with what impact the
Clinton Administration’s systematic
disregard for the most basic personnel,
physical and information security
practices will manifest itself,
one thing seems certain: Someone,
somewhere will seek to take advantage of
these self-inflicted vulnerabilities to
do grave harm to the Nation’s interests.

The following are among the alarming
vulnerabilities gleaned from press
reports, congressional inquiries and
comments by knowledgeable — and deeply
concerned — former and current
government officials:

Dumming Down the Clearance
Process

The Clinton Administration has
repeatedly abused the security clearance
process. It has ignored, circumvented
and, in some cases at least, corrupted
the traditional standards for evaluating
the potential risk posed by entrusting
White House and other senior political
appointees with sensitive information.
As a result, individuals with histories
of serious drug and/or alcohol
abuse, tax evasion and other financial
improprieties and sexual behavior that
could make them targets for blackmail or
coercion were nonetheless given security
clearances.

In fact, the problem of clearing
Clinton political appointees with
acknowledged records of hard drug abuse
became so egregious that the test was
changed from one of no use in the
preceding five years to just no use in
the prior year. At one point, the idea
was even floated of making the drug-free
period as short as 90-days! Even
the individual in charge of White House
Security, Craig Livingstone, had
difficulty obtaining a security clearance
due to his own record of recent drug use.

Access to Secret
Information Granted to Personnel Without
Clearances

Clinton appointees have also been
allowed to work in sensitive areas
without clearances. In the first years of
this Administration, substantial numbers
of senior personnel were permitted to
work for extended periods of time in the
Executive Mansion complex — arguably,
the highest priority target in the
country from an information security
point of view — without clearances.
At least some of these personnel
were exposed to classified information.

Sometimes such exposure occurred
because of stupifyingly lax procedures
concerning physical security of sensitive
documents. In other instances, it arose
as briefings were given to people who
were said to have been cleared but were
not. (At one point, the Department of
Defense felt compelled to warn its
contractors that White House personnel
seeking briefings should not be assumed
to have the requisite clearances.) In
still other instances, exposure could
have occurred as the result of the
President’s cronies and consultants being
given White House passes and/or via their
participation in freewheeling political
strategy sessions.

A case in point would appear to be Dick
Morris. White House
damage-control operatives tried to
preempt concerns that Mr. Clinton’s
Svengali may have compromised national
security secrets by declaring that he did
not have a security clearance.
Unfortunately, that does not ensure that
he was excluded from all conversations in
which such secrets were discussed.
Indeed, given his central role in the
President’s decision-making over the past
two years, it strains credulity that he
would have been altogether excluded, for
example, from such politically sensitive
discussions as: planning for U.S.
peacekeeping operations for Bosnia;
military options for responding to Saddam
Hussein’s predations; and the handling of
the crisis in the Taiwan Strait earlier
this year. If Mr. Morris was privy to
these discussions, inquiring minds want
to know: Was his prostitute also
informally “read in”?

‘What, Me Worry’ About
COMSEC?

Senior Clinton Administration
officials have also displayed a chronic
disregard for the most basic principles
of information security. White House
aides have been repeatedly warned about
the vulnerability of cellular phone
communications to interception, to little
avail. And sensitive conversations — for
instance, about U.S. negotiating
strategies — are frequently held in
hotel rooms in places like Moscow despite
the virtual certainty that such sites are
bugged. As the former KGB and other
hostile intelligence services have only
redoubled their COMINT activities in the
post-Cold War world, these practices
virtually assure undesirable compromises
of American secrets.

Giving Away U.S. Secrets

Matters are made worse by the
Administration’s insistence on actively
sharing sensitive U.S. intelligence with
foreign governments and nationals.
Particularly vexing is the practice of
passing secret information to
multinational organizations known to be
riddled with spies. Some of these
organizations, notably like the United
Nations, have categorically rejected
standard requests for assurances that
such material would be properly
safeguarded. In Somalia, only the
serendipitous last-look of an American
official prevented boxes of classified
information entrusted to the UN
peacekeeping mission from falling into
the hands of local war lords.

The Administration’s insistence on
sharing U.S. intelligence is routinely
jeopardizes sources and methods of
collecting such intelligence — some of
which, notably human agents, may be
effectively irreplaceable. It also
greatly complicates the task of
counter-intelligence by making
problematic efforts to keep track of what
information is being transferred to whom
and on what authority.

Declassifying with Abandon

Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary has
been a prime mover in the Clinton
Administration’s attack on sound security
practices with her campaign to equate the
protection of the Nation’s vital secrets
with “repression.” Secretary
O’Leary’s insistence on declassifying
vast quantities of heretofore classified
nuclear weapons-related information has
virtually assured that nations and
subnational groups are garnering an
undesirably enhanced understanding of
U.S. designs, developmental experiences,
capabilities and vulnerabilities.
At one point, deadlines arbitrarily
imposed by the Secretary obliged security
personnel to declassify documents by the
box-full rather than evaluate each one
page-by-page.

The Administration’s eagerness to be
“transparent” when it comes to
revealing sensitive nuclear weapons and
other classified information is all the
more bizarre in light of its insistence
on classifying materials that are
politically inconvenient but not
necessarily national security secrets
(e.g., its dealings on: missile
defense-related arms control with the
Russians, on technology transfers to the
Chinese and on Iranian arms shipments to
the Croats and Bosnian Muslims).

What did John Huang Know…

Most recently, the publicity
concerning the tenure of a long-time
employee of an Indonesian company with
close ties to China in a senior Clinton
Commerce Department job brought to the
fore the fact that, in such a position, John
Huang enjoyed access to sensitive U.S.
intelligence and trade secrets.
Congressional and other interest in what,
if any, “quid pro quos” were
entailed in the Administration’s
Indonesian connection begs a key
question: Information available to Mr.
Huang in his capacity as a Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Commerce
responsible for international trade would
have been of inestimable value to other
nations’ commercial and military sectors;
was any of it passed along?

The Bottom Line

It may be some time before the
chickens loosed by the Clinton
Administration’s abysmal standards of
conduct with respect to security come
home to roost. There should be
little doubt that at least some
will do so, however — with
potentially devastating consequences for
U.S. interests. After all, even if one
attributes the Clinton team’s behavior to
nothing more sinister than amateurish
incompetence, there are many
potential adversaries around the world
able and willing to exploit the
opportunities thus presented for
penetrating, influencing or otherwise
compromising American policy-making and
intelligence-collection apparatuses.

Unfortunately, even without such
opportunities, it is probably the case
that U.S. secrets are at grave risk of
unauthorized disclosure. As was noted at
a conference convened a few weeks ago
under the sponsorship of the Central
Intelligence Agency href=”96-D103.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
to consider the Venona Project
— the legendary American code-breaking
operation that helped uncover the Soviet
Union’s wartime and post-World War II
espionage operations — only a
handful of the more than one hundred
Soviet spies then working in the U.S.
government were ever unmasked. It
is only reasonable to suspect that those
who went undetected were able to recruit
and place successors.

If the potential repercussions of the
Clinton Administration’s insecurity
policies were not enough cause for
concern, the prospect that there may by
now be third and fourth generation moles
burrowed into the United States
government should compel a fresh look at
the flippant testimony provided to the
House of Representatives in 1994 by Patsy
Thomasson in her capacity as
director of the White House Office of
Administration⁽²⁾:
“We don’t think we have any Aldrich
Ameses at the White House. But we
certainly could.”

If units of the U.S. military were
conducting their activities with such
disregard, not to say contempt, for the
first principles of personnel,
information and physical security, there
would be courts-martials all around. The
Clinton Administration must be held to no
less stringent a standard of
accountability — in the interest of
mitigating the damage that may yet occur,
if not of undoing that which has already
been inflicted.

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1. The fact that
the CIA would sponsor a conference in
which convicted Soviet spies, their
lawyers, offspring and supporters were
given a platform to denounce the Venona
Project and its astounding
accomplishments is but one indication of
the unhealthy politicization of the
Agency. For others, see
Before U.S. Intelligence Can be Reformed,
the Clinton Administration Must Stop
Deforming It ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_44″>No. 96-D 44, 6 May
1996) and Chairman Hyde
Sounds an Urgent Warning About the Need
to Strengthen, Depoliticize U.S.
Intelligence ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-P_06″>No. 96-P 6, 22
January 1996).

2. Interestingly,
Ms. Thomasson served in that sensitive
position for thirteen months
without a security clearance.