Secretary ‘Halfbright’? Hard Questions For Madeleine Albright, Her Promoters

This is the fifth 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.): One of the most
pressing issues facing the next set of
Clinton national security Cabinet
appointees — and the Congress that will
be asked to confirm them and have to
oversee their activities — must be
correcting this
Presidency’s egregious disregard for the
most basic personnel and information
security procedures. This matter
has long been of grave concern to the
Center for Security Policy href=”96-T115.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
but rarely more than today: According to
this morning’s Washington Times,
the State Department’s senior
intelligence official and her husband are
under investigation for facilitating
foreign intelligence operations against
the United States.

The most important subject of this
investigation is Dr. Tobi Gati,
the Assistant Secretary of State for
Intelligence and Research and a former
executive of the U.N. Association. While
Mrs. Gati brought no prior experience
with intelligence to this position (apart
from some exposure to its products during
a brief and controversial stint on the
Clinton National Security Council), she
did bring to it the one-world
mind-set of her former employer.

The Center for Security Policy raised
alarms last May about Secretary Gati’s
views in connection with a paper warning
of the dangers of the Clinton
Administration’s determination to share
intelligence with the U.N. and other
foreign governments and institutions. In
a Decision Brief
entitled Before U.S.
Intelligence Can Be Reformed, the Clinton
Administration Must Stop Deforming It
(No. 96-D 44, 6
May 1996), the Center recalled that:

“In May 1995, the State
Department’s senior intelligence
official — Assistant Secretary of
State Toby Gati — told Congress that
the United States had to share
intelligence with the U.N. even
when it is not in U.S. interests
to do so. Her reasoning? Doing
so might assure that the United
Nations would be willing to make use
of American secret information when
Washington wanted it to.”

Unfortunately, such bizarre notions
were apparently not confined to Dr.
Gati’s efforts to shape U.S. government
policy about intelligence-sharing. To be
sure, she was a prime-mover href=”96-T115.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
behind Director of Central Intelligence
John Deutch’s reckless directive aimed at
revising “Security Controls on the
Dissemination of Intelligence
Information.” This directive turned
traditional practice on its head; the
burden of proof was shifted from those
who wished to share intelligence with
foreign nationals (i.e., to demonstrate
that no harm will accrue to U.S.
interests) to those who opposed such
sharing (they were required to
demonstrate that such sharing will cause
“unreasonable” harm to those
interests.)

Last May, the Center described this
directive as evidence of :

“…The truly radical
nature of the Clinton
Administration’s agenda for U.S.
national security and foreign policy
institutions. Simply put,
that agenda seems designed to
dismantle or incapacitate such
institutions or otherwise to reduce
their effectiveness….This policy
seems rooted in a conviction that
potential adversaries who gain access
to U.S. secrets will not use them to
this country’s detriment — not least
by using such information to
neutralize U.S. ‘sources and methods’
of collecting such information and
exploiting the openness to penetrate
whatever secrets as are still closely
held….An Intelligence Community
still reeling from the effects of one
Soviet/Russian mole, Aldrich Ames,
should be exhibiting more care about
facilitating the burrowing of his
successors.”

‘Gotcha Gati(s)’?

Now, according to the Washington
Times, Secretary Gati is suspected
of having carried her commitment to
intelligence-sharing to lengths
impermissible even under the Clinton
Administration’s lax security standards.
She is reportedly under investigation by
the State Department’s Inspector General
— along with her husband, Dr. Charles
Gati, who served for a time as a member
of the Clinton State Department’s Policy
Planning Staff — “over charges of
several security-related abuses.”
The Times reports:

• “Among the matters under
  investigation are claims that
  Mrs. Gati, a political appointee
  and friend of First Lady Hillary
  Rodham Clinton, improperly
  provided information to Russia’s
  foreign minister [then
  Andrei Kozyrev] and received
  intelligence data without proper
  clearances and before being
  confirmed by the Senate.”
• “Investigators want to know
  if Mrs. Gati misused her position
  and violated security rules in
  getting two highly classified
  documents from the National
  Security Agency at a time when she
  was not cleared properly for
  intelligence derived from
  communications intercepts, among
  the most closely guarded secrets
  in government.”
• “One document linked a
  family friend [identified as Ivan
  Volgyes] of Mrs. Gati to the
  Hungarian intelligence service,
  and a second document
  suggested that her husband, then
  an official in the State
  Department’s Policy Planning
  Office, was a counterintelligence
  risk, said
  officials familiar with the
  reports.”
• “…The second
  document…was an NSA
  intercept that raised serious
  counterespionage worries about
  Mr. Gati’s ties to the Hungarian
  government, specifically
  through Hungary’s embassy in the
  United States.”
• Mr. Volgyes is quoted as denying
  that he was associated with
  Hungarian intelligence but
  acknowledging that he
  “visited the Gatis very
  frequently.”
• “The investigators are also
  trying to determine if officials
  of the Bureau of Intelligence and
  Research, the State Department
  office Mrs. Gati heads, covered
  up evidence of wrongdoing by her and
  others working
  there.”
• “In addition, investigators
  are reviewing Mrs. Gati’s close
  ties to several Russian
  officials, including Andrei
  Kozyrev, who was foreign
  minister until January.”
  The Center has learned that Mrs.
  Gati has stayed with Mr. Kozyrev
  at his residence when she was in
  Russia — a practice that raises
  profound concerns about the
  judgment and security practices
  of this senior U.S. intelligence
  official.
• Mrs. Gati is also the subject of
  an Equal Employment Opportunity
  Commission inquiry over charges
  that she “persecuted” a
  career professional on the
  IN&R staff after he brought
  to her attention classified
  documents bearing on her alleged
  connections and her husband’s to
  Hungarian intelligence.
• It appears that “security
  clearance forms for the Gatis
  were improperly filled out”
  — a practice that has repeatedly
  proved to be no impediment to the
  clearing of Clinton political
  appointees. href=”96-T115.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾
  (Emphasis added throughout.)

The Bottom Line

The Washington Times quotes
an unnamed senior House investigator as
saying that “at least two
[congressional] committees will take a
very serious look at this.” Clearly,
prompt hearings are in order to
establish the contents of the documents
implicating the Gatis in improper, if not
illegal, activity and to take testimony
concerning other aspects of the Gatis’
conduct. Among the questions
that such congressional hearings must
explore are the following:

• Why has Mrs. Gati not
  been put, at a minimum, on
  administrative leave during this
  lengthy investigation?
  It is absolutely mind-boggling
  that, as State Department
  spokesman Glyn Davies put it
  today, “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.”
• Why did the FBI terminate
  its investigation of the Gatis,
  turning the case over to the
  State Department’s IG?
  The Center has been advised that
  political pressure from high
  levels of the Administration was
  brought to dissuade both the FBI
  and CIA from pursuing this
  matter. Is that true and, if so,
  whence came that pressure? (It
  would appear that similar
  pressure was responsible for
  forcing the FBI today to drop its
  prosecution of admitted former
  Soviet spy Vladimir Galkin.)
• What procedures were
  followed to ensure that there was
  no compromise of sensitive U.S.
  intelligence information on those
  occasions when Mrs. Gati spent
  the night at the Russian Foreign
  Minister’s residence?
  Was she explicitly authorized
  during such visits, or other
  meetings with Russian, Cuban,
  Hungarian or other foreign
  nationals, to share intelligence?
  If so, by whom were those
  authorizations made and for what
  purpose?
• What process is being
  used to evaluate the
  reasonableness of the risk to
  U.S. national interests entailed
  in such intelligence-sharing by
  Mrs. Gati and other Clinton
  officials? Has
  any assessment been made of the
  damage to sources and methods of
  American intelligence that may
  have resulted therefrom?
• As noted above, Mrs. Gati
  is reportedly a friend of First
  Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
  If so, the investigation into Mr.
  and Mrs. Gati’s conduct fits a
  disturbing pattern of
  “Friends of Hillary”
  who have run into serious legal
  and/or political problems — more
  than a few of which have to do
  with personnel or information
  security concerns. Others in this
  mold include: Webster Hubbell,
  Vince Foster, Bernard Nussbaum,
  John Huang, Craig Livingstone,
  William Kennedy and Patsy
  Thomasson.
• What precisely was Mrs.
  Clinton’s role in securing Mrs.
  Gati’s present role? Has Mrs.
  Clinton’s patronage insulated
  Secretary Gati from the sorts of
  damage-limitation measures that
  would have immediately
  been taken against any career
  civil servant, Foreign Service
  officer, intelligence operative
  or member of the armed forces?

In addition to plumbing fully the
depths of the Gati(s) Affair, the
relevant Senate and House committees must
take a hard look at the larger problems
arising from the undisciplined sharing of
U.S. intelligence with foreign nationals
and other initiatives that the Clinton
Administration presents as
“reforms,” but that seem sure
to result (whether by design or not) in
the serious undermining — if not the destruction
— of critical intelligence
institutions and capabilities.

– 30 –

1. See the
following Center Decision Briefs:
‘High Crimes and
Misdemeanors’? The Huang Caper Reinforces
Concerns About Clinton Malfeasance on
Security Matters ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_109″>No. 96-D 109, 1
November 1996), Paydirt:
Congressional Investigators Closing In On
The Essence of ‘Filegate’ Scandal:
Jeopardizing National Security
(No. 96-D 71,
18 July 1996), ‘No Aldrich
Ameses at the White House’: Are You Sure?
Real Care In Order As the NSC Reorganizes
‘C.I.’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_45″>No. 94-D 45,
1 May 1994) and The Clinton
Security Clearance Melt-Down: ‘No-Gate’
Demonstrates ‘It’s the People, Stupid’
(No. 94-D
32, 25 March 1994).

2. For more on yet
another catalyst for this benighted
policy, U.N. Ambassador Madeline
Albright, see the Center for Security
Policy’s Transition Brief
entitled Secretary
‘Halfbright’? Hard Questions For
Madeleine Albright, Her Promoters
(No. 96-T 114,
14 November 1996).

3. See, for
example, an article published on 10
November by the Sunday Times of
London entitled “Chinese Trade
Coup Staggers U.S. Spy Chiefs.” It
addresses the possibility that
then-Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s
waiver of foreign background checks into
John Huang’s overseas connections may
have enabled Communist Chinese
intelligence to penetrate the American
government.