Before State Department personnel gain access to national security information, they must successfully undergo a federal background investigation and take an oath affirming their responsibility to safeguard sensitive information. The oath taking is neither a novel nor new concept. On November 9, 1775, members of the Second Continental Congress signed an oath of secrecy to protect the cause of liberty and their lives. Today, the yellowed and faded “secrecy” document rests in a hermetically sealed case in the National Archives, just to the left of the Constitution.
To understand why State Department personnel “leak” classified foreign policy information to the media without prior authorization, one does not have to look any further than the September 21, 2008, edition of the Washington Post where a headline blared “U.S. Backed U.N. General Despite Evidence of Abuses.” The column detailed how the White House came to support the candidacy of Rwanda’s major general Emmanuel Karenzi Karake as the UN’s deputy force commander for the ten thousand soldiers conducting peace-keeping operations in Darfur despite previous allegations that Karenzi had been involved in 1990s human rights abuses in Rwanda. General Karenzi was a junior officer in the Rwandan Patriotic Front that in 1994 helped overthrow the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government, which was responsible for the death of over eight hundred thousand Tutsis. The article, purportedly based on one classified department telegram and a classified INR report, stated that Karenzi commanded the 408th Battalion that was involved in reprisal killings and civilian deaths. Written by Washington Post staff writer Colum Lynch, the article also quoted extensively from a September 2007 “confidential” memo written by Kristen Silverberg, who is identified as the “head of the international organization bureau.” It detailed the internal State Department squabble that pitted one bureau against another over the official US government position on General Karenzi’s appointment.
The article quoted from the “confidential” memo by saying that “IO [International Organizations] is aware of the political complications that would ensure [sic] from US and/or UN rejection of [Karenzi] and that he is not among the worst human rights abusers from Rwanda.” Opposing IO’s position within the State Department was the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), which reportedly had “credible evidence” of human rights abuses that “occurred under his [Karenzi’s] command” and stated “it’s impossible for the department to support his candidacy for policy reasons and in light of legal considerations.”
To be clear, the department had prepared a position paper on the Karenzi appointment. Initially a classified draft version of the “Silverberg memorandum” quoted in the newspaper had been circulated to many offices in the department, including the US Mission to the United Nations in New York City, for review, editing, and approval. State Department officers who were interviewed by DS agents during the preliminary unauthorized disclosure investigation pointed out that the quotes published in the Washington Post derived from a circulating draft of the classified memo. This is important to understand because it helped the agents identify a potential timeframe for the leaked information and the two offices that had access to the draft during that period.
Lynch revealed that the Washington Post staff had obtained State Department documents from “an anonymous source that was critical of US support for Karenzi.” The newspaper was proud to reveal that it had a document, confirming that it had a draft copy. The Washington Post was pleased to report that the authenticity of the document “was confirmed by US officials familiar with the internal debate.” The sad fact is that if you believe this staff writer, there were a number of government officials willing to discuss “secret” information and the internal workings of the department with the press. But what most distressed a number of department officials was that their dirty laundry was being aired in public.
The internal debate was between IO and DRL, both of which submitted their views to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi E. Frazer, a former student of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University, who would make the final decision regarding the matter. According to additionally leaked classified documents, Frazer had assured African Union Darfur mission leaders on September 7, 2007, that the White House would interpose no objection to General Karenzi’s continued position as deputy force commander. It turned out that UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon would eventually agree to an extension of Karenzi’s tenure with the UN Mission.
To DS agents, the identity of the leaker was clear. The investigation disclosed that the leaker had access to the classified documents, had intimate knowledge of internal department workings, and was able to see the gist of the “Silverberg memorandum” during the early August preliminary “draft” stage. The investigation disclosed that the wording quoted in the Washington Post derived from a draft version and not the final copy. The leaker was a department employee dissatisfied with an official State Department position who had hoped to derail the administration’s position on General Karenzi and expose the role of a rather inexperienced political appointee named Jendayi Frazer in rejecting the considered judgment of much more senior department officials. While the evidence was insufficient for a prosecution, investigators were fully confident of where the leak originated and who leaked it. DOJ declined to prosecute the department suspect, citing lack of “jury appeal.”
On April 10, 1986, while serving as the acting chief of the Office of Special Investigations (SIB), I realized one of my worst fears when summoned by telephone to report immediately to Clark Dittmer, the director of investigations. Director Dittmer had been the assistant special agent in charge of DS’s Washington Field Office when I first joined the State Department in 1974, and he was not an individual to be trifled with; if possible, he was one to be professionally avoided at all costs. Towering well over six feet tall, solidly built, with a flat-top style hairdo and no hint of humor, he had been nicknamed “Darth Dittmer” by some office punster due to his reputation for not suffering fools or subordinates lightly. There was not one agent in our organization who looked forward to an audience with him.
My apprehension that morning was no different from other visits—I was panicky. I was ushered into his sterile inner sanctum, bare of any personal mementos or pictures but prominently featuring his manual Remington typewriter, and the office door closed behind me. I was trapped.
Director Dittmer, resplendent in his usual solid brown suit, motioned me to remain standing while he rattled off the latest problem dumped in his lap by the department seniors.
“Robert, this case is going to require your fullest attention,” he barked.
“Yes, sir.”
“While you may feel as though you did a good job on the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Lorton Reformatory leaks, those were easy cases—anybody could have solved them. This new one is different.”
Thanks, I thought. I needed that.
According to Director Dittmer, the secretary of state was furious to discover that Assistant Secretary of State (A/S) Elliot Abrams had been contacted on April 7 by Rowland Evans, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, requesting A/S Abrams to confirm the existence of a classified telegram sent from our embassy in Buenos Aires.
Director Dittmer continued, “On April 8, Robert Novak, another syndicated columnist, also contacted A/S Abrams by telephone asking him to confirm the existence of a classified State Department cable identified as ‘Buenos Aires 2888.’” In 1986, both Messrs. Evans and Novak were writing articles for the Washington Post. In 1991 A/S Abrams would be convicted of two misdemeanors for unlawfully withholding information from the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding the Iran-Contra affair, for which he would be pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in 1992.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I understand.”
State Department telegrams from diplomatic posts overseas are commonly identified by the post of origin. In this case, our embassy in Buenos Aires used sequenced numbering starting with the number 0001—the first cable sent a
fter midnight on January 1, 1986. The ambassador had sent a “secret” message to the department in April 1986. This telegram was Buenos Aires 2888.
According to Director Dittmer, later on the afternoon of April 8, William Kritzberg of the Washington Times had also attempted to contact A/S Abrams at his office. Unsuccessful, he contacted Deputy Assistant Secretary (DAS) William Walker and asked him to verify the authenticity of certain sentences that Kritzberg claimed were parts of Buenos Aires 2888.
Apparently everybody in Washington has seen this “classified” cable, I thought.
Walker refused to discuss BA 2888 with Kritzberg and promptly notified A/S Abrams’s office, which immediately alerted the secretary of state’s office of the leak. After confirming that information contained in a classified department telegram was now in the hands of the press, DS was notified later that evening.
“This is no laughing matter,” Director Dittmer said. “The secretary’s office is absolutely livid about this leak to the press.”
“Yes, sir.”
“They are demanding that we identify those who were responsible for the leak immediately.”
“I will get on it right away,” I said. “Who will be helping me on the case?”
Director Dittmer gave me a quizzical look and scowled as he reached for something on his desk, saying nothing. Oh boy, here I go solo again, I thought. We have only two other agents in the office and both are swamped with investigations.
At this point, Director Dittmer handed me a copy of that morning’s Washington Post and asked me to scan the front page, which contained an article with sentences underlined in red.
Under the heading “Ambassador Assails O’Neill Delegation,” Washington Post staff writer Patrick E. Tyler described a recent Congressional delegation (CODEL) visit to Buenos Aires and liberally quoted from a classified department cable identified as BA 2888. The opening sentence of the article stated, “The U.S. Ambassador to Argentina, Frank V. Ortiz Jr., in a strongly worded cable to Washington has criticized House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass) and other members of a traveling congressional delegation for allegedly pressuring political leaders in Buenos Aires to condemn Reagan administration policies in Central America.”
The article described how Ambassador Ortiz, who accompanied the fourteen House members to meetings with President Alfonsín and other government members, cited boorish congressional solicitations of condemnations from Argentine officials of President Reagan’s foreign policy initiatives in Latin America as the worst he had witnessed in his Foreign Service career. “When I saw the speaker off at the airport, I frankly told him in my 35 years of service I had never seen such a performance. . . .To me it seemed to come close to raising constitutional issues of the legislative branch intruding far into the prerogatives of the executive branch.” An unsmiling Director Dittmer now handed me a copy of BA 2888, classified “secret,” and drew my attention to specific sentences highlighted in the Tyler article.
Specifically in paragraph four of the Washington Post article, the sentence beginning with the words “Congressman Russo (Rep. Marty Russo [D-Ill.]) exceeded all bounds in his attacks on the president . . . with Russo stating that [the] president [is] seeking armed confrontation with Nicaragua” was a word-for-word quote from paragraph three in BA 2888. Later in the article, a sentence beginning with the words “Throughout the visit, Russo and Stark (Rep. Fortney H. [Pete] Stark [D-Calif.]) joined Speaker O’Neil in attempting to obtain official Argentine condemnation of administration policies” was a word-for-word quote from the final sentence of paragraph three of BA 2888.
Instinctively I knew that I was about to be launched on another unauthorized disclosure investigation in an attempt to identify a department employee who had provided a copy of a classified document to the news media.
“Now, Robert,” Director Dittmer said, “I realize your chances of identifying the culprit are slim as probably one hundred people saw the telegram within the first twenty-four hours of it getting here—any one of whom could have deliberately or inadvertently leaked it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do your best, and we will report back to the secretary our preliminary results as quickly as possible. At least the seventh floor will know that we are doing something.”
Ahhh, I thought, the seventh floor, where the secretary of state and the Black Dragons have their offices. I need to tread carefully here.
Left unsaid was the certainty that the Black Dragons were breathing fire over the fact that confidential comments of a respected colleague had been provided to the media. I laughed inwardly as I reviewed the sentences circled in the Washington Post article. The article did not compromise any national security information; however, it reported the candid views of an American ambassador, and the department was now embarrassed to see its laundry hanging out in full view of Congress and the rest of the world.
What Director Dittmer would not point out to the Black Dragons was the fact that all of one agent would be spared to do the job—me. I guess that made me a very special agent in a perverse sense.
“Now drop all of your other investigations and concentrate on this one,” Director Dittmer ordered.
I was dismissed from his office before I could get a straight answer as to whether we would pursue prosecution in the unlikely event that we found the culprit. I returned to my office and opened up case SB12-0846-100-0042 entitled “Unauthorized Disclosure / Washington Post.” News leaks were so common that we did not bother coming up with fancy names for the investigations like “Blue Moon” or “Operation Pampas Tippling.” No matter, the first order of business in any leak investigation was to contact those department employees who initially had access to the telegram. Perhaps not surprisingly, everyone I called said that he had been expecting my call. Maybe this time I would not be treated like a leper seeking shelter from the plague.
Pen in hand, copies of the Washington Post article and BA 2888 in my briefcase, I sought out Elijah Kelly Jr., a special assistant in the department’s Information Management Section. He was like a traffic cop responsible for routing and distributing telegrams received from overseas missions. Sitting in his small office, Kelly patiently studied a copy of my underlined telegram and advised me that Buenos Aires 2888 had been received in the State Department at 1:52 a.m. on April 3 (Thursday). His examination revealed that the cable was properly marked “secret” with the added “NODIS” caption (No Distribution outside the department and limited distribution inside the department to specific addressees). Unfortunately NODIS in this case meant that at least nine offices in the building (SW, S/S, S/S-S, SS/I, D, P, INR, S/P, and CATB) had received copies!
In addition, I was told that per the instructions of Brunson McKinley, a senior manager in the secretary’s executive office, a copy was sent to Phillip Habib, the undersecretary for political affairs. Kelly’s log sheet indicated that a copy had been sent to the National Security Council at the White House; however, it was unclear who had instructed the secretary’s executive office to do so.
My initial fears were confirmed. By 8:00 a.m. on April 3, 1986, less than seven hours after BA 2888 was processed inside the State Department, at least nine offices, encompassing as many as one hundred employees, not including the NSC staff, were in possession of the cable. So much for NODIS! It was time to start interviewing those department employees who had been the initial recipients of BA 2888. The lyrics to “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” ran through my befuddled mind.
On a related note, I still keep a copy of an unclassified July 17, 1991, memorandum from Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson summing up my investigation into the leak of State Department classified cable Mexico 7966 to Proceso, a Mexican weekly newspaper: “Unfortunately, DS was unable to identify the individual responsible for the unauthorized disclosure. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security noted that ARA/MEX’s undocumented processing and distribution of the cable, which was revealed
during the inquiry, precluded a successful resolution. One of the lessons learned from this sorry episode is that we all need to hold more closely sensitive cables and memoranda.”
Despite numerous unauthorized disclosures of State Department cables, they are not managed inside the department in a manner to prevent leaks—or worse—for the investigators, to identify the perpetrators.
On April 1, I interviewed William Walker, deputy assistant secretary of state; James Michel, principal deputy assistant secretary of state; Robert Kagan, special assistant for policy; and Bob Loftis, staff assistant to the assistant secretary of state. Walker informed me that he had spoken to Ambassador Ortiz on April 1, 1986, just after the CODEL had a “wheels-up” from Argentina. After hearing Ambassador Ortiz’s stinging comments concerning the conduct of the CODEL, Walker recommended that a candid assessment of the trip, with NODIS caveat, be sent to the seventh floor immediately. Of course, Ortiz did so.
Walker related how surprised he was to receive an early morning telephone call on April 8 from William Kritzberg, a reporter from the Washington Times, inquiring specifically about BA 2888 barely four working days after the cable was sent to Washington.
“Funny,” Walker said to me, “Kritzberg specifically asked me to confirm the existence of BA 2888 in the early afternoon, and later on that same day Rowland Evans asked me to authenticate some paragraphs from the same cable.”
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
“I told them both that I had not seen all telegrams for the past few days, so I could not confirm or deny the authenticity of BA 2888.”
“Seems like it was compromised, no?”
State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies Page 18