The point of studying this system would obviously be to see whether any of its features could usefully be adopted in this country to help deal with our own security problem. I would add that this procedure has nothing whatever to do with the case which has been much discussed on both sides of the Atlantic of the two British newsmen who spent several months in jail because they refused to tell a tribunal set up by Parliament to investigate the case of William Vassall the sources of stories they had written about him. There was a third reporter, who escaped a jail sentence because his reputed source voluntarily came forward and admitted to being the one who was the origin of the information. There are times, of course, when sources are not given because the writers would have some difficulty in producing them, even if they were so minded, as their stories might have been the product of their own intelligent guesswork. In the case of able reporters, these guesses often hit quite close to the mark.
A further point in the program to improve our security posture is that we should review and tighten up our espionage laws in certain respects. Since 1946, on several occasions, attempts, all abortive, have been made by the executive branch of government to amend the Espionage Act so that prosecution would not fail merely because of difficulties in establishing “an intent or reason to believe” that the information wrongly divulged or passed to a foreign government was “to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation.” This is hard to prove. Fortunately, the requirement of proof of such intent has already been eliminated in cases involving restricted data under the Atomic Energy Act and with regard to disclosure of classified information in the field of “communications intelligence.” The requirement still holds, however, in cases where other types of secret and classified information are divulged. Much secret information has been divulged without authorization, even passed to foreign governments, where the defense would be made that the culprit was really trying to help our government by helping an ally—as the Soviet Union was for a time after 1941. There are other problems of a security nature which arise under our existing legislation when it is necessary to prove that a case is related to “the national defense and security,” as our present espionage law requires.
Comparable British legislation is based on the theory of privilege, that all official information belongs to the Crown and that those who receive it officially may not lawfully divulge it without the authority of the Crown. This theory of government privilege in such matters seems a sound one. In our country, there are many cases where the disclosure in court of all the details of secret information wrongfully acquired or retained or passed on to the adversary may be contrary to the public interest. There are even times when prosecution has to be abandoned rather than divulge this classified information. Some persons who have been guilty of serious actions affecting our security were never prosecuted for one or more of the above reasons. The knowledge that our government is only likely to prosecute in the most heinous cases of espionage gives certain people the assurance that they can commit minor infringements against the espionage laws with impunity. The knowledge has not been lost on the Soviets.
If we drive a car in the streets with reckless abandon and inflict injury to life or property, there is no difficulty in prosecuting; but if our innermost secrets are handled with carelessness, there is little that can be done about it.
Even if we could plug up the holes in our espionage and security legislation—even if we could stop some of the giveaway of information of value to the enemy, there would still remain the dangers of human betrayal. By that I mean our own defectors and all those who betray our secrets and those of NATO, under alien pressure and blackmail, for money or for “ideological” reasons, or merely to satisfy their ego and exchange excitement for boredom. Here the watchful eye of government in a free society cannot provide adequate protective measures without appearing to infringe on the rights of the individual citizen. Unfortunately, there also are cases, here and abroad, when the eye of government has not been watchful enough. Too often the betrayer can act before the security services can catch up with him.
In addition to the prewar and wartime espionage cases, there have been Burgess, Maclean, and Philby; Houghton, Vassall and Blake in Britain, and more recently, Col. Wennerstrom in Sweden, Paques in France, and Dunlap here, who betrayed their trust. Also on our side the defection in 1960 of the two technicians from the National Security Agency, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, was a shocker, and the betrayal by Irvin Scarbeck, the sordid affair of a weakling.
Perhaps the most disturbing treason case of all on our side of the water in recent years, from the point of view of the efficacy of our security practices, was that of Sergeant Jack E. Dunlap, who committed suicide on July 23, 1963, apparently because he could not face the consequences of the discovery and public exposure of his treasonable acts, which, though slow in coming, was inevitable. Dunlap, like Martin and Mitchell, was employed by the National Security Agency, but unlike them he did not occupy a position of any importance and did not have their specialized knowledge of highly sensitive communications matters. Instead, Dunlap’s case was one frequently encountered in intelligence history where an insignificant employee, of meager understanding and less education, performing menial tasks but located at a vulnerable point in the internal workings of a highly secret undertaking, can do as much damage as a top-ranking official.
He was primarily a messenger and clerk responsible for the distribution and circulation of documents within NSA. What was in these documents may not even have been entirely intelligible to him. But it didn’t have to be. All Dunlap had to do was photograph them and make sure that the film reached the Soviet officer handling him. If Dunlap had lived, it is unlikely that he could have recalled more than a small part of the material he passed the Soviets. The indication, however, that the documents were of value to the Soviets can be derived from the fact that Dunlap had very large sums of money at his disposal, owned fancy power boats, racing cars, had mistresses, etc. This affluent mode of living, highly suspicious in the case of a $100-a-week sergeant, did not come to the attention of his superiors for the simple reason that they could not and did not, under our present system, keep tabs on the private lives of their employees. Furthermore, as a member of the armed forces, Dunlap was not subject to the polygraph tests which are normally required of civilians in the NSA. Only when he left the Army and converted to civilian status did he have to submit to such a test, and it was on this occasion that the first suspicions were aroused concerning him. He was then removed from his position as a handler of sensitive documents because his reactions to the polygraph showed that he was not entirely trustworthy. This was the beginning of the end. Investigation and further polygraph tests were to follow. Dunlap obviously saw the handwriting on the wall. At least it can be said that the polygraph, as an indicator that something was amiss, which often is all that can be expected of it, did its work.
While the possible security implications of the Profumo–Ward– Christine Keeler–Ivanov “quadrangle” may never be ascertainable, we do know that here a Soviet intelligence officer, Yevgeni Ivanov, helped to undermine a government and its leaders. Thus he accomplished more to damage the Free World, whether by accident or design, than if he had obtained the intelligence information which he was apparently seeking.
In passing, it is worth noting that the exposure of presumed espionage or treason—indeed, even the hint of it—in high places has a powerfully disruptive effect on governments that can be matched by little else. The most notorious instance of this kind is, of course, the Dreyfus case, which rocked the French government and kept its political and military leaders embroiled and embattled for over a decade. It must often have occurred to the Soviets that if high-ranking members of a rival nation could be tainted with espionage, if only by implication, the advantages in the form of disruption, paralysis and dismay might far outweigh the rewards of successful espionage itself.
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These and the other cases I have described earlier do show the inherent weaknesses of our free societies in protecting our nation’s security. While there is a temptation here to point the finger at the security services, the real cause of the trouble is deeper.
The security services in England, and the same is largely true in the United States, generally have little to do with the security and personnel procedures and practices of other sensitive agencies of government. In the Profumo case, as far as I can judge, these security services had no basis for intervening until the Soviet agent Ivanov appeared on the scene; and with this, a possible breach of security loomed up. If before this the services had been caught out spying on the private lives of British subjects, not to speak of high government officials, then indeed there would have been an uproar.
In Britain, the foreign office and the defense agencies hire their own personnel, and often it is only when those so hired have already become security risks that the security services are called in. Then the damage has generally been done. Neither a Burgess nor a Maclean should ever have been allowed to have anything to do with classified matters. Even a reasonably casual review of their activities during the years before their defection should have resulted in their dismissal, and Burgess never should have been hired in the first place. In the case of Martin and Mitchell, I am convinced that if anyone had reported on the manner of their lives, an investigation would have resulted. Their living quarters were a shambles of disorder and slovenliness. Something must be wrong with people who lived as they did.
Under our system, and it is much the same in Britain, the security services do not continually go prying around into the private lives and private affairs of employees. We should have no Gestapo. A man’s home is his castle, and it is sometimes suggested that a man’s “private” life is of no concern as long as he does his work passably well.
Maybe the British, and maybe we, carry these principles too far. Government service, after all, is a privilege not a right, and to retain a government position one should live up to certain standards of moral conduct, standards which should be higher than those applied to others. The fact that one wears “the old school tie” is not enough.
In the Profumo case, it was emphasized in Parliament that security, not morals, was the main concern. Politically this may have been an astute line to take. The British press itself expressed editorial opinions to the general effect that one should not cast too many stones at the sexually wayward. One paper suggested, “On this basis, England would frequently have gone headless and guideless.” The press pointed out that Nelson, to the distress of his wife, lived in flagrant and public adultery; that the Duke of Wellington was asked by Miss Harriette Wilson, described as the approximate equivalent in that day of Miss Christine Keeler, to pay her adequately for her agreement not to include an account of their relationship in her memoirs. “Publish and be damned” he replied. The British press pointed out that some of the most esteemed British leaders were not always models of moral propriety.
But these items of somewhat ancient British history related to men of courage in high positions, answerable for their conduct to the people as a whole. Also they occurred before we had the problem of Soviet intrigue and Soviet recruitment of the weak and wayward through blackmail. The conditions of past centuries are not a useful guide in personnel recruitment and job retention in the sensitive branches of government today. I see no reason why anyone should be employed or retained in a sensitive government position when there is credible evidence that the person has a serious character weakness or aberrations of conduct which might make him a possible victim for blackmail.
Of course, the problem of personnel security clearances becomes infinitely complicated because this requires periodic assessments and not just the one-time “vetting,” which is the word the British use for it. People whose lives and records appear clean as a whistle when they are employed may, some years later, develop latent weaknesses, which may or may not be discovered in the course of security reviews. No one can suggest that even the most careful and the most frequent security examinations will point up all weaknesses. The best one can do is to have the most thorough examination that can be given, and I feel that one should not exclude, in the examination, technical aids such as the polygraph, more popularly known as the lie detector. In my experience, I found the “lie detector” an important investigative aid in sizing up employees and almost as valuable in clearing people of suspicious and false charges as it was in providing clues to weaknesses or derelictions.
It is dangerous to boast, but I can say that the security record of the CIA has been an excellent one. It got off to a good start and was greatly strengthened under that stern but understanding disciplinarian, General Walter Bedell Smith, my predecessor in CIA, who worked out the principles of its firm security practices. “Beedle” once shocked the public and the press by stating in 1952—this was during the electoral campaign of that fall—that one must assume that there could be a Soviet agent in the CIA. He was quite right to sound such an alarm. One must always assume that there is a chance that this is the case, though neither of us was able to find such a culprit. With the years that have elapsed, we may be more optimistic but never sure as to whether or not he is there. The fact that we had reasonable success on the security side in the CIA was not because of any complacency or failure to try to ferret out the facts or any tendency to “cover up” as is so often done. We set out to eliminate from consideration as employees all known homosexuals, persons of unstable or weak character, or persons whose home or family life seemed likely to produce instability. In this, the Agency has had reasonable success.
In our own government setup, there is a security office in each sensitive agency which has responsibility for the security of that particular agency. The Civil Service Commission and, on occasions, the FBI assist in the investigations of employees of other agencies. Their task is generally limited to checking out an individual by means of interviews with associates, neighbors and others who could cast some light on the prospective employee’s character. They will also check other government records. They do not decide whether a person should or should not be employed. Final responsibility for personnel security decisions rests with the particular agency doing the hiring or the firing.
Each security office, in State, Defense and the Armed Services, the National Security Agency and the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as in CIA, should profit by the experiences of the others, and there is, of course, coordination and consultation among them. As various methods are tried out to eliminate security risks, experiences are exchanged. In some departments, the importance of continuity of service and of experience has not been adequately stressed in choosing the head of the division of security. The idea that this job is one which a political appointee may hold down for a year or two is dangerous. This is a task for the trained professional who should look to a long period of service.
On the other hand, I feel that our industrial leaders for the most part have taken very seriously the protection of the security of their plants where classified work for the government is being carried on. The large number of workers in many of these plants which have various secret phases of our military production in hand makes this a difficult task. I had a striking example of the effectiveness of industrial security during my work on the U-2 and later during the initial stages of the A-11, the first and second generation of the renowned reconnaissance aircraft. Despite the dramatic innovations introduced by these aircraft and the particularly high sensitivity of this work, the Lockheed Company, the builder of the planes, maintained throughout a high degree of security.
I would add a word about the security of our overseas installations where sensitive work is carried on. These are chiefly our various embassies throughout the world and, in certain places where we have overseas forces, sensitive military installations. As compared with the Soviet, it would appear that we are rather l
ax. Their overseas missions, particularly their embassies, are made as far as possible into self-contained fortresses. Except for social occasions, few outsiders are admitted. As far as possible, they have their own personnel to take care of even minor housekeeping problems, such as plumbing, electricity, minor repairs and the like. They rarely, if ever, employ outside local personnel or give them free access to their installations.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 32