WHY CAN'T WE CATCH SPIES?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302510005-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 26, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: June 17, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/26: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302510005-9
W1'1 C1.3 LF
ON PAGE.
NE:v,'S ATE':
17 June 1985
Why Can't We Catch Spies?
MEG GREENFIELD
Two kinds of damage are likely to flow
I from the spying operation now in the
news. The first is the damage to security
from the transmittal of the information it-
self to the Soviet Union. This is said by many
military and intelligence higher-ups to be
serious, and, by some, to be catastrophic.
You and I will never know which because
candor can hardly be expected or demanded
of government on such a question. The peo-
ple in charge do not have a responsibility to
help the Russians understand any better
than they already do the significance of
what they have been getting.
You will nevertheless, of course, hear a
lot of authoritative-sounding pronounce-
ments on the subject, made to reinforce the
speaker's longstanding bias. The catastro-
phe school will suggest that the nation's
seaborne deterrent has been so severely
compromised as to mandate a new infusion
of other weapons?land-based missiles,
bombers and so forth. The opposite. no-big-
deal school will argue that little of impor-
tance has actually been compromised so
that our deterrent is still secure enough to
justify the weapons cuts and arms-control
measures they have long supported.
All this is a manifestation of the second,
kind of damage the poor old nation is likely'
to sustain as a consequence of the spying
revelations. That is the damage that flows
from the public reaction to it. Let's face it:
we really are awful at this. Any trauma in
American public life seems invariably to
produce the most disgusting wallow in pre-
tentious social-science generalizations and
mindless lesson-drawing. After the assassi-
nations of the 1960s, committed by a hand-
ful of warped individuals, the pop psychia-
trists and amateur anthropologists among
us kept explaining that these murders only
demonstrated what a violent and no-good
people we (all) were. Now we are beginning
to endure the first wave of psychologizing
and anthropologizing about the spy story.
Missing Patriotism: It is not a whole lot
better. The relatively low-ranked Navy per-
sonnel who have been charged in this case,
along with a number of other clerks and foot
soldiers who have been convicted of selling
secrets for money over the past several
years, have given rise to yet another genera-
tional indictment about missing patriotism
and failed traditional values, along with a
certain amount of serviceman-bashing. One
knows that it can only be a matter of time
now until someone attributes the alleged
willingness of these men to sell secrets to the
Russians to the absence of prayer in their
schoolrooms when they were young and
someone else says they did it because the
prospect of nuclear war is so terrible that
they had become psychically numbed and
victims of anomie.
The trouble with this kind of palaver is
that it diverts attention from what we
should be thinking about as a result of this
story: the quality of our system of maintain-
ing national-security secrets and clearing
and managing those who have them. I am
aware that anyone who works in my line of
Our security
procedures need a
real overhaul. Much
of our system
is a joke.
business has a credibility problem here.
Doesn't the press routinely violate govern-
ment secrecy rules? Of course we do. But
that is largely because the system of classify-
ing and maintaining those secrets is so over-
blown and defective and ridiculous and un-
worthy of respect that no one takes it
seriously, including large numbers of gov-
ernment officials who get publicly most ex-
ercised over leaks from time to time.
It's not just that unimaginable amounts
of routine material, including even newspa-
per clippings, are classified "secret"; it's
also that material that no doubt should be
held secret regularly turns up in public
places, put there by the government itself.
In case after case where the government has
raised hell with some journalist for reveal-
ing its hottest secrets, these have been
shown already to have been put by it in the
public domain. And in case after case, too, it
has seemed as if the most junior, unchecked-
out kind of personnel have been able to walk
unimpeded into areas of great sensitivity
and emerge with salable documents.
The kind of headless incompetence I am
talking about exists as well in many clear-
ance procedures. Everyone who has been in
Washington a while has clearance-inter-
view stories. I was somberly grilled a few
years back about the ages of a former col-
league's four children by an agent who
wouldn't take statements like "There's a
boy around eight, I think" for an answer.
Someone later told me this was a clever way
of establishing how well I knew the subject,
which seemed kind of dumb, especially
since the man had already been ensconced
in his new job for six weeks at the time of the
interrogation. Once I was unable to per-
suade another interlocutor that I had no
idea why an acquaintance had voted for a
Communist candidate in a municipal elec-
tion in New York City in the late 1930s, as I
had never heard anything about it and had
myself been eight years old in Seattle at the
time. He was unconvinced. A friend of mine
in the State Department told me that he was
visited by a security man in the. late 1960s
asking him if he knew any thing about
"someone named Averell Harriman."
Problem: I don't know why so many
people who understand the ill effects that
over-bureaucratization, personnel infla-
tion, busywork and the paper blizzard have
had on domestic programs seem unable to
accept that these things have happened in
security as well. Our military and intelli-
gence establishments are suffering from the
same diseases. You can read now that au-
thorities are 10 years behind in some impor-
tant clearance procedures; you can read
how computer technology has compound-
ed an already out-of-control problem; you
had better believe that the current case is
probably only a shadow of what is going on.
I am not heartened by talk of new secu-
rity "crackdowns" and the rest: that
sounds to me like draconian measures that
will continue to miss the main malefactors
while harassing everyone else. And I am
not persuaded by those who argue (as they
argue of assassins) that there's nothing
to be done and you can't stop someone
who's determined to do the deed. You
can't make anything completely secure,
but you can do better. Our procedures
need a real overhaul. Much of our system
is a joke. That?not whose generation,
class or profession is at fault?is what we
ought to be worried about.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/26: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302510005-9