Our Cracked National-Security State

Today on TAP: The Jack Teixeira episode demonstrates the bloated incompetence that a trillion dollars of annual military spending purchases.

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You are probably wondering how a 21-year-old flaky National Guardsman could have gotten security clearances higher than top secret. These provided access to documents marked NOFORN. That’s spy jargon for No Foreign Distribution. The documents revealed the dreaded “sources and methods,” including details on how the U.S. spies on close allies and how far U.S. intelligence has penetrated the Soviet military.

The short answer is a bizarre paradox: The U.S. government overclassifies documents, lumping trivial secrets with urgently confidential ones, but it is astonishingly cavalier about who gets access.

This has been the case for at least half a century. And despite the Snowden case, the Teixeira episode reveals that our national-security state is still weirdly lax in who can see the most highly sensitive materials. Blame bloated bureaucratic inertia.

More from Robert Kuttner

I can testify to this from two personal experiences.

In 1966, I was a graduate student at Berkeley, studying international political economy and specializing in the politics of Latin America. I was also something of a radical, doing press for Bob Scheer, then an anti-war candidate for Congress, volunteering at left-wing KPFA-Pacifica Radio, and joining the occasional peace demonstration.

That summer, I was accepted to be an intern at the State Department. My mother told me that some kind of agent had been asking our neighbors questions about my loyalty. But they somehow missed my Berkeley activities, which were hidden in plain view.

On intuition, just before leaving Berkeley for Washington, I shaved off my full beard. When I reported to the State Department, I was given an orientation packet marked ARA/CCA. That turned out to stand for American Republics Area/Coordinator of Cuban Affairs. I had been assigned to the Cuba desk!

There, I was put to work helping the chief economics officer enforce the Cuba boycott, tastefully rebranded as a quarantine. The tasks included reviewing CIA documents on pending shipments to Cuba from friendly nations and working on pressure tactics to get allies to block such shipments. These all involved top secret materials.

Personally, I did not support the Cuba boycott. But as a patriotic American, I was both relieved at the ineptitude of the domestic spy system that granted me a top secret clearance, and aghast that state secrets could be entrusted to someone like me.

Fast-forward a decade. I’m working as an investigator for Sen. William Proxmire’s Senate Banking Committee. We are investigating foreign corporate bribery and devising the legislation that became the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Once again, I get access to highly classified documents.

Senators can routinely get these, but as staff I had not been subject to any sort of security check. I could easily have leaked these materials.

The national-security state is now so bloated and inept that it is drowning in its own bureaucracy, overclassifying supposed secrets but unable to safeguard genuine ones.

In a 1989 opinion piece for The Washington Post, Erwin Griswold, the former U.S. solicitor general who argued the Pentagon Papers case for the government trying to block their publication, switched sides. He wrote: “There is massive overclassification … the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.”

The report of the Commission on 9/11 warned that excessive compartmentalization of intelligence secrets blocked interagency communication and made the nation more vulnerable. Yet the secrets that Teixeira got were anything but compartmentalized. A study by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press pointed to some 3,000 classification guides inconsistently scattered across different government agencies.

The nation would be more secure if we slimmed down the national-security establishment by about half. And think what kind of true security a half-trillion a year could buy.

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