State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies

by Robert David Booth

  CO Wrice left the documents in the file cabinet, locked the OFB front door, and returned to his post. He immediately prepared a memorandum describing the incident and at the end of his shift left copies with three lieutenants and Captain Durham. Worried that he might not be believed, he kept one department telegram marked “Grenada” in his Lorton cabinet locker.

  Listening to his story, I mused that his locker was probably more secure than a cabinet in INR. The following day, CO Wrice discovered that William Plaut, the Lorton administrator, had obtained a copy of his memorandum. Yet over the ensuing weeks no one came forward to question him about the documents.

  But worse was the fact that he started to hear yard talk that some of the prisoners had discovered the classified papers. CO Wrice explained that although Lorton regulations mandate that all inmates be escorted in the OFB, as a matter of practice, the uniformed guards did not watch inmate electricians and plumbers. Approximately one hundred civilian contract laborers and painters had also been in the building since September to refurbish cells in Lorton. He conceded that the guards were supposed to have rosters of all inmates authorized to access the OFB, but they were not accurate or up to date.

  On October 26, 1983, following the announcement that US military forces had invaded the island of Grenada, CO Wrice became convinced of the documents’ authenticity. The next day, while assigned to his normal post, he returned to the furniture building and removed all the papers from the file cabinet, made photocopies, and returned the originals to the cabinets.

  “Like I said,” he explained, “I called lots of FBI officials at various buildings and the lady at the Justice Department’s civil rights division but with no results.”

  “So what led you to our office?”

  “Well, I was told that someone from the State Department had come to Lorton to pick up some of the papers but that no one was interviewed, nothing else happened. No one did anything. State Department documents floating around inside a prison, being traded among convicts, and nothing happens.”

  Mike and I stared at each other as we realized that whoever picked up the documents had done so with the mission of keeping the incident out of the public’s eye. I was coming face to face with the department’s strategy for covering up its losses of classified materials. One week following my interview with CO Wrice, I would interrogate that “someone,” who acknowledged that he traveled to Lorton to retrieve classified department documents. His name was included in my final report of the investigation.

  “So afterwards nothing was done and I was upset,” CO Wrice said. “I decided to fix this thing by finding out who in the State Department needed to know about this. I mean, convicted murderers Elroy Lewis, Connie Wilkens, and Sampson in Block 6 are sharing the papers.”

  “You have done the right thing. This office will immediately open an inquiry, and we need to stay in touch.” After a moment, I added, “This case could get pretty dicey. Would you prefer that we keep your identity confidential in this matter?”

  “I would,” he said.

  He readily agreed, and we scheduled a meeting for the following week. After we escorted him out of the building, I briefed my immediate supervisor, Bernd Schaumburg, the SIB chief. I went home for a good night’s rest—or so I thought.

  Imagine my shock after getting home around 7:30 that night and turning on my bedroom television to hear a reporter announce: “Tonight, exclusive on WTTG-5, we talk with a Lorton Reformatory official who says he found classified State Department documents inside the prison.”

  At 11:00, Channel 5’s lead story started with an image of CO Wrice standing outside the State Department’s diplomatic entrance talking with a television reporter. It seemed that Mike and I had been set up. CO Wrice commenced the story by saying, “A few minutes ago, I finished talking with special agents Booth and Considine, and they. . . .”

  That was how the rest of late-night Washington found out about the Lorton documents. So much for CO Wrice’s request for confidentiality in this matter. About halfway through the WTTG-5 broadcast, SA Walter Deering of our General Investigations Branch called to wish me a good day in the office next morning. His teasing call was one of many that night. The calls from the DS seniors were much less humorous.

  The question I pondered into the wee hours of the morning was this: did CO Wrice plan for the television interview beforehand, or did it result from a serendipitous encounter with one of the many reporters who congregated at the diplomatic entrance in the late afternoon to film their pieces before their deadlines? Who knew? Who cared? I was in the hot seat, regardless.

  Secretary of State George Shultz had ordered a “full-scale investigation” into the matter, and I needed to find cover fast. Too bad security blankets were hard to find for young, vulnerable special agents—even inside a security organization.

  The following Monday, I was at the FBI’s Washington Field Office at 0630 to discuss investigative jurisdiction issues with FBI special agent “Tim.” It was decided that since the documents were recovered at Lorton Reformatory, any investigation fell under the statutory definitions of 18 USC 793—FBI territory. The FBI would assume primary investigative responsibility. I had successfully dodged a big bullet that could have been fatal to my short tenure in security.

  Shortly thereafter, the department’s spokesman, Alan Romberg, advised the press corps the documents found in Lorton Reformatory had been discovered inside surplus State Department furniture that had been sent to Lorton for refinishing. He also acknowledged the cabinets and documents originated from the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He noted that in the first week of August 1983 a team of contract laborers had been escorted to INR office space to remove “empty” office cabinets and used furniture, and they “inadvertently removed one full but unsecured safe.”

  What Romberg left unsaid during the press briefing spoke volumes. Many pertinent and embarrassing questions came to the minds of those sitting in the room. Who were the INR specialists responsible for ensuring that all furniture leaving the INR space did not contain classified materials? Did anyone in the bureau alert anyone in authority that there was a missing safe chock-full of highly classified materials? Who handled the inventory of “top secret” documents in INR? What were the internal controls for releasing office equipment and furniture outside a controlled access area? What roles and responsibilities did senior INR management have in assuring an effective security program within the bureau? If sensitive documents could just vanish without the loss being noticed, one certainly could question the security practices in INR.

  Romberg indicated that it was the department’s “assumption” that most of the recovered documents had not been “compromised.” If the department seniors assumed “top secret” papers left unprotected for a month in a federal prison had not been compromised, then what constituted a compromise of national security information? The press briefing had nothing to do with explaining what happened; it was all about controlling damage to the department’s credibility and image.

  On November 10, 1983, Lorton officials, with the assistance of federal investigators, searched the cellblocks of inmates and were able to retrieve several government classified documents. The Lorton documents were eventually identified as the most sensitive papers in the US government’s arsenal. Unfortunately INR could not positively identify all the documents lost or compromised. Slowly, and to the great relief of the department seniors, the episode disappeared from the national headlines.

  When the FBI finally determined that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a criminal case, the mess was turned over to the department for resolution. Instead of asking DS to conduct an inquiry, the State seniors handed off the investigation to the department’s powerless inspector general’s office, which did not have independent statutory authority like the other executive branch IGs at the time. Although spokesman Romberg had stated that any employee identified by the investigation as being culpable would be subject to “ap
propriate disciplinary action,” no one was reprimanded. Senior INR officials just swept everything under the rug.

  The only significant result of the inquiry was the codification in the Foreign Affairs Manual, the department’s internal regulations, of how properly to inspect and certify a security repository before it was to be removed from the department’s inventory. The change resulted in a requirement for safes and file cabinets to be thoroughly inspected for classified materials before they were retired and removed from service. The new regulation also called for any furniture removal to be documented in writing. Plain commonsense would have sufficed.

  Another incident involving loss of classified information took place at the US consulate in Udorn, Thailand, in the early seventies. It’s not one I can personally vouch for, as the event took place before my time. However, it serves as a cautionary tale. Again, negligence and a failure to follow security rules caused a loss and compromise of classified documents. It also ended up with the department making an unintentional donation to the local economy.

  At the time, the US consulate was a tiny outpost in northern Thailand with only two Americans and half a dozen Thai employees. The Vietnam War had raised its profile given US military operations in the area that supported war efforts in Cambodia and Laos. The consulate did not have the luxury of shredding equipment in those days, but it did not generate or receive much classified material. The consulate practice for destroying such materials was to burn them in a fire pit on the grounds of the compound.

  The American secretary would gather the sensitive papers to be destroyed, and a Thai employee would light them. Burning the papers was an approved method of destruction provided they were thoroughly destroyed and could not be reconstructed in whole or part. However, the flaw in the process was the American secretary, who immediately returned to the consulate without witnessing the destruction.

  The Thai employee would then put out the fire and salvage the unburned documents. Everything had value, and the Thai could not understand why the Americans were stupidly destroying something worth a few bhat in the local marketplace as scrap paper. Apparently recycling was a well-established green practice even then. The arrangement went on for some time until one day an entrepreneurial Thai contacted the consulate.

  The Thai gentleman politely asked the consular officer if the US government wanted to buy back its classified documents. It seemed that the Thai consular employee had been selling the paper to the local fish monger in downtown Udorn. State Department confidential and secret memoranda and cables were now wrappings for Mekong carp and other delicacies sold at the local market. The Thai gentleman bought all of the market’s scrap paper and was now offering to sell it back to Uncle Sam. Reportedly the department paid several thousand dollars ransoming its own secrets! Luckily for us, the literacy rate for English in rural Thailand was rather low.

  Department officials have an uneven record when it comes to safeguarding department secrets. For many years since 1982, whenever my FBI colleagues and I shared cups of coffee over numerous conference room tables to discuss serious counterintelligence breaches, I had to submit to “friendly fire” from my counterparts who complained that department employees were simply not serious about following security regulations that prohibited taking sensitive documents outside the HST in file folders, envelopes, briefcases, and purses. I endured the comments with grace and silence. That is, until 2001, when I had the pleasure of chiding them about the fact that John O’Neill, the FBI’s special agent-in-charge (SAC) of the New York City Field Office’s national security division, was under criminal investigation for the loss of classified documents. In the summer of 2000, local thieves stole a briefcase crammed with sensitive documents concerning IC counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations that O’Neill had left behind in his Tampa, Florida, hotel room following an FBI meeting. Fortunately for all concerned, it was recovered by local law enforcement officials and returned to the FBI within twenty-four hours of its reported disappearance. Unfortunately for SAC O’Neill, the DOJ determined that his lapse of judgment was serious enough to move forward with a criminal investigation. Upon conclusion of the investigation, the DOJ decided not to prosecute O’Neill, and he retired shortly thereafter. (O’Neill became the head of security at the World Trade Center in New York City and perished in the September 11, 2001, attacks.)

  When the FBI agents could no longer tolerate my hectoring, they dropped their department “briefcase caper” bombshell on me.

  On September 28, 1995, a US delegation comprising Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff, his special assistant Daniel Russel, and Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs director Jeffery A. Bader (who later submitted a letter of support for Don Keyser to the US District Court) exited a vehicle in front of the Permanent Mission of the PRC to the United Nations (PRCMUN) in Manhattan. They had arrived for a scheduled 1:00 p.m. meeting with Chinese vice foreign minister Li Zhaoxing. Once inside, the US diplomats were escorted from the lobby to a conference room. At the conclusion of the forty-minute discussion, Tarnoff asked for a private discussion with Li and all other US and PRC officials left the ground floor conference room. Ten minutes later, the US delegation left the PRCMUN and then, according to my FBI colleagues, truth became stranger than fiction.

  Traveling back to the US delegation’s Waldorf Astoria hotel headquarters, the group determined that Tarnoff’s briefcase, crammed with classified US-PRC position papers, was missing. The trio decided that Tarnoff had lost custody of the briefcase sometime that morning. They recalled that Tarnoff had a meeting with the Indonesian foreign minister in the “D” conference room located in the basement of the United Nations (UN) building before they left for the PRCMUN. Russel, being the junior officer, was tasked with trying to locate the briefcase. A department vehicle took Russel to the UN, where he proceeded to the basement area to conduct a quick search. Finding nothing, he decided to go across the street to the US Mission to the UN (USUN). At no point did any one of the trio inform UN security or DS about the missing briefcase.

  At this point, Russel took a US Mission vehicle to the PRCMUN and went inside to ask the Chinese receptionist if he could talk to PRCMUN official Liu Xiaoming. When he was advised that she was unable to reach Mr. Liu by telephone, Russel asked if she would escort him back to the conference room as he may have inadvertently left a “notebook” behind. According to my FBI colleagues, the receptionist looked at Russel and asked if he meant a “briefcase” and dutifully produced Tarnoff’s briefcase, which was inside a shopping bag that was on the floor next to the receptionist’s desk.

  Russel took the shopping bag from the receptionist and left the PRCMUN building. Once inside the USUN vehicle, Russel opened Tarnoff’s briefcase and found a department Skypager, Tarnoff’s glasses, and approximately fifty “secret” and “confidential” documents inside.

  The first thought that ran through my head as I heard this part of the story was that, of course, gentlemen do not read each other’s mail. The MSS officers inside the PRCMUN would never violate diplomatic mores. So all is good in the world. Well, maybe not.

  Once back at the Waldorf Astoria, Russel handed the briefcase to Tarnoff’s executive assistant and promptly forgot the whole episode—at least until the FBI came calling three weeks later. When interviewed by the FBI, the trio had trouble keeping their stories straight, but in the end, DOJ declined prosecution. The FBI’s report was turned over to the department, where Richard Moose, the undersecretary of state for management (the department’s fifth ranking official and responsible for all budgetary, administrative, and personnel matters), was tasked to determine how to conclude the inquiry.

  I almost laughed out loud when the FBI mentioned Richard Moose’s name. That would be the same Richard Moose who in the spring of 1980, while serving as assistant secretary of state for African affairs, was confronted by an irate passenger aboard Braniff flight 704. Apparently Moose was reading classified documents during the flight when a passenger, who happen
ed to be an IC official, challenged him and warned that he should not be handling classified documents in full view of the public. Moose told the passenger that he was indeed reviewing classified material but he needed to work on an urgent draft and was too busy to discuss the matter further. Moose’s attitude infuriated the US government employee. Once the plane landed, the IC official went to the Braniff counter, identified himself, determined Moose’s identity (by seat assignment), and informed the department of the encounter. Moose received an oral admonishment for his Braniff caper from Ben Read, the undersecretary of management, on August 18, 1980. (Moose would resign from the department in 1996 following the disclosure of his relationship with a member of his staff [not his wife] with whom he traveled on official business.)

  DS recommended that written admonishments be issued to the PRCMUN trio for their failure to notify the department that classified documents may have been compromised. Moose determined that a written admonishment was too drastic of a punishment for such an offense and, instead, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security and career Black Dragon Anthony Quainton was directed to administer an “oral reprimand” to Tarnoff. The FBI’s story was too much for me to believe, and I dismissed this FBI “urban legend” until I was informed years later that when Tarnoff reported to the DS executive office to receive his mandated tongue lashing, Quainton was in his full Black Dragon glory. Quainton dismissed his special assistant, SA Thomas McKeever, from witnessing the closed door “punishment session.”