A Leaky Ship of State

...President Reagan, up to his "keister" in leaks, ordered more information stamped "secret" and established higher levels of classification...

...He was outraged, Goldwater wrote, "about the discovery of the President having approved mining some of the harbors of Central America...

...Sometimes it is because they don't care when there are higher political and ideological objectives to be pursued...

...Former officials of the Carter White House have told me that while no such deal ever came close to fruition, such an exchange was, in fact, one of the options under consideration in the National Security Council at the time...

...Officials said the information had come from "a reliable Cuban source...

...His remark was expunged from the Congressional Record...

...Some of the Reagan supporters crusading for national security were obviously willing to divulge official secrets for the sake of political gains...

...During the 1980 campaign, Reagan supporters not only had access to Carter's unclassified debate briefing papers, but also sought to penetrate the national security apparatus...

...That letter was submitted with Nicaragua's complaint to the World Court...

...The cable recounted a breakfast conversation on April 11,1977, at the embassy with Kissinger, who was represented as encouraging the Kremlin to resist President Carter's arms control and human rights initiatives...

...Philip Taubman reported in The New York Times of April 24 that "as part of the Administration's campaign, senior officials have begun to talk openly in recent days about intelligence information indicating that Cuba is preparing a large increase in aid to Salvadoran guerrillas to lay the groundwork for a fall offensive...

...Three years later, Colonel Charles Beckwith, who led the abortive raid, described "Operation Eagle Claw" in his book...

...He was especially upset, he added, because he had denied Presidential involvement and then "found out the next day that the CIA had, with the written approval of the President, engaged in such mining, and the approval came in February...

...There are indications, too, that an attempt was made to use classified information in stealthy efforts to discredit the Carter Administration...

...capabilities to the Russians and facilitating countermeasures...

...He seemed unaware that he was calling the story to my attention and confirming it...

...But, alas poor Trigon...

...Helms wrote a letter to President Reagan accusing the U.S...

...Luckily that didn't work out, for a lot of Reaganite heads might have rolled, including the President's own...

...Air Force and Navy personnel on the Japanese island of Honshu...

...The intelligence agencies hold nothing more sacred than the protection of sources and methods...

...The story had been based on a tip from an anonymous source who described himself as a Navy captain on active duty...

...Therefore, Reagan had to override some strenuous objections from the intelligence community when he decided, in March 1983, to show photos of Soviet installations during a television speech intended to dramatize the "relentless Soviet military buildup...

...The leakers claimed to know that the "Dobrynin telegram" was his last contribution, and that he had long since been "rolled up" by the Russians—betrayed, they believed, by a loose-lipped aide to President Carter...

...In three decades, dating back to the Eisenhower Administration, I have observed no time in which hair-raising secrets dripped so easily from high places...

...It didn't...

...The Japanese Government was persuaded to support a cover story that the tapes had come from Japanese monitoring posts...

...Plausible deniability" had been maintained for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in a series of dark deeds aimed against Fidel Castro and others...

...The Reagan ship of state is of an unusual configuration: It leaks mainly from the top...

...Senator Wallop charged the Carter Administration with outrageous political abuse of sensitive information confided in great secrecy to the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which Wallop was a member...

...But the Senator would not be silenced...

...There was much commotion about tightening up the protection of the nation's secrets...

...Just as classified intelligence is regularly declassified to produce an estimate of Soviet military capabilities that will support the Pentagon's budget, so espionage material is exploited to bolster the Administration's position on Central America...

...It soon emerged, however, that the tapes had come from the super-secret 6920th U.S...

...Last September, for example, Robert Mac- Farlane, in Beirut as Reagan's Middle East envoy, wired back a top secret recommendation for preemptive air strikes at Syrian positions threatening the American Marines...

...It is remarkable how a secret can be spilled in the course of making a political point...

...Thus, from the highest possible source, came confirmation of the reports and conjecture about the secret satellite-linked system that enabled the National Security Agency to listen in on the conversations of Kremlin leaders in their limousines...

...Conservative himself, Senator Barry Goldwater...

...Security Council on the Soviet downing of a Korean airliner...

...After leaving office, Brzezinski admitted he had lied to me, and said he would gladly lie again to protect so sensitive a secret...

...In my experience, some of the most egregious exposures of intelligence secrets have been committed by conservatives who avow their dedication to the nation's security...

...The proposal, discussed in the National Security Council on September 11, was widely reported by newspapers and on television a day later...

...Now, he said, he had learned that the President had indeed authorized the operation, and in writing...

...The Reagan White House's reputation for leakiness is so widespread that it figured in a suspected Soviet disinformation plot...

...For the life of me I don't see how we are going to explain it...

...For Nicaragua and other litigants who had suffered damage in the mining, Goldwater's assertion was the "smoking gun" of confirmation...

...White House officials, ignorant of the possible consequences and anxious to show that the Administration wasn't "just standing there," had talked about possible air strikes in "background" briefings...

...It can happen quite casually...

...It quoted him as telling the Saudi minister that the U. S. Government was considering Saudi Arabia's request for new American jet fighters, but President Reagan had not yet been informed because then "it would be leaked to Congress and the press...

...Secretary of State George Shultz said he would resign before he would submit to such an indignity...

...Furthermore, he said, the agency was not familiar with any operation designated as "Eagle Claw...

...He sought to limit access to Government data under the Freedom of Information Act...

...he sent a "pissed off' letter to William Casey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and arranged to have the letter released informally to the press...

...The report raised hopes which were quickly dashed, to the detriment of the Carter campaign...

...Electronic and photographic evidence is closely guarded for fear of disclosing details of U.S...

...And to drive home the point, he added, "This is an act violating international law...

...Reagan, asserting that the leak endangered cease-fire negotiations and possibly MacFarlane's life, ordered a full-dress FBI investigation, up to Cabinet level, complete with liedetector tests...

...For many years, the Government not only concealed its remarkable high-resolution photographs made from orbiting satellites, but would not even confirm officially that such reconnaissance existed...

...His Attorney General proposed three-year prison sentences for improper disclosure of classified material...

...In the world of clandestine operations, there is no greater sin than exposing Presidential responsibility...

...Last fall, a Beirut newspaper published a purported transcript of a Paris meeting between Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and the Saudi Arabian Minister of Defense...

...On October 15, 1980, Chicago television station WLS created a nationwide sensation by reporting that negotiations were almost complete to furnish military spare parts to Iran in exchange for some or all of the hostages...

...Daniel Schorr, senior correspondent of the Cable News Network, has reported on intelligence agencies and activities for many years...

...Deputy CIA Director Frank Carlucci wrote Defense Secretary Harold Brown denouncing it as a forgery...

...Senate or a journalist, cries of treason would have reverberated from the White House...

...He ordered the use of liedetector tests to snag loose-lipped officials...

...One way or another the Reagan Administration is up to its keister in security breaches of its own making...

...Damn clever, the KGB...

...Soon it emerged that the Senate Intelligence Committee had been briefed on a two-year CIA project that funneled $2 million into El Salvador to facilitate elections and assist parties opposed to Senator Helms's candidate, Roberto D'Aubuisson...

...It is an act of war...

...He noted that the memorandum was titled, "Oplan Eagle Claw Loss Estimate," and pointed out that Oplan (operational plan) was a military term not used by the CIA...

...President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, flatly denied plans for such an installation in China...

...In the end, the FBI concluded, there had been no unauthorized disclosure at all...

...Eisenhower had committed a grave error in quixotically assuming responsibility for the U-2 spy flight shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960...

...Less casual was what happened in July 1980, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, when the right-wing "Madison Group"—Senate staff members who have close ties to the intelligence agencies—undertook to leak a secret to Newsweek designed to undermine Henry Kissinger's standing in Republican ranks...

...But it could be expected that this would change once they were in office...

...Whoever had forged the document must have had access to inside military information not even known at the time to the CIA, and was willing to use it to help bring down the Carter Administration...

...Government of "rigging" the race...

...And there was consternation in the National Security Agency when Reagan ordered the use of recorded Soviet air-to-ground communications for Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's presentation to the U.N...

...Nor could stunned White House aides explain why Reagan had been pinned to the wall by the man whom he had nominated for President in 1964, a true-blue guardian of the nation's security...

...Helms was rebuked for unauthorized disclosure of secret Intelligence Committee information in a letter from Chairman Goldwater and Vice Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the Senate leadership...

...An anonymous informant representing himself as a CIA officer furnished George Wilson of The Washington Post and others with a document claiming that an Agency "estimate team" had warned, more than a month in advance, that 60 per cent of the hostages might be killed or wounded if the contemplated rescue plan was attempted...

...He had, out of ignorance, denied Presidential involvement in the CIA-directed harassment of Nicaragua...

...Weinberger called the transcript "a total fabrication...

...But here was a secret war being exposed, and laid directly at President Reagan's doorstep, by Mr...

...Richard M. Nixon said, in the recent series of interviews broadcast by CBS, that one reason for the CIA's concern about the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was that one document revealed information that "could only have come from the fact that we had Brezhnev's car bugged...

...It failed...

...A frantic effort was made to close the barn door that Senator Goldwater had impetuously opened...

...Sometimes it is because they are too unsophisticated to understand what constitutes an unauthorized disclosure...

...hostages held in Iran...

...Sometimes security is breached by calculated decision, sometimes mindlessly...

...In September 1980, Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, a conservative Republican, showed me an assertion published in New York magazine that Ronald Reagan's pro-Taiwan statements during the campaign might jeopardize a secret intelligence agreement to set up a post to monitor Soviet communications from China, replacing an installation lost in Iran after the Islamic revolution...

...The President said he had "thought of the guillotine" for such offenses...

...The story was about a spy in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, code-named Trigon, who had furnished the CIA with a microfilm copy of a cable from Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin...

...Wilson, suspecting a hoax, did not write a story based on the document...

...A Leaky Ship of State Reagan's secrets are not for keeping BY DANIEL SCHORR Had the culprit been a liberal member of the U.S...

...Another right-wing Republican, Senator Jesse Helms, let the cat out of the bag on a secret operation— CIA support of El Salvador's Jose Napoleon Duarte in his campaign for president...

...The leak was part of a campaign to force cancellation of Kissinger's invitation to address the convention...

...Granted, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was angry when he took the floor...

...Electronic Security Squadron, employing some 1,600 U.S...

...Their main concern was to obtain early warning of a possible "October surprise" rescue or release of the U.S...