Making Government Clam Up

Reagan's leak rules open a fierce debate about censorship

The Administration's latest effort to clamp a lid on Government secrets would have been a secret in itself if its designers could have had their way. A national security directive authorizing wider use of lie detectors to plug leaks and ordering senior federal officials to clear speeches and articles about classified topics for the rest of their lives was signed by President Reagan late on a Friday last March. That is when bureaucrats head home for the weekend and Washington correspondents relax their vigilance. When the order was discovered by reporters--Congress had been given no advance notice--Justice Department officials belittled its significance. The polygraphs would be applied sparingly, they said, and the censorship agreements would affect only about 1,000 of the highest-level employees.

Oh really? Last week Texas Democrat Jack Brooks, chairman of the House Government Operations Committee, held hearings on the order. Richard K. Willard, a deputy assistant attorney general who headed the interagency panel that drew up the directive, admitted that he could not dispute a report by the General Accounting Office that at least 113,000 employees, not 1,000, would be covered by the future censorship agreements that were originally touted as applying only to an elite.

Willard conceded that the order would permit the head of any federal agency to require all his employees holding security clearances to submit to lie detectors on a random basis, whenever an unauthorized disclosure of classified information was being investigated. There need not be any reason to suspect the person being tested.

In testimony provided the committee, the GAO estimated the number of federal employees subject to possible polygraph tests at about 2.5 million, nearly half of all 5.1 million federal employees. That many hold secret or higher security clearances. The GAO study noted that no fewer than 47 Government agencies now handle classified information, including the Office of Micronesian Status Negotiations, the National Labor Relations Board and the Marine Mammal Commission.

At the hearing, as Willard looked on impassively, former Under Secretary of State George Ball assailed the directive as "an appalling document" and "an absurdity." Charged Ball: "This would require the establishment of a censorship bureaucracy far larger than anything known in our national experience." Charles Rowe, editor of the Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star, noted that the clearance rules will enable future officials to review the proposed public statements of earlier ones and protested, "If an Administration can censor the comments and criticism of its predecessors, the potential for political mischief is frightening."

Lie detectors also came under heavy fire. John H. Gibbons, director of the Office of Technology Assessment, said of polygraphs, "The instrument cannot detect deception. It's more of a fear detector than a lie detector." Making a similar point with flair, Dr. John F. Beary, former high health official in the Defense Department, said he had a way to determine guilt that was cheaper than a lie detector and almost as reliable, since "it's right 50% of the time." He held up a coin.

Senators, too, seemed appalled by the lifetime preclearance requirements, which had previously applied only to employees of intelligence agencies. Republican Senator Charles Mathias asserted that he had asked the State, Defense and Justice departments to report how many violations of the relevant security classifications they had experienced in the past five years. Only the Defense Department knew of any, Mathias said: one instance. Concluded Mathias: "This hardly justifies a crash program which infringes on important free-speech rights."

The Senate then passed an amendment to a State Department funding bill banning enforcement of the preclearance rules until next April. The House is also expected to approve a freeze on the Administration's sweeping censorship program this session. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.