Americans cannot keep a secret. Or so it increasingly seems to frustrated Government officials who decry what retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former deputy director of the CIA, terms the "hemorrhaging" of classified information. The experts have no trouble identifying the reasons: "Too much, too many and too little," says Senator William Roth of Delaware, too much classified information, too many people with security clearances to look at it and too little investigation of those getting the clearances. The Walker case has stirred demands in the national security establishment to patch up the storehouse of Government secrets, but an open society makes the cure elusive.
At least 4.2 million have security clearances, most of them civilians who work for the Pentagon or defense-related industry. About 920,000, including 121 Soviet emigres, have access to classified documents all the way up to top secret. The number of security clearances has increased by more than 40% in the past five years.
As the Walker scandal reverberated last week, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger vowed to cut the numbers back. But he may find the task difficult. During his tour as director of the CIA for the Carter Administration, retired Admiral Stansfield Turner tried to put a freeze on the number of clearances granted, "but the pressure became so intense that after three years I had to relax it," he ruefully admits. "In many cases people kept their clearances just as a matter of prestige."
A multitude of different agencies hand out security clearances, usually after the most perfunctory record check for convictions and firings. "It's harder to get an American Express card," says Senator Roth. Of the 200,000 clearances requested last year, only about 160 were denied. Christopher Boyce, now serving a 40-year sentence for selling codes to the Soviets that he stole as a low-level clerk at TRW, a CIA contractor, noted that his sister was required to take a polygraph test to get a job at a 7-Eleven convenience store, but that investigators took no notice of his own counterculture life- style before letting him handle some of the nation's most sensitive secrets. Reclearance, mandated every five years for those approved for access to top- secret information, is even more haphazard. The feds currently have a ten- year backlog. During the 15 years Jerry Whitworth is accused of having spied for the Soviet Union, the Navy twice reinstated his clearance to handle top secrets.