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Defense contractors and high-tech firms have been notorious for lax security. At TRW, according to Boyce, "security was a joke." He and his co-workers used the code-destruction blender in TRW's ultrasecret "black vault" for mixing banana daiquiris. The Boyce scandal forced TRW to tighten up, and other firms as well are becoming more careful, contend authorities in Silicon Valley. The military is also lax. Says retired Admiral Clarence Hill: "When I was a sub commander in World War II, we never sent anything over four lines. Everything had to be coded and decoded by hand. Now they think nothing about sending three or four pages, and many of these are being sent just because you can send them." Admits Turner: "There is no question that our entire procedure for handling classified documents in this Government is sloppy." Horror stories abound. Turner recalls that, when CIA Clerk William Kampiles sold a classified manual on satellite surveillance to the Soviets (for $3,000), the CIA checked and could not find 13 other authorized copies of the same document.
There may just be too many secrets to keep. It has been estimated that there are 19.6 million authorized copies of classified documents. That, of course, does not take into account the photocopier. "The Xerox machine is one of the biggest threats to national security ever devised," says retired Admiral Thomas Moorer. "Even if documents are numbered and accounted for, it is easy to slip one out over lunch and copy it quickly."
Other technological breakthroughs have made secrets harder to keep. Most phone messages now pass through the airwaves rather than over wires, which facilitates interception by the microwave gadgetry atop Soviet consulates and in offices. Sophisticated laser devices can eavesdrop on conversation in a room by picking up the vibrations from the windowpane. The most insecure place to store information is probably a computer. A study by the Department of Defense Computer Security Center in Fort Meade, Md., concluded that only 30 out of about 17,000 DOD computers are even minimally secure against intrusion by clever hackers. Though no one has ever been caught doing it, the mere thought of Soviet intelligence plugging into Defense Department computers, particularly the ones that command the American nuclear arsenal, is the stuff of Hollywood chillers.
The Pentagon this week will announce steps to eliminate leaks, including cutting back on both the number of security clearances and the number of classified documents. "If we don't do these things and do them soon," warns Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, "we're going to have a lot more Walker cases in the future." But no one is suggesting the kind of drastic steps that would protect state secrets as securely as they are held, say, in the Soviet Union. Says John Martin, chief of the Justice Department's Division of Internal Security: "You've got to maintain an open society, or you're no better than your adversaries."
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