Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest; William M. Arkin

Author:Dana Priest; William M. Arkin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: POL036000
ISBN: 9780316194044
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2011-09-06T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

007s

Every police agency sending a terrorist tip in to the FBI and every FBI bureau that began working on counterterrorism since the 9/11 attacks created a ripple throughout the national security bureaucracy. More tips and more counterterrorism organizations meant more intelligence analysts, more investigators, more technical spying experts, gadget inventors, and out-on-the-street agents. Those people, in turn, required more administrative and logistics support: secretaries, clerks, recruiters, librarians, personnel managers, IT staff, construction workers, architects, janitors, air-conditioning mechanics, security specialists, countless guards; and every one of them, including those who emptied the trash and processed health insurance claims, had to have a top secret clearance.

Even organizations that did not directly perform top secret work needed a few employees with security clearances. On Capitol Hill, the Senate sergeant at arms, the Architect of the Capitol, the U.S. Capitol Police, all these law enforcement officers of Congress whose jobs are also to protect the members, they, too, have top secret clearances so they can be briefed by the Secret Service on classified threats, and can be read into sensitive evacuation plans. The National Archives staff need clearances, too—and their own special SCIF in Maryland—in order to have access to historic classified documents.

In fact, there isn’t a single federal department that doesn’t have a group of employees with top secret clearances to receive sensitive threat-reporting information, to join interagency committees, and to plan for national security emergencies and participate in classified exercises using terrorist attack scenarios. This includes the National Park Service, whose newly created intelligence and counterterrorism unit protects Washington monuments and other national icons. The same is true for the Environmental Protection Agency, where law enforcement coordinators deal with sensitive information about chemical and biological agents, and for the Department of Labor, which handles health-care claims for some clandestine military employees.

The expansion of top secret clearances has been so extensive and opaque that not even the people charged with answering the public’s questions always know what is happening in their own agencies. When Arkin called the U.S. Forest Service’s public affairs office to ask how many employees had top secret clearances, the conversation sounded like an argument between first graders.

“We don’t have anyone with a top secret clearance,” the staffer told him.

“Yes, you do,” Arkin said.

“No, we don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, we don’t.”

“I’ll email the information to you.”

That was the way the conversation went at a half-dozen agencies.

Then again, for employees of other agencies, it was hard to track the influx. Even in offices long used to dealing with a cadre of top secret employees, the speed of the expansion after 9/11 made the clearance process impossible to keep up with. When Arkin compiled a chart listing the number of people with top secret clearances throughout the government—a calculation based on two years of reporting and reviewing budgets—the person in charge of clearances for most government employees (most, but not all, because no one was in charge of them all) said: “That sounds about right.” Then she asked if she could use a copy of his chart for her next congressional testimony.

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