Secrecy Run Amok

In July 1983, DOE's chief historian asked to borrow a copy of the journal to help write the volume of the AEC's official history covering Seaborg's tenure, promising to return it within three weeks once copies had been made. Nineteen months later, Seaborg was informed that the journal contained classified information. The DOE placed his second copy at home in a locked safe (with an alarm). Three months later, it ordered a classification review of this copy; because Seaborg had no written verification and the DOE could not locate any records from the AEC's Office of Classification 1971 action clearing the journal, he could not "prove" it was unclassified.

Demonstrating the arbitrary and often capricious nature of classification and declassification actions, the reviewer (working for several weeks at Seaborg's home) made 162 deletions affecting 137 documents. One year later, Seaborg learned that his first copy (borrowed by the DOE historian) was also undergoing a review. That review — of the identical document — later resulted in 327 deletions and the removal of 530 documents pending further review. In October 1986, the DOE ordered a second review of Seaborg's journal, this time to "sanitize" it. The process took two months and involved up to a dozen people. When this copy was returned to Seaborg, it had been subject to some 1,000 deletions, and about 500 documents had been removed. An additional review was made of portions of the journal provided to an author collaborating with Seaborg on a book about arms control. Numerous deletions were made and documents confiscated (some not returned for nearly four years). The DOE then sent another team of twelve people to Seaborg's office and home to itemize all of his personal correspondence and papers, including those from the twenty-five years prior to his work with the AEC. Additional classified material was discovered. As Seaborg later remarked, "My grammar and high school and university student papers stored in another part of my home, overlooked by the DOE classification teams, have so far escaped a security review."

Among the items deleted from his journal were a "description of one of the occasions when I accompanied my children on a ?trick or treat' outing...and my account of my wife Helen's visit to the Lake Country in England." The reviewers also removed "many items that were already part of the public record," including material from Seaborg's 1981 book (with Benjamin S. Loeb) Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban, and the "code names of previously conducted nuclear weapons tests," which the DOE itself had published in 1985.

Reflecting on the process, Seaborg stated: "I would go so far as to contend that hardly any of the approximately 1,000 classification actions...taken so randomly by the various reviewers could be justified on legitimate national security grounds."²

Other examples abound. In 1993, Alex DeVolpi, a researcher at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, visited Russia and met with Russian nuclear scientists. They showed him their superbomb, a 150-megaton weapon, of which six had actually been built. Returning home, DeVolpi decided to include the information in a revised version of entries on the "atomic bomb" and the "hydrogen bomb" that he had written a decade earlier for a scientific encyclopedia. When Argonne security officials read about the 150-megaton bomb, they demanded he delete it, along with other data first used in the decade-old published version. When DeVolpi produced his original copy of the encyclopedia entries and showed them it was stamped "unclassified," the officials confiscated the document, his computer, and his security clearance. Only the direct intervention of Secretary of Energy O'Leary allowed DeVolpi to regain his computer, materials, and clearance.³

Equally troubling is the case of Hugh DeWitt, a physicist who has spent more than four decades working on unclassified matters at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1991 DeWitt wrote an article for Stanford University's alumni magazine about the politics of selling the X-ray laser, the centerpiece of the Strategic Defense Initiative. In the article, based entirely on open sources, he discussed well-known instances of senior laboratory officials leaking classified information to promote the laser, which by that time was no longer an active program (see chapter 1). Two months after it was published, lab security officials told DeWitt that his article constituted a "Class A security infraction."

Two years later, DeWitt happened to mention this incident to journalist Robert Scheer, adding that officials said he had disclosed nine "items" of classified information. When Scheer related this story in summarized form in a May 2, 1993 article in the San Francisco Examiner, security officials notified DeWitt a week later that the number of classified items was itself classified. Ten months after this, on March 8, 1994, DeWitt's security clearance was revoked and his office moved 30 feet (9 meters), from inside a fenced-in area to an unclassified area. In April 1994, he appealed to Secretary O'Leary citing the apparently retaliatory nature of the lab's action against him. One month later O'Leary announced that DeWitt's clearance had been restored.⁴

Notes:

² Seaborg, "Secrecy Runs Amok," p. 1411. The head of the DOE Office of Declassification stated in April 1997: "Although Mr. Seaborg believes his papers were reviewed before he left the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, we have been unable to confirm this, either through a search of the files or from interviews with people who were here at the time. In any event, we were obliged to remove classified information from these papers, some of which were from other agencies and governments. Mr. Seaborg has requested a re-review of 71 documents. All of these documents have been declassified except one, which is pending action at another agency." See A. Bryan Siebert, "The DOE's Declassification Program," Letter to the Editor, The Washington Post, April 16, 1997, p. A16. [Back]

³ Transcript of report by Dan Charles, KQED-AM (San Francisco), May 5, 1994. [Back]

⁴ Letter from Dr. Hugh E. DeWitt to Secretary Hazel O'Leary, April 4, 1994; Hugh DeWitt, "The Selling of a Wonder Weapon," Stanford, March 1991, pp. 28-33; Keay Davidson, "Nuke Lab Scientist Regains Security Status," San Francisco Examiner, May 6, 1994, p. A2. [Back]