It was a hot item because of Spiers’ rank in the department and because of the obvious carelessness with which he treated access to the highly secret document. Both the Associated Press and UPI covered the cover story, too, ensuring its wide distribution around the country. The Times continued to lead on the story, but was quickly followed by the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. A common refrain was the supposed fact attributable to security professionals that the text could be enlarged and read with the right equipment. “He had some hand-written notes partly shielding the print on the facing page, but clearly visible at the bottom of the page was the number 121.” This analysis was quickly picked up by other newspapers, all of which noted the prominent map of the country where the United States had lost hundreds of Marines in a terrorist attack four years before. “A map of Lebanon was partly blocked by Mr. I was unwilling to give him a quote, but I was able to confirm the facts for him off the record. He knew exactly what had happened to me that day: the visit from the security officials, and my refusal to turn over the film. It was from Clyde Farnsworth of the Times. But that shock was compounded when they asked me if I would turn over the slides, which I quickly said I wouldn’t do, citing the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. You can imagine my shock at that revelation. Existing technology, they claimed, could enlarge the open page and compromise security. They pointed to the undersecretary’s hands, which only partially covered a color map and a page of text. But they quickly came to the point: Our February cover contained classified information. mail to nearly every country in the world. The two men-dressed in dark business suits with matching black ties-were a little embarrassed as they talked about a problem with the magazine and its distribution via the diplomatic pouch and the U.S. The bureau then dispatched two officers to visit me. The Helms aide called the Bureau of Diplomatic Security in the State Department, which is responsible for the protection of premises, personnel and information. The cover of the February 1987 edition of the Foreign Service Journal accidentally contained an image of the president’s National Intelligence Daily. But it was the photograph on the front that garnered all the attention. Inside the magazine was an interview with the undersecretary. The Journal is the diplomats’ professional magazine, published by the private American Foreign Service Association and edited then by me and a staff of three. Spiers, the undersecretary of state for management and the fourth-ranked officer in the Department of State.Īs you may have guessed by now, the photograph in question was published as the cover of a magazine, the February 1987 edition of the Foreign Service Journal. And posing prettily with his hands placed casually over the document was the smiling countenance of Ronald I. Each copy was carefully numbered, and it was forbidden to discuss its contents in hallways or on the telephone. The NID was produced by the CIA every day and went to the president and a small group of top advisers. The aide quickly recognized the document in the photograph as a copy of the National Intelligence Daily (NID)-“one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence documents,” according to the New York Times. One of those copies went to an aide of then-Senator Jesse Helms, the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, with jurisdiction over the State Department. They went to every embassy and every consulate staffed by the Foreign Service, plus to members of the diplomatic corps in Washington (including the Soviet delegation) and thousands of offices in Foggy Bottom and dozens on Capitol Hill. I then proceeded to send the copies to more than 100 foreign countries, using the diplomatic pouch. I blew up one of the slides to 8½ x 11 inches and made 10,000 copies. I then left his office on the State Department’s exclusive seventh floor and went across the street to my office. ambassador to Turkey and, using an Olympus OM1 single-lens-reflex camera on a tripod and two slaved flash units, carefully took 72 Ektachrome slides of the highly sensitive document that lay open on his desk. In my case, I walked into the office of a former U.S. The servant became a Nazi spy, penetrating the safe of the unwitting envoy and using a 35-millimeter Leica and a bare light bulb to photograph secret documents about an Allied invasion of France he then sold the negatives to the Germans. It was a scene right out of the book I Was Cicero, the first-person chronicle of the valet to the British ambassador to Turkey during World War II.
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