By Ted Gup

For the better part of 25 years I have made my living as an investigative reporter, ferreting out national secrets and revealing what the government would not otherwise disclose. So it may seem strange to hear me say that I worry about our government's ability to keep a secret. Over the years, CIA covert operatives, members of Congress, White House officials and Pentagon and State Department insiders have all shared information with me that carries the stamp of "secret." Indeed, the ship of state is leaking and listing badly, so willing are those in possession of secrets to share them.

The litany of recent abuses is alarming. At Los Alamos, hard drives containing nuclear secrets went missing for weeks. At the State Department, a laptop containing super-sensitive information vanished. At the CIA, a series of spies have wreaked havoc. It is now common practice for government officials to take home restricted documents. Even a former CIA director was found to have placed sensitive operational details on his unsecured home computer. Most recently, America's ambassador to Israel has been temporarily relieved of his duties over concerns about his handling of classified documents.

I think I know why it is that Uncle Sam cannot keep a secret: Our government's obsession with secrecy has promoted the laxity in security from which we now suffer. Time and again, the classified label is wielded so liberally that it has become virtually meaningless. Many of those charged with protecting the national security seem utterly desensitized to its strictures. Over the past four years, in researching a book, I interviewed more than 400 covert CIA operatives. Each of them could be persuaded to substitute individual discretion for institutional edict, because they believed the restrictions were groundless, even ludicrous.

For an example of overclassification, one need look no farther than the case of Barbara Robbins, a 21-year-old CIA secretary who was killed by a car bomb in Saigon (now, Ho Chi Minh City) during the Vietnam War, and whose affiliation with the CIA remains a state secret. Her father's dying wish was that the agency recognize her sacrifice. Thirty-five years after her death, the CIA still clings to the fallacy that she was a State Department employee.

Such smothering secrecy invites mischief. I should know. My strongest argument when approaching sources has always been that it defies reason to classify this or that. Indiscriminate classification disregards common sense and undermines respect for legitimate secrets - those that pose a real threat to national security. The cold war left behind mountains of secrets and a mind-set predisposed to husbanding information, contrary to the principles of a free and open society. I know that I am not the only beneficiary of loose security. The nation has its enemies, both foreign states and terrorists, who can just as easily exploit that contempt for secrecy.

No one is more hamstrung by the excesses of secrecy than the agencies and departments charged with safeguarding the nation. During the air war over Yugoslavia, the CIA selected a single ill-fated target believed to be the Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement in Belgrade. It turned out to be the Chinese Embassy. The operation was so compartmentalized that the CIA officers who knew it was an embassy were not consulted.

I've come to see that the pervasive abuse of the classification process threatens more than national security. Our diplomatic and military histories are incomplete, our national archives impoverished, because tens of millions of documents carrying the stamp of secrecy are beyond the reach of the citizenry. The result: Americans are burdened with an elliptical grasp of their own history and an inability to understand other nations' perceptions of them. A child in the dark will imagine things - creepy, scary things. So it is with a nation kept in the dark. The obsession with secrecy has bred a population vulnerable to conspiracy theories and sinister imaginings. Who can blame those who believe the CIA was complicit in the assassination of JFK or responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South-Central Los Angeles? People were constantly asking me if I was afraid for my life while I was working on my CIA book, so little did they trust their own government.

What is that same government's response to the rash of security breaches? A knee-jerk call for tighter security. I have no easy answers. But I know that it is easier to stamp something secret than to declassify that same material, and that secrecy has too often been used by those in power to escape accountability. If the country wants to get a grip on its secrets, it must first check its compulsion to lock up everything. As a journalist, I might find my job tougher, but as a citizen, I'd sleep a little easier.

SOURCE: This excerpt is derived from the 9 October, 2000, issue of Newsweek, from an editorial column entitled, "My Turn;" the title of the editorial is, "When Everything Is Secret, Nothing Is Safe," by Ted Gup, a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.