REMINISCENCE AND FAREWELL

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on this last day of the 106th Congress I

would ask to be allowed a moment of reminiscence and farewell.

  Come January 3--deo voluntus, as the Brothers used to teach us--I

will have served four terms in the United States Senate, a near quarter

century. In our long history only one other New Yorker, our beloved

Jacob K. Javits, has served four terms. I had the fortune of joining

the Finance Committee from the outset, and served for a period as

chairman, the first New Yorker since before the Civil War. I was also,

at one point, chair of Environment and Public Works. I have been on

Rules and Administration for the longest while, and for a period was

also on Foreign Relations. Senators will know that it would be most

unusual for someone to serve on both Finance and Foreign Relations at

the same time. An account of how this came about may be of interest.

  The elections of 1986 returned a Democratic majority to the Senate

and the Democratic Steering Committee, of which I was then a member,

began its biannual task of filling Democratic vacancies in the various

standing committees. There are four ``Super A'' committees as we term

them. In order of creation they are Foreign Relations, Finance, Armed

Services and Appropriations. With the rarest exceptions, under our

caucus rules a Senator may only serve on one of these four.

  There were three vacancies on Foreign Relations. In years past these

would have been snapped up. Foreign Relations was a committee of great

prestige and daunting tasks. Of a sudden however, no one seemed

interested. The Senate was already experiencing what the eminent

statesman James Schlesinger describes in the current issue of The

National Interest as ``the loss of interest in foreign policy by the

general public'' (p. 110). Two newly-elected Senators were more or less

persuaded to take seats. At length the Steering Committee turned to me,

as a former ambassador. I remained on Finance.

  And so I served six years under the chairmanship of the incomparable

Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. I treasure the experience--the signing

and ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), the

final days of the Cold War. But I continue to be puzzled and troubled

by our inattention to foreign affairs. To be sure, the clearest

achievement of this Congress has been in the field of foreign trade,

with major enactments regarding Africa, the Caribbean, and China.

These, however, have been the province of the Finance Committee, and it

was with great difficulty and at most partial success did Chairman Bill

Roth and I make the connection between world trade and world peace.

This would have been self-evident at mid-century. I remark, and I

believe there is a case, that any short list of events that led to the

Second World War would include the aftermath of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff

of 1930. Indeed, in the course of the ceremony at which the President

signed the measure naming possible permanent normal trade relations

with China in connection with its admission to the World Trade

Organization, I observed that the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which

conceived the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and

anticipated an international trade organization, opened on the day I

joined the Navy. For certain there was no connection, but my point was

simply that in the midst of war the Allies were looking to a lasting

peace that might follow, and this very much included the absence of

trade wars.

  But again, how to account for the falling-off of congressional

involvement in foreign affairs. I offer the thought that the failure of

our intelligence, in the large sense of term, to foresee--forsooth to

conceive!--the collapse of the Soviet Union has brought forth a

psychology of denial and avoidance. We would as soon not think too much

about all, thank you very much.

  I have recounted elsewhere the 1992 hearings of the Foreign Relations

Committee on the START I Treaty. Our superb negotiators had mastered

every mind-numbing detail of this epic agreement. With one exception.

They had negotiated the treaty with a sovereign nation, the Union of

Soviet Socialist Republics. Now they brought to us a treaty signed with

four quite different nations: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

When asked when this new set of signatories was agreed to, the

Committee was informed that this had just recently taken place at a

meeting in Lisbon. An observer might well have wondered if this was the

scenario of a Humphrey Bogart movie. The negotiators were admirably

frank. The Soviet Union had broken up in December 1991. Few, if any, at

their ``end of the street'' had predicted the collapse. Let me correct

the record: None had.

  As to the record, I would cite the 1991 article in Foreign Affairs by

the estimable Stansfield Turner. The Admiral had served as Director of

Central Intelligence and knew the record. He was blunt, as an admiral

ought. I cite a passage in Secrecy:

  [Turner wrote,] ``We should not gloss over the enormity of this

failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis. We know now

that there were many Soviet academics, economists and political

thinkers, other than those officially presented to us by the Soviet

government, who understood long before 1980 that the Soviet economic

system was broken and that it was only a matter of time before someone

had to try and repair it, as had Khrushchev. Yet I never heard a

suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of

defense or state, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing systemic

economic problem.'' Turner acknowledged the ``revisionist rumblings''

claiming that the CIA had in fact seen the collapse coming, but he

dismissed them: ``If some individual CIA analysts were more prescient

than the corporate view, their ideas were filtered out in the

bureaucratic process; and it is the corporate view that counts because

that is what reaches the president and his advisors. On this one, the

corporate view missed by a mile. Why were so many of us insensitive to

the inevitable?

  Just as striking is the experience of General George Lee Butler,

Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) from 1990 to 1994.

Again to cite from Secrecy.

  As the one responsible for drafting the overall U.S. strategy for

nuclear

[[Page S11838]]

war, Butler had studied the Soviet Union with an intensity and level of

detail matched by few others in the West. He had studied the footage of

the military parades and the Kremlin, had scrutinized the deployments

of Soviet missiles and other armaments: ``In all, he thought of the

Soviet Union as a fearsome garrison state seeking global domination and

preparing for certain conflict with the West. The only reasonable

posture for the United States, he told colleagues, was to keep

thousands of American nuclear weapons at the ready so that if war broke

out, Washington could destroy as much of the Soviet nuclear arsenal as

possible. It was the harrowing but hallowed logic of nuclear

deterrence.'' But Butler began having doubts about this picture, upon

which so much of U.S. foreign policy was based, by the time of his

first visit to the Soviet Union, on December 4, 1988. When he landed at

Sheremetyevo Airport, on the outskirts of Moscow, he thought at first

that the uneven, pockmarked runway was an open field. The taxiways were

still covered with snow from a storm two days earlier, and dozens of

the runway lights were broken. Riding into downtown Moscow in an

official motorcade, Butler noticed the roads were ragged, the massive

government buildings crumbling. He was astonished when the gearshift in

his car snapped off in his driver's hand. After pouring over thousands

of satellite photos and thirty years' worth of classified reports,

Butler had expected to find a modern, functional industrialized

country; what he found instead was ``severe economic deprivation.''

Even more telling was ``the sense of defeat in the eyes of the people.

. . . It all came crashing home to me that I really had been dealing

with a caricature all those years.''

  General Butler was right. More than he might have known. This fall

former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski estimated that the

economy of ``Russia is one-tenth the size of America and its industrial

plant is about three times older than the OECD average.'' The

population has dropped from 151 million in 1990 to 146 million in 1999.

Infant mortality is devastating. Far from overwhelming the West, it is

problematic as to whether Russia can maintain a presence east of the

Ural Mountains. If you consider that the empire of the Czars once

extended to San Francisco we can judge the calamity brought about by

sixty-some years of Marxist-Leninism.

  And yet we did not judge. To say again, the United States government

had no sense of what was coming, not the least preparation for the

implosion of 1991.

  In 1919, John Reed, a Harvard graduate, and later a Soviet agent

wrote Ten Days that Shook the World, his celebrated account of the

Russian Revolution, as it would come to be known, in October 1917. In

no time these events acquired mythic dimension for intellectuals and

others the world over. At Harvard, Daniel Bell would patiently guide

students through the facts that there were two Russian Revolutions; the

first democratic, the second in effect totalitarian. But this was lost

on all but a few.

  It would appear that the Soviet collapse was so sudden, we were so

unprepared for it, that we really have yet to absorb the magnitude of

the event. It was, after all, the largest peaceful revolution in

history. Not a drop of blood was shed as a five hundred year old empire

broke up into some twelve nations, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus,

Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan,

Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine, whilst formerly independent

nations absorbed into the Soviet Bloc, Poland, the Czech Republic,

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia et al., regained their independence. In the

aftermath there has been no book, no movie, no posters, no legend.

  To the contrary, weak Russia grows steadily weaker--possibly to the

point of instability, as shown in the miserable events in Chechnya. We

see a government of former agents of the intelligence services and the

secret police. We see continued efforts at increasing armament. Witness

the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk. We see the return of the

red flag. We see little engagement with the West, much less the East

where China looms with perhaps ten times the population and far more

economic strength.

  And the United States? Apart from a few perfunctory measures, and one

serious, the Nunn-Lugar program, almost no response. To the contrary,

at this moment we have, as we must assume, some 6,000 nuclear weapons

targeted on Russia, a number disproportionate at the height of the Cold

War, and near to lunacy in the aftermath. When, as Senator Lugar

estimates, the Russian defense budget has declined to $5 billion a

year.

  What is more, other than the highest echelon of the Pentagon, no

doubt some elements of the intelligence community, possibly the

Department of State, no American knows what the targeting plan is. In

particular, Members of Congress, possibly with very few exceptions, do

not know. Are they refused information? Just recently, our esteemed

colleague, J. Robert Kerrey of Nebraska, wrote the Secretary of

Defense, William S. Cohen, a former colleague of ours, to set forth the

facts of this insane situation.

  There are signs that an open debate concerning nuclear weapons may be

afoot. In The Washington Post recently, we learn of the response to a

proposal by Stephen M. Younger, associate director of Los Alamos

National Laboratory and head of its nuclear weapons work, proposing a

great reduction in the number of massive weapons now in our arsenal in

favor of smaller devices intended to deal with much smaller engagements

than those envisioned during the Cold War. The Post reports that we now

have some 7,982 warheads linked to nine different delivery systems,

ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers. These are scheduled to decline to 3,500, half

on Trident II submarines, under the Start II agreement. Younger argues

that still fewer are needed. Any one of which would wipe out any large

city on earth. It appears that other experts believe that a few dozen

to several hundred of today's high-yield warheads would suffice to

manage the standoff with Russia or China. There is, perhaps more

urgently, the matter of nuclear weapons in what are for some reason

still called Third World nations, a relic of Cold War usage. Nuclear

standoff has settled into the South Asian subcontinent. The prospect

that an ``Islamic Bomb'' will migrate westwards from Pakistan is real

enough. It may be happening at this moment. The more then do we need

open debate. The more urgent then is Senator Kerrey's assertion that

Congress be involved. His profound observation that ``Sometimes secrecy

produces its opposite; less safety and security.''

  I have remarked on how little notice has been taken of the Russian

revolution of 1989-91. By contrast, the ``information revolution'' has

become a fixture of our vocabulary and our pronouncements on the widest

range of subjects, and at times would seem to dominate political

discourse. It might do well to make a connection as Francis Fukuyama

does in the current issue of Commentary. In his review of a new book by

George Gilder with the suggestive title Telecom: How Infinite Bandwidth

Will Revolutionize Our World, Fukuyama makes the connection.

  Why, then, do those convinced that the revolution is already

triumphant shake their heads so sadly at those of us who ``just don't

get it?'' True, people want to feel good about themselves, and it helps

to believe that one is contributing to some higher social purpose while

pursuing self-enrichment. But it must also be conceded that the

information-technology revolution really does have more going for it

than previous advances in, say, steam or internal combustion (or, one

suspects, than the coming revolution in biotechnology).

  The mechanization of production in the 19th and early 20th centuries

rewarded large-scale organization, routinization, uniformity, and

centralization. Many of the great works of imagination that accompanied

this process, from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times to Aldous Huxley's

Brave New World, depicted individuals subsumed by huge machines, often

of a political nature. Not so the information revolution, which usually

punishes excessively large scale, distributes information and hence

power to much larger groups of people, and rewards intelligence, risk,

creativity and education rather than obedience and regimentation.

Although

[[Page S11839]]

one would not wish to push this too far, it is probably no accident

that the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes did not survive

the transition into the information age.

  Is it possible to hope that we might give some serious thought to the

possible connection? And to ask ourselves just how we measure up in

this regard?

  That said, is it not extraordinary and worrying that of a sudden we

find ourselves in a state of great agitation concerning security

matters all across our government, from our nuclear laboratories at

home to embassies abroad to the topmost reaches of government? The late

Lars-Erik Nelson described it as ``spy panic.'' In the process the

possibility emerges that our national security will be compromised to a

degree unimaginable by mere espionage. The possibility is that we could

grievously degrade the most important institutions of foreign and

defense policy--our capacity for invention and innovation--through our

own actions.

  Take the matter of the loss, and evident return in clouded

circumstances of two hard drives containing sensitive nuclear

information from the Nuclear Energy Search Team at Los Alamos National

Laboratory. This June, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson asked two of

our wisest statesmen, the Honorable Howard H. Baker, Jr., and the

Honorable Lee H. Hamilton, to enquire into the matter. Here are the Key

Findings of their report of September 25th.

  While it is unclear what happened to the missing hard drives at Los

Alamos National Laboratory, it is clear that there was a security lapse

and that the consequences of the loss of the data on the hard drives

would be extremely damaging to the national security.

  Among the known consequences of the hard-drive incident, the most

worrisome is the devastating effect on the morale and productivity of

LANL, which plays a critical national-security role for the Nation.

  The current negative climate is incompatible with the performance of

good science. A perfect security system at a national laboratory is of

no use if the laboratory can no longer generate the cutting-edge

technology that needs to be protected from improper disclosure.

  It is critical to reverse the demoralization at LANL before it

further undermines the ability of that institution both to continue to

make its vital contributions to our national security, and to protect

the sensitive national-security information that is critical to the

fulfillment of its responsibilities.

  Urgent action should be taken to ensure that Los Alamos National

Laboratory gets back to work in a reformed security structure that will

allow the work there to be successfully sustained over the long term.

  Almost alone among commentators, Lars-Erik Nelson pursued the matter,

describing the interviews Senator Baker and Representative Hamilton had

with lab personnel.

  They now report that ``the combined effects of the Wen Ho Lee affair,

the recent fire at [Los Alamos] and the continuing swirl around the

hard-drive episode have devastated morale and productivity at [Los

Alamos].

  The employees we met expressed fear and deep concern over the . . .

yellow crime-scene tape in their workspace, the interrogation of their

colleagues by . . . federal prosecutors before a grand jury and the

resort of some of their colleagues to taking a second mortgage on their

homes to pay for attorney fees.

  There is no denying that Lee and whoever misplaced the computer

drives committed serious breaches of security. But the resulting threat

to our safety is only theoretical; the damage to morale, productivity

and recruitment is real.

  Employees were furious at being forced to take routine lie-detector

tests, a requirement imposed on them by a panicky Secretary of Energy.

. . .

  Obviously, there is a need for security in government. A Los Alamos

employee gave Baker and Hamilton an obvious, easy solution.

Unfortunately, it will be the one most likely to be adopted: ``The

safest and most secure way to do work is not to do any work at all.''

  In the course of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government

Secrecy (of which more later), a Commission member, then-Director of

Central Intelligence John M. Deutch, revealed to the American people

the extraordinary work of the VENONA project, an enterprise of the Army

Security Agency during and after World War II. During the war the

agency began to copy KGB traffic from and to the United States. On

December 20, 1946, Meredith K. Gardner--I am happy to say still with

us, buoyant and brilliant as ever--``broke'' the first. Dated 2

December 1944, it was a list of the principal nuclear scientists at Los

Alamos. Bethe, Bohr, Fermi, Newman, Rossi, Kistiakowsky, Segre, Taylor,

Penney, Compton, Lawrence and so on. The Soviets knew, and in time

stole essentials of the early atom bomb. But what they could not do,

was to slow down or deter the work of these great men, who would take

us further into the age of the hydrogen bomb. Next, their successors to

yet more mind-bending feats. The Soviets could not stop them. Would it

not be the final triumph of the defunct Cold War if we stopped them

ourselves?

  Do not dismiss this thought. If you happen to know a professor of

physics, enquire as to how many ``post-docs'' are interested in weapons

research, given the present atmosphere. To work at one-third the salary

available elsewhere, and take lie detector tests.

  And then there is intelligence. Nelson quotes a ``former top

intelligence official'' who told him, ``If you're not taking secrets

home, you're not doing your job.'' And yet here we are harassing John

M. Deutch, a scientist of the greatest achievement, a public servant of

epic ability for--working at home after dinner. Would it be too far-

fetched to ask when will the next Provost of the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology choose to leave the banks of the Charles River

for the swamps of the Potomac?

  Now I don't doubt that, as opposed to an intelligence official, there

are ambassadors who don't take their work home at night. Over the years

the United States has created a number of postings with just that

attraction. But these are few. The great, overwhelming number of our

ambassadors and their embassy associates are exceptional persons who

have gone in harm's way to serve their country. I was ambassador to

India at the time our ambassador to Sudan and an aide were abducted

from a reception by Islamic terrorists, spirited away and murdered.

Some days later the Egyptian envoy in New Delhi asked to see me. He had

a message from then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to tell me that

their intelligence sources reported I would be next. It is a not

uncommon occurrence. But nothing so common as taking work home, or

working in a--usually heavily armored--embassy limousine. Ask any

former ambassador to Israel. Our embassy in Tel Aviv is an hour's drive

from the capital in Jerusalem. The drive up and back is routinely used

to dictate memoranda of conversation, type them on a laptop. Whatever.

This fall, the superbly qualified, many would say indispensable

ambassador to Israel, Martin S. Indyk, was stripped of his security

clearances for just such actions. I cite Al Kamen's account in The

Washington Post.

  Just the other day, ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk was deep

into the State Department doghouse for ``suspected violations'' of

security regulations. His security clearance was suspended, so he

couldn't handle classified materials. He needed an escort while in the

State Department building. The department's diplomatic security folks

wanted him to stay in this country until their investigation was

completed.

  At a White House briefing Monday, a reporter asked if Indyk could

``function as ambassador? Do we have a functioning ambassador?''

  ``Not at the moment,'' press secretary Jake Siewert said.

  Allow me to cite a report by the redoubtable Jane Perlez, who was

just recently reporting from Pyongyang on the psychotic security

measures in the capital of North Korea. Eerily similar antics were to

be encountered on September 30, Ms. Perlez reported:

 State Dept. Unfreezes Hundreds of Promotions After Delay for Security

                                 Review

       Washington, Sept. 29.--A continuing security crackdown at

     the State Department led to the freezing of promotions for

     more than 200 senior officials, pending a review of their

     security records, department officials said today.

       The director general of the Foreign Service, Marc Grossman,

     said he was assessing the promotion files for security

     violations

[[Page S11840]]

     before sending the promotions to the White House, which then

     dispatches them to Congress for approval.

       The release of the list was delayed after the suspension of

     the security clearance of one of the department's most senior

     officials, Martin S. Indyk, ambassador to Israel, and a

     sudden vigilance by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright,

     who is under pressure from Congress on security problems.

       This evening, the department said that ``under 10''

     officials had been barred from promotions after Mr.

     Grossman's review of 400 candidates. The nearly 400 people

     included 200 midlevel officials, whose promotions were

     released today after a weeklong delay.

       As word of the latest action spread through the department,

     an assistant secretary of state complained at a senior staff

     meeting this week that management faced ``rage'' in the

     building and increasingly demoralized employees, according to

     several accounts of the session.

       Others, as well as diplomats abroad, complained of a

     poisonous atmosphere in the department created, in part, by

     security officials who grilled junior Foreign Service

     officers about their superiors. One senior official said the

     obsession with security had created a ``monster'' out of the

     bureau of diplomatic security, which Congress generously

     finances to the detriment of other areas of the department.

       In a yet more eerie analogy, one department employee

     described the situation as a ``security jihad.''

       It doesn't stop. It accelerates! Just this month The

     Washington Post reported the resignation of senior diplomats,

     the suspension of another, the firing of a further two over

     security matters.

       J. Stapleton Roy, one of the nation's two most senior

     foreign service officers and a three-time U.S. ambassador,

     has resigned in protest after Secretary of State Madeleine K.

     Albright suspended his deputy without pay and fired two other

     long-time State Department officials over a missing top-

     secret laptop computer. . . .

       The departure of Roy and the reassignment of [Donald]

     Keyser will rob the department of two of its top China

     experts. The son of a missionary, Roy grew up in China,

     returned to the United States to go to Princeton University,

     then joined the foreign service. He later served as

     ambassador to China, Indonesia and Singapore. Keyser had

     served in Beijing three times, had been the State

     Department's director of Chinese and Mongolian affairs, and

     most recently held the rank of ambassador as a special

     negotiator for conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and former

     Soviet republics.

       ``That's a lot of brainpower suddenly removed from the

     State Department,'' said William C. McCahill, a recently

     retired foreign service officer who served as the deputy

     chief of mission in Beijing. ``Keyser is a brilliant analyst

     and a person of great intellectual honesty and rigor. Stape

     is the kind of person you want in INR, someone who can think

     beyond today and tomorrow, who can think beyond established

     policy.''--The Washington Post, December 5, 2000.

  With some hesitation I would call to mind the purge of the ``China

hands'' from the Department of State during the McCarthy era. As our

Commission established with finality, there was indeed a Soviet attack

on American diplomacy and nuclear development during and after World

War II. There were early and major successes. The design of the first

atom bomb. But not much else, and for not much longer. The real

damage--the parallels are eerie--to American security came from the

disinclination of the intelligence community--then largely in the

Army--to share information with ``civilians.'' Specifically, documents

obtained from the F.B.I. indicate that President Truman was never told

of the Army Signals Security Agency's decryptions of Soviet cables

during and after the war. He thought the whole business of Communist

spying was a ``red herring.'' In 1953 he termed Whittaker Chambers and

Elizabeth Bentley ``a crook and a louse.'' American diplomacy and the

Department of State in particular were for years haunted by charges

they could readily have dealt with had they but known what their own

government knew. And who issued the instruction that the President was

not to be told? General Omar N. Bradley whom the President had made

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Admittedly it is hard to prove

a negative.) But I was reassured by an article in the Summer edition of

the ``Bulletin'' of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. In

it, Deputy CIA historian Michael Warner votes with the judgment I

offered earlier in my book ``Secrecy.''

  What might it be that Secretary Albright needs to know today but has

not been told? A generation hence we might learn. If, that is, the

current secrecy regime goes unaltered.

  For the moment, however, I have further distressing news for

Ambassador Stapleton if he should have occasion to return to the

Department of State main building for one or another reason. I have

just received a copy of a letter sent to David G. Carpenter, Assistant

Secretary of State for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Another

recently retired Ambassador, a statesman of large achievement and

impeccable reputation recently called at Main State, to use their term.

He was frisked at the entrance. He was allowed into the building, but

assigned an ``escort,'' who accompanied wherever he went. Including,

the ambassador writes, ``the men's room.''

  It is difficult not to agree with the Ambassador's assessment that

``the `escort' policy is insulting and totally out of proportion to any

desired enhancement of security.'' But then so is so much of security

policy as it has evolved over the past sixty years.

  What is to be done? Surely we must search for a pattern in all this.

Our Commission proposed a simple, direct formation. Secrecy is a form

of regulation.

  In the previous Congress, legislation was prepared to embody the

essentials of the Commission recommendations. All classified materials

would bear the name and position of the person assigning the

classification and the date, subject to review, that the classification

would expire. It is not generally realized, but apart from atomic

matters, under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and a few other areas

there is no law stipulating what is to be classified Confidential,

Secret, Top Secret--and there are numerous higher designations. It is

simply a matter of judgement for anyone who has a rubber stamp handy.

Our bill was unanimously reported from the Committee on Governmental

Affairs, under the fine chairmanship of Senator Fred Thompson, with the

full support of the then-ranking Committee member, our revered John

Glenn. But nothing came of it. The assorted government agencies,

covertly if you like, simply smothered it. The bureaucracy triumphed

once more. Thomas Jefferson's dictum that ``An informed citizenry is

vital to the functioning of a democratic society'' gave way before the

self-perpetuating interests of bureaucracy.

  I am pleased to report that this year's Intelligence Authorization

bill, which is now at the White House awaiting President Clinton's

signature, includes the Public Interest Declassification Act. The

measure establishes a nine-member ``Public Interest Declassification

Board'' of ``nationally recognized experts'' who will advise the

President and pertinent executive branch agencies on which national

security documents should be declassified first. Five members of the

Board will be appointed by the President and four members will be

appointed by the Senate and the House.

  The Board's main purpose will be to help determine declassification

priorities. This is especially important during a time of Congress'

continual slashing of the declassification budgets. In addition to the

routine systematic work required by President Clinton's Executive Order

12958, the intelligence community is also required to process Freedom

of Information Act requests, Privacy Act requests, and special searches

levied primarily by members of Congress and the administration.

  There is a need to bring order to this increasingly chaotic process.

This Board may just provide the necessary guidance and will help

determine how our finite declassification resources can best be

allocated among all these competing demands.

  My hope is that the Board will be a voice within the executive branch

urging restraint in matters of secrecy. I have tried to lay out the

organizational dynamics which produce ever larger and more intrusive

secrecy regimes. I have sought to suggest how damaging this can be to

true national security interests. But this is a modest achievement

given the great hopes with which our Commission concluded its work. I

fear that rationality is but a weak foil to the irrational. In the end

we shall need character as well as conviction. We need public persons

the stature of George P. Shultz, who when in 1986 learned of plans to

begin giving lie detector tests for State Department employees, calmly

announced that the day that program began would be the day he submitted

his resignation as Secretary of State. And so of course it

[[Page S11841]]

did not begin. And yet with him gone, the bureaucratic imperative

reappears.

And so Mr. President, I conclude my remarks, thanking all my fellow

Senators present and past for untold courtesies over these many years.