Security Clearances
What indicates a trustworthy employee?
They say the CIA is filled with Mormons. I have no idea if this is true. The CIA probably wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole, and also I would gouge my eyes out with a rake rather than endure the security clearance process. But the rumors I’ve heard say that it’s full of Mormons and home-schooled Christian kids, because that’s who can pass the security test.
Thank goodness this newsletter is not journalism, because I’m about to fill it with hearsay. My buddy’s friend was a navy pilot. He lived with perfect discipline for years to qualify to fly a fighter jet. Once he’d been approved for this assignment, the government checked him for security clearance. Agents interviewed his family and college roommates. Finally, they interviewed him. They asked about drugs, gambling, affairs, gang affiliations, anything that could compromise his loyalty to the United States and its aircraft secrets. At the very end, they asked, once again, “Have you ever used drugs? Remember, we’ve interviewed your close friends from college. We’ve scanned your social media. Don’t lie to us.”
He broke down. “Just once. I had been drinking and tried a small puff of marijuana. But never anything else. It’s the truth.” They ended the interview right there. He went home, where of course his roomates hadn’t said anything. (Urban legend? Verifiable truth? I refuse to track this down to find out.)
It reminds me of a lower-stakes moment. I was hitchhiking across the country the summer after college, sleeping where I could, visiting friends. I was in shock. A family friend had died, and I needed to figure out how to get home to Alaska for her funeral. Should I cut the trip short, or rush to California and fly from there? I needed money. I’d been working a little as I went—I hung gutters in North Carolina, at least. I showed up at a Labor Ready in Colorado, taking a seat in a busy little waiting room around 6am. Everyone looked elderly to me when I was 22, but especially the haggard men looking for work that morning. I’d have guessed many were homeless, others were proud but down on their luck. They could have gone tooth-for-tooth with a hockey team. I told the desk guy about my experience working in oil and other odd manual labor jobs, which apparently made me an ideal candidate for baling hay, as did the fact that unlike my competition, I had not yet destroyed my body with drugs, rough sleeping, and baling hay.
The desk guy handed me a long, multiple-choice test: just a formality. Fill it out, he said, and then he’d find me some loaner boots. Now if there’s one thing the public education system prepared me for, it’s multiple choice tests. You have to get a little pedantic. This is about absolutely true answers. If a question says, “never” well, there’s probably an exception to “never” so cut that bubble and narrow it down to the other three.
This quiz was ridiculous: “I have yelled at a coworker. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.” “I have stolen from my employers. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.” “It is okay to give discounts to my friends. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.” “I solve my problems with fighting…” I was beginning to feel like I had extremely limited life experience. If this thing came back squeaky clean they were gonna think I was just a liar. I started looking for exceptions. What constitutes a fight? At Boy Scout camp we wrestled in the dirt over minor insults all the time.
When he ran the scantron, the office guy looked crushed. I had answered a question wrong. The only correct answer was “never.”
Both of these tests failed the real life tests of honesty we learn as kids—admit a mistake, and you receive forgiveness, but lie and you get punished severely. Government, however, has no room for mistakes, and neither does corporate liability. Trying marijuana once and never bothering again might be excellent proof of moral character. It may indicate life experience that leads to wisdom and empathy, helping read people. It may also fail you your background check.
The best way to win a legal game of “never have I ever” is simply to be so young and inexperienced that you never ever have. So the CIA security clearance process selects for two things—liars, and Mormons. I suppose they believe they need a little of both.
Back in the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover ran a “lavender scare,” to try to rid the federal government of gay people. Hoover, who may have been gay, said gay employees were vulnerable to blackmail by communists. (Incidentally, Hoover insisted that America had no such thing as a Cosa Nostra, so maybe his threat modeling was a little skewed.) I wonder if Hoover’s paranoid obsession with blackmail shaped the modern government’s security clearance process, or if it simply leans on yes/no questions about vices because yes/no questions are easy for bureaucrats to defend. “Does this person seem like a dipshit” is too subjective for military paperwork.
I bring this all up because tonight, the Washington Post got ever closer to finding the American who leaked massive amounts of intelligence about the Ukraine war. The leaks have been catastrophic. If legitimate, they revealed that America has sources in specific Russian military units who warned us about surprise attacks, revealed that we have undisclosed satellite imaging capabilities which Russian (or someday, Chinese?) forces can now learn to evade, and revealed some impressive eavesdropping capabilities. They detailed the location of Ukraine’s air defenses, ammunition needs, and some of Ukraine’s plans for a spring offensive. Whoever leaked these sensitive documents will get a lot of people killed—not just American spies, but Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. The Post talked to the leaker’s good friend: a teenager he was trying to impress on the internet.
The leaker, known as OG, apparently spent months trying to show off to an invitation-only Discord server for about 25 young men, roughly half of them from foreign nations, “united by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God.” The article is amazing. It’s great reporting and an insane story. One immature kid’s need to look cool to teenagers he’s never met will destroy families and change future wars. He’s consumed so much propaganda here in America, he works smack dab in the middle of the Deep State and complains about “government overreach,” not realizing government is not a boogeyman, but just a bunch of other paycheck-cashing derps like him.
The leaker got people killed because he lacked maturity, empathy, and life experience. But I bet he never admitted to trying drugs.