By Jamie Dettmer and Kenneth R. Timmerman

jdettmer@InsightMag.com and ktimmerman@InsightMag.com

Clinton Holdover Orders Secret Documents Destroyed

A Clinton-administration holdover at the Pentagon agency in charge of reviewing dual-use technology exports has ordered the wholesale destruction of classified documents relating to controversial sales of military technology to China and Russia during the Clinton presidency. The documents include top-secret intelligence reports on foreign-weapons programs and front companies, as well as memoranda documenting Pentagon decisions to allow U.S. companies to sell advanced technology directly to Russian and Chinese military facilities, news alert! has learned. “These internal letters, memos and records of conversations are just the type of thing that Congress likes to subpoena when it conducts oversight on our export-control system,” a Pentagon analyst says. “Now the entire record of what’s happened here over the past eight years is gone.” David Tarbell, the director of the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA), ordered the shredding as he moved his agency from a building across the street from the Pentagon to a new location near Washington Dulles International Airport. The move, which was approved under the Clinton administration, was strongly criticized by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) since it distanced DTSA experts from critical Washington meetings where export-licensing decisions are made. Tarbell claimed to employees who objected to the destruction of the classified documents that the floors in the new building could not bear the weight of the heavy safes. “We were told not to take more than two drawers each to the new facility,” a DTSA analyst says. Tarbell instructed DTSA employees to empty their safes into burn bags, which then were taken away by contracted cleaning personnel to an incinerator. Many of the documents came from other agencies and were so tightly restricted that each copy was numbered and had to be signed for individually. Under Tarbell’s burn order, even the receipts now have been destroyed, so there is no longer a record of who handled classified documents at his agency. Tracking such receipts is a valuable counterintelligence tool that has helped expose foreign spies and deter leaks of classified information. “No one even took an inventory of what was in the safes,” the DTSA analyst said. “This material should have gone to the National Archives, if nothing else.”

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2001