The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

stays in the individual’s official performance file for two years (or until reviewed by two boards); a letter of a six-or-more-day sus- pension stays in the file until the employee is tenured or promoted — significantly increasing the odds that he or she will be even- tually be selected out. The “point system” runs essentially as follows: • 10 points for each security violation received with- in the past 10 years; • 5 points for each security violation received between the past 10 to 20 years; • 5 points for each security infraction received with- in the past five years; • 2 points for each security infraction received in the past five to 10 years. The Foreign Affairs Manual differentiates a “viola- tion” from an “infraction” roughly as follows: A security infraction, in the judgment of DS, does not result in actual or possible compromise of the infor- mation. For example, at the end of the workday, an employee leaves a security container unlocked and unattended, containing classified information, in an area which has been authorized for the storage of clas- sified information. In contrast, a security violation is a security incident that, in DS judgment, results in actual or possible com- promise of the information. For example, if a classified document is transmitted over an unclassified facsimile machine, the incident would be adjudicated as a viola- tion, as there is a real possibility for electronic inter- ception and transcription of the classified document. Security Clearances. We can all hope that the new, more stringent penalties for security violations will elic- it greater attention to security within State and embassies by “scared straight” employees. But it has greatly exacerbated the confrontational attitude between DS officers doing their jobs and their col- leagues. Only those not planning on a full Foreign Service career will now accept a security violation blithely. Accepting a security violation — even the most obvious one — is now fought tooth and nail; it is far easier to fight off the first or second than to try des- perately to avoid the third. No one wants to discover at State an Aldrich Ames, Jonathan Pollard or Robert Hansen, or the other more-or- less-forgotten spies who have betrayed U.S. intelligence from trusted positions. The case of Felix Bloch remains in an anom- alous category: it was intimated that the former Embassy Vienna DCM consorted with Soviet agents, but charges were never formally laid. Still, State has a real incentive not just to prevent “bad apples” from entering the barrel in the first place, but to check the quality of the ones already in the larder to ensure that none have gone rotten. Two generations ago, the U.S. diplomatic gene pool was shallow; “old boys” from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and other Ivy League schools or equivalents were a limited, virtually self-vetting group of mostly WASP males. But still, they generated Alger Hiss. A genera- tion ago, a married woman could not be a Foreign Service officer; an individual had to be naturalized for 10 years before being eligible for the diplomatic ser- vice; known homosexuals could not hold security clear- ances; foreign-born spouses were viewed as potential security problems; assignment to the country of a for- eign-born spouse was unlikely; access to the highest- level intelligence was implicitly limited to the native- born and/or those without more than the slightest con- nection to hostile foreign countries. The United States never had the equivalent of Canadian Prime Minister Elliot Trudeau’s precedent- setting declaration that the state has no place in the bedrooms of its citizens. Indeed, it was not until May 28, 1998, that President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13087 prohibiting discrimination against civilian federal workers on the basis of sexual orientation. This was supplemented on June 23, 2000, by Executive Order 13160, which prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation in federally conducted education and training programs. And as of June 6, 2003, when the Supreme Court overturned all state sodomy laws as unconstitutional, these laws were still in effect as felonies in both Maryland and Virginia. Today, Virginia also remains one of seven states with a law prohibiting cohabitation of unmarried couples. Thus, while enforcement of such laws clearly declined over the years, DS could justify concern over activity that tech- F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 The correlation between security violations and failure to be promoted has become quite evident.