Former Central Intelligence Agency director John Deutch kept both classified information and pornography on his home computer, leaving unauthorized outsiders - including hackers - the potential to gain access to U.S. state secrets, senior intelligence sources have revealed.
United Press International says the sources claim Deutch was in e-mail contact with an individual who identified himself as a Russian scientist, and that his home computer was also used to access so-called high-risk Web sites, including porn sites.
Deutch lost his top-secret security clearances two years after retiring from the CIA, when it was discovered and revealed he had created top-secret documents on CIA-issued personal computers in his home which were not cleared to handle such information, UPI says.
Incumbent CIA director George Tenet says there's no way to know whether any information in Deutch's home computer was intercepted by hackers or foreign nationals, but the agency isn't ruling out the possibility, either.
"I can't tell you it has or has not occurred," Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "There is no evidence to suggest that it happened."
Tenet, who had been Deutch's friend as well as successor, says Deutch had been sloppy in what he was doing. "Nevertheless….as director I believe he should have known better," he told the Senate panel.
The CIA and the Defense Department have put top-secret information on secure private computer networks which can be entered only with special computers an software. But Deutch opted not to have the special system in his home, UPI says, writing many documents on his personal computers. Secrets were thus in position to be compromised, the sources told UPI, because Deutch used the computer for e-mail and was in contact with someone who could have been a foreign agent.
Tenet says Deutch largely created documents he'd put into the secure system later. The UPI says the irony is that Deutch had been one of the first government officials to warn how vulnerable computers are to information attacks.
Deutch headed the CIA from March 1995 through December 1996. The agency allegedly knew he was using his home computer to write and store highly classified documents, UPI says, but took no action and never even told Congress or the Justice Department until last August, when Tenet suspended his old friend's clearances. He says the CIA should have acted sooner on the breach but that pulling Deutch's clearances is one of the most severe punishments he can receive.
