Stephen R. Dujack is an editor and writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was editor of the Foreign Service Journal from 1981–88.

Every time I read the breathless media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s nongovernmental email account and private server she kept when she was secretary of state, or when I hear Donald Trump muse about her supposedly pending FBI indictment, I’m reminded of another State Department scandal, years back. In February 1987, at the height of the Cold War, a top official at State caused a leak of extremely sensitive material, classified above top secret. It was distributed far and wide—to nearly every country in the world. And for that serious information breach—much worse than anything Clinton is accused of—he received nothing more than a letter warning him to be more circumspect in the future.

How do I know? I was the agent of that massive leak.


It was a scene right out of the book I Was Cicero, the first-person chronicle of the valet to the British ambassador to Turkey during World War II. The servant became a Nazi spy, penetrating the safe of the unwitting envoy and using a 35-millimeter Leica and a bare light bulb to photograph secret documents about an Allied invasion of France; he then sold the negatives to the Germans.

In my case, I walked into the office of a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and, using an Olympus OM1 single-lens-reflex camera on a tripod and two slaved flash units, carefully took 72 Ektachrome slides of the highly sensitive document that lay open on his desk.

It took me 10 minutes. I then left his office on the State Department’s exclusive seventh floor and went across the street to my office. I blew up one of the slides to 8½ x 11 inches and made 10,000 copies. I then proceeded to send the copies to more than 100 foreign countries, using the diplomatic pouch. They went to every embassy and every consulate staffed by the Foreign Service, plus to members of the diplomatic corps in Washington (including the Soviet delegation) and thousands of offices in Foggy Bottom and dozens on Capitol Hill.

One of those copies went to an aide of then-Senator Jesse Helms, the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, with jurisdiction over the State Department. The aide quickly recognized the document in the photograph as a copy of the National Intelligence Daily (NID)—“one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence documents,” according to the New York Times. The NID was produced by the CIA every day and went to the president and a small group of top advisers. Each copy was carefully numbered, and it was forbidden to discuss its contents in hallways or on the telephone. And posing prettily with his hands placed casually over the document was the smiling countenance of Ronald I. Spiers, the undersecretary of state for management and the fourth-ranked officer in the Department of State.

As you may have guessed by now, the photograph in question was published as the cover of a magazine, the February 1987 edition of the Foreign Service Journal. The Journal is the diplomats’ professional magazine, published by the private American Foreign Service Association and edited then by me and a staff of three. Inside the magazine was an interview with the undersecretary. But it was the photograph on the front that garnered all the attention.

The cover of the February 1987 edition of the Foreign Service Journal accidentally contained an image of the president’s National Intelligence Daily.

The Helms aide called the Bureau of Diplomatic Security in the State Department, which is responsible for the protection of premises, personnel and information. The bureau then dispatched two officers to visit me. The two men—dressed in dark business suits with matching black ties—were a little embarrassed as they talked about a problem with the magazine and its distribution via the diplomatic pouch and the U.S. mail to nearly every country in the world. But they quickly came to the point: Our February cover contained classified information. They pointed to the undersecretary’s hands, which only partially covered a color map and a page of text. Existing technology, they claimed, could enlarge the open page and compromise security.

You can imagine my shock at that revelation. But that shock was compounded when they asked me if I would turn over the slides, which I quickly said I wouldn’t do, citing the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press.

That night I got a phone call at home. It was from Clyde Farnsworth of the Times. He knew exactly what had happened to me that day: the visit from the security officials, and my refusal to turn over the film. I was unwilling to give him a quote, but I was able to confirm the facts for him off the record.

The article came out the next morning. “A map of Lebanon was partly blocked by Mr. Spiers’ left hand,” the Times reported. “He had some hand-written notes partly shielding the print on the facing page, but clearly visible at the bottom of the page was the number 121.” This analysis was quickly picked up by other newspapers, all of which noted the prominent map of the country where the United States had lost hundreds of Marines in a terrorist attack four years before. A common refrain was the supposed fact attributable to security professionals that the text could be enlarged and read with the right equipment.

The Times continued to lead on the story, but was quickly followed by the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. Both the Associated Press and UPI covered the cover story, too, ensuring its wide distribution around the country. It was a hot item because of Spiers’ rank in the department and because of the obvious carelessness with which he treated access to the highly secret document. Even if no information could be gleaned from the document, it was also hard to imagine a more egregious transmission of classified material—and classified above top secret at that. And yet, even despite this, the press coverage was almost 90 percent light, even if told in standard journalistic prose. The top diplomat “blew his cover,” as Time magazine put it (with millions of additional copies of the cover accompanying its article, an unintended irony).

As the story ran in the press, I hunkered down in my office with the slides, which I hid in a locked filing cabinet. I quickly concluded that no First Amendment issues were involved, since no one had interfered either with publication of the photograph or its distribution. And so, I went to the State Department’s security office and gave them the two boxes of slides.

One month later, after much internal deliberation within Foggy Bottom, Spiers got his punishment: “Spokesman Charles E. Redman said the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security will issue a letter to Ronald Spiers, undersecretary of state for management, advising him to exercise more caution in the future,” the AP reported. Redman called the incident “an infraction.” Importantly, he also said that a State Department analysis had concluded that none of the type could be read, even with advanced equipment—and thus no harm had been done. The bureau is under the jurisdiction of the undersecretary, and the press noted the irony of, in effect, Spiers’ sending the letter to himself, as both chief security officer and the department’s foremost security miscreant.

Spiers acknowledged that he “wasn’t careful enough” with the document, the AP reported, but Redman noted that he did try to cover it up with his hands and some papers. Spiers later told me that he didn’t realize I was shooting with a wide-angle lens that would have the document in view—he thought I was after a headshot. But he was clearly in the wrong: I should not have even been allowed in the room with the document unsecured.

About the time that Spiers was notified of his “infraction,” I received the “corpse” of our February issue, returned from the printer. The package included a final irony: the single slide I had sent to the printer for the cover, a slide that I had completely forgotten about when I had turned the other film over to the State Department. Curious, I put the slide in a projector and enlarged it to maximum resolution. That’s when I noticed that the map was not of Lebanon. It was of another country with a western seacoast that much concerned the United States at the time: Angola.

30 years later, you’d never know that Clinton’s violation was less serious than Spiers’.

Thirty years later, you’d never know that Clinton’s violation was less serious than Spiers’. The media coverage is more insistent; government officials are more concerned. The departmental inspector general has chimed in critically, and the FBI and the Department of Justice have been brought into the case. And yet, look closer at the facts, and you will see there’s no evidence that Clinton’s email scandal constituted an information leak at all. None of the emails she sent or received contained material that was classified at the time, and there’s no evidence that anybody but the intended recipients ever read them.

Yes, Clinton violated a government record-keeping policy and showed poor judgment—but, as in the case of Spiers’ carelessness in the face of much higher stakes, there’s no evidence that national security was jeopardized because of Clinton’s actions. If Spiers wasn’t criminally prosecuted for his worse “infraction,” why would Hillary Clinton be prosecuted for hers?