Execute the Sell-Outs : Our Security Can’t Be Hostage to the Moral Weakness of a Few

Sex. Money. Treason.

It seems that every week another story breaks about how America’s most sensitive intelligence, military and diplomatic secrets have been found out or sold out.

We now witness the utterly demoralizing spectacle of members of this country’s most elite fighting force betraying Marine Corps honor and their fellow countrymen in a disgusting swap of sex for top secrets at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

When I read of these sordid spy stories, I am haunted by the memory of my many trips to Laos and Cambodia with wives and mothers of U.S. military pilots missing in action during the Vietnam War. In East Bloc and Soviet embassies in Phnom Penh and Vientiane, diplomats and embassy “political officers” (read that KGB) would divert discussions about Hanoi violating Geneva Convention rules pertaining to POWs by rambling on about how America would be beaten in Indochina because we are a decadent, self-centered, sex-obsessed nation. It sounded then like your cliche Soviet propaganda. I vividly recall the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Laos telling me in January, 1970: “You now have sexual perversion, drugs in school and child pornography. We have none of this. Your people are too comfortable, and grow weaker year to year.”

The four young military-dependent wives nervously looked to me to defend our national honor. As hard as I tried to defend our way of life, our freedom from government repression and all the good things that we have and they lack, I knew that these communists might someday be on target.

Well, Americans obviously have grown weak, and we obviously do abuse our freedom. And, to use the language of espionage, the KGB knows well how to “turn” a modern American. Sex or money or both. Goodby semper fi for at least some Moscow embassy guards.

When was the last time you heard of some disillusioned American betraying his or her country out of deep and abiding solidarity with Marxist comrades in the struggle against imperialist domination of the proletariat class? It just doesn’t happen that way anymore. In recent decades every American who has sold out our nation to the Soviets has done so for sex or money or both.

What do we do about this disgusting situation? Our government, our churches and our civic institutions can and must reestablish a national curriculum that breeds honor, loyalty, respect for tradition, patriotism and individual and collective responsibility. But, try as we may to rebuild character standards, we still are a nation of more than 240 million individuals, each with his or her own particular moral code of honor--or lack of one. No matter how honorable a people we are, and by and large we are very decent people, there will always be those who will sell out their countrymen for 30 pieces of silver.

That is why the individuals we select to research, design and build our top-secret weapons, man our worldwide military installations and guard our embassies must not only be highly trained and emotionally stable but also be security-cleared to the maximum extent possible. Incredible though it may sound, this is not being done at this time.

So that an increased security process does not become an impossible nightmare, our government also must start classifying as secret only the information that absolutely cries out to be designated at that level. During both the Carter and Reagan Administrations many of us in Congress repeatedly tried to persuade both Presidents to declassify roughly three-quarters of all classified intelligence information.

As an elected federal official who receives this information regularly, I am convinced that if much of it were made public the American people could learn about the present danger to liberty from Soviet power around the world. At the same time, we should drastically reduce the number of people with access to truly top-secret information. We could then concentrate our FBI and CIA resources to make sure that the people needing clearances receive the most painstakingly thorough background checks possible.

Also, and most important to stop this hemorrhage of vital intelligence to our enemies, traitors, when found guilty and after having exhausted our incomparable appeal process, must be executed. The death penalty must be mandatory for all traitors who spit on the graves of those who died to make us, and keep us, free.

My Soviet adversaries in Laos and Cambodia in 1970 may have been right--sex and greed do sell in modern America. Unfortunately, those vices are the dark side of liberty. But on the bright side we have our great Bill of Rights, the precious American freedoms that Soviet citizens always cite when they defect to us. Freedom sells itself. We also have that uncanny, unique American ability to set things right when they go to blazes. When it comes to the Soviets, Americans need to get strong and stay smart. Back to semper fidelis.