Soviets Urged to Shorten Life of State Secrets

BRUSSELS—In 1972 Victor Brailovsky, then a 37-year-old cyberneticist, and his 32-year-old wife Irma, a computer scientist, applied for a visa to leave the Soviet Union. Four years later Victor was granted permission to emigrate to Israel but Irma was not. The reason, according to Soviet authorities, was that “she had been able during her work to listen and hear something secret.” Fifteen years later the Brailovskys finally arrived in Israel. Last month, at a meeting here organized by the International Federation of Scientists for Soviet Refuseniks, they met with Western scientists to discuss when and for how long a government is justified in restricting the movement of scientists who possess secret knowledge. Despite Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforming spirit of glasnost, the Brailovskys said, the secrets that many scientists hold threaten to keep them in the Soviet Union forever. Participants at the meeting focused on the question: How long does a secret stay a secret? In 1985 Gorbachev told French journalists that the maximum period of detention to protect secret information should be five years. Later in the same interview he added that, in exceptional circumstances, detention might be “up to 10 years.” Conference attendees agreed to ask Soviet authorities to reconsider the five-year rule on secrets. They suggested one year as more reasonable for the average scientist whose work is neither a breakthrough nor politically sensitive. Yuval Ne’eman, a physicist at Tel Aviv University who served as scientific adviser to the Israeli government in the late 1960s, said that once secret information becomes known or irrelevant, there is no basis for detainment. Even the most fundamental scientific secrets lose their value in two years, he said. Ne’eman divides secrets into four broad types: political and diplomatic, intelligence and covert operations, military and scientific. Scientists are affected in the latter three categories by cryptography of some materials. The importance of a secret is in- versely proportional to the number of people who know it, Ne’eman said. He suggested that the product of a secret’s life and the number of people aware of it is approximately a constant—about 100 person years. For example, new military equipment will lose its secrecy value within months of its issue because it is distributed to so many soldiers. On the other hand, he said, a long-term strategic plan known only to a few trusted generals could have a life of 10 years. Files Kept Forever The attempt to withhold large amounts of information from the worldwide scientific community is dcomed to failure, Ne’eman said. When scientists refrain from publishing and attending conferences, he said, colleagues from other countries gradually guess what is happening. “After that, it is only a question of weeks or months before they find out what it is,” he added. The Soviet system of record keeping also fullfills the state’s need to monitor access to information, the Brailovskys say. Special sections within institutes oversee the circulation of secret information. Scientists must hold permits to gain access for one day only to classified documents. Their names are recorded in a special daybcok labeled “to be kept forever.” Despite the rigor of the Soviet government’s record-keeping, Victor Brailovsky said, its use of the information is arbitrary and inconsistent. “They use the excuse of state secrets even without records,” he said. “It’s up to the KGB department for state secrets.” The Brailovskys’ experience confirms this. Although Irma’s name was not recorded in the special journals, her emigration request was denied and both lost their jobs. Victor organized seminars for other scientists in similar situations, and in 1980 was arrested for “spreading anti-Soviet propaganda.” In 1981 he began a five-year exile, but was freed before completing the term. Earlier this year Irma was told she could not emigrate until 1995. In September, however, she received her exit visa and departed for Israel. Dorothy Hirsch, director of the New York-based Committee of Concerned Scientists, said that 868 scientists, engineers and doctors are waiting to leave the Soviet Union. Many are being held back by information learned 20 years ago, she said. “For 50 percent of the refuselniks the trouble is due to the first three years of their career,” said Victor Brailovsky. “People aged 47 are answering for what happened when they were 22 years old.” Carr is a correspondent for The Economist.

Soviets Urged to Shorten Life of State Secrets

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