I’ve lifted this straight from the Questions Answered column in The (London) Times of 2 February, purely because I think it’s a fascinating query. I’m not sure whether all such questions get an answer (the column is a recent innovation) but if replies are forthcoming I’ll happily provide a link when they are available. In the meantime:
‘Are there secure nursing homes for former spies who, as they develop dementia, might divulge state secrets?’
Personally I wouldn’t restrict this query to former spies. I’d include anyone who once had access to state secrets.
No cites, but given the money various nations are willing to spend on things like witness protection (how about homes for them?), I’d wager that while there may be no specific homes as such, a sufficiently paranoid government would see to it that they are well looked after, and hang the expense. If it means a private house and a carer with security clearance, then so be it.
What does “access to state secrets” mean? Does it mean just having at least a top secret clearance at some point? Are you aware that the number of people who have at least a top secret clearance at any time in the U.S. is more than 100,000? The number of people in the U.S. who are retired and once had at least a top secret clearance is surely in the tens of thousands. If you included everyone who had secret or confidential clearances it would be even more. How could the U.S. government possibly afford to take care of all those people in secure facilities? In other countries (like the U.K. or Australia, where I now notice that two posters to this thread are from), the number of people with security clearances of that level is presumably about the same proportion of their population, so the same problem holds for trying to keep track of all retirees in that way. In any case, a person with dementia isn’t likely to divulge secrets. He will have forgotten them.
I guess that decades after active duty, most spy might still remember details of their secret service work, but the major part of this information will have become totally outdated and worthless. Hence, Grandpa Spy happily chatting with other residents in the nursing home does not constitute too much of a security risk.
Add to that, what happens when someone who has had access to critical information is arrested and thrown in jail? Does he mix with the general population, who might learn his secrets as they’re torturing him for the fun of it? Or does he get solitary confinement? And in either case, how does he prove his status to the authorities?
Most secrets diminish in value with the passage of time hence the need for monitoring people who are privy to them wouldn’t apply in such cases. Furthermore, a proportion of former government employees holding sensitive information would remain lucid into old age. Don’t ask me how many.
However, there must be some information which is so sensitive that governments, or security agencies, wouldn’t appreciate its disclosure at any price. Maybe we could concentrate our attention on the relatively small number of persons who are in possession of this type of information, and how such secrets are preserved in the light of a risk which, however small, still exists.
There are procedures you’re supposed to follow whenever you under general anesthesia or other circumstances where you might be pliable, but to my knowledge they’re not rigorously enforced. For the most part, really critical “top secret” information that would inpact operational security like access codes and the like are changed on a regular basis just for this reason. “State secrets” and the like generally don’t last long enough that an insider going into dementia is a common problem; even something that is TS generally works its way out to the general public in at least the large details within a few years. Specific technical TS information–say, design and dimensional details on the W87 warhead are too extensive and complex to be got just by talking to someone, particularly someone who is senile; you’d really need drawings and specs to get any genuinely valuable information.
This isn’t to say it’s totally a nonissue, and stories of varying degrees of credibilty surround Reagan and his staffers regarding their reluctance to provide him with restricted access information for fear that he’d blurt it out in an inappropriate forum. (Well, that and that Reagan would probably have little appreciation for the details, anyway; a technical brain he was not.)
Or maybe we just send Jack Bauer to remove their vocal cords and sever their fingers to prevent them from talking “for the good of the nation”. He’d totally do it, and he’d there before the next commercial break no matter how bad the traffic is.
I know about something calling ‘switching off’, which is implanting a hypnotic block and is or was used to detune highly trained soldiers. The odd thing is that I don’t know how I know about it, it must be from my uncle who knew a lot of strange things from his time in WWII. One of his long term friends was one of those guys - they met on pilot training.
In 1986 I figured something out, a pretty significant family thing, I told him about it, and he said I must not talk about it to anyone - I must not even think about it. In 2001 I found I was talking to an ex special forces Major - and asked him a few probing questions about what happened after he was demobbed. The next day and until early 2004, I felt thoroughly confused, as if I had mislaid a period of my life - it was like not being able to remember something - a small but irritating ‘cloud’. In early 2004 a relative told me something that got me wondering, and everything from 1986 came back and the ‘cloud’ disappeared.
What I remembered was so important and potentially destructive that I would never have not thought about it for 18 years. When one has eliminated the impossible … and I do know that my uncle was interested in hypnotism - and knew a lot of people.
I know of one place where elderly ‘distingushed gentlemen’ retire, it is a bit like an Oxbridge college. My uncle was there for about 15 years. The inmates were an interesting bunch. I expect there are others.
I also noticed that at least three elderly Dons at an Oxbridge college had Intelligence backgrounds from WWII.
From what I’ve noticed from the above and others, is that they don’t much like talking about things to people who don’t understand. I suspect it is a case of birds of a feather flocking together.
I’ve also a suspicion that Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame, held some stuff back as a form of insurance - and I’ve a suspicion I know roughly what it could be.
[QUOTE=There are procedures you’re supposed to follow whenever you under general anesthesia or other circumstances where you might be pliable, but to my knowledge they’re not rigorously enforced.[/QUOTE]
FWIW, my friend’s grandfather was a CIA dentist for many years in the 50s/60s. He had a high grade security clearance and worked solely on agency officers undergoing procedures requiring anesthetics.
He said that no one ever babbled anything of interest while under, though.
I believe Johnny VonNeumann was guarded by the army in his final days, for fear he would spill secrets. I’ve read this at least twice, but I don’t have a cite handy.
The story’s repeated by Norman Macrae in his biography of him (John von Neumann, Pantheon, 1992, p377); the book is light on sources, but he does thank several close family members for sharing their memories of his illness and it’s plausible they mentioned the detail.
Of course, when he did start talking in his sleep, it was in Hungarian and the guard was none the wiser whether he was revealing secrets or not.
