The Nation - News from Aug. 22, 1988

In an unusually blunt internal report, Navy auditors have accused the Marine Corps of carelessly exposing tens of thousands of secret military documents to possible compromise due to “general inattention to implementing security” and a “less-than-diligent approach to handling classified material.” The Naval Audit Service said the whereabouts of 60,000 secret documents from Marine Corps headquarters in Arlington, Va., is unknown. Auditors did not say they had found any instances of espionage. Marine Corps records can deal with sensitive topics such as troop operations, war strategy, invasion contingency plans, weapons capability and performance, intelligence matters and North Atlantic Treaty Organization operations. The report said officers who discovered that secret records were missing put off investigating.