BY JAY BRYANT

Back in the Stone Age, when I was a kid, even a pre-teen in the backwoods of Maine was aware of a man named Allen Dulles, who had spent the War (you know, the War) in Switzerland spying on the Nazis, and then was chosen to head up our new American espionage agency, the CIA. Dulles, whose brother, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State at the time, was the very template for the caricature of the tweedy, pipe-smoking superspy.

Even little kids like me knew that he knew stuff nobody else knew, and we knew we were glad he did. We felt safer knowing there were real, live spies fighting the Cold War with the USSR and making sure it didn’t become a Hot War. 

The “H” in Hot War, after all, stood for Hydrogen, as in Hydrogen Bomb, and even though we didn’t think it was likely they would drop any such thing in Somerset County, Maine, we still didn’t want one dropped, wherever.

Sometimes, in between cowboy and cop fantasies, we imagined growing up to be a spy. But we knew that to become a spy a person had to be very smart, very brave, and very trustworthy. The United States government, after all, wouldn’t trust its most important secrets to just anybody.

Well, another fantasy blown to bits. Turns out you don’t have to be any smarter, braver, or more trustworthy than that skunk Edward Snowden.

For my money, there is no greater scandal in the whole NSA mess than the question of how someone like Edward Snowden ever got a security clearance that allowed him access to the data to which he had access.

Top Secret security clearance, I am reliably informed, requires an extensive background check that takes weeks or months to compile. People who have such clearance may not all be as smart, brave, and trustworthy as Allen Dulles was, but they’re supposed to operate only on a need-to-know basis, keep their mouths shut forever about the secrets they are privileged to know and be utterly devoted to the United States of America.

Snowden was demonstrably none of these things.

He was a high school dropout computer geek whose father defends him by saying he was a “sensitive young man,” which probably ought to disqualify him for Top Secret clearance in and of itself.

There’s sensitive as in the sensitive material those with Top Secret clearance are supposed to keep top secret, and then there’s sensitive as in emotionally unequipped to handle the realities of this tough world. Spies aren’t supposed to be sensitive in the latter sense, if you get the sense of what I’m saying.

Sensitive though they are, we are all still in a state of incomprehension with regard to Snowden’s motives. Maybe it will come out that he is truly a traitor who was purposely trying to give aid and comfort to America’s enemies. Or maybe it’s murkier than that, a confused congeries assembled by an addled mind.

But the scary thing to me – and this is where the Snowden case comes face to face with the IRS scandal – is that if people no more worthy than Snowden can have access to the vast mass of data the NSA and the Justice Department assure us are protected by firewalls and protocols galore against revelation, then what about people like Lois “Fifth Amendment” Lerner?

Unlike Snowden, you see, we know exactly what Lois Lerner’s motivation is. She’s out to get anybody and everybody whose politics is to the right of her own, which is to say all Republicans, a third or more of Democrats, and probably two thirds of all other Americans. And she has no scruples about using government secrets to do it.

Remember, the worst thing she did in her tenure at the IRS, which followed her tenure at the Federal Elections Commission where she pursued the same agenda, was not to delay the approval of applications for C-4 status by Tea Party groups, it was to demand access to their contributor lists so the individuals who gave to them could be audited, harassed and otherwise threatened.

So don’t tell me those emails and telephone conversations the NSA is storing out there in Utah are secure and could never be used against Americans. General Keith Alexander may be a paragon of virtue in the Allen Dulles mold, but I can rebut his testimony, and that of Deputy Attorney General James Cole, who followed Alexander to the witness stand at the House Intelligence Committee hearing this week and detailed how excruciatingly hard it is to actually get access to the metadata on file.

Here’s my rebuttal: Yeah, but what about Edward Snowden? What about Lois Lerner?