Koval, although a private, is rather a special case. He trained as a chemical engineer in the USSR, then as an electrical engineer in the US.
I also don’t think Whitacre was killed/abducted for any secrets.
There are two reasons:
1) I was in the USAF in the ‘90s, and my MOS required a Top Secret/SCI clearance. This doesn’t mean you have access to everything classified as such; generally only what you have a need to know (for your specific job.)
But more importantly, 2) Klaus Fuchs had already given everything we knew about the atomic bomb to the Soviets in 1945:
“Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had helped the United States build its first atomic bombs, was arrested for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. While stationed at U.S. atomic development headquarters during
World War II, Fuchs had given the Soviets precise information about the U.S. atomic program, including a blueprint of the
“Fat Man” atomic bomb later dropped on Japan, and everything the Los Alamos scientists knew about the hypothesized hydrogen bomb.” (
Ref)
So certainly, a low-level enlisted person (as Whitacre, and I was) can have access to TS information, but it isn’t generally worth killing them over, IMO.
The simplest explanation is that someone (lots of people, by the sound of it) knew he was carrying around a lot of cash, and the usual thing occurred.
Also, in re: his 24-hour pass. This generally just permission to be off base. Even in the 90s, it wasn’t automatic that you could just wander into town or whatever. We also had to let our supervisor know where we were and how we could be contacted; for example, when I was in Monterey, CA, spending a weekend in San Francisco entailed filling out a form with the dates, address and phone number where we could be located. When we returned, we’d often get a debrief from OSI about anyone we’d been in contact with, no matter how seemingly casually.
We didn’t get paper passes, but here’s what they looked like in 1947:
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