Ex-security adviser to plead guilty

WASHINGTON — Sandy Berger, a national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, has agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and give up his security clearance for three years for removing classified material from a government archive, the Justice Department and associates of Berger said Thursday.

A well-respected figure in foreign policy circles for many years, Berger has also agreed to pay a $10,000 fine as part of an agreement reached recently with the Justice Department after months of quiet negotiations, the associates said.

He is expected to enter his plea on Friday in U.S. District Court here, capping an embarrassing episode that reverberated in last year's presidential campaign.

Berger was a senior policy adviser to Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee, and was mentioned as a possible secretary of state in a Kerry presidency. But he quit the campaign abruptly in July after accusations surfaced that he had removed classified material from the Archives.

The material involved a classified assessment of terrorist threats in 2000, which Berger was reviewing in his role as the Clinton administration's point man in providing material to the independent commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Officials with the archives and the Sept. 11 commission ultimately determined that, despite the incident, the commission had access to all the material needed in its work

When the issue surfaced last year, Berger insisted that he had removed the classified material inadvertently.

In the plea agreement reached with prosecutors, he is expected to admit that he intentionally removed copies of five classified documents, destroyed three of them, and misled staff members at the National Archives when confronted about it, according to an associate of Berger's. who is involved in his defense but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plea has not been formalized in court.

The Justice Department, without discussing details of the agreement, acknowledged that Berger had said he would plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents.