Steve Jobs feared someone might try to kidnap his daughter, considered his LSD use a “positive life changing experience,” and had a previously unreported arrest as a very young man, according to an application for top secret security clearance he filled out in 1988.
The Defense Department file was obtained by
Wired.com under a Freedom of Information Act request.
Asked how he might be vulnerable to blackmail, the Apple co-founder said someone could kidnap his illegitimate daughter for use as a bargaining chip. But Jobs said any kidnapper would be more likely to go after him for money, not his access to classified information.
“[If] I do receive my clearance,” he said, “there can be a possibility of blackmail and I do acknowledge this fact.”
Jobs also wrote in an application for top security clearance that he had been arrested in 1975 over failure to pay a speeding ticket, but he had not mentioned it on an earlier government application because he did not consider it an “actual arrest.”
Although Jobs’ use of LSD has been previously reported, the iPad inventor went into more detail in his application, saying he had taken the drug some 20 to 15 times between the years of 1972 and 1974.
“I have no words to explain the effect the LSD had on me, although, I can say it was a positive life changing experience for me and I am glad I went through that experience,” he wrote.
He also admitted using marijuana and hashish.
Jobs did end up receiving the top secret security clearance. The Pentagon documents did not say why he needed it, but Walter Isaascon’s biography, published shortly after Jobs’ death in October 2011, said it was related to work his Pixar company did for intelligence agencies in rendering data from reconnaissance flights and satellites.
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