THE INSECURITIES OF OUR SECURITY PROGRAM

...These cases illustrate the main problems of the Industrial Personnel Security Program...

...It may be expected that large business corporations will continue to screen their employes as a matter of sound personnel practice...

...A slightly different type of case is that presented by Dr...

...Before a defense contract involving classified materials can be awarded to a company by any branch of the military service, a plant must first obtain a facility clearance, a process which involves a determination that the plant's top officials are loyal and trustworthy, and a signed agreement that the company will undertake the prescribed steps to safeguard classified information...

...Yet some of the men were denied a security clearance on the grounds of association with Communists or other persons who were members or sympathizers of organizations on the Attorney General's list...

...The Butler Bill (S...

...Hanes had not lived in Doylestown since 1943 and had never been a member of the Communist Party anywhere...

...This, coupled with the vague criteria of the IPSP, such as "any behavior, activities or associations which tend to show that an individual is not reliable or trustworthy," further jeopardizes the accused person's basic constitutional rights and adds to his problem of trying to clear himself of guilt...

...The recent study by the New York Bar Association strongly recommended that these two million workers be eliminated from the IPSP and that the program be confined to the 800,000 employes who need a secret or top-secret clearance granted only after a government investigation...

...Some are said to maintain a central blacklist of suspected security risks for the use of all the personnel directors in that city or town...

...About two million of the three million workers covered by the program are maintenance and production employes who need only the lowest level of clearance for access to "confidential" information, which the employer himself can grant...

...If a man were in a Communist-dominated international or local union, his name may have appeared on the mailing list of a Communist front organization...

...It also calls for security screening before a potential employe is hired, which in itself could lead to many problems, and stresses in many of its recommendations as well as its tone the need for ultra-security...

...Another major problem of the IPSP is the misuse of the program by employers, some of whom have been known to initiate security proceedings for workers who need no access at all to classified materials, simply to find an excuse to fire them...

...After long, involved, and expensive legal proceedings, most of the men are now back at work...

...Strong opposition from unions and other liberal groups, including the charge from Tom Harris, assistant general counsel of the AFL-CIO, that the bill would lead to the "tyranny of a police state," kept it from coming out of committee in 1955...

...On May 23, 1957, after five years, he was finally cleared...

...All these cases come under the regulations of the Industrial Personnel Security Program...

...depending on the type of classified information to which they have access—confidential, secret, or top secret...

...2) character weaknesses exhibited by past action which make an employe unsuitable for access to classified information...

...Greene's case is now pending in the U.S...

...After his security risk firing in 1958, he was forced to start with another company as a $5,000 a year draftsman...

...The charges against four additional persons were false...

...At best the Industrial Personnel Security Program is a necessary evil required to protect genuinely secret and sensitive defense materials...

...Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia...

...A former PBX installer with a Midwestern telephone company has had one week of ur skilled labor in the 18 months that have followed denial of security clearance...

...Many union workers who are anti-Communists found themselves associating with Communists or members of other organizations now called subversive during the "united front" days of the 1930's when Communists penetrated unions and other liberal groups...

...Sperry discharged the men after they had been denied a security clearance, although ten of them were not on classified work and had no access to any restricted area of the plant...

...A secret-level screening was requested by the company for Kreznar although 1) he was working on non-classified materials, and 2) the company has no defense contracts in the area where he was employed...

...An admiral, a general, and a colonel testified at his security hearing to Greene's major contribution to the war effort...

...The 22 guideposts which determine whether an individual is a loyalty or a security risk under the IPSP fall into two general categories, both of which involve past acts or associations: Indication that 1) the employe may be disloyal, for example, for "establishing or continuing a sympathetic association with a spy, saboteur, traitor, seditionist, anarchist or revolutionist...

...Eight of the 22 criteria spelled out in IPSP regulations deal especially with the past associations of the employe...

...This could include any factory, railroad station, newspaper, or even textile mill which the Secretary of Defense decided was a "defense facility," and could bar any workers against whom there was "reasonable ground to believe they may engage in sabotage, espionage, or other subversive acts...

...The union official, who took a lie detector test to prove that he had left the Socialist Workers' Party some nine or ten years ago, has had difficulty finding work ever since he was fired by Sperry...

...An employe denied a clearance need not be fired, security regulations provide, but may be transferred to non-classified work in another area of the plant...

...In the Sperry case, the company justified firing workers denied a security clearance because it held "security begins and ends at the plant gate...

...William Greene had started with ERCO as a junior engineer some seventeen years before...

...In the course of union activities they may have served on committees together, attended meetings and rallies, ridden in the same car pool...

...JCYCE L. KORNBLUH, e research assistant to Mr...

...A worker's past actions and associations have in the past often been judged by officials who do not understand the history of the trade union movement of the 1930's and 1940's and do not know how common it was for many union members and local union leaders to be involved with an organization now regarded as suspect, or to have known persons who were members of such groups...

...Or he may have joined any one of a number of left-wing splinter groups or nationality groups, believing in the atmosphere of the '30s that the organization's philosophy offered some solution to the economic chaos of the depression years...

...It would be unfair to our employes and a breach of trust with our . . . customers to continue people like him [Kreznar] on our payroll...

...At least eleven of the men had led the fight against the Communists in their old union...

...These cases involve men whose clearance difficulties stem from the charge of "associations" with either an organization included on the Attorney General's list of about 300 subversive organizations, or association with a person or persons accused of subversive activities or associations...

...Until that time, the American worker stands in jeopardy of his reputation and his job...

...After 18 months of study, the long awaited report from the Commission on Government Security was released June 23...

...One case still pending, however, involves the local union's chief shop steward who was neither working on classified materials nor had access to restricted areas when his clearance was denied in June 1954...

...His brother-in-law's wife had been a member for several years...

...But Mrs...

...The Industrial Personnel Security Program, established by the Secretary of Defense in 1949, aims to safeguard classified information in the hands of private companies performing Defense Department contracts...

...The issue of guilt by association still remains very much of a problem under the IPSP covering three million workers in industry because close to one-third the criteria used to judge a man's security status deal with his social, organizational, and family associations...

...To judge by the testimony of the Defense and Justice Departments which supported the bill, this measure would extend the present Industrial Personnel Security Program (theoretically limited at the present time to those working on classified materials) to all employes in any plant, factory, or facility that may be important to national defense in the time of an emergency...

...The charges against the last two were true...

...The more important the information, the more stringent the screening process...

...Membership in the IWO, however, was necessary in order to take out an insurance policy...

...Once the contract is granted, the employer has two main security duties...

...Hanes' brother-in-law had been a member of the Communist Party for one year...

...Kreznar's case is pending in the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia...

...While it recommends, on the positive side, the elimination of the confidential level of clearance and is opposed to the extension of the industrial security program through the Butler bill, it is disappointing in that it would formalize the Attorney General's list after making certain minor changes to "minimize possible abuses...

...This is a greater number than is found in any of the other government security programs...

...The extreme difficulties confronting those accused has been heightened by the fact that they have no opportunity to subpena or cross-examine either the professional confidential informants used by the government or the casual informants who have made derogatory statements against him...

...If we are to avoid another round of security cases which strike at the heart of American safeguards, the Industrial Personnel Security Program should be overhauled from top to bottom...

...Or he may have been induced to join a Communist-front organization for social reasons...

...Take, for instance, the following cases: A former $18,000-a-year general manager and vice president of a Maryland research corporation is now working as a $5,000-a-year architectural draftsman following dismissal as a security risk in 1953...

...Kreznar was also charged with membership in the Socialist Workers Party, which he denies, although he admits attending meetings of the group and contributing to the defense fund of legless veteran James Kutcher, an SWP member who recently won his court case to be reinstated in his Veterans Administration clerical job...

...Wilbur A. Hanes, a physicist suspended in 1952 from the Boeing Aircraft Company...

...The bill passed the Senate in 1954 but failed to clear the House...

...The employer decides which workers need access and thus have to be cleared...

...The bill does not define what constitutes "reasonable grounds" or "subversive acts...

...Many employers simply fire a worker denied a clearance rather than transfer him to another department...

...He was also charged with a membership in the Washington Bookshop Association, for which he admits paying $1 in order to get the discount on books and records allowed by this organization which posed as a consumer co-op...

...However, the Defense Department has failed to make any basic changes in the essentially unfair and undemocratic procedures which characterize the IPSP at its worst...

...Both had permanently severed their relationships with the Party by 1943 and Hanes had not been closely associated with either of them at this time...

...He must maintain certain physical safeguards around the classified information, and he must permit access to classified information only to those employes who "need to know" in order to carry out their jobs and who have been cleared for access to the restricted area...

...A somewhat similar situation is found in the case of Stephan Kreznar, a Milwaukee PBX installer and former president of Local 5501, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, who was fired by the Wisconsin Telephone Company in 1954 after being denied a security clearance...

...Labeled today as subversive, the International Workers' Order in the '30s and '40s was especially successful in its membership drives among workers who were not aware of the Communist domination of the group...

...Of the remaining three, one appears to have been a member of the Congress of American Women for a short time before it was cited as a Communist-front organization by the Attorney General...

...There have been several cases in recent years where workers were labeled security risks because they or their families had held insurance and membership in the IWO...

...In a recent court case that some observers feel may well become a major legal test of the industrial security program, the actions of the government were upheld in the denial of clearance and the subsequent firing of a former $18,000 a year general manager and vice president of the Engineering and Research Corporation (ERCO) of Riverdale, Maryland...

...1140) has been reintroduced into the current session of Congress...

...These companies, many of which hire detective agencies to check on all workers in their employ, have an unofficial, unannounced, and usually unacknowledged security program...

...These employes are subject to three levels of security clearance BENJAMIN D. SEGAL, president of the Workers Education Local of the American Federation of Teachers and a workers' education specialist, is directing a trade union program on civil liberties and civil rights under a grant from the Fund for the Republic...

...An additional charge made against Hanes was that his own wife had been a Communist Party member in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1946...

...An "emergency" could be declared as soon as the bill passed Congress...

...The Wisconsin Telephone Company supported its actions by claiming that as a communications set-up, it was a "key facility...

...In 1953, his security clearance, formerly granted for top-secret information, was overruled, mainly on the charges of his former social acquaintance with several suspect individuals— none of whom he has seen since his divorce in 1947...

...It is just one of the major problems, however, that have made the IPSP one of the most controversial of the government's security programs...

...The evidence in Hanes' favor showed that he did not associate with ten of these people, unless a single, unsought, casual contact could be construed as "association...

...The Insecurities of Our Security Program by BENJAMIN D. SEGAL & JOYCE L. KORNBLUH IN SPITE of the decline in the number of headline-making security cases, it would be a mistake to assume that McCarthyism died with the passing of the junior Senator from Wisconsin...

...Greene's security problems stemmed from the time prior to 1948 when he was married for five years to an alleged Communist sympathizer from a socially prominent family...

...anyone denied a security clearance, it holds, "has destroyed his usefulness...

...Hanes, a distinguished scientist, had been employed on the atom bomb project after finishing college, but on going into private industry, was denied a security clearance on the charge of "close and sympathetic is sociation with seventeen persons al-leged to be or to have been members of the Communist Party or Communist front organizations...

...In addition, loyalty-security programs have sprung up in a number of industries that have no connection at all with defense work, or with the regulations of the IPSP...

...Union members who come under the screening mesh of the program are especially hard hit by these association criteria...

...Criticism is concentrated on its wide-ranging scope, its loose criteria, its disturbing procedures, its denials of basic constitutional freedoms, its economic and psychological damage to a worker accused of being a security risk, and the loopholes that permit employer misuse of the program...

...Take the case of fourteen workers who were dismissed three years ago from the Sperry Gyroscope Company, Lake Success, New York...

...In 1953, his last appeal to the Industrial Personnel Review Board was turned down, but with the help of two scientist friends, Hanes reopened his case...

...herred by the Navy's revocation of his security clearance...

...By submitting new evidence to prove the allegations false, he asked in October, 1956 for the Department of Defense again to review his case...

...The IWO's insurance program offered workers lower rates than many other companies, provided burial insurance, and insured colored groups at the same rates as whites...

...A former physicist with a research unit of a large West Coast aircraft company has been running a small consultant business following the denial of his security clearance in 1952...

...Greene had engineered some of the classified projects from which he was later...

...Some of the others were denied clearance because of past membership in or association with members of the Socialist Workers Party, a left-wing splinter group which reflected in the past the Trotskyite deviation from Soviet Communism...

...The cases of Hanes, Kreznar, and Greene point up one of the most severe problems under this government security program—the lack of due process, and the burden placed on the accused person to prove his own innocence...

...Segal, is a former member of the education staff of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union...