Why We Can't Catch More Spies

...Another is the case of Ruby Schuler, an executive secretary at a Silicon Valley defense contractor, who stole documents relating to the Minuteman missile and the ICBM...

...Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA in the Carter administration, tried to freeze the number of clearances in his agency, "but the pressure became so intense that after three years I had to relax it," he said recently...

...Spies like these are an even greater threat to our country than the old kind were...

...An example: in 1980, the Air Force conducted an audit of 11 units of its weapons development and testing bureaucracy and found that all of the personnel surveyed had top secret or sensitive compartmented information clearances, when only 50 percent actually needed them...

...Complicating matters further are the "multiple clearances" required when contractors do work for different agencies...

...But Steven Garfinkel, head of the ISOO, acknowledged in a recent statement to the Senate Government Operations Committee that "the number of national security clearances among executive branch employees far exceeds the number of employees who require access to classified information to do their jobs...

...A third, and most grievous of all, is the dramatic cutback in periodic updates that ensure that individuals already cleared are still worthy of trust...

...Not an awfully impressive record, even assuming that the mere existence of the clearance process prevents some undesirables from applying...

...Just as bigger Pentagon budgets and fancier "gold-plated" weapons don't necessarily provide better defense, more classified information doesn't automatically improve our national security...

...He was recruited by a Polish intelligence agent who, it was reported, reminded him of his son...

...All we see is cash" Take William Holden Bell, an employee at Hughes aircraft who was convicted of espionage in 1981...

...One federal judge said that he didn't know of a single colleague on the federal bench who would provide uncomplimentary information regarding an applicant for federal employment...

...Most of the time we passed it on...

...Accordingly, the government is supposed to reinvestigate each top secret and sensitive compartmented information clearance every five years...

...Only a few who can develop information, recognize the significance and know what to do with it ?' The promotion tracks at the clearance agencies, moreover, encourage the best people to get out of investigative work rather than to strive to do their jobs better...

...Sometimes, it's a simple question of status and feeling important...

...Motives tend to be personal rather than ideological...

...Similar problems arise in checking employees' financial status—especially troubling in light of the increasing amounts the formerly niggardly Soviets are now paying for stolen military information...

...Allegedly, he had been spying for the Soviets for most of those years, but had never been reexamined...

...This "crank 'em out" attitude helps explain why last year the Pentagon denied or revoked only about 1 percent of the number of clearances it issued—fewer than 11,000 out of 895,000...

...Making matters worse, the quality of the staff conducting these clearance investigations has diminished in recent years...

...For one thing, classifying so many documents can cheapen the designation...

...he wound up passing along classified weapons data for two years...

...We are neglecting maintenance in order to keep the system running...

...William McGowan is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...throw in Boston and San Francisco for good measure, and you have some idea of the magnitude of the problem...

...It's reached the point where even Pentagon officials seem to draw a distinction between processing clearances and guarding the national security...

...There's been a general diminution of ability," confirms one 30-year OPM veteran, now retired...

...More often, it's the profit motive...

...The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) handles clearances for the civilian agencies, primarily the Department of Energy, which does nuclear-related work...

...Another example is the recent case of James Cavenaugh, a technician at Northrup Aircraft who had a secret-level clearance to work on the Stealth bomber...

...Often, clearances are based not on what an employee actually does but on job descriptions which in government are notoriously inflated...

...For the civilian agencies, the rejection rate has been even lower, about .01 percent from 1980 to 1984...

...You have a guy who enters government service as a young man who is fine...

...His brother, Arthur, also had a top secret clearance that had never been reinvestigated...

...Jackie Conciatore assisted with research or this article...

...With all these applications, we now seem to be in the business of clearing people, not of finding potential security risks," one such official told The New York Times...

...Everything can't be that secret, so people treat nothing as secret," Senator Durenberger observed...

...Another result is the need for more clearances for the employees who handle classified information...

...In practice, the Defense Department concedes, it's more like once every 17 years...

...Thus, your incentive is to clear everyone to the highest possible level, even if some jobs do not involve handling sensitive material...

...The biggest abusers may be the defense contractors, whose top secret clearances—the kind that require full field investigations—have tripled in recent years...

...We are so busy looking for symptoms of bad character in someone's past behavior that we are prone to overlook the lonely guy in midlife crisis who could really hurt us," says Larry Howe, the industrial security specialist...

...The other agencies aren't blind...

...There are only a small number who can conceptualize what they are supposed to be doing...

...In the old days, when there was a career interest in investigations," says the 30-year veteran, "they were more conscientious ." Patriotic traitors Mounting backlogs and cursory investigations are two results of an overloaded security clearance system...

...You have to worry about their change in motivation over time," says Stansfield Turner...

...Intended to protect innocent citizens against smears on their character, it has the side effect of impeding the collection of information on possible spies...

...Investigators are worried about lawsuits, too...

...What it all means is that we catch as catch can," says George Woloshyn, director of investigations for OPM...

...To make matters worse, investigators climb the ladder more by meeting quotas than by doing a thorough job...

...On one point, however, agreement was widespread: the system for keeping alleged spies such as John Walker Jr...

...His solution was to try to sell classified information to Soviet spies, who it turned out, were undercover FBI agents...

...For one thing, they become a vehicle of bureaucratic advancement...

...The three principals in the case—Walker, his brother, Arthur, and James Whitworth—all had received "top secret" clearances to view information like that in question...

...It's in their interests to get as many people cleared and to keep them cleared whether they now have classified contracts or not," says Britt Snider...

...Largely from the crush of work, the process dwells more upon what an individual was like ten years ago— ideologically or otherwise—than on what they are like today...

...In many cases people kept their clearances just as a matter of prestige...

...The study estimated that probably "no more than 35,000 to 40,000 of the 115,000 contractor personnel cleared at the top secret level have ever had access to top secret information ." Like the bureaucrats, the private contractors can use the clearance process to angle for advantage...

...At the OPM, for example, investigators now start at the GS-5 level—which pays about $12,500 per year—down from the GS-7 level in the fifties...

...The Defense Investigative Service is supposed to screen these requests from contractors for clearance investigations, but it generally rubberstamps them for lack of time and staff...

...If you are a federal employee in a defense-related agency, you realize that your spectrum of potential promotions is wider if you are eligible for jobs that are classified...

...To move any higher, you have to go into management...

...But as is by now amply clear, the process is breaking down, primarily for one reason: "Numbers are overwhelming the whole system," says Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia...

...While the job has been getting harder, the agencies have been downgrading the status of the people who do it...

...If you are a supervisor, you want the largest possible pool of promotable subordinates from which to choose...

...By most accounts, John Walker Jr...

...A number of people in Washington are coming forward with solutions, some of which make sense...

...Far from resisting the bureaucracy's inclination to excess, the Reagan administration has reinforced it...

...Recognizing this problem, the CIA and the other intelligence agencies have a policy of rigorous reexamination of their employees...

...John's son, Michael, who was also involved, held a "secret" level clearance...

...There is a big pressure for security investigators to produce and to show that they've handled so many cases in a certain period of time...

...Even attorneys at the Department of Education were required to have full background investigations, until two of them challenged this rule successfully last year...

...This lessens the sense of importance and meaning that investigators in the field tend to feel," says one retired OPM investigator...

...But the rigorous updating of clearances that is routine in the intelligence community is the exception rather than the rule...

...The natural inclination is to press for the maximum clearance you can get...

...To be sure, clearance overload is not the only obstacle facing the investigators...

...I can't believe that that's showing enough care," said Senator Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee...

...We usually get the information we need, but there are gaps, significant gaps, and we know it and somebody who's trying to evade our process knows it...

...The federal Privacy Act poses yet another problem...

...The Act entitles the subject of a federal clearance investigation to see a copy of his file, including the statements of all the people who were interviewed...

...It used to be if you got five grand out of the Soviets, you were doing well," a CIA official recently told columnist Jack Anderson...

...Bell had lost a son, gone through a divorce and remarriage, and was deeply in debt...

...In some cases, files have been put together so carelessly that confidential sources were exposed...

...An increasing number of engineers and other high-tech experts working for defense contractors are immigrants whose backgrounds are difficult if not impossible to check...

...Most traitors today are not Soviet sympathizers along the lines of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for passing secrets related to the atom bomb...

...The FBI takes care of high-level political appointees, White House staff, and selected employees of the federal courts and congressional committees...

...As the national media seized upon the Walker case, officials all over Washington were bemoaning the security breakdown...

...Former employers are reluctant to provide anything beyond a simple confirmation of employment...

...The record of the Reagan administration has not been encouraging...

...The Walker case is not the only example of espionage in recent years that might have been prevented by more diligent reexaminations...

...There is a perception in the field that investigators can't do much," says a Senate staff counsel familiar with the issue...

...These would be good initial steps...

...If they plan to compete for contracts in the future, it puts them in a better position...

...Thus the original background check, while still necessary, is of limited use...

...It seems straightforward enough...

...was a political conservative who had even done organizing for the Ku Klux Klan...

...We'll do it ourselves ! " Hear no evil All of these requests for clearances end up on the shoulders of investigators who have more work than they can handle...

...The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Secret Service, and several other agencies do their own security clearances...

...I had agents who used to go in and say to interviewees, 'You don't know anything bad about so-and-so, do you?' " says one former OPM investigator...

...A former case supervisor recalls, "Sometimes we'd get stuff back from investigators with so many holes in it that we'd want to send it back...

...But just because he was loyal 25 years ago when he joined doesn't mean he will be forever...

...Gene R. LaRocque, a retired admiral, points out, that while there aren't that many Trotskyites running loose, "the people who want a little more cash are legion" Yet, our federal clearance policies haven't kept up with this threat...

...You wind up doing separate paperwork for the same people," says Larry Howe, a corporate security official with Science Applications International Corporation, a California defense contractor...

...His former wife told the Los Angeles Times that he started spying because he needed money for a failing restaurant in which he had invested...

...But with managers on our backs to keep things moving and the delays involved, we had to decide whether to send the case back and wait another six months for it to be redone or simply pass it on...

...The government is supposed to reinvestigate each high level clearance every five years...

...Given these difficulties it should come as no surprise that people with lower-level, secret clearances are not being reinvestigated at all...

...Senator David Durenberger, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed the view of a number of his collegues when he called upon the Reagan administration to "cut in half the amount of information we classify and cut by more than half the number of people who have access to it ." Even the Reagan administration has conceded that there might be a problem...

...There has been much less discussion, however, of how the clearance process came to be so overloaded...

...Schuler's husband, a freelance engineer named James Harper, sold these documents to Polish intelligence agents for upwards of $250,000...

...This was not a case of Russians breaking into locked file drawers with hacksaws...

...Walker had received his top secret clearance in 1965 and held it until he retired from the Navy in 1976...

...By some accounts, there is a tendency to avoid troubling information rather than to seek it out...

...They don't show up, like membership in the Communist party, through examination of an individual's past...

...If the agencies aggressively sought people with talent, degrees would be superfluous, but a 1983 survey of investigators in the Defense Investigative Service showed that 40 percent of those polled judged the caliber of new recruits in their organization to be "extremely low...

...You wind up giving more information on your private finances to a bank officer for a car loan than you .do to the government for a clearance," says one former investigator...

...many were lawyers...

...But people are understandably wary...

...A 1980 federal case set a precedent that they can be held personally liable for damages if they exceed the bounds of their authority...

...Today investigators don't even need a B.A...

...Now they're giving out 20, 30, 50 and even 75 thousand dollars like it's nothing ." Bank accounts are off limits, unless the applicant signs a waiver (which generally is not required...

...They can, but not knowing the letter of the law, they are needlessly restrained by fear...

...The Walker case is a pointed illustration of the dangers of neglecting reinvestigations...

...to the first two years of Reagan's...

...Clearances are supposed to be reciprocal, but the agencies don't always accept fully the investigations done by someone else...

...They see their job as secondary in the overall scheme...

...The Walker case is just one of many in recent years in which individuals fully certified by the federal government for access to sensitive defense data, have been caught selling that information to the Soviets...

...Schuler's secret clearance had never been reinvestigated, even though she was known to associates as an alcoholic who often carried a flask of vodka in her purse...

...In the federal bureaucracy, clearances have a significance quite apart from the security function they are supposed to serve...

...One Pentagon study cited the finding by a private survey of 2,360 contractor employees with top secret clearances that more than half had had no contact whatsoever with classified information in the preceding 18 months...

...Almost all investigators used to be college graduates...

...The clearance process is supposed to weed out such spies...

...Burgeoning high-tech weapons research accounts for some of that increase, but much of it is plainly excess...

...Technically, a source can request confidentiality, and investigators can grant it on the spot...

...Hyper-classification of documents is not the only reason for such excesses...

...and his accomplices away from the nation's defense secrets is alarmingly weak...

...But the greater challenge is to eliminate, or at least reduce, the bureaucratic and personal pressures that produce too much classification, too many clearances, sloppy investigation, and too little reinvestigation...

...In fact, the opposite can result...

...a tendency to avoid troubling information rather than to seek it out...

...Even when the government does reinvestigate these days, it's generally a quick national agency check of criminal and other records, without a thorough examination in the field...

...Security risks like these usually develop in the course of the individual's career...

...The Defense Investigative Service of the Department of Defense conducts most of the security investigations, since most of the clearances are issued by that department...

...In defense plants, a great deal of sensitive information is classified as "secret," making the casualness of the clearance process at that level especially worrisome...

...A tendency to push for too much classified paper and too many clearances is virtually built into the federal bureaucracy...

...Unless official Washington comes to grips with these measures, its stern resolutions about cutting the number of clearances will amount to so much hot air...

...The promotion tracks at the clearance agencies encourage the best people to get out of investigative work rather than to strive to do their jobs better...

...Out of necessity, the whole system stresses quantity over quality...

...Imagine trying to do a background investigation on every resident of the city of Chicago...

...Even though such lawsuits rarely succeed, investigators fear they will be the exception to the rule and lose their shirts in the process...

...Cavenaugh was in line for a promotion to a job that required a top secret clearance, and, being deeply in debt, he feared that he wouldn't qualify...

...The reigning attitude is 'No one can do it as well as we can...

...Investigators are required to warn sources that their statements may be revealed under the Act in this manner...

...fearing lawsuits, former employers have become tight-lipped on employment references as well...

...The system is so bogged down that from 1981 to 1983, the Defense Investigative Service had to put all reinvestigations on a complete hold...

...The top grade level for investigators is only GS-11...

...for this and other reasons, clearance checks are not as thorough as they should be...

...In practice, the Defense Department concedes, it's more like once every 17 years...

...Thousands of officials scattered throughout the federal government decide what documents need to be classified as defense secrets, and thousands of others decide who needs to be cleared for access to this paper...

...Clear 'em all If all the people getting security clearances really needed them, we'd just have to live with it...

...The government ends up expending time and money clearing people to sit around waiting for contracts that may never arrive...

...There's a big pressure for agents to produce and for their supervisors to show that they've turned out so much work in such a period of time," explains Britt Snider...

...The problem is not confined to security clearances...

...I don't know of a single [espionage] case in the last 15 years where ideology had a role at all," Bobby Ray Inman, former deputy director of the CIA, said recently on "Face the Nation ." Sometimes it's a yen for excitement, a desire to play James Bond...

...They are overwhelmed by too many classified secrets and too many people with clearances...

...Too many cooks The first problem with the clearance system is that it is so diffuse...

...We don't see ideological motives," Bill Baker, an FBI spokesman, says of the Walker case...

...Specifically: • Too much paper in the federal government is being classified as containing "national security secrets ." • Too many federal employees are getting clearances to handle all this paper, • As a result, the government is spending too much time investigating people before they are hired and not enough time doing periodic checks of people already on the job and actually handling sensitive material...

...Sam Nunn has proposed that the government start to bill defense contractors for the cost of conducting clearances and that the president reward both contractors and government agencies that reduce their clearances by putting them at the front of the line for the ones they do request...

...On top of that, many states deny the Defense Department access to data on criminal arrests (as opposed to convictions), and no federal law requires the states to provide this information...