Hughes Tightens Its Security : Offers Model for Policing Workers, Protecting Secrets

A few years ago, when an employee of Hughes Aircraft Co. committed suicide, the boss sent flowers. Today, besides the flowers, a national security check would also be started on the chance that the employee may have been involved in espionage.

The background checks, also begun on occasions when an employee suddenly quits without notice and disappears, are part of a tougher approach to security instituted at Hughes in the last three years.

Hughes, the largest aerospace company in the Los Angeles area and a leader in advanced radar and communications technology, is one of the primary targets of Soviet intelligence in the nation.

Employee Arrested

In 1981, a Hughes employee, William Holden Bell, was arrested in one of the first major spy cases of the decade for selling radar secrets to the Soviet Union though a contact with a Polish intelligence agent.

Since that time, however, Hughes has built a reputation among U.S. security officials as the toughest major company in private industry in policing its employees and protecting its secrets from foreign intelligence agents.

The two men responsible for turning Hughes around are former FBI officials who joined the aerospace giant in 1985, just as the spy wave of the 1980s had peaked.

Edgar N. Best, 56, former agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, took over as head of corporate security at Hughes shortly after serving as security director for the 1984 Olympics. As his top aide, he brought in Joseph R. Mellitt, an ex-FBI counterintelligence official who had helped direct the Bell investigation.

The toughest job for a security official in private industry is persuading the company’s work force that the espionage threat in the United States is worth worrying about, Best said.

“At Hughes we have 76,000 employees,” he said. “The great bulk of them are engineers. They aren’t going to take you seriously unless you give them solid information.”

For Best and Mellitt, that has meant providing Hughes employees with a constant supply of speakers from the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. defense agencies, as well as internal publications aimed at presenting a tough security policy in a “believable” manner.

Hughes has also led California defense firms in cooperating with an “adverse reporting” system about employees instituted by the U.S. Defense Investigative Agency in 1983, after the arrest of James D. Harper in Silicon Valley. Harper, who was convicted of spying, obtained ballistic missile information from an ex-wife who had an alcohol problem.

While all 2,700 California firms with defense clearances are asked to submit information on employees with severe financial, legal or personal problems, few of the smaller companies comply.

Nationally, about 8,000 such reports are now submitted annually, most of them by the nation’s largest defense firms. In California, Hughes and the other larger aerospace companies do most of the reporting.

“I think our employees are concerned about the problem of espionage, but not as concerned as we are,” Best said. “Whether or not they want a tough security policy here, they are getting it in full doses. Even then, our best efforts can be defeated.”

One concern for Best is interception of telephone conversations. For that reason, Hughes, along with other major defense firms, is in the process of installing security telephones at its California facilities.

Travel Concerns

Another worry is travel overseas by Hughes employees to international science and technology conferences, where Soviet intelligence agents frequently hunt for possible American recruits.

“It’s rare you find a person actually being recruited at a conference,” said Mellitt, who is in charge of employee awareness and international security for Hughes. “It’s primarily for assessment. The Soviets want to observe our people there and look for weaknesses.”

Like most major U.S. defense firms, Hughes now has large overseas operations. While the Soviets and other foreign powers find it easier to operate outside the United States, Best said, Hughes protects itself from that threat by simply keeping its best secrets at home.

“They can steal it a lot of places, but what they would like to steal most is the emerging technology,” Best said. “We don’t put that overseas.”