Reagan Appointee’s Departure Disputed : Security: Official was probed in a leak of data to South Africa. He says he was cleared before he quit.

A Justice Department political appointee with a high security clearance was investigated last year for possibly disclosing classified information to the government of South Africa, government sources said Thursday.

The official, Roger Pilon, a Ronald Reagan appointee who headed the Office of Asylum Policy and Review, subsequently resigned, but the circumstances of his departure are now the subject of dispute.

A department report said that he resigned “prior to the initiation of removal proceedings.” But Pilon, in an interview, said that he chose to fight it out and left only after receiving an official letter saying that the investigation had been closed with “no implication adverse to you.”

The unusual case came to light with the issuance Thursday of the annual report of the department’s watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility.

The report did not use Pilon’s name, which was supplied by other government and former government sources, but it did cite his case as one of the “representative examples of misconduct investigated by the office.”

Pilon became the subject of a foreign counterintelligence investigation on the basis of information indicating that he “may have been involved in the disclosure of classified information to a foreign government,” the report said.

“The investigation did not develop sufficient evidence to support a prosecution but did discover that sufficient cause existed to terminate his political appointment,” the report said.

The classified material involved, Pilon said, is a nine-page document entitled “Report to Congress on Communist Influence in South Africa,” dated Jan. 8, 1987.

Pilon said it was alleged that he had obtained the document when he was with the State Department, which he left to join the Justice Department March 28, 1987, and that he turned it over to his wife, Juliana Geran Pilon, who then gave it to the South Africans.

Both Pilons deny the allegation, saying that, although they are associated with conservative think tanks, neither has any regard for South Africa.

Pilon said that he first became aware of the investigation on Jan. 6, 1988, when his wife was being investigated for a possible appointment as an assistant secretary in the Interior Department.

FBI agents asked to interview the Pilons in separate places but at the same time, and Pilon recalled thinking that this was strange. “Play it straight, but be careful,” he said he told his wife.

Pilon’s suspicions were borne out, and he ended up being placed on administrative leave for nine months. He said that his wife lost the opportunity of becoming an assistant secretary at Interior because of the inquiry.

Pilon said that both he and wife passed polygraph examinations, one conducted by a former National Security Agency specialist and the other by the FBI’s former polygraph examiner.

But Pilon’s case remained active until August, 1988, when then Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, who had brought Pilon to the department, ordered a full review of the matter.

The review resulted in a Sept. 9, 1988, letter from Dee V. Benson, then principal associate deputy attorney general, which informed Pilon that the investigations by the FBI and the Office of Professional Responsibility had been completed and that he was being reinstated, Pilon said.

Pilon, who returned to the Justice Department for three weeks before leaving to become a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank, said that his top secret security clearance was restored.

“If they were about to institute removal proceedings, why did they give me back my security clearance?” he asked.

Pilon, acknowledging that he is “speculating,” said he thinks that the investigation began because the National Security Agency recorded a call to his wife from the South African Embassy during which there was probably a discussion about exchanging documents.

She had been doing an assessment of the United Nations for the Heritage Foundation, which interested the South Africans, and she was trying to get from them information about Soviet activities in the world organization, Pilon recalled.

Michael E. Shaheen Jr., who heads the department’s watchdog unit, refused to discuss his office’s report.