Security Lapsed at White House, Ex-Aide Testifies

A former longtime White House employee told a congressional committee Wednesday that after President Clinton was inaugurated, young students and volunteers without full security clearances were allowed to work in an office that handled hundreds of sensitive FBI background reports.

The testimony by Nancy Gemmell, who retired from government service in August 1993 after 24 years at the White House, came as top White House lawyers from the Reagan and Bush administrations contended they had run a much tighter security operation than did Clinton.

The disclosure that 18- to 20-year-olds lacking full security clearances served in the White House Personnel Security Office came as the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight tried to answer the central question of the growing controversy enveloping the Clinton White House:

Did operators of the office in 1993 use FBI background checks to collect derogatory information on GOP predecessors, or did they merely lose control of a little-watched administrative process?

The answer could have major implications for both the president and his Republican adversaries in the escalating 1996 presidential campaign.

At the heart of the controversy is the possession by the White House of 481 FBI background files obtained from December 1993 to February 1994. The FBI has said that at least 408 of the requests--many for files of Republicans from previous administrations--were unjustified and amounted to an inexcusable invasion of privacy.

The White House has said the episode simply amounted to a case of bureaucratic bungling, though it has offered an official apology and instituted new security procedures.

After more than four hours of dogged but sometimes highly partisan questioning by the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in its first day of hearings on the matter, the interrogators emerged with a few hard-won insights into the affair, but much confusion remained.

Gemmell, who worked for many years in the White House personnel office whose security procedures are now under fire, helped deepen the mystery surrounding the files.

She said that when she retired she left for her successors an incomplete list of people who required FBI background checks, believing it would be cross-checked with a more up-to-date list from the Secret Service.

She speculated that the man who replaced her, Army detailee Anthony Marceca, may not have obtained a current Secret Service list before requesting the files.

The Clinton administration has explained the presence of the large number of files, many on long-departed Republican officials such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, by suggesting that Marceca had had been working from an outdated Secret Service list.

Republicans, however, contend that Marceca, who worked in several Democratic campaigns, could have obtained the files on their colleagues for political purposes.

“We are still so confused about this list,” said Rep. William F. Clinger Jr. (R-Pa.), chairman of the committee. “Nobody claims paternity for this list.”

As the hearings got underway, the head of the personnel office had served what appeared to be his last day at the White House.

Craig Livingstone, 37, a former political operative who has run the operation since the beginning of Clinton’s term, would return only if the pending review of its operation satisfies White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, one official said.

He added: “It will take an awful lot to satisfy this chief of staff.”

The White House simultaneously announced that the beleaguered personnel office will be absorbed into the security office that controls most of the White House. That will put it under the control of Charles Beasley, 56, a former Army counterintelligence expert who joined the security office during the Reagan administration.

The move will ensure that these essential security procedures “are carried out efficiently, by career professionals,” Panetta said in a statement.

White House officials did not dispute witnesses’ suggestions that volunteers with only low-level security clearances were working in the office of personnel security. They said that because of their reluctance to hinder investigations now underway, they had not been asking questions about the office’s practices in 1993, nor did they plan to.

Mark D. Fabiani, special associate counsel, said he simply couldn’t comment on the allegations, either to confirm or deny them. But the president had been assured by the counsel’s office that no such violations could now take place.

White House officials said they were frustrated by their lack of facts in the matter but were reluctant to conduct their own investigation, both because it would have little credibility and because such investigations tend to become in turn a target for investigation by congressional committees.

“We’ve seen what happens when we conduct any kind of internal inquiry,” said Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary. “That then becomes the subject of yet another congressional inquiry, and there are yet more subpoenas and yet more attacks by this president’s political opponents.”

Republican senators, meanwhile, released information from the Secret Service that they said showed an apparent fragment of a Secret Service list released last week by people sympathetic to the White House’s position did not reflect the Secret Service’s most up to date information.

The list released last week apparently showed that Baker still held an active White House pass on Feb. 16, 1994. But information offered Wednesday by the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said Baker’s pass was rendered inactive Aug. 26, 1993.

Ed Amorosi, a spokesman for Clinger, said if teenage volunteers had been making requests for FBI files from these disputed lists, without the proper security clearances, it was “sadly indicative of the way this White House appears to have been mismanaged.”

Jane Dannenhauer, who directed the security office during the Bush and Reagan administrations, said that interns and volunteers, while they might have been used elsewhere in the White House, were never used in her office because they hadn’t undergone a full background investigation.