Missing Foreign Service Officer Investigated

A Foreign Service officer who vanished in Shenandoah National Park last month may have compromised Navy missile secrets while serving as a lieutenant in the Persian Gulf, according to federal investigators who said they are trying to find him for questioning.

James S. Schneider, 27, was last seen Aug. 30 at a restaurant in the park, just days after his expected assignment to Greece was suspended because he failed two polygraph tests, law enforcement officials said. The sections he failed focused on whether he had mishandled classified information or been contacted by foreign agents while he was aboard the ship Chancellorsville, the officials said.

Schneider, an Arlington, Va., resident, vanished before officials could decide if the violations were serious or trivial.

“The anxiety at the Navy is very high,” said one law enforcement source familiar with the investigation. “At one extreme, it could be just that he got sloppy and lost a few documents. At the other, he could be sitting in Moscow. We have to assume the worst but hope for the best.”

Adding to the mystery are questions about whether Schneider is still alive. Park rangers found Schneider’s rented red Hyundai in a parking lot 10 miles from Big Meadows Lodge, where he was last seen. In it, investigators found newly purchased camping equipment, two boxes of ammunition and a sales slip for a recently purchased handgun, but no gun, park and federal officials said.

Family members said Schneider was despondent over a recent “bump in the road” in his Foreign Service career.

“His goal was to be in the Foreign Service; that’s why he chose to go to Georgetown [University] and the military,” Schneider’s father, Jim Schneider, said in a telephone interview from his Minnesota home. “Practically everything he did was to prepare himself for the Foreign Service.”

But Jason Knutson, 27, James Schneider’s friend of 14 years and current roommate, said Schneider did not strike him as despondent. “He is a very even-keeled, goal-oriented individual,” Knutson said. “He is not a guy with a lot of intrigue.”

A Navy Department spokeswoman said Schneider, who graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 1991, had an unblemished record when he was honorably discharged in June 1995.

About that time, he applied for a job at the Central Intelligence Agency and was turned down because he failed a general polygraph test that customarily is administered to agency applicants, sources at three federal agencies said.

He enrolled in the Foreign Service Institute in November 1995.

Last month, the State Department learned of Schneider’s CIA polygraph failure and brought in the FBI, which administered a second polygraph test, which Schneider also failed, federal officials said. The FBI had scheduled a third polygraph test when Schneider disappeared, the officials said.