Lawbreakers Get Classified Data Access: Report

A Pentagon agency regularly grants security clearances to employees of defense contractors who have long histories of financial problems, drug use, alcoholism, sexual misconduct or criminal activity, a newspaper reported.

Citing its own survey of more than 1,500 cases, USA Today said in Wednesday’s editions that applicants have been given sensitive clearances despite repeatedly lying about past misconduct to Defense Department investigators.

In other instances, contractor employees involved in significant criminal frauds were granted clearances, as were applicants who had violated state and federal laws by not filing income tax returns for several years, the report said.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), in a letter to Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, demanded an investigation and said the practice “defies common sense.”

Harkin, a frequent critic of Pentagon practices, urged Cohen to take “immediate steps to prevent granting of security clearance to people whose record suggests a high risk to national security.”

In one instance, an employee mishandled classified material during a five-year period but didn’t lose his top-secret access, the newspaper found.

The clearances were approved by the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals, or DOHA, a little-known agency that decides whether to grant or deny clearances to employees of defense contractors.

The cases cited in the newspaper’s project were made by administrative judges who rule in cases in which applicants seek to overturn preliminary decisions denying them access to classified information.

“To be honest with you, I think DOHA often finds in favor of the individual and not security,” Edwin Forrest, executive secretary of the Navy’s Personnel Security Appeal Board, told the paper. “What we see coming from DOHA are decisions that go outside the envelope--outside the adjudicative guidelines.”

“Any American who looked at these DOHA decisions would be horrified,” Howard Strouse, a former senior DOHA official told the paper. “To know that we are giving clearances to some of these people is just intolerable.”

The head of the agency for the last 10 years, Leon J. Schachter, said he did not agree with every decision, “but it is important to treat people fairly, and we have a system designed to be fair.”

“The goal is to understand past conduct and predict the future on it,” Schachter told the paper. “We are being asked to use a crystal ball. It is a very difficult job.”