SLOW PACE SEEN FOR REVAMPING SECURITY POLICIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201830052-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 24, 2012
• Sequence Number: 52
• Publication Date: July 28, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201830052-4
ARTICLE AP 'MD
ONPA
Slow Pace Seen.
For Revamping.
Security Policies
Officials Cite Concerns
Raised by Spy Cases
6
By STEPHEN ENGELBERG
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 27 - Senior of-
ficials in Congress and the Reagan Ad-
ministration say it will take years to
fully repair the weaknesses in security
policies brought to light by the recent
series of damaging espionage cases.
Despite the distress sparked by last
year's breaches in the nation's most
sensitive military and Intelligence
agencies, proposals for security im-
provements are moving at an uneven
pace, and have been slowed in some in-
stances by interagency disagreements
over how best to deal with the problem,
the officials said.
"I think we're way behind and we
have a long way to go," said Senator
Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Demo-
crat who is vice chairman of the Select
Committee on Intelligence. "With
some notable exceptions, particularly
in the C.I.A., I don't think near enough
has been done. If this were private in-
dustry, the board of directors would be
fired for a performance like this."
Lack of Overall Policy
But Administration officials say they
have begun a major effort to protect
sensitive information and assign
greater importance to security issues.
They say that some initiatives, such as
a 16 percent reduction in the number of
people who have access to secret infor-
mation, are already showing results,
but they acknowledged that others will
take substantial time to carry out.
A Senate Intelligence Committee re-
port issued late last year found "trou-
blesome evidence of a lack of overall
national policy guidance, especially
with regard to security programs and
countermeasures that are supposed to
protect classified information."
Just last week, Jerry A. Whitworth,
one of 11 Americans charged with es-
pionage last year, was convicted on 12
of 13 counts of spying for the Soviet
Union and tax evasion.. Security ex.
perts say the Whitworth case and the
others have each pointed up major
weaknesses in security, personnel and
NF'W 'r ORS: TIMES
28 July 1986
counterintelligence policies.
Employees at various agencies were
able to smuggle secret documents out
of buildings, unimpeded by even a ran-
dom search of briefdases. And officials
say the cases point out the threat posed
by the number of diplomats allowed ro
staff Soviet posts in the United States.
A key area of concern is the granting
and renewing of security clearances;
the spy investigations.have shown that
people can be cleared for access to se-
cret data early in their careers and
then never be re-examined.
John A. Walker Jr., a former Navy
chief warrant officer who recruited
Mr. Whitworth as a spy, was, for exam-
ple, never reinvestigated from the time
he received a top-secret clearance in
1965 until his retirement in 1976. Mr.
Walker, who pleaded guilty to espio-
nage last October, began spying for the
Soviet Union by 1968, and Federal in-
vestigators say he was paid more than
$1 million over the next 10 years.
Mr. Whitworth's first re-examina-
tion did not come until nine years after
he received his top-secret clearance
and he was approved. But he had begun
passing sensitive information to Mr.
Walker four years earlier, in 1974.
Since 1983, Pentagon rules have re-
quired reinvestigations every five
years for those holding clearances of
top secret and above. Periodic reap-
praisals are crucial to improving se?
curity, said Mary C. Lawton, the Jus-
tice Department's Counsel for Intelli.
gence Policy.
"If you look at all the spy cases," she
said, "most people were pretty clean
coming in. They soured afterwards."
A Four-Year Backlog
More than 90 percent of the 3.5 mil-
lion security clearances are held by
members of the armed forces or mili-'
tary contractors, and Pentagon offi-
cials estimate that the current backlog
of people awaiting reinvestigation
numbers 250,000. L. Britt Snyder, the
Pentagon's Director of Counterintelli-
gence and Security Policy, acknowl-
edged that it would take as long as four
years to eliminate the backlog.
Mr. Snyder said that Congress last
year gave the Defense Investigative
Service, which carries out the investi-
gations, an additional $25 million to
hire 600 to 700 additional investigators.
The money was not included in the Ad-
ministration's budget request for the
Pentagon and was added by Congress.
Senator Leahy contended that the
Defense Department's budget requests
have routinely slighted security pro-
grams in favor of more visible items
like new weapons. "The problem is,
they're much more into public rela-
tions than security," he said. "Security
measures are not glamorous. No one
gets to sit on the bridge and comm-
mand them. We just don't see the Sec-
retary of Defense or the Secretary of
the Navy up here asking for more
money for security."
Mr. Snyder said the Pentagon has
begun to carry out the recommenda-
tions of a commission headed by Rich-
ard G. Stilwell, a retired Army gen.:
eral. Among these are plans, beginning
Oct. 1, to expand the investigation re-
quired for the clearances to use infor-
mation classified "secret."
The expanded investigation will in
clude a credit check and written inquir-
ies to previous employers. Now, access
to "secret" information - which
nearly three million people have - is
granted if the serviceman or employee
does not show upon the files of the Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation or Penta-
gon investigative agencies.
A more extensive background inves-
tigation, involving interviews with
references, is done only for top-secret
clearances.
Government Changes Slowly
"To me, the pace seems pretty fast'
because it takes so long for anything to
change in the Government," said Mr.
Snyder. "Things are happening in due
course, although it may look slow to an
outsider. It takes a long time for a
place the size of D.O.D. to make its
policy changes felt at the lowest
levels."
Mr. Snyder and others said that one
of the most significant changes in the
past few years was the high-level inter-
est in the problem, spurred by the spy
cases. "In the past, people who raised
these subjects tended to be scoffed at,"
said Roy Godson, a Georgetown Uni-
versity professor who served on the
Central Intelligence Agency's transi-
tion team when the Reagan Adminis-
tration was first taking office. "Now
they're taken seriously. Still, there's
still a long way to go between a com-
mitment to change and actually mak-
ing improvements in security for a vast
bureaucracy."
The espionage cases have also illus-
trated specific failings in the agencies
involved. The Central Intelligence
Agency, for instance. has been revising
its rsonne rules since the case of owar a former officer w o
was dismissed-after bein trained for
service in Moscow. utricials familiar
with the case say that Mr. Howard was
able to tell the Soviet Union about
American techniques for contacting
agents in Moscow. This in turn allowed
the Russians to make a series of ar-
rests and expulsions, and in at least one
case, the execution of a Soviet citizen
working for American intelligence.
Mr. Howard was dismissed from the
after failing a ra or lie-
detector, test on drug use and other
misdeeds. Under its new policy the
agency would place such an employee
in a less sense ivf ition rather than
dismiss him out e t and ieopardize
the in ormation a possessed.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201830052-4
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201830052-4
A.
Interagency Study Group
One Administration effort to im-
prove security throughout the Govern-
ment has gained momentum this year
after several years of inactivity. An in-
teragency committee headed by Miss
Lawton of the Justice Department,
which began meeting in 1983, is rewrit-
ing the 33-year old executive order that
sets standards for granting security
clearances and investigating employ-
ees.
On May 1, 1984, the committee asked
the National Security Council for guid-
ance on the scope of its work, but it got
none for nearly two years. The council
finally resolved the questions last Feb-
ruary, after Congressional insistence.
Miss Lawton of the Justice Depart-
ment, who is chairman of the panel,
said she expects its work to be com-
pleted by the end of this year. She said
the group has been struggling to come
up with procedures and rules that
would improve security while still
meeting the Defense Department's
need for upwards of three million se-
curity clearances for employees and
contractors.
Cost Is a Key Factor
Cost and practicability are impor-
tant considerations in the committee's
work. One proposal that was consid-
ered and rejected called for clearance
holders to submit an annual form on
personal financial data. But the Penta-
gon reminded the group that this would
require hiring enough people to read
and analyze a cascade of three million
new records each year.
"Ideally, you would have person-by-
person judgments based on a back-
ground investigation for every single
person, but we can't afford that," said
Miss Lawton. "Our attitude is: 'What is
the best we can reasonably expect?'
There is no way we can reach ideal."
She said the Pentagon has estimated'
that it would cost $80 billion annually to
perform a full investigation, complete
with field interviews, of all personnel
and contractors who have access to
classified information.
Another perennial Government ef-
fort called for by numerods studies is a
reduction in the amount of classified
data. The theory, according to counter-
intelligence experts, is that when
everything is classified, nothing is.
Cutting the amount of classified infor-
mation has proved difficult for the Rea-
gan Administration. According to an: annual report by the Information Se-
curity Oversight Office, the total num-
ber of decisions to classify data rose by
14 percent from 1984 to 1985, to a total of
more than 22 million. In 1981, there
were 17.3 million such decisions.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201830052-4