EXCLUSIVE: Top secret clearances flawed at Pentagon

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By Shaun Waterman THE WASHINGTON TIMES

EXCLUSIVE:

The Pentagon may have issued top-secret clearances last year to as many as one-in-four applicants who had "significant derogatory information" in their backgrounds, including a record of foreign influence or criminal conduct, a little- noticed government audit says.

Flaws in the system for granting clearances to Defense Department staff and contractors pose a risk to national security, and the right tools to measure how well the process works are essential, said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, California Democrat and chairman of a House intelligence subcommittee that oversees personnel and management issues.

"At present, we're basically operating on faith. This shouldn't be a faith-based process," Ms. Eshoo told The Washington Times.

Ms. Eshoo was responding to an audit published last month by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warning one in four top-secret clearances issued by the Pentagon last year had no record of why officials had approved the applicant despite "significant derogatory information" that raised security concerns - most frequently about foreign influence or criminal conduct.

The audit also found that nearly nine in 10 new top-secret clearances last year were granted even though background investigation files on the applicant "were missing at least one type of documentation," most often employment verification.

The Pentagon granted more than 450,000 initial security clearances, and another 180,000 renewals, to military personnel, civilian employees and private contractors last year, based on the results of background investigations conducted by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Auditors reached their conclusions by examining a random sample of 3,500 files on top-secret clearances granted in July last year.

GAO auditors said their report concentrated on top-secret clearances because people with them "have access to information that, if improperly disclosed, could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security."

The risks inherent in granting security clearances to the wrong people are illustrated by the case of Noureddine Malki, a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked as a contract translator for the U.S. military in Iraq. Last year, Malki was sentenced to 10 years in prison and stripped of his citizenship after pleading guilty of lying about his background, biography and even his name in his applications for citizenship and later a top-secret security clearance.