U.S. Personnel Security Practices

I know you cannot speak for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but, from your standpoint, does it mean anything to you?

Mr. JOHNSON. Unless you specify the agency, I don't know-
Mr. SOURWINE. The agency is the State Department.

Mr. JOHNSON. We may have made an agreement to handle some in

vestigations for them at times, but it is on our authority and under the authority of the Executive order and of the law.

Mr. SOURWINE. And you do not have an option, do you?

Mr. JOHNSON. No.

Mr. SOURWINE. And if the Department wants to give you that work, you would have to perform it?

Mr. JOHNSON. We would have to perform that work in the competitive civil service.

Mr. SOURWINE. Yes. Well, could the State Department have been referring to instances in which you conducted the investigation of Foreign Service persons-have you ever done that?

Mr. JOHNSON. To my knowledge, no. There are laws that cut across programs, and as far as the Foreign Service, that might go into the World Health Organization, where, by law, we are required to make an investigation and there was a period during the earlier midfifties when the State Department was seriously in arrears in its gram and Mr. McLeod came to us and we agreed to detail to him 100 of our investigators.

Mr. SOURWINE. Yes, we know about that.

Mr. JOHNSON. I see.

Mr. SOURWINE. That is not what we are talking about.

Mr. JOHNSON. Then I don't know what he meant or what it could be. (Addressing Mr. Meloy). Do you?

Mr. MELOY. Well, do you think that he had in mind excepted employees?

Mr. SOURWINE. Well, I am sorry, I don't know. But we will eventually find out for the record, and when we do, we will let you know. Mr. MELOY. Well, I have no idea.

Mr. JOHNSON. I have had conversations with State about handling some of their work and my protest has been that it should be done on a long-range basis and not just cases here and there.

Mr. SOURWINE. Does the Civil Service Commission ever perform evaluative functions?

Mr. JOHNSON. Only for its own personnel.

Mr. SOURWINE. Would you know what weight normally, under good security practice, is given by superior officers to evaluation of security material at the evaluative level of the original evaluating officer?

Mr. JOHNSON. Our evaluations are made by, first, an analyst, and then the work is reviewed by a panel, and I personally give it considerable weight if I have to make the final judgment.

Mr. MELOY. Considerable weight is given by the reviewer where the case has been prejudged or judged before, by a panel.

Mr. SOURWINE. Would you say it is good security practice to refer to the recommendations of the evaluator, assuming he is a trained man and only with reason and not arbitrarily?

Mr. MELOY. I do, and of course there should be a reason, rather than its being arbitrary. Any arbitrary action, I think, is wrong.

Mr. SOURWINE. Now, there was at one time a program in the Government of going out through the files to identify seriously derogatory cases and to reevaluate those cases.

I am not talking about the reexamination of all cases under the order, which required that, but the programs which have been put into effect in some departments, at least, since then, to bring everything up to date with regard to their top level people, at least, and with regard to what their security officers considered cases that had seriously derogatory information-have you had anything to do with these programs?

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, of course, you mentioned the one that was required by the Executive order.

Mr. SOURWINE. Yes.

Mr. JOHNSON. And that one has long since been completed.

No, we are not involved in any of that.

Mr. SOURWINE. From what you know of departmental routines, could you make a prediction on the outcome of a security case where it is established that the subject misrepresented to his department and on his written form lied to the security investigators and impeded policies in his position and withheld his expertise from the department where he was required to put his opinions on record?

Mr. JOHNSON. Could I answer that off the record, because I have made a lifelong practice of not giving hypothetical judgments on hypothetical cases, because you always get into trouble.

I would not form a judgment on the basis of a hypothetical case. But all of the facts that you have cited are significant ones.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. SOURWINE. One more question, and I am through, Mr. Johnson: You mentioned that Civil Service investigators use the first person in all their reports of investigations and you told us why.

Have you ever had any complaints that this distorts the report? Mr. JOHNSON. No. But I have had complaints that it sometimes results in extraneous and too long testimony, but not that it distorts. As a matter of fact, we have found to the contrary. Where we would find it necessary to go back a year or 2 years later to reinterview the same witness by another investigator and read to him the submission in the first person of the testimony, and he would say, "I did not realize it was being taken verbatim, but that is exactly what I said"—and at the same time we would be getting across the color and flavor of it. Mr. SOURWINE. Doesn't it amount to putting words in the witness mouth?

Mr. JOHNSON. You mean, in the first person?

Mr. SOURWINE. Yes.

Mr. JOHNSON. No. One of the things that we stress to the investigator-to the supervisor in his review of the investigator's notes, is to see if he finds that the investigator is reporting testimony without much documentation, and then we

Mr. SOURWINE. You understand, I am not trying to put anybody on the spot, and I am addressing this to you, Mr. Meloy, but have you had any trouble in that regard?

Mr. MELOY. No.

Mr. SOURWINE. No trouble at all?

Mr. MELOY. No, and I think it is rather objective. good att anda

Mr. SOURWINE. Do you just regard those reports as being verbatim as to what the man said, or do you have in mind constantly that it is really only a paraphrase, even though it is in the first person and is not actually what he said in words, although it purports to be?

Mr. MELOY. I think that as near as one human can report the conversation of another, I think it is very acceptable.

Mr. JOHNSON. And let me say that the reaction that we get from the agencies on that point depends almost entirely on how nearly the agency is to a purely security evaluation-for a good example, the Atomic Energy Commission is solely concerned with security, the security of contractor employees. That is its basic concern, whereas the U.S. Information Agency is concerned with employee ability and other factors relating to what the man did and how well he did it, and they find the report-they like that report and, we being in the employment business, have probably oriented our investigator staff more on the employability angle than, say, the FBI or other agencies might have.

Mr. SOURWINE. Would you say that it takes a very highly skilled investigator to do a good job with this first person report?

Mr. JOHNSON. It takes a great deal of training, but I would likewise say that it takes greater training for him to report objectively in the third person. zibuggy/en.

Mr. SOURWINE. You think, then, that it takes more training and more experience with the first person reports so as to understand them and digest them than to similarly understand and digest a third person report?

Mr. JOHNSON. No; my own feeling—and I have had many discussions with others on this point-is that the trend in the third person report would be to get too much in and

Mr. SOURWINE. I don't mean to be argumentative, but in a third person report, is it not always possible to use direct quotes where they are of special significance, and they will thereby stand out? How do you reach that point in your first person report?

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, reports are always carefully read, and are considered to be the testimony in substance, and then, unless it is indicated in quotes, the investigator is allowed to quote definitely. Of course, if it does happen to be a highly significant statement, he may record an affidavit and get a signed statement, and

Mr. SOURWINE. Well, you can achieve the same results by having the significant statement stand out in direct quotation marks. You can simply do that by putting quote marks around them, couldn't you? Mr. JOHNSON. Yes.

Mr. SOURWINE. And, of course, all of the statements are in the third person in the report except that there are some shifts from the third to the first person, so wouldn't that be equally effective and even

Mr. JOHNSON. Well, I certainly do not quarrel with that. I simply prefer the other.

Mr. SOURWINE. Thank you, Mr. Johnson.

No more questions.

Mr. Scott?

Mr. SCOTT. No questions.

Mr. SOURWINE. I am deeply grateful to you both for taking the time for this long this afternoon, and to the Senator from taking a great deal of his time to sit away from his work all of this while.

(Whereupon, at 5:30 p.m., the subcommittee adjourned, subject to call of the Chair.)

(Additional material pertinent to the hearing was later supplied by Mr. Johnson under cover of the following letter:)

Mr. J. G. SOURWINE,

Chief Counsel, Internal Security
U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.

U.S. CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION,
BUREAU OF PERSONNEL INVESTIGATIONS,
Washington, D.C., March 20, 1963.

Subcommittee, Committee on the Judiciary,

DEAR MR. SOURWINE: Attached in accordance with a request made during the course of testimony before the subcommittee on March 12, 1963, are the following:

1. A copy of Executive Order 10450, and amendments.

2. A copy of Public Law 298.

3. A copy of the Presidential directive of March 13, 1948.

4. A statement of the cost accounting procedures used by the Civil Service Commission in determining the cost of full-field investigations conducted as a reimbursable service for other Government agencies.

5. Employment history statement for Lawrence V. Meloy and a biographical statement for myself."

If I can supply any additional information, please do not hesitate to call on me. Sincerely yours,

KIMBELL JOHNSON, Director.

(The above listed documents are printed in Appendix XXVIII, pp. 1117, 1146, 1148, and 1149.)

The documents referred to in item No. 5 appear at p. 69 of the hearings.

INDEX

NOTE. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee attaches no significance
to the mere fact of the appearance of the name of an individual or an organiza-
tion in this index.