Why we can't catch more spies.

• Author: McGowan, William G.

As intelligence officials picked through the evidence of the Walker spy ring, there was disagreement over the extent of the damage. On one point, however, agreement was widespread: the system for keeping alleged spies such as John Walker Jr, and his accomplices away from the nation's defense secrets is alarmingly weak.

This was not a case of Russians breaking into locked file drawers with hacksaws. The three principals in the case--Walker, his brother, Arthur, and James Whitworth--all had received "top secret" clearances to view information like that in question. John's son, Michael, who was also involved, held a "secret" level clearance. The Walker case is just one of many in recent years in which individuals fully certified by the federal government for access to sensitive defense data, have been caught selling that information to the Soviets.

The clearance process is supposed to weed out such spies. But as is by now amply clear, the process is breaking down, primarily for one reason: "Numbers are overwhelming the whole system," says Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. Specifically:

* Too much paper in the federal government is being classified as containing "national security secrets."

* Too many federal employees are getting clearances to handle all this paper.

* As a result, the government is spending too much time investigating people before they are hired and not enough time doing periodic checks of people already on the job and actually handling sensitive material.

Imagine trying to do a background investigation on every resident of the city of Chicago; throw in Boston and San Francisco for good measure, and you have some idea of the magnitude of the problem. Making matters worse, the quality of the staff conducting these clearance investigations has diminished in recent years; for this and other reasons, clearance checks are not as thorough as they should be.

AS the national media seized upon the Walker case, officials all over Washington were bemoaning the security breakdown. Sentor David Durenberger, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed the view of a number of his colleagues when he called upon the Reagan administration to "cut in half the amount of information we classify and cut by more than half the number of people who have access to it." Even the Reagan administration has conceded that there might be a problem.

There has been much less discussion, however, of how the clearance process came to be so overloaded. A tendency to push for too much classified paper and too many clearances is virtually built into the federal bureaucracy. Unless official Washington comes to grips with these measures, its stern resolutions about cutting the number of clearances will amount to so much hot air. The record of the Reagan administration has not been encouraging. Far from resisting the bureaucracy's inclination to excess, the Reagan administration has reinforced it.

Too many cooks

The first problem with the clearance system is that it is so diffuse. Thousands of officials scattered throughout the federal government decide what documents need to be classified as defense secrets, and thousands of others decide who needs to be cleared for access to this paper. The Defense Investigative Service of the Department of Defense conducts most of the security investigations, since most of the clearances are issued by that department. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) handles clearances for the civilian agencies, primarily the Department of Energy, which does nuclear-related work. The FBI takes care of high-6evel political appointees, White House staff, and selected employees of the federal courts and congressional committees. The Central Intelligency Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Secret Service, and several other agencies do their own security clearances.

More Spies

There is bickering among the different agencies over standards and techniques for conducting security clearances. Calls to centralize the process have gotten about as far as the perennial proposal to reduce the number of congressional committees. But the greater problem is, simply, the incredible workload. At present more than half of the 5.6 million federal employees hold clearances, while another 1.4 million workers for defense contractors hold them as well. That's a total of more than 4.2 million, up from 3 million as recently as 1979.

"The requests for clearances have been increasing like crazy the last couple of years," Britt Snider, director of counterintelligence and security policy at the Defense Department, told The New York Times. Last year the government tried to handle more than 200,000 new top secret clearances--a 50 percent increase since the mid-seventies--as well as 700,000 lower-level, secret, clearances for the Defense Department and military contractors alone. The Defense Department, which conducts the vast majority of clearance checks, has only about 1,500 investigators in the field, and these officials also are trying to keep an eye on people, such as the Walkers, who have already gone through the process.

The crunch starts with paper. The government classifies purportedly sensitive information into four categories: confidential, secret, top secret, and sensitive compartmented information. An employee must undergo security clearances that are, in theory, progressively more rigorous the higher the level of classified information he is to have access to.

The confidential theory has become so overused--and meaningless--that the government permits defense contractors to administer this designation themselves. A secret clearance involves what is called a "national agency check," which is little more than most of us would expect when we open a charge account--a check for a criminal record, credit rating, and the like. Clearances at the two top levels, by contrast, involve full-scale investigations...