Panels probe DoD response to Deutch security breach

Twin Senate probes of why the Pentagon took so long to investigate what military secrets John Deutch might have compromised while deputy defense secretary are now focused on whether Donald Mancuso, President Clinton's nominee for Defense Department inspector general, muffled the alarm bells that his deputies tried to sound.

During the past few days, investigators from the Senate Judiciary Administrative Oversight Subcommittee and the Governmental Affairs Committee have questioned present and former Mancuso associates.

Some of those who were questioned challenged Mancuso's claim that he did not know until this February about a 1998 memo warning that Deutch had endangered the Pentagon's most highly classified information, congressional officials said.

Meanwhile, Mancuso reportedly ordered inspector general's office employees who were questioned by Senate investigators to write a memo afterward detailing what they were asked, as part of his own in-house investigation into the Deutch affair.

But Judiciary Administrative Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, criticized this practice, saying it "could be viewed as retaliatory in nature."

In a letter dated last Friday to Mancuso, Grassley wrote, "While I do not believe that your intentions are to intimidate any past or future congressional witnesses, such an investigation on your part could be misinterpreted and may compromise the results."

The subpanel's investigators Monday questioned Mark Spaulding, a former investigator in the inspector general's office. Spaulding wrote a far more alarming memo in 1998 on Deutch's possible security breaches than Mancuso ended up sending to Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre.

Spaulding told National Journal before his Senate appearance that he assumed Mancuso received his June 17, 1998, memo that said the CIA had discovered Deutch's computerized journals, which hackers could penetrate.

The memo also noted the journals included "top secret compartmented as well as DOD Special Access Program" information.

In Mancuso's "SecDef Alert" memo of July 20, 1998, to Hamre, he did not mention the possible compromise of super secret, Special Access information. Hamre told National Journal that he did not regard the comparatively mild Mancuso memo as a warning of a serious problem. "It doesn't tell me to do anything," he said. "There is no word here of Special Access material."

Senate investigators are focusing on whether the Spaulding memo fell between the chairs in the inspector general's office, or whether Mancuso watered it down. This is part of a widening probe of why Hamre and Defense Secretary William Cohen took 18 months to launch an investigation into what military secrets might have been compromised by Deutch's mishandling of the super secret information.