WASHINGTON - The same federal contractor that vetted Edward Snowden, who leaked information about classified U.S. spying programs, also performed a background check that let the Washington Navy Yard shooter obtain a security clearance.
Now the contractor, USIS, is drawing fire from a senator asking how Snowden and Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis slipped through the cracks. The vetting process also has been a focus in an inquiry by law-enforcement agencies into Alexis’ activities before his deadly rampage this week.
No company does more U.S. government background checks for clearances than USIS, which was awarded $253 million by the Office of Personnel Management last year. The company did about two-thirds of background investigations performed by contractors, and more than half of all those performed by the U.S. personnel office, according to the office of Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
“What’s emerging is a pat-tern of failure on the part of this company, and a failure of this entire system, that risks nothing less than our national security and the lives of Americans,” McCaskill said in a statement. “We clearly need a top-to-bottom overhaul of how we vet those who have access to our country’s secrets and to our secure facilities.”
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Alexis, 34, obtained a secret-level clearance from the Navy in March 2008 that would have enabled him to get the access card he used to get on the base. After leaving the Navy in January 2011, Alexis kept the clearance even with three arrests,a history of mental illness and a record of military misconduct. His clearance was good for 10 years and wasn’t subject to reinvestigation, according to a defense official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified.
Security specialists say USIS, a unit of Falls Church, Va.-based Altegrity Inc., owned by Providence Equity Partners, is a beneficiary of a system where the number of people with security clearances surged to almost 5 million as of last year. Investigators are overworked and underpaid, security specialists say, and the government has become increasingly reliant on outside contractors to do background checks.
USIS did Alexis’ background investigation in 2007, Ray Howell, a USIS spokesman, said Thursday in an email.
“Today we were informed that in 2007, USIS conducted a background check of Aaron Alexis” for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Howell said.
Just the day before, Howell said that USIS hadn’t vetted Alexis, who killed 12 people at the Navy Yard on Monday and then died in a shootout with police.
The company can’t comment further because it’s prohibited contractually from retaining information gathered during its background checks for the personnel office, he said.
Merton Miller, associate director for federal investigative services at the Office of Personnel Management, said that the agency “has reviewed the 2007 background investigation file for Aaron Alexis, and the agency believes that the file was complete and in compliance with all investigative standards.”
Once an investigation is complete, Miller said, it is submitted to the “adjudicating agency” - in this case, the Defense Department - for review.
The personnel office’s involvement with Alexis’ security clearance ended when it submitted the case to the Defense Department.
The Pentagon “did not ask OPM for any additional investigative actions after it received the completed background investigation,” Miller said.
Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware and chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said the panel will take a closer look at the background-check procedure for security clearances.
“We need to do all that we can to understand what went wrong in the process and why, and what we can to do to improve it moving forward,” Carper said in an emailed statement.
Patrick McFarland, inspector general of the personnel office, has said there may have been shortcomings in USIS’ vetting of Snowden, a former Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. employee who worked for the National Security Agency.
Snowden, who leaked information about U.S. electronic surveillance programs, faces federal charges of theft and espionage and is in Russia under temporary asylum.
Federal authorities are looking into the security-check process as part of a broader investigation into Alexis’ activities, said a law-enforcement official, who would only speak on condition of anonymity.
“In light of recent events, we plan to step up our efforts to investigate and prosecute the individuals and companies who risk our security by cutting corners and falsifying information in background checks,” Matthew Jones, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen in Washington, said in a statement.
At least 10 background-check workers, all employed by contractors, have been convicted or pleaded guilty to falsifying records since 2006, according to the personnel office’s inspector general. Eight of them worked for USIS.
CO-WORKERS TARGETED
Meanwhile, according law-enforcement officials and witness accounts Monday, Alexis began his rampage by heading directly to the fourth floor, where he shot people who worked with him, and authorities are investigating whether a workplace problem sparked the killings.
People in the department where Alexis was working had concerns about his job performance, and investigators are looking into whether those concerns escalated last week, the officials said.
“He was not doing a very good job, and somebody told him that there was a problem,” one law-enforcement official said.
“Our belief is that the people who were shot first were people he had issues with where he worked, people he had some sort of a dispute with. After that, it became random.”
Although the investigators say they do not know the exact order in which the victims were shot, they said the rampage started in an area of people who would have worked with him.
The law-enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is in its early stages.
Three of the officials said most of the victims on the fourth floor were shot at close range and in the head, but a senior law-enforcement official said no clear evidence had emerged pointing to a workplace dispute.
FBI Director James Comey said Alexis arrived for work about 8 a.m. Monday and parked on a deck across a narrow road from Building 197. Carrying a bag containing a Remington 870 shotgun, he entered the building and went to a bathroom on the fourth floor.
Both the stock and the barrel of the shotgun had been sawed to shorter lengths, making the weapon more compact and easier to wield, Comey said
“He shot folks on the fourth floor and the third floor,” Comey said. Then he walked downstairs to the lobby “and shot a security guard and took a weapon from the security guard - a Beretta semi-automatic pistol - and continued moving up and down through the building, focusing on the third and fourth floors.”
Comey said he viewed a surveillance video of parts of the shooting. “It appears to me that he was wandering the halls and hunting people to shoot,” Comey said. “When you look at the folks who were shot, and those poor folks who lost their lives, they’re people from all different backgrounds from all over the building.”
Comey said it appears from the video that Alexis ran out of shotgun shells. So he began firing the pistol he had taken from the slain security officer.
“And that continued until the first responders arrived,” the FBI director said, referring to District of Columbia police and other law-enforcement officers.
The officers “cornered him and had a sustained exchange of fire with him. And then he was downed and obviously killed at the scene.”
RADIO MALFUNCTIONS
Also on Friday, a union leader said Navy firefighters who responded to the Washington Navy Yard shooting had faulty radios that hindered their communications.
Greg Russell, the president of the union that represents civilian Navy firefighters in the Washington region, said the radio malfunctions were described to him by multiple firefighters who responded to Monday’s massacre.
Russell said the problems prevented firefighters inside Building 197, where the shooting occurred, from communicating with one another and were so bad that the department had to send one of its officials outside the building to transmit messages and commands.
“We’re our own fire department. We need to have our own radio system. It needs to work,” Russell said, adding that the radio system has long been problematic.
The firefighters were ultimately able to use the radio system of local first responders, Russell said. He said the problems caused unnecessary delays, though it was not clear what effect those delays may have had.
“Firefighters provide emergency medical services. Cops chase bad guys, we rescue people,” he said.
A spokesman for Naval District Washington did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
SIGNS 6 WEEKS BEFORE
In the days before Alexis called the police in Newport, R.I., to complain that he was hearing voices sent by a “microwave machine,” employees at the Residence Inn in nearby Middletown were struggling to cope with his behavior.
Daily logs kept by the hotel detailed how, on successive nights, he knocked on doors to find the voices, woke up a person in one room and frightened another so badly she asked to move. Then came a call from his employer.
“Brenda from The Experts Inc. called re: Mr. Alexis in 407,” a Residence Inn employee noted in a log dated Aug. 7 that was reviewed by The New York Times.
“She explained that he is unstable and the company is bringing him home,” the entry continued. “She asked me to check the room (it was vacant), and check him out.”
The company also relayed its worries to his mother, according to Melinda Downs, who became acquainted with Alexis in Fort Worth. Alexis expressed a measure of chagrin, she said.
“I can’t believe HR called my mom,” Downs said he told her.
But The Experts called Alexis three days later, summoning him back to work the next day, Downs said.
A company spokesman said they were aware that Alexis was having trouble sleeping six weeks before the shootings and said that after he rested, he performed his job without problems.
It was also revealed Friday that The Experts Inc. CEO Thomas Hoshko sent an email to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus offering condolences and his services to help the military improve security.
In the email, obtained by The Associated Press, Hoshko lays out his work experience and says he could help improve security for the military, contractors and civilians.
Navy officials confirmed the email was sent to Mabus, but they declined to characterize its contents. The company declined to comment.
Information for this article was contributed by Danielle Ivory, Kathleen Miller, Laurie Asseo, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Gopal Ratnam, Tony Capaccio, Tom Schoenberg and Chris Strohm of Bloomberg News; by Ashley Halsey III, Clarence Williams, Leslie Minora, Sari Horwitz, Paul Duggan, Peter Hermann, Carol D. Leonnig, Susan Svrluga, Matea Gold, Marjorie Censer, Carol Morello and Julie Tate of The Washington Post; and by Eric Tucker of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/21/2013