248 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



Investigation of contractors' personnel was never on as comprehensive a 

 scale as for OSRD employees. Primary responsibility for the security of work 

 done under contract rested with the contractor. OSRD recognized, however, 

 that in many cases contractors had no way of assuring themselves that their 

 employees were both loyal and discreet. The contractor might feel perfectly 

 secure as to his old employees, but when new employees were being added 

 by the dozen, and particularly when the bottom of the manpower barrel 

 was reached, he could not have the same assurance as to them. 



OSRD sought to assist the contractors, and also to assure itself, by making 

 it possible for a contractor to obtain a security investigation of personnel. It 

 specified that clearance should be obtained for all persons who would have 

 access to or who would be working with classified information, but these 

 conditions were never clearly defined, with the result that the practice varied 

 widely among contractors. In some cases OSRD contractors were also doing 

 work for the Army or the Navy and the same employees were working on 

 OSRD and Service contracts. Arrangements satisfactory to the Services were 

 acceptable to OSRD, and few investigations of such employees were made 

 for OSRD. In other cases, contractors submitted the names of all employees 

 engaged in work on an OSRD contract, regardless of the type of activity 

 in which the employee was engaged. Clearly if all contractors had followed 

 such a course the investigative machinery would have broken down under 

 the load. As it was, the breakdown was perilously close at times. Various 

 expedients were adopted from time to time by the investigative agencies 

 with a view to cutting down on the amount of time required for routine 

 cases in order to permit concentration upon those where there were factors 

 which might indicate a real danger of espionage. 



There probably is no satisfactory answer to the problem of reconciling 

 speed with absolute security; but if there is, OSRD did not find it. The 

 results were surprisingly good, however; at least, OSRD did its job with 

 reasonable celerity, there was no known case of improper disclosure or 

 "leakage" of information, and there was no infringement upon individual 

 rights so far as is known to OSRD. 



Under the plan first adopted, NDRC submitted requests for investigation 

 to both Army and Navy, which resulted in some duplication of investiga- 

 tions. The system was changed, therefore, to one under which NDRC sub- 

 mitted roughly one half its requests to the Army and the remainder to the 

 Navy; each Service checked with the other to the extent it felt desirable. 

 In the spring of 1942, the Army took over from the Navy the responsibility 

 for personnel security investigations with a few limited exceptions. There- 

 after OSRD dealt exclusively with the Army, and the Army determined the 

 extent to which it made use of other agencies. 



Prior to June 1942, the reports from the Services to NDRC and OSRD 

 indicated whether they objected to disclosure of classified information to 



