Passport prying draws apology

Workers saw records of 3 candidates

WASHINGTON - The passport files of all three major presidential candidates were breached by unauthorized searches by four employees, the State Department said yesterday, prompting apologies from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, outrage from the candidates and calls by lawmakers for further probes.

The State Department had announced Thursday night that two contract employees had been fired and a third disciplined for separately examining Senator Barack Obama's passport file in January, February, and March.

No sooner had Rice gotten off the phone yesterday morning after expressing her regrets to the Illinois Democrat and pledging a full investigation when the department announced that the passport files of Senators Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, had also been inappropriately reviewed. Rice quickly placed apologetic calls to Clinton and McCain, as well.

"We are going to do an investigation through the inspector general, who will get to the bottom of it and make certain that nothing more was going on," Rice said. She added that she told Obama "that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file."

The nearly 200 million passport files maintained by the State Department contain individuals' passport applications, which include such raw data as each applicant's Social Security number and physical description. Otherwise, the files provide rather limited information; they do not contain records of overseas travel or visa stamps from previous passports.

Unless the people who accessed the candidates' files disclosed the data to an unauthorized person, they probably did not violate any law, outside lawyers said. The State Department said that it is examining whether any laws were broken, but a spokesman, Sean McCormack, said that the employees seemed motivated by little more than "imprudent curiosity."

After receiving a 90-minute briefing from State Department officials, Obama's office issued a statement saying there were "still many unanswered questions." Obama, speaking to reporters in Portland, Ore., said he expects "a full and thorough investigation" that "should be done in conjunction with those congressional committees that have oversight function so it's not simply an internal matter."

Administration officials yesterday struggled to explain why repeated attempts to look at the files were not known by senior officials until they received a reporter's inquiry Thursday. The incident jarred the race for the Democratic nomination and brought back memories of a passport scandal during the 1992 race between President Bush's father and Clinton's husband, when senior State Department officials examined Bill Clinton's passport files, resulting in a two-year probe by an independent prosecutor.

"We do feel like the system worked," McCormack said, noting that the unauthorized searches were quickly identified to supervisors. "But the system isn't perfect." The employees were caught because of a monitoring system that is triggered when the passport file of a "high-profile person" is accessed, the State Department said.

Before entering a person's passport file, employees must answer "yes" or "no" in a screen that warns them: "You are permitted access to passport and consular personal records on a need to know basis" and "These are privileged records and are subject to the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974." Entry into the system does not give users access to other government records, officials said.

The two employees fired for examining Obama's file worked for Stanley, an Arlington, Va.-based firm that has handled passport processing for 15 years and just this week won a five-year, $570 million contract.