Report: Navy Yard shooting could have been prevented

Threats to Defense Department personnel and facilities are increasingly coming from trusted insiders, and to defeat them the Pentagon must beef up security from within, according to several reviews triggered by last year's Washington Navy Yard killings.

The reviews, released Tuesday, say the shooting by former Navy reservist-turned-contractor Aaron Alexis could have been prevented if the company that employed him told the Navy about problems it was having with him in the months before he gunned down 12 civilian workers.

An independent study and internal review ordered after the September 2013 attack said the Pentagon must expand its focus beyond defending against external threats. More attention must be paid, they concluded, to defending against threats from inside the workforce.

"For decades, the department has approached security from a perimeter perspective," said Paul Stockton, former Pentagon assistant secretary for homeland defense and one of the authors of the independent review. "That approach is outmoded, it's broken, and the department needs to replace it."

According to the Navy probe, Alexis' employer, an information technology company called The Experts that worked on defense contracts, had concerns about his mental state but did not report them. Instead, it briefly pulled his access to classified material after he made a series of bizarre complaints that people were following him and using a microwave machine to "send vibrations through the ceiling" in his hotel room.

The report said The Experts' human resources manager called Alexis' mother, who said her son "has been paranoid and this was not the first episode he had experienced."

Alexis was called back to Washington, and The Experts concluded the information on Alexis was based on rumor and innuendo and thus restored his access two days later.

"The company leadership decided not to inform the government of adverse information concerning Alexis' emotional, mental, or personality condition, even when they had concerns that Alexis may cause harm to others," the Navy report said.

The Experts declined to comment.

The report also said the Navy itself had failed to properly evaluate and report his behavior when he was a sailor. His secret-level security clearance from the Navy carried over when he went to work as a computer contractor last summer.

The independent review ordered by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel concluded the Pentagon grants far too many people secret security clearances, as it did to Alexis, even though he never needed it to perform his Navy job.

The clearance in turn helped him obtain employment after leaving the Navy with a defense subcontractor working on secret-level information systems at the Washington Navy Yard and other installations.

Alexis entered the Navy Yard the morning of Sept. 16 using his Defense Department access card and carrying a concealed sawed-off shotgun, the Navy report found. He killed 12 people and wounded four before being slain by police an hour and 10 minutes after first opening fire.

Hagel said he had accepted four key recommendations aimed at improving security, including moving to a system of continuous evaluation of people who have secret security clearances, rather than the current practice of not re-examining them for a decade unless derogatory information is presented to authorities.

He also agreed to the establishment of an insider threat management and analysis center within the Pentagon to place responsibility for the process under a top official, and to create an identity management software system that allows different services to share personnel information.

Hagel said three other proposals were being considered: reducing the number of people holding classified security clearances by 10 percent, conducting background checks in the Pentagon rather than externally, and working to improve mental health care in the department.

About 3.5 million people hold Defense Department security clearances, the independent review said, noting that this is far more than necessary.

Wire services