As President Clinton prepares to lift the ban on gays in the military, U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies still are weeding out some gay applicants and examining the sexual orientation of employees in tens of thousands of jobs that require security clearances.
Interviews and court records show that gay workers in the FBI, the CIA and a number of other agencies still face harassment and even firings, just as they did at the height of the Cold War, when authorities feared they were vulnerable to blackmail.
And while security agencies no longer routinely ask job seekers if they are homosexual, as the military does, applicants who appear to be gay often are rejected, sometimes after undergoing humiliating interrogations about details of their sex lives.
The evidence of such harsh treatment is being disclosed through lawsuits by several gay workers, and their complaints could help propel public debate well beyond the question of whether homosexuals and lesbians should be allowed to serve in the armed services.
Their charges of abuse also could increase the pressure on Clinton to issue an order banning discrimination against gay workers throughout the federal government. Clinton recently promised gay leaders that he is considering such a move to strengthen civil service rules that differ from agency to agency.
By most accounts, the FBI-with its macho, crime-busting culture-remains the most aggressive agency in rooting out homosexuals.
But agencies ranging from the CIA to the U.S. Customs Service continue to spend untold tax dollars on similar inquiries. The investigations also focus on civilian workers at the Pentagon and on some of the 850,000 people who need security clearances to work for private defense contractors.
Some of the most powerful evidence of abuses comes from a lawsuit filed in 1990 by former FBI agent Frank Buttino, who contends he was fired from the San Diego office because the bureau found out he is gay.
FBI officials say they dismissed Buttino, a 21-year veteran, in June 1990 because he lied about writing a letter proposing that he and another man engage in “erotic wrestling.”
Internal files made public as part of Buttino’s case show that since 1985, the FBI has investigated nearly two dozen employees thought to be gay, and it has rejected all 15 job applicants that it knew or suspected to be homosexual.
The records also show that in the mid-1980s, one agent, whose name and identifying traits were blacked out, committed suicide within hours after being questioned about whether he had visited a beach and a marina thought to be gay pickup spots. Buttino said the agent was married and had children.
Many of the other two dozen employees resigned quietly after investigators said they would need to interview family members, co-workers and sex partners to determine if their behavior made them vulnerable to blackmail or raised questions about their judgment.
“The FBI, in effect, became the blackmailers,” Buttino said. “In effect, the bureau was threatening to `out’ these people.”
Top officials at the Customs Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had to apologize last year to workers who had been subjected to overzealous inquiries.
Security officers had ordered the FEMA employee, who had admitted his homosexuality, to prepare a hit list of gay colleagues. The list was destroyed after a House subcommittee intervened.
At Customs, senior investigators repeatedly threatened to prevent several college interns from ever winning full-time jobs at the agency if they did not implicate an analyst, Warren Asher, in homosexual activity. Asher refused to say if he was gay during a six-year effort to suspend or fire him.
But one 19-year-old student alleged under oath that two investigators took him into a room where a gun was lying on a briefcase, pushed him against a wall and frisked him. They then dictated false allegations against Asher and ordered him to sign it. The investigators later denied that they did this, and neither was disciplined.
Top officials at the FBI, the CIA, Customs and other agencies all insist that they do not have blanket policies against hiring or promoting homosexuals.
They also say they have begun to curb a tendency to conduct the kind of witch hunts that became notorious during the homophobic McCarthy era of the 1950s and continued as a legacy of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
FBI officials say, for instance, that they have identified four homosexual employees since Buttino filed his suit, but they have not taken action beyond questioning them.
But FBI officials also admitted in sworn statements last fall that homosexual conduct makes it “significantly more difficult” to be hired, either as one of the bureau’s 10,000 special agents or for some of its 11,000 support jobs.
And just one week before Clinton took office, the CIA won a court ruling upholding its right to fire an electronics technician who, it claimed, had been deceptive about being gay.
Buttino’s suit seeking reinstatement at the FBI is set to go to trial in San Francisco on June 7-five weeks before the deadline for the military to present Clinton with a plan for ending its ban on gay soldiers.
Given the timing, Buttino’s case could become a rallying point among gay groups pushing Clinton to provide more protection for civilian workers.
It also could lead to a more thorough examination of whether the security agencies still can justify maintaining any focus on homosexuality in deciding who can be trusted with access to sensitive intelligence and law-enforcement operations.
FBI and CIA officials say they remain concerned about any type of homosexual conduct that raises questions about a person’s reliability, such as promiscuity or practices that might be considered deviant or that are illegal in some states.
They also say they need to retain the right to dismiss people who lie about whether they are homosexual.
Gay rights activists counter, however, that the agencies’ notions of acceptable behavior are far too narrow. They say homosexuals are often victims of a double standard in which their behavior comes under greater scrutiny than that of heterosexuals.
They also contend that gays and lesbians long have faced a catch-22 situation, fearing they would be fired if they either admitted their homosexuality or lied about it.
Buttino’s case illustrates how the range of concerns on both sides has played out in practice.
Buttino, 48, received several awards for his work, which included dangerous periods undercover in organized crime and espionage cases.
He said he does not think his co-workers knew he was gay until 1988 when one of them received an anonymous package that included a letter he wrote proposing “erotic wrestling” to a man who answered a personal ad Buttino had placed in a gay newspaper.
Buttino said he had not mentioned his last name or where he worked in the letter, and he still has no idea how anyone identified him as an FBI agent.
When a supervisor asked Buttino if he wrote the letter, Buttino said no. But five weeks later, he admitted to investigators that the letter was his.
He said the investigators then demanded to know “all the gory details of my homosexual life from the first experience.” They also wanted to know the names of gays and lesbians in the FBI and of his sex partners outside the bureau, but he refused to provide them.
Buttino’s case has been bolstered by affidavits from several people who also contend that the FBI discriminated against them.
Dana Tillson, a private investigator in San Francisco who applied in 1988 to become an FBI agent, said two agents conducted “an amazingly humiliating inquisition” in which they demanded to know if she had ever had oral-genital sex with a woman.
After she acknowledged she had, they told her it would be hard for the FBI to hire her because it would not be able to transfer her to any of 24 states with sodomy laws.
“My question to them, which of course they failed to answer, was, `Are you also asking all of these same questions to your heterosexual applicants?’ “
Tillson said her point was that 15 of the 24 states make no distinction in their sodomy laws about whether the acts are homosexual or heterosexual.
After that, said Tillson, who is the daughter of a submarine captain and the granddaughter of an admiral, she began “raking (the FBI agents) over the coals” about “how deceptive it is” that the bureau does not state clearly that it does not want gays and lesbians.
“At least the military just comes right out and tells you we do not want you,” she said.
