The US defence department said that a woman was denied a top-secret security clearance this year because she was a “close” relative of an authoritarian dictator.
The woman and the country in question were unnamed, according to a report by CNN based on publicly available documents from the US defence department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals. The country was referred to as ‘Country X’.
The judge in the case ultimately decided to deny the clearance citing that the applicant is related to “an extremely bad and dangerous person, a dictator of a country that is hostile to the United States”.
The applicant is in her 30s and is married to a US citizen born in the country. The judges were also in a fix while denying her the clearance because she is an ‘ideal employee’. The applicant also has worked for defence contractors for several years and moved to the US in the 1990s with her family and later they all became US citizens.
The judge pointed out that “Country X supports international terrorism, and it conducts cyberattacks and espionage against the United States” as one of the reasons for not handing her the security clearance.
“Applicant was born a citizen of Country X. A close family member (cousin, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew) is the dictator of Country X,” the records say.
It also said that the woman in question already has a secret security clearance and there were no concerns regarding how she handled sensitive information earlier.
“This is a difficult case because Applicant is intelligent, honest, loyal to the United States, a model employee, and a current clearance holder with no evidence of any security problems,” the administrative judge on the case, Edward Loughran, noted.
“She credibly testified that her connections to Country X and its dictator could not be used to coerce or intimidate her into revealing classified information. There is nothing about her that makes her anything less than a perfect candidate for a security clearance except her family connections to a dictator,” Loughran further added.
Speaking to the broadcaster, Dr. Marek Posard, a military sociologist at the RAND Corporation, citing the information in the records, said that these records suggest that the woman in question could be from North Korea.
“Sounds like this is Kim Jong Un’s cousin. The thing is, they mention a dictator and state terrorism. Only four countries are on the state terrorism list — two are involved in cyber, and one is particularly retaliatory, which is the DPRK (North Korea),” Rand was quoted as saying.
The broadcaster in its report pointed out that the four countries listed by the US as sponsors of state terrorism are Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Syria.
A separate report from the Washington Post dating back to 2016 said that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s aunt and her three children immigrated to the US in 1998. The judge also pointed out that Country X “considers people who leave their country to be traitors, and the country has taken retaliatory actions against some of them” and also noted that the woman’s mother feared ‘retaliation’.
