WASHINGTON — Four CIA employees, fired for their involvement with a private and unauthorized chat network on the agency's computer system, said in interviews this week that the agency had treated them far too harshly for what they considered a harmless social activity.
The four employees, who were dismissed late last year as part of a broader investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency of what it said was secretive and unauthorized computer usage, have lost their appeals of their dismissals, according to their lawyer, Janine Brookner. They now plan to pursue other internal administrative remedies before deciding whether to take the agency to court.
The four — Chris Hlatky, a senior systems engineer; Janet Platt, a program manager; Annemarie Kline-Edens, an information security officer; and Jane Harmon, a computer scientist — are speaking out for the first time to present their side of the story of the investigation.
In November, the CIA said it had completed an investigation of a group of agency employees and contractors for their involvement in what the CIA called a "willful misuse of the agency's computer networks."
In addition to the four employees who were fired, others have faced less severe disciplinary action. The existence of the agency's investigation of inappropriate and unauthorized computer usage was first reported by The Washington Post.
The CIA said that its investigation had not found any unauthorized disclosure of classified information as a result of the computer usage. But American intelligence officials say that the main reason the CIA took the matter seriously was that the employees had tried to keep the chat network secret for years.
"The significance was that they were trying to use a classified computer system for their own use, and they tried to hide what they were doing," said one intelligence official. "We have to have absolute confidence in the CIA's computer systems."
The employees say that their chat network — which they say began around 1987 and underwent several name and format changes over the years — was harmless and had effectively ended in 1997. They argue that was before new CIA regulations went into effect forbidding such informal databases.
"There was no attempt at deception or malice," argued Hlatky, who helped create the system in the 1980s. The firings, he said, were "a gross overreaction to the alleged offenses."
Kline-Edens added, "I suspect that they had very real concerns, but I suspect strongly that this was an overreaction."
The underground chat system first began on an early, pre-Internet CIA computer network, and was nicknamed "Lunacy" by its members, Hlatky recalled. He said it started out as an effort to test new ways of using computer bulletin boards to let people working in different sections of the CIA to communicate. At first, Hlatky said, Lunacy was open and visible to other computer users.
But as computer software technology evolved, so did the chat network, and its members acknowledged that it became a private system. At various times it was called "The Den" or "The Underground Railroad" and allowed members to share off-color jokes, network about jobs and share other personal information, as well as set up social gatherings. A kind of social club, with occasional get-togethers, developed around the chat system, several of the former employees noted.
Membership in the database was by invitation only, according to Hlatky. "The reason for screening members was to ensure that their sense of humor would be generally aligned with the current membership," he wrote in a memo about the history of the chat system. "While the content of the Underground Railroad varied from gripe sessions to off-color humor, it had numerous tangible benefits. Some of the agency's worst stutterers and most terminally shy people were able to become extraordinarily articulate within its bounds," Hlatky wrote.
It was shut down on the CIA's Lotus Notes-based system in early 1997, though Hlatky said that others tried to revive it later on a Web-based system.
Hlatky and Platt, who is his wife, said that they both revealed the existence of the chat network when they underwent routine CIA polygraphs in 1995. They both said they were told by the polygrapher that it was not a problem.
The employees were notified of the investigation in May 2000.