Charlie Wolf wrote:

I had a brief discussion with a gentleman last night and the President
of our local Community Development group and this gentleman is
interested in moving a high tech business into our small rural town.
He says the basis for the work is photonics. I told him about some of
my background ( BS Comp. Science, retired Navy enlisted with top
security clearance) and he asked me how much money it costs a company
to obtain govt. clearances for a defense contract. I told him I
didn't know but I thought it was expensive. Maybe some of you in this
group have some experience with that, hence my questions:

What the company needs is a facility security clearance,
typically held under a government contract. That involves no
fees payable to the government, but depending on whether
classified material storage is involved, and at what level of
clearance that stored material is classified, and how much of it
there is, the company can spend real big bucks meeting the
protection and administrative requirements that must be met to
set up and run a Defense Industrial Security Program.

The gentleman should run, not walk to his local DSS [Defense
Security Service, a combination of the former the Defense
Industrial Security Clearance Office and the Defense
Investigative Service. He has a *lot* to learn, and, no
disrespect to you, he is not learning what he needs to from you.
You and he might want to check things out at http://www.dss.mil/

Pages of particular interest:

Who we a http://www.dss.mil/aboutdss/index.htm

Industrial Security Program: http://www.dss.mil/isec/index.htm

Personal Security Investigations Program:
http://www.dss.mil/psi/index.htm

What would it cost a company to obtain a security clearance for - say
for example - a recent college graduate with no prior govt. or DoD
experience?

$0.00 beyond the company's internal processing costs.

Would it make a difference if the clearance was TS or Crypto? I
assume this guy has some kind of comm tech in mind.

No.

What would it cost for the company to get a clearance for a military
retiree who has been out a short time (less than 3 years)?

How much less than three years? It will still cost the company
$0.00 beyond its own processing costs, but a military clearance
can't be converted to a civilian clearance after 18 months [last
time I looked, see the DSS pages at the links above]. Absent the
conversion, the ex-military type will have to go through the same
application process as anyone without any prior clearance would
have to. Depending on level, it could involve just a National
Agency Check, a full background investigation, or, for the higher
compartmented stuff, special background investigations.

What would it cost for the company to get a clearance for a military
retiree who has been out a longer time (more than 10 years)?

$0.00, beyond the company's internal processing costs.

What agency does this for such a company? NSA? DoD? FBI? others?

Defense Security Service, formerly the Defense Industrial
Security office. http://www.dss.mil/

Would any of you have a point of contact that you could give me to get
more information?

http://www.dss.mil/
--
OJ III
[Email to Yahoo address may be burned before reading.
Lower and crunch the sig and you'll net me at comcast.]