It could have been the particular agency that was doing the clearance in my case. With a military customer, I saw less issues, but with the customer I was referring to in my previous post, there were lots of denials. I think the location of foreign born wives is important in this case. The few cases I saw were countries we don't have good intelligence relationships with, in asia and the middle east.
Yes, close personal contacts with people from unfriendly countries can be a problem. However, I do know people with clearances who are from several countries the U.S. is not particularly friendly with.
Quite often it could be that the investigator could not ascertain the relationships on the wife's side and/or they don't have a citizenship yet.
