THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING DISK-DRIVES Washington Weekly 6/19/00 Edward Zehr It all began on May 7 when, according to a Fox News report, "lab workers responsible for the disks discovered they had vanished from a suitcase in the vault but did not report the loss to higher-ups at the lab or to security, according to a lab spokesman." Michael Y. Park, a Fox news reporter, indicated that the hard drives, which "disappeared" from a vault at the Los Alamos National Laboratory contained "detailed information on U.S. and Russian nukes." Although the exact nature of the information has not been revealed, Republican senators investigating the incident have described it as possibly the most serious security breach in the nation's history. The latest word as I finish this article is that the disks have been found behind a photo-copying machine in a "secure" area of the lab. An administration official told UPI Friday night that the drives had been found "in very questionable circumstances" and that the federal investigation of the matter is "far from over." The area where the hard-drives were found had been searched at least twice before and investigators are certain that they were not there at the time. The area is being treated as a crime scene by the FBI. The disks themselves are of no importance -- the official told UPI that investigators would like to know where the drives had been "from when they disappeared until they were discovered." He indicated that they are "particularly interested in whether the hard drives 'have been compromised' -- whether the classified information on them has been accessed or downloaded." At least 20 FBI agents are investigating the security breach, together with security personnel from the Department of Energy. Having worked with classified information during most of an engineering career that spanned three-and-a-half decades, a couple of things immediately caught my eye in the brief news accounts. First I would point out that when one is handling information as sensitive as this is said to be, things don't simply "vanish." There is (supposed to be) a chain of accountability that anchors the information to a person, or persons, responsible for it's safekeeping. Because access to such highly classified data is tightly restricted, it should be abundantly obvious which (small group of) people are likely to have seen it last. Given the urgency of the situation, it should not take weeks or months to determine what happened. Although 85 people are said to have had access, it seems that only 28 people were authorized to enter, unescorted, the vault where the disk- drives were kept. Presumably at least one of these people knows what happened to the missing data. The FBI is presently giving lie-detector tests to those involved, in an effort to identify the knowledgeable one(s), much to the annoyance of everyone involved. The other point that comes readily to mind is that, unless a person has been suddenly afflicted with a rare brain disorder that causes him to regress back to the psychological level of a mindlessly irresponsible, infantile brat, that person does not wait three weeks before informing someone in authority that the nation's nuclear secrets are missing. As annoying as it must be to be given a polygraph test under these circumstances, nobody forced any of these people to involve themselves in work that requires the safeguarding of highly sensitive classified information. Perhaps had they taken that part of the job a bit more seriously they would not have been confronted with such an irritating imposition. LETHARGY AT LOS ALAMOS Last Tuesday a Department of Energy security official told the House Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee that none of the 85 employees who had access to the classified vault were questioned for two weeks after the hard-drives were reported missing because lab officials were preoccupied with the wildfire that was threatening the facility at the time. On the surface this may sound plausible enough, but the disk-drives were found to be missing soon after the fire had been reported. Since when do brush fires take precedence over national security investigations? Do these people really find it so difficult to walk and chew gum at the same time? Are the local security people all members of the volunteer fire department? Wouldn't it have made sense to inform somebody in Washington so that they could look into the security problem while the local employees were preoccupied with the fire? Connoisseurs of mush-headed bureaucratic double-talk will find none of this particularly surprising -- or convincing. What I am attempting to say, in brief, is that there is something terribly wrong with this story. Highly sensitive information is just not handled in this slapdash manner -- at least not in my experience. And if it were, why isn't somebody hanging from the yardarm by now? In an obvious attempt at damage control, the Clinton administration told reporters that "former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton would conduct a separate investigation and make recommendations to President Clinton," according to Fox. For those who may have tuned in late, when any administration invites a respected member of the other party to rummage around in the laundry room, it means that they have sprung a leak and the ship of state is beginning to list just the slightest bit. Of course, the purpose of such appointments is purely cosmetic. The appointees will hire a staff, study the problem at great length, and much later -- when everybody has forgotten about it -- issue a report, which will be ignored just as the previous one was. Why do I find this so annoying? Perhaps it is because I have seen good people walk the plank for making mistakes that are utterly trivial compared to this Keystone Kops fiasco. I once worked with a very bright engineer whose promising career as an Air Force officer was scuttled because he inadvertently forgot to lock up a classified document before leaving the office at the end of the day. The document was very sensitive. He was not given a second chance, even though everyone who has worked with classified material knows how easy it is to make such a blunder. Security regulations are a gigantic pain in the nether region, but that doesn't mean they can be regarded lightly. Another example: I worked for a time in Munich with programmers who were writing the operational flight software for the Tornado aircraft. The flight control system for that aircraft is completely computerized -- switch off the (redundant) computers and it will go belly-up -- unless the pilot is swift enough to switch over to the mechanical controls in time. Anyway, the operational flight program contained highly sensitive information so the programmers worked in a secure room with TV cameras looking over their shoulders and armed guards outside the door. To make a long story short, one of the programmers inadvertently erased everything on his secret work disk. "You signed for a disk full of secret data," said the German security officials, "where is it?" The hapless programmer attempted to explain that he had accidentally erased it, but they weren't having any of that. Within a couple of weeks his security clearance had been pulled and he was on his way home to merrie England. A German national would have found himself in even greater trouble. In those days, German security officers lived lives of quiet desperation. Their country was divided and East German state security (a.k.a. "the Stasi") had its spies everywhere. One of our German Kollegen went missing for a time. When discrete inquiries were made with the local Polizei it turned out that the feds had him in "Untersuchungshaft" (investigative custody). The way it works in Germany, if the police become suspicious of you they can lock you up, and you will stay locked up until they decide whether or not you have done something bad. It seems that our Kollege had broken up with his girlfriend so, in a fit of pique, she phoned up the feds and denounced him as a spy. After a few weeks, the cops figured out that he wasn't, released him and collared the girlfriend for filing a false report. If all of this sounds a bit paranoid it is well to remember that even paranoids have enemies. Only a few months prior to this incident a renegade Luftwaffe officer had stolen a Sidewinder missile, rolled it up in a rug, and driven right through the check-point into East Germany with the purloined piece of ordnance protruding from the trunk of his auto. But this sort of security could be considered stringent compared to what goes on in the nation's primary nuclear research lab at Los Alamos, where it seems nuclear secrets are left lying around like party favors, to be pocketed by visiting Chinese officials, or anyone else with a lively curiosity about such things. Last December, you may recall, Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested "for misuse of secret nuclear data," after being investigated for three years on suspicion of giving U.S. nuclear secrets to China. He is presently in jail awaiting trial. Although Lee is still suspected of spying for the Chinese, the feds have been unable to make a case against him. The feeling persists that the FBI bungled the investigation. The lackadaisical attitude of the Clinton administration with regard to national security matters is typified by the grotesque security violations committed by Clinton's former Director of Central Intelligence, John Deutch. This imbecile took classified information of the most sensitive nature home with him and put it on his personal computer, where it was completely insecure and could be accessed by anybody. (Foreign intelligence services have means of remotely reading from computers, without the use of a modem). According to World Net Daily, Deutch also incorporated much of this sensitive information "into memos he sent to various unauthorized . . . individuals in the Clinton-Gore White House." We are talking about Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) of the sort seen by only a few select spooks within the very bowels of the CIA. Disclosure of such information could seriously compromise the entire intelligence network, resulting in the deaths of agents and the failure of national policies. The willful mishandling of this information by Deutch was an act of arrogant contempt and disdain, not only for the law, but for the nation itself. Attorney General Janet Reno decided that Deutch had broken no laws, but the law is quite specific: it is a serious federal crime to disclose SCI to any unauthorized person. Obviously Reno has no more regard for the law than has Deutch. Referring to the latest Los Alamos security fiasco, Sir Laurence Martin, identified as a strategist at the British-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, commented: "Maybe people will say they have the wrong man and the right man is still on the premises." Good thinking, Sherlock. Surely no foreign intelligence service would go so far as to place TWO spies at the same secret nuclear research facility. Why, that just wouldn't be -- cost-effective. But, come to think of it, TWO foreign intelligence services might each put ONE of their spies at Los Alamos. Especially after word gets around that Uncle Sap is virtually giving it away these days. Los Alamos has long been known as a sort of grab-bag of freebies for commies, ever since a bunch of traitors who worked there during the war on the Manhattan Project decided that it just wouldn't be fair to leave kindly, twinkley-eyed old Uncle Joe in the dark about how to build A-bombs after he had graciously allowed us to save his skin during the Second World War. While the major players in this theater of treachery, the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglas, et al, were exposed, information that has subsequently come to light suggests that we really didn't know the half of it. OPPY AND THE ATOM-SPIES -- THE VENONA VERSION In the summer of 1997 the conservative weekly Human Events published an article by reporter Michael Chapman which outlined the communist connections of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb." Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Second World War and later became the chief adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission. One of the more suggestive discoveries Chapman came up with is a photograph of Oppenheimer that was on display at the KGB museum in Moscow. The theme of the exhibition, held in June of 1997, was a sort of retrospective on "leading atomic espionage agents and espionage documents." Stephen Goode wrote in the Oct. 6-13 Insight magazine that "Oppenheimer's image was displayed by KGB historians along with a photograph of another nuclear physicist, convicted Communist spy Klaus Fuchs, and a shot of a Manhattan Project laboratory site." Chapman noted that when the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance in 1954 his liberal supporters shrieked that he had become a victim of "McCarthyism." But the AEC alleged that it had "substantial evidence of Dr. Oppenheimer's association with communists, communist functionaries and communists who did engage in espionage." Oppenheimer's partisans denied everything, as was the practice at that time when anyone was charged with communist activity of any kind. "McCarthyism" was alleged even when the communist connections of the accused were a matter of record. I was recently taken to task by a reader for defending the man who had "unjustly" accused Annie Lee Moss of being a communist, although Moss had never made a secret of her membership in the Communist Party, unlike certain members of the press who had hotly denied it. The American mainstream press were made absolutely sick with intellectual dishonesty during that era and have never recovered from it. They are simply not capable of acknowledging, much less telling the truth about Joe McCarthy and communist infiltration of the U.S. government. Chapman wrote that he had been told by former KGB official Yuri Kolesnikov during his summer visit to Moscow that "Oppenheimer and other top scientists cooperated with us," although they were not "Soviet agents," in the strictest sense of the term. Nevertheless they "gave us information about the atom bomb," said Kolesnikov, at first, because they were worried that Hitler might defeat Stalin, and later because Oppenheimer and other scientists wanted to create a balance of power between this country and the Russians. If this doesn't tell you something about the arrogance of liberal intellectuals nothing will. Without really understanding anything about the global politics of that era, or being privy to intelligence information that might form the basis for a reasoned judgement, these professional scientists and amateur statesmen placed themselves above the law and presumed to dictate how the world was to be ordered. To that end they placed the ultimate weapon of mass destruction into the hands of a ruthless, mass- murdering tyrant who had, by a conservative estimate, already slaughtered at least 35 million people. And we're supposed to feel sorry for Oppenheimer just because his supporters cried "McCarthyism"? According to Chapman, there is evidence that Oppenheimer had close ties with communists, starting in the mid-1930s, including his wife Kitty and his brother Frank. He also associated with such shadowy figures as Steve Nelson, a naturalized American, born in Yugoslavia who participated in clandestine Communist Party activity in the U.S. Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse. Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president, Henry Wallace, would have become president had FDR, who suffered from severe hardening of the arteries, died a year earlier. Wallace had expressed his intention to make cookie-pusher and Latin American specialist Laurence Duggan his secretary of state and Harry Dexter White his treasury secretary. It is well known by now that both White and Duggan were communists. Emory University professor Harvey Klehr notes that the fact their names were mentioned as potential members of a Wallace cabinet indicates how powerful a role secret communists had come to play in wartime Washington. Early in 1943, as the Manhattan Project was getting underway at the Los Alamos School for Boys in New Mexico, a team of cryptoanalysts, mathematicians, and linguists, working for an Army intelligence project code-named Venona, found a flaw in the Soviet diplomatic code that was considered "unbreakable." Confronted with 25,000 intercepted Soviet messages, the team had been unable to decipher the first cables until 1946. But by 1950 the decoded messages had revealed a network of hundreds of Soviet agents, many of them with responsible positions in the government. Klehr and John Earl Haynes, of the Library of Congress, describe the revelations in their book "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America," which demonstrates how espionage was being done in this country, not only by Soviet operatives run by the foreign and military intelligence services, but by members of the Communist Party as well. Although no more than ten percent of the messages had been decoded when the project was shut down in 1980, they confirm widespread involvement of American communists in Soviet espionage. In its 1997 Winter edition, the newsletter of the International Intelligence History Study Group, edited by Dr. Michael Wala, of the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, discussed Oppenheimer's role with the Manhattan Project, in the context of Venona. Ronald Kremish, a former member of the US Atomic Energy Commission, described J. Robert Oppenheimer as an "agent of influence," although he maintains that Oppenheimer did not personally give information to the Soviets. Kremish also provided clues to the identity of another atom-spy identified in the Venona papers as "Pers" who "worked at Oak Ridge and supplied Soviets with information about its gaseous diffusion plant." Journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, who worked for a time in Moscow, were able to identify another Soviet agent, referred to as "Mlad" in the Venona messages, as Theodore Hall. Although his espionage activities were known to the FBI, this man was never prosecuted -- since the case against him would have to be based on the Venona intercepts, a trial would have tipped off the Soviets that we were reading their mail. Albright and Kunstel later wrote a book about Hall titled: "Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Bomb Conspiracy." In an article published last year, the German news magazine Der Spiegel asked, "How important was espionage in the USA for Moscow's atom bomb program?" The heaviest blow was struck by Klaus Fuchs, who stole the details for building the bomb in 1943, with the help of the Soviet secret intelligence service and its network of spies in this country. Fuchs' treachery was discovered through intercepted messages decoded by the Venona project. He confessed to everything, although the Soviets denied any involvement with him. After spending 14 years in prison Fuchs was released and settled in East Germany, where he died in 1988. His former case officer, Alexander Feklisov, remarked somewhat bitterly that others were richly rewarded for the roles they played in stealing the bomb for the Soviet Union, but Fuchs got nothing from it besides the time he served in prison. Der Spiegel suggests that KGB chief Lavrentii Beria had rich pickings among the research team put together by Oppenheimer from "immigrant circles and American Universities." Many of the young scientists had pacifist leanings that were "unfamiliar to the FBI," although some suspected that they had more sympathy for the Soviet Union than for a U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons. Also included in the mix were "revolutionaries" such as Fuchs. The first Soviet atom bomb was exploded on August 29, 1949 at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. It is estimated that the espionage performed by Beria's minions shortened the Russian's time-lag disadvantage by at least two years. The first Soviet atom bomb was virtually a carbon copy of the "Fat Man" bomb exploded at Nagasaki in 1945. It was later revealed that, in addition to Fuchs, the Soviets had a second super-agent at Los Alamos, the physicist Theodore Hall, code name "Mlad," who had provided the Soviets with information at least as important as that given them by Fuchs. The magazine describes Hall as a "young Communist" brought to the project at the age of 19 by none other than Oppenheimer. U.S. counterspies had known the true identity of "Mlad" since the early fifties, but allowed him to emigrate to England rather than reveal the fact that we were reading the Russian's message traffic. Oblivious to it all, many American academics continue to harbor the notion that Marxism is really on "the right side of history" despite all appearances. How else can one account for their tireless support of brutal tyrants such as Fidel Castro? Their sophistical double-talk and sickly rationalization really explain nothing. The bitter-enders still cling to the illusion that Alger Hiss was an innocent victim of "McCarthyism," framed by that dastardly scoundrel Richard Nixon. Never mind that Hiss has been identified in the Venona intercepts as a Soviet agent. The "innocence" of traitors such as Hiss and the Rosenbergs is taken as an article of faith by these people. Daniel J. Flynn, addressing Accuracy in Academia's "Rethinking McCarthy" Conference last February in Washington, D.C., noted that Maryland's Washington College holds an Alger Hiss Day every year in honor of the Soviet spy. And Bard College in New York maintains an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies. But the City University of New York trumped them all, awarding "a dozen $500 Ho Chi Minh scholarships for a time." It seems so unfair -- what new worlds are left to conquer for aspiring academic half-wits and filthy-rich Tinsel-town trashballs? The Pol Pot School for Social Research? The Lavrentii Beria Chair of Behavioral Psychology? DESIGNING A DISASTER An article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times last Thursday revealed that the, "Two computer hard drives missing from the Los Alamos National Laboratory contain highly sensitive data about nuclear arsenals of France, China and Russia, in addition to secrets about American nuclear weapons, U.S. officials disclosed Wednesday." The missing disk drives were to be used by the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), a group of volunteers whose job it is to assess any nuclear terrorist threat and, when necessary, to disarm the threatening nuclear device. The team is made up of physicists and engineers who built our nuclear weapons and now train to disable possible terrorist devices that might disperse radioactive material or produce a nuclear explosion. That is why the disks contain information on the design of foreign nuclear weapons, together with suggested procedures for disarming them. It has been stated by government spokesmen that the disks contain no "intelligence data." But it's a safe bet that they point to the existence of intelligence pipelines right into the nuclear labs of the countries named. As the Times article put it, "The data thus includes key military intelligence about what the United States knows about other nations' nuclear forces -- and what it doesn't." One of the points brought out in last Wednesday's Senate hearings is the possibility that the information contained on the hard disks might be used by terrorists to make their bootleg nukes more difficult to disarm. It was also suggested that the information on the disks was under-classified "Secret" instead of "Top Secret." That is hardly surprising -- procedures for handling Top Secret material are extremely cumbersome, especially if the material is being hustled around from place to place by a traveling Emergency Search Team. Just to make life more "interesting" for the big team, the hard drives are designed to be shoved into an ordinary computer and used without keying in bothersome passwords, decryption or other annoying impediments. I wouldn't fancy riding herd on Secret material in that format. Safeguarding Top Secret info in a package that can be stuffed into a shirt pocket would be a real horror show. However, the nature of the information indicates that it ought to be Top Secret. Any data that gives away clues as to what we know about another nation's nuclear forces can be life-threatening to those involved in gathering such information. Presumably that is why the potential intelligence loss has created such consternation on Capitol Hill, and even had a noticeable impact upon the accustomed torpor with which security issues are regarded at the White House. There is also a greater than usual degree annoyance over the fact that the DOE never seems to get it right despite the lavish assurances they have given Congress after each previous security disaster. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) complained: "What's missing, and may well have been stolen, is information about how to disarm our nuclear weapons and those of perhaps some other countries whose nuclear weapons could be stolen and used by terrorists." The senator expressed concern that terrorists could use the data on the disks to make the nuclear device more difficult to disarm. Lab officials insisted that the hard drives had more likely been lost or misplaced than stolen, however, they declined to give their reasons for assuming this except in executive session (i.e. in secret testimony). This is a much-used ploy for evading embarrassing questions and it seemed to annoy the senators that much more. One senior official did concede, however, that "we have no choice but to assume the worst." And therein lies the rub. Even though the missing hard-drives have been found, they might well have been copied, reverse- engineered or who-knows-what? One of our most closely guarded secrets during the Second World War (besides the atom bomb, which wasn't guarded all that successfully) was the Norden bomb-sight. Bomber crews risked their necks to destroy this device after being shot down. At war's end, Patton's Third Army discovered an underground factory in Bavaria that was stamping them out like cookies. Even though the disk drives have been found, how can anyone be certain that the information on them hasn't been copied? For all anyone knows, the loss of the chain of custody for information this sensitive is equivalent to putting it on a slow boat to China. It seems that the damage has already been done. Of course, if you dispatch your sensitive information all over the map it goes without saying that eventually it will fall into the wrong hands, especially if you put it in a package that is two-thirds the size of a deck of cards. As regards the Norden bomb sight there was no alternative -- the device would have been of no use locked up in a vault. But is it really necessary to put that much highly sensitive information onto a hard-drive that is likely to be sent most anywhere and handled rather haphazardly by people who do not always seem to be entirely alert? (If a brush fire is sufficient to rattle the boys at the lab, try to imagine how they would react if some terrorists nuked the Bronx). You might say that this security debacle was designed into the system. Granted that the people on the scene would need the information in case of a nuclear incident, there are other ways to solve the problem. Imagine, for example, that the information were stored in something the size of a bank vault, rather than in a tiny package that is easily passed around. No doubt the necessary data would be transmitted to the scene of the incident over a secure phone line, in encrypted form, in that case. The present state of encryption is such that it is theoretically unbreakable. The same was true of the Soviet cipher that was decrypted by the Venona team -- they were able to read some of the messages due to human error on the part of the Russians. But what if some of the data does get deciphered by the wrong people? It would be no more than a tiny fraction of what they would get by stealing one of those chock-full-of-goodies hard-drives. Sometimes decision-makers become so mesmerized by the possibilities presented by new technology they lose sight of the tradeoffs involved in its use. Wow! All that info in such a neat little package -- how can we not use it? If security considerations are to be given short shrift by managers who have been dazzled by science why act so surprised when secrets leak? No doubt such considerations were uppermost in their minds when the senators voted 97-0 to confirm former CIA Deputy Director John A. Gordon as director of the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. Gordon's position came about as a consequence of the last security disaster at the Los Alamos lab, involving the illegal copying of highly classified computer files by nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee. Democrats had held up Gordon's appointment for months while quibbling over ways to limit his authority, thereby protecting the turf of the energy secretary. Now that the livestock are out galloping around in the adjacent counties this must have seemed like the opportune moment to think about closing the barn door. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-AK) made the point in last Wednesday's hearings that energy secretary Bill Richardson had given repeated assurances that the improvements he was making to security measures at the lab would suffice to protect our nuclear secrets. To put it in context, this was really a turf battle. Richardson, as loath as any bureaucrat to cede a single square inch of territory, had told the senators, in effect, that he didn't need no STEENKING security czar -- he was quite capable of handling things himself. So now it's showtime, the klieg lights are switched on him, and his imperial majesty is standing there starkers, as the British would say. And what did Richardson have to say for himself? Well actually, he didn't show up for last week's hearings. It seems that he had pressing business elsewhere. The secretary's snub was not well received by senators at those hearing, who made repeated references to the empty chair they had reserved for him and wondered aloud what pressing business he might have that seemed more important to him than national security. In fact, the criticism was flying so thick and fast that Richardson was moved to graciously accept their invitation to a barbecue this week, at which he is to be the featured attraction (properly basted, of course). Richardson assured reporters that, "We will have more answers next week," adding thoughtfully that he was "extremely outraged" by the "lack of accountability" at Los Alamos. This evoked an acerbic reaction from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): "He thinks he's not accountable." There was more than a slight hint of "Oh, look what THEY did" in Richardson's statements. "I'm concerned about the timelines that were -- lack of notification to officials at the Department of Energy after all the massive security improvements that we have made," said the energy secretary. One shudders to think what kind of a shop they must have been running before they made all those "massive security improvements." The timeline was addressed in hearings held by a House committee the previous day. It seems that the two hard drives had been missing since May 7 when two employees were told to retrieve from "a highly secured storage vault" the equipment that would be needed to respond to a "nuclear emergency." It seems that the lab was being threatened by a wildfire set by the U.S. government through gross incompetence, and they did not wish to be caught short if the place burned down. "It was at that point that they noticed that these hard drives were missing," said Los Alamos lab director John Browne, who had been left in the hot seat by Richardson. "They did not immediately call their supervisors, and the lab was closed for two weeks." In fact, Browne was not notified until June 1. Good thinking -- never mind those nuclear emergencies, we have a brush fire to worry about. As many times as I have read this I find it impossible to fathom the mentality behind it. Six employees have been suspended already at Los Alamos. If the missing drives had been reported in a timely manner they would all be in the clear. Why would they drop themselves in it this way? Their behavior cannot be attributed to carelessness -- there is nothing inadvertent about willful failure to report such a gross breach of security. We are not talking here about tragic victims of the American educational system. A lot of these guys are "piled higher and deeper." (That is to say, their names are garnished with the prefix "Dr.") This is the sort of thing that leaves one with the nagging suspicion that there is a little, horrible piece of this story that hasn't yet been told. It doesn't help when the FBI plants cover stories such as the following one that appeared in the Albuquerque Journal last Thursday: "LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - An FBI agent says a lab employee might have taken two computer hard drives loaded with nuclear weapons secrets and then been unable or afraid to return them, the Albuquerque Journal reported today." The article went on to quote Special Agent Bill Elwell as saying, "That's kind of the way we feel. I think a lot of us are leaning in that direction. But you never ever rule out the possibility of espionage." Clue 1: FBI agents do not chat with reporters over the back fence about the latest developments in a high-profile case unless they have been told to spin the story to government specs. Clue 2: Anyone smart enough to land a job at a nuclear weapons research lab is probably capable of figuring out that if he swipes a hard-drive from a secret vault at Los Alamos -- especially one that contains highly sensitive data about the nuclear arsenals of France, China and Russia, in addition to secrets about American nuclear weapons -- the theft will be investigated by the FBI, the CIA, and possibly by a foreign intelligence service that is none too squeamish about his civil rights and personal well-being. On the other hand, if he shoplifts it from his local computer store, the theft will be investigated by local police who will most likely file a report and forget about it -- if it is investigated at all. Never mind that the computer store probably has much tighter security than Los Alamos; that is a secondary consideration. If the feds are getting a bit lax about security these days, their cover stories are downright putrid. Why do they find it so difficult to come up with a scenario such as an adult might be expected to believe? Is it that they assume we are all congenital idiots or dumbed-down victims of an educational system designed for dolts, and that it is not worth their while to come up with a plausible lie? Let's hope that's the answer. I would hate to think that the government is staffed with people who are unable to prevaricate more convincingly than this bit of spin would suggest. Meanwhile, the FBI has rounded up the usual list of suspects and is grilling them with the aid of a polygraph, the twentieth century's contribution to the craft of witch-finding. (Polygraph tests are especially useful for identifying people who have scruples. Psychopaths regularly breeze through them with flying colors). In addition to the investigations already being conducted by the FBI, the CIA and both houses of Congress, two independent probes have been announced by the University of California, which manages the Los Alamos laboratory for the Department of Energy. UC President Richard C. Atkinson released a statement to the press that said in part: "The university is prepared to take all appropriate personnel action and to work with the laboratory in implementing corrective measures necessary to strengthen security at Los Alamos. This incident is unacceptable. We will not tolerate weaknesses in security at the national laboratories managed by the University of California." They must know they are in for it now; unless the perpetrator(s) 'fess up pronto, they could all be packed off to sensitivity training. Let's see, thus far those responsible include the lab management, the Department of Energy, the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, and the University of California. Who is actually running the store? If everybody is a little bit responsible that sort of implies that nobody is very much responsible. Could that be part of the problem? Los Alamos has been an open sore since Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall ran amuck there during the Second World War, funneling atomic secrets with boldest abandon to the boys at Dzerzhinsky Square. It's first director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, occupies a place of honor in the pantheon of the KGB. Now, at last, it appears that something may be done about it. And all it took was a couple of national security disasters of the first magnitude. Edward Zehr can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Published in the Jun. 19, 2000 issue of The Washington Weekly Copyright 2000 The Washington Weekly. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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