Washington Times-June 20, 2000
Insecurity complex
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's performance on the Sunday
morning television talk shows reminded one of a man sentenced to
death and pleading for his life. In the wake of the furor
unleashed by the latest security meltdown at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, the former congressman and U.N. ambassador whined,
blustered, admitted errors, promised to reform and begged for a
stay of political execution.
While the White House professes its full confidence in him,
Mr. Richardson clearly no longer enjoys that of his former
colleagues on Capitol Hill — several of whom publicly called over
the weekend for his resignation. More importantly, the secretary
does not deserve the confidence of the American people.
To be sure, Mr. Richardson can rightly claim to have
implemented various initiatives to tighten up security in the DOE
nuclear weapons complex. These were long-overdue and obviously
needed, even before the allegations that Los Alamos physicist Wen
Ho Lee may have compromised the nation's nuclear "legacy codes."
The trouble is that these steps have been wholly inadequate
to correct what is increasingly being seen as a "culture" under
the present administration — a phenomenon that might be called
the Clinton-Gore insecurity complex — characterized by
inattention to, if not actual hostility toward, the most
fundamental principles regarding personnel, information and
physical security.
In particular, Mr. Richardson has done very little to undo
the "denuclearization" and "openness" agenda embraced by
President Clinton's first energy secretary, Hazel O'Leary. And he
has repeatedly allowed job actions to be taken against those in
his department who have had the temerity to oppose them.
Mrs. O'Leary made no secret of her hostility to her
department's most important function — maintaining the nation's
strategic deterrent and the thermonuclear weaponry that underpins
it. She recruited a gaggle of anti-nuclear activists to staff
senior DOE positions, some of whom remain in place today; others,
like Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller, have been brought in
under her successors Federico Pena and Bill Richardson.
Consider a few illustrative examples of the troubling
O'Leary-Pena-Richardson record at DOE:
• On April 17, 1995, President Clinton lent his authority to
an "openness" initiative championed by Mrs. O'Leary, the current
White House chief of staff, John Podesta, and then-National
Security Council staffer Morton Halperin, with his signature of
Executive Order 12958. This order called for the automatic
declassification by April 17, 2000, of all documents containing
historical information that are 25 years or older.
To be sure, Mr. Clinton's directive did not try explicitly
to override the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, a statute designed
permanently to protect nuclear weapons-relevant — or "restricted"
— data. The practical effect of Executive Order 12958, however,
has been greatly to abbreviate the time and necessarily to
diminish the care with which classified documents are scrutinized
prior to their release to the public. j Leading senators were
horrified to learn in 1998 that Restricted Data (and "Formerly
Restricted Data") governed by the Atomic Energy Act were being
hastily thrown out with the bath water as officials were not
being given the time or resources to declassify sensitive
documents on a page-by-page basis. Instead, it had to be done by
the box, if not by the shelf. Mr. Podesta, apparently infuriated
at any interference with the declassification initiative,
instructed Secretary Richardson to have Miss Gottemoeller
reprimand a senior DOE bureaucrat, Joseph Mahaley, for
encouraging Congress to intervene.
• Mrs. O'Leary banned personnel badges that clearly
indicated whether the bearer had a security clearance and, if so,
how high. Her reasoning: Such badges were discriminatory. She
also ended the practice of requiring reports to DOE headquarters
about foreign nationals from "sensitive countries" who visited
the unclassified areas of the nation's nuclear weapons
laboratories.
Among those who had the unenviable task of dealing with the
deleterious consequences of this sort of security malpractice was
Notra Trulock. Until the Cox committee's findings about Chinese
espionage at Los Alamos came to light, Mr. Trulock was chief of
intelligence at DOE. When his years of warning about the
penetration of some of the United States' most sensitive
facilities — warnings that were suppressed by, among other
superiors, Rose Gottemoeller, to whom the intelligence office
reported until a reorganization in 1998 — were publicly
vindicated, Mr. Trulock was demoted and ultimately driven to
leave the department.
• Then in 1999, Assistant Secretary Gottemoeller took
another personnel action, this time against Edward McCallum, a
retired Army colonel who headed DOE's Office of Security and
Safeguards. In that capacity, he worked tirelessly to call
attention, including in unclassified official reports, to the
dangerous decline in the security of critical sites in the U.S.
nuclear weapons complex.
Apparently panicked at the mounting evidence that Mr.
McCallum's heretofore unheeded alarms were becoming a serious
embarrassment to the Department of Energy, Miss Gottemoeller
effectively fired him in April of last year. On the basis of
transparently trumped-up charges that Col. McCallum, of all
people, was handling classified information indiscreetly, Miss
Gottemoeller placed him in the bureaucratic equivalent of limbo
—on indefinite, unappealable administrative leave with pay.
• Secretary Richardson has allowed the same thing to be done
to another champion of improved security practices, the Associate
Director for National Security Programs at Los Alamos, Stephen
Younger. By placing Mr. Younger on leave in the wake of the hard
drive debacle, Mr. Richardson has falsely implied this widely
respected physicist bears responsibility for the repeated failure
of department officials to implement his recommended changes at
the lab and for the sensitive hard drives going missing.
Removing Bill Richardson from office will not, in and of
itself, bring an end to one of the most dangerous of Bill
Clinton's legacies — his administration's systematic misfeasance,
if not malfeasance, with respect to security procedures
throughout the U.S. government. It would, however, begin to
establish accountability for this "insecurity complex" and set
the stage for what had better be wholesale improvements under the
next president.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security
Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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