REMEMBER LOS ALAMOS
Richardson's lab defense all spin?
Orders came 'right out of headquarters' to lower fences around
nuke secrets
By Paul Sperry © 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- When news broke last month that two laptop hard
drives containing nuclear secrets were missing at Los Alamos, it
was enormously embarrassing for Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
He'd just last year certified lab secrets safe and secure.
But Richardson and his top advisers managed to blunt criticism
from the Hill and the press with a four-pronged defense.
First, they shifted some of the blame to the Bush administration
by pointing out that it relaxed inventory rules for the kind of
secret data on the hard drives.
Lab contractors also should share some blame, they argued,
because they've fostered an academic "culture" that kicks against
gates, guns and guards.
They even dragged the Defense Department into the fray by
releasing a 1999 letter from the Pentagon shelving a plan to
build higher fences around secret lab data. Reason: too costly.
And Energy officials calmed nerves by leaking to the press that
the drives, missing from a vault for six months, didn't store
information on how to actually build or detonate a nuclear bomb.
But the defense was pure spin, according to career government
officials concerned with what they say is the Clinton
administration's cavalier attitude towards national security.
"They're lying," said one senior administration official who
wished to go unnamed.
*Bush administration.
"You hear DOE (Department of Energy) now saying, well, the last
administration downgraded the (accounting) requirements" for data
classified "secret restricted," a Pentagon official said. "Well,
that's not quite the truth."
In 1992, the government standardized protection of classified
information among the different agencies dealing with
intelligence -- CIA, Energy and Defense -- to make programs more
streamlined.
In January 1993, just two weeks before the start of the Clinton
administration, the new rules were made official and they
affected government contractors, including the University of
California, which runs Los Alamos. The Clinton administration
adopted the new standards.
"But the requirement to inventory 'secret' (information) did not
go away completely," said the Pentagon official, who asked not to
be named. "They (the labs) were still supposed to inventory all
material moved in and out of secure areas. The new rules did not
tell the Department of Energy to stop doing accounting."
Yet Los Alamos did not require a system to sign out the secret
drives from the vault. Investigators still don't know who had
possession of the tapes or where they were kept for the six
months they were gone.
Energy spokesman Stuart Nagurka says the FBI still has a team of
investigators in Los Alamos questioning people.
"It's a criminal case," he said. "That's all I can say."
*Lab culture.
The notion that the labs and university should be taking the
heat for the security breach is wrong, an Energy official says.
It was Energy's headquarters in Washington that fought measures
to tighten security.
"During the Chinese espionage scare (which started in 1995), Los
Alamos came to (Energy's) defense-programs headquarters with an
upgraded security plan and a request for additional protective
forces and additional alarm systems, which would have included
cameras for places like the vault," the official said.
But "defense-programs headquarters was telling the labs, 'Don't
do this stuff,' " he said. "They wouldn't fund it."
He added: "The labs will do what you tell them to do, as long as
you pay them to do it."
The Energy official, who requested anonymity, says the chief
naysayer at Energy headquarters was Victor Reis, former assistant
secretary of Energy for defense programs and the official
overseeing the labs.
Reis left the department in June 1999, a month after the
bipartisan Cox committee released its alarming report of rampant
Chinese espionage at the labs.
"The guidance to minimize (security) was coming right out of
headquarters, right out of Victor Reis' office," the official
said.
*Pentagon letter.
Energy released a recent letter it received from the Pentagon
advising against a plan called the "Higher Fences Initiative."
The plan called for upgrading select nuclear weapons data to "top
secret" to better protect them. Only, the Pentagon shelved it as
too costly.
Its Dec. 17, 1999, letter said the added costs of screening
workers for the higher security clearance, combined with the
costs of upgrading security for storage facilities and computer
networks, would be "substantial."
But Energy officials failed to mention that Energy's front office
has also fought the plan -- since it was first proposed in 1995.
(Energy resurrected the plan and asked Defense for its opinion
only after receiving bad press in the wake of the Cox report.)
Energy's security office in May 1995 issued a report recommending
the data be upgraded to top secret.
But then-Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, as well as Reis, "didn't
think it was an important issue," the Energy official said.
The information recommended for upgrade was narrowly scoped and
defined. Security officials went through the nuclear weapons
classification guides line by line and identified some 137 out of
more than 1,000 topics for upgrade to top secret to ensure
adequate protection.
Then, in January 1997, former Sandia National Laboratory
President Albert Narath incorporated the upgrades as part of his
own report recommending "higher fences around the most sensitive
information."
Ironically, O'Leary had tasked Narath with declassifying data as
part of her "openness" policy.
But in reviewing the data, he came to the conclusion that some
information is still so radioactive -- literally -- that it
deserves even greater protections than currently exist.
He recommended upgrading 137 topics to top secret. Though he
didn't list them all in the unclassified version of his report,
Narath did single out for special protection nuclear coding
called "Sigma 1 and 2" and "Sigma 14 and 15."
Energy's front office -- on the 7th floor of the Forrestal
Building in Washington -- turned down that part of Narath's
proposal.
"They didn't want to do this," the Energy official said. "I
mean, this was counter to their move" to declassify atomic
information.
To his credit, "Narath held" and stood by his recommendations for
upgrading protection for the 137 topics, the official said.
Attempts to reach Narath for comment were unsuccessful.
If they had upgraded the data from secret restricted to top
secret, the official says, the hard drives more than likely would
never have been so loosely handled.
The lab vault would have had cameras in it and there would have
been strict logout procedures and accountability for what was
checked out, he says.
What's more, those with access to the vault would have been
subject to more rigorous vetting.
"With top secret clearance you get a full background
investigation, which means people go and knock on doors and they
ask your neighbors and they go to your college and make sure you
really went there," he said.
In contrast, "with a secret investigation all they do is check
with the police and the FBI and CIA and do a name check. That's
it. Nothing more. If you're not a felon, it doesn't matter," he
added. "So the difference between the two is tremendous."
*Contents of hard drives.
After WorldNetDaily broke the story about the Narath report in a
June 19 article titled "Energy ignored nuke data warning," this
reporter received a call from a senior policy adviser to
Richardson.
He insisted that the hard drives that were missing do not contain
the Sigma codes 1 and 2, or 14 and 15, that were specifically
recommended for upgrade in the Narath report. Therefore, he said
he didn't "see the relevance" of the report in relation to the
latest Los Alamos security breach.
The adviser, who asked not to be named, would not say if the hard
drives contain any of the more than 100 other sensitive items
Narath picked for protecting with higher fences. For that
matter, he refused to even hint at what information the drives do
contain.
The hard drives are part of a kit used by the Nuclear Emergency
Search Team, the scientists and technicians trained to locate and
disable nuclear bombs in the event of a terrorist threat or
accident.
Contrary to the assertions of the Richardson aide, an official
who has actually been on NEST deployment exercises during which
the drives were used, told WorldNetDaily that the drives do
contain the Sigma codes. In fact, they contain "everything,"
including secret codes needed to build nuclear bombs, he said.
"In the NEST deployment exercises that I've been on, where they
(drives) were used, it was everything. It was everything. It
(Sigmas 1, 2, 14 and 15) would be a very narrow definition of
those Sigmas (codes on the drives)," he said. "It was
radiographs of weapons. I mean, you could build them (nuclear
bombs) from those things."
Asked about it, Energy spokesman Nagurka defended Richardson's
adviser's claims.
"He's seen what's on them," Nagurka said. "And he's been very
insistent. He's extremely trustworthy and not a person to
mislead."
"Someone's putting out bum information," he said of the NEST
source.
Has the adviser actually been on a NEST exercise and seen what's
on the drives, which mysteriously reappeared last month behind a
lab copying machine?
"I don't know if he's seen the drives or if he's seen a written
report of what's on them," Nagurka said. "I am under the
impression that he has seen whatever he needs to see to be
convinced of what was on them."
But the official who's been on the NEST deployment exercises says
Energy's front office is misleading the public as to the
seriousness of the information on the drives.
"Look, if you can go in and take them (nuclear bombs) apart
without detonating, you've got to have detailed information," he
said. "These are technical flyaway packages that the NEST people
would take with them if they went to the field, to the site of an
actual weapon or an improvised weapon."
Nagurka says that maybe the source is talking about a different
set of NEST drives stored in the vault.
"Not every drive is the same," he said.
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