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.
=================================================================
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