Lab door still open to spies?

By Paul Sperry

WASHINGTON — A laptop hard drive in a shirt pocket would go
unnoticed at Los Alamos National Laboratory because it’s not against
security rules to carry such data-storage devices around, a lab
spokesman confirmed for WorldNetDaily.

The freedom is especially remarkable given the lab director’s recent
fears that spies could easily slip past guards with such devices.

“Security rules and practices did not anticipate portable devices
small enough to fit into a shirt pocket,” Los Alamos Director John
Browne wrote in an internal lab paper dated May 18, 1999.

In spite of his concerns about espionage, there are still no guards
to check pockets at some entrances and exits to the lab’s sensitive
X-division, where physicists design nuclear warheads, confirmed Los
Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark.

Instead, electronic turnstiles with badge and palm readers let
workers pass through unobserved.

John Brown, director, Los Alamos National Laboratory

The X-division also is where two laptop hard drives, smaller than a
pack of cards, were found last week behind a copying machine. They’d
been missing from an X-division vault at least since early May, and
perhaps for as long as six months.

FBI agents couldn’t find the drives in two earlier searches,
suggesting someone had returned them after removing them from the area,
if not the lab.

The drives contained Secret Restricted Data on not only nuclear
warheads in the U.S. arsenal, but Russian and Chinese nuclear bombs as
well.

The 26 workers who had access to the vault could enter it without
signing any log. They also could remove and return secret material
without filing any report.

Roark told WorldNetDaily that workers can pass in and out of the
X-division with secret computer disks, tapes or hard drives, “as long as
all the parameters for taking possession of the classified material are
met.”

That seemed to bother Browne at the time he wrote his internal
report.

Referring to recent massive Chinese espionage at Los Alamos and other
labs, he said: “Recent compromises have been caused by underestimating
the threat, by a nation-wide lowering of our guard after the end of the
Cold War, and by an attitude that sometimes fails to see small
infractions as the harbinger of bigger problems.”

“Most damaging,” Browne added, “was the failure to apply the
laboratory’s technical expertise to the security of our data. Security
has not kept up with changes in technology, particularly computers.”

Even so, Browne hasn’t beefed up security to ensure that people
walking around with portable computer-storage devices in the lab are
authorized to have them.

Foreign visitors program

In fact, Browne went on to defend the lab’s controversial foreign
visitors program in the same paper.

“At first glance, the exclusion of foreign nationals may look like an
attractively simple solution, but it would not solve the broader
security problems that the world faces,” Brown wrote.

Also, “isolation from the broader scientific community could atrophy
the laboratory’s scientific capabilities,” he explained.

In 1998 alone, 3,100 visited Los Alamos from “sensitive” countries
viewed as a threat to U.S. security, including 918 from communist China
and more than 1,100 from Russia.

(Many of the visitors have stayed, hiring on at the lab. During the
Clinton administration, the number of Chinese nationals employed by Los
Alamos has soared 411 percent to 97, as of April 1999.)

Not to worry, says Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. Chances of
espionage are slim.

“I can right now face the American people and say that because of the
counterintelligence measures that we have initiated that there are no
potential serious espionage at our labs,” he said May 30, 1999, on Fox
News Sunday, just after the bipartisan Cox commission report on Chinese
espionage came out. “We’ve corrected the problem.”

However, the so-called Rudman commission report, issued the next
month, found that the risk of shirt-pocket espionage was as high as
ever.

“With all the emphasis of late on computer security, including a
weeks-long stand-down of the weapons lab’s computer systems directed by
the secretary, the stark fact remains that, as of the date of this
report, a nefarious employee can still download secret nuclear weapons
information to a tape, put it in his or her pocket, and walk out the
door,” the report said.

Richardson said Sunday that he’s “pretty certain” no spy got hold of
the lost-and-found hard drives.

The Rudman report also made reference to a lab “safe” to which
foreign nationals had access.

‘Jiggling’ open the safe door

“In an area of a weapons lab frequented by foreign nationals, a safe
containing restricted data was found unsecured,” the report said. “It
had not been checked by guards since August 1998.”

“When confronted with the violation,” the report went on, “a
mid-level official is said to have implied that it was not an actual
security lapse because the lock had to be ‘jiggled’ to open the safe
door.”

Ed McCallum, the former Energy official in charge of lab security,
last year reported several egregious cases of security breaches
involving foreign visitors.

In one instance, a Russian visitor was caught digging through a
dumpster in a secure area of a lab, McCallum told Congress.

Another Russian visitor who’d skulked off with a lab-owned laptop was
found secretly trying to access classified information.

Richardson suspended McCallum after he blew the whistle on an
across-the-board relaxation of security rules and procedures by Clinton
appointees.

In addition, Los Alamos physicist Bobby Henson last year outlined
previously unknown examples of spying by both China and Russia. He was
fired for speaking out (before suing his way back into his old job).

Richardson, too, defends the foreign visitors programs and refuses to
cancel them. He also won’t cancel lab-to-lab collaborations with Russia
and China.

“We want to get the Russians to control their nuclear materials,”
Richardson explained. “We want to get the Chinese to learn about nuclear
safety and nonproliferation and arms control.”

PRC is ‘gathering intelligence’

But in a recent letter to Richardson, Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., urged
him to end the scientific exchanges, pointing out that they offer spies
a window for espionage.

“The latest joint FBI-CIA report confirms that PRC (People’s Republic
of China) scientists, through scientific exchange programs, continue to
gather valuable intelligence through U.S. national laboratories,” Smith
wrote in his March 20 letter.

Richardson still hasn’t responded to the letter from Smith, a member
of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Richardson is scheduled to
appear before the panel today.

Richardson has complained that Congress hasn’t
afforded him the budget to beef up security as he’s
liked.

But the Rudman report cast doubt on that excuse.

“Money cannot really be the issue. The annual DOE
(Department of Energy) budget is already $18 billion,”
the report said. “There must be some other reason” for
continued weak security.

Of the seven nuclear weapons systems that still remain in the U.S.
arsenal, Los Alamos designed and engineered five.

Related stories:


Energy ignored nuke data warning


Most favored spying nations?


Chinese spy gets slapped


Nuke lab security changes ineffective

Paul Sperry

Paul Sperry, formerly WND's Washington bureau chief, is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington." Read more of Paul Sperry's articles here.