Energy Loss: What happened to the nation's secrets - security lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Notra Trulock

New revelations about security lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory underscore the Clinton administration's continuing failure to safeguard America's nuclear secrets. For more than a year, administration officials have assured the nation that these secrets were secure: Energy secretary Bill Richardson and his political appointees were vigorously implementing new policies and procedures, and the lax security arrangements of the past would no longer be tolerated. The problem is fixed, so let's put this behind us and move on, high-ranking Department of Energy (DOE) officials urged.

But the new security scandals prove that these assertions were-in the succinct phrasing of a recent congressional report on DOE counterintelligence-"nonsense."

Recent reports from inside the DOE indicate that management has interfered in security self-assessments at DOE facilities in New Mexico and, at another DOE lab, permitted sales of computer equipment containing classified nuclear-weapons information to China. Just what is going on inside the DOE complex? Can all of this be explained away as mere incompetence?

In truth, the recent scandals were utterly predictable. While Secretary Richardson probably has good intentions, he has entrusted the implementation of his new policies to many of the same Clinton administration political appointees responsible for much of the mess in the first place. Congress is setting great store in the establishment of a new "semiautonomous" entity inside DOE: the National Nuclear Security Administration, headed by Gen. John Gordon. Gordon has the credentials and experience to do the job, but he will be saddled with many of the same personnel who have resisted all efforts to reform the agency. Officials from within the DOE Office of the Secretary handpicked his staff for him; these officials have repeatedly chosen "science" over security, as if these were somehow incompatible.

How did we get here? My intent is to provide some background and context for understanding the mess within DOE and its national laboratory complex. This is a tale of cover-ups, complacency, bungling, and outright dishonesty. I watched as senior DOE officials repeatedly lied under oath during congressional testimony. Lurking in the background, of course, were the Chinese fundraising allegations and investigations of the transfer of missile-guidance technology and supercomputers to China. I never saw any direct evidence of a linkage between fundraising and these scandals. But the facts-that the Chinese were spying, and that other foreign intelligence services were feasting on the DOE labs-are undeniable. The consequences of the loss of nuclear secrets, technological know-how, and classified information during this period could be devastating to our national security.

THE CHINESE SPY THREAT

Our first indications that the Chinese had penetrated our nuclear- weapons labs came in early 1995. We gradually became aware of a broad Chinese intelligence assault on the labs, one that had been underway for at least 15 years. Key officials in the Clinton White House were alerted to our findings in the summer of 1995, but for the next two years their response was, at best, feeble. In May 1999, the Cox Committee report finally told the world about China's success against U.S. nuclear secrets, but, by that point, the damage was done.

The administration's response was to "shoot the messenger." They sought to undermine the credibility of our warnings of Chinese espionage-and in the process, they drowned out our warnings of long-standing security vulnerabilities and counterintelligence shortfalls.

As DOE's director of intelligence, I bore the brunt of many of these attacks; I was demoted in 1998 and forced out of the department in 1999. My successor told me that I had single-handedly "destroyed DOE," and that I was a pariah in the department. I soon read in the Washington Post and elsewhere that I was a "dangerous demagogue," a "great imposter," "obsessed," and even that I resembled Star Trek's Captain Kirk. (I never did figure out whether that was a compliment or a criticism.) Reporters, citing "anonymous" sources, accused me of unfairly singling out one man, Wen Ho Lee, as the culprit in the case. Racism and xenophobia were imagined in media accounts to explain the events of the past four years. This was pretty heavy stuff for someone who has spent most of his career trying to stay out of the public eye; but it has become routine treatment for whistle-blowers in this administration. I was not alone; other DOE security officials were subjected to equal or worse treatment at the hands of the Clinton political appointees within the department.

I was director of intelligence from 1994 to 1998; in 1995, I also became director of counterintelligence (CI) at the department. I was thus responsible for the management of all intelligence and CI activities within the department and at the DOE laboratories. When I took over, I found the CI program in total disarray. Despite numerous espionage attacks on the labs-dating back to the Manhattan Project in the 1940s-CI was a fairly new program at DOE. The Bush administration, recognizing the threat to the labs, had done a number of important reviews and began to implement a viable CI program. The program faltered, however, because it commanded little respect from lab scientists and DOE managers. The arrival of the Clinton team in 1993 stopped the program in its tracks. FBI agents on loan to DOE were driven out of the department, and security in general received little attention from the new appointees. Funding was reduced, hiring was frozen, and personnel slots were cut.

Meanwhile, the labs were opening up at an alarming rate. Visits from, and exchanges with, foreign visitors-particularly those from such sensitive countries as China and Russia-were encouraged, and areas of the labs were opened up to facilitate the burgeoning presence of these visitors. These trends had started late in the Bush administration, but the new team relaxed even further the security rules governing such visits. The influx of foreign visitors quickly outstripped the ability of the CI team at the labs to keep up with it. Lab managers considered CI mostly a nuisance, in any case, and Washington's new emphasis on "openness" provided the excuse to further reduce CI funding and staff. The Lawrence Livermore lab had (and has) a good CI program, staffed with experienced CI professionals, but lab management was steadily reducing its funding and trimming its staff.

Counterintelligence at Los Alamos was widely considered a joke within both the DOE complex and the CI community. Funding for CI was in a steep decline, and the CI staff there was inexperienced and inept. Later reports documented the bungled management of the Lee case by the Los Alamos CI staff; CI officers were also complicit in the relaxation of safeguards on foreign visitors. Washington had been signaling, through its decisions on budgets and programs, that CI was largely a waste of time and money; this message found a very receptive audience at the labs. It was an ideal climate for espionage-under the guise of scientific exchanges and visits.

China's espionage objectives against the DOE labs were clear: Nuclear deterrence is a cornerstone of Chinese strategic planning. China has opted for a nuclear force that could survive a nuclear attack and retaliate with enough weapons to inflict great damage on the attacker. They have not sought a large missile inventory similar to that of the U.S. or Russia; they have calculated, instead, that a survivable capability would deter the U.S. or Russia from using force to thwart Chinese regional objectives-vis-a-vis Taiwan, for example.

The keys to such a survivable nuclear force were new mobile missiles and the development of smaller, lighter, and more efficient warheads. The current Chinese ICBM force is roughly similar to that fielded by the U.S. in the 1960s-heavy, inaccurate, and with slow reaction times in the event of a crisis. The Cox Committee report documented how the Chinese obtained the crucial technological know-how to meet these objectives from the United States-through espionage and misguided technology transfers.

China fixed on the U.S. W-88 nuclear warhead, designed at Los Alamos, as the benchmark to guide its own warhead developments. China's selection of the W-88-hailed as the most modern nuclear warhead in the world-was initially surprising: The technical sophistication of the warhead seemed far beyond China's grasp. But the Chinese succeeded; by stealing a proven road map from the U.S. to guide their efforts, they avoided the expensive and time-consuming scientific blind alleys the U.S. had experienced before perfecting the technology.

We don't know for sure when the Chinese assault on U.S. nuclear secrets began. The initial exchange of scientists between China and the U.S. began late in the Carter administration. By the early 1980s, our scientists were already expressing concern about the depth of Chinese knowledge about U.S. nuclear-weapons developments and scientific trends. Lab apologists and others have asserted that much of China's knowledge came from the proliferation of nuclear information in the public domain-but in fact, Chinese scientists were asking detailed and well-informed questions about classified U.S. nuclear programs, and their command of detail did not come from reading Aviation Week & Space Technology. Surprisingly, however, until the mid 1990s, no one questioned the expanded interactions with the Chinese.

For reasons that remain classified, by 1995 DOE intelligence officers and lab experts were suspecting the possible acquisition of W-88 information by the Chinese. As our deliberations continued, the CIA alerted us to the existence of a Chinese document containing very detailed information about the W-88 warhead. The document, now known as the "walk-in" document, has been the subject of much speculation; DOE officials, among others, have spread disinformation about this document in an attempt to discredit this important clue to Chinese espionage successes. The document did provide key evidence of Chinese acquisitions not just of the W-88, but of nearly all other U.S. missile warheads. There was (and is) considerable additional evidence, still classified, which corroborates our conclusion of Chinese nuclear espionage. The U.S. Intelligence Community Damage Assessment, completed in 1999, largely validated our conclusions.

THE ADMINISTRATION RESPONDS: AN OSTRICH STRATEGY

Many observers have minimized the importance of Chinese espionage, underscoring another conclusion of the damage assessment: "To date, the aggressive Chinese collection effort has not resulted in any apparent modernization of their deployed strategic force or any new nuclear weapons deployment." But no one had ever claimed otherwise; our focus was on the contribution U.S. nuclear secrets would make to future Chinese developments. They now have the technology; what they do with it will become clear over the next ten years.

Critics have also contended that even if the Chinese had stolen W-88 information, they could not actually manufacture such warheads. Such assertions were heard even from members of the intelligence community, mostly junior intelligence analysts lacking hands-on experience in developing nuclear weapons. Our lab experts, on the other hand, believed that any country with a modern aerospace industry or manufacturing infrastructure capable of producing precision munitions could also assemble such warheads. (CIA intelligence specialists testified before Congress that China would be unable to develop the "exotic materials" necessary for the W-88 warheads. When asked to give some examples of such materials, the specialists had to admit that they were clueless about the actual components of the W-88.)

We repeatedly warned administration officials about China's intelligence objectives and its aggressive attack on the labs. By mid 1997, we were able to forecast Chinese targets and objectives, particularly in the area of nuclear-weapons codes, simulations, and databases. Not once were our warnings heeded; sadly, we subsequently learned that our nuclear secrets had been placed on unclassified computer systems at the labs that were highly vulnerable to outside computer attacks. Such attacks were occurring at an alarming rate. It was not until 1999 that FBI computer forensic experts uncovered the magnitude of the potential loss of our nuclear secrets through computer attacks.

The administration had been very slow in responding to our warnings. The FBI's prosecution of the espionage case, formally underway since mid 1996, had been dilatory at best. Months went by with little or no FBI action; more than a year passed before the FBI even attempted to obtain technical coverage of the key suspect in the case. What the FBI did with the list of eleven other potential suspects provided to them by DOE in 1996 remains a mystery. We have since learned that the FBI missed numerous opportunities for breakthroughs in the case, largely through neglect and ineptitude.

Our first encounters with White House officials came in mid 1995, when DOE informed White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and CIA director John Deutch. DOE also had an obligation to inform Congress's intelligence committees in a timely fashion; by the spring of 1996, however-more than a year after our initial findings-we still had not made the trip to Capitol Hill. Deutch had pledged to handle this matter, but we had good reason to believe that he did not follow through. En route to Capitol Hill, we met with Sandy Berger, the president's deputy national security adviser. This meeting took place in April 1996 on a Saturday morning in the White House situation room. DOE and CIA officials met with Berger and another NSC staff member. Berger was told of our conclusions about the scope and magnitude of Chinese nuclear espionage and the DOE lab vulnerabilities that enhanced the Chinese prospects for success; Berger approved our plans to brief Congress. There was another briefing, that summer, for the NSC's Robert Bell; we also met with Vice President Gore's national security adviser on the same topic. There was little other contact or follow-up with the White House in 1996. That summer, we completed our obligations to notify Congress.

Despite a subsequent 1997 meeting with Berger, who had since been elevated to national security adviser, and a flurry of activity within the administration intended to finally initiate security reforms at DOE, nearly three years passed before we visited Capitol Hill again. Twice in 1998, DOE blocked efforts to transmit information to Congress regarding new developments in Chinese espionage. The only rationale offered was that "Congress only wanted to hurt the president on his China policy."

Meanwhile, DOE and the administration studied the issue to death. Most of the changes that DOE and lab officials are boasting about today were first proposed in 1996 and 1997, but fiercely resisted by lab managers and DOE officials. Even a Presidential Decision Directive, issued in 1998, mandating CI and security reforms met stiff resistance. More than a year passed before any concrete measures were taken, and the president's own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board concluded in 1999 that DOE's response to even this presidential mandate was "grudging and belated."

The recent scandals show that the fault line between science and security within the labs has not been overcome. "Lab culture" is often cited as a serious threat to security, but this is little more than a convenient excuse for DOE incompetence and management complicity. In truth, the "culture" takes its cues from DOE headquarters, and in recent years these cues have emphasized "openness," interaction with nuclear scientists from Russia, China, India, and other sensitive countries, and the presence of such scientists in large numbers at our national labs (even-indeed, especially-those entrusted with the design of our nuclear warheads).

Another threat arises from DOE's permission of unfettered travel by our scientists to sensitive countries. The security incidents associated with such travel are only now becoming known to the public, but the potential for espionage and the compromise of our most crucial secrets is staggering. In their travels, our scientists have had their laptop computers searched, briefcases rifled, and telephone conversations monitored; foreign intelligence services routinely seek to entrap the scientists. DOE officials and the administration have simply looked the other way, and have valued continued access to foreign scientists above securityof the risks.

This, then, has been the atmosphere fostered by DOE within our national labs for much of the 1990s. Arrogance, complacency, disregard for the simplest counterintelligence safeguards, and a stubborn disbelief in the continuing existence of foreign intelligence threats have all combined to make our national labs a ripe target for espionage. Clearly, Secretary Richardson's reforms and efforts of the past year have fallen short of his guarantee that our nuclear secrets are now safe.

The fact is, we have yet to come to grips with espionage at our labs. These labs will continue to maintain and develop knowledge, information, and technology that are highly prized by foreign intelligence services. The attacks will continue, and the cyber capabilities of China, Russia, and others only compound the threat. DOE's response to the peril has, thus far, been pitiful. Moreover, a serious damage assessment has yet to be performed to measure the true extent of potential future threats. Who in this administration has even started to think about the implications of a technologically sophisticated opponent gaining access to hard information on U.S. warhead vulnerabilities? Undoing the damage to our nuclear-weapons policy and management will be one of the many challenges confronting the next administration.

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