DOE `Green Book' Secrets Exposed

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 1, 2001 | by J. Michael Waller

Insight uncovers astonishing new security lapses by the Energy Department that, via public e-mail, compromised U.S. nuclear-weapons designs and next-generation weapons plans.

Evidence of terrible security lapses at Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear-weapons labs continues to mount -- thanks, ironically, to defenders of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos, N.M., scientist who, according to the FBI, passed many of the most sensitive U.S. nuclear-weapons secrets to the People's Republic of China.

Insight has learned that the sloppy -- and possibly illegal -- DOE handling of other nuclear-weapons secrets may have compromised the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal to other countries, including Russia. Senior DOE officials knew about the breach, but failed to inform Congress. One former U.S. official with firsthand knowledge tells Insight, "It all got kind of hushed up."

Some of Lee's defenders have argued that the Taiwan-born scientist, who pleaded guilty in August to a single felony count in a plea bargain with the FBI, was targeted unjustly because he is Chinese. Their line of defense is curious: that violations such as those to which Lee pleaded guilty are common occurrences at the DOE labs.

One of those defenders is Charles E. Washington, a former DOE acting director of counterintelligence. Washington stated in an August affidavit for Lee, "I am aware of Department of Energy employees who were not imprisoned or prosecuted for committing offenses that are much more serious than the `security infractions' alleged to have been committed by Dr. Lee. I am personally aware of a DOE employee who committed a most egregious case of espionage that cost our nation billions of dollars and drastically impacted our national defense. That DOE employee was not prosecuted."

One of those cases to which Washington refers, sources tell Insight, involves the aforesaid compromise of the entire U.S. nuclear-weapons inventory, as well as plans for next-generation nuclear weapons, to Russia and other countries. Yet DOE did not recommend punishment for the offending individual, sources tell Insight.

That shocking and undoubted compromise occurred during preparation of a classified report of the DOE's Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan known as the "Green Book." According to Assistant Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs Victor Reis, the Green Book "describes in detail our plans for maintaining the safety and reliability of the nuclear-weapons stockpile in the absence of underground testing and no new-design nuclear-warhead production." DOE presented the secret report to Congress in 1997 and released a declassified version in response to a lawsuit from disarmament groups early the following year.

The declassified version discussed the need to replace existing stocks of nuclear weapons by 2010, to retain "the ability to develop new nuclear options for emergent threats" and "the technology for new approaches to deterrence," according to excerpts released by the antinuclear Los Alamos Study Group.

But Insight has learned the far more sensitive classified version of the Green Book was compromised even before it was completed. According to sources, a Los Alamos lab editor responsible for compiling the Green Book sent edited sections back to the authors over the open Internet -- a massive security breach that deposited the document, piece by secret piece, on open computer servers in cyberspace.

"Every server it went through backed up automatically," says an Insight source. "Anyone looking for the information could have found it." Whether it is still on the servers depends upon the length of time between backups.

In a damage assessment in 1997, counterintelligence investigators found that a computer printer at a Los Alamos area frequented by visiting foreign scientists also was accessed for the classified report. And "at least one printer attached to the server had forensics accessed from a Russian site," according to a source. An audit trail traced Internet-protocol (IP) addresses around the world through which unknown computer operators accessed that printer within the Los Alamos lab.

IP is a format for transmitting data over the Internet between two computers. An IP address is a numeric identifier for a computer, usually an Internet service provider on a transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) network. It does not generally identify the exact location of the individual accessing the information. But those following the audit trails found that computers entered the Los Alamos printer either from or through IP addresses in Brazil, China, Israel and Russia. But there the trail ended.

Federal security officials must presume that the U.S. nuclear-weapons data in the Green Book were compromised. And "every warhead in the current inventory is described in the Green Book," according to a senior nuclear-weapons security source. "By definition, every warhead is compromised when it is put on an unclassified system, made accessible whenever it switches through different servers over the Internet and is then backed up."