Truth About Espionage Was Out There but Ignored

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 31, 1999 | by Sean Paige

By now it's no secret that Department of Energy, or DOE, nuclear laboratories have been a target of Chinese espionage. But their vulnerability to penetration by foreign agents long has been known by at least one shadowy agency of the federal government.

No, not the FBI. Or the CIA. Or the National Security Agency.

The truth has been known all along by the very public GAO -- or General Accounting Office -- whose intrepid investigators have been warning about porous security at DOE facilities for nearly two decades, to no apparent avail. The GAO has released at least 31 major reports on nuclear-security problems at the department since 1980, including less-than-best-selling thrillers such as 1982's "Safeguards and Security at DOE's Weapons Facilities Are Still Not Adequate," 1985's "Security Concerns at DOE's Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production Facility," 1988's prescient "Major Weaknesses in Foreign Visitor Controls at Weapons Laboratories," 1990's "Potential Security Weaknesses at Los Alamos and Other DOE Facilities," 1991's "Accountability for Livermore's Secret Classified Documents Is Inadequate," 1995's "Poor Management of Nuclear Materials Tracking System Makes Success Unlikely" and 1997's "DOE Needs to Improve Controls Over Foreign Visitors to Weapons Laboratories."

All were unclassified. All were distributed to officials at DOE and key congressional committees. And all, apparently, were roundly ignored -- until very recently, that is, when revelations about the likely theft by China of top secrets from at least one DOE lab hammered home to a somnambulant nation the reality that our nuclear program still has secrets and remains a target for spies.

While the rest of the capital slept, the GAO has, since the early 1980s, been warning -- albeit in the ponderous, measured, perhaps even boring manner of accountancy -- that controls were lax over foreign visitors to DOE facilities; that equipment, nuclear materials and thousands of pages of sensitive documents were disappearing; that physical security of nuclear facilities was laughable; and that security clearances of DOE personnel or contractors were incomplete and backlogged.

The GAO first reported in 1988 that background checks were conducted on less than 10 percent of foreigners visiting nuclear laboratories from "sensitive" countries -- even as the frequency of those visits increased 70 percent between the late 1980s and mid-1990s -- and that often such visits were occurring without the knowledge or approval of DOE. Nor were foreign visitors barred from unescorted access to sensitive areas of the labs because, as one official at Los Alamos told the GAO, such restrictions would dampen the "campus atmosphere" being nurtured.

In February 1991, the GAO reported that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had misplaced more than 10,000 secret documents. Two reports in 1987 and 1989 warned that DOE was exercising lax control over unclassified but still-sensitive information that could prove valuable to nuclear status seekers. In 1991, a review of physical security at nuclear facilities showed that they were being guarded by a cross between the Keystone Kops and the gang that couldn't shoot straight. In 1990, the GAO found that 16 percent of the government-owned equipment at Livermore was missing, and a similar inventory at Rocky Flats in Colorado in 1994 found $21 million in missing equipment, including forklifts and a semitrailer.

The GAO believes that about 70 percent of the reform recommendations it makes to government agencies never get fully implemented, and DOE is no different, according to Victor S. Rezendes, director of the GAO's Energy, Resources and Science division. "The problem in government in general, and DOE in general, has been implementation," Rezendes says, when asked why all the warnings seemed to go unheeded. "DOE has a complex organizational structure, without any clear lines of responsibility, and they don't hold people, their employees and contractors, accountable."

Another problem, according to Rezendes, is a reluctance by DOE to do what had to be done to tighten security. "In 1988 they brought in the FBI" in response to the foreign-visitor problem, says Rezendes, "but the FBI ended up leaving because DOE wouldn't do what the FBI told them to."

The GAO's focus on strengthening nuts-and-bolts management practices at federal agencies is sleep-inducing to some -- "It's hard to be alarmist at that point, because you're only talking about a potential problem," says Rezendes -- and only a debacle will sound the wake-up call.

Perhaps none of the hundreds of recommendations that the GAO made in the 31 reports would have prevented alleged spy Wen Ho Lee, a trusted nuclear-lab insider, from stealing secrets for the Chinese. Yet might not DOE's cavalier attitude toward security have tempted other Wen Ho Lees still out there, undetected, or at least made their nefarious tasks a bit easier?

Only time will tell whether these security breaches ever will come back to haunt Americans in some future conflict or on whom the political fallout from the unfolding scandal will settle. But whoever else of whatever administration is to blame, one thing is certain -- nobody better try to blame the GAO.