Content provided in partnership with
Energy Failure - Bill Richardson under fire for security issues at Dept of Energy
Insight on the News, July 17, 2000 by Sean Paige
The Department of Energy under Secretary Bill Richardson has failed to improve on lax security at U.S. nuclear labs and continues to be plagued by new lapses.
There is more bad news for besieged Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, already scrambling to deal with horrendous security lapses at the nation's top nuclear-weapons lab and soaring gasoline prices that have American motorists up in arms. Now two government reports obtained by Insight detailing other security problems within the department have intensified calls for the secretary's head and doubts about whether the security overhaul he promised in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee case in any way has reversed long-standing laxity in the way the nation's most sensitive nuclear facilities are being run.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
According to one report, officials in the Department of Energy, or DOE, and at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory -- where two computer hard drives containing top-secret bomb designs recently went missing under suspicious circumstances -- altered reports and pressured members of an internal-security assessment task force to soft-pedal shortcomings identified in annual reviews of the lab's nuclear safeguards.
A second report, also from DOE's inspector general, or IG, raises the possibility that sensitive information from the department's Savannah River complex in South Carolina, not properly erased from computer systems that were sold as surplus, may have gone to the People's Republic of China, or PRC.
Responding to whistle-blower complaints concerning Los Alamos security self-assessments in 1998 and 1999, DOE's IG now has concluded that managers at DOE's Safeguards and Security Division in Albuquerque did indeed soften or alter the results of Los Alamos lab-security assessments in 1998 and 1999, overriding the recommendations of security professionals without providing a documented rationale for the alterations.
Security safeguards within the lab that were rated as "marginal" or "unsatisfactory" by field personnel were altered and sometimes even upgraded by managers, after the fact, in moves that seem designed to distort the true condition of security at the facility and paper over the field security assessments and warnings. The IG further reported that documentation supporting the security assessments had been destroyed or was missing (in violation of DOE policy), making it impossible to review the bastardization of the ratings, and that DOE officials in Albuquerque downplayed the embarrassing results of a force-on-force security exercise that was conducted during a 1998 security survey.
Responding to a second set of allegations, the IG also confirmed that Los Alamos lab-security personnel felt pressured by managers of the lab's Security Operations Division -- which is staffed with employees of the facility's long-standing prime contractor, the University of California at Berkeley -- to soften findings of security self-assessments they were conducting. Based on interviews, the IG found that 30 percent of the security personnel who worked on the assessments (or eight of the 28 interviewed) had felt pressured to soften their security assessments. "Several of these individuals said [Los Alamos] management appeared to be more concerned about making [the lab] and the Security Operations Division `look good' than reporting the actual security condition at [the lab]," according to the report.
After lab managers became upset by deficiencies identified by some security reviewers, the reviewers were reassigned and replaced with less-critical personnel. IG investigators also found that certain security self-assessments required by lab procedures weren't being conducted by the lab's Security Operations Division.
During the 1998 security survey, ratings of Los Alamos "security systems," "protective force," "material control" and "personnel security" were upgraded by DOE officials in Albuquerque from an "unsatisfactory" to a "marginal" rating -- changes that allowed the lab to forward to the White House a composite rating of "marginal" that election year rather than "unsatisfactory." And, in at least four instances, 1999 survey results of "satisfactory" later were downgraded to "marginal."
As a result of these and other findings, the IG concluded that "there are legitimate concerns that the overall security condition at [Los Alamos National Laboratory], specifically for fiscal years 1998 and 1999, was not being accurately reported."
No one in the agency's Albuquerque Operations Center office has been disciplined or sanctioned as a result of the IG's findings, center spokesman Al Stotts tells Insight. However, the office isn't challenging its conclusions, claims it is taking them seriously and says that it has instituted a reorganization of the office's Safeguards and Security Division. Discipline isn't justified, says Stotts, because "there was no evidence [in the IG report] that there was any kind of deal-making and collusion between our office and Los Alamos to make changes to the assessments."
