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USIS Washington 
File

23 June 1999

UNPRECEDENTED JOINT HEARING EXAMINES SECURITY AT DOE WEAPONS LABS

(Lawmakers discuss Rudman report on weapons labs security) (1300)
By Steve La Rocque
USIA Staff Writer

Washington -- The security situation at the U.S. Department of
Energy's weapons labs is in bad shape. Or, if you prefer, things have
been getting better since the new team took over.

Those were the conflicting messages given at a first-ever joint
hearing of four Senate committees June 22 on the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board's report on security problems at the
Department of Energy. Thirty-two senators participated in the hearing.

Criticizing security at the labs was former U.S. Senator Warren
Rudman, now chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board.

Members of the Governmental Affairs, Select Intelligence, Energy and
Natural Resources, and Armed Services Committees listened carefully as
he outlined security failures at the weapons labs in a report titled
"Science at its Best, Security at its Worst."

Nothing is more important for America's long-term national security,
said Rudman, than the security of its nuclear secrets. "And that
security has been atrocious for a long time," he said.

"How can it be it took less than three years for this country to
construct the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, but it took in the last
several years, four years, for someone to fix a lock on a door
protecting nuclear secrets," Rudman told senators. "It's pathetic," he
said.

One employee, Rudman noted, had said the DOE "was about as well
organized as the Titanic in the eleventh hour."

The report, Rudman said, "finds that the Department of Energy is badly
broken, and it's long past time for half-measures and patchwork
solutions.

"It's time to fundamentally restructure the management of the nuclear
weapons labs and establish a system that holds people accountable," he
said.

"We found evidence and heard testimony that was appalling in six
critical areas: security and counterintelligence management and
planning, physical security, personnel security, information security,
nuclear materials accounting and foreign visitors," Rudman said.

"We can, and we should, demand absolute accountability," Rudman said.

"I want to be clear," Rudman said, "nothing we say in this report is
intended as criticism of the scientific research and development at
the laboratories.

"Nor do we want to do anything to undermine their effectiveness," he
stressed.

"We want to improve their security, their counterintelligence, and the
accountability that allows them to continue to do their job," Rudman
said, acknowledging that "maintaining security and strong
counterintelligence at the weapons labs, even under ideal
circumstances, is challenging."

Even in the current uproar over the Cox Committee Report, Rudman said,
his board "found as late as last week business as usual at some level
at the labs."

In spite of Secretary Richardson's best efforts, Rudman said, there
was still "incomplete implementation of certain computer security
measures, and we believe foot-dragging on implementation of a good
polygraph program."

If the current scandal, Rudman said, "plus the best efforts of Bill
Richardson are not enough, only a fundamental and lasting
restructuring will be sufficient.

"I would agree, it is up to the Congress to decide what that
restructuring is," Rudman said, adding, "it should be done carefully,
and it should be a measured approach."

Rudman urged the senators "to decide first what you want to do.

"Do you want to have a departmental reorganization embodied by a
statute, or do you want it semi-autonomous," he asked.

"Once you decide that it seems to me that there are enough
knowledgeable staff and senators and members of the House," to draw up
the necessary legislation, he said.

Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Bill Richardson gave the Clinton
Administration's position to both skeptical and supportive lawmakers.

The Rudman report, Richardson acknowledged, "is good, it's thorough,
it's hard-hitting, it outlines the problem.

"We are prepared to accept close to 90 percent of its recommendations
right away," he said.

But, Richardson urged, "It is very important that we not build the
Berlin Wall between our science and our defense and nuclear programs."

Senator Frank Murkowski (Republican of Alaska), chairman of the Senate
Energy and Natural Resources, chaired the joint hearing, and, while
sympathetic to Richardson, in an opening statement quoted from the Cox
Report on Chinese nuclear espionage at the weapons labs, that
"'organizational disarray, managerial neglect and a culture of
arrogance, both at the DOE headquarters and the labs themselves,
conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to happen.'"

Never before, said Murkowski, "have the members of the special
investigative panel witnessed a bureaucracy, a culture so thoroughly
saturated with cynicism and disregard for authority.

"Never before has this panel found such a cavalier attitude toward one
of the most serious responsibilities in the federal government:
control and the design information relating to nuclear weapons," the
Alaskan senator said.

"Particularly egregious have been the failures to enforce cyber
security measures to protect and control important nuclear weapons
design information," Murkowski emphasized.

"Never before has the panel found an agency with the bureaucratic
insolence to dispute, delay and resist implementation of a
presidential directive on security as DOE's bureaucracy tried to do,"
Murkowski charged.

Looking at the embattled Energy Secretary, Senator John Warner
(Republican of Virginia) told Richardson, "I think that you have done
as best you can given that you didn't create the problem -- you
inherited it."

The problem was not so much China stealing America's state secrets,
Warner said, rather the lack of effort to protect vital national
security secrets.

"My own view," Warner said, "in the 21 years I have been in the Senate
and served on the Intelligence Committee as former vice chairman, we
are aware as a nation that all nations to one degree or another are
involved in trying to determine the secrets of another.

"In this case it seems to me," the long-time defense advocate said,
"that to the extent China was behind this, and the evidence is
mounting, it is like the burglar that entered the house and there the
jewelry and the cash were left out on the bureau. Little more than a
flashlight was needed to remove it and to depart," Warner said.

"And that's what we have got to protect this nation from ever
happening again, whether it's China or any other nation seeking to get
our secrets" Warner said.

The government, said Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat of
Connecticut), "cannot tolerate either a culture or an organizational
framework that does not put appropriate emphasis on safeguarding the
security of our nation's most precious secrets -- secrets that we have
invested billions of dollars to develop and that are critical to our
security."

While a generally bipartisan spirit informed the hearing, Senator
James Inhofe (Republican of Oklahoma) made the point that it was
during the Clinton Administration that the transfer, presumably to
China, of the "legacy codes" containing data on "50 years of U.S.
nuclear weapons development, including over 1,000 nuclear tests"
occurred.

Inhofe scored the Administration for "the sale and diversion to
military purposes of hundreds of high performance computers, enabling
China to enhance its development of nuclear weapons ballistic missiles
and advanced military aviation equipment."

He criticized the "compromise of nuclear warhead simulation
technology, enhancing China's ability to perfect miniature nuclear
warheads without actually testing.

"The compromise of advanced electromagnetic weapons technology useful
in the development of anti-satellite and anti-missile systems," Inhofe
said, "all these happened during the Administration."

"The transfer of missile nose-cone technology enabling China to
substantially improve the reliability of its inter-continental
ballistic missiles; the compromise of space-based radar technology,
giving China the ability to detect our previously undetectable
submerged submarines," Inhofe said, were the fault of the Clinton
Administration, including "the transfer of the missile guidance
technology that allows China to substantially improve the accuracy of
its missiles."