Page 1 TOP OF DOC
65–546
2000
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–54]
SECURITY FAILURES AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD
JUNE 14, 2000
Page 2 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
One Hundred Sixth Congress
FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina, Chairman
BOB STUMP, Arizona
DUNCAN HUNTER, California
JOHN R. KASICH, Ohio
HERBERT H. BATEMAN, Virginia
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
STEVE BUYER, Indiana
TILLIE K. FOWLER, Florida
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
JAMES TALENT, Missouri
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
Page 3 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
BOB RILEY, Alabama
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
DONALD SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
NORMAN SISISKY, Virginia
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
Page 4 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
TOM ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT BRADY, Pennsylvania
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
Robert S. Rangel, Staff Director
Lisa Wetzel, Staff Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2000
Page 5 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
HEARING:
Wednesday, June 14, 2000, Security Failures at Los Alamos National Laboratory
APPENDIX:
Wednesday, June 14, 2000
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 2000
SECURITY FAILURES AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
Spence, Hon. Floyd D., a Representative from South Carolina, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
WITNESSES
Browne, Dr. John C., Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Department of Energy
Page 6 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Curran, Edward J., Director, Office of Counterintelligence, Department of Energy
Gioconda, Brig. Gen. Thomas F., Acting Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs, National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy
Glauthier, Hon. T.J., Deputy Secretary of Energy
Habiger, Gen. Eugene, (USAF, Ret.), Director, Office of Security and Emergency Operations, Department of Energy
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Skelton, Hon. Ike
Spence, Hon. Floyd D.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents Submitted for the Record can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Letter to Hon. Floyd D. Spence from John C. Browne, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Page 7 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Questions and Answers can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Andrews, Hon. Robert E.
Bateman, Hon. Herbert H.
Hunter, Hon. Duncan
Thornberry, Hon. Mac
Weldon, Hon. Curt
SECURITY FAILURES AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, June 14, 2000.
The full Committee met, pursuant to call, at 2:06 p.m. in Room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Floyd D. Spence (Chairman of the Committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FLOYD D. SPENCE, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order. Today the Committee meets to take up testimony on the latest and still developing nuclear weapons security failure at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Page 8 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me apologize to members for the lack of normal notice for this hearing. Mr. Skelton and I felt that the seriousness and urgency of the situation merited having this hearing as quickly as possible in order to better understand the specifics of the situation at hand.
In many respects, this afternoon's hearing gives me a sense of deja vu. Since 1998, this Committee has been deeply involved in investigating and legislating fixes to address the fundamental breakdown in national security procedures within the Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex.
What began as a look at serious weaknesses in the Department's foreign visitor program soon transformed itself into a counterintelligence revelation that stunned the country. The People's Republic of China somehow obtained U.S. nuclear weapons design information. The Department of Energy national laboratories, and Los Alamos in particular, were quickly identified as the most likely source of the loss of this sensitive information.
We now know that an individual working in the weapons design X Division downloaded volumes of nuclear weapons design and test data from his secure classified computer into his unsecure, unclassified system and onto portable tapes. Though never charged with espionage, Mr. Wen Ho Lee was subsequently arrested and charged with mishandling classified nuclear weapons information and potentially exposing it to compromise.
The seriousness of the security shortfalls identified during this incident led President Clinton to ask the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to examine the security threat at the department's weapons laboratories and the adequacy of measures taken to address it. The board found that, and I quote, ''Department of Energy (DOE) and the weapons laboratories have a deeply rooted culture of low regard for and at times hostility to security issues.''
Page 9 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The chairman of this board, former Senator Warren Redman, testified before this Committee that the board concluded that the Department of Energy was bureaucratically and culturally incapable of reforming itself. The board, therefore, recommended that the national security functions of the department be placed under the direction of a totally independent agency or as a semiautonomous agency within the department.
This latter construction was adopted in the fiscal year 2000 National Defense Authorization Act, which created the National Nuclear Security Administration. In addition, Congress enacted frequent reforms of the law and procedures governing how the department conducts security and counterintelligence responsibilities.
I have to say that these efforts were met with a level of resistance and hostility by Secretary Richardson that continues to this very day. Rather than accepting and implementing the legal tools passed by the Congress and enacted into law by the President to address this critical problem, Department of Energy has been engaged in a pattern of legal obfuscation and evasion in order to frustrate the clear intent of the Congress in this area.
Despite the continuing efforts to circumvent key portions of the DOE reorganization legislation, the department had been proceeding with changes in security procedures. This progress led to some hope that we would finally turn the corner on this problem and that many of the fundamental problems universally recognized and highlighted by the Redman report were finally being rectified.
While I recognize that this investigation is still in its early stages and much is not yet known, I also believe there is enough known to conclude that the DOE national laboratory conflicts, and Los Alamos in particular, still suffer from serious, disturbing and unacceptable deficiencies in how they safeguard the Nation's most sensitive nuclear secrets.
Page 10 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
With us today to update us on this incident and discuss the various issues that are raised are the Honorable T.J. Glauthier, Deputy Secretary of Energy; Brigadier General Thomas F. Gioconda, Acting Deputy Administrator for Defense programs, National Nuclear Security Administration; General Eugene Habiger, director, Office of Security and Emergency Operations; and Mr. Edward Curran, director, Office of Counterintelligence; John C. Browne, director, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Let me welcome our witnesses and thank you for agreeing to appear before us on such short notice.
Before I go any further, I would like to recognize the Ranking Democrat on the Committee, the Honorable Ike Skelton.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Spence can be found in the Appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This Committee has previously expressed its concern about the legacy of disregard for the protection of nuclear weapons related classified information within the Department of Energy. However, this latest incident involving a loss of a theft of highly sensitive computer disks at the Los Alamos Laboratory raises new and troubling additional concerns.
Page 11 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I am disappointed—I think a better word might be incensed—that this Committee again finds itself having to address yet another serious lapse in security involving the protection of national nuclear information.
I am not willing to accept the proposition that the many heralded scientific accomplishments and achievements of the many world class Department of Energy scientists would not have been possible in a rigorous security conscious environment. I am not willing to accept the rationale that the recent security lapse resulted from the high intensity environment created by the fire and the shutdown of the laboratory.
Continued security lapses simply cannot be tolerated. It is particularly troubling that apparently the disks were known to be missing for at least a couple of weeks before the officials of the Department of Energy headquarters were notified.
Last June, this Committee met to receive the report of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. We were reminded that lax security administration within the Energy Department was not a new concern. The board's report states in part, ''Time after time over the past few decades, officials at the DOE headquarters and the weapons labs themselves have been presented with overwhelming evidence that their lackadaisical oversight could lead to an increase in the nuclear threat against the United States.''
Throughout its history, the department has been the subject of scores of critical reports from the General Accounting Office, the intelligence community, independent commissions, private management consultants, its Inspector General and its own security experts, yet the Department's ingrained behavior and values have caused it to continue to falter and fail.
Page 12 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The report describes a culture within the Department of Energy complexes of a low regard for security and cites the need for a change in that culture. In a Procurement Subcommittee hearing in October last year, General Habiger, you testified about your program and activities as the department securities are, and you indicated that you were focused on changing the security climate at the Department of Energy. As commendable as your efforts so far have been, they obviously have not been successful.
I note that each of our witnesses today has significant departmental responsibility for security and counterintelligence matters. It would be instructive for each of you to address your assessment of the cultural attitudes towards security matters in the protection and control of highly sensitive information. It would also be helpful if you could describe current security incident reporting procedures.
Mr. Chairman, I applaud the Department for its significant contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge and for its good work on stockpiles storage and nonproliferation activities. I am also certain that there are many dedicated and hard working professions in the department with a genuine understanding of and appreciation for the value of security policies and practices.
Over the last several months, the many congressional committees with jurisdiction over the Department of Energy activities have been given assurances that significant changes in security procedures were being made. I am confident that some changes have been made, but it is painfully obvious that much more must be done. I know that safeguarding information about our nuclear weapons activities is a complex and complicated issue, but we must find a solution that will balance the needs of scientific inquiry on the one hand and the protection of our national security interests on the other.
Page 13 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I look forward to the occasion when we will be able to have confidence that our nuclear secrets and related information will be adequately safeguarded. I do not have that confidence today.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, the prepared statements of all of our witnesses, along with any accompanying material, will be inserted in the record.
Secretary Glauthier, the floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. T.J. GLAUTHIER, DEPUTY SECRETARY OF ENERGY
Secretary GLAUTHIER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Skelton and members of the Committee. We do appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss this incident and the ongoing federal investigation into the handling of classified information at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
With me today, as you have mentioned, I have General Gioconda, who is the acting Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration for Defense Program and is responsible for the Los Alamos Laboratory program. I have Dr. Browne, as you mentioned, who is the director of the Los Alamos Lab within that structure; General Habiger, who is the director of our Office of Security and Emergency Operations; and Ed Curran will be joining us shortly. He is the director of our Counterintelligence Office and is completing a briefing with another committee. He will be here shortly.
Page 14 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me mention some brief remarks first, and then we will turn it to some other statements. As soon as we learned at headquarters about the security incidence on June 1, Secretary Richardson tasked me to head up in the department the effort to find out what happened at Los Alamos Lab, including a determination of accountability and recommendations for disciplinary action and security procedure changes.
I have been working intensively since we first learned of the problem with the people I have just mentioned who are here with me today and the others in their offices. We also immediately contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation through Mr. Curran and General Habiger, which has initiated a criminal investigation of this matter in cooperation with the department.
Let me say at the outset that the Department of Energy has not and will not tolerate security lapses by our employees and contractors and that the leadership of the Department of Energy is extremely concerned about what has happened at the Los Alamos Lab.
While it is true that this problem evolved during a fire of catastrophic proportions, we are particularly angry at how long it took the lab to notify the department about this incident. The Department is required to be informed of such problems within eight hours of their discovery. The contractor informed us three weeks after the initial discovery.
Frankly, if one of these people had discovered their car had been stolen from their garage at home, they would have notified the authorities immediately. This information is far more important. It is of national security importance. We were not notified within an hour, within a day, but within three weeks of the initial discovery. I can assure you that personnel will be held accountable and that disciplinary action will result from this incident.
Page 15 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
As you know, Secretary Richardson put tough security measures in place after his arrival at the Department, including selecting General Habiger as the Department's security czar and fully implementing PDD-61, the President's counterintelligence order for DOE.
Secretary Richardson has worked tirelessly to respond to the security problems that arose last year, and we think we have an excellent team in place for situations such as this. We are very pleased that this morning the Senate has confirmed General John Gordon to be the Undersecretary for our National Nuclear Security Administration, the first administrator of that semiautonomous part of our Department.
We have set high standards for security. We demand to know why the lab was not able to meet these standards. We plan to hold them accountable. In our briefings to the Congress on this matter, there have been a lot of questions of the time line on this incident, so let me go through it quickly.
On May 7, it was determined by lab employees that these disk drives were missing. By way of background, these two drives were used by the NEST team, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, which is trained to respond to nuclear accidents or terrorist acts. The disks contained very sensitive technical data.
May 7, as the evacuation of the town of Los Alamos was underway and evacuation of the lab was beginning the NEST team discovered these disks missing as they were preparing to take their emergency materials off site in case of an emergency during the time that the lab was closed.
Page 16 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
From May 8 to May 22, the Los Alamos lab was shut down because of the Sierra Grande fire. May 22 to 24, employees began to return to the laboratory, and a search was begun for the missing hard drives. It was not until May 31 that laboratory manager John Browne was told about the loss.
On June 1, the following day, DOE headquarters was alerted about the loss. On June 2, we had a series of meetings, including our first teleconference with the Los Alamos people, and on June 2 we notified the FBI about the reported loss. We also notified Secretary Richardson, who was traveling overseas, and on that weekend—June 2 was a Friday. Over the weekend, we also notified the National Security Council, the deputy and then the head of the National Security Council and ultimately the President that weekend.
On Monday, June 5, I dispatched General Habiger and an FBI team to go to Los Alamos to manage the inquiry as a joint Department of Energy and FBI inquiry. A series of employee interviews was conducted, and additional searches were made. General Habiger and the FBI team arrived at the site on Tuesday, June 6, and began their inquiry at that time.
A week later, June 12, General Habiger returned and briefed the Secretary of Energy, and our decision was made. The Secretary made the decision to turn the investigation over to the FBI. Currently, the FBI, with the full cooperation of DOE, is conducting a criminal investigation into this matter. Let me emphasize this is an ongoing investigation. All the facts are not in yet, and it is at a very sensitive stage.
Let me also summarize the actions we have taken relating to this matter. First, the laboratory has suspended work and conducted a thorough search of the offices and classified work areas in this part of the laboratory, including affirmative inventorying of all classified materials in computers. The laboratory has also tightened access to vaults and computers.
Page 17 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We have asked for a damage assessment from the Central Intelligence Agency. The University of California has placed six management employees from the Los Alamos Lab on administrative leave pending a review of their responsibilities and actions.
Polygraphs of laboratory employees will begin today. We will be considering additional security measures, and we are also waiting to hear quickly from the University of California about what actions they are prepared to take to meet the accountability and security standards that we put in place over the last 18 months. I will be briefing the Secretary regularly as this investigation proceeds.
Finally, the Secretary announced yesterday that former Senator Howard Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton will be conducting a thorough investigation and assessment into the circumstances surrounding the security incident at Los Alamos and will make the necessary recommendations for corrective measures. This assessment will be done expeditiously and will be conducted in a manner so as not to interfere with the FBI investigation.
Senator Baker and Congressman Hamilton have agreed to this assignment and will report both to President Clinton and the Secretary. We trust that Senator Baker and Congressman Hamilton will help us get to the bottom of this in a bipartisan, unbiased manner.
The most important thing to leave you with is that the FBI and DOE investigations are continuing, that every effort is being made to find out what happened and to recover the missing disks. The Department of Energy security team is responding to this very serious incident in an aggressive and expeditious manner. We will continue to keep you and other key congressional committees informed of developments.
Page 18 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I would like to ask now for Dr. John Browne, the director of the laboratory, to comment on this and then General Habiger to comment a bit on the investigation and then open it up for questions if we might.
The CHAIRMAN. Fine.
Dr. Browne.
STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN C. BROWNE, DIRECTOR, LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Dr. BROWNE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee.
Let me start by first acknowledging that this is a very serious security incident. We do not take it lightly at our laboratory. I certainly do not. This happened on my watch. I am accountable for my laboratory, the actions of everyone who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
I am accountable for the policies, the procedures and the systems that underpin security at Los Alamos. I am responsible for training our people, for providing them with security awareness and then retraining them when they need it. That is my responsibility.
It is also true that any good security system depends on a fundamental principle of individual accountability as well. All the systems in the world do not do us any good unless the people follow them. That is also my responsibility to insure that our people follow our procedures and use our systems.
Page 19 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Negligence is not an excuse, disregard. Attitudes about being a scientist do not cut it. It is a responsibility that people have as part of their job. I want to just tell you personally when I heard about this my first reaction was disbelief. I think the question that went through my mind is the same question that went through your minds. How could this happen at Los Alamos after everything we have been through in the last year?
We have made a lot of security improvements that have been validated by a lot of people. We have had scores of independent auditors comb our laboratory looking at our practices and our procedures, but it still happened. How could it happen in our laboratory?
Then my reaction went to anger, and now it has moved to frustration, frankly, because I know the people of our laboratory are dedicated to our mission, and yet it happened at our lab.
So what did happen? You heard Deputy Secretary Glauthier went through a chronology. I would just like to repeat one or two parts of that chronology because I think they are key to understanding what went on. The May 7 date, that was the date when the Sierra Grande fire broke out and threatened the town of Los Alamos and the laboratory at Los Alamos. It was the evening, Sunday evening, and the flames literally were hundreds of feet high.
I was standing on the bridge that separates the laboratory and the town site, and it was very frightening to everyone. We were evacuating people in the community at that point. We made the decision to evacuate the laboratory, not to let anybody in the lab and to get anybody who was in the laboratory out of the laboratory.
Page 20 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
That evening the people on this team, the NEST team, called our emergency operations center where all of my management, my senior management was. My deputy director for operations, who is in charge of controlling emergency operations, and this team, two people, requested permission to go into the area where these hard drives that are missing—they went in to take not the hard drives, but their entire NEST tool kit, which is more than the hard drives.
The reason they wanted to take this away was they are on a 24 hour call to respond to nuclear incidents around the world. They could not allow it to happen that this tool kit would not be accessible, so we gave them permission to go in.
They have access to this vault through a positive identification system that identifies them by where they have to match a code against their assigned code with security guards. They did that properly, but they went into this vault, and they found that these hard drives were missing.
They then made a serious mistake, in my opinion. They called us at the emergency operations center to tell us they were going in. They did not call us back to tell us the hard drives were missing.
There were duplicate copies of these hard drives, and the reason for that is obvious. When you have a nuclear emergency search team, you have to have backup systems. They took backup hard drives, and they placed them into their tool kit, and they removed them from the vault and properly secured the vault and placed this tool kit at another secure location far away from the fire.
Page 21 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We then were down. The laboratory was evacuated for over two weeks. As Secretary Glauthier said, the laboratory started to turn back on May 22, and by May 24 most of the employees were back at the laboratory. Not totally. This team started to search for these missing hard drives at that point.
I think that was another mistake because the policy is eight hours' notice, not only to the Department of Energy, but within our laboratory. When they find out something is missing, we are to be notified within eight hours. So they made a mistake for a second time, and it went on for a week while they were searching for these hard drives before they notified the management chain of command at Los Alamos.
When I found out, we immediately notified the Department of Energy, and that weekend, which was the weekend of June 1, 2, 3 and 4, I guess, we turned the laboratory upside down. We literally had everybody in teams searching every vault, every office, several times. We brought in teams of our security experts and interviewed people. We did 200 interviews in 72 hours seeing if we could not turn these hard drives up.
On Monday morning, June 5, it was clear to me we had run into a brick wall. We had no more ideas about where these hard drives were than we did a few days before, so I formally asked the Department of Energy if I could turn this investigation over to them, and Secretary Glauthier assigned General Habiger to come out immediately to Los Alamos, and he assembled a team of Department of Energy security experts, and the FBI team joined them.
Now, what about the impact of this fire? I am not going to use that as an excuse for this. However, let me just say that it was a traumatic experience for everyone in that area. We had hundreds of families lose their homes, including some of the people that were associated with these programs. They either knew people that lost their homes, family members, et cetera. The stress level was incredibly high. Everyone in the town was evacuated, including my own family, and that is a very stressful event.
Page 22 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Now, I cannot prove to you that people made mistakes. Someone maybe did this with nefarious purposes in mind, but if you are going to have a period in which someone makes a mistake, I cannot think of a period in which a mistake would be more likely than what occurred then, but I am not going to use that as an excuse, but it may help with the investigation.
We are doing a lot to address these problems today. I think I will reserve those to the question and answer period. I would just like to make one closing comment.
The University of California (UC), my immediate boss, UC President Atkinson, has made it clear to me that I am accountable as lab director. He brought in a team not of academics. He brought in a team of specialists that are at my laboratory today, tomorrow and Friday. It includes Bob Admiral Worthime, who many of you know, James Gere, who was a former deputy FBI director, and it includes Mr. Francis Sullivan from the Institute for Defense Analysis, who is a cyber security expert, so we have those three people coming in.
In addition, the UC has a laboratory security panel that was formed after the incident that Chairman Spence referred to last year. That laboratory security panel is again an independent panel from the university of experts headed by Admiral Tom Brooks, who maybe a lot of you know, but he assembled a really outstanding team. They are coming into our laboratory on Monday, and they are going to look at management practices. We have policies and procedures. The question is what are the practices? Do people follow what we say? That is one of the questions that is going to be answered by the University of California.
You know, improving security does not have an end point. In my opinion you do not say well, here is where we are going. We are there, and everything is fine. It is a continuing struggle against a changing world. It is a journey, and we have run into a serious roadblock in our journey at Los Alamos, but it does not mean we stop.
Page 23 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In my opinion, we figure out what went wrong, and we have to move on because I believe our mission is very important to the security of this country, and we do take our responsibilities seriously.
Thank you.
Secretary GLAUTHIER. Now if we could have General Habiger make some observations, too, about the investigation?
The CHAIRMAN. Fine.
STATEMENT OF GEN. EUGENE HABIGER, (USAF, RET.), DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF SECURITY AND EMERGENCY OPERATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
General HABIGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to speak with you and other Members of the Committee about our continuing investigation into the events surrounding what happened at Los Alamos.
I want right up front to echo the Deputy Secretary's sentiments that we will not tolerate security lapses in the Department of Energy. This sentiment was made very clear to me by Secretary Richardson when I came to the department almost one year ago. This sentiment has also been very clearly articulated in numerous security initiatives we have issued over the past year to include timely reporting of security incidents.
Page 24 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I wish to briefly expand on Deputy Secretary Glauthier's chronology of events to include that Mr. Curran and I met with FBI officials in Washington on early in the afternoon of Monday, May 5, or June 5, and it was agreed upon at that time that we would aggressively move out with a joint investigation.
Our joint DOE/FBI team began our first session at 7:00 in the morning, Tuesday morning, the 6th of June, in Los Alamos. We immediately began a series of interviews and searches at Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where it was believed the information might have been moved. We discovered subsequently, based upon numerous interviews and searches jointly with the FBI, that the hard drives in question were not at Livermore.
We have conducted to date over 100 interviews with the FBI, initiated numerous physical searches, and the FBI began their polygraphs today. The investigation is no longer joint, but is now headed solely by the FBI with Department of Energy certified credentialed investigators supporting them.
I wish to close by saying that upon hearing of the incident, the Department of Energy moved swiftly and decisively to determine what happened to this information. These efforts continue even as we meet here today.
Our approach is an aggressive, three phase campaign. First, to find the hard drives; second, determine who is responsible and then take the appropriate actions when we find out who is responsible; and, third, as we go through the investigative process, and I must emphasize we are very early on in that process, that we make the appropriate changes to our policies and procedures to insure that something like this does not happen again.
Page 25 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Anyone else?
Secretary GLAUTHIER. No.
The CHAIRMAN. To begin the questioning, I want to yield my time to the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Thornberry, who chairs a special subpanel on this matter.
Mr. Thornberry?
Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Over the past day and a half, as I have sat through several briefings from these folks, classified and not, I have found myself with exactly the same emotions that Dr. Browne talked about. First it is disbelief and then anger and then pure frustration.
I think part of the frustration that we feel is that a year ago Congress passed a law to restructure the Department of Energy to help prevent incidents just like this from happening, and yet over the past several months the department has drug its feet and looked for all sorts of ways to avoid implementing that law.
As I think back just a year to statements such as Secretary Richardson made in USA Today, May 26, 1999, when he said Americans can be reassured our nation's nuclear secrets are today safe and secure, and then when I look back at some of the comments in the report that the Chairman and Mr. Skelton talked about from the President's own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Page 26 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
You can dust this off, and it still applies today. A year later we still have the same problems, and we still have the same conclusion where the Department of Energy, when faced with a profound public responsibility, and that is in part the source of the frustration I feel.
Mr. Chairman, as you will recall, when we were writing this law a year ago one of the things we did was create a strong central administrator with new authorities so that he could knock heads and clean house if he needed to get this place in shape, and yet when the law was signed by the President he nominated Secretary Richardson to take the job as administrator.
Now, part of the purpose of this law was to separate the nuclear weapons complex from electricity deregulation, from the price of fuel, from refrigerator coolant standards, and yet we have the Secretary, who has been the administrator with these 18 specific authorities that the law says, and he is the one that is responsible for following it out. There is no wonder that we have not seen the kind of improvement we would like.
I have had a number of members ask me. Well, when you were writing this law last year did you not do something about security? As a matter of fact, Section 3232(c) of the law creates a Chief of Defense Nuclear Security, and that chief shall be responsible for the development and implementation of security programs, including the protection, control and accounting of materials and physical and cyber security for all facilities. We put that specifically in the law.
What happened? Secretary Richardson appoints General Habiger, who already has another job, to go ahead and fulfill this job too so that you have the same problem. He has two jobs. You do not have one person focus solely on whether or not the practices and the policies are being followed.
Page 27 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
And so, Mr. Chairman, as our panel has gone around and talked to people over the past year with Ms. Tauscher and the other members of the panel, what we found out is in the field everybody says nothing has changed. Some of them have some new letterhead, but basically after all of these reports, including the President's own report, nothing has changed fundamentally and so we have another incident.
What I am also hearing, Mr. Chairman, is that there are still concerns, as you mentioned, within the Department about whether General Gordon, who has just been confirmed today largely because of this episode, but he has just been confirmed; whether he will have the support in the Department that he is going to have to have.
One of the questions I want to ask, Mr. Secretary, is whether you can give me your personal assurance that the law will be followed, the law will be implemented both to its letter and spirit, and whether General Gordon is going to get the staff and support and cooperation he needs.
Let me give you an example. What I am hearing from the department is he is going to have a total of five people to help him. That is opposed to Undersecretary Menez, who has nine, and that the word has gone forth that he is to be relatively isolated and not to receive the kind of cooperation he needs.
Let me just get to another question, and then I will get you to answer that if I could. You mentioned that the Secretary has said that he is going to appoint a new commission to study all of this. I have great respect for Senator Baker and Congressman Hamilton, our former colleague. I do not really think what we need is another study to add on to a stack of studies that have been gathering dust.
Page 28 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
What we need is action. What we need is to have the law that Congress has passed to be implemented, and until you do that we are not going to have a chance to change the culture that needs to be changed, and that is why I would like for you to address whether the law, both the letter and the spirit of the law, are going to be implemented.
Second, General Habiger, I would like to ask you after the Secretary finishes that question. I understand that a year ago the department developed a system for tracking security violations, both small, little violations that do not matter and bigger ones. I would like to know how many violations we have had in the past year.
Mr. Secretary.
Secretary GLAUTHIER. Thank you. Thank you for those questions. In fact, I think there are many areas of agreement among us. It may seem that we have been moving in a different direction over this year. The differences a year ago when the legislation was under discussion were strong, and we had hoped to try to work things out. Once you passed the legislation, the President signed it, and we have moved to try to implement it.
Bill Richardson has in fact spearheaded the effort to make sure we could find a good, strong candidate for this job, and we are pleased that General Gordon has been confirmed today and that it appears that Congress is going to be able to pass legislation to give him a full three-year term as the first administrator so that he will come in not just at the end of an administration, but be able to come into the job and really get in place and begin to exercise the kind of authority and leadership that we all hope that he will be able to carry out.
Page 29 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Our feeling is that it is important to have a strong National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); that this is going to provide focus and leadership and some continuity across our national security programs. We also want to see General Gordon as a part of the top management of the department and contribute his experience and his wisdom to a range of issues that will face the department.
Your question about staff really goes in part to that. The staff that the Undersecretary will have, General Gordon, within the Office of the Secretary will be similar to that of the other Undersecretary, Dr. Menez. Dr. Menez does not have nine people by our count, but in that area the Office of the Secretary broadly, which is where I sit, as well as the Secretary and our immediate staffs. Both Undersecretaries will have a couple of senior advisors, a couple of secretaries and a scheduler. A small staff.
In addition, however, General Gordon will have an Office of the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will have additional staff, so he is not going to be limited to this small staff. It is a question of where the budget, where the authorities for the overall department leadership go and then the NNSA itself.
We are very anxious to be sure that he has the resources to carry out the job and are going to work to make sure that that is available to him.
Mr. THORNBERRY. General Habiger, how many security violations have we had in the past year?
Page 30 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General HABIGER. Sir, I will get that information. I do not have the exact number off the top of my head, but I will tell you that in September of last year, just like I did at the United States Strategic Command, I implemented as part of our four phase security campaign a process whereby we would start to get data from the field, which we had never done before in the Department of Energy when it came to security issues.
I will tell you it took me nine painful months to get operational metrics out of military organization, and it has taken me a little bit longer in the Department of Energy, but we are getting there.
While I have not been able to get the data in a form that I can figure out exactly, but I am very, very close, into very specific areas because what does a metric do for you? It shows you where you have problems in certain specific areas, whether it is safes being unlocked, classified documents being left on desks inside secure areas, and once I can figure out what is going on then we can take the appropriate training actions, administrative actions.
I will get that number very quickly to you, sir.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. THORNBERRY. If my information is correct, then it is well over 100. Does that sound reasonable?
General HABIGER. Based upon what I recall, yes, sir. Sir, let me—
Page 31 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. THORNBERRY. And I understand that is from small to big.
General HABIGER. Yes, sir.
Mr. THORNBERRY. It does not tell us everything. This one incident is a whopper.
General HABIGER. You bet.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Now, the—
General HABIGER. That is the biggest whopper we got on the block.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Yes, sir. All right. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Skelton?
Mr. SKELTON. Dr. Browne, you are the captain of this ship. Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Page 32 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. As I understand it, the disks were found missing on May 7. Is that right?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. And on June 6, the Department of Energy and the FBI began their work together? Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. I do not want names, but what type of employee determined that the disks were missing on May 7?
Dr. BROWNE. These were individuals who were directly associated with the NEST program, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team program. They were not senior officials or security people at the laboratory.
Mr. SKELTON. Did they report this to anyone?
Dr. BROWNE. No, they did not.
Mr. SKELTON. Did they report it on May 8?
Dr. BROWNE. No, they did not.
Page 33 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. Ninth?
Dr. BROWNE. No. They did not report it until the 31st.
Mr. SKELTON. They reported it on the 31st of May?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. No names, please, but to whom did they report it?
Dr. BROWNE. They reported it to our security division and also to their immediate chain of command, their line management.
Mr. SKELTON. In the meantime, there was a fire in the area?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. On what day did it start?
Dr. BROWNE. The fire was set as a controlled burn on May 4, and on May 7 it got out of control.
Mr. SKELTON. The laboratory was shut down on what day?
Page 34 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. On May 8.
Mr. SKELTON. And opened again when?
Dr. BROWNE. We began to open it slowly on May 22, letting small numbers of people back to insure that the buildings were safe to reenter, so it was a phase type of reentry to the laboratory.
By the 24th, most of the employees were back in, although some sites were burned seriously enough that people are still not fully back in some areas.
Mr. SKELTON. On what date were you notified?
Dr. BROWNE. The 31st of May.
Mr. SKELTON. The first you ever heard of it?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. Was there anyone between you and those that discovered the missing disk—
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Mr. SKELTON. —notified?
Page 35 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. No. They were not notified either. No one between me and the people who discovered the disks were missing on May 7 were notified until the May 31 time period.
Mr. WELDON. Would the gentleman yield on that point for one moment? Mr. Skelton?
Mr. SKELTON. You bet.
Mr. WELDON. There were reports that it was leaked; that it was not reported initially. It was leaked to the lab leadership. Not reported, but leaked. Is that true?
Dr. BROWNE. Not to my knowledge. I certainly did not know anything until that date. I have never heard that anyone knew.
Mr. SKELTON. You were notified on the 31st. In the morning or the afternoon?
Dr. BROWNE. It was late afternoon, I believe.
Mr. SKELTON. And the next day you reported this to the Department of Energy headquarters?
Page 36 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. The information channel is to the Department of Energy Albuquerque Operations Office immediately from our security division to their security division. I understand there was a phone call made on the evening on May 31 followed up in the morning with a documented paper type of description of the event.
Mr. SKELTON. And the Secretary was not notified until June 2?
Dr. BROWNE. That is my understanding. You will have to check that with the Deputy Secretary.
Mr. SKELTON. You know, we are talking about and you used the phrase this very serious incident. Actually, Dr. Browne, these are the crown jewels of American scientific achievement. Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes, I believe so.
Mr. SKELTON. Were there security cameras in the vicinity of the vault?
Dr. BROWNE. No, there were not, and the reason for that is that the general practice for all security vaults, not just at Los Alamos, but across the Defense Department as well, is not to use video cameras because it represents a vulnerability. There could be signals that are picked up, so all the technical countermeasures people advise against video cameras.
Page 37 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. There was a log. Is that not correct?
Dr. BROWNE. I do not know about that, sir.
Mr. SKELTON. Whether or not there was a log to sign in?
Dr. BROWNE. Oh, a log. I am sorry.
Mr. SKELTON. Yes.
Dr. BROWNE. I thought you said a law. Excuse me.
Mr. SKELTON. Log, L-O-G.
Dr. BROWNE. L-O-G. For those people, there are some of the people in the NEST program who have access to that—
Mr. SKELTON. No, no. That is not my question.
Dr. BROWNE. Oh, I am sorry.
Mr. SKELTON. Was there a sign in log for people to have access to these disks?
Dr. BROWNE. No.
Page 38 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. There was no sign in log?
Dr. BROWNE. No.
Mr. SKELTON. Do you have any way of telling who went in and who did not go in?
Dr. BROWNE. We have knowledge of who goes in these vaults.
Mr. SKELTON. Well, now wait a minute. What kind of knowledge if you do not have a log?
Dr. BROWNE. Well, people—first of all, there is an access list. Not everyone can get into this vault.
Mr. SKELTON. Eighty-six on the access list? Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. The number actually at that point was 83.
Mr. SKELTON. All right. Does not everyone have to be accompanied to get into the vault?
Dr. BROWNE. No, they do not. The people who are on the NEST team who are authorized to have access on their own cognizance to this vault are people who are part of this NEST team who have to be able to access this at any time to be on 24 hour call to respond anywhere around the globe to a nuclear incident.
Page 39 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SKELTON. How many are those? Now, these people that are on the team, the NEST team, do not require anyone with them? Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SKELTON. How many is that?
Dr. BROWNE. That is ten. On the order of ten or eleven. I am not sure exactly.
Mr. SKELTON. Ten or eleven people have uncontrolled access? Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. Excuse me?
Mr. SKELTON. Ten or eleven people have uncontrolled access? Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. There are actually more than ten people who have uncontrolled access to that list. Excuse me. To that vault.
Let me point out something about the vault.
Mr. SKELTON. Wait just a minute. I will do the questioning,—
Page 40 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. Okay.
Mr. SKELTON. —and you can answer. Do you have any idea who went in that vault during the previous month? Is there any list or record—
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Mr. SKELTON. —as to who went in there?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. There is a custodian for that vault. That custodian—
Mr. SKELTON. Does he keep a written record?
Dr. BROWNE. For those people who need to be escorted in the vault, they keep a record.
Mr. SKELTON. How about for those who do not need to be escorted in the vault? Was there a record?
Dr. BROWNE. No, there is not a record.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Page 41 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Stump?
Mr. STUMP. Pass.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Hunter?
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Browne, there is in the vault—we call this the nuclear secrets vault. This is a vault that Wen Ho Lee, the suspected spy, had access to. Is that not true?
Dr. BROWNE. No, that is not true.
Mr. HUNTER. He did not have access?
Dr. BROWNE. He did not.
Mr. HUNTER. You better check with General Habiger because I got a briefing the other day, and I understood he had access during his time at the laboratory to that vault.
General HABIGER. It was Mr. Curran, sir.
Mr. HUNTER. Or to Mr. Curran.
Page 42 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General HABIGER. Yes, sir.
Dr. BROWNE. To my knowledge, he did not have access, but I will have to check that.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. Could you check that for me?
Dr. BROWNE. I will check that, and I will give you an answer for the record.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. There is a vault lady, is there not, a lady who resides in the vault, who if someone comes to the vault opens the vault and gives them access? Is that right?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes. She is the custodian for the vault. The vaults are alarmed, and so she opens the vault, takes the alarm system off, sits there and checks people who do not have authorization to be unescorted in this vault.
Mr. HUNTER. She leaves for lunches, does she not, for up to an hour and a half at a time?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes, and she closes the vault and locks it.
Page 43 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HUNTER. Now, are you certain of that? You better check with—
General Habiger, is that your understanding?
General HABIGER. No, sir. My understanding—
Mr. HUNTER. Okay.
General HABIGER. —is that when she leaves for short periods, relatively short periods, she closes the door, and then you have the cipher lock that secures it.
Dr. BROWNE. Yes, the cipher lock. There is a lock.
Mr. HUNTER. Well now, is the cipher lock for the vault, or is that for the case that the—
Dr. BROWNE. It is for the lock, sir. For the vault. For the vault, so it is locked. It is secured.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. And you have approximately how many people that have access to that lock?
Dr. BROWNE. Twenty-six.
Page 44 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. Twenty-six people have access to the cipher lock?
Dr. BROWNE. Correct.
Mr. HUNTER. When Wen Ho Lee was first ID'd by the FBI as being a possible spy, a suspected spy, that was August of 1997. He was not relieved of his duties and in my understanding continued to have access to the most sensitive secrets until December of 1998, approximately 17 months later. Is that not true?
Dr. BROWNE. I believe that is correct.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. When did you come on, Dr. Browne?
Dr. BROWNE. In November of 1997.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. So you were on. It was during your watch when Wen Ho Lee was suspected of being a thief with respect to nuclear secrets.
Why was he allowed to stay in this sensitive position with access to these secrets for 13 months after the director of the FBI had said get him out of there?
Dr. BROWNE. I was not informed of that statement by the director of the FBI. When I came on as director, I was told that the Bureau wished to keep this individual in place so that they could continue the investigation. That is how it was presented to me.
Page 45 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HUNTER. And to your knowledge, you are saying that he did not have access to the nuclear secrets vault?
Dr. BROWNE. There are several vaults in the organization in the X Division area at the laboratory. I will have to check this particular vault that is involved in the NEST operation. It is not the same vault as what we called the central X Division vault.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. What is the reason for having the vault custodian?
Dr. BROWNE. You want to be able to control movement into that vault of unauthorized people when the vault is open.
Mr. HUNTER. Because she recognizes who comes in, does she not?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct, and she has a list of people.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. When she is gone, even though you have a lock in place, you still have a lock that somebody has to know the combination to.
There is no way of identifying at that point when she is out at McDonalds or the Burger King or wherever for lunch as to who that person is that utilizes the vault, is there? Is that not one of the problems we have right now?
Page 46 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. Well, it is a positive control type of system. You do not just type in a number on a—
Mr. HUNTER. Well, I am asking—let me ask the question. Is that not true? Would you answer my last question?
Dr. BROWNE. Could you repeat it for me, sir?
Mr. HUNTER. Well, if the vault lady is out to lunch for let's say an hour and a half, then you have no way of recording through a photograph or a palm scan or anything else who is actually going into the vault at that point, is there?
Dr. BROWNE. The only—
Mr. HUNTER. There is no record, and there is no log in with another individual, is there?
Dr. BROWNE. There is a record. The person who enters the vault has to call our central guard facility and have to identify themselves not only by their name, but a particular cipher code that they have been given.
Mr. HUNTER. Now, is that to enter the vault, or is that to enter that particular floor?
Dr. BROWNE. No. To enter the vault.
Page 47 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HUNTER. What is the purpose of having the vault custodian?
Dr. BROWNE. Again, the vault custodian is there principally when the vault is open, and you want to insure that no unauthorized person walks into that vault.
Mr. HUNTER. But if you have what you consider to be adequate security arrangements with respect to the cipher lock, why do you have the added value of the custodian? Is that in fact a valuable security tool?
Dr. BROWNE. I think it has to do with the operation of that organization. If people are in and out of the vault who have authorization to be in and out of the vault, the time factor of having to call the central guard station, get it unlocked, et cetera, it would basically congest the ability to do the job during daily operations.
Mr. HUNTER. So, Dr. Browne, that is an important security apparatus, is it not, or important security element to have a real person who can identify real people who may know who are coming into that vault?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Mr. HUNTER. Is that not true?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Page 48 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HUNTER. Then would it not make sense when that person takes an hour and a half break for lunch to have somebody to take their place?
Dr. BROWNE. We do have that situation. There is a backup vault custodian. Now, that does not always happen because people get sick or people take vacations, but there is an authorized backup custodian.
Mr. HUNTER. Now, I was informed in the briefings that I got that when that person takes short breaks or goes to lunch, nobody takes their place.
General Habiger, is that not your information?
General HABIGER. That is my understanding. Yes, sir.
Mr. HUNTER. Well, are you saying it is different, Dr. Browne?
Dr. BROWNE. I will have to check for you, and I will give you an answer for the record, but it was my understanding there was a backup custodian, and this individual is also authorized to perform the same function.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. HUNTER. Now, let's get this straight for the record. You are telling me that you are not sure of that, but you are going to find out about it?
Page 49 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. I am going to.
Mr. HUNTER. My understanding is that person takes breaks, and nobody fills in for them.
Dr. BROWNE. Let me check that for you.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay. Now, while you are checking that, check this also. Are you telling me that a guard is called even if the vault custodian is out to lunch? The guard is called and must be called by anyone who enters the vault?
Dr. BROWNE. Otherwise the alarm system will go off. That is my understanding. Is that not correct?
Could I ask my director of security that question?
Mr. HUNTER. Yes. Go right ahead.
Dr. BROWNE. It is Mr. Stan Busboom.
Mr. BUSBOOM. Thank you. The situation is that the alarm would go off when the vault is secured, so that would be not during business hours. During business hours it has been referred to as a cipher lock.
Mr. HUNTER. You better pull that thing in so we can hear you.
Page 50 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. BUSBOOM. During business hours we are referring to a cipher lock, I believe, which does not set off the alarm. So you open in the morning, and you close in the evening.
Mr. HUNTER. Precisely. So, Dr. Browne, you are wrong. You vault is not locked and unlocked every time somebody goes in. It is opened one time by a guard, not while the vault lady is at lunch.
Mr. BUSBOOM. It is locked and unlocked, sir. It is unlocked using a different lock, a cipher lock.
Mr. HUNTER. But not with a call to the guard?
Mr. BUSBOOM. That is correct. Not with a call.
Mr. HUNTER. So you do not have to identify yourself to a guard to get in. Is that not right, Dr. Browne, now that you are refreshed on this?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes. I stand corrected.
Mr. HUNTER. Dr. Browne, let me ask you this. You know, when we had this theft, the Wen Ho Lee theft, you heard the statement that Mr. Thornberry made, very strong statements and commitment by the administration that the American people could rest assured that their nuclear secrets were safe.
Page 51 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
It appears to me that you had inadequacies in your safety system that would result in the resignation or firing of a good Wal-Mart security manager. Did you go down and did you check which vaults—you say some vaults—Wen Ho Lee did have access to? Did you check to see if the locks were changed after he was identified as a foreign spy?
Dr. BROWNE. I think that is an inappropriate statement. He has not been identified as—
Mr. HUNTER. Well, after he was suspected. Did you think that justified changing the locks in places where he was allowed to go and had the lock system down?
Dr. BROWNE. During that period, there was a discussion of changing the locks. This was before my time. This was in like 1996. There was a discussion about preventing him from having access to the central vault, the main X division vault, and that action never occurred.
It was blocked because the people in the chain of command from Los Alamos to the Department of Energy were not read into the case and so they denied the approval, is my understanding of adding a positive type of device that would prevent someone from getting into the vault.
Mr. HUNTER. Okay, Dr. Browne. I know my time is up, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for allowing me to go as far as we have gone with this.
Page 52 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I would like you to report to the Committee which vaults, if any, Wen Ho Lee had access to, and I was briefed at least one time that he had access to this vault, and which lock changes were made, if any, as a result of his identification as a possible thief of nuclear secrets. Could you get that for us?
Dr. BROWNE. I will. Certainly.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Spratt?
Mr. SPRATT. Dr. Browne, the questions so far seem to have assumed that these two disks were taken from the vault, but the kits are taken from the vault from time to time by the NEST teams, are they not?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SPRATT. Taken out on location?
Page 53 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. Onto the field, correct, for exercises.
Mr. SPRATT. And recently taken to Livermore for some kind of experiment there?
Dr. BROWNE. That is not clear that that happened during that week. I might defer to General Habiger, who has been more closely—
General HABIGER. Congressman, in my opening statement I alluded to the fact that when we began on Tuesday, the 6th, we were not sure. We sent people to Livermore, and we have assured ourselves that the kits in fact, a kit in fact, did not go to Livermore.
Mr. SPRATT. Did not go to Livermore.
When the kit goes out—well, has the kit been out in the last several months out of Los Alamos or out of the lab at least?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes. It is my understanding that things have been removed for different drills and exercises. That is a fairly typical movement three or four times a year at least, the vault, to go out to the field.
Mr. SPRATT. Now, when the kit is out in the field, would it not be possible for somebody to extract the disks from the kit at that time and not return them?
Dr. BROWNE. Certainly possible.
Page 54 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SPRATT. Is there any inventory kept by a third party and non-member of the NEST team, a custodian, of the kit and its contents when it goes out and of the kit and its contents when it comes back in?
Dr. BROWNE. I do not know the details of the NEST program. That is a limited access program that the exact security details of how they handle the material once it is off our site becomes the responsibility of the team when they are in the field, but I believe my understanding is they check it when they go out. The team members check it when they go out, and they check it before they ship it back. It is shipped by military aircraft or—
Mr. SPRATT. The team members self-inspect and self-verify?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SPRATT. There is no third party which—
Dr. BROWNE. Not to my knowledge, but I would have to check because, as I said, it is the responsibility of the national team.
Mr. SPRATT. These are computer disks, magnetic disks. They can be copied, can they not?
Dr. BROWNE. They are hard drives.
Page 55 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SPRATT. Hard drives.
Dr. BROWNE. Hard drives. The actual hard drive of the computer.
Mr. SPRATT. And they could be copied, could they not?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Mr. SPRATT. So while they are away from Los Alamos, what is to prevent them from being copied? Is there some sort of dual control process where one team member keeps watch over another or anything that prevents these things from being taken, copied and reinserted in the kit?
Dr. BROWNE. Not to my knowledge.
Mr. SPRATT. Now, for clarification, as I understand it, these disks are used in the system that detects or reads the radiation from an object to determine exactly what sort of nuclear device might be contained within it?
Dr. BROWNE. The information is actually used to help the people on the NEST team assess what they find when they get in the field.
Mr. SPRATT. It is reading solely the radiation signature of an object?
Page 56 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. It is part of that, but we have to be a little careful of what we go into in an open session.
Mr. SPRATT. Okay.
Dr. BROWNE. It is related to that.
Mr. SPRATT. Okay. Okay.
Dr. BROWNE. Could I make a point, Mr. Spratt? One thing that I think is not totally understood about this material. This is secret RD material. Secret RD material is not accounted for according to government rules across the entire government and has not been since 1992 or 1993, in that time frame.
Mr. SPRATT. What do you mean, not accounted for?
Dr. BROWNE. You do not—before that time we had each copy of every piece of secret Research and Development (R&D) information labeled with a serial number that identified who the owner was of that document or that piece of equipment, and you inventoried it on a regular basis, and when you transferred it to somebody you signed a transfer form saying I am giving you this document. Not a copy of it, but this document with this serial number goes to you.
We lost that ability in the early 1990s across the government. This is not top secret information. We account for top secret information at our laboratory and elsewhere in the DOE with strict accountable serial number, number of documents, et cetera.
Page 57 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SPRATT. So this is secret and not top secret information?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. SPRATT. Could you, if you had the disk, backward engineer the design of a weapons system, of a nuclear warhead?
Dr. BROWNE. I think we would like to defer that one also to a closed session, if possible.
Mr. SPRATT. General Habiger, have you specifically inspected or overseen the security arrangements and protocols that surround the NEST team's operations?
General HABIGER. I have since the 6th of June, sir. We have put out policies over the past year that encompass NEST team operations.
As this is very early on in the investigation, we have discovered some things that we need to look at very carefully, and one of those is the technology that allows encyclopedic amounts of data, even though it is very secret, not to be required to be controlled. I will tell you, sir, that we are going to change that. We are going to—
Mr. SPRATT. Does it concern you that the kits go out in the field with these disks in them which might be copied?
Page 58 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General HABIGER. No, sir. It happens at the Department of Energy on a regular basis.
Mr. SPRATT. It has to, I guess, for the kits—
General HABIGER. Yes, sir.
Mr. SPRATT. —to be usable?
General HABIGER. Yes, sir. If it was top secret there would be an entirely different set of rules.
Mr. SPRATT. What about some sort of dual watch process and—
General HABIGER. For secret information, sir, it is not applicable. The Department of Defense also uses the same procedures.
Mr. SPRATT. So, both of you, this is secret information, so it is not likely design data then that was downloaded from the highly secure computer to Wen Ho Lee's personal computer? It does not fall in that category of gravity and sensitivity?
Dr. BROWNE. I believe it does, but that information was also secret RD, not top secret.
Page 59 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SPRATT. That was not top secret information?
Dr. BROWNE. It was not.
Secretary GLAUTHIER. Congressman, one of the things we are exploring is whether or not we need to elevate the classification levels of some of those data.
Mr. HUNTER. Will the gentleman yield for one—
Mr. SPRATT. Sure.
Mr. HUNTER. Just one point. Just the fact that it is secret and you are not mandated to have these controls does not mean you should not out of common sense have the controls. What is your answer to that?
Dr. BROWNE. There are controls, Congressman Hunter. It is the—
Mr. HUNTER. But I am talking about the kind of controls Mr. Spratt is talking about.
Secretary GLAUTHIER. I think the answer is you are right. It does not mean we cannot do it, and those are some of the potential changes that we are going to be looking at in the next several days.
Page 60 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SPRATT. Is it a fact that you mail these disks in the mail from time to time, a classified secure mail, United States mail, though?
General HABIGER. Yes, sir, it is. As a matter of fact, because of the department wide rules—I mean government wide rules—allow classified material to be sent via U.S. postal express mail.
We have taken a more conservative approach. We had an incident that I got into early on in my tenure, and the Department of Energy no longer uses express mail. We use registered mail.
Mr. SPRATT. But still you use the mail nonetheless?
General HABIGER. Just like every other agency does, sir.
Mr. SPRATT. Yes. Let me ask you two final questions quickly. General Habiger, would you have done anything differently if you had not been dual hatted, if you had not had the arrangement, the institutional arrangement, that the Secretary prescribed for you to fulfill two functions? Would you have done anything differently with respect to this case?
General HABIGER. No, sir, not at all.
Mr. SPRATT. Finally, what would it take? What sort of system would it require to prevent this from happening? You must be asking yourself that. What should you have had in place that would have prevented this kind of occurrence? Do you have an answer to that?
Page 61 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. Well, I think raising the accountability of documents and of materials like hard drives would help because I believe when you know your name is associated with a serial number or something, whether it is a piece of paper or a piece of material, a hard drive, whatever, it changes your attitude, and so for me that is something that will not guarantee that someone who is intent on doing something will not do it.
That is always the situation. I do not think you can ever have a foolproof mechanical system, countermeasure system, that cannot be somehow broken by someone, but if you raise the barrier to a high enough level where either they cannot easily do it or it will be detected when they do it, I think it strengthens the overall system.
Secretary GLAUTHIER. If I might add to that? I think the specific questions about access to information and about chain of custody, about logs, inventorying, things of that sort are among the recommendations that we are actively exploring and this question about the potential for elevating the classification level for some sets of data.
Mr. SPRATT. One final question, Mr. Glauthier. When was General Gordon's name sent to the Senate for confirmation?
Secretary GLAUTHIER. It was actually announced by the Secretary at about the 1st of March when the NSA went into implementation, but it was not officially sent to the Senate until the clearance process of the White House was completed sometime in April.
Mr. SPRATT. Thank you.
Page 62 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Bateman?
Mr. BATEMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am appalled. You sit there and describe what is on these hard drives as being of some very, very special significance to our national security, then dismiss questions on the basis ho-hum, it was secret. You did not have to treat it as routine secret if you in fact knew that it was of extraordinary importance to our national security. That irritates me.
Dr. Browne, it irritates me that you know so much less about the subject matter we are discussing today than I would think someone in your position and with the experience in your agency should know. I think it is remarkable that you do not know specifically whether or not Wen Ho Lee did or did not have access to this particular vault.
I am interested that you say that the people who discovered the absence of the hard drives were non-senior people. Did some senior person tell them to go to the vault and check out whether the hard drives or anything else was missing from these kits, or did they just think well, it might be a good idea to do it, but having done it waited for weeks before they told anyone else?
Dr. BROWNE. No. They did it for the right reasons. With the fire threatening the laboratory and that building, they took responsibility as a member of that team, of that NEST team, to go get that kit out of that building and move it to another secure facility farther away from the fire. I think that was a responsible action.
Page 63 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. BATEMAN. I think it was, too. I think it would have been responsible, if they were not senior people, that some senior person would have told them to do it. They did do it. They just did not get around to telling anybody anything was missing. That strikes me as very strange.
This access business. When the custodian is there, anyone can come in.
Dr. BROWNE. Not anyone.
Mr. BATEMAN. Suppose someone who is not authorized just happened to walk through and she is there. She just tells them go away?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Mr. BATEMAN. Suppose four or five people come in at the same time. No one is logged in, and she cannot keep all of them under observation as to what they are doing. Can any one of the five not do anything they want to or walk in or out with anything they want to?
Dr. BROWNE. If these are people who are already on the access list, then they can go in.
Mr. BATEMAN. Suppose they are people on the access list who do not require accompaniment, but there is someone who is on the access list who can be there if accompanied. Are there sometimes both classes of people who are in the vault at the same time?
Page 64 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct. The people who have to be escorted again have to be escorted by either the vault custodian or by someone who is on the authorization list to have access all the time.
Mr. BATEMAN. How big is this hard drive?
Dr. BROWNE. It is very small. It looks like a pack of cards.
Mr. BATEMAN. What premises are there for it being wherever it is; that is, stolen, misplaced, lost? What are the theories? What are the hypotheses that are in play here?
Dr. BROWNE. Could I defer that to General Habiger, because he has been closer to the investigation?
Mr. BATEMAN. Certainly.
General HABIGER. Lost, stolen. Lost, misplaced or stolen. Those are the their hypotheses, sir.
Mr. BATEMAN. If the hypothesis is that it was lost, what scenario would you write as to who lost it, how it got lost, where it got lost, when it got lost?
General HABIGER. Sir, I could answer that in closed session.
Page 65 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. BATEMAN. Okay. I assume you would have to do the same as to ''misplaced?''
General HABIGER. Yes, sir.
Mr. BATEMAN. And you would have to do the same if it was ''stolen?''
General HABIGER. Yes, sir.
Mr. BATEMAN. Do you have a leading theory?
General HABIGER. I personally have one, yes, sir, and I would share that with you in a closed session.
Mr. BATEMAN. Okay. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Pickett?
Mr. Snyder?
Ms. Tauscher?
Ms. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Page 66 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. Browne, prior to May 7 were you in compliance with DOE security policies regarding the vaults?
Dr. BROWNE. In compliance? Yes.
Ms. TAUSCHER. So if you were in compliance with DOE policies regarding the security of the vaults, then this is a failure of policy?
Dr. BROWNE. That is one way to look at this. I guess one could also make the comment that one should always look beyond policy to see what one could do to prevent something from being lost if the policy is inadequate.
Ms. TAUSCHER. But clearly the second piece of this is the failure of the procedure to have the NEST team, upon finding that they could not find the hard drives on May 7, to inform the chain of command so that there was a high alert set and some immediate investigation launched, so there were two pieces to this?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Ms. TAUSCHER. But you were in compliance with policy?
Dr. BROWNE. My understanding is that all of the procedures were in place to follow the policies. There is some indication that some individuals—the practices were not followed by individuals.
Page 67 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Ms. TAUSCHER. But is that about the care, custody, control of the hard drives, or is that about the, you know, red alert status that should have happened when it was discovered that they were missing?
Dr. BROWNE. My understanding is that it had to do with how complete the log of who was in the vault at what time was; in other words, there may have been some individuals who did not follow the DOE and laboratory procedure to log in appropriately.
Ms. TAUSCHER. But is it safe to say that generally you were in compliance with the policies; that there was not some grand design put out there for you to have much more redundancies, much more of a state-of-the-art care, custody and control of these hard drives or that vault that you were not complying with?
Dr. BROWNE. No. That is correct. We were.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Okay. General Habiger, if it is true that the policies of the labs were absolutely adhered to and there may have been some breaches in procedure, I assume that you have on the drawing board a whole new set of plans for how to secure these vaults and the secrets generally?
General HABIGER. Yes, ma'am. Let me characterize what has happened here to an aircraft accident, a commercial aircraft accident.
The manufacturing company, Boeing, General Dynamics, whatever, goes to a great deal of trouble to engineer and build an airplane that is very, very safe. Things happen. Unfortunately, people get killed. As a result of that accident, you change things with the airplane.
Page 68 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I would put our policies up, security policies, against any in the government, but something has happened so we will make the appropriate changes.
Ms. TAUSCHER. The other three labs, do they all have the same policies vis-a-vis their different comparable vaults as the policies that were in place—
General HABIGER. Yes.
Ms. TAUSCHER. —on May 7? They all have the same?
General HABIGER. They are Department of Energy policies. There could be some differences. The laboratories can be more conservative, but they can never be less conservative than what the basic policy says.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Why would we have, for example, a lab, hypothetically, that had much more conservative policies and not create a uniform standard that was the most conservative?
General HABIGER. Because the basic policy we feel is adequate. Now, I will tell you that at Lawrence Livermore there is a similar NEST team. I have directed that we look at their policies above and beyond the standard, and if there is some good business practices there I guarantee you we are going to apply them to Los Alamos.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Okay. Dr. Browne, how many vaults does the Los Alamos Lab have?
Page 69 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. I will have to check with—seven.
Ms. TAUSCHER. And do they each have policies that are similar to this, or is there a band width because—
Dr. BROWNE. No. There is a standard policy for the whole laboratory. There are close to 100 vaults in the whole laboratory.
Ms. TAUSCHER. When was the University of California informed, Dr. Browne?
Dr. BROWNE. The same day that the Department of Energy was informed.
Ms. TAUSCHER. And that would be on the 1st? The evening of the 31st, the morning of the 1st?
Dr. BROWNE. I believe they were actually informed on the 1st.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Okay. When they were informed, you informed them?
Dr. BROWNE. Correct.
Ms. TAUSCHER. And then you informed DOE?
Page 70 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. No. I actually informed DOE first.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Is that the prescribed procedure?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes. Yes, it is, because in my position as director I am viewed as an officer of the university, so an extension of the office of the president, and they look to me not to wait to talk to the office of the president before I act. They expect me to act immediately with the Department of Energy
Ms. TAUSCHER. So in fact when you were informed on May 31, it was the de facto that the University of California was informed—
Dr. BROWNE. Yes. Certainly.
Ms. TAUSCHER. —because you act for them?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Was there something that the University of California, regardless of whether it is you or someone else, might have, could have, should have done, in your opinion?
Dr. BROWNE. With regard to the—
Page 71 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Ms. TAUSCHER. Informing DOE.
Dr. BROWNE. Informing DOE? I wish we could have informed them three weeks earlier. That is the major point here. I think once the information got into our management's hands, the normal apparatus worked very quickly.
It was the delay that has impeded I think the progress that we might have been able to make if we had the information. We could have had an investigation going even during the fire. We could have had an investigation going.
Ms. TAUSCHER. But if you did not know, then UC in effect could not have known?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Browne, I am still intrigued by the question Mr. Hunter asked you about the vault lady. We have talked about it a whole lot whether she goes to lunch or takes any kind of a break, for that matter, that she is not relieved by someone else.
I thought in all like situations you have to be relieved by somebody else before you can leave and I thought in that important a job, but you say that you do have backup ladies to take over, but they are not used all the time?
Page 72 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. BROWNE. I believe that is the case; that they are not used all the time; that the cipher lock is used when there is no backup, when there is no vault custodian present. Then the vault is locked with this cipher lock. Not this alarmed lock, as I was corrected.
The CHAIRMAN. That cipher lock, does that identify the person who is entering the vault?
Dr. BROWNE. No, it does not.
The CHAIRMAN. But the lock has to respond to the identification that that person has, does it not?
Dr. BROWNE. That is correct.
The CHAIRMAN. It does not have any way of reconciling those two to tell you who the person is?
Dr. BROWNE. At that point in time, no, it did not. The individual just indicated like a personal identification number like when you have a credit card and you put your credit card in and you put a personal identification number in.
This individual would have a code that they would know was assigned to them, and they would type it in, something to that effect, that type of system.
Page 73 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The CHAIRMAN. With all the technology we have, certainly there has to be some machine somewhere that reconciles these two and gives the name of that person.
Dr. BROWNE. Yes. What I have directed our security division to put in place is a system that would read your badge, so you have to have that identification, read your hand, which is a unique indicator of an individual.
My understanding is that this is one of the most accurate ways of biometrics where you look not just at a—you do not look at the fingerprint. You look at the actual outline of a person's hand, and you are identified then by the two together, and it records when the person moved into the vault and who they were. That is what I have directed to have installed on all our vaults.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Weldon?
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Browne, is it true that No. 2 is the kit that is missing, that had the missing devices?
Dr. BROWNE. Yes.
Page 74 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. WELDON. Is it true that on May 2 and 4, the NEST team was involved in an exercise, and, if they were, was Kit No. 2 used?
Dr. BROWNE. To my understanding, it was not used.
Mr. WELDON. Is that for sure, or you do not know?
Dr. BROWNE. I will have to defer again to General Habiger.
General HABIGER. It was not used.
Mr. WELDON. It was not used?
General HABIGER. No, sir.
Mr. WELDON. General Habiger, has anyone questioned any of the NEST members to see whether or not one of them picked it up initially, felt that something was missing and left it there? Are you aware of that?
General HABIGER. I am aware of all the investigations, sir. Could you rephrase your question?
Mr. WELDON. Yes. I am asking the question is the NEST, when they went to pick up the kits, the first one they picked up they knew something was missing and put it back down and took the other two or other one?
Page 75 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General HABIGER. Oh, yes, sir. What they did—
Mr. WELDON. So they knew then something was missing?
General HABIGER. On the 7th of May.
Mr. WELDON. This is May 2 to 4.
General HABIGER. Sir, the 7th of May at 2300 hours. The kit was never taken to Livermore.
Mr. WELDON. I did not say it was taken to Livermore. I said did you ask one of the NEST members if when they went in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th they picked the kit up, felt something was missing and put it down and took another one?
General HABIGER. Sir, I have not heard that.
Mr. WELDON. Has anyone asked that question?
General HABIGER. Yes. Yes, sir. The FBI and the Department of Energy did a very thorough evaluation of what went on not the 2nd, 3rd or 4th, but the previous week as they were getting ready to go on the exercise to Livermore.
Mr. WELDON. So on the—
Page 76 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
General HABIGER. The kit was never taken on the exercise.
Mr. WELDON. I know it was not taken. My question is did an employee pick it up, realizing that perhaps there was something missing in that kit and, therefore, did not take that kit?
Secretary GLAUTHIER. Congressman, we probably would have to answer this in more detail in a closed session. There are a number of materials there, and I do not believe one could identify the missing weight you are talking about, given the overall weight of the whole package.
Mr. WELDON. I just want to make sure that someone has asked an employee if that occurred. That is all I am asking.
You mentioned the size of the item. Would you tell us how many pages are on a hard drive?
Dr. BROWNE. Pages in terms of—
Mr. WELDON. Pages. Information.
Dr. BROWNE. —information? Well, it is like the hard drive on a personal computer that you would have. You can have gigabytes of information, which could be—I do not have a specific number of pages. You know, it is very large.
Page 77 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. WELDON. Millions?
Dr. BROWNE. Possibly.
Mr. WELDON. So this could have been for the sake of the public not one page, millions of pages of documents on our most important national nuclear security materials that this country has? Millions of pages, including information about Russia's nuclear weapons and our nuclear weapons. Is that correct?
Dr. BROWNE. I cannot answer anything in detail about the content of the hard drive.
Mr. WELDON. Was there anything about Russia's nuclear weapons in those? Do you know?
Secretary GLAUTHIER. We cannot answer that in this session, sir. We would have to go to a closed session.
Mr. WELDON. I would suggest, Mr. Chairman, we have a closed session at some point in time to discuss this.
Let me ask Mr. Chairman a question. Was the Secretary of Energy invited to appear here today? Was the Secretary of Energy invited? He was invited?
Page 78 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I need to get an answer. The staff back here is saying yes. The staff there is saying no. Was he or not? He was invited. Why is the Secretary not here? Did we get a reason? Does anyone know why he did not show up?
Secretary GLAUTHIER. The Secretary I believe offered to be available next week if that would have worked, but we understood that you wanted to proceed quickly. He asked me to come as the person who he has tasked to lead this effort, and I have brought the individuals with me who are directly involved so that you would have the best information that we could provide to you.
Mr. WELDON. My understanding is he also was invited to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, confirmed, and he never showed. Is that correct?
Secretary GLAUTHIER. He did not confirm it. He was invited, and the same situation existed. He offered to appear there next week. We appeared, the people before you now, and were with them this morning to try to provide all the information we could.
Mr. WELDON. Mr. Chairman, for my colleagues, on May 20, 1999, the Secretary appeared before the House Science Committee, which I sit on, and this is what he said regarding his efforts. ''I would just ask you to let me run my department. Give me a year to see if I have performed. Call me up again, and I will appear again to see whether I have initiated the reforms that I said I have had.''
There is nothing more important than this effort. He should have been here. He should have been here with the rest of you.
Page 79 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Let me read some other quotes, Mr. Chairman. Los Alamos press release, September 20, 1999. ''The best review we have ever done. The most impressive inspection we have ever had.'' On to the second paragraph. ''The inspectors judged the laboratory's efforts to safeguard nuclear materials as the best in the DOE complex.''
This is the best? I cannot even walk out of this room down the hall and go to the staff area without punching through security codes.
It goes on to say here that Mr. Pondisky, who did the investigation for DOE, ''You really have a first class operation here. We intend to speak clearly and loudly on the Hill about this audit. It is time all your hard efforts get recognized.''
It is disgusting. Somebody ought to be fired. Somebody ought to be relieved of their job because you have jeopardized the most important secrets this Country has. No should haves, would haves or could haves. It happened, and somebody's head ought to roll.
The CHAIRMAN. We have a vote on right now, so we will break and be right back.
[Whereupon, a short recess was taken.]
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order. We have about 30 minutes before the next vote, so we thought we might go ahead and have a few questions before then.
Page 80 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Ms. Fowler is recognized.
Ms. FOWLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate your starting back up.
I just sit here in total astonishment and amazement at what I have been hearing today, what I was reading the past few days, and I guess I was thinking back—I used to read a lot of C.S. Lewis—to an old C.S. Lewis line that said we scoff at honor and then are amazed to find traitors in our midst, and I believe that is what has been occurring at the labs unfortunately over the past several years. The mentality that we should not have to take polygraphs, you know, we should not have to be accountable, and then we see what has happened time and again.
You know, these rogue nations, they do not have to spend money on weapons development. All they have to do is pick up a briefcase at the State Department or pick up hard drives with the information on them out at DOE, get the information off the computers that are not secure, and they have what they need without investing a lot of money and their own scientific research. It is really disturbing to me.
I want to go back to a comment you made earlier, Dr. Browne, and then also to General Habiger because I was reading the testimony of when you appeared yesterday before the Commerce Committee, and you referred, Dr. Browne, to changes in security procedures that were made in 1993, and then yesterday General Habiger, in answer to a question from Representative Stupak made the statement, and I quote from General Habiger's testimony yesterday, ''Sir, there is no requirement to inventory the disk. As a matter of fact, because of changes in security policies across the entire government there is very little requirement to inventory classified material.''
Page 81 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Could someone explain to me then what in 1993 or 1994 when this occurred, what type of changes were made in government policies as far as protection of security materials, classified materials—
Dr. BROWNE. Yes. This started—
Ms. FOWLER. —and by whom?
Dr. BROWNE. I cannot answer the second question by whom, but it started in the early 1990s and was phased in over a period of years. There were several types of classified information that were included in this openness initiative on the government's part after the Soviet Union collapsed that people in the government at that point felt that a lot of this information—there were too many secrets.
I believe there were some reports that came out that indicated that the government had too many secrets and that we needed to reduce the number of secrets, and so a lot of information was declassified, but also the accountability for documents changed in that 1991-1992-1993 time frame.