Disappearance Puts Lab in the Spotlight

With his deep suntan, Corvette and parties on his houseboat, Ronald K. Stump never fit the conservative image of a $45,840-a-year nuclear chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

So it came as little surprise to colleagues that after he disappeared in April, 1987, he turned up at a Club Med in Sonora Bay, Mexico, teaching water skiing and leading bicycling tours.

Stump, 45, vanished as lab officials began to question his work and his finances. Those questions led to his indictment in March on a charge that he bilked the lab out of $250,000. The chemist-turned-playboy fled again a month ago, just as Mexican police were about to arrest him at the request of federal authorities in San Francisco.

“We have suspicions where he might be headed,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Rodolfo M. Orjales said, though he declined to be specific.

Orjales told The Times that the Mexican police were “extremely close” to arresting Stump at the resort. Authorities here believe he was tipped about his impending arrest. The San Jose Mercury News reported that Stump departed in a Ford Bronco, ski boat in tow, only 20 minutes before authorities arrived, and left behind a Cadillac, a second boat and a motor home.

While authorities continue their search, details of the case have emerged in court records, congressional testimony and interviews with colleagues, who describe Stump as a fast-living free spender. He lived so far beyond his means that he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1980 after having taken out four mortgages on his home.

“The guy would live like a hermit for a couple of weeks, save up his money and have an absolute blast--rent a fancy car, buy fancy champagne,” Livermore chemist Chuck Morris said.

Richard Crawford, another colleague, described him as “incredibly good-looking and incredibly athletic . . . the kind of guy that would be very effective working at Club Med.”

‘Flamboyant’ Life Style

Even before he disappeared, Stump’s style drew the attention of Livermore security officer Timothy Mitchell. The officer told a congressional oversight committee looking into the matter in June that he suspected Stump financed his “flamboyant” life style through the sale of drugs or the sale of classified information--neither of which has been proved, despite investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies.

In the federal indictment, Stump is accused of engineering the sale of a spectrometer, a sophisticated electrical device used by the laboratory to analyze radioactive tritium for use in nuclear detonations and lasers. The lab bought the spectrometer in 1986 with federal Department of Energy funds on the strength of Stump’s recommendation--from a company owned by a former co-worker of Stump’s.

The U.S. attorney said in a separate civil suit against Stump that the device is useless, having “only trivial salvage value,” and accused Stump of receiving a $125,000 kickback from the company that sold the machine.

The lab’s reaction to Stump’s disappearance brings to the fore questions about how it handles potential security breaches, a serious matter given that, along with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore is responsible for designing the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

Highest Security Rating

“This raises questions about national security. If they are stealing government property, one wonders if they are not stealing government secrets, which are much more valuable,” said Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), who chairs a subcommittee that oversees the national labs.

Stump spent 26 years, his entire career, at Livermore. He had a Q-clearance, the lab’s highest security rating, and had access to some of the most sensitive sections of the facility. Because he was responsible for analyzing tritium used in weapons tests at the Nevada test site and in the lab’s massive Nova laser, he routinely played a role in and was aware of important research.

Despite the sensitive nature of his work, the lab did not notice anything unusual about Stump’s disappearance for days and failed to report the apparent fraud involving the spectrometer to law enforcement officers for almost a year.

In March, with only 20 days remaining on the statute of limitations, lab officials turned the Stump file over to the U.S. attorney in San Francisco. Stump’s single-count indictment on a charge of defrauding the government was handed up on March 30, with only one day to spare.

Congressional Role

“That was outrageous,” said prosecutor Orjales. “Our office pulled those people out of the fire.”

Stump’s case might have gone unnoticed altogether if congressional investigators early this year had not looked into the conduct of another investigation at the lab, one into drug usage, and discovered an internal memo about Stump and his spectrometer.

Dingell’s subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations convened hearings in June focusing on what some lab security officers thought was the premature termination of the “Operation Snowstorm” drug investigation in 1986. The lab also was criticized for its handling of the Stump affair.

“The lab seemed completely disinterested in whether he was involved in potential espionage, what the potential damage to national security was if he was missing, which he was,” said committee staff member Clifford Traisman.

”. . . Only when the subcommittee urged them to look into these things did they start looking into them, and that took two months.”

On April 20, a year after Stump disappeared, the lab finished an assessment of the national security threat posed by the chemist, finding that he had no “information of national security significance.”

“Because much of his work was done outside of normal daytime work hours, he had even less access to classified information; classified documents were not left out, parts were not available for visual observation, and potentially classified discussions between staff were not being held,” V. Alan Mode, deputy associate director of the chemistry department, said in his report.

However, congressional staff said in a June 14 memo to Dingell subcommittee members that the laboratory’s “analysis was misleading because it understated the true breadth of Stump’s sensitive access.”

However, Chuck Latting, FBI spokesman in San Francisco, downplayed any espionage threat, saying: “That does not seem to be paramount in anybody’s mind.”

Christopher Gatrousis, head of the chemistry department at Livermore, which is run by UC Berkeley under contract to the Department of Energy, said: “People with a Q-clearance don’t necessarily have total and free access to nuclear design information. There’s no need to know.”

Resident Expert

Stump, who has a master’s degree from the University of the Pacific, worked in the lab’s Tritium Facility, where he was the resident expert in the use of spectrometers to analyze tritium. Tritium is analyzed to ensure that it is of the required purity and amount before it is used in the laboratory’s massive Nova laser, or in nuclear bombs detonated at a Nevada weapons test site.

In February, 1982, the Tritium Facility needed a state-of-the-art light isotope mass spectrometer, one capable of measuring precise quantities of tritium. Because of Stump’s expertise, the procurement department asked him to write specifications for the machine and provide a list of manufacturers.

Among the four companies Stump listed was one that had never produced such an instrument. The company was Quantum Mechanics Corp. of Sonoma. The company’s president was Stump’s friend and former lab employee Edward G. Walter.

At the time, Walter held a $10,000 fourth mortgage on Stump’s home in the form of a demand note, which gave Walter the right to demand payment at a moment’s notice, according to documents in Stump’s bankruptcy.

No Payment

Officials would not speculate about whether Walter used the loan as leverage over Stump, or which man initiated the alleged fraud. When Stump went bankrupt, Walter apparently did not receive any payment.

When the bids came back, Stump’s recommendations ensured that Walter’s company won. The price tag was $250,000. But what Quantum Mechanics delivered that autumn, said prosecutor Orjales, was an obsolete model that it had purchased years earlier for about $60,000--from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Although he was unable to make it work, Stump signed a memo that the instrument “meets specifications and is acceptable.” Stump, meanwhile, received three checks totaling $125,000 from Quantum Mechanics, according to the U.S. attorney’s suit against him.

Eventually, Stump’s superiors, impatient for the machine to come on line, assigned a chemist to assist him. Trapped by his deception, Stump abandoned the laboratory.

Sofa-Sized Device

“He felt the hot breath of the whole system coming down on him,” said Crawford, who helped evaluate the machine after Stump disappeared. He found that it did none of what Stump claimed it did. The sofa-sized device is now stored as evidence, awaiting Stump’s arrest and trial.

Walter’s alcohol-related death in 1985 robbed prosecutors of the only other likely suspect in the kickback scheme. Quantum is now under new management. Its attorney, Richard Urdan, said the company cooperated with investigators, adding: “I don’t anticipate that the company will be implicated in any way.”

When he left the lab, Stump told people he was going in for cancer tests. Friends said Stump had confided that he doubted he would live past 50, given a family history of cancer. Many believed this explained his frenetic life style.

But by the end of April, 1987, when days had passed without his contacting his superiors, lab authorities tried to contact him. Mode said the chemistry department followed lab policy by notifying the security office as soon as they realized he was gone. Mode said he doubted that he would act differently if a similar situation came up again.

“I could give you a nice answer that is totally self-serving,” Mode said. But he added: “We handled it appropriate to the information we had at the time on an employee who had apparently gone out ill with a legitimate excuse.”