Lax Security Gave Spies Access to Weapons Labs, Report Finds

Foreign intelligence agents have been granted extensive access to secret U.S. weapons laboratories because of lax security procedures, according to congressional investigators.

In a report to be released today, the General Accounting Office charges that the Energy Department, which operates the labs, has failed to adequately screen foreign scientists who are regularly allowed to visit the top-secret facilities.

The GAO, the investigative agency of Congress, says it has determined that a number of these visitors were affiliated with foreign intelligence services. Investigators did not, however, find evidence that any classified material had been stolen from the labs.

Three Laboratories

The report was prepared at the request of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which has authority to oversee Energy Department facilities. The nation’s nuclear weapons are designed at three department laboratories: Lawrence Livermore in California and Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico.

An aide to the committee confirmed the GAO’s findings and said that the report was part of a continuing investigation of safety and security at Energy Department weapons facilities.

The visitors to the weapons labs came from the Soviet Union and a number of smaller countries suspected of working on their own nuclear bombs, including Israel, Pakistan, Brazil and Argentina, congressional sources said Monday.

GAO investigators compared the names of the scientists to U.S. records of known or suspected intelligence agents and found a number of overlapping names. The GAO said that the Energy Department had failed to conduct even elementary background checks on most of the visitors.

An earlier committee investigation found that officials at Los Alamos, where the first American nuclear bomb was designed and built, improperly declassified more than 100 documents relating to nuclear weapons design. The documents were freely available in the center’s library, which is open to the public, a committee aide said.

Second Investigation

A second congressional panel, the House Committee on Government Operations, has been investigating safety procedures at the laboratories and the Energy Department’s production facilities.

The GAO report comes in the wake of the disclosure of a series of unreported safety violations at the Energy Department-operated Savannah River Plant near Aiken, S.C., where critical fuel for nuclear warheads is produced.

The Savannah River Plant has been closed since August because of safety concerns, leading some government experts to express concern about the nation’s ability to keep its nuclear arsenal ready for use.

“National security has been put at risk” by poor operating procedures at the South Carolina plant, a congressional official said, referring to the halt in the plant’s production of tritium, a key component of all modern U.S. nuclear warheads.

Tritium gas decays over time and must be replaced to keep nuclear weapons operational.

“We are not in a crisis because of the shutdown of the facility, and it would be speculative to discuss if or when such a crisis stage would be reached,” Defense Department spokeswoman Jan Bodanyi said Monday.