Secrets, Science Are Volatile Mixture at Los Alamos Lab

Security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, America’s largest nuclear weapon facility, sometimes seems straight from a Hollywood thriller.

Secure phones and special conference rooms are rigged to jam electronic eavesdropping. Heavily guarded walk-in vaults hold top-secret documents. Fingerprints are scanned outside restricted zones. In some areas, visitors are followed into restrooms.

“Secret Restricted Data” is marked on the 48 linked servers that comprise Blue Mountain, the world’s most powerful computer. Hidden portals and sensors check people and cars for smuggled nuclear material. The lab proudly calls its prison-like plutonium storage site “the most heavily guarded four acres in the United States.”

But for all the high-tech hardware used to protect 7 million classified documents from spies, Los Alamos increasingly is under attack by critics in Congress and elsewhere who fear security is left behind when some scientists meet their peers overseas, especially in China.

“The toughest problem is dealing with what’s in someone’s mind, not with protecting classified documents in a file in the lab,” said John C. Brown, director of Los Alamos. “I don’t know how you can have 100% guarantees.”

That’s the challenge the FBI, CIA and other U.S. agencies face as they investigate whether Los Alamos computer scientist Wen Ho Lee passed along nuclear weapon design data in the 1980s to help China build smaller, more powerful nuclear warheads--weapons suspiciously similar to W-88 warheads aboard U.S. Trident submarines. If true, the leak would be a major blow to U.S. security.

Failure to Report Contact 11 Years Ago

Lee, 59, was fired from Los Alamos on March 8, shortly after he admitted to the FBI that he was covertly approached by Chinese officials at a conference in Beijing in June 1988, when he gave a lab-approved lecture on his apparent specialty: “Material Void Opening Computation.” The Taiwan-born Lee had failed to report the illicit contact 11 years ago.

That, plus failing a polygraph test, raised warning flags. Lee worked with about 300 other scientists in the top-secret “X Division,” the chief nuclear weapon design group at Los Alamos. Among Lee’s duties: developing computer codes for W-88 trigger mechanisms.

Lee has not been charged or arrested and has retained his full pension and other retirement benefits. No one answered the door at his home last week, although a television set blared inside, rose bushes were freshly pruned and an aging Oldsmobile with rust spots sat in the driveway. The doorbell and phone were disconnected. His lawyer declined to comment.

FBI and counterintelligence officials say they have no witnesses or hard evidence with which to prosecute Lee or anyone else for espionage. Indeed, despite a three-year investigation, authorities never even collected enough evidence to obtain a court order to tap Lee’s phone or search his home.

“You have to tell the court you have knowledge, evidence, that he is involved in espionage. We don’t have it,” a senior law enforcement official involved with the case said.

The official added that data may have been passed inadvertently. “With a person of that knowledge, you’re picking at his brain,” he said. “That’s the way the Chinese work. There’s no money or threats involved. They would have their nuclear physicist work at him. He would say [to Lee], ‘Gee, this is hard. What would you do about this?’ ”

To be sure, some approaches are far less subtle.

John Shaner, head of international security affairs at Los Alamos, recalled attending a Beijing conference in June 1995, when one of China’s top physicists boldly asked for blueprints for a unique dual-axis X-ray system designed to find defects in nuclear warheads.

Shaner says he laughed. “I told him, ‘It’s not going to happen.’ ”

Overall, security debriefings last year of 200 Los Alamos employees after they returned from official trips overseas--including 21 who went to China--found four who said they were contacted by suspected foreign intelligence agents or were asked to reveal sensitive data, according to Kenneth Schiffer Jr., head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos.

Schiffer said he wants to build a better database of specific information or technology that potentially dangerous nations like China may need, from warhead design to rocket science. The goal is to better warn--and better watch--traveling U.S. scientists. But he admits his solution is late.

“The incident we’re talking about [with Lee] happened more than 10 years ago,” Schiffer said. “We’re staffing up today. That’s an enormous gap.”

Los Alamos Site Looks Like Campus

Part of the problem is Los Alamos itself. Much of the 43-acre site looks more like a college campus than a fortress, and scientists and their guests gather in local restaurants and bars to banter about their work. One official calls the atmosphere “quasi-academic.”

All told, 7,137 full-time scientists work at Los Alamos. But 9,243 people--all U.S. citizens, but including retirees, postgraduate students and others--hold “Q” clearances that grant them access to the lab’s classified materials and restrict what they can say. Higher clearances are themselves classified.

A weapon expert who grew up in Los Alamos confided over dinner that, until he obtained top-secret clearance, he never knew what his father did at the lab. Now his own security clearance is on such a need-to-know level that he cannot discuss his work with his father.

Not everyone is so careful. Los Alamos security officials or the FBI investigated 40 cases last year in which lab workers sent suspicious e-mail, left classified papers out, forgot to lock office safes or violated other rules, said Stanley Busboom, head of Los Alamos security. He said the infractions all appeared to be negligence, not espionage.

Real spying, of course, isn’t new here. The site, a rocky expanse of scrub brush and ponderosa pines high on the slopes of an extinct volcano, was chosen in 1942, during the dark days of World War II. The best minds of the Free World soon were gathered at Project Y, the lab’s wartime code name, to design and build the first atomic bomb.

Secrecy was so tight that birth certificates of newborns then listed their place of birth only as P.O. Box 1663. Mail was censored and the three telephones were monitored. The lab and nearby town remained a secret, closed world, behind high barbed-wire fence and under Army guard, until 1957.

Yet a Soviet spy ring led by German-born scientist Klaus Fuchs secretly infiltrated Los Alamos in the mid-1940s and stole sketches, plans and other crucial information that helped Moscow test its first atomic bomb.

Today has another parallel with the past. The initial group of chemists, physicists and other scientists at Los Alamos included Poles, Canadians, Germans, Swiss, British and Austrians. These days, nearly 3,000 scientists, graduate students and officials visit from around the world each year.

About one-third are from Russia, China, India or 19 other so-called “sensitive” countries. About 275 came from China last year, including about 100 who stayed to do unclassified research at the lab.

That program now may be trimmed, thanks to the Lee case. The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), has urged President Clinton to halt all lab visits from sensitive countries, as well as all visits by lab scientists to those nations, until better counterespionage controls are in place.

Such sweeping curbs, scientists here argue, would be a mistake.

After highly enriched uranium from Russian stockpiles began showing up in Europe in 1994, for example, scores of Los Alamos scientists and technicians began to help secure, monitor and safely dispose of dangerous nuclear materials at about 50 locations in Russia and the former Soviet republics.

“This is a program that is beneficial to us, to the Russians, and to the world as a national security concern,” said Richard C. Wallace, manager of the nuclear materials protection, control and accounting project at Los Alamos.

Los Alamos Experts Travel to China

Lab-to-lab cooperation with China, which is far behind the United States and Russia in nuclear technology, is more limited--and less successful.

About 20 Los Alamos experts have gone to China every year since 1995 in an effort aimed both at bringing Beijing into international arms control and nonproliferation regimes, and at learning about China’s nuclear programs.

The Americans have visited China’s top nuclear labs and its nuclear test site at Lop Nur. They have sponsored workshops on nuclear export controls, verifying the nuclear test ban treaty and protecting sensitive materials.

Last July, for example, 10 U.S. scientists joined about 40 Chinese experts at the China Institute for Atomic Energy complex southwest of Beijing. For a week, they demonstrated special U.S. computer software, cameras, canisters and other gear used to monitor and secure nuclear material.

But Shaner, who led the team, concedes he has seen no evidence that China adopted any of the U.S. suggestions.

“This is not what the Chinese want,” he said. “They’re still after all the technology they can get.”