Energy Chief Targets 3 Lab Workers in Bungled Inquiry

Citing a “total breakdown in the system,” Energy Secretary Bill Richardson recommended disciplinary action Thursday against a senior official and two other employees at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for failing to properly investigate allegations of Chinese espionage at the New Mexico facility.

Richardson declined to identify the three. But he said that he was reacting to a long-awaited and still-classified inspector general’s report, which determined that officials never adequately confronted allegations of spying by Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear physicist and computer scientist who was fired earlier this year.

Lee, a native of Taiwan, has been accused of passing U.S. nuclear warhead designs to the Chinese government--a claim that he and his attorneys have sharply denied.

The allegation, separately reviewed by congressional committees in both the House and the Senate, remains unresolved, and it has yet to be decided whether the three-year criminal investigation will lead to Lee’s prosecution.

Richardson called his department’s inspector general’s report a “thorough, fair and independent review,” and his recommendation marked the first potential job actions since Lee was fired in March.

However, lab officials made no immediate commitment to follow through on the recommendation and discipline the lab employees.

“This report makes it clear that Department of Energy political and career management failed to give necessary attention to counterintelligence and security,” Richardson said.

He said that a lack of accountability, poor communication between agencies and other “dysfunctional” behavior created “fertile ground for the problems that occurred during the investigation.”

Richardson added: “There was a total breakdown in the system, and there’s plenty of blame to go around.”

Congressional officials were waiting to obtain the inspector general’s report before commenting on whether Richardson’s recommendation goes far enough to correct problems in how the China spy allegations were treated.

“We identified there were serious security problems,” said one source close to Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), who chaired a House select investigative committee into the matter.

“So this is long overdue. The problem is, we don’t know exactly what it is the inspector general found, who they identified and what steps they have taken so far.”

Federal sources have acknowledged developing no evidence connecting Lee with any purloined nuclear secrets.

Instead, public scrutiny has centered on how lab and government officials went about investigating the allegations. At the heart of that question is whether Lee should have had his job assignment changed to limit his access to classified information and whether lab officials should have cooperated more fully with FBI investigators.

“I’m frustrated that the factual record isn’t clearer about who knew what when about the suspect’s access, and therefore should have acted,” Richardson said.

“There were three lab employees whose responsibilities were clear, and they failed to meet their responsibilities,” he said.

But John Browne, director of the lab, was noncommittal about what will happen, if anything, to the lab workers.

“I will consider what actions to take, consistent with the policies and procedures of the laboratory and the University of California,” which supervises the lab, Browne said in a brief statement.

“I intend to act as quickly as possible. But I must ensure fairness in this process,” he said.