Security Official Quits Over Weapon Lab Controversy

Notra Trulock, the intelligence official who triggered the federal government’s investigation into suspected Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, resigned Monday amid growing controversy about his handling of the case.

Trulock said in an interview he quit because the Department of Energy’s inspector general last week issued a report that failed to back him up and hold senior Clinton administration officials accountable for security failures at Los Alamos. He called the report “a whitewash” and said, “I think the time has come for me to move on. I’ve done all I could do here.”

Trulock has come under mounting pressure in recent weeks as two government reports and a growing number of intelligence and security officials sharply criticized him for singling out Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese American physicist at Los Alamos, as the government’s prime espionage suspect.

Three officials who participated in various stages of the investigation have said they believe Trulock and FBI agents focused on Lee largely because of his ethnicity. At least three other Energy Department employees have filed grievances against Trulock for alleged discrimination and retaliation on the job.

Trulock’s resignation as the department’s deputy director of intelligence--he was demoted last year after serving as director of intelligence for four years--is the latest twist in a year of charges and countercharges about Chinese nuclear espionage.

At least five high-level government reviews have concluded that China’s intelligence service has targeted U.S. weapon laboratories and succeeded over the last two decades in obtaining some information about the design of nuclear weapons, including the W-88, the United States’ most advanced warhead. The Central Intelligence Agency, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and two congressional inquiries also have concluded that security and counterintelligence at the nation’s weapon labs have been lax.

But most of the experts who have looked into the suspected Chinese espionage have concluded that it is not clear exactly how much classified data China has obtained or where the information came from. There is also a continuing debate about the value of the information and whether China has used it to update its nuclear arsenal.

Trulock has been a central figure in the espionage probe and an influential proponent of the view that China stole significant secrets from Los Alamos. When the allegations became public early this year, leading Republicans in Congress accused the Clinton administration of dragging its feet and hailed Trulock as a hero for drawing attention to security lapses at the weapon labs.

In March, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson fired Lee from his job in Los Alamos’ top-secret X Division for violating security regulations by transferring classified files to an unclassified computer in his office.

Lee, a Taiwan-born nuclear physicist and U.S. citizen, has denied passing secrets to China and has not been charged with any crime. The Justice Department is considering whether to prosecute him for violating security procedures. But federal officials have acknowledged that they have no evidence that would warrant charging him with espionage.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in May, Trulock expressed no reservations about the government’s evidence, comparing the possible loss of nuclear secrets at Los Alamos to “the Rosenbergs-Fuchs compromise of the Manhattan Project information” at the end of World War II.

In June, however, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board criticized Trulock and other investigators for focusing almost exclusively on Lee when there was no solid evidence that he, or anyone else at Los Alamos, was the source of classified information that China had somehow obtained about the W-88.

Even sharper criticism was leveled at Trulock last week by Robert S. Vrooman, the former chief of counterintelligence at Los Alamos, who said Trulock and federal investigators had singled out Lee as the government’s prime espionage suspect because he is a Chinese American.