House OKs Legislation to Boost National Security

The House made a start Wednesday on approving some of the recommendations in a House committee report on Chinese pilfering of U.S. nuclear weapons secrets but sponsors said that more sweeping provisions would have to await later action by congressional committees.

By an overwhelming 429-0 vote, House members passed legislation aimed at tightening security at U.S. national laboratories, toughening penalties for divulging classified information and strengthening counterintelligence efforts.

The bipartisan package, added to the defense authorization bill by Reps. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) and Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), is designed to spur Congress to move faster to put reforms into effect. Cox is chairman of the panel that made the recommendations, and Dicks is the ranking Democrat on the panel.

But Cox noted at a press conference that the provisions deal only with a handful of the less controversial of the report’s 38 recommendations for countering Chinese spying and that lawmakers still “have much more to do.”

The Senate already has passed a smaller package of China-related measures and is expected to accept the bulk of the House-passed provisions when the bill goes to a House-Senate conference committee. The House expects to approve the full defense authorization bill today.

The series of amendments, among other things, would tighten security regulations at national laboratories, requiring employees who handle sensitive information to take periodic polygraph tests, increasing penalties for mishandling classified information and allowing authorities to search scientists’ computers.

They also would toughen security requirements at overseas satellite-launching sites, requiring detailed reports on security leaks and setting minimum standards for government security guards who are sent to monitor U.S. satellite launchings abroad.

And the legislation would write into law major parts of a directive issued by President Clinton last year to establish an independent counterintelligence operation inside the Energy Department to guard against espionage in the nuclear weapons program.

Many of those reforms already have been instituted by the Energy Department.

“We can work with” the proposals, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson told reporters after the vote.

Rule Would Affect Private Contractors

Lawmakers also approved an amendment that would make private contractors--such as the University of California, which manages and operates two of the three major nuclear weapons labs--liable for stiff civil penalties if they fail to follow Energy Department rules for safeguarding secrets.

The fines would total up to $100,000 for each violation.

The package approved Wednesday also would impose a temporary moratorium--expected to last only a few months--on visits by foreigners to the national laboratories to give the Energy Department time to put new safeguards in place.

But Richardson said that he opposes even a limited ban on the thousands of foreign scientists who visit the labs each year or are allowed to do unclassified work there.

“The moratorium is something we want to correct” as the bill is considered in conference, Richardson said. He said he is concerned that a two-month moratorium “would send scientists home and they might not return.”

The House rejected, 266 to 159, a proposal that would have extended the ban to two full years, arguing that the prohibition ultimately would backfire by impeding exchanges of scientific information that have helped the United States keep its edge.

Experts inside and outside the national laboratories had warned that barring foreign scientists from exchanging information with their U.S. counterparts would have a chilling effect on the ability of the United States to develop new technology.

Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richardson argued strenuously against a separate proposal to create a new, semiautonomous Nuclear Security Administration within the Energy Department to manage and oversee all the department’s nuclear weapons programs.

“To set up a new agency, a new fiefdom, in a department of fiefdoms, is not what I need,” Richardson said. If the amendment is included in the intelligence authorization bill, he added, “I will recommend that the president veto it.”

In recent weeks, Richardson has publicly vowed that “heads will roll” after he gets the results of an internal inquiry into alleged spying at the Los Alamos lab. He said Wednesday, however, that he rejected the report on Monday because “it did not effectively deal with headquarters personnel.”

Richardson said that he has asked the department’s inspector general for a further “comprehensive” review of the case within 30 days. “There will be disciplining,” he added. “There will be terminations.”

Although Republicans repeatedly have used the Cox report to lambaste the administration over its policies toward China, Wednesday’s House debate was virtually free of any partisan harangue. Only a few Democrats raised concerns about the provisions.

Even so, Cox and Dicks conceded that the most sweeping of their panel’s recommendations are not likely to be considered until they are taken up by various House and Senate committees--a process that is likely to take at least several more weeks.

These include expansion of domestic capacity for launching commercial satellites, a tightening of restrictions on the export of sensitive technology and, possibly, removing the nuclear weapons program from the Energy Department and transferring it to the Pentagon.

Dicks said Wednesday that efforts by both Republican and Democratic administrations over the last 20 years to prod the Energy Department into tightening its security practices had been “a total failure.”

House Votes to Ban Exchange Program

The House passed two other amendments Wednesday.

One, approved 284 to 143, would prohibit U.S. military personnel from participating in official exchange programs with members of the Chinese military--a program begun by the Clinton administration to help ease tensions between the two nations.

The second, approved 227 to 198, would require the Pentagon to recall 503 U.S. soldiers still on duty in Haiti in the wake of the U.S. invasion there in 1993. Proponents said that military officials had complained that the troops were being harassed by Haitians.

The House also rejected, on a vote of 225 to 203, a proposal that would have permitted female military personnel and dependents to obtain abortions in overseas military hospitals if they paid for the procedures themselves.