Lax Shield for Secrets

The White House can take small comfort from the conclusions of an expert panel appointed by President Clinton to assess the security of the nation’s nuclear laboratories. While finding that the media and a special House committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) exaggerated the damage done by Chinese espionage at the labs, the panel faults the Clinton administration for slowness in repairing obvious security breaches and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson for overstating the improvements that have been made. And it describes previously undisclosed security breakdowns at the labs, including listening devices discovered in several weapons-related facilities in the late 1980s and, more recently, a telephone wiretap installed by an employee.

The report issued by the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was written by a four-member panel headed by the respected former Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.). Ignoring semantic niceties, it bluntly describes the Energy Department as “a dysfunctional bureaucracy . . . incapable of reforming itself.” The report points to “organizational disarray, managerial neglect and a culture of arrogance” in the department and at the labs the department has controlled since 1977, saying that nuclear secrets became vulnerable over the years to espionage attempted by a “number of states.”

The panel proposes putting the labs under the control of a semiautonomous agency within the department, or else into an independent agency. The chronic laxity in security going back to the 1980s described by the panel and in the Cox committee document argues strongly for Congress to consider major change in the labs’ administrative status.

It would be useful to know who planted listening devices in the weapons-related facilities. But it’s more important to learn how that was allowed to happen at sites the American people would reasonably assume are among the nation’s best guarded, and most important of all to be assured that rigorous counterespionage measures will be instituted to prevent such things from happening again. This is not a partisan issue. The penetration of the labs began during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and continued well into Bill Clinton’s. That record supports a conclusion that the Energy Department bureaucracy seems incapable of dealing effectively and consistently with threats to nuclear security.