UC Blames Federal Cuts for Security Lapses at Labs

Breaking their silence for the first time, University of California leaders suggested Wednesday that federal officials who have loosened rules and slashed security budgets should share the blame for security violations at the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories.

Although contrite for their part in security lapses at the labs, which UC manages for the government, university officials noted that cost-cutting pressure from Congress and the Energy Department have forced the labs over the years to scale back security measures--sometimes at the Energy Department’s prompting.

One major example came in 1992, when a budget cut caused the Los Alamos National Laboratory to abandon its elaborate bar code checkout system for top secret data stored in its highly secure vaults.

The absence of that system, university officials assert, was one of the reasons that lab officials could not determine who had possession of two computer hard drives, loaded with highly classified nuclear weapons data, that were missing for at least six weeks from the vault in the lab’s X Division.

“I don’t think it would have prevented someone from doing something illegal,” said John C. Browne, director of the Los Alamos lab. But with the bar code system “we would have had a timeline of who had it last.” The computer drives were eventually found behind a copying machine in the laboratory.

The elimination of the checkout system was just one of many security measures that were relaxed in the post-Cold War era when the labs’ budgets were being cut and their missions being redefined from the traditional role of designing, developing and testing nuclear weapons.

The university has come under blistering attack from Congress and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson for national security violations involving the missing hard drives and the alleged misappropriation of nuclear secrets by Wen Ho Lee, a former weapons designer at Los Alamos who is in jail awaiting trial.

After an extended period of grumbling privately about those attacks, university officials are now airing their grievances in public.

“What some critics of UC’s role have lost sight of is that Washington, not the University of California, is responsible for setting [national security] policy and providing resources,” said UC President Richard Atkinson.

Atkinson said he believes the university’s strong stewardship of the labs will become apparent as more facts become public. When it comes to implementing security policies, he said, “we have been comparable or better than other national laboratories.”

Regent Ward Connerly, echoing a view of many university leaders, complained that the national security scandal has become politicized during this election year, making the university an easy target.

“The university is not asleep at the wheel,” Connerly said. “We understand our responsibilities. We are trying to be as diligent as we can be.”

Several members of Congress have called for terminating UC’s contract to manage the nuclear weapons laboratories in Los Alamos, N.M., and Livermore, in the eastern Bay Area. UC has managed the labs since the first atomic bombs were designed in the 1940s.

Earlier this month, Richardson announced his plans to restructure the university’s contract and shift security and some other responsibilities either to another contractor or to a new joint venture between the government and a private entity.

Under the current contract, UC officials are responsible for implementing a complex array of security policies set by the Energy Department. But UC officials point out that those policies have become looser over the years.

For instance, the Energy Department, under congressional pressure to save money, urged the labs to end their formal accountability procedures for handling all secret documents and computer data. Under the old system, each scientist who generated a document would be held accountable for every copy in circulation.

The Energy Department also nudged the labs to eliminate color-coded badges so that lab officials could easily determine who had access to the most restricted data. Los Alamos has three levels of security: 7,000 employees have secret clearance, only 700 have top secret clearance and 70 have access to the highly restricted data in the vaults.

In March 1999--a year before the hard drives disappeared and as the Wen Ho Lee espionage scandal was going public--the lab directors sent a fax to the Energy Department, urging a return to the old restrictions on classified material, including a bar code tracking system.

Energy Department officials say that the faxed memo got lost at the time in a flurry of recommendations about tightening security.

Although the Energy Department permits UC to have stricter security than the government requires, UC officials point out that the government has not provided money for additional security measures. Since the disappearance of the hard drives, the lab has independently bar coded 66,000 computer disks and hard drives to reinstitute tighter controls.

Browne, the lab director, questioned how the new security arrangements will work if the newly created National Nuclear Security Administration decides to bring in an outside group and puts it in charge of all classified material.

“Who’s responsible for locking the safe at night?” Browne asked. “Who’s responsible for sending an e-mail? It has to be the individuals who create the information.”

Yet Atkinson was optimistic. He said that John Gordon, director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, left him with the impression that he understands the nuances of enforcing security without stifling all scientific work.

“He’s not going to be a cowboy and say, ‘You are going to do it this way, or else.’ I think the scientific community will be comfortable with the way things work out.”