Los Alamos Employees Take Polygraph Tests

Federal investigators examined two computer hard drives filled with nuclear secrets Saturday in an effort to determine what happened during the month or more they went missing from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The investigators also administered polygraph tests to some of the 26 people who had untrammeled access to the high-security, X-Division area of the New Mexico facility from which the drives were apparently taken. An FBI spokesman said no results were expected to be released Saturday.

The intensified FBI probe follows Friday’s sudden reappearance of the drives, which were discovered missing in early May when officials sought to retrieve them as a forest fire closed in on the New Mexico weapons lab.

Trouble on Top of Trouble

The disappearance--and mysterious reemergence--of the drives has given the troubled lab another black eye after congressional allegations that China may have stolen nuclear data from Los Alamos and the discovery that former lab scientist Wen Ho Lee allegedly mishandled classified material.

Lee has been charged with 59 felony counts and jailed for allegedly downloading and copying nuclear data from a secure computer network. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is awaiting trial. He was not charged with espionage.

An FBI spokesman said Saturday that a team of experts sent from Washington was expected to verify whether the hard drives, which were found behind an office copy machine at the lab, are in fact the ones that were missing, and determine whether their contents had been copied or tampered with.

The hard drives contain data intended to help the government’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team disarm nuclear weapons in cases of accident or terrorist attack. They include highly classified information about American weapons, as well as those of France, Russia and China.

The drives were found missing on May 7 when NEST officials went to retrieve them from the X-Division vault to protect them from a nearby forest fire. They had last been seen during an April 7 inventory.

Officials said the NEST members did not notify their superiors as they were required to do, instead waiting for three weeks to conduct their own informal search. They finally told the lab’s top administrator on May 31, and he notified the FBI and the Department of Energy, which oversees the facility.

Officials said the fact that the drives turned up on their own suggests that a Los Alamos employee probably had them but did not want to come forward once a furor erupted over their disappearance.

“If these are validated by the FBI to be the actual hard drives, then it is clear they have been in someone’s possession for the entire time and they were trying to find a way to put them back,” laboratory director John Browne told CNN Saturday.

The latest developments provided new grounds for recrimination Saturday.

Speaking at a Florida convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Texas Gov. George W. Bush cited the drives’ disappearance as evidence of the Clinton administration’s willingness to permit a “slow slide to military weakness.”

“America’s nuclear security should not be a matter of lost and found,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said.

Administration officials on Saturday scrambled to cope with the political fallout from the incident. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson vowed that the administration will “continue to aggressively pursue” a criminal investigation.

“We are going to hold people accountable. There are going to people disciplined,” Richardson said.

Already, six Los Alamos managers, including the chief of the emergency response team and the head of the lab’s nuclear programs, have been put on paid leave pending completion of the investigation.

Officials said that 86 people had access to the X-Division vault where the drives were stored. Of these, 26 could enter without restriction and remove material without logging in or out. They said the investigation is focusing on this smaller group.

*

Times staff writer Maria L. La Ganga contributed to this story from Florida.