Mystery of Missing Disks Deepens

The computer hard drives containing nuclear secrets that vanished from a guarded vault at Los Alamos National Laboratory have now been found on the floor behind a copying machine, but the mystery surrounding their disappearance, and the political storm that broke here last week, are likely to continue unabated.

The FBI discovered the drives, and experts have been evaluating them to see if they had been tampered with. But the Energy Department’s announcement late Friday brought only a partial sigh of relief to investigators. According to the brief official statement, the drives were found not in the vault itself, but “within the secure area of X-division,” the top-secret unit where nuclear weapons are designed.

The discovery left officials frustrated. “How did they get back there?” one asked Friday. “How come they were not found before? Had DOE security looked there before? If not, why not? This may open up even more questions.”

It was possible a lab employee had the drives and, frightened by the intensive investigation, planted them behind the machine. During the FBI probe, scientists and workers in X-division continued to have normal access to the area. Though officials had no indication that espionage was involved, they could not rule it out, either, because whoever may have taken the drives could also have downloaded the data they contain.

In 1996, officials of X-division came up with a scheme to cut costs. An electronic palm reader would be installed to replace the two guards who controlled access to the X-division’s vault. This was the same vault from which the two hard drives temporarily disappeared.

Four years ago, security officials watching Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwan-born scientist whom they suspected of spying for China, thought the palm reader would be an excellent way to solve another problem. They wanted to limit Lee’s access to the vault but avoid alarming him. Once the palm reader was installed, several workers, including Lee, would be told they no longer had access to the vault. The lab chief thought the palm reader had been installed, but it never was.

The computer hard drives that went missing from the vault were each the size of a deck of cards. They contain information about the nuclear weapons of the United States, Russia, China and France that could be used by the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), the scientists and technicians trained to locate and disable nuclear bombs in the event of a terrorist threat or an accident.

There were three laptops in the X-division vault, each with removable hard drives and backup drives. Each laptop was stored in a separate suitcase or “kit.” On May 7, two NEST team employees entered the vault to retrieve one suitcase and discovered the drives were missing. The two employees had planned to remove the computer data from the path of an approaching wildfire inadvertently set off by a National Parks superintendent three days earlier. The Los Alamos lab was closed down that day, but the loss was not reported for three weeks, a fact that added to the uproar on Capitol Hill over the possible loss of nuclear secrets. Once the Department of Energy learned of the disappearance, it called in the FBI. The bureau began administering lie-detector tests to persons with access to the vault.

Investigators were convinced that whoever took the drives is a lab employee. “It’s virtually impossible for an outsider to get into the vault,” said one official. “Forget the Tom Cruise scenario [in “Mission: Impossible”]. It had to be someone on the inside.”

Despite the enormously embarrassing disappearance, officials took some comfort from a number of factors. First, the drives were recovered. Also, investigators said, they do not contain Sigma-14 information on how to actually detonate a bomb. The data on the drives are designed to enable NEST members to disarm one.

Moreover, investigators, so far at least, do not believe a spy stole the drives, because, as one official said, “A spy would download the information so that we would never know. Why take the drives if you can just steal the information?”

Many of the scientists at Los Alamos were upset last year when Energy Secretary Bill Richardson ordered employees to take lie-detector tests in the wake of the Lee affair. “It could be a disgruntled person upset about the Wen Ho Lee case,” one official speculated. Lee, who says he is innocent, was not charged with espionage. He was arrested in December, and is being held in solitary confinement awaiting trial on 59 counts of mishandling classified information. The government contends he downloaded nuclear secrets from a secure computer onto 10 tapes, seven of which are missing.

The drives in this episode contain detailed information about U.S. nuclear weapons. The information about the nuclear bombs of other countries is believed to be less detailed, because it is based on intelligence information. It includes drawings with weights, yields and dimensions, but not detailed information about the inner mechanism of the Russian, French and Chinese bombs. According to one administration official, the drives contain enough information to allow NEST team members to recognize a foreign weapon, so that Department of Energy specialists on that weapon can be called in to advise the team.

One intelligence expert said the drives do not contain data about the most sophisticated U.S. nuclear weapons, such as the W-88, the warhead that sits atop the missiles on the Trident submarines. That is because NEST officials reason that a terrorist would be unlikely to obtain such heavily protected weaponry but might somehow come into possession of an older U.S. or perhaps Russian nuclear bomb.

Even now that the drives have been found, this scandal has cast a shadow over the political future of Richardson, an admired congressman who as a Cabinet member has been buffeted by one problem after another. Richardson, who is on the short list of Al Gore’s possible Democratic vice-presidential choices, first had to cope with the Lee case, which preceded his appointment to DOE. Then rising gas prices this year hit Americans just as they planned their summer vacations, and now the missing nuclear secrets. A plague of grasshoppers may be next.

Republicans were quick to attack Richardson, seeking to pin the blame on him for all the troubles at Los Alamos. “This incident occurred on his watch. He’ll have to be made accountable,” thundered Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was furious when Richardson skipped a Senate hearing last week. Shelby said Richardson might have found time to attend “if the secretary would spend less time trying to get the vice president elected.”

Officials here were at least hopeful that investigators would solve the mystery of how the drives vanished in the first place. Meanwhile, they could only hope that the X-files were simply misplaced behind the copying machine and have not been read by a spy, a thief looking to sell them or, worse yet, a terrorist.