No Sign Drives Left Lab, Richardson Says

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Sunday there is no evidence that two computer hard drives full of nuclear secrets ever left the Los Alamos National Laboratory where they were stored or that espionage was involved in their disappearance.

The drives disappeared from a vault in the high-security X-Division area of the New Mexico weapons lab in April or early May, only to resurface Friday behind an office copier at the facility. They were flown to Washington on Saturday to be examined for evidence of tampering or copying.

“I believe there’s no espionage. It doesn’t appear [the drives] left the X-Division,” Richardson told NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

Investigators have focused most of their attention in recent days on the handful of Los Alamos employees with unrestricted access to the drives. The investigators apparently believe that members of that group borrowed or misplaced the drives, panicked when their absence was spotted and sought to return them without attracting attention.

“The possibility here is of human error . . . a mistake . . . somebody concerned that they might lose their job and they tried to cover up,” Richardson said Sunday.

Though benign compared with the alternative of espionage, the idea of employee mishandling has done little to quiet the political furor that has erupted over the drives.

In short order Sunday, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence committees said Richardson should consider resigning over the issue and a string of senior Democrats issued scathing comments.

“I don’t believe that he’s the manager that he should be and he’s not the man for this job,” said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate panel.

“I don’t think . . . he’s measured up,” said Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), who heads the House panel.

Richardson rejected the criticism, saying he has done more than any of his recent predecessors to improve security at the nation’s weapons labs.

Richardson said the University of California, which operates the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs under a contract with the Department of Energy, is “going to have some explaining to do.”

“They are very strong on science; they are a great institution, but on security . . . they haven’t done a good job,” he said.

Richardson said that all 26 individuals who had full access to the vault where the drives were stored have undergone polygraph tests. Separately, the Energy Department’s director of counterintelligence, Edward Curran, said Sunday that several of those tested gave “contradictory statements . . . [that] tend to indicate they had some knowledge” of how the drives disappeared and then reappeared Friday.

Controversy over the drives started in early June when Washington officials were told that the devices had been discovered missing more than three weeks earlier, after Los Alamos officials sought to retrieve them as a wildfire closed in on their facility.

Although Energy Department regulations require speedy notification when classified material is missing, lab officials apparently decided to wait until the threat of fire had abated so they could conduct their own informal search.

Once notified, department officials called in the FBI, which sent more than 60 agents to the weapons lab. But the drives turned up Friday in a high-security area of the facility that had been searched by investigators.

The drives contain detailed information about how to disarm the nuclear weapons of four nations, including the United States, and are part of the equipment of the government’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST, a group assigned to respond to accidents and terrorist events involving nuclear devices.

Some of the outrage over the drives’ mishandling stems from the fact that investigators and review panels have criticized Los Alamos for lax security, a problem Richardson and the Clinton administration had promised to correct.

The facility was the subject of congressional allegations last year that China may have stolen nuclear data from its files. In addition, a former Los Alamos engineer, Wen Ho Lee, was jailed for mishandling classified material by downloading nuclear secrets onto an unsecured computer network.

However, some of the outcry appears to be politically motivated. Shelby, the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested that problems at the weapons lab may have gone unsolved because Richardson has been preoccupied campaigning for Vice President Al Gore. Richardson was once thought to have a shot at becoming Gore’s running mate this fall.

How long Republicans can maintain such criticisms seems open to question. The security requirements on secret information like that found on the hard drives was loosened by President Bush shortly before he left office in January 1993.