Senators Lambaste Richardson

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson came under attack at a Senate hearing Wednesday as lawmakers advised him to resign, saying that he has broken a promise he made last year to ensure that secrets are safe at the nation’s nuclear weapon labs.

“This is just one more potentially catastrophic security failure which has become an all-too-familiar pattern of security failures at the Department of Energy,” Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Richardson at a hearing on the disappearance of key computer hard drives at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

“Mr. Secretary, as I’ve said publicly, we are holding you accountable,” Warner said. “These incidents happened on your watch.”

Testifying before the committee, Richardson confirmed reports that the hard drives, each containing highly classified data about nuclear terrorism, are believed to have vanished months earlier than previously believed. But he said that human error, not espionage, was at fault.

After interviewing dozens of people and conducting a string of polygraph tests, investigators still are uncertain about precisely when the two drives disappeared, Richardson said. He said that the FBI now “puts the loss . . . at the tail end of March.”

Until this week, officials had said that the drives were inventoried in a Los Alamos vault April 7.

The drives were discovered missing from the highly secured vault in the lab’s X Division last month, but the disappearance was not reported to senior lab managers or the Energy Department for 24 days. The drives are used by members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, a group assigned to respond to accidents and terrorist events involving nuclear devices.

Richardson acknowledged in his testimony the seriousness of the security lapse but defended actions he has taken to deal with the matter.

“In two years I’ve done more on security than has been done in the last 20 years . . . ,” Richardson said. “We have to find a way to balance science and security.”

Richardson said the FBI has determined that the two hard drives found Friday behind a copy machine are the missing ones. He said that the FBI had found fingerprints at the scene and on the external wrappings of the drives.

A grand jury has been convened to look into whether any law had been violated in the case, he said.

“I am particularly angry at how long it took the laboratory to inform me” that the drives were missing, Richardson said. “The Energy Department procedures were not followed in this incident, so it is taking some time to assemble all the facts.”

Richardson called for patience from lawmakers who have been calling on him to declare that he will fire employees over the affair.

“We have moved aggressively . . . but I will not take action before I have all the facts before me,” Richardson said. And he added: “I will not rest until I know what happened.”

Until the latest security controversy, Richardson had been held in high regard on Capitol Hill and largely escaped direct criticism stemming from another alleged security breach last year at the Los Alamos lab involving Wen Ho Lee, a former lab scientist who has been accused of security violations. Lee has pleaded not guilty to 59 felony counts.

But the controversy over the missing tapes has eroded support for Richardson even among fellow Democrats.

“There’s no tolerance for data of this kind to be missing,” said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee. “The nation wants appropriate people held accountable.”

Republican members of the committee were considerably more harsh.

“You’ve lost all credibility,” Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Richardson. He suggested that Richardson resign, saying: “Mr. Secretary, we need strong and consistent leadership at the top. It appears to me that we don’t have it.”

Warner said that he plans to introduce legislation calling for an examination of whether operation of the labs and of other nuclear weapon programs should be taken out of the purview of what he called the “dysfunctional” Department of Energy and turned over to an independent agency or the Department of Defense.