March 24, 1999
The Honorable Warren Rudman Dear Warren: First, let me congratulate you on your recent appointment to lead the bipartisan review of security threats to the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories over the last twenty years. I am hopeful that your review will finally focus appropriate attention on a very serious and longstanding problem that has been ignored, mismanaged, and/or covered up during several Administrations. Unfortunately, your effort is only the latest in a long line of reviews undertaken by, among others, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Department of Energy (DOE) and its Inspector General, the U.S. Nuclear Command and Control System Support Staff, and various Congressional committees, the results of which have been uniformly ignored by the responsible officials. I am also writing to offer you my assistance as you undertake this review. During my 14-year tenure as chairman, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce conducted several classified and unclassified inquiries into this matter. (This letter discusses the unclassified portion of our work.) We found a disturbing pattern of security weaknesses in the contractor-run national weapons laboratories, along with extraordinarily lax oversight by the Department of Energy (DOE). As you may already know, these problems included: laboratories refusing to implement basic security precautions; DOE Secretaries and other officials ignoring repeated warnings of security problems; and bureaucratic obfuscation of the problems that meant that even the National Security Council and the President received inaccurate, misleading information. Although our main focus initially was terrorism and physical security, our concerns soon broadened to encompass other significant security deficiencies and the system’s management problems. The Subcommittee, on a bipartisan basis, sought continuously to bring these problems to light, and to fix the underlying weaknesses, such as the lack of independent security oversight, that allowed problems to persist. This work required a sustained effort over several years, work made more difficult because of the recalcitrance of the contractors running the national laboratories. You should expect significant difficulties in arriving at a full understanding of the problems, particularly if, given your tight deadline, you are forced to rely on those contractors and government officials responsible for managing the laboratories over the last twenty years. The Subcommittee’s work on this matter began in 1981 in response to efforts to undermine independent review of security threats. The Department of Energy’s Assistant Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs had become concerned in 1979 about the level of security at the weapons laboratories. As recommended by the General Accounting Office (GAO) in 1977, and also the Inspector General, he established an independent, inter-agency group that reported directly to him on the adequacy of safeguards at these facilities. This program employed some of the best experts in the country in terrorism, sabotage, protection of classified material and related activities. This group found that the safeguards at the most critical facilities – which included Los Alamos – were in shambles while, at the same time, DOE’s Office of Safeguards and Security was giving the facilities a clean bill of health. However, in 1981, when a new Administration took over, the Assistant Secretary was replaced by a high-ranking official from Los Alamos National Laboratory who immediately shut down the independent assessments program. In 1982, in a classified report to the Subcommittee, GAO strongly recommended (in part because DOE was submitting misleading reports to the National Security Council) the reinstitution of an independent assessment program which would report directly to the Under Secretary of the DOE. Two hearings by the Subcommittee in 1982 and 1983 focused on the organizational problems at DOE and the GAO recommendation. In 1983, the Committee adopted, with strong bipartisan support, an amendment to the DOE Defense Authorization bill establishing an independent Office of Safeguards Evaluation reporting directly to the Secretary. Unfortunately, the bill never received floor consideration. Attempts by the Subcommittee and others in 1983-84 to establish an independent evaluations office within DOE were turned down by the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs, who wanted the evaluations program under his control. Independence was critical because, during the Subcommittee’s work, top officials misled the Subcommittee and harassed a DOE whistleblower. In 1984, the Subcommittee held a hearing on the Department’s attempts to strip the employee’s security clearance and issued a report. The Department rewarded the harassers with promotions, bonuses and medals. In 1984, the Department also terminated an investigation by its Inspector General into management adequacy in the safeguards and security program. The Subcommittee also attempted to alert President Reagan to its concerns. In 1984, however, DOE officials told the President there was nothing to be concerned about. In January 1986, prior to his briefing by DOE on the status of safeguards and security, I wrote a letter to President Reagan listing general problem areas. These included: credibility of the inspection and evaluation program; inadequately trained guard forces; inadequate protection against insider threats; inability to track and recover special nuclear materials and weapons if they were stolen; inadequate protection of classified information; inverse reward and punishment system for the contractors; and lack of funding for safeguards and security upgrades. (A copy of that letter is enclosed.) In response, based on information provided by the national laboratories and DOE officials, Secretary of Energy Herrington wrote of "significant progress" and "improvements," and Admiral Poindexter said he was "impressed with the progress being made." The Subcommittee continued its work during President Bush’s Administration. Among other matters, it looked at inadequate personnel security clearance practices at the laboratories where it was immediately clear that there were inadequate resources to do an effective job. That situation has not changed to this day. The Subcommittee also began to review the foreign visitors program -- as did Senator Glenn, then chair of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee -- and the mysterious shutdown of an investigation into drug problems and property controls at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory At the same time, Secretary Watkins’ Safeguards and Security Task Force recommended establishing independent oversight functions which would report directly to the Under Secretary. Once again, the recommendation was not implemented, although Secretary Watkins did move the Office of Security Evaluation out from under Defense Programs. In 1991, the Subcommittee also reviewed the role the Department may have played in allowing Iraq to augment its nuclear capability. In May of 1989, DOE employees attempted to alert Secretary Watkins to the fact that Iraq was shopping for strategic nuclear technologies. They were not allowed to brief the Secretary. But in August of 1989, three Iraqi scientists attended the "Ninth Symposium (International) on Detonation" sponsored by the three weapons labs, the Army, Navy, and the Air Force. It was described by a DOE official as the place to be "if you were a potential nuclear weapons proliferant." At the time, DOE didn’t even have a nonproliferation policy, and Secretary Watkins was not briefed on the Iraqi threat until May of 1990. In 1991 and 1992, the Subcommittee received six GAO reports critical of DOE’s safeguards and security efforts. These covered weaknesses in correcting discovered deficiencies, incomplete safeguards and security plans, weak internal controls, unreliable data on remedial efforts, inadequate accountability for classified documents, and security force weaknesses. Two other GAO reports noted that even basic control measures for non-classified property were not in place at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, nor was DOE oversight adequate. Subcommittee staff met with Secretary O’Leary and her senior staff in 1993 to outline these concerns. At the time of the Republican takeover of the House in January 1995, when my chairmanship ended, the problems had not gone away, and recent GAO reports find little, if any, improvements. In March of 1998, the U.S. Nuclear Command and Control System Support Staff, an independent, federal-level organization chartered by Presidential Directive to assess and monitor all equipment, facilities, communications, personnel and procedures used by the federal government in support of nuclear weapons operations, recommended once again a high-level, independent office to review safeguards and security at DOE. Many of us in the Congress have tried for years to address the chronic problems at DOE’s national laboratories. You now have the opportunity to take an independent, comprehensive, and bipartisan look at these security weaknesses. Independence from those who have failed to solve these problems – which includes officials at DOE and representatives of the laboratory contractors who implement and establish policies at the labs as if they are academic researchers, not the guardians of our weapons secrets – is essential for your review to accomplish more than the prior reviews. Similarly, the independence of any future evaluations office will be essential to any lasting progress. Your review will not be easy work, but I stand ready to help. With every good wish. Sincerely,
JOHN D. DINGELL Enclosure cc: The Honorable Bill Richardson, Secretary
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