Statement by Sen

Statement by Sen. Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, to the House Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs And International Relations Committee on Government Reform

"Our Nuclear Weapons Labs: In Harm's Way" June 24, 2003

Thanks to your outstanding leadership on oversight, Mr. Chairman, this important hearing is taking place today. I am honored to be a part of it. I thank you for allowing me to testify. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continuing interest and commitment to oversight and investigation or O&I.

O&I is an essential part of what we do here in Congress. Putting the public spotlight on ugly problems is the heart and soul of oversight. Today we are going to shine the public spotlight on lab security.

The labs are in harm's way. Security is lax. Our nuclear secrets are not safe. The labs are R&D facilities for weapons grade materials, weapons reactors, weapons design and test data as well as other highly classified information pertaining to those programs. These critical commodities are sought by foreign governments and terrorist organizations bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Chairman, I just don't get it.

The labs contain some of the most sensitive and the most sought after technology in the world today. This stuff should be locked up tight like at Fort Knox and guarded night and day by alert sentries.

To criminals and spies, the labs must be like a candy store with the front door left wide open and nobody at the register. And the terrorists must be licking their chops.

Without swift and decisive corrective action, a lab could easily be converted to a very dirty bomb and blown up in our face. This situation is totally unacceptable.

Mr. Chairman, I hope we can work together and keep the public spotlight focused on the problem until we create enough pressure to get it fixed.

I am new to this inquiry. You, by comparison, have had the General Accounting Office (GAO) working on lab security since October 2001. We didn't officially team up until May 22, 2003 when we co-signed a letter to the GAO. We directed the GAO to expand its ongoing investigation to address a broader range of issues, including management oversight of internal security investigations.

Mr. Chairman, I didn't intend to get involved in lab security. I was drawn to it by necessity.

Over the past 8 months, 5 whistleblowers from two labs have come to my office with a laundry list of horror stories. Four of the whistleblowers were fraud, waste, and abuse investigators; one was Operations Chief of the Protective Force.

All have been threatened with reprisals and removed from their jobs for committing truth. The information they have given me is compelling. I could not turn my back on these brave soldiers for the truth. I had to get involved and help.

Once the information began pouring into my office, I started writing letters to Secretary Abraham. So far I have sent him five letters. My letters to Secretary Abraham summarize the most egregious allegations. There is a list of 102 different security investigations. These were conducted between 1997 and 2003.

For the most part, these are aborted investigations - investigations that went no where because of orders from above.

I will now take a moment to highlight the most egregious cases I know about. These are as follows:

-Several "Little Boy" atomic bombs on public display in museums, including the Smithsonian, contained secret restricted data;

-An FBI surveillance operation captured at least a dozen members of the security force engaging in misconduct on video tape, including sleeping on duty; Members of protective force can earn up to $110,000.00 a year with overtime; At that price, they should stay awake;

-A member of the guard force was caught on FBI video tape stealing computer components; and later sold them to supervisors at below market prices;

-Sensitive facilities - like inside the reactor area - and the SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] are left unlocked and/or unalarmed at night;

-Activated alarms in highly secure areas trigger no response; Guards simply re-set alarm circuits in command center and make no attempt to investigate possible intrusions; An evaluator performed jumping jacks in a nuclear reactor area to activate alarms and test guard response, but there was no guard response;

-A classified hard drive containing weapons research data is missing from a vault;

-Master keys providing access for everything right up to the glass doors of the reactors "went" missing from guard force custody at two labs; Locks never re-keyed at one lab;

-The same security gate turnstyles costing $25,000.00 each were repeatedly sold to the lab for $50,000.00 each, netting $3 million in cash to cover excessive guard force overtime;

-Vice President David Nokes allegedly ordered the destruction of a hard drive that is critical evidence in an ongoing investigation of gross misconduct in the highly classified "5900" area SCIF; The hard drive was first destroyed with a magnet and then a sledge hammer; the hard drive allegedly held nude photos involving two employees - [----]; the photos were taken with a digital video camera brought into the SCIF area without clearance or authorization; [----] is described as "con man and professional computer hacker;" He established unauthorized computer links in and out of SCIF and is known to have planted an unauthorized intercept-type software - called Spector Key Key - in some management computers;

-A Verizon maintenance van parked inside a classified area was stolen at 5am and crashed through perimeter fences in what is characterized as a "high risk" exit; The van was discovered in the parking lot of a nearby Home Depot store; There are no clues as to why the van was stolen, but its theft coincides with the disappearance of a classified Sun computer system from the SCIF; Investigators were unable to check alarm data because protective force radio and telephone recording system was turned off;

-FBI sting operation recovered large numbers of stolen lab lap tops and CIA computers from Doctor Dan's chop shop in Albuquerque; computers are stripped of serial numbers, chopped up and re-sold; computer losses at one lab are estimated at $700,000.00 per year; the prime suspect - [----] - is still employed at the lab;

-And now there is plutonium missing at Los Alamos

There is a very disturbing pattern that cuts across all of these aborted investigations. I call it the common denominator. It is buried in the culture. It tempers management's response to every security problem. It is an attitude - a state of mind. And it's really bad news.

The culture stands in the way of accountability, corrective action, and effective security. It is the single most significant problem at the labs.

The typical management M.O. at the labs works something like this: Quash the investigation; Sweep it under the rug - fast; And shoot the messenger. One source says the lab M.O. is: "deny everything and make counter accusations." Revelations about security breaches are an embarrassment to the lab. They are suppressed at all costs and never reported up the chain of command.

Mr. Chairman, if you have doubts about the existence of the culture today, just check lab Vice President Don Blanton's All-Hands video address on April 16th. I have it right here in my hand.

Mr. Blanton trashes the whistleblowers who came to my office when they were unable to get their concerns about security addressed internally. He trashes them in front of the whole department.

And he trashes the whistleblowers after the lab President, Paul Robinson, had publicly praised them for having the courage to "bring these issues forward by other means" - that is, directly to Chuck Grassley.

When his derogatory remarks leaked out, Mr. Blanton was forced to make a public apology on May 9th. Mr. Chairman, if you think we have seen the last quashed lab investigation, I have news for you. There appears to be more cover-up work in progress right now - today.

I am talking about the Bay Report completed on June 4th. It's 80 to 90 percent pure whitewash. The Bay Report is supposed to be an independent look at the aborted security investigations.

It examined five of the most egregious cases and concluded that only one of five "was clearly obstructed or impeded." The rest are fine. I don't buy it. The Bay Report does not say one word about lab security.

It is a personnel report on two whistleblowers. It concludes that there was no real retaliation - only the "appearance of retaliation." If it looks and smells like retaliation, it is retaliation. I fear that management will now use the Bay Report to broom the whistleblowers into the dustbin of history.

In this environment, there is no incentive to connect the dots. Dots are key pieces of information investigators must connect to solve crimes - like putting a puzzle together.

Focusing on one dot is the specialty of lab managers. For instance, according to sham lab reports, the missing set of master keys was mere carelessness. They were inadvertently left in someone's gym bag and forgotten for 11 days - even though computers are disappearing right and left with no evidence of forced entry.

The stolen Verizon Van was written up as routine auto theft.

Nude photos taken with an unauthorized camera and downloaded on to a hard drive in the SCIF was nothing more than run of the mill employee misconduct.

To current management, the van stolen from a classified compound crashing through perimeter fences at 5am is mickey mouse stuff - pranks.

Lab President, Mr. Paul Robinson, characterizes some of these issues as "monkey business." A management team that has a healthy respect for security would assume that the master keys could have been taken in the furtherance of some other crime - like theft of government property - or theft of sensitive information - or even espionage.

The nude photography that surfaced on the hard drive in the SCIF could have been part of an elaborate scheme to conceal espionage activity. It could have been a clever distraction operation. An unauthorized camera in or near the SCIF is a red flag.

What about the illegal intercept software that was planted in all the labs' computers by a person known to have suspicious connections? Two years have passed, and it still hasn't been checked out. Why?

The Cox report makes it crystal clear that our nuclear weapons labs - Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, and Sandia - are targets for China's "long-term, ongoing intelligence collection effort." The Cox report is a wake-up call - if I ever heard one.

Management needs to start thinking "outside the box." Management needs to start considering worst case scenarios and react accordingly.

When Sandia's authorities learned about the missing keys, for example, a counterintelligence sweep should have been conducted for "bugs" in sensitive areas. None was conducted.

The alarm data should have been analyzed for unexplained intrusions in sensitive areas. None was conducted.

Why wasn't the alarm data for the night the van was stolen checked for unexplained intrusions? Everything I read in the newspapers tells me that foreign agents are already inside the labs.

The Cox report warned us they were coming and that they would keep coming. I think we have to assume they are there. We have identified some of these agents, but there must be others we don't know about.

When the presence of foreign agents is coupled with missing keys for every lock at two labs; and unauthorized photography is going on in the lab's most sensitive area, the SCIF; and a van is stolen from a classified area at 5am and crashes through perimeter fences and coincidentally a classified computer is missing from the SCIF; and top management calls it "monkey business," I fear the worst.

There are gaping holes in the security net, and we don't know where they are. Security breaches at our nuclear weapons labs is nothing new, Mr. Chairman. It's an old story.

Four years ago, the Rudman report recommended the creation of a semi-autonomous agency to address the problem. That led to the creation of the National Nuclear Security Administration - NNSA.

NNSA is supposed to be THE FINAL ANSWER. Its primary mission is to tighten security at the labs. But I am not sure that any of the 2,391 NNSA employees know it. The NNSA mission statement doesn't say it.

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