http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-05/06/020l-050699-idx.html GOP Senators: U.S. Bungled Probes of Atomic Spying By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, May 6, 1999; Page A02 Senate Republicans unveiled new evidence yesterday that investigations of the chief suspect in possible Chinese espionage at nuclear weapons laboratories have been marked by repeated bungles over the past 15 years, including at one point the loss of his security file. "I think heads should roll," Don Nickles (R-Okla.), the Senate majority whip, said at a hearing held by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The panel heard testimony in one of a number of congressional investigations into the handling of suspected Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory and other weapons labs. Adding to charges of lax security and improper investigations that have cascaded out over the weeks, the revelations provided further fuel for a growing controversy pitting Republican lawmakers against the Clinton administration. Senators at yesterday's hearing, however, shifted their focus slightly. After previously aiming their wrath at White House aides who they said failed to take the investigations seriously enough, senators looked instead at officials at the Justice Department and the Energy Department as well as the FBI. Nickles, who made a brief appearance at the hearing, criticized the Justice Department for failing to get a warrant to search an unclassified computer belonging to the main suspect, Wen Ho Lee, at his lab work space in 1996. That computer became the focus of investigation after it was learned Lee downloaded highly secret information into it from a classified computer network. "An individual is suspected of being a spy with access to all of our warhead information . . . and we did not get into his computer. This is total incompetence," Nickles said. Speculating that data on U.S. nuclear weapons in Lee's computer "could advance Chinese nuclear weapons programs by decades," Nickles said officials at the FBI and the Energy Department should be held responsible for what he said qualified as a botched inquiry. Lee's lawyer repeatedly has denied his client committed any crime. And according to officials familiar with the inquiry, the major FBI investigation begun in early 1998 has failed to turn up evidence that Lee gave the Chinese anything. In the summer of 1998, after two years of investigation gave no indication Lee had any relationship with Chinese intelligence, the FBI attempted to entice Lee into spying using two Chinese American bureau agents. The so-called "false flag" operation involved the two agents contacting the Los Alamos physicist and saying they were looking for information to help their country. Lee listened, according to sources, and later turned them down. Lee, however, does face the possibility of criminal charges for transferring classified nuclear computer codes to his unclassified computer from 1983 to 1995. And investigators are continuing to study whether some other identifiable party gained access to the material with or without Lee's six-digit password. The major known indication to date that Beijing gained U.S. nuclear secrets is a 1988 Chinese military document that contains data on the exact dimensions and shape of the newest American miniaturized warhead and the weight and explosive yields of a half-dozen other U.S. systems, according to administration and congressional sources. This data, much of which was available in scientific and technical journals in the late 1980s, is still considered classified by U.S. government standards. Feeding the concern of Nickles and others was disclosure by Los Alamos director John C. Browne that Lee, like all employees, had signed a waiver permitting his e-mail and personal computer to be reviewed without his knowledge. Browne said that despite the waiver the FBI and Justice Department in 1996 decided a court warrant would be needed before that step could be taken. Without a warrant, information taken from Lee's computer under the waiver could not be used in any criminal prosecution. While the hearing proceeded on Capitol Hill, computer security officials at Los Alamos disclosed that in 792 attempted attacks on Energy Department computers in a nine-month period ended in June 1998, hackers penetrated the Los Alamos lab's unclassified computer network five times. They could not say whether any of those were into Lee's computer. "All of these attacks involved activities intended to gain password files, probes and scans, as well as actual compromises of DOE computer systems where the intruders gained access," according to an unclassified assessment by the CIA's Counterintelligence Center. Defense Department computer networks, by contrast, experience an estimated 250,000 attacks a year, the General Accounting Office has reported. The overall assessment on cyberattacks, which was mandated by a February 1998 presidential decision, was done to support a counterintelligence plan that began to take effect in January 1999, according to an Energy Department chronology. Directors of the three national nuclear laboratories who appeared at yesterday's energy committee hearing maintained that computer security has been tightened by recent changes and all employee computers are open to search. In addition, all e-mail from the labs passes through a central point and is also subject to monitoring. Republicans, however, viewed the evidence of security lapses in a different light. They maintained that China already has gained access to Lee's data in an espionage coup equal to the delivery of secrets of the first atom bombs to Moscow by the Rosenberg spy ring. Chairman Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) opened the session saying "the loss of our most sensitive nuclear weapons secrets to the Chinese" was caused by officials in the Clinton administration who were "lax, nonresponsive, or just plain asleep at the switch." Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), a major supporter of Los Alamos, disclosed that in 1984 the FBI gave Lee a second polygraph after he showed deception on his first test on questions involving contacts with foreign intelligence services and inappropriate sharing of classified information. The polygraph came as a result of Lee's having earlier phoned another Chinese American scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who in the early 1980s was suspected of giving classified information on the neutron bomb to China. Domenici said Lee was cleared after he passed the new polygraph but information about an FBI and Los Alamos security service probe of him, along with the reasons for his deception during the first polygraph, was not at that time passed on to senior officials at Los Alamos or the Energy Department. It was not until 1989, when Lee's five-year renewal of his special Q clearance was up for review, that the Energy Department at the highest levels learned of the FBI's inquiry into Lee. But a file put together on Lee that was sent to DOE headquarters for security review was lost, Domenici said, and it was not until 1992 that the department hired an "outside contractor to reconstruct the lost Wen Ho Lee file." -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Hacker News Network [www.hackernews.com]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:23:02 PDT