Nuclear Secrets and the Culture Wars

...Maturity dates may vary...

...Wen Ho Lee had access to the hydrodynamic codes and sub-codes at the laboratory...

...In 1985, Energy Secretary Herrington initiated the most massive increase in security spending at DOE in two decades...

...China's sharing of missile technology with North Korea and nuclear technology with allies such as Pakistan raises entirely new security concerns for U.S...

...They put the pedal to the metal for us," he says, referring to Congress's and the administration's orders to match the Brezhnev-era Soviet build-up by accelerating weapons production in the eighties...

...These mobile missiles can also be adapted to carry W-88 type warheads...

...Edward V. Badolato, Herrington's deputy assistant secretary for security affairs from 1985 through 1989, was told one of his first tasks at the Energy Depai tment was to evaluate the security problems first-hand...

...Tritium's radioactive half-life is seven-anda-half years, so as a result of Watkin's decision, unless the U.S...

...Assistant Attorney Fimberg's grand jury returned criminal indictments against three Department of Energy weapons plant officials and five contract employees...

...Until then, defense planners had dismissed China's nuclear arsenal as sixties-era technology, amounting to a small number of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could not support multiple warheads...

...Her new- team of political appointees, many drawn from the ranks of the anti-nuclear movement or extremist environmental groups, were eager to ferret out and disclose the department's secrets...

...Intelligence insiders expect the publicly disclosed assessments to be a whitewash...

...WHO HELPED WEN HO LEE...

...One measure of the failure to respond can be found in a November 1997 General Accounting Office report...

...O'Leary's actions were destructive to depaitment morale...

...The guys making the nuclear weapons felt like they were the bad guys, and they really got the short end of the stick," recalls Bergen...

...One result of the close cooperation between DOE and the FBI was Operation Tiger Trap, a sting to draw in and thwart foreign spies before they got past Operation Cerberus's sentinels...

...The vigilance was thorough...

...Even then, fabricating a workable nuclear device like the W-88 is a significant engineering achievement requiring advanced technology— technology to which Wen 76 May 1999 • The American Spectator...

...And Bergen says it would have been easy to give a foreign intelligence agency access to the codes: "all you do is download it onto a computer disk....there was nothing in place that prevented people from walking out with floppy disks in their briefcase...

...Rocky Flats' senior managers were gathered inside one of the hundred buildings sprawled over four hundred acres at the Department of Energy complex...

...Another senior O'Leary appointee, Tern- Lash, was drawn from the Illinois state environmental protection agency...

...In addition to academic conferences, foreign delegations also visit U.S...

...During John Herrington's tenure as Energy secretary in Reagan's second term, Chinese efforts to infiltrate Energy Department facilities were constant and persistent...

...Ambassador Lilley confirms Deacon's account...

...Since at least 1993, Trulock "appealed to the urgency of security," according to Del Bergen, a former high-ranking scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory...

...Sessions's tenure as FBI director was less than six months old at the time of Operation Desert Glow...

...Badolato's recommendations resulted in Operation Cerberus, a 81.5-billion comprehensive security program...

...By the end of the Bush administration, Watkins had fallen out of favor, particularly because of the seemingly open-ended financial commitments he was making with state governments to mitigate clean-up costs and environmental claims from nuclear weapons production...

...The FBI chose to launch the operation on the forty-fifth anniversary of D-Day's Normandy Invasion, almost as if to herald the end of the World War II Manhattan Project which spawned Rocky Flats and 57 other sites around the country involved in nuclear weapons production and research...

...The new management culture looked upon those same executives and scientists with a mixture of suspicion and disdain—as, at best, useless relics of the Cold War...

...In addition, China is upgrading its silo-based nuclear missiles...

...The situation virtually invited foreign intelligence services to redouble their efforts to recruit nuclear spies...

...The details remain classified, but Badolato confirms that Tiger Trap snared "a lot" of would-be nuclear spies...

...In one case in the eighties, a man carrying classified information had second thoughts during his overseas flight...

...CHINESE EXPERT S VISITING U.S...

...The story of China's early nuclear spying is told in Richard Deacon's 1974 book, A History of the Chinese Secret Service...

...The ultimate casualty of the W-88 espionage scandal may turn out to be the Department of Energy itself...

...The FBI also kept close tabs on scientists traveling overseas...

...intelligence community...

...Brewer, who is now with the nuclear power investment holding company Brewer-Hanzlik Nuclear Partners, testified that the national security functions of the Energy Department should be split off and given to the Defense Department...

...The W-88 nuclear theft is not the first time China has raided U.S...

...I can tell you as a fact that the Chinese visiting scientists would consistently ask, 'Do you have any Chinese-American scientists here...

...started in the seventies, when the PRC established a mission in the U.S...

...nuclear arsenal...

...The introductions sometimes open the way for efforts to recruit spies...

...According to a Washington Post account from December 8, O'Leary's goal was to expose secrets from "an unresponsive bureaucracy wedded to a bomb-building culture...

...That takes at least a day or two, and exposes the spy to further risks...

...He believes that classified information has been compromised because of the political ideology of the anti-nuclear activists...

...Herrington was incredulous when he learned about the Rocky Flats raid...

...K'ang Sheng, Mao Tse-tung's intelligence chief, built dossiers on Chinese students who had gone abroad in the thirties to study in France, Britain, and the United States...

...But inside DOE, his warnings went unheeded...

...Tsien), an aeronautical engineer with degrees from MIT and Caltech, who operated unsuspected for many years in the United States before being implicated as a spy...

...If the JL-2 missiles are armed with W-88 type multiple warheads, each Chinese submarine can carry up to 8o nuclear warheads...

...John Dingell (D-Mich...

...We don't know if there's a mole in Los Alamos...

...Sessions promised he would...

...What would a decline in the stock market do to your stocks, mutual funds and retirement accounts...

...Our own government, giddy with the prospect of peace dividends and an end to the era of nuclear stalemate, started to see 35 E?" HER DOE's nuclear weapons plants as Cold War fossils, dangerous environmental polluters, or a combination of both...

...One of K'ang's spies was Chi'en Hsue-Shen (Americans often called him G.S...

...facility in Colorado...

...MIB Financial A full service, asset growth and protection company 1 We have something with STOCK MARKET RETURNS— without STOCK MARKET RISKS...

...China exploded its first nuclear bomb in 196o...

...When the Clinton administration persisted in withholding the details from Capitol Hill, Trulock alerted Congress...

...Insiders say that this decade-long assault on the institutional values of the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons complex created a lax security atmosphere that resulted in the most ruinous loss of nuclear technology in any espionage case since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the atomic bomb...

...A key question regarding the theft of the W-88 design is precisely what China acquired from its spies in the United States...

...JOHN B. ROBERTS II is a writer and television producer...

...The GAO found that between 1994 and 1996 there were 5,472 visitors to the national labs from 22 countries on a U.S...

...Call 1-800-575-1566 to find out what your stock broker doesn't want you to know: decided that if he won a second term he would replace Watkins with Shelby Brewer, a former Navy officer and head of the nuclear power program under Reagan, who had made a confidential study of the DOE at the request of Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft...

...China is also modernizing its land-based missile forces...

...AS A RESULT, OUR NUCLEAR WEAPONS COULD STOP WORKING EARLY NEXT CEN TURY...

...a different group knows a lot about the engineering...

...reviews its tritium production, our nuclear weapons will cease to function sometime early in the next century...

...When she took over the department as Clinton's first energy secretary, Hazel O'Leary made clear that she thought DOE had too many secrets...

...The simplest explanation is that China's nuclear spying probably extends beyond anything that Wen Ho Lee is alleged to have done...

...They were only doing what we told them to do...

...I.R.A...

...CHINA'S "SIMPLE WAY" James Lilley, a former CIA station chief in Peking and U.S...

...General discussion with other academicians could have augmented his knowledge beyond his narrow work specialization...

...K'ang's intelligence service played on the Asian cultural trait of extreme family loyalty to enlist spies...

...Assistant U.S...

...The cover story the FBI gave them was that they should all assemble for a briefing on a threat from the environmental extremist group Earth First to carry out a terrorist attack on the plant, which produced plutonium triggers for America's atomic weapons arsenal...

...Instead of heeding Trulock's warnings, O'Leary ordered the department's intelligence division to cease gathering information on anti-nuclear extremists and environmental radicals—such as those responsible for the recent arson at a Vail, Colorado ski resort—who frequently impede shipments of nuclear materials...

...It's a massive operation," he says...

...weapons scientists, like their Russian counterparts, wondering about their futures...

...Rockwell was fined $18.5 million, one of the largest environmental pollution fines in history, second only to the Exxon Valdez case...

...By the end of 1949, he had some 3,500 names in the files, including hundreds of well-placed scientists and engineers...

...But this extraordinary cabinet-level attention was not due to suspicions of foreign espionage at the weapons production facility...

...But it wasn't until Watkins that foreign scientists were invited to join as fellows...

...A new variant, the CSS-4, will have an 8,000 mile range...

...But China's interest was no mystery in the mid-eighties...

...The raids at Rocky Flats were deeply ironic...

...We should identify what really ought to be protected, and build the walls higher around it," explains Troy Wade, who served on the committee...

...Tight budgets and program cutbacks at the national labs after the Cold War left U.S...

...Even after the massive spending and several years' halt in production, the critics weren't satisfied...

...Recent press reports have speculated that our shift from underground nuclear tests to computer-simulated explosions helped the Chinese learn the W-88 design...

...There was insufficient evidence to prosecute him, but he was stripped of his security clearance and eventually went back to China...

...Chinese agents began to "spot, develop and recruit" spies in the Chinese-American community, Lilley says...

...The secretary justified disclosing the secret tests in order, as she put it, to "expose the impact of the Cold War, both in terms of environmental health and safety impacts and also impacts on, if you will, the psyche of the nation...

...Ho Lee did not have access...

...In the summer of 1992, President Bush Are you like most people...

...We know it...

...NUCLEAR FACILIT IES WOULD ASK, "DO YOU HAVE ANY CHINESEAMERICAN SCIENTISTS 36 May 1999 • The American Spectator nuclear weapons researchers...

...Spurred on by Agent Lipsky, Fimberg would eventually take the fight for criminal prosecutions of those indi34 May 1999 • The American Spectator viduals ensnared by Desert Glow to the top levels of the Justice Department...

...If a mouse went through that line," Badolato recalls, "we knew it...

...facilities and meet our THE PRC US ED FAMILY LOYALTY TO E NLIST SPIES...

...Herrington's response was to ask for FBI counter-intelligence agents to be detailed to the Energy Department to work closely with Badolato's teams...

...The American Spectator • May 1999 Now the strategic calculus has changed...

...According to the Office of Naval Intelligence, China is developing a nuclear submarine fleet that is expected to be operational early in the next century...

...It is equally unlikely that Wen Ho Lee was able to give the Chinese sufficient information to copy the W-88...

...The CIA's internal review will be headed by Robert Walpole, national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs for the National Intelligence Council...

...We know this from defectors and from documents...

...This astonishing statistic becomes all the more difficult to grasp when viewed against the history of Chinese spying in the United States...

...facilities to advance its nuclear superpower ambitions...

...Clinton has asked former Senator Warren Rudman, head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to make a full assessment of the damage from Chinese spying...

...Attorney Ken Fimberg would later recall how strange it seemed, sitting in the airplane next to Agent Lipsky during the nighttime surveillance flights, to be spying on a U.S...

...To appreciate their perspective, it's important to understand what preceded Operation Desert Glow...

...The facility produced tritium, a vital component of every nuclear weapon's triggering mechanism...

...government "sensitive" list...

...Riecher drew other environmental activists into the ranks of DOE's mid-level and junior political appointees...

...Fighting espionage was a key element...

...and at worst, environmental criminals and pro-bomb fanatics...

...The evidence is that [Chinese agents] were talking to many people," says Ambassador Lilley...

...At DOE, Lash drew fire from Congress for misusing funds appropriated for nuclear reactor and safety research programs by reallocating the money for alternative and renewable energy grants...

...Such a move would set the stage for eliminating the department's Cabinet status...

...Fimberg, a self-described liberal Democrat and environmentalist who had clerked for the Environmental Defense Fund, was an ardent advocate of Lipsky's operation...

...Trulock was not the only one to warn O'Leary to tighten security...

...Not so, responds another nuclear insider, who describes Watkins as "your typical run of the mill techno-military bureaucrat," and attributes the damage he did to simple "stupidity...

...The waiting executives were unaware that the agents who were already descending on them would thoroughly search the Rocky Flats facilities for eighteen days, guard it twenty-four hours a day, and gather more than 104 boxes of evidence...

...Herrington gave him an overview and urged Sessions to "get read into and briefed up" on the secret side of the department's activities...

...At a reception in California, the former cabinet member confronted the FBI director...

...arsenal, the W-88 warhead...

...The new disrepute of the nuclear weapons profession and the government investigations at Rocky Flats combined with the sudden declassification of long-guarded DOE secrets fostered the perception among nuclear lab employees that security no longer mattered...

...Ambassador Lilley says the second phase of China's espionage against the U.S...

...And you had a culture at DOE that was anti-nuclear...

...Of those visitors, only 892—a mere 16 percent—received background checks before being permitted to enter the nuclear facilities...

...Counter-intelligence agents monitored the lifestyles of those with access to the most sensitive data...

...Secrets can be imparted intentionally, and unintentionally, in the course of conferences...

...We knew what they were up to...

...FBI Agent Jon Lipsky, whose investigative work led to the creation of Operation Desert Glow, was taking no chances that morning...

...Qualified With No Market Risk...

...The FBI was doing an excellent job," Badolato says...

...FBI Director William S. Sessions, Attorney...

...Fully Secured and 21% Fixed Returns on an 18-month program...

...The priorities were wrong," says former Secretary Herrington, "and when that was over you had a secretary of Energy put in there whose priorities were world travel, junketing with businessmen and CEOs, and a huge declassification effort including things that shouldn't have been declassified...

...Inside the U.S...

...Although Fimberg insisted on prosecuting, Rockwell The American Spectator • May 1999 International —which managed Rocky Flats under contract to DOE—spared the individuals criminal trials by pleading guilty to ten counts of violating federal environmental laws...

...But after Operation Desert Glow, the change in atmosphere was detectable...

...But when the plane landed the FBI retrieved the documents and built a case against him...

...Clinton's recent statements, security at the labs was extremely tight in the mid-eighties...

...intelligence community, the targeting of America's nuclear secrets is a well-established fact...

...Herrington still bristles at the government's prosecution of the weapons plant managers...

...With an understanding of the codes, experts say that it is theoretically possible to reverse-engineer in order to arrive at the design of the nuclear device...

...By 1973, after the historic Washington-Peking rapprochement, the Chinese "espionage program really took off" Their top intelligence goals were to gain access to nuclear technology and to disrupt Taiwan's relations with the U.S...

...JOHN B. ROBERTS II 0 Aeration Desert Glow began like clockwork at 0900 on the morning of June 6,1989...

...Operation Desert Glow had been authorized at the highest levels of government...

...In both instances, there is evidence that China used ethnic Chinese scientists' access to American research facilities to boost their nuclear know-how...

...Badolato says...

...After one scientist purchased a sailboat and in other ways spent beyond his means, he was placed under FBI scrutiny...

...THE LATEST CHINESE SPY CASE IS JUST A HINT OF THE DAMAGE IT HAS DONE...

...So when at the end of the Reagan administration Bush's incoming FBI director, William Sessions, wanted to meet for a briefing, Herrington readily agreed...

...More than anyone else in the federal government, the two thirty-something friends were responsible for the entire probe...

...Like with the British...

...In the mid-eighties, Rep...

...In December 1993, O'Leary declassified 204 previously-secret nuclear tests just before traveling to Russia...

...He quickly pulled together a team of half-a-dozen specialists...

...Dingell's hearings meant there was a good chance that Congress would give DOE funds to improve security...

...O'Leary chose Dan Riecher, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, to be her chief of staff and later named him assistant secretary...

...Wade believes that Watkins was basically anti-nuclear weapons all along, and that the damage that he did was thus essentially deliberate...

...Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger appeared on the same panel and seconded Brewer's view...

...The end-product was something called the Fundamental Review, which determined that many of the documents and programs classified during the Cold War no longer required secrecy...

...Even within Los Alamos's so-called X Division, where nuclear weapons are designed, secrets are not widely shared...

...China's ballistic missile submarines will be armed with 16 advanced JL-2 missiles capable of hitting parts of the United States while operating off China's coast...

...At Rocky Flats, four miles of barbed-wire fence line was replaced with PIDS, the Perimeter Intrusion Detection System, a state-of-the-art integrated microwave and multi-sensor system...

...38 May 1999 • The American Spectator ambassador to China, divides China's nuclear espionage program into two phases...

...Knowing the long history of Chinese efforts to steal U.S...

...The hundred federal agents were sent to Rocky Flats to search for criminal violations of environmental laws...

...So were similar efforts by the Russians, the South Africans, and the Israelis...

...What would you say to: Your Principal is...

...Chris Cox's committee report on Chinese espionage, they expect the White House to try to keep the details of the W88 theft classified...

...But interviews conducted for this article suggest that this is highly unlikely...

...If the culture wars truly contributed to the lax security that permitted the most significant loss of nuclear secrets since the Rosenbergs, it would be only logical to shift the DOE's nuclear weapons function to a more hospitable culture...

...Notra Trulock III, DOE's special adviser for intelligence activities, is the man who put together the analysis that concluded that the Chinese had successfully built and tested a nuclear device like W-88...

...CIA Director George Tenet has tasked retired Navy Admiral David Jeremiah with leading the agency's independent review...

...Once sites reflecting the nation's scientific ability and advanced technological prowess, by 1989, with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the start of Velvet Revolutions across central Europe, the nuclear weapons complexes and national research labs came to be viewed in a new light...

...Sometime next year China is expected to begin deploying the DF-41 road-mobile ICBM, with a range of 7,500 miles...

...Phase one started in the late 1940's after the Communists took control...

...Troy Wade, who was DOE's assistant secretary for defense programs in the late eighties, thinks that the security regime began to falter after the end of the Cold War...

...That it is the target of their activity, that we know...

...Sessions, a former federal judge, knew little about DOE's national security mission...

...defense planners...

...Prime opportunities for espionage occur during academic conferences and exchanges between scientific delegations, many of which take place overseas...

...As part of her declassification drive, the secretary had appointed a top-level committee to decide which secret DOE activities could be declassified...

...She forbade them even to keep newspaper clippings on the suspect groups...

...Scientists were urged to cooperate either to improve their relatives' prospects in the PRC, or to avoid retaliation against family members...

...There is an inherent conflict between academic freedom and openness and the need for security to safeguard nuclear secrets, a conflict that can only be resolved through creative counter-intelligence...

...Security and morale in the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure plummeted as a result...

...is not certain that China employs espionage to probe our nuclear secrets...

...You know," Sessions answered defensively, "these are high priority cases, too...

...Yes, STOCK MARKET RETURNS without STOCK MARKET RISKS...

...Insiders say there is a direct correlation between the cultural shift at DOE and the degradation of security that per-mitted China to steal the secrets of one of the most advanced nuclear weapons in the U.S...

...Why are you sending the FBI out to Rocky Flats," Herrington asked in straight Marine Corps fashion, "when we have problems in this country with drugs, with crime, with espionage in Silicon Valley...

...And then they would want to meet these people, get their names...

...But as the Fundamental Review progressed, there arose a strong belief among the committee that the department's vital secrets needed better safeguarding...

...Nuclear Secrets/ Roberts (Continued from page 39) But to have value to a foreign intelligence service, the codes need to be explained in detail...

...NOTHING-TO-HIDE O'LEARY After the 1992 election, matters only got worse...

...Some of those have a lot of information about the physics...

...S.E.P...

...General Richard Thornburgh, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins, and EPA Administrator William K. Reilly had all sanctioned the massive federal raid on Rocky Flats...

...12% Fixed Returns on a 12-month program...

...Notra Trulock's assessment that China had the W-88 sent shock waves through the U.S...

...But while O'Leary was more than pleased to accept the committee's recommendations on declassification, she ignored its advice to improve security in coordination with other agencies including the FBI and the Defense Department...

...Continued on page 76) 39 BUSH' S ENERGY SECRETARY CLOSED A TRITIUM PLANT TO PLACATE ENVIRONMENTALISTS...

...Operation Desert Glow marked the beginning of a cultural shift in the U.S...

...Slogans were rife in Mao's China, and K'ang's slogan was "the right way is the simple way" — i.e., using Chinese living abroad to acquire sensitive intelligence for the fledgling People's Republic...

...They didn't know that the innocuous-looking airplane that had flown over the complex on three separate nights six months earlier was operated by the FBI and crammed with infrared surveillance equipment...

...There are hundreds of cases of illicit acquisition of high technology...

...That was like putting a fox in the henhouse," says Brewer, who points out that the activist hard-hne NRDC had frequently filed nuisance suits against the department during the eighties...

...So Watkins simply shut the plant down, thereby curtailing all tritium production for the U.S...

...nuclear secrets and the lax state of security at the national labs, Trulock urged more vigilant counterintelligence programs...

...Given the division of knowledge, for one inside spy to assemble all the information needed to build a sophisticated, reliable nuclear bomb, "he would have to go to several different places," says Bergen...

...When China's new landand sea-based nuclear weapons platforms are operational, the W-88 design will make the PRC a full-fledged member of the nuclear club...

...Admiral James Watkins, the former chief of naval operations who was appointed Energysecretary by President Bush, liberalized the scientific exchanges to a degree that Wade believes was imprudent...

...The overhaul spanned the gamut from instituting new physical fitness and marksmanship qualifications standards for plant security guards to high-technology safeguards...

...A wider group of scientists knows the theory of how the weapon works...

...nervous about the stock market...

...There have been legitimate scientific exchanges between the labs for years," he says...

...One former high-ranking Energy Department security official is convinced that O'Leary's environmental activists have used their access to official information to funnel documents to environmental and anti-nuclear groups, ensuring a wave of litigation against future nuclear power or nuclear weapons programs...

...Did you know that if your funds are in the stock market, your principle is at risk...

...Citing the administration's strenuous efforts to suppress publication of Rep...

...Unaware that he was under FBI surveillance, the suspect went to the airplane restroom, tore up the papers he was illicitly transporting, and flushed them down the toilet...

...government that would last through the Bush administration and accelerate under Clinton...

...It is unlikely that any of these review boards will come up with the solution proposed by Shelby Brewer in Senate hearings two years ago...

...Over the next thirty-odd days, they surveyed all 58 facilities which make up the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure...

...Just outside Denver, Colorado, almost a hundred heavily armed federal agents, including seventy special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, descended en masse upon the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant...

...Operation Cerberus did more than tighten physical access to the weapons plants and nuclear labs...

...Herrington knew how important cooperation behveen the FBI and DOE was in preventing foreign espionage...

...FROM TIGHT SECURITY TO NUCLEAR SHUTDOWNS Contrary to Mr...

...The August19, 1965 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review identifies him as heading China's nuclear missile program with the help of another Chinese scientist, Chien Wei-chang, who had also worked at Caltech...

...Meanwhile, those who think differently are liable to be punished for doing their jobs...

...The controversial case Lipsky and Fimberg built around Rocky Flats would consume years of investigative work and vital FBI manpower and still not be fully resolved eight years later, in 1997...

...Thinking he was safe, he returned to his seat...

...She ordered an agency-wide review of files and documents for the purpose of releasing information...

...then chairman of the House Energy Committee, held oversight hearings probing whether terrorists could penetrate nuclear weapons sites...

...China's next nuclear feat came in 1965, when Chinese scientists perfected a missile-launched nuclear blast...

...In his March 19 news conference, President Clinton asserted that the U.S...

...In retaliation, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson tried to demote him, but so far has been blocked by the high profile of the case...

...A handful of people—perhaps only two or three at a time —has complete knowledge of both the physics and the engineering characteristics of a given weapon design...

...Early on his watch, the admiral shut down the Savannah River Productions Reactors—which had been a source of friction among DOE, environmentalists, and state officials in South Carolina for many years—and ordered some $2 billion in improvements...