The Secret Sharer
SOKOLSKI, HENRY
The Secret Sharer How Notra Trulock tried to protect America—and was punished for doing so. BY HENRY SOKOLSKI Notra Trulock's book Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage...
...The final result was that Congress scampered to reorganize the Department of Energy, threw more money at counterintelli-gence, and then washed its hands of the matter...
...Sadly, this is true even when one is trying to protect America's most important military secrets...
...The FBI, we learn, couldn't or wouldn't investigate ten of the twelve spy leads it was given...
...Foreign scientists from sensitive nations—including Iran—are still getting into these facilities without the required approval of the secretary of energy, necessary background checks, or clearance from counterintel-ligence officials...
...It's enough to convince anyone but the most base or patriotic to avoid government defense work, or, if so employed, to proceed with extreme caution...
...How are we to attract and hold on to the talent needed to alert us to these dangers if their reward for speaking up is punish-ment—and if the slow-rollers and foot-draggers are the ones who get rewarded...
...Another broke the news on the scandal but then backed away and cut off contact with Trulock when administration officials raised the canard of racial bigotry...
...Certainly, Kindred Spirit puts a painfully bright spotlight on how the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Department of Energy bungled and denied clear evidence that China was stealing nuclear secrets...
...BY HENRY SOKOLSKI Notra Trulock's book Code Name Kindred Spirit: Inside the Chinese Nuclear Espionage Scandal is unique among histories of U.S...
...It preferred to fight crime, and it was also con-flicted—having previously employed two of the top suspects, Sylvia and Wen Ho Lee, as informants (a fact it conveniently kept to itself until late in the day...
...Follow-up was minimal and soon the Department of Energy was back to business as usual...
...Again, officials say they are fixing things, but no one has been disciplined...
...Meanwhile, the National Security Council and the Department of Energy were preoccupied supporting nuclear cooperation with China, particularly Chinese accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban...
...But, as Notra Trulock makes clear in describing the Clinton administration's prevarications and the unfocused, self-serving oversight of Congress, you'd be wrong...
...To prevail in such ventures, one must have the support of both superiors and subordinates—as well as of outsiders who might benefit from such discoveries...
...If we are serious about getting the answers and avoiding a future even worse than the recent past, we owe it to ourselves and our country to begin by reading Trulock's work...
...Yet another committee wanted to name names to reverse the damage, but decided to do so only when timely corrective action was no longer possible...
...In this arena, as with work in large American organizations generally, no one is responsible for anything but success...
...administration tried to handle China's theft of America's nuclear-weapon designs...
...This sorry charade might be laughable if it weren't so worrisome...
...They chose to downplay China's nuclear spying and kept it from the public for nearly two and a half years...
...It doesn't just describe what went wrong when the Clinton Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center in Washington...
...Early this January, the Department of Energy's inspector general reported that security at the laboratories is still egregiously lax...
...What chance do we have to detect domestic terrorists or nuclear dangers over the horizon if we can't even stop nuclear espionage after nearly a decade of repeated warnings...
...it is also a firsthand account of personal and bureaucratic cowardice, incompetence, malfeasance, venality, and betrayal...
...Being right about what's wrong is not enough: One has to persuade those in charge that ignoring or glossing over a failure will be more costly than addressing it...
...The department's top counterintelligence post is now held by the FBI section chief who, despite pleas from his subordinates, stood by and withheld information in the Chinese case for nearly two years...
...Detecting or limiting failures is, at best, a dogcatcher's job: Nothing good can come from it, only resistance and denial from those whose performance, policies, or organizations might be questioned...
...When their foot-dragging was finally exposed (too late to prevent further leakage), they simply did the dishonorable thing: attempted to discredit the official who most persistently tried to get them to act, Notra Trulock...
...Congress similarly failed to ge oversight of Chinese spying on tar One committee wanted to assure c tinued funding for the national laboratory where most of the spying took place...
...intelligence failures...
...One would think that getting the president and Congress to keep nuclear-weapon designs from a strategic competitor wouldn't require a complicated political defense or bureaucratic game plan...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 25
