Secrets Still Wandering

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson’s earlier assurances that security flaws at the Los Alamos National Laboratory had been fixed turn out to be not just wrong but ridiculous. The disappearance of secret nuclear data on two computer hard drives from a vault at the New Mexico weapons facility reveals continuing laxity in safeguarding highly sensitive information. The failure of subordinates to inform Los Alamos director John Browne of the loss for 24 days after it was discovered suggests a self-protecting cover-up that at a minimum prevented a prompt search for the missing material.

There may be a partial excuse for that failure. The forest fire that threatened the lab last month forced the evacuation of the town of Los Alamos and destroyed hundreds of homes of lab employees, a stressful event that could explain part of the delay. The removable hard drives, each slightly larger than a deck of cards, were found to have vanished when officials went to take them from the vault as the fire neared.

But there can be no excuse for what has since been revealed about procedures for removing classified material from the vault. It appears that the scores of employees cleared for access to the vault aren’t required to log in or out. That’s why there’s no record of when the hard drives were taken. They could have been removed hours before their loss was discovered May 7 or they could have gone out the door weeks earlier. As one House member noted at a committee hearing this week, record-keeping at his hometown library is more exact than that at the top-secret vault at Los Alamos.

Richardson, who won no friends Wednesday when he failed to show up at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, has named former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, a Republican, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, to conduct an independent investigation and recommend improvements in security. Both are highly respected in Congress. The Senate, meanwhile, has confirmed John A. Gordon, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, to head a new security administration that will seek to prevent nuclear secrets from being stolen or lost. Assuming, of course, that there are any secrets left to be stolen or lost.

The missing hard drives contain information about Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons, as well as weapons of American allies. The danger of this material falling into the wrong hands is obvious. Richardson, who has put a number of Los Alamos employees on paid leave, vows “we will not tolerate this.” The problem is he promised pretty much the same thing after flagrant security gaps were exposed last year in an investigation that led to the indictment of physicist Wen Ho Lee for security violations.