Clinton Intel Panel Confirms that D.O.E. Security Melt-down, Begat by Hazel O’Leary, Continues Under Bill Richardson

(Washington, D.C.): Today, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB)
released the findings of its 90-day study of security issues at the Department of Energy.
Although the report itself was unavailable at this writing, press reports indicate that the PFIAB
analysis not only paints a grim picture of past breaches of the most basic procedures for
safeguarding classified nuclear weapons data. It also reveals that the gross disregard for
elementary physical, information and personnel security — encouraged by Mr. Clinton’s
first Energy Secretary, Hazel O’Leary, and epitomized in her infamous December 1993
declaration that, “Someone else has the job of looking more carefully at the national
security interest” — continues to this day under her successor, Bill Richardson.

A ‘Denuclearizer’s’ Greatest Hits

Other highlights of then-Secretary O’Leary’s lengthy — and frequently incoherent — press
conference on Tuesday, 7 December 1993 ¹speak volumes
about the Clinton Administration’s
special responsibility for the present security melt-down at the Department of Energy. ² Indeed,
Mrs. O’Leary made no secret of her hostility to her Department’s most important function —
maintaining the Nation’s strategic deterrent and the thermonuclear weaponry that underpins it.

In particular, Mrs. O’Leary clearly took pleasure in disclosing theretofore secret information
concerning:

• the total quantity and precise locations around the country of much of the Nation’s
  stockpile of plutonium — an invitation to domestic or foreign acts of terrorism;

• the fact that there were then “three miles” of (ostensibly) unduly classified
  documents,
  which Sec. O’Leary promised aggressively to declassify. (She did so, releasing, among
  other sensitive information, nuclear weapons-relevant “Restricted Data” and “Formerly
  Restricted Data” despite a specific statutory prohibition on doing so contained in the Atomic
  Energy Act);

• the number of secret underground nuclear tests that the United States had
  conducted (the
  government had previously chosen not to announce some 200 tests whose low yields could
  not be detected by others) — a potential intelligence windfall for foreign powers; and

• the explosive allegation that the Department of Energy’s bureaucratic predecessors
  had
  conducted radiological experiments on human beings without obtaining the
  participants’
  informed consent.

It was predictable — if not actually calculated by Mrs. O’Leary and her
anti-nuclear political
appointees ³ — that each and every one of these
‘revelations’ would undermine popular
support for these weapons in both the eyes of the American people — and perhaps
embolden America’s adversaries. While Secretary O’Leary has, mercifully, been gone
from
office for three years, ⁴ the legacy of her “denuclearization”
campaign continues to be felt to this
day.

Don’t Take Our Word for It

The ominous nature of the Clinton-O’Leary legacy is apparently evident from both the
bipartisan
congressional report by the select House committee chaired by Rep. Chris
Cox ⁵and, more
recently, by the PFIAB, led by former Republican Senator Warren Rudman.
According to
press accounts, the PFIAB study — entitled Science at its Best, Security at its Worst
reaches,
among others, the following, damning conclusions:

• “The Department of Energy, when faced with a profound public responsibility, has
  failed.”

• “Our bottom line: DOE represents the best of America’s scientific talent and
  achievement, but it has also been responsible for the worse security record on secrecy
  that the members of this panel have ever encountered.”

• “The report [issued in December 1990 by then-Secretary of Energy James Watkins]
  skewered
  DOE for unacceptable ‘direction, coordination, conduct and oversight’ of safeguards and
  security…Two years later, the new [Clinton] Administration rolled in, redefined
  priorities, and the initiatives all but evaporated.”

• According to the Washington Times, “Mr. Clinton waited until 11 February
  1998, to issue a
  presidential directive responding to the security lapses. That was more than six months after
  National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger received an in-depth briefing on the problem by
  the Energy Department. That briefing ‘was sufficient to warrant aggressive White House
  action,’ the PFIAB report said. ‘These issues had such national security gravity that [the
  presidential directive] should have been handled with more dispatch.'”

• According to the Washington Post, “Rudman, [a] White House official said,
  told Clinton that
  a presidential decision directive signed in 1998 was ‘the first really serious effort’ to tighten
  security at the department, but that in the wake of espionage charges it was ‘late in coming.’
  Rudman surprised the president by saying that ‘people [at the Energy Department]
  were still trying to keep it from being implemented,’ the official said.”

• “[Richardson] has overstated his case when he asserts, as he did several weeks
  ago, that
  ‘Americans can be reassured: Our nuclear secrets are, today, safe and secure.'”

• “Organizational disarray, managerial neglect and a culture of arrogance — both at DOE
  headquarters and the labs themselves — conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to
  happen.”

Arguably, most importantly, the PFIAB found that: “The Department of
Energy is a
dysfunctional bureaucracy that has proven it is incapable of reforming
itself.” (Emphasis
added.) Rep. Cox evinced a similar judgment when he declared this morning on National Public
Radio’s “Morning Edition” program that: “There may well have been an effort to show that the
[espionage] case was closed, the problem was solved and we could put it all behind us and load
all the burden on to the shoulders of one individual. But the problems that have been
identified go well beyond one individual.”

It should come as no surprise that Secretary O’Leary, her senior subordinates and their
successors proved indifferent to U.S. national security interests given that they were generally
selected to hold such high offices on the basis of “diversity” and leftist ideologies. Just as
straightforward should be the remedy: Create a new, free-standing agency whose
sole
mandate would be to maintain the safety, reliability and effectiveness of the nuclear
stockpile, staffed by people with the requisite technical skills and a shared commitment to
the competent fulfillment of this important responsibility.

The Bottom Line

Importantly, President Clinton’s own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was sufficiently
alarmed by DOE’s incompetence and malfeasance to recommend such an action or alternatively
that “The weapons research and stockpile management functions [to] be placed wholly within a
new, semi-autonomous agency within [the Department of Energy] that has a clear mission,
streamlined bureaucracy and drastically simplified lines of authority and accountability .”

Secretary Richardson flatly rejected even this less draconian approach for improving quality
—
and security — control at the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex. As the
New
York Times reported today, he has declared that “An independent agency is out of the
question”
and of the proposal to create a semi-autonomous agency, he has said “I don’t think [it] is a good
idea.” (Curiously, he rejected the latter on the contortionist logic that it would create ‘a new
fiefdom’ and conflict with his efforts to streamline and strengthen counterintelligence and
security directly under the energy secretary (read, create a new CI and security fiefdom!))

Now that Secretary Richardson’s judgment about how the success of his efforts to
improve
security within the DoE’s bureaucracy has been shown to be in error, there is no reason to
believe that he is more right — or entitled to congressional deference — with respect to
moving the nuclear weapons program out from under the malign neglect of the
Department of Energy political leadership. This should be done forthwith.

¹ See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
U.S. ‘De-Nuclearization’: Who is Minding the
Store? (No. 93-D 103, 9 December 1993).

² See Everybody Didn’t Do It: Clinton
Administration is in a Class by Itself on Damaging
Security Practices (No. 99-D 68, 11 June 1999).

³ See Waste, Fraud and Abuse: D.O.E.’s
Mismanagement of Nuclear Clean-Up Facilitates
Denuclearization Agenda (No. 95-D 29, 25
April 1995).

⁴ According to last night’s “O’Reilly Factor” program on Fox News,
Mrs. O’Leary joined the
board of an Energy Department contractor to whom she appears to have thrown a sweetheart deal
— keeping steady its remuneration for providing security at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons
facility in Colorado — but cutting the security workforce the firm was responsible for paying to
do that job. Interestingly, a personnel action has been taken by another anti-nuclear political
appointee in DoE’s senior ranks, Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller,
against Lieutenant
Colonel Ed McCallum, (a former Army special forces officer who has tried to warn
repeatedly
about DoE’s security shortfalls as the director of its office of Safeguards and Security) on the
trumped-up charge that he had had an indiscreet phone conversation with a Rocky Flats
employee in which they commiserated about the unnecessary dangers thus created to Rocky Flat
and the surrounding metropolitan Denver area.

⁵ See Cox Report Underscores Abiding Nuclear
Dangers, Should Caution Against Efforts
that Would Exacerbate Them (No. 99-D 62, 25
May 1999).