Clinton Legacy Watch # 41: Security Meltdown at D.O.E.
(Washington, D.C.): Lately, it seems that scarcely a day goes by without some new
revelation
about serious security problems at the Department of Energy (DOE) — or the Clinton
Administration’s lack of seriousness about addressing them competently. Less obvious, but no
less troubling, are the steps the Administration is taking to punish conscientious DOE employees
who have been raising alarms about these problems.
Much of the blame for the present mess appears to lie with President Clinton’s first
Secretary of
Energy, Hazel O’Leary.
secret of her hostility to her Department’s
most important function — maintaining the Nation’s strategic deterrent and the thermonuclear
weaponry that underpins it. While she has mercifully been gone from office for three years, the
legacy of the gaggle of anti-nuclear activists O’Leary recruited to staff senior DOE positions and
the “denuclearization” and “openness” policies that she and they promulgated together linger on.
A Bill of Particulars
In fact, just last month, the current Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson,
succeeded in sneaking
through the Senate the nomination of an advocate of the abolition of nuclear weapons to serve as
Assistant Secretary for Nonproliferation and National Security. This dark-of-night operation is all
the more outrageous in light of the mounting evidence that this appointee, Rose
Gottemoeller,
is implicated in a number of the security scandals now coming to light — and the personnel actions
being taken against the whistle-blowers. Consider the following:
- Information Insecurity:
On 17 April 1995, President Clinton lent his authority to an “openness” initiative
championed by Mrs. O’Leary, the current White House Chief of Staff, John
Podesta, and then-NSC staffer Morton Halperin
called
for the automatic declassification by 17 April 2000 of all documents containing historical
information that are 25 years or older.
To be sure, Mr. Clinton’s directive did not try explicitly to override the 1954 Atomic Energy
Act,
a statute designed permanently to protect nuclear weapons-relevant — or “restricted” — data. The
practical effect of Executive Order 12958, however, has been greatly to abbreviate the time and
necessarily to diminish the care with which classified documents are scrutinized prior to their
release to the public.
Leading Senators were horrified to learn last year that Restricted Data (and “Formerly
Restricted
Data”) governed by the Atomic Energy Act were being hastily thrown out with the bath-water as
officials were not being given the time or resources to declassify sensitive documents on a
page-by-page basis.
if not by the shelf. Mr. Podesta,
apparently infuriated at any interference with the declassification initiative, instructed Secretary
Richardson to have Ms. Gottemoeller reprimand a senior DOE bureaucrat, Joseph
Mahaley, for
encouraging Congress to intervene. (The personnel action — which would, among other things,
have denied Mr. Mahaley an expected performance bonus — was quietly withdrawn after he
threatened legal action.)
- Espionage at DOE Facilities:
Two further O’Leary “openness” initiatives contributed to the circumstances under
which
the penetration of U.S. nuclear facilities by Communist China, among others, has occurred during
the present administration. (The New York Times reported on Saturday, 24 April,
that Reps.
Chris Cox (R-CA) and Norm Dicks (D-WA) — the chairman and
ranking minority member,
respectively, of a select House committee assigned to look into PRC technology diversions — told
Mr. Clinton on Friday that there is “evidence of ‘current and ongoing’ Chinese spying
during
the Clinton Presidency.”)
First, Mrs. O’Leary banned personnel badges that clearly indicated whether the
bearer had
a security clearance and, if so, how high. Her reasoning: Such badges were
discriminatory.
And second, she ended the practice of requiring reports to DOE headquarters about
foreign
nationals from “sensitive countries” who visited the unclassified areas of the Nation’s
nuclear
weapons laboratories.
Among those who has had the unenviable task of dealing with the deleterious consequences
of
this sort of security malpractice is Notra Trulock. Until the Cox committee’s
findings about
Chinese espionage at Los Alamos came to light, Mr. Trulock was Chief of Intelligence at DOE.
When his years of warning about the penetration of some of the United States’ most sensitive
facilities — warnings that were suppressed by, among other superiors, Rose Gottemoeller, to
whom the intelligence office reported until a reorganization last Fall — were publicly vindicated,
Mr. Trulock was demoted and his future at the Department seems in jeopardy.
- Physical insecurity:
Just last week, Assistant Secretary Gottemoeller took another personnel action, this
time
against Edward McCallum, a retired Army colonel who heads DOE’s
Office of Security and
Safeguards. In that capacity, he has worked tirelessly to call attention, including in
unclassified
official reports, to the dangerous decline in the security of critical sites in the U.S. nuclear
weapons complex.
Apparently panicked at the mounting evidence that Mr. McCallum’s heretofore unheeded
alarms
were becoming a serious embarrassment to the Department of Energy, Ms. Gottemoeller
summarily on 19 April effectively fired him. On the basis of transparently trumped
up charges
that Col. McCallum, of all people, was handling classified information indiscreetly, Ms.
Gottemoeller has placed him in the bureaucratic equivalent of limbo — on indefinite, unappealable
administrative leave with pay.
Where’s the Congress?
If ever there were a need for serious oversight by the legislative branch, this is it.
Unfortunately,
Congress has thus far appeared more like the Keystone Cops than a body determined to stop the
myriad compromises of national security being permitted by the Clinton team and to protect those
inside the system who are being punished for opposing its reckless agenda. At last count, some
nine different congressional committees are investigating aspects of this affair. Meanwhile, the
Cox committee’s report — adopted on a bipartisan and unanimous basis last December —
still has
not been declassified, thanks in part to DOE’s newfound concern about protecting nuclear
weapons-related information!
The Bottom Line
The time has come for Congress to take dramatic action. It should:
- reconstitute a single Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, ending the
fractionating of
oversight responsibility among myriad congressional panels that has contributed to the present,
deplorable condition of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and its security;
- remove from political appointees chosen in this Administration on the basis of
“diversity” and leftist ideologies the responsibility for DOE’s nuclear weapons programs
by creating a new, free-standing agency whose sole mandate would be to maintain the safety,
reliability and effectiveness of the nuclear stockpile; and
- assure that patriotic whistle-blowers are promoted, not punished.
For example, an
independent office for assuring the security of those vital nuclear weapons-related activities
should be established under an individual like Ed McCallum.
The Most Important Justification for Firing Hazel
O’Leary: Her Role in Denuclearizing the United States (
Decision Briefs entitled
Senate Given Another Opportunity to Reject Clinton’s Policy of Denuclearization:
the
Gottemoeller Nomination (No. 98-D 166,
29 September 1998) and Clinton’s Reckless Nuclear
Agenda Revealed? Study Co-Authored By Candidate For Top Pentagon Job Is
Alarming (No.
97-D 96, 12 July 19997).
Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, Mr. Halperin has recently returned to government as the Director of the State
Department’s Policy Planning Staff.
see After Years of
Wantonly Declassifying Nuclear Secrets, D.O.E. Is Suddenly Seized with the Need to Protect
Them — from Us (No. 99-D 46, 20 April 1999) and
Clinton Legacy Watch #40: A Scandal at
the Department of Energy On His Watch — Grievous Damage Done to Sell the
C.T.B.T. (No.
99-D 38, 23 March 1999).
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