Saving Lieutenant Colonel McCallum

(Washington, D.C.): The good news on the ominous Chinese technology-acquisition front ¹ is
that Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has promised that heads will roll this week in the
Department of Energy. The bad news is that it looks as though those really responsible may be
spared. ² Worse yet, one of the heads on the chopping
block belongs to Ed McCallum — an
individual who has done more than practically anyone else at the Department of Energy to raise
alarms about an environment that Richardson now acknowledges to be replete with
“communications breakdowns…incompetent acts…[where] security was not considered
important.”

Gottemoeller vs. McCallum

Indeed, with Secretary Richardson’s blessing, a senior official deeply implicated in the
aforementioned insecurity practices — Assistant Secretary of Energy for
Nonproliferation and
National Security Rose Gottemoeller ³ — has
already put McCallum, the Director of DOE’s
Office of Safeguards and Security, in bureaucratic limbo. On 19 April, she
placed the retired
Army lieutenant colonel on indefinite administrative leave (with pay) on the basis of what ten
Members of Congress have described in a letter to Richardson as “trumped up and insupportable
accusations that he has violated rules for handling classified information.”

On 26 May, these Congressmen — among them, the Number 3 man in the
House Republican
leadership, Majority Whip Tom Delay — correctly described Mr. McCallum as
“one of the few
high-ranking DOE employees who has vigorously striven to implement and enforce a safeguards
policy for DOE and the National Laboratories.” They declare that this conscientious public
servant is being harshly “repaid for his unfashionable commitment and inconvenient
effectiveness in doing his job” in exposing and counteracting “the systematic and flagrant
disregard for security issues that has thrived in the highest levels of [DOE] for several years.”

Richardson’s Contempt for Congress

Richardson’s response to this letter was astoundingly contemptuous. According to
the
Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Rep. Dan
Burton,
the Secretary of Energy declared in a meeting with McCallum that the letter “doesn’t intimidate
me, this isn’t [expletive deleted]. These guys are my basketball buddies.” In a letter to
Richardson dated May 28, Congressman Burton said the Secretary seemed to be suggesting that
“you had the ability to dissuade Members of Congress who might be inclined to pursue matters
brought to our attention by Mr. McCallum.”

Regrettably, ex-Congressman Richardson has grounds for believing he can work his will
with his
former colleagues. Chairman Burton’s missive describes how “when we met earlier this week
[Richardson] asked me not to hold a hearing regarding the Department of Energy which would
include as a witness Mr. Edward McCallum.” Rep. Burton reluctantly acceded to the request,
despite the fact that “[McCallum] appears to be uniquely qualified to address the many current
oversight concerns facing Congress in light of the Cox Report’s revelations.” Earlier on, another
personal intervention by Secretary Richardson had a similar result with Rep. Thomas
Bliley,
chairman of the House Commerce Committee, resulting in the abrupt cancellation of a
Commerce subcommittee hearing at which Mr. McCallum had been invited to testify.

The Trulock Precedent

Secretary Richardson is evidently determined to prevent Mr. McCallum from achieving the
sort
of transformation Notra Trulock has recently undergone. Mr. Trulock, it will
be recalled, is the
man who — as Director of Intelligence for the Department of Energy — first blew the whistle on
the apparent Chinese penetration of the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories.

Unfortunately for him, Mr. Trulock’s warnings conflicted with the Clinton Administration’s
policy of “engaging” Beijing and were repeatedly suppressed. Like Ed McCallum, a job action
was taken against him by Ms. Gottemoeller, in this case demotion to the temporary position of
Acting Deputy Director of Intelligence. His career would have been permanently blighted but
for the opportunity afforded Mr. Trulock by the Congress publicly to illuminate the penetration
made easier by Clinton policies, and the cover-up mounted to keep it from coming to light. Last
week, Secretary Richardson gave him a performance bonus and professed his desire to keep Mr.
Trulock on his “team” (a sentiment that appears, however, not to extend to giving him his old job
back!)

Will Lt. Col. McCallum Get His Day in Court?

In the absence of a comparable public platform, Lt. Col. McCallum is suffering one indignity
after another. In addition to having to retain a lawyer at his own considerable expense to defend
himself against Richardson-Gottemoeller’s “trumped-up” charges, he has been given an
ultimatum: Accept banishment to a DOE facility in Albuquerque, acknowledge a
security
infraction and agree to have an official reprimand placed in his personnel file — to put it mildly, a
career-blighting deal — or face unspecified, but dire, consequences.

Even more Kafkaesque, Assistant Secretary Gottemoeller reportedly last week held a
meeting in
which she indicated that McCallum’s Office of Safeguards and Security may lose 10%
of its
budget. (This would come on top of a roughly 20% cut it has sustained in recent years.)
Such an
initiative seems more consistent with the DOE policies Mr. Richardson now decries than with his
endlessly repeated assurances that — thanks to his leadership in tightening up security practices —
the Department’s proverbial barn door is now certifiably closed.

The Bottom Line

To his credit, Chairman Burton last week served notice on Secretary Richardson that he
intends
to have Mr. McCallum testify before his committee in the near future. This hearing should not
only put a spotlight on the witness’ years of heretofore unrecognized efforts to protect the
Nation’s nuclear secrets. It should also make clear that substantial responsibility for the
egregious insecurity at DOE facilities and the national laboratories in recent years rests
with senior policy-makers — whose disdain for time-tested physical, information and
personnel security practices appears to rival Mr. Richardson’s apparent contempt for
Congress.

If Secretary Richardson’s purge is to be at all just, to say nothing of complete, it had
better
include among its targets political appointees like Rose Gottemoeller. Congress
should, in
addition, ensure that some good comes out of all this by seeing to it that Ed McCallum’s
reputation and career are fully rehabilitated, either by entrusting to him the new job of “security
czar” at the Department of Energy or by creating an independent position from
which he can
perform this critical function.

The latter approach is likely to prove needed if Sec. Richardson approves a draft decision
memorandum dated 17 May 1999 that would reorganize “Safeguards and Security Roles and
Responsibilities.” This plan would appear to give the nuclear weapons laboratories and DOE
“field offices” latitude on security matters that their track record suggests they have not exactly
earned. Mr. Richardson would be ill-advised to provide critics with such compelling proof that
his damage-control operation is about political cover, not protecting what remains of the
Department of Energy’s secrets.

¹In the process of denying the Cox Committee’s charges that it had
acquired U.S. nuclear
weapons secrets via espionage, the People’s Republic of China yesterday called attention to the
irresponsible practice of organizations like the Natural Resources Defense
Council and the
Federation of American Scientists of putting sensitive weapons-related data on
the Internet.
The Chinese clearly “doth protest too much” in arguing that the information they have let the
United States know they have came from these open sources. In fact, the detailed designs for
American thermonuclear weapons known to be in their possession could only have come from
secret data bases. With its public relations stunt, however, China has helped to underscore the
irresponsible folly of anti-nuclear activists who — against all logic — believe that the cause of
non-proliferation is being served by their efforts to spread around materials helpful to those
interested in designing or otherwise acquiring nuclear arms.

² This is especially true since the problem with Chinese
acquisition of sensitive U.S.
technology has not been limited to the Department of Energy. While most of the
attention
generated by the Cox Report — and most of the smoke blown on the Administration’s behalf —
revolves around the allegations of espionage at DOE facilities, the bulk of that study and the
majority of its thirty-eight recommendations deal with the acquisition, diversion and/or theft by
China and other potential adversaries of militarily relevant U.S. non-nuclear
technology. Those
in the White House, National Security Council, Commerce, State and Defense Departments and
elsewhere responsible for allowing the wholesale loss of such technology deserve censure every
bit as much as those culpable for the compromise of America’s nuclear secrets.

³ See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled
Giving ‘Clinton’s Legacy’ New Meaning: The
Buck Stops at the President’s Desk on the ‘Legacy’ Code , Other D.O.E. Scandals
(No. 99-D
52, 29 April 1999), Senate Given Another Opportunity to Reject Clinton’s
Policy of
Denuclearization: the Gottemoeller Nomination ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_166″>No. 98-D 166, 29 September 1999) and
Clinton’s Reckless Nuclear Agenda Revealed? Study Co-Authored By Candidate
For Top
Pentagon Job Is Alarming (No. 97-D 96, 12
July 1997).