Timmerman Offers Fresh Evidence That D.O.E.’s Front Office Needs to be Cleaned-Out, Not Just Rearranged

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, Secretary of Energy Bill
Richardson finally threw in the
towel on his doomed effort to persuade bipartisan congressional critics and the American people
that nothing more need be done to address his Department’s security melt-down than to add a
few more layers of unaccountable bureaucrats. With his capitulation, it is now all but certain that
there will be — at a minimum — a new “semi-autonomous agency” created within the Department
of Energy charged with exclusive responsibility for nuclear weapons stewardship.

An important essay in this month’s American Spectator by Kenneth R.
Timmerman — one of
the most intrepid and prolific investigative journalists of our time — demonstrates that, unless
this reorganization is accompanied by substantial changes in Clinton Administration policies and
personnel, the Department of Energy is virtually certain to continue to exacerbate
U.S.
security challenges, not redress them. The following excerpts from Mr. Timmerman’s
article
illuminate in particular the harmful role being played by an advocate of radical anti-nuclear
policies, Assistant Secretary of Energy Rose Gottemoeller, whose stealthy
Senate
confirmation was arranged by Mr. Richardson and to whom (if he could get away with it) he may
be inclined to look for a new Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship, if such a position is
ultimately created.

Excerpts from “Russo-American Nuclear Cities”
The American Spectator, July 1999

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Since 1994, the Clinton administration has been spending taxpayer dollars to employ
Russian
nuclear scientists and weapons designers in civilian projects, with the laudable goal of seeking to
prevent them from selling their talents to rogue states such as Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Libya.
But a recent review by the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that some of the
money
has helped the Russians develop better nuclear weapons, missiles, and biological weapons–and
that many civilian projects financed with U.S. taxpayer money have direct military
applications. Even worse: Some of the U.S-funded scientists and institutes are
developing
weapons for Iran and Libya.

Despite these warnings, the Clinton administration now proposes to spend an additional $600
million to launch a massive public works project in ten Russian “nuclear cities.”
Although these
sites are ostensibly closed to outsiders, Iranian visitors have in the last five years been
spotted at some of Russia’s most sensitive weapons labs, including Vector and
Obolensk,
where scientists have genetically engineered human and animal viruses to produce the most
deadly biological weapons known to mankind.

The GAO concluded in February that the Nuclear Cities Initiative is “likely to be a
subsidy
program for Russia for many years rather than a stimulus for economic development,” and
recommended that it be scaled back. It also said the Department of Energy (DOE),
which will
oversee the program, should more vigilantly check the backgrounds of Russian scientists slated
to benefit from U.S. taxpayer largesse, in order to ensure that weapons designers do not enter
classified U.S. facilities and do not use U.S. funds to subsidize new weapons development.

Heading the Nuclear Cities program at DOE is Assistant Secretary of Energy Rose
Gottemoeller, the same official who fired the department’s head of security programs
because
she suspected him of leaking information to Congress on the disastrous state of security at DOE
nuclear storage plants and at the national labs (“Nuclear Security Meltdown,” TAS, June 1999).
In her academic writings, Ms. Gottemoeller has urged the U.S. to abandon its long-standing
policy of strategic ambiguity by declaring publicly that the U.S. will not be the first to use
nuclear weapons.

But Rose Gottemoeller is not just any anti-nuclear academic: In 1993 she became National
Security Council director for Russia and the other Soviet successor states. Since then,
she has
presided over policies that advanced the career of former KGB Director Yevgeni
Primakov, turned a blind eye to Russia’s nuclear and missile transfers to Iran, and
supported President Boris Yeltsin at the expense of democratic reformers, plying him
with
political favors and cash that went directly into off-shore bank accounts. Although she has no
hands-on managerial experience, Gottemoeller inherits a program crippled by poor management
and lack of oversight, which seems destined to have precisely the opposite effect of its stated
intention of helping wean Russia away from nuclear weapons.

ENTER BILL RICHARDSON

When he unveiled the $600 million Nuclear Cities Initiative last September in Vienna at a
joint
press conference with Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Yevgeni Adamov, Energy Secretary
Bill Richardson praised the Russians for their willingness to open ten previously closed nuclear
cities. “This is a Russian-led effort to ‘rightsize’ their nuclear complex and use the valuable skills
of their scientists and engineers to promote economic development and new enterprises -to turn
the scientific and technological expertise that resides in their premier weapons facilities toward
peaceful uses,” Richardson said. “I can not emphasize enough how important it is to us all that
economic hardship not drive Russian nuclear weapons scientists into employment in places like
Iran and North Korea.”

But that was not what the Russians promised at all, according to a GAO
audit. The GAO’s
own investigators were denied entry to Sarov (formerly known as Azarmas-16, one of Russia’s
two nuclear weapons design institutes) earlier this year. In a meeting with the auditors outside the
closed city, Sarov officials acknowledged that “it will be difficult to attract commercial partners
to a city located behind a fence.”

The DOE’s stated aim is to help the Russians to develop viable commercial projects that will
attract Russian and foreign investment capital. “The notion that the national labs can
help the
Russians to commercialize their nuclear weapons technology is absurd,” says former
Pentagon official Henry Sokolski. “The labs have no notions of commerce. The
problem is that
with enough utopianism, you can commit the very crime you’re trying to prevent.”

A DOE official who worked extensively with the Russians on efforts to convert
their
nuclear weapons and missile industries to civilian ends deems the programs a resounding
failure. “The majority of U.S. taxpayer investments in Russia since 1992 have been
misdirected,
because they did nothing to convert military production to viable civilian projects,” he says.
“There has been inadequate oversight, a lack of direct involvement by U. S. industry, and no
effort to create an environment where the Russians have an economic interest in the outcome.”
For offering such criticisms, the official was removed from dealing with Russia and placed into
administrative limbo by his superiors.

* * *

Even Russian lab directors are complaining that in its naive approach to
proliferation, the
Clinton administration is making dangerous mistakes. The American
Spectator has learned
that one Russian lab director warned the director of DOE’s Initiatives for Proliferation
Prevention (IPP) project in Moscow in November 1996 that U.S. taxpayer money was being
funneled into Russia’s most dreaded biological weapons facilities, and that, given the way the
U.S. had structured the programs, there was nothing he could do to stop it.

GERMS, MISSILES, AND IRAN

The State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector, was founded in
the
1970’s to carry out topsecret research into deadly viral weapons. Given all new labs and a new
charter by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, Vector “weaponized” new strains of smallpox at a time
when the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated worldwide. On May 24 of
this year, the World Health Organization voted not to destroy the remaining world stockpiles of
smallpox, which in theory are held only at Vector and in Atlanta, Georgia, for fear the Russians
may have transferred them to rogue states for use as weapons. Worldwide smallpox vaccination
was halted nearly twenty years ago, leaving most of the world’s population with no immunity
-and thus, easy victims of a Third World biological attack.

According to Ken Alibek, a Russian defector who was deputy director of Vector’s parent
organization, Biopreparat, the U.S. has only 7 million doses of smallpox vaccine, putting major
U.S. cities at the mercy of any large-scale terrorist attack. Smallpox has killed 500 million people
this century alone, making it the deadliest disease known to man.

Before Alibek defected from Russia in 1992, Vector also developed a new form of the Ebola
virus known as Marburg-U, a disease which liquefies the victim’s internal organs and causes the
pores of the skin to ooze blood from internal bleeding. Vector’s state-of-the-art
production
facility near the Siberian town of Koltsovo continues to receive funds from IPP and the
U.S. Department of State, under a parallel program known as the International Science
and
Technology Centers (ISTC). Vector’s programs are still “too sensitive to discuss,” say former
officials, who voice concern that the State Department has provided general support
funds
which Vector can use for whatever purpose it chooses. These funds were
awarded Vector
despite U.S. government awareness that the institute is currently developing new biological
weapons for the Russian military, including a new strain of German measles that
creates AIDS-like symptoms in a matter of days.

A Vector researcher went to Iran on a contract approved by the Russian government, the
GAO
discovered, at the same time that Vector was receiving U.S. taxpayer grants, ostensibly to
develop new vaccines. And according to Alibek, who published a chilling insider’s account of
Russia’s secret biological weapons programs earlier this year (Biohazard: The Chilling True
Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, Random House, $24-95),
Vector scientists have recently succeeded in introducing a gene from Ebola into the smallpox
Virus to create “a smallpox-Ebola weapon.”

Other institutes whose ISTC-funded projects have been put on hold include NPO Trud,
which
sold liquid fuel booster technology to Iran, the Moscow Aviation Institute, and the Baltic State
Technical University, where Iranian missile designers were being trained. The Scientific
Research and Design Institute of Power Technology (NKIET) was also receiving ISTC funds.
Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Bulat Nigmatulin acknowledged that NKIET had held talks
with Iran, aimed at building heavy-water and light-water reactors. However, he said, “these talks
did not lead to anything and were halted when talks reached more concrete matters.” Nigmatulin
then used a Clintonian defense to explain why NKIET should not be punished: “If a wife dances
with another man the whole night and nothing happens in the end, I don’t understand why the
husband would be upset and jealous,” he said. “And they didn’t even dance all night.” Two
weeks later, on February 1, the Ministry of Atomic Energy announced that a group of 40 Iranians
was arriving in Russia that month for a 13-month training program in nuclear reactor operations.
So much for dancing.

FUNDING PROLIFERATION TO ENHANCE CAREERS

Critics of the State Department’s ISTC program include Oles Lomacky, an
American who
served as Executive Director of ISTC in Moscow from 1995 to 1997 “The purpose of
these
programs is very noble, but the difference between our intent and our actions is night and day.”

Lomacky and others involved in the programs who asked not to be named cited poor
management and careerism as impediments to meeting the administration’s nonproliferation
goals. “The grand scheme is, if you give Russian scientists enough money, they will
stop
doing what they were doing before, which was designing weapons. That is just a fantasy,”
says Lomacky. “Our objective ought not to be maintaining the nuclear cities, but
creating
opportunities for these people to do other things somewhere else. As it is, the same people who
were designing bombs in the Soviet era are still there.”

A former U.S. intelligence officer who has tracked both programs tells TAS…”For God’s
sake, if
you’re going to give them money, you need to make sure you know what they’re doing. Most of
the time, the ISTC doesn’t have a clue. They are actually providing U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund
proliferation. We need to get our scientists into those Russian labs, not write the Russians a blank
check so they can do whatever they want.”

* * *

The DOE has accepted the GAO’s criticism and has pledged to correct the
deficiencies the
government auditors found in the IPP program. But while individual programs can be
corrected, the administration’s approach toward the collapse of Russia remains
fragmented, fraught with bureaucratic infighting, and lacking any strategic vision.

In a separate review of the Russian programs, released this May, the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) pointed out that U.S. taxpayers currently spend $700 million per year on programs
aimed at enhancing nuclear security in Russia that have simply failed to solve the problem.
“Sizable quantities of fissile materials in Russia remain unprotected; no effective export control
system or enforcement mechanism exists to ensure that stolen materials or warheads are not
smuggled out of the country; and thousands of weapons scientists and nuclear workers are facing
economic hardship because of budget cuts and recession,” says the CBO.

We have been lucky so far, but the Clinton administration’s piecemeal response to the
momentous challenge created by the end of the Cold War will face far greater scrutiny after the
first nuclear terrorist bomb goes off on Main Street, and Americans realize that it could have
been prevented.