Malone writes: "Classified material was missing
for years before anyone noticed, and a lab official's public slides included
bomb design data."
The Obama administration levied $1 million in fines against two of the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories for failing to keep track of classified materials and for repeatedly disclosing information related to nuclear weapons design. (photo: Paul Buck/AFP/Getty)
Two Nuclear Weapons Labs Accidentally Spilled Bomb
Secrets for Years
By
Patrick Malone, Center for Public Integrity
06 June 15
Classified material was
missing for years before anyone noticed, and a lab official’s public slides
included bomb design data.
he Obama administration levied fines totaling nearly
$1 million this week against two of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories,
mostly for failing to keep track of classified materials and for repeatedly
disclosing information related to nuclear weapons design in public
presentations stretching over nearly a decade.
In notices published by the Energy Department on June
5, the National Nuclear Security Administration provided only general
information about the materials and data that got loose but said the breaches
were among the most serious such infractions, and could have an “adverse impact
on national security.”
It said a private company that operates Sandia
National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., would be fined $577,500 for its
poor handling of classified nuclear bomb design information.
A second private company that operates Los Alamos
National Laboratories, also in New Mexico, faced a fine of $247,500 for failing
to secure something that was identified only as classified “matter,” according
to one of the notices, as well as a fine of $150,000 for an unrelated employee
safety violation.
The notice did not explain what the missing “matter”
is, but accused Los Alamos of conducting a poor investigation into what
happened to it and of wrongly assuming, for years, that it had been safely destroyed.
The Energy Department said the two violations
involving classified materials and data were labelled with its highest level of
severity because they “involve the actual or high potential for adverse impact
on the national security,” but it did not explain further. Even Los Alamos’s
own internal inquiry “concluded that a compromise of classified information
cannot be ruled out,” the Energy Department said.
The notices suggest that the laboratories—which
endured unusual scrutiny a decade ago over allegations that they had failed to
safeguard highly sensitive nuclear weapons information—are still having trouble
complying with security regulations.
In January, the Energy Department’s Office of
Inspector General asserted that a Los Alamos classification officer had
erroneously approved the release of classified information and said the lab had
poorly trained its classification employees. In 2004, the laboratory’s director
suspended the lab’s operations to fix problems that included the loss of
classified computer disks, and in 2006, police responding to a domestic
violence call at an employee’s home discovered thumb drives from the lab that
contained classified information, along with illicit drugs.
Those events helped provoke the Government
Accountability Office to say in a 2008 report that Los Alamos “has experienced
a series of high-profile security incidents that have drawn attention to the
laboratory’s inability to account for and control classified information and
maintain a safe work environment.”
This week’s infraction notices add to the
laboratories’ growing list of national security embarrassments.
In one, federal investigators specifically said Los
Alamos National Security, LLC, the corporate consortium that manages Los Alamos
National Laboratory with a base contract of $2.2 billion annually, could not
account for an unspecified piece of classified matter. It was last logged in at
Los Alamos in 2007, the report said, shortly before it was supposed to be
shipped to the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site for disposal.
Personnel at the Nevada site did not determine until
five years later that the missing material had never been shipped from Los
Alamos, according to the notice, which did not explain the lapse. Los Alamos’s
internal investigation into the missing material concluded that it was probably
destroyed, but turned up no confirming documentation.
An investigation by the Energy Department concluded to
the contrary that “the probability of undetected removal cannot be regarded as
‘low,’” according to the notice. Energy Department investigators found the
lab’s internal investigation to be riddled with factual errors.
“The fact that [Los Alamos National Security] didn’t
realize this material was missing for five years, and the unreliable nature of
their review of it when they did learn about it is very disturbing,” said Jay
Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonprofit watchdog
organization that tracks nuclear labs in that state. “It’s particularly
troubling because the investigators’ report says it could have had a high level
of damage to national security.”
In a separate probe, Energy Department investigators
similarly found a longstanding security breach went undetected for years at
Sandia National Laboratories.
Between 2003 and 2011, according to the notice, an
unnamed employee of Sandia gave presentations at the lab and in settings open
to the public that divulged classified nuclear weapon design information. In
some cases, slides from the presentation were handed out on paper to the
audiences, or computer disks containing the full presentation were distributed.
A supervisor at the lab discovered the breaches in
2012, kicking off an Energy Department investigation that eventually turned up
47 versions of the employee’s presentation saved on unsecured servers at Sandia
National Laboratory. They were stored there as early as 1997 and were
accessible for years to foreign citizens, according to the violation notice.
Even after the presentation’s presence on the unsecure
network was discovered, Sandia did a sloppy job of purging it from the computer
system, according to the notice. The lab searched only for documents with the
same title, and overlooked others that lacked that label.
Sandia’s internal review reached the same overall
conclusions as the Energy Department, according to the notice. Both concluded
that classified information about nuclear weapon design was compromised.
The $577,500 fine was assessed against the Sandia
Corp., the lab’s Lockheed-Martin-owned managing contractor. But Coghlan called
it “a slap on the wrist” to a contractor that collected more than $26 million
in bonuses and fees last year for managing Sandia.
Sandia’s three full-scale nuclear weapon development
programs have strained the lab’s capacity to manage classified information,
according to the National Nuclear Security Administration.
“Sandia continues to experience a significant number
of security incidents, topping out at 190 incidents of security concern in
FY2014,” according the administration’s last annual performance evaluation of
Sandia. “Failure of the workforce to follow established Corporate Policy
relative to classification reviews continues to be a [safety and security]
management concern.”
“Sandia has taken this security issue seriously since
becoming aware of it in 2012,” Jim Danneskiold, a spokesman for Sandia, said
Friday, after the new notices were published. “After discovering and reporting
the issue, Sandia analyzed the causes and identified, developed and carried out
a series of improvements that will reduce the likelihood of security violations
of this kind.”
The Energy Department’s violation notices acknowledged
that both labs had made progress correcting the problems that led to the
violations. The contractors have until June 26 to contest the fines.
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