North Koreans Asked Ex-Clinton Official for Los Alamos Tour
When North Korean officials sought out newly-elected New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson last December to discuss the Bush administration's refusal to accede to Pyongyang's nuclear blackmail, they asked for a tour of the U.S.'s premier nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos.
"We were at the governor's residence in Santa Fe," Richardson told radio host Don Imus Thursday morning. "You could see Los Alamos (from that location). And they did ask me, is there any chance they could take a tour?"
"I said no," Gov. Richardson quickly added.
During the mid and late 1990s, while Richardson served as Energy Secretary in the Clinton administration, many of the U.S.'s most closely guarded nuclear secrets were obtained by China, a close ally of Pyongyang, including the super-sensitive "legacy codes" - which were described in media reports at the time as "the crown jewels of America's nuclear weapons research program."
Wen Ho Lee, a research physicist at Los Alamos who had met with military scientists from Beijing, was indicted for making unauthorized computer copies of the super-secret nuclear data. Lee has never revealed where he hid the duplicate files of U.S. nuclear secrets.
The Justice Department's espionage case against Lee fizzled after the prosecution was bungled under then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
Richardson described Thursday for the first time how the North Koreans sought him out.
"What happened was.... I was driving to get my laundry, which is a royal pain in the neck, in Santa Fe. And I got this cell call from my friend, the North Korean - who I'd dealt with before when I got some prisoners out of there," the former Clinton official explained.
"He said, 'Look, I'm having difficulty talking to the Bush people. Can you contact them for me?'" Richardson recounted. "And I said, 'I don't know whether they're going to listen to me.'"
After notifying the White House, Richardson said he received an immediate call back from Secretary of State Colin Powell. "He said, 'Yeah, follow up.'"
Richardson said the Bush administration gave the North Koreans a special visa to Santa Fe, a development he said was "significant in itself."
"North Koreans (are only) allowed to travel within a 25 mile radius of New York City," he explained. "We don't let them out beyond that because we think they're probably spying, which they probably are." |
