Hi Paul. Thanks for the chuckle..................
All U.S. Nuclear Weapons Said to be Compromised
by James Risen and Jeff Gerth
WASHINGTON -- A scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred huge amounts of secret data from a computer system at a government laboratory, compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal, government and lab officials say.
The data -- millions of lines of computer code that approximate how this country's atomic warheads work -- were downloaded from a computer system at the Los Alamos, N.M., weapons lab that is open only to those with top-level security clearances, according to the officials.
The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, then transferred the files to a widely accessible computer network at the lab, where they were stored under other file names, the officials said.
The Taiwan-born scientist transferred most of the secret data in 1994 and 1995, officials said.
American experts said the data would be useful to any nuclear power trying to replicate this country's atomic designs. But one American scientist said the codes and accompanying data were not, by themselves, sufficient to produce an exact copy of an American weapon.
American officials said there was evidence that the files were accessed by someone after they were placed in the unclassified network. Other evidence suggests that this was done by a person who improperly used a password, the officials said.
The investigation is continuing, and officials do not know whether the data transferred by Lee was obtained by another country.
In 1996, Lee became the focus of an FBI investigation into a separate case, what American official believe was China's theft from Los Alamos of design data for America's most advanced warhead, the W-88. That theft apparently took place in the 1980s. China has denied stealing the material.
Now officials fear that a much broader array of nuclear test data may have been moved to Beijing in the 1990s. Lee has not been charged with any crime.
Federal investigators did not discover the evidence of huge file transfers until last month, when they examined Lee's office computer in connection with their investigation of the earlier theft at Los Alamos, a sprawling lab complex about 35 miles outside Santa Fe.
They then found evidence that Lee, who held one of the government's highest security clearances, had been transferring enormous files involving millions of lines of secret computer code, officials said.
Although Lee had been under investigation in the W-88 case for nearly three years, Los Alamos officials failed to monitor his computer use and let him retain his access to nuclear secrets until late 1998.
Lee was fired by the Energy Department for security violations on March 8. His attorney, Mark Holscher of Los Angeles, did not return a telephone call. In the past, Holscher has denied any wrongdoing by his client.
President Clinton was first told of the new evidence by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson on March 31. During a subsequent meeting at the White House residence in early April, the president told Richardson to "get to the bottom of it," Richardson recalled in an interview Tuesday.
Earlier in March, before being briefed by Richardson, the president said he had not been told of any evidence of espionage during his administration.
In response to the new evidence and with the president's support, Richardson shut down the classified computer systems at Los Alamos and two other major nuclear weapons laboratories this month. He ordered changes in the computer security procedures to make it more difficult to move nuclear secrets out of the classified networks.
"These Wen Ho Lee transgressions cannot occur any more," Richardson said in the interview.
Congressional leaders were told of the new evidence in classified briefings last week.
The huge scale of the security breach has shocked some officials, and has prompted a new sense of urgency in the FBI to solve the Los Alamos spy case. The bureau is now pouring additional agents and resources into the investigation. The evidence of transfers from his office computer provided the basis for an FBI search of Lee's home on April 10, officials said. Lee is believed to be still living in Los Alamos.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview that the briefings on the new evidence "confirmed my worst fears that China's espionage is ongoing, it's deep and we can't wish it away."
There were varying assessments of the gravity of the security breach. One official familiar with the new evidence said, "This is much, much, much worse than the W-88 case."
But an Energy Department official said that because it remained unclear whether China actually obtained the data, the case at this point "is serious but not of the scope of the W-88."
The fact that the huge data transfers were not detected until the last few weeks has sparked outrage among officials who wonder why computer use by a scientist already under suspicion as a spy was not being closely watched by Los Alamos or the FBI.
An internal investigation at the Energy Department into why Lee retained access to American nuclear secrets while he was a spy suspect was begun a month ago and is nearing completion. It is likely to prompt disciplinary action against some lab and Energy Department officials, according to a senior Energy Department official.
FBI officials have told Congress that Lee and his wife, Sylvia, had prior relationships with the bureau. In the early 1980s, Lee volunteered information to the bureau, but officials would not provide details. Mrs. Lee provided the bureau with information on foreign visitors to Los Alamos from about 1987 to 1992, but her information was not considered valuable.
Until now, Clinton and his aides have portrayed Chinese nuclear espionage as a problem that occurred during previous administrations. Amid the furor over the administration's handling of the earlier theft of the W-88 data from Los Alamos, the White House has stressed that the espionage occurred in the 1980s, long before Clinton took office.
But the new evidence raises the stakes of the congressional investigations now under way into how the Los Alamos case was handled after the W-88 theft was first detected in 1995.
The information improperly transferred by Lee included what Los Alamos officials call the "legacy" codes. According to John Browne, director of Los Alamos, the legacy codes consist of computer data used to design nuclear weapons, analyze nuclear test results and evaluate weapons materials and the safety characteristics of America's nuclear warheads.
"They are codes that integrate our best understanding of the processes that go on in a nuclear weapon," Browne said in an interview.
The legacy codes can be used to help design nuclear weapons through computer simulation, and so are valuable on their own. But they become more valuable when combined with specific performance data, which would then enable someone to generate a computer simulation of American warhead designs.
Officials said Lee transferred both the legacy codes and the input data for specific U.S. warheads that go with the legacy codes. The codes and performance data provide what a Los Alamos scientist described as a "rough approximation" of the physical processes that occur in a nuclear weapon.
Ray E. Kidder, a nuclear-weapons physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said the combined data was equivalent to a scientific blueprint.
"If you've got the source code and the input data, you can reverse-engineer the thing and have a complete plan for nuclear explosive part of the weapon," Kidder said.
One lab official said investigators were still trying to determine the extent of the security breach and exactly how many warheads were involved in the data transfers.
The legacy codes and the warhead data that goes with them could be particularly valuable for a country, like China, that has signed onto the nuclear test ban treaty and relies solely on computer simulations to upgrade and maintain its nuclear arsenal. The legacy codes are now used to maintain the American nuclear arsenal through computer simulation.
Most of Lee's transfers occurred in 1994 and 1995, just before China signed the test ban treaty in 1996, according to American officials.
But officials say Lee may have started transferring files out of the classified computer network as early as 1983. So far, officials have not found evidence of transfers after 1995.
Lee, 59, began working at Los Alamos in 1978. His wife worked as a secretary at the lab.
Lee also traveled to China on several occasions while working at Los Alamos. In June 1986 he delivered a paper on nuclear-weapons related science at a symposium in Beijing with the approval of Los Alamos officials. In June 1988 he delivered another paper at a conference in Beijing, again with the lab's approval.
In 1995 U.S. intelligence officials began to suspect that China had obtained design data from the W-88 warhead. In 1996 the FBI began a criminal investigation of the W-88 theft, and Lee emerged as the principal suspect.
Yet by 1997 the bureau's investigation was stalled. The Department of Justice declined an FBI request to seek court approval to gain surreptitious access to Lee's office computer, officials said. Once the the request was rejected, officials of the bureau and the Energy Department determined that they needed Lee's approval to examine his office computer.
In April 1997 Lee was transferred to a new job at Los Alamos, where he was responsible for updating legacy codes for five American warheads. Although Los Alamos officials knew he was already under investigation in the W-88 theft, they believed that his continued access to the legacy codes would not be damaging because they knew he had had access to them for years, lab and Energy Department officials said. But Los Alamos officials also assured the Energy Department that there were fire walls in place to prevent the leakage of classified information, they added.
It was not until last month, just a few days before he was fired, that the FBI finally asked for and received Lee's authorization to search his computer, officials said. Once the bureau saw the transferred files in the unclassified computer network, investigators realized their significance.
Within days, Richardson was briefed, and he then told the president and shut down the lab's computer systems for two weeks. But the FBI still encountered delays in winning Justice Department approval to seek a court-ordered search of Lee's home, officials said, and did not conduct the search until April 10.
The FBI has told Congress that it believes that the new information of computer transfers is the strongest evidence they have against Lee, officials said. The New York Times delayed publication of this article for one day at the request of the FBI, which said the latest disclosure could impede its inquiry.
The New York Times, April 28, 1999 |
