By Ian Hoffman Journal Northern Bureau
SANTA FE — Security executives at Los Alamos National Laboratory admit they probably could have better protected two lost hard drives containing nuclear secrets.
"We could have," said John E. "Gene" Tucker, the lab's deputy security chief. "We're studying that right now."
Yet here is the catch: No one in the federal government had to do more than LANL did because no checkout sheets, no tracking or inventories have been required for information classified as secret since May 1992.
The reason: too many secrets. Defense contractors balked at the time and expense of bar-coding and tracking every classified document from creation to destruction. The Bush administration agreed and rolled back the rules.
"They said this is such an extraordinary amount of effort," explained the Federation of American Scientists' Steve Aftergood, head of the Project on Government Secrecy and a leading proponent for limiting classification to the truly valuable secrets, then protecting those well. "Given the expanding volume of secret level material, it was almost an inevitable decision."
Tracking and inventory bar codes were first dropped in February 1991 for non-nuclear weapons data that were classified secret, then in May 1992 for all data classified as secret.
Only information classified as top secret — the small amount of nuclear weapons data with the highest classification — remained bar-coded and inventoried.
The two hard drives discovered missing May 7 from Los Alamos' vault contain details for a wealth of U.S., French, Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons, as well as simpler, easy-to-make nuclear bombs that lab scientists figure terrorists might acquire. The highest classification admitted by government officials for the missing drives' contents is secret restricted data, a category typically applied to details of nuclear weapons systems.
Los Alamos' Tucker argues that checkout sheets and tracking would not necessarily have prevented removal of the drives by a top-security-cleared scientist or engineer.
"This wasn't a patron of a library," Tucker said. "This was the librarian. If you're the librarian, who's checking you? You take the book, turn out the lights and lock the door. So the book's gone, and with the fire raging, you can't return it."
This week, FBI agents formally classified their hunt for the drives as a criminal investigation. But they have found no evidence of espionage and are leaning toward agreeing with lab officials that an employee probably has the drives.
