By: Walter Pincus
The Washington Post
September 12, 2000, Tuesday

With the Wen Ho Lee case apparently on the verge of being settled, Energy Department officials and some members of Congress are urging the FBI to wrap up the other high-profile security investigation at Los Alamos National Laboratory--the case of the disappearing computer hard drives--so that the lab can begin to recover from a dispiriting year.

The hard drives contain highly classified information that members of an emergency response team at Los Alamos might need to disarm a nuclear bomb in the event of an accident or terrorist incident. They were reported missing from a vault on May 31 and mysteriously turned up two weeks later behind a photocopier inside the lab's high-security X Division.

Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that funds Los Alamos, said yesterday that he had expressed concerns about the FBI's wide-ranging, three-month investigation to Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh last week.

"They understand now, if they didn't before [that the hard drives investigation] is creating a morale situation that is not very good," Domenici said. The tough questioning and polygraphing of some 40 employees, including top scientists who have designed many of the nation's nuclear weapons, "could result in a disaster" if they decide to leave the lab, he said.

In an unusually combative speech on the Senate floor last Thursday, Domenici said his message to the FBI is that, "If you can't prove there is spying or espionage" by scientists at Los Alamos, then "pretty soon you ought to get off their backs."

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson had delivered a similar message to Reno three weeks ago.

FBI spokesman John Collingwood said yesterday that "Senator Domenici feels very passionately about the national laboratories, and we have great respect for that. Certainly we take his views very seriously, as we always have."

The FBI investigation, however, appears stalled, according to government officials familiar with the case. After an early determination that the two hard drives probably never left the secure area of the X Division, the bureau has been unable to pin down when the drives were first taken out of the vault, who was responsible for their disappearance, or who returned them.

The inquiry has focused on six Los Alamos employees, including four members of the volunteer Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST. Polygraph tests, which are not admissible in court, indicated that some of them were being deceptive in their answers to questions about the hard drives.

Sources said that based on physical evidence, such as measurements of dust, the FBI believes that the drives had been placed behind the photocopier shortly before they were found there on June 16. But investigators believe there is an agreement among some scientists to cover up the original misplacement, since the drives apparently were never compromised by being removed from the lab or falling into unauthorized hands.

One element of the cover-up, sources said, was to say that the disappearance was first discovered on May 7, when two NEST members went into the vault to retrieve computer disks as a wildfire threatened to engulf the lab.

"That is not true. . . . The fire story was part of the cover-up," one source said yesterday, contending that the NEST's leadership actually had learned that the drives were missing more than a month earlier.

In recent weeks, several scientists have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Albuquerque to describe the NEST's procedures, but none of those under suspicion has been given immunity from prosecution and forced to testify about what went on, one source said. The FBI agents running the case have not been able to decide who is "the least guilty" and thus should be immunized, one source said.

Since the grand jury only meets one day a week, on Fridays, progress has been slow, although some sources believe that a plea bargain in the Wen Ho Lee case could speed things up.

A government official familiar with the investigation said the FBI thinks that Lee's decision to plead guilty to one of 59 felony counts puts pressure on the scientists to come forward and tell the truth. But this official said he thinks that, in reality, "there is no incentive to cooperate, so no one is talking."

Yesterday, Los Alamos Director John C. Browne sent a message to employees expressing hope that Wen Ho Lee's plea agreement will "allow the Laboratory to put this difficult chapter behind us and move on, and will make it easier for our employees to focus on the important work they need to do to ensure national security."