House Committee to Investigate Security Breaches -- 03/26/1999

House Committee to Investigate Security Breaches

26 March, 1999

By Bruce Sullivan
CNS Staff Writer

(CNS) – The chairman of the House Commerce Committee has announced that he will convene hearings early next month to look into security breaches at the Department of Energy's labs. "In the wake of revelations of Chinese spying at Los Alamos and other DOE facilities [the] committee will review security procedures on a lab-by-lab basis," wrote committee chairman Tom Bliley (R-VA) in letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

Additionally, Bliley sent a separate letter to the Government Accounting Office requesting that they conduct a comprehensive investigation of DOE's safeguards and security programs.

On March 8 Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born American citizen was fired from his sensitive nuclear weapons position at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee was a scientist at the lab, who ran a sensitive nuclear weapons computer program. Last year his security clearance was revoked and he has taken two polygraph tests. He passed the first one, but the second indicated deception, according to officials.

Bliley said that he is troubled by the Energy Department's long history of "failing to implement in a timely or effective manner security recommendations that have been made by experts within and outside of DOE repeatedly over the past decade."

He said that he will conduct an aggressive, "bottom-up review" of DOE labs with the greatest security risk.

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