Research facility site of FBI probe into suspected Chinese espionage
A dozen keys to top-secret rooms inside a U.S. nuclear-weapons research facility have gone missing, prompting national security concerns.
The Department of Energy's inspector general raised the red flag Tuesday in a critical report obtained by Agence France-Presse.
On May 5, officials at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reported one set of master keys missing. The discovery was actually made on April 17. The DOE report ups the ante to 12 keys.
"The loss of the master keys and the Tesa card, and the delay in reporting these losses, raised the possibility of security vulnerabilities at the laboratory," Inspector General Gregory Friedman warned in the report.
The nature of the work done at the national lab, which is managed by the University of California, is so sensitive that only a handful of personnel possess master keys.
Tesa cards are plastic cards with a magnetic strip that function as keys.
Through his investigation, Friedman found security officers had known about the loss of keys but failed to report it, in violation of rules that require such losses to be reported within 24 hours.
"We concluded that Livermore did not have adequate internal controls to ensure that security incidents involving missing master keys and Tesa cards were reported within required timeframes," Friedman wrote in the report, according to Agence France-Presse.
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Livermore was the site of an FBI espionage investigation, with agents suspecting former weapons scientist Gwo-Bao Min of having spied for China.
While at Livermore's D-Division, which studies the military uses of nuclear weapons, Min had access to secrets about the W-70, or neutron bomb, which U.S. intelligence believes were leaked to China. According to the 1999 Cox Report, "this suspect may have provided the PRC (People's Republic of China) additional classified information about other U.S. weapons that could have significantly accelerated the PRC's nuclear-weapons program."
Min was forced to resign in 1981 under suspicion of passing bomb secrets to Beijing, though no criminal charges were filed.
WorldNetDaily exclusively reported Min was later spotted in December 1990 by an FBI counterintelligence agent in China near the North Korean border, raising suspicions that U.S. nuclear secrets may have also found their way to the "axis of evil" state the Bush administration seeks to thwart.
