The hard drives, which are about the size of a pack of cards and contain how-to manuals for disarming nuclear bombs, were found in mid-June behind a copying machine in a tightly guarded building–right after the FBI began hauling lab personnel before polygraph examiners. Eighty-six people had access to the lab’s vault. All of them claimed ignorance, although a handful reportedly flunked the lie-detector. The failure of the responsible parties to come forward has turned what was believed to be a minor security infraction into a major embarrassment for Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and the Clinton administration.
Even more embarrassment could be on the way: in light of the Los Alamos debacle, the Energy Department has ordered a nationwide “inventory” of secret information stored on electronic media, to be completed in 30 days. A similar inventory at the Livermore weapons lab near San Francisco several years ago revealed that 10,000 classified documents were missing.
