(AP) – NEW YORK # Security at the nation’s nuclear weapons labs is so lax that the facilities have repeatedly failed drills in which mock terrorists captured radioactive material and escaped, according to an article in Vanity Fair magazine.
“Some of the facilities would fail year after year,” said Rich Levernier, who spent six years running war games for the U.S. government. “In more than 50 percent of our tests at the Los Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn’t fire a shot, because we didn’t encounter any guards.”
These failures occurred despite security forces at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and other nuclear facilities knowing the dates of the drills months in advance, according to the story in next month’s Vanity Fair.
Anson Franklin, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the DOE that oversees nuclear-weapons security, denied that nuclear-weapons facilities are vulnerable to attack.
“The impression has been given that these tests are staged like football games, with winners and losers,” he said. “But the whole idea of these exercises is to test for weaknesses # we want to find them before any adversaries could # and then make adjustments.”
The report says Levernier, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Department of Energy, was stripped of his security clearance in 2001 after he faxed an unclassified document to The Washington Post.
Levernier has filed a whistleblower lawsuit arguing that he was illegally removed from his duties. Franklin told the magazine he could not comment on the allegations because the lawsuit is pending.
Sure, “Anson Franklin” would deny any facilities were vulnerable to compromise. There are a host of incompetent GM-21’s drawing down big bucks to convince their superiors of their brilliance, while they spend their actual time preparing resumes’, increasing their workstaff and gathering self-fulfilling data that will step them to the next rung of the GM-ladder.
I have no doubts whatsoever that a highly trained team (or even a single agent in the daytime shift) could penetrate, reach objective, and complete their mission at more nuclear and other utility facilities than they would fail at.
“No winners”, “No loosers”??? Who does he thinks believes that garbage? Any fool who thinks there are no winners and no loosers, and the only objective is to “test for weaknesses… (of physical security) .. and make adjustments”, has no concept of the resoursefullness of trained infiltrators. What he is claiming is as patently incorrect as if MS were to say they fixed the flaw in their OS that was discovered last year by a cracker, so now they are secure from all future attacks.
I hope Levernier burns their a$$3$ with his whistleblower lawsuit. If it was filed after 9-11 he probably passed the unclassified tests as a matter of conscience after years of official denial and inaction. If he passed it before 9-11 he probably smelled the fumes of the coming battle.
Of course, if he does win, the GM21-types will probably just be moved up a notch to a higher paying job after some workerbee gets burned.
And the beat goes on…..
Just MHO
OK, here are a couple of documents under the FOI Act, where DOE says they have no record of any visits by Lavernier/et-al. FYI, “Wackenhut” is a large security company.
Read these carefully, and think between the lines if you care. Notice DOE does not deny the visits by Lavernier, they just don’t have any correspondence about them.
Lavernier Visit Info Denied in DOE FOIA Response:
http://www.oha.doe.gov/cases/foia/vfa0601.htm
http://www.oha.doe.gov/cases/foia/vfa0565.htm