M A I N   N E W S

US N-secrets missing

LOS ALAMOS, June 13 (Reuters) — Electronically-stored classified information — believed to include U.S. and Russian nuclear secrets - disappeared from a vault at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory last month and the FBI has launched an intense search, officials have said.

The lab’s director, John Browne, said “classified information” was missing, but gave no details. The New York Times, which broke the story on its website, said the information was stored on now-missing hard drives and included US and Russian nuclear secrets and other sensitive data.

Mr Browne said the FBI and investigators from the Department of Energy, which operated the world-famous nuclear facility with the University of California, had been searching for the missing data. “This is an extremely serious matter and we are taking swift action to deal with it,” he said in a statement.

Mr Ed Curran, director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Counter-intelligence, said: “At this point, there is no evidence that suggests espionage is involved in this incident.”

The disappearance comes after an espionage controversy involving the lab and one of its employees, Dr Wen Ho Lee, who was fired in March, 1999, after allegedly copying nuclear weapon secrets and storing them on an unclassified computer network.

At issue were two hard drives that contained information on how to disarm and safely dismantle U.S., Russian and other nuclear devices, the Washington Post reported in its Tuesday edition. It said the two identical hard drives were stored in a suitcase in the vault and belonged to an Energy Department emergency response team that was prepared to rush to any site where the government believed a nuclear bomb might be planted.

Mr Browne said a major effort was under way to find the missing electronically stored data and it was not known if they were just misplaced, stolen or inadvertently destroyed.

“If the inquiry reveals that individuals did not fulfil their responsibilities with respect to this matter, they will face certain and appropriate disciplinary actions,” he said.

NBC News reported the hard drives were first discovered to be missing two months ago, before the Los Alamos wildfire that forced the lab to shut down on May 8. The lab was closed for two weeks, with only a skeleton crew on hand. But lab spokesman John Gustafson said the hard drives were discovered missing “sometime in May.”

“It was in the course of everyday work. Somebody needed something in there and they discovered them (the drives) missing,” he told reporters.

Gustafson declined to elaborate, except to say the person involved was a staff member with clearance for the area where the drives were stored.