by Cheryl Rofer
I’m waiting until the FBI releases (officially) whatever it is going to release in their case against Bruce Ivins before I try to decipher anything. What I’m seeing in commentary is confusing, and, in some cases, wrong.
For example, Richard Spertzel says in the Wall Street Journal that Ivins couldn’t have been the guy because the anthrax had silica in it. There was a flurry of concern the other day that it may have been Ivins that said that the anthrax had bentonite in it, which may have been an attempt to throw suspicion off of him or possibly to help the government along in its case against Iraq. Or both. So there wasn’t bentonite, but there was silica. Although I think I recall that it was just very, very pure anthrax. This is the kind of stuff I just don’t have time to sort out, and it may all become obsolete when the FBI releases its information.
But there is one issue that is being raised that is valid no matter what the FBI’s evidence shows. That is how to keep the crazies away from dangerous stuff. And it’s not just the crazies, but those who, for reasons of money, ego or anything else, would share information around that maybe shouldn’t be shared. This problem first arose when the guys were gathering stones and making spears and one of them decided that his future lay with the guys across the plain so he would tell them of the impending attack.
A woman who worked at another weapons plant recently told me that the first time she came to Los Alamos, she was shocked that briefcases and purses weren’t searched as she was accustomed to. Just as I was shocked when I drove onto a military base without being required to present identification and found that I was expected to make a classified presentation without being behind guarded gates.
Standards are different across the government, as are the standards for clearances. But the problem goes far, far deeper than that, and it’s not different from the one those guys gathering the stones faced: how do you trust people?
The Manhattan Project had Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass, along with a few others, who shared the information they had with the Russians. Meanwhile, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his brother Frank had explicit ties to the Communist Party and were entirely loyal in their Manhattan Project work.
By the 1960’s, there was a more formal process for security clearances, and a requirement for a loyalty oath in the laboratories administered by the University of California, and there doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of spying. It could have been the process, or, more likely, that everyone working at Los Alamos felt like they were part of a very important enterprise for which it was equally important that the information not be spread around.
That sort of in-groupiness frayed, however. The first time I booted up my computer at work and a warning spread across the screen that the computer was the property of the government and could be searched at any time, I wondered why they didn’t just put up flashing red letters:
WE DON’T TRUST YOUThat was done, of course, in response to the lawyers’ concerns that Wen Ho Lee hadn’t been properly informed that his government-owned computer might be searched. So one person comes under suspicion, and we all are distrusted. I wondered what such a breach of trust would do to someone who was feeling a little paranoid for other reasons.
And there have been more and more requirements, plans, certifications, and other ways of allowing the bureaucrats to present their pile of paper to show that they have done their job, each one pulling another strand out of whatever trust might remain.
Anthrax is easier to transport than plutonium, a briefcase full of which would be picked up on the ubiquitous (at Los Alamos, anyway) radiation detectors. Anthrax is not so detectable, the amounts for those letters fitting into a small vial.
And information is still easier to transport, much easier now than in the Wen Ho Lee days. I have the cutest little fluorescent-green 1-Geg memory card, maybe a centimeter long! And that, like the anthrax, can be secreted in many places not subject to a cursory search of a purse.
Or worse, even if full body searches are instituted for everyone, every day as they leave, someone who is determined can memorize information. A page a day, say. Write it down as soon as you get home. They can’t find that with brain scans yet. As Bugs ‘n Gas Gal says, “An insider at ANY secure facility, with the intent to break rules, can always do so.”
Ultimately, this kind of security depends on trust. You can vet people for obvious weaknesses, but even those supposed markers (the Oppenheimers’ Communist ties; blackmail of homosexuals in the 1950s) can be all wrong, and they may miss other motivations. It’s not clear to me that we know what motivated Robert Hanssen to pass FBI information to the Russians, but it seems to have been tied to a need to “show the bastards” that he worked with and for.
On the other hand, there seem to have been some things about Bruce Ivins that might have merited a bit more scrutiny, although I’m withholding judgment on this until we see more of what the FBI’s got. His co-workers say otherwise, but I’m not sure that’s reliable either.
So how many bioscientists or nuclear weapons handlers are getting really, really irritated at all the ridiculous hoops they have to jump through for the sake of someone else’s distrust? And how likely are they to want to show the bastards? And how can we know?