[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16508-16527]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



 INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2000--MOTION TO PROCEED

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate will now resume consideration of 
the motion to proceed to H.R. 1555, which the clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       Motion to proceed to the consideration of a bill (H.R. 
     1555) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2000 for 
     intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the 
     United States Government, the Community Management Account, 
     and the Central Intelligence Agency Retirement and Disability 
     System, and for other purposes.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico is recognized.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, frankly, this is a very important debate 
that starts today on a very important bill, H.R. 1555, and there is a 
very important amendment that we will allude to and talk about this 
afternoon with reference to reorganizing the Department of Energy in 
ways that have been suggested by many in order to minimize security 
risks in the future and maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of 
the department of the Department of Energy that works on the nuclear 
weapons installations, facilities, and research within that department.
  I note the presence of Senator Levin on the floor, and I want to be 
as accommodating as he would like in terms of his using time. I am 
prepared to speak a lot today about history and the like, but whenever 
he is ready, I will be glad to yield to him.
  I am going to start today's debate by inserting into the Record a 
June 30, 1999, column from the Wall Street Journal, written by Paul C. 
Light. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the author 
of ``The True Size of Government,'' Brookings, 1999.
  I ask unanimous consent that that article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  Loose Lips and Bloated Bureaucracies

       How can Washington prevent future security breaches like 
     the one at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory? Last week 
     former Sen. Warren Rudman, chairman of the President's 
     Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and head of a special 
     investigating panel, recommended a ``new semi-autonomous 
     agency'' within the Department of Energy that would have ``a 
     clear mission, streamlined bureaucracy and drastically 
     simplified lines of authority and accountability.''
       Mr. Rudman is right to focus on the structure of the 
     department, not the failures of one or two key bureaurcrats. 
     For the Energy Department has never had more layers of 
     management than it does now--and its leadership has never 
     been more disconnected from what is happening at its bottom. 
     Secretary Bill Richardson last week appointed a security 
     ``czar,'' Gen. Eugene Habiger, to serve as the fulcrum for a 
     newly rationalized chain of command. But the czar may merely 
     add one more layer to a meandering, mostly unlinked 
     collection of overseers who can easily evade responsibility 
     when things go wrong.
       At the department's founding in 1979, its secretary, deputy 
     secretary, undersecretary and assistant secretary 
     ``compartments'' contained 10 layers and 56 senior 
     executives. By 1998 those four compartments had thickened to 
     18 layers and 143 senior executives, including an assortment 
     of chiefs of staff and other alter-ego deputies who fill in 
     whenever their bosses are out.
       The problem in such overlayered, top-heavy organizations is 
     not a lack of information on possible wrongdoing. Lots of 
     people knew about the vulnerabilities at Los Alamos. The 
     problem is finding someone who is

[[Page 16509]]

     ultimately responsible for taking action. Which department 
     executive does Congress hold accountable for the security 
     breach? The secretary? His chief of staff? One of the two 
     deputy chiefs of staff? The deputy secretary? Undersecretary? 
     Assistant secretary for defense programs? For environmental 
     management? For science? How about the principal deputy 
     assistant secretary for military applications? Deputy 
     assistant secretary for research and development? Defense 
     laboratories office director? Perhaps the assistant secretary 
     for strategic computing and simulation? Or the inspector 
     general, deputy inspector general, or assistant inspector 
     general?
       The answer is everyone and no one. And the diffusion of 
     accountability continues down into the University of 
     California, the contractor that supervises the Los Alamos 
     laboratory and three other DOE facilities. Whom does the 
     federal government hold accountable at the university? The 
     president? The senior vice president for business and 
     finance? Vice president for financial management? Associate 
     vice president for human resources and benefits? Assistant 
     vice president for laboratory administration? The executive 
     director for laboratory operations? Director of contracts 
     management? The manager for facilities management and 
     safeguards and security?
       No wonder it takes a crisis to focus attention. With 15 to 
     25 layers just to get from the top of the department to the 
     top of Los Alamos, information is bound to get lost along the 
     way, and no one is accountable when it does.
       The Department of Energy is hardly alone in such senior-
     level thickening. Forced by repeated hiring freezes to choose 
     between protecting the bottom of government and bulking up 
     its middle and top, federal departments and agencies have 
     mostly sacrificed the bottom. In 1997, for the first time in 
     civil service history, middle level employees outnumbered 
     bottom-level ones. Nearly 200,000 senior and middle-level 
     managers have retired from government in the past few years, 
     and almost everyone next in line has been promoted--all at a 
     cost of $3 billion in voluntary buyouts for what turned out 
     to be a big retirement party with no effect on the basic 
     structure of government.
       Some of the lower-level jobs have disappeared forever with 
     the arrival of time-saving technologies. Others have migrated 
     upward into the middle-level ranks as professional and 
     technical employees have added lower-level tasks to their 
     higher-paid duties. Still others have migrated into the 
     federal government's contract workforce which numbered some 
     5.6 million employees in 1996.
       Meanwhile, the top of government has grown ever taller. 
     From 1993 to 1998, federal departments created 16 new senior-
     level titles including principal assistant deputy 
     undersecretary, associate deputy assistant secretary, chief 
     of staff to the under secretary, assistant chief of staff to 
     the administrator, chief of staff to the assistant 
     administrator and--lets not forget--deputy to the deputy 
     secretary.
       Spies will be spies, and the Los Alamos espionage probably 
     would have occurred regardless of the width or height of the 
     government hierarchy. But the breach would have been noticed 
     earlier and closed sooner had the top been closer to the 
     bottom. If Congress wants to increase the odds that nuclear 
     secrets will be kept in the future, it could do no better 
     than to order a wholesale flattening of the Energy Department 
     hierarchy. Then it should do the same with the rest of the 
     federal government.

  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I want to talk a little bit about what 
Mr. Light discusses in this column on the 30th day of June, 1999, and 
set it a bit in perspective. As Senators and those listening today 
might recall, starting about 3 months before this article written by 
Paul C. Light appeared in the Wall Street Journal, word broke through 
the media in the United States of the possibility that the People's 
Republic of China had, in fact, breached security at Los Alamos 
National Laboratory and, indeed, they may have some of the most 
significant and profound secrets with reference to our nuclear weaponry 
in their possession. That broke in the New York Times in a series of 
articles, and thereafter it was in the headlines and on the front pages 
of our papers for 3 or 4 weeks. Now it seems to have dwindled a bit 
because Congress and the executive branch are working on what we ought 
to do about it.
  Frankly, one of the purposes for my being on the floor today and 
tomorrow and for as many days as it takes until we can take up the 
intelligence bill, H.R. 1555, which I have little to do with because I 
am not on that committee, is an amendment that would permit us to 
organize within the Department of Energy that aspect of the Department 
of Energy's work that has to do with nuclear weapons.
  The reason that is important is because the American people should 
not be misled, nor should we let this issue go to sleep. The issue is a 
serious one. The issue of who develops and protects our nuclear 
weapons, and are they doing it in the best possible way, should be 
front and center with the American people because if, in fact, the 
security was breached to the extent that the Cox committee report had--
that is a House Member's name; he was chairman of a joint committee in 
the House that prepared a report commonly known as the Cox report. If 
it is as bad as he and other House Members say in that report, and as 
bad as some others who have reported on it say, then clearly we are at 
risk that the Communist Chinese has sufficient information to develop, 
over time, a very significant arsenal of nuclear weapons.
  Coupled with the fact that they are moving rapidly with respect to 
delivery systems, then clearly in the next millennium we will have a 
new adversary in the world. It will no longer necessarily be Russia as 
a successor to the weapons systems and delivery systems--the U.S.S.R.--
but, essentially, we may have both Russia and China with substantial 
nuclear weapons. We may feel secure with our Air Force and our Navy and 
with our Army, as we have had these skirmishes in the past 3 to 5 
years, but we will still be looking at a very dangerous world.
  As a matter of fact, it may be the only single source of real power 
and military might that Russia might have for the first 50 or 100 years 
in the next millennium. And that is enough for a country that is not 
doing very well to be a bit dangerous. It is certainly enough for the 
world to be dangerous and America to be in danger and fearful if the 
Chinese Communist regime has a determined and dedicated and significant 
nuclear arsenal.
  With that as a background, and with many hearings in both bodies--
some joint, some singular by different committees--over the weeks since 
this was first broken, we have heard all kinds of evidence about how 
this happened--some of it in secret, some of it public. As a Senator 
from New Mexico, I have had to learn about nuclear weapons because two 
of the laboratories are in my State, and I happen to be chairman of the 
committee that funds all of the Department of Energy. I have said that 
there is so much that went wrong that there is plenty of blame for 
everyone. This is not exclusively a problem that occurred within that 
laboratory at Los Alamos. It is not exclusively a problem that 
something happened within the Department of Energy. It is not totally 
dispositive of this issue to stand on the floor of the Senate and say 
the FBI didn't do their job right--which they didn't. The problem is, 
it was a comedy of errors. Everybody seems to have messed up on this 
one.
  Frankly, it seems that enough time has passed for us to be on the 
verge of fixing it, and so let's talk a minute about how we are going 
to fix it, and then I will read excerpts from the article that I asked 
be printed. First of all, there is no question that we received a 
formidable report from the PFIAB Commission, which is made up of five 
members. It is a presidentially appointed group.
  The President did something different about this one than in the past 
in that he asked them to do the report and to plan to release it to the 
public. They did. It was released to the public, and its principal 
spokesman and chairman was the very distinguished former Senator from 
New Hampshire, Mr. Rudman.
  We will talk at length about what they recommended. But suffice it to 
say they found that the management structure within the Department of 
Energy was in such a state of chaos that it could not control, in the 
form and manner that it existed over these past years, the security of 
valuable secrets and information within the laboratories; that it was 
incapable of doing it because it was disorganized, or organized in a 
manner where there was no accountability. So that if you wanted to 
blame the FBI for something that happened out of their Santa Fe, NM, 
office, they could clearly, if they chose, say: Yes, but somebody else 
fell down on the job.
  If you asked the Director of the laboratories, he would say: Nobody 
ever

[[Page 16510]]

told me about it. Nobody brought me on board. I thought since they were 
doing an investigation of an individual that they were in charge of the 
investigation, and I didn't have anything to do with it.
  There are many examples, real and anecdotal, that say the Department 
of Energy is incapable of maintaining within its current framework of 
management such a significant system as the nuclear weapons system of 
the United States of America.
  Frankly, it pains me to come to the floor and say that I have arrived 
at that conclusion unequivocally. And it pains me to say that I arrived 
at it some time ago. As a matter of fact, there will be a big argument 
made that we should move slowly.
  I would like in due course, if not today, tomorrow, to outline why 
the time has come to fix it in the manner recommended by the Rudman 
commission, which is a Presidential commission. How much more time do 
we need?
  I will tell the Senate that 2 to 3 weeks before the Rudman report was 
issued, this Senator from New Mexico was busy working with Senators 
developing the exact same model that the Rudman commission ultimately 
recommended to the Congress and the President of the United States for 
restructure, in a formidable way with significant changes, of the 
entire apparatus that functions within DOE and produces for us safe, 
sound, and reliable nuclear weapons and that has all of the ancillary 
functions which are related to that.
  Having said that, it was not just yesterday that there were 
recommendations that the Department of Energy was straining under its 
own bureaucracy and that the nuclear weapons laboratories were victims 
of it. In fact, we will allude to at least two prior reports and 
recommendations to that of the Rudman commission by which clearly we 
are sending a loud and clear signal: Fix it. It is not working. It is 
the risky way you have it done.
  I would add, it is not only risky as to security, but let me suggest 
there is a substantial lack of efficiency and the ability to manage the 
nuclear weapons system adequately and frugally to get the very best we 
should have. It is almost an impossibility within the structure of the 
Department of Energy, a hybrid department made up of many different 
agencies and groups thrown together in a haphazard way. And then we 
expect the nuclear weapons part of it to function under the overload of 
management, rules, and regulations that apply across the board to any 
kind of function within the Department, some so removed from nuclear 
weaponry that you wouldn't even think of them being in the same 
personnel department, in the same environmental department, or in the 
same safety and health departments.
  With that, let me move to the Wall Street Journal article and paint a 
little history along with this writer, Mr. Light.
  He starts by saying:

       How can Washington prevent future security breaches like 
     the one at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory? Last week 
     former Sen. Warren Rudman, chairman of the President's 
     Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a head of a special 
     investigating panel, recommended a ``new semiautonomous 
     agency'' within the Department of Energy that would have ``a 
     clear mission, streamlined bureaucracy and drastically 
     simplified lines of authority and accountability.''
       Mr. Rudman is right to focus on the structure of the 
     department, not the failures of one or two key bureaucrats. 
     For the Energy Department has never had more layers of 
     management than it does now--and its leadership has never 
     been more disconnected from what is happening at its bottom.
       Secretary Bill Richardson, last week appointed a security 
     ``czar,'' Gen. Eugene Habiger, to serve as the fulcrum for a 
     newly rationalized chain of command. But the czar may merely 
     add one more layer to a meandering, mostly unlinked 
     collection of overseers who can easily evade responsibility 
     when things go wrong.

I could not say it any better.
  Continuing on:

       At the department's founding in 1979, its secretary, deputy 
     secretary, undersecretary and assistant secretary 
     ``compartments'' contained 10 layers and 56 senior 
     executives. By 1998 those four compartments had thickened to 
     18 layers and 143 senior executives, including an assortment 
     of chiefs of staff and other alter-ego deputies who fill in 
     whenever their bosses are out.
       The problem in such overlayered, top-heavy organizations is 
     not a lack of information on possible wrongdoing. Lots of 
     people knew about the vulnerabilities at Los Alamos. The 
     problem is finding someone who is ultimately responsible for 
     taking action. Which department executive does Congress hold 
     accountable for the security breach? The secretary? His chief 
     of staff? One of the two deputy chiefs of staff? The deputy 
     secretary? Undersecretary? Assistant secretary for defense 
     programs? For environmental management? For science? How 
     about the principal deputy assistant secretary for military 
     applications? Deputy assistant secretary for research and 
     development? Defense laboratories office director? Perhaps 
     the assistant secretary for strategic computing and 
     simulation? Or the inspector general, deputy inspector 
     general, or assistant inspector general?
       The answer is everyone and no one. And the diffusion of 
     accountability continues down into the University of 
     California, the contractor that supervises the Los Alamos 
     laboratory and three other DOE facilities. Whom does the 
     federal government hold accountable at the university? The 
     president? The senior vice president for business and 
     finance? Vice president for financial management?

  And on it goes. I will jump down in the article to another full 
quote:

       No wonder it takes a crisis to focus attention. With 15 to 
     25 layers just to get from the top of the department to the 
     top of Los Alamos, information is bound to get lost along the 
     way, and no one is accountable when it does.

  I am going to skip a little bit of the article and move down to the 
end of it with another quote. I will insert it with the underline parts 
being that which I read.

       Spies will be spies, and the Los Alamos espionage probably 
     would have occurred regardless of the width or height of the 
     government hierarchy. But the breach would have been noticed 
     earlier and closed sooner had the top been closer to the 
     bottom. If Congress wants to increase the odds that nuclear 
     secrets will be kept in the future, it could do no better 
     than to order a wholesale flattening of the Energy Department 
     hierarchy. Then it should do the same with the rest of the 
     federal government.

  The reason I read excerpts from the article is that it is quite 
obvious to me this man has his finger right on the problem.
  Let me now proceed to a discussion of the latest thorough 
investigation of the Department of Energy and its mission as the 
primary functionary in nuclear weapons from research to security to 
safekeeping, et cetera. Let me move to the latest thorough report, and 
then we will go back to some others that existed prior thereto.
  I don't know that I want to make this report a part of the Record, 
but everybody should know if they want to read what has been said by 
the latest contingent of reputable, dedicated, knowledgeable Americans, 
I am reading from ``Science at its Best, Security at its Worst,'' a 
report on security problems of the U.S. Department of Energy by a 
special investigative panel, the President's Foreign Intelligence 
Advisory Board, of June 1999.
  There are plenty of these reports around for anybody who wants to 
participate in this discussion. We will make them available. We will 
see that some are in the Cloakroom for people who might want to review 
them. I will talk a little bit about the significance of this report 
and why I think the time has come to adopt its principal 
recommendations.
  For those who wonder what we are trying to do, obviously, we had to 
draw from a lot of people to do what was recommended in this report. 
While Members may not find every word of the extensive amendment I will 
soon allude to in detail within this report, let me repeat, for anybody 
interested in the security of the weapons laboratories and the nuclear 
weapons activity of our Nation, the amendment we are trying to call up 
as part of H.R. 1555 is the recommendations from this report.
  Let's get in the Record what this report is. This report is the 
result of a March 18, 1999, President Clinton request that the 
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, commonly known as 
PFIAB, undertake an inquiry and issue a report on ``The security threat 
at the Department of Energy's weapons lab and the adequacy of measures 
that have been taken to address it.''
  I will read the names of the board members and make sure the Senate

[[Page 16511]]

and everybody knows who they are: The Honorable Warren B. Rudman, 
chairman; appointed members are Ms. Ann Z. Caracristi, Dr. Sydney 
Drell, Mr. Stephen Friedman, to form the special investigative panel. 
They are the members. They were given detailees from several Federal 
agencies, including CIA, FBI, DOD, to augment the work of the staff. 
They spent 3 months interviewing 100 witnesses, received more than 700 
documents encompassing thousands of pages, and conducted on-site 
research and interviews at five of the Department's National 
Laboratories and plants: Sandia National Lab, Pantex in Texas, Oak 
Ridge in Tennessee, Livermore in California, and Los Alamos in New 
Mexico.
  This report and an appendix that supports it, both of which are 
unclassified, are now before the Senate. A large volume of classified 
material which was also reviewed and distilled for this report has been 
relegated to a second appendix and is authorized for special kinds of 
authorized recipients.
  This report examines the 20-year history--which I just alluded to in 
reading the excellent article by Mr. Light--of security and 
counterintelligence issues at the laboratories, with an issue on five 
laboratories that focus on weapons and related weapons research. It 
looked at the inherent tensions between security concerns and 
scientific freedom at the laboratories. In effect, they looked at the 
institutional culture and efficacy of the Department. They looked at 
the growth and evolution of foreign intelligence and the threat 
thereafter to the National Laboratories, particularly in connection 
with foreign visitors programs, the implementation of effective 
Presidential Decision Directive No. 61, the reforms instituted by the 
Secretary, and other related initiatives.
  At some point in time within the last 5 or 6 months when it started 
to evolve that, in fact, there could have been a very serious, 
significant, prolonged, and persistent breach at Los Alamos, the 
President of the United States--and others might argue that the 
timeliness of the President's actions is an issue. I am not sure that I 
will argue that point. My point in what I will discuss today and 
tomorrow, and for however long it takes to get this bill up and get 
this amendment considered, is going to be discussing how we fix what is 
wrong with this Department of Energy as it relates to nuclear weapons 
and how we do it now--not 6 months from now, not a year from now, but 
now.
  Eventually, the President issued a Presidential decision directive 
which is called No. 61. Now, that suggested in no uncertain terms that 
some things be changed in the Department, and changed forthwith. 
However, those were things the Department could do without any 
legislation. They preceded the thorough recommendations that were made 
by the Rudman commission. Then it included additional measures to 
improve security and counterintelligence.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the page of the 
abstract of the Rudman report, with the panel of members and the staff.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                             Panel Members

       The Honorable Warren B. Rudman, Chairman of the President's 
     Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Senator Rudman is a 
     partner in the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and 
     Garrison. From 1980 to 1992, he served in the U.S. Senate, 
     where he was a member of the Select Committee on 
     Intelligence. Previously, he was Attorney General of New 
     Hampshire.
       Ms. Ann Z. Caracristi, board member. Ms. Caracristi, of 
     Washington, DC, is a former Deputy Director of the National 
     Security Agency, where she served in a variety of senior 
     management positions over a 40-year career. She is currently 
     a member of the DCI/Secretary of Defense Joint Security 
     Commission and recently chaired a DCI Task Force on 
     intelligence training. She was a member of the Aspin/Brown 
     Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the Intelligence 
     Community.
       Dr. Sidney D. Drell, board member. Dr. Drell, of Stanford, 
     California is an Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics 
     and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has served 
     as a scientific consultant and advisor to several 
     congressional committees, The White House, DOE, DOD, and the 
     CIA. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a 
     past President of the American Physical Society.
       Mr. Stephen Friedman, board member. Mr. Friedman is 
     Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University and 
     a former Chairman of Goldman, Sachs, & Co. He was a member of 
     the Aspin/Brown Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of 
     the Intelligence Community and the Jeremiah Panel on the 
     National Reconnaissance Office.


                              pfiab staff

       Randy W. Deitering, Executive Director.
       Mark F. Moynihan, Assistant Director.
       Roosevelt A. Roy, Administrative Officer.
       Frank W. Fountain, Assistant Director and Counsel.
       Brendan G. Melley, Assistant Director.
       Jane E. Baker, Research/Administrative Officer.


                          pfiab adjunct staff

       Roy B., Defense Intelligence Agency.
       Karen DeSpiegelaere, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
       Jerry L., Central Intelligence Agency.
       Christine V., Central Intelligence Agency.
       David W. Swindle, Department of Defense, Naval Criminal 
     Investigative Service.
       Joseph S. O'Keefe, Department of Defense, Office of the 
     Secretary of Defense.

  Mr. DOMENICI. I note the presence of the cochairman of the committee 
that actually has jurisdiction and is in control of the bill, H.R. 
1555, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska.
  I say to the Senator what I said to one of his staff members who was 
on the floor. Whenever the Senator is ready, I will relinquish the 
floor and yield. I am prepared to speak today and tomorrow and however 
long is necessary until we all get together and get the bill up and get 
the amendment to it called up. I am not here today to keep others from 
speaking. My responsibility with reference to the amendment which we 
propose is to start talking about the significance of it and of the 
Rudman report to the future security prospects for our nuclear resource 
development by the Department of Energy.
  I started on that report of your good friend and mine, Senator 
Rudman. This is not a bad breaking point for me if the Senator desires 
to speak.
  Mr. KERREY. I have a unanimous consent request, and then I am pleased 
to let the Senator continue.


                         Privilege of the Floor

  Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Biden, I ask 
unanimous consent that the privilege of the floor be granted to David 
Auerswald, an American Political Science fellow on the Democratic staff 
of the Foreign Relations Committee, during the pendency of H.R. 1555, 
to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2000 for intelligence and 
intelligence-related activities for the United States Government.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, what I want to do, in the presence of my 
friend, is recap. I heretofore, I say to the Senator from Nebraska, 
made the point of why we need some dramatic, drastic, and significant 
reform of the Department of Energy as it applies to nuclear weaponry in 
all its context. I have indicated there are a number of reports that 
point in the direction of doing something very different, not just some 
new boxes in the Department.
  I said I would start with a review of the Rudman report as to what 
they recommend, because the amendment I will be proposing and of which 
Senator Kerrey is a cosponsor is our best effort to incorporate into 
the bill language the Rudman recommendations. We are not inventing 
something new, although some of us were on that trail before the Rudman 
report. It is essentially an effort to convert these recommendations, 
of which my colleagues are fully aware, to a bill, and that legislation 
will be presented when we are on the bill. We do not know when that 
time will come. We are now on a motion to proceed to that bill.
  Let me now, in my own way, talk a bit about the Rudman report. The 
Senate is now fully aware of who the commissioners are, what their 
origins are, and the fact that this is the first such report that has 
been made public. In the past, Presidents have used them, but they have 
not made them public. The President asked from the outset that this 
report be made public. That was prudent because we were in such a

[[Page 16512]]

state of confusion and chaos regarding how much of our future security 
was actually stolen. This was a good way to say some people are 
recommending ways to fix it. It is public.
  Let me state to the Senate, and those interested, some of the 
significant findings of this report. Remember, the reason the report is 
significant is not because it is the only report of its type, but it is 
the last one recommending drastic change. These findings I am going to 
be talking about are in support of the bill we want to introduce, 
because they are in support of the Rudman commission's recommendations.
  Findings found at pages 1 through 6--I am going to pick out the ones 
I think most adequately present the issue and the reasons for doing 
something.
  No. 1, from my standpoint:

       More than 25 years worth of reports, studies and formal 
     inquiries--by executive branch agencies, Congress, 
     independent panels and even the DOE itself--have identified a 
     multitude of chronic security and counterintelligence 
     problems at all the weapons labs.

  I give this fact at the outset because I am very concerned there 
still will be some in the public, at the laboratories and in the 
Senate, who will say we need more time. Remember, the finding I just 
stated was that for 25 years there have been reports, studies, and 
inquiries that addressed the issues in this amendment we want to call 
up on the bill.
  No. 2:

       Organizational disarray, managerial neglect, and a culture 
     of arrogance--both at DOE headquarters and at the labs 
     themselves--conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting 
     to happen.

  Those are not my words. I might have phrased it differently. 
Essentially, in the amendment we want to call up, we are also trying to 
change the organizational disarray. We are trying to change it so that 
managerial neglect will be harder to be vested in this part of the DOE. 
We are addressing the culture, but we are not destroying the actual 
necessary component within these laboratories of freedom for 
scientists. But freedom is not absolute for scientists who work on 
nuclear weapons. We want to give them as much freedom as is consistent 
with minimizing security risks, and that means there has to be pushed 
through management a change in the culture without changing the 
scientific excellence.

       . . . DOE headquarters and at the labs themselves--
     conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to happen.

  The way it is phrased one would think they were doing something 
intentional in that regard. I would not have used ``conspired.'' It 
happened that way because of the way it is managed and the way the 
culture has developed.
  Let me move down to another couple I think are very important:

       DOE has a dysfunctional management structure and culture 
     that only occasionally gave proper credence to the need for 
     rigorous security and counterintelligence programs at the 
     weapons laboratories. For starters, there has been a 
     persistent lack of real leadership and effective management 
     of the DOE.

  They also factually concluded that the Department--and this is very 
important--is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has proven it is 
incapable of reforming itself. Why do I pull that one out? Because we 
are hearing that we do not need to do everything this report recommends 
because the Secretary is going to do it. As a matter of fact, the 
Secretary is a friend of mine. He is from my State. He served in the 
House and I in the Senate, and I have great respect for what he did. He 
has done more in the Department in the past few months than anybody we 
have had around in terms of seeing that it is really risky and things 
are dangerous there; we have to get on with fixing them.
  The point is, the Rudman commission said the Department's bureaucracy 
is so dysfunctional that it cannot reform itself. For those who will 
come to the Chamber either in opposition to the amendment or indicating 
we should go slowly because the Secretary is doing some things, I will 
keep reading them this statement.
  This is not our statement. This is the statement of five of the best 
people around appointed by the President of the United States to tell 
us how to fix this. In fact, I will tell you one of them, Dr. Drell, 
would be picked by anyone on any five-member commission that was going 
to survey and recommend how we should handle nuclear weapons within our 
bureaucracy better.
  He is on this, and he agrees. They are saying the Secretary cannot 
fix it because the bureaucracy is so rambunctious, so overlapping, so 
inconsistent that it cannot fix itself.
  Last:

       Reorganization is clearly warranted to resolve the many 
     specific problems with security and counterintelligence in 
     the . . . laboratories, but also to address the lack of 
     accountability that has become endemic throughout the entire 
     Department.

  I am going to move to a couple more facts. We all know--no, we do not 
all know; some of us know because we have been around here long 
enough--that we can look at who have been the Secretaries of Energy 
over time, and the Rudman report has something to say about that.
  This is a complicated Department, but if you know anything about it, 
it runs all the nuclear weapons activities in the country. For 
starters, one would think: Boy, we ought to put somebody in who knows a 
little bit about that.
  The report says:

       The criteria for the selection of Energy Secretaries have 
     been inconsistent in the past. Regardless of the outcome of 
     ongoing or contemplated reforms, the minimum qualifications 
     for Energy Secretary should include experience in not only 
     energy and scientific issues, but national security and 
     intelligence issues. . . .

  I am not going to list the Secretaries in the last 30 years since the 
DOE was formed, and prior to it ERDA, but I am going to merely say 
there have not been very many Presidents who gave serious consideration 
to who should be the Secretary in the same context that the five-member 
commission looked at what should be the qualifications.
  There will still be some who will say: Well, look, we have a 
Secretary who is trying. This has just come upon us. Let's go a little 
slower.
  The Rudman commission made another finding, and it is the following:

       However, the Board is extremely skeptical that any reform 
     effort, no matter how well-intentioned, well-designed, and 
     effectively applied, will gain more than a toehold at DOE, 
     given its labyrinthine management structure, fractious and 
     arrogant culture, and the fast-approaching reality of another 
     transition in DOE leadership. Thus we believe that he has 
     overstated the case when he asserts, as he did several weeks 
     ago, that ``Americans can be reassured; our nation's nuclear 
     secrets are, today, safe and secure.''

  That is an allusion to a statement by our Secretary of Energy. I take 
it Secretaries have tried to tell us they are doing everything they can 
within the structure they have and that we are moving in the direction 
of making things safe.
  This board--I frequently call it a commission--the Rudman board, has 
taken a look at that statement versus what they think you can do in 
that Department, and they have concluded that things are still kind of 
at risk.
  I note today, in the presence of the press the new securities czar, 
the distinguished four-star general who was appointed, is saying: We're 
working on it, but it is at least a year away in terms of having 
something in place. I note that is in the news today.
  What did this distinguished board--sometimes referred to in my 
remarks as commission--actually recommend by way of reorganizations? I 
want everyone to know I am going to repeat that there are other 
reports, prior to this, that recommended dramatic changes within the 
Department, and I have not yet alluded to them. I am only talking about 
the Rudman recommendations.
  They suggest that:

       The panel is convinced that real and lasting security and 
     counterintelligence reform at the weapons labs is simply 
     unworkable within DOE's current structure and culture. To 
     achieve the kind of protection that these sensitive labs must 
     have, they and their functions must have their own autonomous 
     operational structure free of all the other obligations 
     imposed by [the department].

  In order to do that, they say it can be done in one of two ways.

       It could remain an element of DOE but become semi-
     autonomous--by that we mean

[[Page 16513]]

     strictly segregated from the rest of the Department. This 
     would be accomplished by having an agency director report 
     only to the Secretary of Energy. The agency directorship also 
     could be ``dual-hatted'' as an Under Secretary, thereby 
     investing [him] with extra bureaucratic clout both inside and 
     outside the department.

  They go on to say:

       Regardless of the mold in which this agency is cast, it 
     must have staffing and support functions that are autonomous 
     from the remaining operations at DOE.

  Essentially, when you read the recommendations, the most significant 
words are their functions must have their own autonomous operational 
structure free of all other obligations imposed by DOE management.
  You get that one of two ways. You get it semiautonomously--which I 
have just read--or you can take it out of the Department of Energy in 
toto, stand it free, i.e., NASA. They have suggested those are the two 
ways.
  Those of us who have been involved for years think that we ought to 
start by trying to convince the Senate and House that we should make it 
semiautonomous, leaving it within the DOE, for a number of reasons, and 
only if all fails should we go the other route.
  This Senator is very concerned about the laboratories that make us so 
strong and contribute so much to our science effectiveness in the 
world, that they remain the very best. I would not, for a minute, be 
talking about restructuring if I did not think those laboratories could 
continue to do work for others, work for other agencies, and work for 
the Department of Defense and nuclear weapons. I believe they can and 
they will. I believe they will, under the amendment about which we are 
talking.
  So while there is much more to talk about, in summary, H.R. 1555, 
which is the annual intelligence authorization bill, the sooner we can 
get it up on the Senate floor, the sooner we can bring up this 
amendment, the Kyl-Domenici-Murkowski, et al. amendment, which has 
every chairman of every committee who is involved in this as 
cosponsors, along with a number of other Senators, and the 
distinguished Senator from Nebraska, who is here on the floor with us, 
Senator Kerrey, and Senator Feinstein of California. As soon as we can 
start debating it--obviously, we are willing to listen; we do not claim 
that every ``t'' is crossed right and every ``I'' is in the proper 
place, but we believe the format to accomplish what the Rudman five-
member board recommended is within the four corners of that amendment, 
and that is what we ought to be looking at now in the next few days to 
get it done.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. KERREY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Voinovich). The Senator from Nebraska.
  Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, the Senator from New Mexico has done a 
very good job of outlining an urgent need to change our law governing 
the Department of Energy. I have high praise for him and Senators 
Warner, Murkowski, Kyl, and, on our side, Senators Levin, Bingaman, and 
Lieberman, who have worked to try to fashion a piece of legislation, a 
law that will balance our need for secrecy and our need for security.
  I appreciate very much, I say to the Senator, his leadership on this 
and the sense of urgency that he has brought to the need to change our 
law. My hope is that we, at the end of the day, at the end of this 
debate--I do not think there is going to be very much objection to 
moving to this bill--my hope is that we can get a very large majority, 
if not a unanimous vote in support.
  I know the Senator from Michigan, Mr. Levin, has some amendments he 
wants to offer. He has talked to me a little bit about them. We will 
have a chance to talk about those, I guess, tomorrow when we come to 
it.
  But there is no question that the laboratories have been a tremendous 
source of pride and a tremendous source of discovery and a tremendous 
success story as far as delivering to the United States of America 
things that have made the United States of America more secure and more 
prosperous.
  Likewise, there is no question that over the years--over the last 20 
years or so--since the Department of Energy was created, there has been 
sort of a gradual buildup of layers of bureaucracy that make it more 
and more difficult for any Secretary of Energy, whether that individual 
has the requisite skills or not, to know what is going on in the 
laboratories and to have the authority needed to manage those agencies 
so those laboratories, as Senator Rudman, chairman of the PFIAB says in 
the title of his report, can get both the best science and the best 
security simultaneously. We unquestionably have the best science. I am 
quite certain the Senator from New Mexico believes the same way I do. 
In visiting the labs, in particular the lab that is under question, Los 
Alamos, most of the people I have met there described themselves as 
being very conservative to extremely conservative on the question of 
security and expressed their concern that their reputation for keeping 
the United States of America safe has been damaged. Of all the people 
who are anxious to get the law changed so that the lab's reputation for 
being the world's finest both for science and security can be restored, 
there are no more powerful advocates of that than at Los Alamos 
Laboratory from Dr. Brown on down.
  This is an unusual opportunity because normally the intelligence 
authorization bill goes through almost with unanimous consent. Since I 
have had the opportunity a few years to come here with the chairman, 
with usually about 15 minutes' worth of conversation and without a lot 
of interest, the bill goes through. The good news this year is that it 
will not go through quite so quickly. It is good news because it gives 
us an opportunity to examine what it is this bill does and what it is 
this bill does not do.
  Unfortunately, current law does not allow us to tell the people of 
the United States of America either how much we spend on all of our 
intelligence collection, analysis, or dissemination efforts, or does it 
allow us to tell what the individual components of that are. I say 
``unfortunately'' because I do believe quite strongly that we would be 
better off changing the law so the public did know both of those 
things. I believe that unless the people of the United States of 
America support what it is we are doing with our intelligence efforts, 
it is very difficult, over a long period of time, to sustain that 
effort. I myself am very much concerned that at the moment the general 
public does not either understand what it is we do on the intelligence 
side, or as a consequence of some very highly publicized failures are 
they terribly confident that we are doing a very good job of collecting 
intelligence, analyzing that intelligence, producing that intelligence, 
and then disseminating that intelligence to either warfighters or to 
national policymakers.
  I have had the good fortune of watching the men and women who do this 
work for a number of years. I am not only impressed with their skills, 
but I am impressed with their patriotism and impressed with their 
successes, most of which I cannot talk about on the floor this 
afternoon.
  Let me make the case, first of all, for secrecy. I think there are 
times when it is absolutely vital and needed. When we have warfighters 
on the field, as we recently had in Kosovo, we obviously can't provide 
the target list to the public and let people know where it is that 
these pilots are going to be flying. We cannot obviously provide 
battlefield information. Otherwise, we are going to increase the risk 
to these warfighters. It is always difficult in an environment where it 
is just the United States, let alone where there are 18 allies, to 
contain that intelligence and not have a terrible example of something 
where intelligence information got to our enemies, and as a 
consequence, they were better prepared, and as a consequence either we 
were not as successful as we wanted to be or there were casualties as a 
consequence.
  It is a life-or-death matter that we keep these secrets. We have 
asked men and women to put their lives at risk, and we have to protect 
their interests. Otherwise, we will find it very difficult to find 
volunteers to go on these missions.
  It is needed for military operations. It is needed for some covert 
operations

[[Page 16514]]

as well, where the President has signed a finding. He has asked that 
certain things be done, again, in the interest of the United States, 
overseen by the Congress. Today, I have very high praise for this 
administration in that regard. Since the Aldrich Ames spy incident 
where Aldrich Ames, traitor to his country, not only gave up U.S. 
secrets, he gave up secrets that led to the deaths of many men and 
women who were working on our behalf, this administration has 
increasingly come to the oversight committees, one in the House and one 
in the Senate that were created in 1976, with what are called 
notifications of errors, notifications of problems and mistakes that 
were made on a weekly basis.
  We are receiving information that the executive branch thinks we need 
to know in order for us to make judgments about what it is we think the 
United States of America ought to be doing. So there is a lot more--in 
fact, it feels like a fire hose at times--notifications that are 
occurring in both the House and the Senate committee.
  Indeed, our committee was notified about this particular incident in 
1996, and I think we responded appropriately to it at the time. We 
pushed back and asked for additional counterintelligence. When I say 
``this particular incident,'' I am talking about the notification of 
the possibility that the Chinese had acquired what we now know in 
published accounts to be details about a weapons system known as the W-
88, our most sophisticated nuclear weapon, that the Chinese had 
acquired that through espionage in the 1980s.
  We were notified of that in 1996, 11 years after it was suspected to 
have happened. I think the committees were properly notified, and I 
think the committees properly responded and measured the relative 
threat to other things in the world and pushed back and responded, I 
thought, in an appropriate fashion. There was much more that we 
probably could have done. I will let history judge whether or not we 
did enough. The point is, there are secrets. As a consequence of those 
secrets, under law, under a resolution we have created, the Senate 
Committee on Intelligence and the House has done the same. Those 
committees have congressional responsibility for hearing these secrets 
and making judgments, first, about what kind of structure, what kind of 
budget, and what kind of operations we are going to approve.
  I make the case that secrecy is needed in order to maintain our 
security both for military and for our operations. There are sources 
that we use, there are methods we use, both of which must be kept 
secret in order for us to continue to recruit and in order for us to 
continue to operate with a maximum amount of safety for, again, the men 
and women who have chosen, as a result of their patriotic love of their 
country, to serve their country in these missions. We need to make 
certain we provide them with the secrecy needed for them to conduct 
their operations.
  However, there are times when secrecy does not equal security. It is 
a very important point for us to consider as we both debate this bill 
and try to think about how we want to write our laws and think about 
how we are going to do our operation. Sometimes secrecy can make 
security more difficult.
  There is a recently declassified report called the Venona Report that 
describes the acquisition of information about spies inside the United 
States during the post-World War II era. In that report, there is a 
very interesting moment when General Omar Bradley, who at that time was 
in charge of intelligence, made the decision not to inform the 
President of the United States that Klaus Fuchs and others were spies 
for the Soviet Union. The President was not informed. Secrecy was 
maintained. General Bradley liked President Truman; he was an Army man 
like himself. But he made a judgment that secrecy had to be maintained, 
that the commanding officer of all our forces, that the President, duly 
elected by the people, didn't have a need to know. So a judgment was 
made to preserve secrecy.
  I believe, as a consequence, policies didn't turn out to be as good 
as they should have and security was compromised as a consequence. I am 
not blaming General Bradley. I see it from time to time. Indeed, what 
caused me to talk about this was my belief that we should change the 
law and allow the people of the United States of America to know how 
much of their money we are allocating for intelligence and how much in 
the various categories is being allocated. I fear that all the public 
has are bad stories about mistakes that are being made, the most recent 
one being a mistake in targeting inside of Belgrade.
  The Chinese Embassy was mistakenly hit one block away from another 
target that should have been hit. A great deal of examination of that 
has already been done. It caused us a great deal of trouble with the 
Chinese Ambassador. Under Secretary of State Pickering had to make a 
trip to China. This all occurred at a very delicate time when we were 
trying to get the Chinese to agree to some changes in their policy to 
ascend to the WTO. It was a big embarrassment.
  I get asked about it all the time: What kind of so-and-so's are over 
there? Are we getting our money's worth? Are we wasting our money? 
Couldn't they just have spent $2 on a map that was readily available to 
show where the Chinese Embassy was? Why spend billions of dollars on 
all these folks if they don't even have good enough sense to use a 
commercially made $2 map?
  There are questions about the failure to predict the detonation of a 
nuclear weapon in India over a year ago, which was followed by a 
detonation by Pakistan. A third item I hear a lot is that the CIA 
failed to predict the end of the Soviet Union, and anybody that can't 
predict that doesn't deserve to get a lot of U.S. tax dollars.
  It is unfortunate that only the bad stories get out. First of all, on 
the targeting of the embassy, it was a mistake, but we were in a war, 
for gosh sakes. We are being asked to deliver targets, asked to 
identify the targets, and the operation's requirement was to minimize 
the casualties to the United States and our allies. Not a single 
American or single ally was killed during that entire operation. I 
consider that a mark of tremendous success. That did not occur by 
accident. There is no shelf of books with one saying ``T'' for targets 
in Belgrade and Kosovo. We had to develop those targets on our own and 
relatively late. We didn't expect the bombing operation to go on that 
long. We had--when I say ``we,'' I mean the administration--the 
impression that possibly it would be over quicker, based upon the 
experience of 1995.
  In short, it was a tremendous success. Not only were we able to 
conduct that operation without a single allied casualty, but, in 
addition, we reversed the trend of modern warfare in the 20th century. 
Modern warfare in the 20th century has seen an increasing fraction of 
casualties that are noncombatants. I believe, in this case, except for 
the casualties produced by the Serbian army and their military police 
and their paramilitary units in Kosovo, there was also success in 
minimizing civilian casualties in this effort.
  We could not, for example, have implemented Dayton. One of the untold 
stories is the success of the intelligence operations. At that time, it 
was General Hughes who organized the takeover authority in December of 
1995. It was a United Nations operation, transferred over to NATO. They 
worked night and day to set up a communications system that allowed us 
to know who was and who wasn't abiding by the Dayton agreement--a very, 
very complicated agreement. The people who were in charge of developing 
our intelligence operation read it, knew it, and disseminated it down 
the ranks. Everybody understood what had to be done. It was impressive 
that, in a very small amount of time, we were able to put together an 
intelligence collection and dissemination effort that enabled us to 
implement the Dayton agreement.
  There are many other examples, such as the Indian detonation of a 
nuclear weapon. In fact, we had the intelligence collection that 
predicted and prevented one about 18 months earlier. Nobody should have 
been surprised. We

[[Page 16515]]

don't really need to have intelligence officers collecting and 
predicting a detonation of nuclear weapons in India when the successful 
party in an election promised, and made a part of their campaign a 
promise, to detonate if they were elected, to test a nuclear weapon.
  Anyway, I think it is very important for me, as somebody who has been 
given by my leader the opportunity to sit on this committee and to 
observe what is going on, to attempt to correct things I thought were 
wrong, make decisions about how much taxpayer money to allocate, about 
how to respond to mistakes made and intelligence errors that occur, how 
to respond and correct those errors--it is very important for me to say 
to taxpayers that my view is that you are getting your money's worth.
  According to published accounts, we spend $28 billion a year. I wish 
I could provide that number as well as some additional details, but if 
that is the current dollar amount, according to published accounts, in 
my view, just watching what is done, the American people are getting 
their money's worth. There are tremendous threats in the world that our 
intelligence agencies collect against. They supply that intelligence to 
our warfighters, to our military people. Imagine what it would be like 
to be in charge of U.S. forces in South Korea. You have the most 
heavily militarized area in the world between North and South Korea. 
There are about 37,000 young men and women in South Korea defending 
against a possible attack from North Korea, and the question to their 
commanding officer is: What are North Korea's intentions? What are they 
doing? They need an answer.
  It is an extremely hard target to penetrate and to know what is going 
on. Those warfighters need to know that information. They can't operate 
in the dark. Our intelligence collection operators do that time in and 
time out, day in and day out, try to collect, process, produce, and 
disseminate intelligence to warfighters and the national policymakers 
and decisionmakers, in order that the United States of America can be 
as safe as it possibly can be. My view is that they have achieved a 
substantial success. They are not perfect; none of us are. But their 
substantial success deserves a very high amount of praise.
  Mr. President, a related problem we have with intelligence is that 
many people presume that the Director of Central Intelligence, who 
manages the CIA and other national intelligence efforts, controls it 
all. Not true, though the Brown commission report that was assembled 
after the Aldrich Ames betrayal recommended that increased authority be 
given to the Director of Central Intelligence to budget and select 
personnel for these other areas. For many reasons, these authorities 
were not granted the Director. The current Director, Mr. Tenet, 
controls far less than they realize, under law.
  I don't believe that is a healthy situation. We were successful 2 
years ago in getting the Director, under statute, some additional 
authorities. But my view is that it is not enough to match authority 
with responsibility. We have not done that. We are holding the Director 
responsible for intelligence failures in many areas over which he has 
no real direct budget authority or personnel authority.
  So the distinguished Senator from New Mexico has properly identified 
a problem at the laboratories, as a result of the structure of the law 
that governs the Department of Energy, that needs to be fixed. The 
concern is that through some set of facts--today, we don't even know 
what the set of facts are--the Chinese probably acquired information 
about our nuclear secrets, and, as a consequence, they may have the 
capacity to build and deploy very dangerous weapons. They stole secrets 
from us, and, as a consequence, we are concerned about how to increase 
the secrecy of these labs.
  I underscore with this statement that secrecy does not in all cases 
equal security. There are times when secrecy will make security more 
difficult to achieve. My own view is that the failure under law to let 
the public know what our expenditures are, and how those moneys are 
spent, decreases our security because, unless I am mistaken in just 
sensing citizens' attitudes toward our intelligence agencies, they do 
not have a sufficient amount of confidence that they are getting their 
money's worth. As a consequence of that lack of confidence, I think we 
are having a difficult time acquiring the resources necessary in a 
world that is more complicated and a world that, in many ways, is more 
dangerous than it was prior to the end of the cold war.
  My hope is that this debate about the Department of Energy can occur 
relatively quickly, that we can get to it tomorrow, that we can resolve 
the remaining conflicts, and that we can get this intelligence 
authorization bill passed. Both the chairman and I see the year 2000 as 
a watershed year. We were successful last year in increasing the 
resources given to our intelligence checks and analysis and production 
and dissemination efforts. We need to continue that trend.
  We have been downsizing in the 1990s. I believe very strongly that 
that downsizing must stop if we are going to be able to honestly say 
yes to the American people, that we are doing all we can to keep them 
as safe as possible against a real range of threats which are still out 
there in the world.
  The United States of America is the leading nation on this planet. We 
have the strongest economy. We have the strongest military. We have the 
longest running democracy. We tend to take sides on issues, whether it 
is in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or someplace else on the 
planet. We clearly take sides when it comes to fighting for individual 
freedom--for the freedom of people in China, for the freedom of people 
in Russia, and throughout this planet. We put our resources and our 
reputation and our lives on the line.
  In 1996--it has been so long ago--Americans stationed in Saudi Arabia 
after the gulf war, flying missions and supporting missions in the 
southern area, were killed. We suspect a variety of possibilities as 
perpetrators. But they were killed not because they were in Saudi 
Arabia by accident; they were in Saudi Arabia defending U.S. interests, 
and they were killed because they were targeted by people who didn't 
want them in Saudi Arabia.
  We take sides, and, as a consequence, we are targets. We are targets 
as well because we have been successful. There is jealousy and hatred 
towards the people of the United States of America.
  We understand the interconnected nature of our economy and of our 
diplomacy throughout the world. A problem in Angola can be a problem in 
Omaha, NE relatively quickly.
  So we forward-deploy our resources. We don't just have missions in 
NATO or missions that involve the United Nations. We are forward-
deployed throughout the world in an attempt to make the world more 
peaceful, more democratic, and more prosperous. It is a mission the 
United States of America has selected for itself. I thank God that it 
has. It is a mission that has resulted in enormous success.
  I don't know how the rest of my colleagues felt at the time, but I 
remember quite vividly and was very moved for moments during Joint 
Sessions of Congress--not that Presidents haven't moved me with their 
State of the Union Addresses. But far more moving to me was Vaclav 
Havel, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea.
  All four of these men came to a Joint Session of Congress and said to 
the representatives of the people of this country: Thank you; you have 
put your lives on the line for our freedom; you put your money on the 
line for our freedom; you stayed the course, and we are free.
  Since Kim Dae-jung of South Korea gave that address, if I ever ran 
into a man who fought in the ``forgotten war'' in South Korea in the 
1950s, I am quick to say this. I know there are many criticisms of that 
war. Many people wondered whether or not it was worthwhile. Let me tell 
you, on behalf of the President of South Korea and the people of South 
Korea, that that war was worth fighting.
  All one has to do is look at the difference between living in freedom 
in

[[Page 16516]]

South Korea--an imperfect democracy, as many are; but, nonetheless, the 
people of South Korea are free; their standard of living is higher; 
they have the liberty to practice their religion, to speak on the 
streets--and North Korea, which is a nation of great suffering and 
great anguish. Large numbers of people are dying as a consequence of 
malnutrition. The country is arguably in the worst condition of any 
country on the face of this Earth.
  That didn't occur by accident. The world marketplace didn't get that 
done. I am a big fan of the marketplace and a big fan of what business 
can do. The intervention that liberated the people of South Korea was 
not the intervention of Sears & Roebuck; it was the intervention of 
American forces, American will, American blood, and American money. The 
people of South Korea are free as a consequence.
  We didn't make a decision based on the shape of their eyes or based 
on the color of their skin or based upon their religion. We didn't do 
it based upon a desire to own territory or a desire to own wealth or a 
desire to establish a colony. We did it based upon a desire to fight 
and to keep the people of South Korea free.
  When you take a stand such as that, as the distinguished occupant of 
the Chair knows--he has been in politics a very long time, an 
outstanding public servant--you know when you take a stand, especially 
on a controversial subject, you are apt to provoke some enemies; you 
are apt to get people organized against you. They don't agree with the 
position on this, that, or the other thing.
  The United States has enemies as a result of taking a stand and as a 
result of our having taken a stand throughout the world in general on 
behalf of freedom.
  We provoke animosity in many ways. We are at risk, as a consequence, 
not just from nation states--that is the older world where nation 
states were the No. 1 threat--today, it is nonnation state actors such 
as Osama bin Laden and other terrorists who organize themselves away 
from the normal powers and structures of government. Cyber warfare, 
biological and chemical warfare--all of these things we have discussed 
at length are real and present dangers to the people of the United 
States of America.
  It is certainly true that our diplomats at the State Department and 
our diplomats in other areas of Government have to try to use our 
intelligence and produce diplomatic successes, as well as to reduce 
threats. But the State Department, the Department of Justice, the 
Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of 
Agriculture--throughout Government--the Congress, and the President of 
the United States regularly receive analysis that has occurred after 
checks have been done, after analysis has been done, after production 
has occurred, and then it is disseminated to people who make decisions 
all the time and, hopefully, make better decisions as a consequence of 
the intelligence delivered to them.
  My view is that this budget decline we have experienced in the 1990s 
needs to stop. I hope that this intelligence authorization bill will be 
passed by the Senate, that we can go to conference quickly with the 
House, and get it to the President for his signature. I have no doubt 
that the President, subject to our not putting things on here that the 
President can't support, will sign the bill.
  One of the things that I think undercuts our ability to do that is 
the continued belief we have to keep from the American people how much 
money is being spent. I have said that often enough now. I am not going 
to offer an amendment. I can count votes. I know that amendment would 
not succeed. But I intend to continue to make the point and try to 
persuade, especially my friends on the other side of the aisle, that we 
will increase the Nation's security by making this information publicly 
available to the American people.
  Again, the point here is that 100 percent secrecy does not always 
equal 100 percent security. Sometimes 100 percent secrecy can actually 
decrease the security, as a consequence of the right people not getting 
the information. As a consequence of discussions not proceeding subject 
to compartmentalization that prevented one key person from talking to 
another key person, and, as a consequence, neither one of them knew 
what the other was doing, the result is that a bad decision was made.
  I also would like to discuss an issue that, to me, is extremely 
important. I don't know if the Senator from New Mexico has additional 
things he wants to say.
  Does the Senator from Michigan desire to speak? Since I will be 
assigned to sit down for a long period of time, Senators may want to 
move on. I think I will have plenty of time to talk about this bill.
  Mr. President, I presume they would like to speak. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I thank my good friend from Nebraska and my 
friend from New Mexico for their courtesies in sharing the floor so 
that we can chat about some of the issues which we will be taking up 
when we move to this bill tomorrow, which I hope and expect we will.
  One of the issues we are going to be taking up, which will probably 
take more time than other issues in this bill, is the Department of 
Energy reorganization issue. This comes to the floor on this bill. 
Whether it is the best place or not, it is going to happen. I think 
everyone wants this reorganization issue to be resolved, hopefully, in 
some kind of a consensus manner, if possible, in a way that it can 
become law.
  There is strong opposition in the House to the reorganization of the 
Department of Energy being added to either the Department of Defense 
authorization bill or to this appropriations bill, this intelligence 
appropriation. That is a fact of life we have to deal with.
  I suggest the more we are able to come together in a bill which has 
more of a consensus support, the stronger position we are going to be 
in, in trying to persuade the House to take up this matter promptly, 
for all the reasons the Senator from New Mexico gave, as well as to get 
the President to sign the bill. I hope we will take these hours between 
now and the time this bill is before the Senate to attempt to work out 
some of the differences that do exist.
  I simply want to summarize where at least I am in terms of the 
recommendations of the Rudman commission. I am for those 
recommendations. The label of the agency is not as important to me as 
the powers of this new agency--semiautonomous agency, separately 
organized agencies, as they are called, including DARPA. I believe we 
should have a separately organized agency which is synonymous with, I 
presume, a semiautonomous agency.
  That does not resolve the issue, simply to agree on a label. The 
question then is: What powers will that agency have and what is the 
relationship of that new agency to the Department of Energy? That is 
the issue we should try to resolve in a consensus manner if we possibly 
can.
  We want two things to be true: We want this agency to have a 
significant degree of autonomy, independence, separate organization, 
separate staff, legal advice, personnel advice. We want them to have 
their own set of staff so they can operate in a significantly 
independent way.
  On the other hand, we want the Secretary to be able to run his 
agency, to run the overall agency. If it is going to be in the Energy 
Department, if it is not going to be carved out of the Energy 
Department--which was the other alternative that Rudman suggested as a 
possibility--if it is going to be inside the Energy Department, then we 
have to have the Secretary be able to implement the policies of the 
Department of Energy, which have to apply to all parts of the 
Department of Energy, whether or not they are ``separately organized'' 
agencies within the Department.
  That is the balance we are trying to strike. I will come to that a 
little bit later, as to how other separately organized agencies within 
the Department

[[Page 16517]]

of Defense have struck that balance. Reaching a consensus, instead of 
having a significantly divided vote, is going to strengthen the 
prospects for reorganization of the Department of Energy along the 
lines Senator Rudman has proposed.
  Do we need to reorganize the Department? We sure do. For 20 years or 
longer, there have been reports after reports after reports of lack of 
accountability, of duplication, of an inability for this Department to 
function in a very smooth and strong way, particularly as it relates to 
elements of national security. We should do something about it. We 
should do it now. It doesn't mean we should simply say let's delay it 
for some later time. On that, I think, there is a consensus. We ought 
to fix this Department, not just say let's do it at a later time.
  I hope there is also some agreement that we ought to take the few 
days that may be necessary to try to put together a reorganized DOE--
one which has a separately organized agency to handle these nuclear 
issues--so we can have a stronger chance of this becoming law. We have 
all been frustrated by the breakdown in security which the Cox 
commission report highlighted by the so-called PFIAB report, the 
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which Senator Rudman 
chaired. That frustration has been compounded by the fact that past 
administrations and past Congresses have received literally dozens of 
intelligence studies, GAO reports, FBI briefings, going back to the 
mid-1970s, detailing inadequate security safeguards at the Department 
of Energy labs and detailing foreign espionage efforts to obtain 
sensitive U.S. technology. This has been going on for over 20 years.
  This is what Senator Rudman said at a joint hearing of four Senate 
committees:

       I had our staffs sit down and add up the number of reports 
     that have found problems with the security of the DOE for the 
     past 20 years. The numbers are astounding. 29 reports from 
     the General Accounting Office, 61 internal DOE reports and 
     more than a dozen reports from special task forces and ad hoc 
     panels. Altogether, that is more than 100 reports, or an 
     average of five critical reports a year for the past two 
     decades.

  Here we are, 20 years down the road, Senator Rudman said, still 
battling with the same issues. I think you would agree with me, that is 
totally unacceptable. All Members listening that day I think were 
nodding our heads, without exception.
  As Senator Rudman noted last month, security at the Department of 
Energy has been an accident waiting to happen for over 20 years. Three 
administrations and Congress share the responsibility for not doing 
more over the years to heed the warnings of those reports to legislate 
corrective action. The challenge is to put that frustration, which we 
all share, to constructive use and to put in place an effective and 
workable management structure, the Department of Energy's nuclear 
weapons program, that ensures our vital national security secrets are 
not compromised in the future.
  The Rudman recommendations include not just putting in place a 
separately organized agency but also putting that agency under the 
effective direction and control of the Secretary of Energy. That is 
going to be, it seems to me, what we have to resolve. We want it 
separately organized, but we want the Secretary to have effective 
direction and control of that agency. Those are two goals. Those two 
goals can be harmonized. They have been with other separately organized 
agencies, including some that I will mention in the Department of 
Defense which are used by Senator Rudman as his model, including DARPA.
  We should seek both things: That semiautonomy, or that separate 
organization, which will put some focus and accountability inside that 
agency. If we are going to leave it in the Department of Energy--and 
that seems to be the consensus, that we leave it inside the 
Department--we must be able to have a Secretary who can effectively 
direct and control that semiautonomous or separately organized agency 
within his Department. It is a real challenge, but it is doable. We 
will do it with some care. They are both legitimate goals.
  There have been some steps taken already to achieve those goals. As 
the Senator from New Mexico pointed out, we had a Presidential Decision 
Directive No. 61 which President Clinton signed over a year ago. The 
Rudman report noted, to its credit, in the past 2 years the Clinton 
administration has proposed and begun to implement some of the most 
far-reaching reforms in DOE's history. In February of 1998 that 
directive was signed. The Rudman report highlighted 5 of the most 
significant of the 13 initiatives in Presidential Directive No. 61.
  First, counterintelligence and foreign intelligence elements in DOE 
would be reconfigured into two independent offices and report directly 
to the Secretary of Energy.
  Second, the Director of the new Office of Counterintelligence would 
be a senior executive from the FBI and would have direct access to the 
Secretary of Energy. That is a very important question we are going to 
have to resolve and take up again, whether or not we want the director 
of a new Office of Counterintelligence to be not only a senior 
executive from the FBI but to have direct access to the Secretary of 
Energy. If we want to hold the Secretary of Energy accountable, which I 
do, then we have to access to him directly, it seems to me, a director 
of a new Office of Counterintelligence. That will be one of the issues 
we will be discussing and hopefully resolve.
  Third, existing DOE contracts with the labs would be amended to 
include counterintelligence program goals, objectives, and performance 
measures to evaluate compliance with these contractual obligations.
  Counterintelligence personnel assigned to the labs would have direct 
access to lab directors and would report concurrently to the Director 
of the Office of Counterintelligence.
  The Senate has also acted in a number of ways. We passed significant 
legislation this year under the leadership of Chairman Warner in the 
Armed Services Committee. We have adopted a series of measures in the 
National Defense Authorization Act which were designed to enhance 
counterintelligence, security, and intelligence activities at DOE 
facilities.
  These measures include putting in statute most of the specific 
recommendations on security and counterintelligence contained in PDD-
61. For instance, our bill, which is now in conference, includes a 
provision establishing separate offices of counterintelligence and 
security at DOE, each reporting to the Secretary. That provision, which 
the Senate already adopted, is in the DOD authorization conference, 
which is going on right now. It is taking up a Senate provision which 
establishes an office of counterintelligence and security at the DOE 
reporting directly to the Secretary.
  That is not inconsistent, in my book, with having a 
counterintelligence chief at the agency. I do not view that as being 
inconsistent. On the other hand, we have to be clear one way or the 
other as to whether or not we believe there is an inconsistency in 
having both a counterintelligence person for the entire agency directly 
reporting to the Secretary, as well as having this new agency having 
its own counterintelligence chief. To me, that is not inconsistent, but 
the people who are offering the amendment may view that as being an 
inconsistency.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. LEVIN. Yes, I will yield.
  Mr. DOMENICI. On page 5 of the amendment, which I think my colleagues 
have, we adopted the language that is in the Armed Services bill:

       The Chief of Nuclear Stewardship Counterintelligence shall 
     have direct access to the Secretary.

  Secretary of Energy.
  Mr. LEVIN. That is somewhat different than the provision in the 
Senate bill which established the separate Office of 
Counterintelligence and Security at the DOE reporting directly to the 
Secretary. We have to work out whether we intend that to be the same or 
whether we intend that to be two separate offices of 
counterintelligence.
  For instance, the new agency, I say to my good friend, is going to 
presumably have its own personnel director

[[Page 16518]]

and its own programs inspector general and its own general counsel, but 
so is the Department of Energy going to have its own general counsel 
and its own personnel director and its own inspector general. There 
will be an office in that separate agency, and there will be an office 
at the Department. That is not inherently inconsistent. We do similar 
things with DARPA and with other separately organized agencies.
  It seems to me, to make sure that we are not creating confusion and 
lack of accountability, we would want to make that clear in the 
amendment that we, indeed, are talking about an office at the 
departmental level, as well as now a separate office with some of these 
staff functions at this separately organized agency.
  Again, that is the kind of language which I think is important we 
attempt to work out.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I do not know how much longer the 
Senator wants to speak, but I can only be here about 15 or 20 minutes 
and I still have a few comments. I want to listen attentively to what 
he is saying.
  I believe I heard the Senator mention four or five things. I ticked 
them off as he mentioned them, and we find there may be two that are 
not in the bill which were thought to be management techniques. Three 
out of five or three out of six are in the bill. I am willing to work 
on anything my colleagues want to work on, except I want to make sure 
of what I consider to be the most important recommendation of all, when 
the Rudman report says:

       To achieve the kind of protection that all these 
     laboratories have, they and their functions must have their 
     own autonomous operational structure free of all the other 
     obligations of DOE management.

  If we start with that, then I think we can work on that in terms of 
how you get there and make sure it means what you want it to mean. 
Frankly, I am very pleased this afternoon because I heard both the 
Senator from Michigan and the cochairman of the Committee on 
Intelligence say they want to get on with the bill and they want to try 
to work on the amendment to get it as bipartisan as we can.
  Frankly, if that is the way we are moving, I am ready to say, let's 
work on it. I have given my colleagues my draft. It is the final draft. 
As soon as my colleagues have amendments, we want to look at them. I 
have three or four Senators to check with, and I am sure my colleagues 
have, too, but I do think you clearly understand, in the way the 
Senator has expressed it, that it will have its autonomous functions 
within that agency.
  The Senator has a great concern, and if I was not positive that we 
had satisfied it, I would not be here.
  On the second page, paragraph (C), we say:

       The Secretary shall be responsible for all policies of the 
     agency. The Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship shall 
     report solely and directly to the Secretary and shall be 
     subject to the supervision and direction of the Secretary.

  That was put in because everybody said we ought to do that. It was a 
little earlier than some of you think. My colleagues missed it for a 
while. It is there.
  At the end of the page we also say:

       That the Secretary may direct other officials of the 
     Department who are not within the agency for nuclear 
     stewardship to review the agency's programs and to make 
     recommendations to the Secretary regarding the administration 
     of these programs, including consistency with similar 
     programs and activities of the Department.

  The Senator from Michigan has expressed a concern about that one. 
This may not be exactly the wording he would like, but I believe it 
moves in the direction of one of his previous concerns.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from New Mexico. Senator 
Rudman has said the following, in addition to the quotation my 
colleague cited:

       That the Secretary is still responsible for developing and 
     promulgating DOE-wide policy on these matters.

  Then he said, and this is in his memorandum of clarification dated 
June 30, the second paragraph from the bottom:

       He is still responsible----

  Talking about the Secretary----

     for promulgating DOE-wide policy on these matters, and it 
     makes sense to us that a Secretary would want advisers on his 
     or her immediate staff to assist in this vein. We understand 
     that is why Secretary Richardson recently created DOE-wide 
     czars to advise him on security and counterintelligence.

  There is a need for a Secretary who is running a Department to have, 
as Senator Rudman points out, advisers on his or her immediate staff to 
assist him in developing and promulgating DOE-wide policy on these 
matters.
  I want to take up the suggestion of my friend from New Mexico. It is 
possible we can achieve both, as the DOD does with DARPA and other 
separately organized agencies, or what I think the Senator from New 
Mexico would indicate are semi-autonomous agencies, agencies which are 
not separate from a Cabinet-level agency; they are not separate from 
the Department. We are not creating a new department, and I do not 
think the Senator from New Mexico wants to create a new department. We 
want this inside a department which is subject to departmental-wide 
policies and a Secretary who is able to effectuate those policies.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Can I comment?
  Mr. LEVIN. Sure.
  Mr. DOMENICI. That is a fair statement that the Senator made about 
what I would like to see. I also stated on Friday past, the first time 
I ever said this as a Senator who has been involved with these nuclear 
activities since I arrived--and I have been chairman of the 
subcommittee that appropriates it for almost 6 years--if the 
semiautonomous agency is weakened, to the extent it is really just 
another of blocks on a chart, I will wholeheartedly support taking it 
all out of the Energy Department and making it a freestanding 
department. In fact, I am almost looking at this that if it were a 
freestanding agency like NASA, and moved within the Department, how 
would the Secretary control it? I am beginning to think of it that way. 
He still would have to control it so long as it is in his Department. 
But I think we have said that in the amendment.
  We are willing to work with you on whether there are better ways to 
make sure he still is the boss; that is what you are talking about, 
that he is in control. The Under Secretary in charge of this new 
semiautonomous agency is not totally independent or we would not call 
him ``semiautonomous.''
  Mr. LEVIN. Exactly.
  Mr. DOMENICI. If we wanted him independent, we would put him out here 
like NASA and call him an Administrator or Director. So as long as we 
are thinking the same way, we are willing to work with you.
  Mr. LEVIN. As I understand what you are saying, you want one 
Secretary to be able to have effective direction and control of this 
quasi-autonomous agency that is in his Department. With that standard, 
if that is a standard which you also accept, it seems to me that we 
ought to be able to find common ground. Whether that includes all the 
other Senators who have interests in this, neither of us can say. But 
as far as I am concerned, the test for me is whether or not we leave 
the Secretary of Energy like the Secretary of Defense with DARPA, 
having effective direction and control of that separately organized 
agency which has been called here a semiautonomous agency. That is my 
standard.
  I am going to continue to work with colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle; and our staffs will share some amendment language which at least 
this Senator is working on. There are other Senators who have 
amendments as well. We will get you our amendment language by the end 
of the day in the spirit of trying to achieve some kind of a joint 
position on this going into the debate tomorrow.
  I am happy to yield the floor. I heard my friend from New Mexico 
indicate that he is only able to stay a few more minutes. I am 
basically done. There are a few more thoughts I have about some of the 
separately organized agencies inside the Department of Defense and the 
way they are organized. They were used as the models by Senator Rudman. 
If we follow those models, I think--not exactly and not precisely--but 
if we follow the spirit of those models, we will have a Secretary of 
Energy

[[Page 16519]]

who can effectively direct and control his semiautonomous agency that 
would be created, including, it seems to me, to be effective, the use, 
as Senator Rudman pointed out, of advisers on his immediate staff to 
assist him in effectively directing and controlling--which are my last 
words, not Senator Rudman's.
  I yield the floor and thank my friend from New Mexico.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I say to the Senator, I will not take very long.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Collins). The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. DOMENICI. I thank you for recognizing me.
  I say to Senator Levin, I have read that part of the Rudman report 
which talks about the Secretary having adequate input and having staff 
to make input. Let me tell you what I would be very worried about; and 
I remain worried about it as we talk with the members of the staff of 
the Secretary.
  I think the worst thing we could do is to create this semiautonomous 
agency on paper but make it still like it is subject in every detail to 
the Secretary of Energy and his staff. So I am not going to sit by and 
tell you I agree because I do not agree that we should say on the one 
hand an Under Secretary is going to run it, and it is created with 
autonomous authority for him, and then say the Secretary's office can, 
with various staffers, run it day by day. Because then all we have done 
is created autonomy and then taken it away.
  There are two ways to take it away. One is very direct. For example, 
just take out the environment and say they do not have control of the 
environment. That is one way. The other is to put it all back into the 
Secretary in detail so his staff can be running it.
  I think you and I would be serving our country terribly if we created 
it, in a poor manner, semiautonomous and then found in 5 years, when it 
was set up, that three strong men in the Secretary's office were 
running it. I think that would be the worst ending we could have 
because we would be back to seeing how good they were at things; and 
without that, it would be an unsuccessful operation. There would be 
more masters rather than just the one we are looking for.
  Having said that, I want to speak for a moment--because I forgot to 
during my opening remarks--about the kind of science that exists at 
these laboratories, especially our three deterrent laboratories and two 
that help them that are partially in this mode, and a little bit about 
the origin of all this work.
  I want to start by ticking off a few names. This is by far not the 
entire list.
  This whole scientific entourage that we have here which we call the 
nuclear weapons laboratories, the great crown treasures of our science-
based research, was started in an era when America did not have enough 
scientists of its own who were nationalists, American born and raised, 
educated in America.
  So guess what the list of the early Manhattan Project scientists who 
helped us get a bomb sounded like. They sounded like Italians. Enrico 
Fermi; he was an Italian. He was at one of the other laboratories in 
the country. Both he and his wife were taken to Los Alamos and they 
became some of the principal players. It sounded like Hans Bethe; it 
sounded liked Edward Teller, Carl Fuchs--and the list goes on.
  Frankly, we were taking a real gamble because they knew what they 
were doing, each and every one of them. Collectively, they knew they 
were preparing an atomic bomb for the United States of America to 
either win the Second World War or to use it to stop it. They were 
working at a ferocious pace to get it done before the Germans got it 
done. We all remember that as we read about it.
  Those scientists had contacts all over the world, whatever kind of 
world it was at that point in time. The same thing is happening today. 
We should not be surprised that we have marvelous Chinese scientists at 
our laboratories. They are American born, American educated, and I 
assume some are naturalized citizens, and they are among our best.
  It just so happens that the Chinese seem to have breached our 
security in some intricate ways, not the way the Russians did it. They 
did not come along with a big bribe and pay somebody off. They did it 
in an intricate way by little bits and pieces. Since the Chinese 
scientists who make their nuclear program work are intimate about 
Americans in science, would you believe that it is our understanding 
that the chief scientist in charge of their nuclear weapons development 
has a Ph.D. from one of our universities? You do not think he knows 
American scientists of his era? He was apparently a very good nuclear 
physicist or scientist--Ph.D.--from one of our universities. We 
understand in the hierarchy there may be six or seven who were educated 
as MIT or Caltech or someplace, and they are running their program.
  The point of it is, we cannot, in some fit or frenzy, put a wall up 
around these laboratories and say these scientists cannot exchange 
views around the world; they cannot travel to conferences.
  Let me ask you, do you think they would stay at the laboratories, if 
they are among the greatest minds around, if you told them they can be 
only half a scientist, that they cannot go to a conference where 
Chinese scientists are coming who may exchange views on something 
extraordinarily new in the field of physics which has nothing 
necessarily to do with nuclear bombs? The truth of the matter is, if 
you try it, do you know who the losers will be? The losers will be the 
American people, because we won't have the greatest scientists in those 
laboratories. What has made us the most secure nuclear power in the 
world? Our scientists. We talk about everything else, but it is the 
scientists over the last 40 years, successors to this list I gave --
incidentally, I did not mean to imply that there weren't many early 
scientists who were American; obviously there were. Some of the leaders 
were Americans, no question about it. We should not leave the 
impression that we don't want scientists, whatever their national 
origin is or whatever their basic culture is, working in our 
laboratories and we want to muzzle them; for if we put a wall around 
the laboratories, it will be a matter of a decade and nobody will want 
in the laboratories, much less out of the laboratories. Instead of 
worrying about getting secrets out, we will have to worry about getting 
enough good things to happen where there are some secrets.
  I want to make that point so everyone will know that my approach and 
the approach I am working on with other Senators to create this 
semiautonomous agency is not directed at closing these laboratories, 
closing the lips and the brains of scientists and putting them behind a 
bar up there.
  When I was a young boy, believe it or not, we had a family that could 
all fit in one big car. On a number of occasions we drove from 
Albuquerque to Los Alamos because we were inquisitive. We had heard 
that if you went up there, they wouldn't let you in. So we would drive 
up, and they wouldn't let us in. We would drive up to these big gates, 
and that was the Los Alamos scientific laboratory. No trespassing. So I 
was there. That was the early version of this. Now they have grown into 
much larger institutions, much more sophisticated kinds of science.
  In addition, because my friend Senator Levin has been talking about 
things that concern him, I will mention two or three things that I want 
everyone to know.
  First, what is a semiautonomous agency and what is an independent 
agency? The best I can tell Senators is, a model of independence would 
probably be NASA. I don't know the best model for a semiautonomous 
agency within a department, but I will tell my colleagues that what it 
means is described very clearly in the Rudman report, that the 
functions of this agency must be autonomous and not subject to the 
everyday rule of the larger department.
  If we are not prepared to do that, then let's not kid ourselves and 
say we have done it halfway. It must be done in a way that is 
consistent with the agency director reporting only to the

[[Page 16520]]

Secretary of Energy and in a manner that would assure that its 
functions are autonomous, even if it means we must have a duplication 
of functions. Because if there is one set of functions, we are back 
where we are. If it is not subject to the Secretary's power, then it is 
not semiautonomous; it is autonomous.
  I think we are on the same side, trying to make it semiautonomous, 
which means the Secretary is still all powerful. Having said that, let 
me say that as we proceed, I am willing to look at the document line by 
line as it gets introduced--it has been circulated--and cite where I 
believe we have covered most of the aspects that are of concern and 
that have been expressed as of concern on the floor, save two.
  One of them has to do with the laboratories being able to take work 
for other agencies, for the Defense Department and from the Energy 
Department, and thus remain laboratories that are diversified, that 
are, thus, very attractive to scientists. I will insert in the Record, 
and not read much from it, testimony given in the Committee on Commerce 
Subcommittee on Energy and Power and the Committee on Science 
Subcommittee on Energy in the House, by William Happer.
  Dr. Happer is one of the distinguished scientists in the United 
States and used to be in the department. He concludes in the statement, 
in reference to the new agency:

       I do not think that the ANS need hinder the support by 
     other parts of DOE, or by outside agencies, of science at the 
     Weapons Laboratories. As a former director of the Office of 
     Energy Research, I saw, at very close quarters, how work was 
     funded by my office at the Weapons Laboratories, and how 
     other Federal agencies--for example, the National Institutes 
     of Health, or DARPA--arrange to have work done. The creation 
     of an ANS within DOE might actually help the interactions 
     between the Science Laboratories and the Weapons Laboratories 
     if it leads to better management [at the semiautonomous 
     agency].

  I ask unanimous consent that the Happer statement of July 13 in its 
entirety be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the statement was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                      Testimony of William Happer

       Thank you for this opportunity to testify on current 
     proposals to restructure the DOE. I am a Professor of Physics 
     at Princeton University and Chair of the University Research 
     Board. I am also the Chairman of the Board and one of the 
     founders of a high-tech startup company, Magnetic Imaging 
     Technologies, Inc., which makes images of human lungs with 
     laser-polarized gases. So I have experience with the business 
     world outside of academia. I have had a long familiarity with 
     the activities of DOE, as a practicing scientist, as a member 
     of advisory committees for DOE Weapons Laboratories and 
     Science Laboratories, and as the Director of the Office of 
     Energy Research under Secretary of Energy James Watkins 
     during the Bush administration.
       The DOE has many missions, but none more important than 
     nuclear stewardship, that is, ensuring the safety, security 
     and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile. Connected with 
     this mission are--or at least used to be--many others, the 
     construction and operation of nuclear reactors for the 
     production of special nuclear materials, the enrichment of 
     stable isotopes, the construction of scientific facilities to 
     learn more about the fundamental scientific issues connected 
     with nuclear weapons, and how to ensure the safety of those 
     working with dangerous materials--radioactive, toxic or both. 
     I could go on, but my point is that the DOE weapons program 
     is so challenging that it needs the most capable technical, 
     scientific and managerial talents available. As long as the 
     United States maintains its own nuclear weapons and feels it 
     necessary to cope with those of others, we must ensure that 
     the part of DOE responsible for nuclear weapons functions as 
     well as possible.
       Regretfully, I must agree with various assessments, 
     stretching back many years, that DOE's missions--including 
     the nuclear weapons mission--are often poorly managed. The 
     recent Rudman and IDA reports, the Galvin report of a few 
     years ago, and many others have clearly spelled out what is 
     wrong. The DOE has become a bureaucratic morass, with many 
     paper-pushing, regulatory offices competing to build up their 
     staffs of FTE's and SES billets, to take credit for successes 
     of increasingly-harried, front-line scientists, engineers and 
     technicians, and to avoid responsibility for anything that 
     may go wrong. The recent revelations of Chinese espionage and 
     the DOE reaction to it are but one example of how difficult 
     it is for the DOE to cope with serious real and potential 
     problems in the weapons program, and other DOE programs as 
     well. So I support a reorganization of DOE along the lines 
     suggested in the Rudman report. If a reorganized DOE with a 
     more efficiently operating Nuclear Stewardship Agency (NSA) 
     is a result of the Chinese espionage, at least we will have 
     some benefit from the regrettable affair.
       I have no illusions that a semiautonomous Nuclear 
     Stewardship Agency within DOE will correct all of the 
     problems we are struggling with, but I am sure that the 
     current DOE structure will not work. I say this as a 
     pragmatist and an experimental scientist. We have tried to 
     make the current structure work for many years and it always 
     fails. When one of my experiments does that again and again, 
     I try something else.
       We have several reasons to be hopeful that a semiautonomous 
     agency could work. The example of NSA within the Department 
     of Defense (DoD) has often been cited as a successful, 
     semiautonomous agency, and there are other precedents like 
     DARPA in DoD or the Naval Reactor Program within DOE. I like 
     the word ``Agency,'' which comes from the Latin root ``to 
     do.'' An agent does something for you. Some in the current 
     structure of DOE and its supervisors seem not to care if 
     anything ever gets done. This is not acceptable for any 
     worthwhile mission, but it is simply not tolerable for 
     Nuclear Stewardship.
       Nuclear weapons, ours and those of our potential 
     adversaries are real and very dangerous. They are too 
     important not to take very seriously.
       There is a wise old saying, sometimes ascribed to the 
     Chinese, that ``The best fertilizer for a farm is the feet of 
     the owner.'' Someone has to own the mission of nuclear 
     stewardship, or at the very least someone must be a dedicated 
     Steward. To succeed, the Steward must have the means to 
     manage. As best I understand the proposed the Agency for 
     Nuclear Stewardship, it will give the Steward both ownership 
     and the means to do the job.
       You cannot be a good Steward of the Nuclear Weapons mission 
     of DOE unless you control all of the key functions, 
     manufacturing, security, research, safety, etc. There is 
     never enough money or enough personnel to do everything that 
     is needed, so the Steward will have to balance many competing 
     needs: the security of plutonium facilities; human resources; 
     environmental, safety and health requirements; research 
     needed to ensure that aging nuclear weapons remain safe and 
     effective; counterintelligence precautions--the list is 
     extremely long and every issue is important. However, someone 
     must make the decision on how to distribute finite resources 
     to do the best possible job. With the current DOE structure, 
     various offices can demand that this action or that be taken 
     with no concern for the broader problem of how to optimize 
     finite resources of funds and people. One unfunded mandate 
     after another comes down from headquarters or the field 
     office. It is not possible to fully respond to all of the 
     mandates. So the poor front-line troops do the best they can, 
     and a year later another GAO report comes out saying that 
     this or that requirement was not met. There is substantial 
     duplication, triplication or even quadruplication of roles in 
     DOE, with the front-line DOE contractor, the DOE site office, 
     the DOE field office and headquarters all contributing to 
     some issues.
       I have testified before that part of DOE's problem is that 
     it has too many people at headquarters and in the field 
     offices. I would hope that the ANS Steward would not be 
     saddled with making work for every DOE employee currently on 
     a payroll related to the ANS mission. But I am a realist, and 
     if every employee remains, the system could probably still be 
     made to work better with the sort of crisp management 
     structure envisaged for the ANS. Almost all of the DOE civil 
     servants I met during my time there were good and talented 
     people, determined to do something to earn their keep. It is 
     a shame that so many of them are used for counterproductive 
     activities.
       Some would say letting the ANS Stewart control most of the 
     important oversight now assigned to various independent DOE 
     offices would be letting the fox watch the hen house. I do 
     not think this needs be the case, and in any event the 
     current structure is not working. The proposed ANS Steward 
     will have a clear list of responsibilities, and will have to 
     report annually to the Secretary of Energy--and through the 
     Secretary to the Congress and to the President--on how well 
     these responsibilities have been fulfilled, and why the 
     allocation of funds and people for safety, security, research 
     programs, etc. is optimum. One could also enlist the aid of 
     other federal agencies for periodic tests of how well the ANS 
     is fulfilling its mandate. For example, another competent 
     federal agency could be tasked to try to penetrate the 
     computer security of the ANS.
       Concerns have been raised about possible bad effects of ANS 
     on DOE science. Indeed, one of the strengths of the DOE 
     weapons laboratories has been the strong basic science done 
     there and the close ties their scientists maintain to other 
     DOE laboratories and to the rest of the scientific world. 
     This has paid important dividends to our country and we do 
     not want to lose these benefits in a restructuring of DOE. 
     One of the benchmarks on which the Nuclear Steward will be 
     judged

[[Page 16521]]

     should be the health of science in the Weapons Laboratories.
       To help maintain ties of the laboratories to the entire 
     scientific world, visits by foreign scientists to the weapons 
     laboratories should continue, but we should redouble our 
     efforts to be sure such visits do not result in the loss of 
     classified information. Those of you who have visited weapons 
     laboratories realize that non-classified scientific work is 
     often done ``outside the fence'' where security issues are 
     less urgent. The Steward should ensure that there is a graded 
     system of visitor controls. It would be silly to follow the 
     same procedures for a scientist coming to talk to colleagues 
     about human genome sequencing as for one who may be 
     interested in weapons-related topics. Visitor controls should 
     be very stringent in the latter case, but relatively light in 
     the former.
       I do not think that the ANS need hinder the support by 
     other parts of DOE, or by outside agencies, of science at the 
     Weapons Laboratories. As a former Director of Office of 
     Energy Research, I saw, at very close quarters, how work was 
     funded by my office at the Weapons Laboratories, and how 
     other federal agencies--for example, the National Institutes 
     of Health, or DARPA--arranged to have work done. The creation 
     of an ANS within DOE might actually help the interactions 
     between the Science Laboratories and the Weapons Laboratories 
     if it leads to better management within the ANS.

  Mr. DOMENICI. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative assistant proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KERREY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. KERREY. Madam President, this bill doesn't normally get a lot of 
attention, but because of the concern over the loss of secrets through 
our laboratories at the DOE, we are going to have a debate about an 
amendment to restructure the Department of Energy.
  I want to make a point that I made earlier, which is that secrecy and 
security are not the same thing. Sometimes secrecy equals security. 
Sometimes secrecy can make security more difficult, harder for us to 
accomplish the mission of keeping the United States of America as 
secure as we possibly can.
  I am not going to offer an amendment to this bill, because it has 
been defeated pretty soundly in the past--although I must say I am 
tempted to do so--to disclose to the American people how much is spent 
on intelligence gathering. Right now, under law, we cannot do that. I 
want to call my colleagues' attention to what is happening. Our first 
vote is on cloture. I think cloture will be invoked pretty easily. Our 
leader is not going to hold anybody up from voting for cloture. Maybe 
we can go right to the bill.
  Listening to Senators Domenici and Levin earlier, I think they may be 
able to solve their differences. The vote may end up being unanimous, 
which is my wish. I hope we can continue to move closer together on 
that piece of legislation, an important piece of legislation on which 
Senator Domenici and others have been working.
  I want to call my colleagues' attention to what we do every year 
basically, and that is, the authorization of appropriations for the 
intelligence bill is very small, as a consequence of not being able to 
disclose to the American people what is in the bill. The House bill 
contains six titles. The Senate bill, which will be offered as a 
substitute for the House bill, also contains six titles. The first two 
titles are identical. Titles I and II in the House bills are identical. 
Then there are general provisions, and then each bill has additional 
things in there.
  But you can see the problem we have getting public support for 
intelligence collection. That is one step in the process of 
intelligence. We collect with imaging efforts, we collect with signals 
intercepts, we collect with human intelligence, and we have measurement 
intelligence. We have all sorts of various what are called INTs that 
are used to gather raw data.
  Then somebody has to take that data and analyze it. What does it 
mean? What does this data mean? What is the interpretation of it? 
Oftentimes secrecy can be a problem because one compartment may not be 
talking to another.
  This administration and others have worked to try to bring various 
people together so there is more consultation than there has been in 
the past. But oftentimes decisions have to be made very quickly. 
Sometimes interpretations of public information are made, and an 
adjustment is made.
  Let me be very specific. About 80 percent, in my view, of the 
decisions that most elected people make in Congress having to do with 
national security are made as a result of something they acquired in a 
nonclassified fashion in a TV report, in a radio report, in a newspaper 
report, or a published document. Staff analyze it and come and say: 
This is what we think is going on--about 80 percent of the information 
that we process.
  I would say that would probably be on the low side. It may be even 
higher than that. Indeed, the President may be in a similar situation. 
He may be making a decision on a very high percentage of publicly 
accessible information as opposed to classified information.
  That is quite the trend. The trend is both healthy and at times 
disturbing because more and more information is being made available to 
the public that was not available in the past. The good news is 
citizens have more information. They process that information. We have 
a lot of independent analysts out there.
  In a couple of years, when metering satellite photographs are 
available, we are going to see competing analyses being done over 
images. This is what I see when I take that photograph.
  I say this because I think it is true that it is very difficult, for 
any length of time for the Congress and the President to do something 
the public doesn't support, especially when it comes to spending their 
money.
  In this case, I just hazard a guess. I never polled on this. But 
certainly I take a lot of anecdotal stories on board from citizens who 
question whether or not they are getting their money's worth. Is all 
the money we are spending worthwhile when we aren't able to tell where 
the Chinese Embassy is in Belgrade? A $2 map would have told us where 
it was. When we were unable to forecast a class of facility, when we 
were unable to foresee that India was going to test a nuclear weapon 
following an election, during which the party that was successful 
campaigned, and their platform said, if we are elected and we come to 
power, we are going to test a nuclear weapon? Many failures, in short, 
are out in the public, and the public acquires the information. I think 
it has caused them to lose confidence that they are getting their 
money's worth.
  It is a real crisis for us. It is a real challenge for us because, 
again, if you look at the document we will be voting on sometime in the 
next couple of days--usually this thing goes through very quickly and 
we don't have much time to consider it. In an odd way, I thank the 
Senator from New Mexico for bringing so much attention to the 
Department of Energy's need for restructuring because it has given us 
some time to pause and look at this piece of legislation.
  As I said, the two most important titles, the ones you will see in 
almost every intelligence authorization bill, is title I and title II. 
Title I has five sections. It authorizes appropriations. It give us 
classified schedule authorization, personnel ceiling adjustment 
authorization, community management account authorization, and 
emergency supplemental appropriations. That is in the House bill. The 
Senate bill has four titles. It is quite revealing when you go into 
title I.
  Again, normally, if this is a Department of Defense authorization, 
each one of these titles would provide the detailed and specific number 
of how much is being spent, all the way down to the very small 
individual accounts that would be disclosed to the public. There would 
be a great debate going on. The committee report comes out. The budget 
comes out. The bill is reported by the Armed Services Committee. 
Editorials are written. Journalists and specialists say we are spending 
too little; we are spending too much; we need to build this weapons 
system, and so forth. A great public debate then ensues when the 
committee brings

[[Page 16522]]

the bill up and reports it out for full consideration by the Senate.
  I think that debate is healthy. The public participates and helps us 
decide what it is we ought not be doing. Sometimes we still put things 
in we shouldn't and some things we should. We still make mistakes. That 
public debate helps us.
  Under this authorization, what you see in section 101 is the 
following: The funds are hereby authorized to be appropriated for 
fiscal year 2000 for the conduct of intelligence and intelligence-
related activities of the following elements of the U.S. Government: 
the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency, 
the National Security Agency, the Department of the Army, the 
Department of the Navy, the Department of Air Force, the Department of 
State, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Energy, the 
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Conference Office, and 
the National Imagery and Mapping Agency--11 different Government 
agencies are named but no dollar figure is included. The only dollar 
figure in this entire budget comes in section 104 where the public 
learns we are authorizing $171 million to be appropriated for the 
Community Management Act of the Director of Central Intelligence. We 
have that piece of information.
  Later in the bill that we will be voting on, we learn $27 million is 
available for the National Drug Intelligence Center. Then later, a 
third time we get another number. We learn $209.1 million is authorized 
to be appropriated to the Central Intelligence Agency's retirement and 
disability fund for fiscal year 2000.
  That is all the public learns. That is all the public knows. The 
public does not know how much we spend in each one of these agencies, 
nor how much the committee is recommending in this authorization bill, 
nor the total amount of dollars being spent.
  We have had debates about this before. There are good arguments 
usually filed against it: This is going to deteriorate our national 
security; we need to maintain, in short, a secret in order to preserve 
national security.
  I have reached the opposite conclusion, that this is a situation 
where the preservation of a secret deteriorates our national security 
as a consequence, first of all, of not having a public debate about 
whether this is the right allocation but, most importantly, as a 
consequence of deteriorating citizens' confidence that we are 
authorizing and appropriating the correct amount.
  In short, keeping this secret from the American people has caused 
difficulty in retaining their consensus that we ought to be spending an 
amount of money they do not know in order to collect, analyze, produce, 
and disseminate intelligence. I think that is a problem for us.
  Again, I have not done any polling on this, so I don't know. I 
typically don't poll before I make a decision, to the consternation of 
my staff and supporters. But my guess is, just from anecdotes, there is 
a deterioration of confidence.
  It bothers me because my term on the Intelligence Committee--thanks 
to the original appointment by our former Democratic leader, George 
Mitchell, from the great State of Maine, and also Leader Daschle's 
confidence in retaining me on this committee--over time my confidence 
has increased.
  Indeed, the argument in my opening statement about this bill is that 
we have drawn down intelligence investments in the 1990s as we have 
drawn down our military from roughly 2 million men and women under 
active duty uniform to 1.35 million. We have also drawn down our 
intelligence efforts to a point where I don't believe we can do all of 
the things that need to be done either today or in the future.
  As I said, I have to collect intelligence. I have to analyze the 
information. I have skilled people who can analyze it. These images 
delivered from space very often mean nothing to me when I look at them. 
It requires somebody who is not only skilled but can process it in a 
hurry and can make something of it in a hurry.
  In the situation with India, where we had difficulty warning the 
President that a test might occur, again, according to published 
accounts, the Indians were aware that we, first, were able to identify 
a year earlier they were about to test, and we warned them not to test, 
as a result of overhead imaging. And they took evasive measures in the 
future.
  These are very difficult things to tell. You have to hire skilled 
people to do it. That is the analysis. The next piece is the 
production. It is getting very exciting but also very complicated. 
There is a lot of competition with the private sector to do this 
production work.
  Back in the ice age when I was on the U.S. Navy SEAL team, we were 
given a map if we were going to do an operation in an area in Vietnam. 
We would look at a map and say: This is the area we will operate in. 
The map might be 10 years old. Then we would supplement that with human 
intelligence. Somebody would say: There are some changes here that 
aren't quite the same as the map.
  Today an image is used. It is enhanced. It is remarkable how quickly 
we can deliver very accurate pictures of theaters of operation to the 
warfighter to disseminate differently, produced in a much different 
way, and enable that warfighter to have a competitive edge on the 
battlefield.
  Indeed, anybody who is thinking about becoming an enemy of the United 
States of America knows we have tremendous capability on the 
intelligence side. We get warnings, and those warnings are delivered 
when threats begin to build. Oftentimes a mere warning enables the 
heading off of a potential threat that could have erupted into a 
serious conflict and would have resulted in a loss of lives.
  The effort to collect, analyze, produce, and disseminate to the right 
person at the right time, and to make a decision, is not only 
complicated, but it is also quite expensive. It is not done 
accidentally.
  I hope this year is a watershed year and we are able to authorize 
additional resources for our intelligence agencies. If we don't, at 
some point we will have a Director of Central Intelligence in the 
future deliver the bad news to Congress that there is something we want 
to do but we can't because we cannot accomplish the mission we want to 
accomplish--not just because of resources but also because it is 
getting harder and harder to do things we have in the past taken for 
granted, such as intercept signals, conversations, or communications of 
some kind between one bad person and another bad person with hostile 
intent against the United States.
  Increasingly, we are seeing a shift in two big ways away from nation 
states. In the old days, we could pass sanctions legislation or do 
something against a government that was doing something we didn't like. 
What do we do if Osama bin Laden starts killing Americans or 
narcoterrorists or cyberterrorists say they hate the United States of 
America and are going to take action against us? It is very difficult--
indeed, it is impossible--for diplomacy to reduce that threat. We need 
to intercept and try to prevent it and, very often, try to prevent it 
with a forceful intervention.
  Not only is it shifting away from the nation state, making it harder 
both to collect and to do the other work--the analysis, the processing 
and dissemination, or production of dissemination--the signals are 
becoming more complex and difficult to process, and they are becoming 
more and more encrypted.
  I have had conversations with the private sector, people in the 
software business, who say we have to change this export regimen that 
makes it difficult for these companies to sell encryption overseas. 
This administration has made tremendous accommodation within the 
industry to try to accommodate their need to sell to companies that are 
doing business all over the world.
  Don't doubt there is a national security issue here. There is 
significant interception, both on the national security side and the 
law enforcement side. That encryption at 128 bits or higher is actually 
deployed. We will find our people in the intelligence side coming back 
and saying: Look, I know

[[Page 16523]]

something bad happened, and do you want to know why I didn't know? I 
will tell you why I didn't know. I couldn't make sense of the signal. 
We intercept, and all we get is a buzz and background noise. We cannot 
interpret it. We can't convert it.
  In the old days, we converted with a linguist or some other 
technological application. In the new world, we are being increasingly 
denied access to the signals. As described by the technical advisory 
group that was established on the Intelligence Committee, it was 
described as number of needles in the haystack but the haystack is 
getting larger and larger and harder, as a result, for the intelligence 
people to do the work they need to do.
  The chairman is moving to the floor. I know he will make a brilliant 
and articulate statement.
  Earlier, the Senator from New Mexico offered a statement on his 
amendment that he hopes to offer tomorrow. Senator Levin was here as 
well. I believe there is reason to be encouraged that we will move this 
bill quickly tomorrow, and reasonably encouraged, as well, that the 
differences which still exist on this bill can be resolved, and we can 
get a big bipartisan vote and move this on to conference.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama is recognized.
  Mr. SHELBY. Madam President, I have been listening in my office, 
before I came to the floor, to Senator Kerrey's comments. While we 
don't agree on everything, we agree on most things working on the 
Intelligence Committee.
  I want to say this about the distinguished Senator from Nebraska who 
is the vice chairman of the committee. We have tried to work together 
on very tough issues in the Intelligence Committee and tried to bring 
them to the floor of the Senate together--not separately. I think it 
says a lot when we can do this. I certainly have a lot of respect for 
the Senator from Nebraska and enjoy working with him. One thing about 
him, he is candid, and that goes a long way on anything.
  I think we have to devote our time and our effort in the Intelligence 
Committee and in the Senate to what works, what works best on basic 
intelligence gathering, as well as counterintelligence, where there is 
a shortfall.
  In that spirit, Madam President, I rise in support of the motion to 
proceed to consideration of H.R. 1555, the Intelligence Authorization 
Act of Fiscal Year 2000.
  As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I am 
deeply disappointed that certain Members of the minority have decided 
to oppose this motion. I hope it will be short lived. The intelligence 
bill, I believe, is a balanced, thoroughly bipartisan piece of 
legislation that is critical to our national security.
  Some Senators are objecting to the Kyl-Domenici-Murkowski amendment 
to restructure the Department of Energy, not the underlying bill. I am 
a cosponsor of that amendment, as is the distinguished vice chairman of 
the Intelligence Committee, Senator Kerrey.
  Basically, this is essentially the same proposal that prompted a 
filibuster threat when it first was offered to the Defense 
authorization bill back before the Memorial Day recess. At that time, 
the argument was, ``it's too soon, it's premature, there haven't been 
any hearings yet.''
  Whatever the merit of those arguments at the time, I believe, they 
are wholly without merit today. The Intelligence Committee has held two 
open hearings on the Kyl amendment and DOE security and 
counterintelligence issues, including a joint hearing with the Energy, 
Armed Services, and Government Affairs Committees that more than 60 
Senators had the opportunity to attend. The Intelligence Committee also 
held a detailed, closed briefing on the report of the President's 
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, also known as the Rudman report.
  We heard testimony from Secretary of Energy Richardson twice, from 
Senator Rudman twice, and from the sponsors of this amendment.
  I also should point out that, long before the current controversy, 
the Senate Intelligence Committee, on a bipartisan basis, identified 
problems in DOE's counterintelligence program and took steps to address 
those weaknesses. Most importantly, it sought to energize the 
Department of Energy to allocate the necessary resources, and take the 
necessary steps, to eliminate these vulnerabilities.
  Since the Kyl et al amendment was first offered, the sponsors have 
negotiated extensively, and in good faith, with the Department of 
Energy in order to address the concerns that Secretary Richardson has 
expressed, without changing the underlying thrust of the amendment, 
which is to create a semiautonomous agency for nuclear security within 
the Department of Energy.
  Last month, the need for action was dramatically reinforced by the 
publication of the Rudman report, entitled ``Science at its Best; 
Security at its Worst: A Report on Security Problems at the U.S. 
Department of Energy''--a report on security problems at the U.S. 
Department of Energy.
  I commend former Senator Rudman and also Dr. Drell, and others, who 
were so involved in this work.
  The Rudman report found among other things, that:

       At the birth of DOE, the brilliant scientific breakthroughs 
     of the nuclear weapons laboratories came with a troubling 
     record of security administration. Twenty years later, 
     virtually every one of its original problems persists. . . . 
     Multiple chains of command and standards of performance 
     negated accountability, resulting in pervasive inefficiency, 
     confusion, and mistrust. . . .
       In response to these problems, the Department has been the 
     subject of a nearly unbroken history of dire warnings and 
     attempted but aborted reforms.

  Building on the conclusions of the 1997 Institute for Defense 
Analyses report and the 1999 Chiles Commission, the Rudman panel 
concluded that:

       The Department of Energy is a dysfunctional bureaucracy 
     that has proven it is incapable of reforming itself. . . .  
     Reorganization is clearly warranted to resolve the many 
     specific problems . . . in the weapons laboratories, but also 
     to address the lack of accountability that has become endemic 
     throughout the entire Department.
       The panel is convinced that real and lasting security and 
     counterintelligence reform at the weapons labs is simply 
     unworkable within DOE's current structure and culture. . . . 
     To achieve the kind of protection that these sensitive labs 
     must have, they and their functions must have their own 
     autonomous operational structure free of all the other 
     obligations imposed by DOE management.

  To provide ``deep and lasting structural change that will give the 
weapons laboratories the accountability, clear lines of authority, and 
priority they deserve,'' the Rudman report endorsed two possible 
solutions:
  One was the creation of a wholly independent agency, such as NASA, to 
perform weapons research and nuclear stockpile management functions; or 
two, placing weapons research and nuclear stockpile management 
functions in a ``new semiautonomous agency within DOE that has a clear 
mission, streamlined bureaucracy, and drastically simplified lines of 
authority and accountability.''
  The latter option, or the second approach, is the one contained in 
the Kyl-Domenici-Murkowski; amendment. Examples of organizations of 
this type are the National Security Agency and the Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency, DARPA, within the Defense Department.
  The new semi-autonomous agency, the Agency for Nuclear Stewardship, 
would be a single agency, within the DOE, with responsibility for all 
activities of our nuclear weapons complex, including the National 
Laboratories--nuclear weapons, nonproliferation, and disposition of 
fissle materials.
  This agency will be led by an Under Secretary. The Under Secretary 
will be in charge of, and responsible for, all aspects of the agency's 
work, who will report--and this is very important--who will report 
directly and solely to the Secretary of Energy, and who will be subject 
to the supervision and direction of the Secretary of Energy. The 
Secretary of Energy will have full authority over all activities of 
this agency. Thus, for the first time--yes, Madam President the first 
time--this critical function of our national Government will have the 
clear chain of command that it requires.

[[Page 16524]]

  As recommended by the Rudman report, the new agency will have its own 
senior officials responsible for counterintelligence and security 
matters within the agency. These officials will carry out the 
counterintelligence and security policies established by the Secretary 
and will report to the Under Secretary and have direct access to the 
Secretary. It is very important that this happen. The agency will have 
a senior official responsible for the analysis and assessment of 
intelligence within the agency who will also report to the Under 
Secretary and have direct access to the Secretary.
  The Rudman report concluded that purely administrative 
reorganizational changes are inadequate to the challenge at hand: They 
say: ``To ensure its long-term success, this new agency must be 
established by statute.''
  For if the history of attempts to reform DOE underscores one thing, 
it is the ability of the DOE and the labs to hunker down and outwait 
and outlast Secretaries and other would-be agents of change--yes, even 
Presidents.
  For example, as documented by Senator Rudman and his colleagues, 
``even after President Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 
61 ordering that the Department make fundamental changes in security 
procedures, compliance by Department bureaucrats was grudging and 
belated.''
  At the same time, we in the Senate should recognize that our work 
will not be done even after this amendment is adopted and enacted into 
law. As the Rudman report warned, ``DOE cannot be fixed by a single 
legislative act: management must follows mandate. . . . Thus, both 
Congress and the Executive branch . . . should be prepared to monitor 
the progress of the Department's reforms for years to come.''
  It is an indication of how badly the Department of Energy is broken 
that it took over 100 studies of counterintelligence, security, and 
management practices--by the FBI and other intelligence agencies, the 
GAO, the DOE itself, and others, plus one enormous espionage scandal--
to create the impetus for change.
  I am encouraged by what appears to be some progress toward getting to 
this bill. I think we all are seeking--and I hope we are--the same 
thing: A better and more secure Department of Energy. This nation must 
have no less.
  I ask my colleagues: please, do not let the Senate become the lastes 
obstacle to reform at the Department of Energy.
  Stop the delay. Vote for cloture tomorrow morning, and let's get on 
with the business of the people and make our labs safe for our future 
and our country.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska is recognized.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, I rise in support of the Kyl-Domenici-Murkowski-
Kerrey amendment. I will first identify the need for the amendment.
  What we found in this issue concerning the Department of Energy is 
lack of accountability. What this amendment will do, in a nutshell, is 
to create a single agency in the Department of Energy, an Agency for 
Nuclear Stewardship, that will undertake all activities of our nuclear 
weapons laboratories programs, including the nuclear weapons 
laboratories themselves. It puts one person in charge, and that will be 
the Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship. That is the person in 
charge of and responsible for all aspects of the new Agency for Nuclear 
Stewardship. It creates a clear chain of command, a new Under Secretary 
for Nuclear Stewardship solely and directly reporting to the Secretary 
of Energy.
  Why do we need this? I believe all my colleagues will agree that the 
Department of Energy, as far as its security arrangements are 
concerned, is badly broken. To suggest that we should take time to 
evaluate at greater length when we have in the report of the 
investigative panel, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory 
Board--a report which I have before me entitled ``Science At Its Best, 
Security At Its Worst.''
  I am very proud of the role of the laboratories as far as science is 
concerned, but what we have is a severe breach of our national 
security.
  In summary, the amendment would create a new agency within the 
Department of Energy called the Agency for Nuclear Stewardship.
  The Agency for Nuclear Stewardship would be semiautonomous because it 
would be responsible for all of its activities. It provides that the 
Secretary of Energy shall be responsible for all policies of the 
agency; that the Agency for Nuclear Stewardship, headed by the Under 
Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship, would be just that, responsible, 
again, to the Secretary of Energy. The Under Secretary for Nuclear 
Stewardship shall report solely and directly to the Secretary; and that 
individual shall be subject to the supervision and direction of the 
Secretary.
  Make no mistake about it, the chain of command is to the Secretary of 
Energy. The Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship will have authority 
over all programs at the Department of Energy related to nuclear 
weapons, nonproliferation, and fissile material disposition.
  The agency's semiautonomy, as recommended by the Rudman report, is 
created by making all employees of the agency accountable to the 
Secretary and Under Secretary of Energy but not to other officials of 
the Department of Energy outside the agency.
  Specifically, the language reads:

       All personnel of the Agency for Nuclear Stewardship, in 
     carrying out any function of the agency, shall be responsible 
     to and subject to the supervision and direction of the 
     Secretary and the Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship, or 
     his designee within the agency, and shall not be responsible 
     to or subject to the supervision or direction of any other 
     officer, employee or agent of any other part of the 
     Department of Energy.

  The Secretary, however, may direct other officials, other departments 
who are not within the Agency for Nuclear Stewardship, to review the 
agency's programs and to make recommendations to the Secretary 
regarding the administration of such programs, including consistency 
with other similar programs and activities in the Department.
  The Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship will have three deputy 
directors who will manage programs in the following areas:
  First, Defense programs; that is, the lab directors and the heads of 
the production and test sites will report directly to this person; 
second, the nonproliferation and fissile materials disposition; and 
third, the naval reactors.
  The Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship will appoint chiefs of--
and they are as follows--first, counterintelligence--this must be a 
senior FBI executive whose selection must be approved by the Secretary 
of Energy and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation--
second, is security; and third is intelligence.
  These three chiefs shall report to the Under Secretary and shall 
have, statutorily provided, direct access to the Secretary and all 
other officials of the Department and its contractors concerning these 
matters. It requires the Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship to 
report annually to the Congress regarding the status and effectiveness 
of security and counterintelligence programs at the nuclear weapons 
facilities and laboratories, the adequacy of the Department of Energy 
procedures and policy for protecting national security information, and 
whether each DOE National Laboratory and nuclear weapons production 
test site is in full compliance with all departmental security 
requirements, and, if not, what measures are being taken to bring the 
lab into compliance--security violators at the nuclear weapons 
facilities and laboratories, foreign visitors at the nuclear weapons 
facilities and laboratories.
  In other words, what we have is a complete listing of requirements 
for the Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship to report annually to 
the Congress. So not only will he report to the Secretary but he will 
report to the Congress.

[[Page 16525]]

  It requires the Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship to keep the 
Secretary and the Congress fully and currently informed regarding 
losses of national security information and requires every employee of 
the Department of Energy, the National Laboratories, or associated 
contractors to alert the Under Secretary whenever they believe there is 
a threat to or a loss of national security information.
  In order to address concerns that Department of Energy officials were 
blocked from notifying Congress of security and counterintelligence 
breaches, the amendment contains a provision stating that the Under 
Secretary shall not be required to obtain the approval of any DOE 
official except the Secretary before delivering these reports to the 
Congress and, likewise, prohibits any other Department or agency from 
interfering.
  As we look over the history of the debacle associated with the breach 
of our national security regarding the laboratories, clearly, we have 
case after case, as we look to the former Secretaries, where there was 
a lack of an effective transfer of information, transfer of security 
matters, and just the transfer of everyday activities associated with 
responsibility and accountability. The system failed.
  The system failed because various people did not have access to the 
Secretary who were in charge of responsible security areas that 
mandated that they have such access in order to complete the 
communication within the chain of command.
  As a consequence, I support this amendment. We need this amendment to 
protect the national security. We need it to keep our nuclear weapons 
secrets from falling into the wrong hands. We have already suffered a 
major loss of our nuclear weapons secrets.
  According to the House Select Committee, the Cox report, the Chinese 
have stolen design information on all of the United States' most 
advanced nuclear weapons. This is simply unacceptable.
  The question we now face is: Will we lose more national security 
information if we do not take action? The answer is: Certainly that we 
stand greater exposure. The problem is the management of the Department 
of Energy. The problem is lack of accountability and lack of 
responsibility.
  Let me quote from the report of the President's Foreign Intelligence 
Advisory Board, the Rudman report. Again, I refer to this report, 
``Science at its Best, Security at its Worst.''

       Organizational disarray, managerial neglect, and a culture 
     of arrogance--both at DOE headquarters and the labs 
     themselves--conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting 
     to happen.

  This is in the report itself.
  Further:

       The Department of Energy is a dysfunctional bureaucracy 
     that has proven it is incapable of reforming itself.

  Right out of this report.
  I quote further:

       Accountability at the Department of Energy has been spread 
     so thinly and erratically that it is now almost impossible to 
     find.

  Right out of the report.
  Further:

       Never have the members of the Special Investigative Panel 
     witnessed a bureaucratic culture so thoroughly saturated with 
     cynicism and disregard for authority.

  Further quote:

       Never before has this panel found such a cavalier attitude 
     toward one of the most serious responsibilities in the 
     federal government--control of the design information 
     relating to nuclear weapons.

  Further:

       Never before has the panel found an agency with the 
     bureaucratic insolence to dispute, delay, and resist 
     implementation of a Presidential directive on security.

  If that isn't evidence enough that the security is at its worst, I do 
not know what other points to make. To date, the only DOE people who 
have been removed from their jobs as a consequence of the question of 
who is accountable are: Wen Ho Lee, who is alleged to have engaged in 
espionage at Los Alamos, is yet to be even charged with anything--not 
everyone a security violation; a gentleman by the name of Notra 
Trulock, the person who uncovered the alleged espionage and pushed 
perhaps too hard to stop it--which I might add, the Department of 
Energy felt a little uncomfortable with. He was shuffled off to a 
sideline position in the Department of Energy because he was too 
aggressive in bringing this matter to light. A gentleman by the name of 
Vic Reis, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Energy for Defense 
Programs, has, I understand, resigned because he disagrees with the 
officials down there and happens to support the pending amendment, the 
Kyl-Domenici-Murkowski amendment.
  Not a single high-level bureaucrat at the Department of Energy, the 
FBI, or the Justice Department has been removed, demoted, or 
disciplined over this massive failure. One has to wonder with all the 
talent associated with these agencies who bears the responsibility for 
failure in this case?
  The questions we must answer are certainly clear: How long are we 
willing to put up with this? Do we want to continue with the status 
quo? Our proposal is pending the cloture vote tomorrow. Those that are 
in opposition--who feel perhaps a bit uncomfortable with this--do they 
have a proposal to fix it? Clearly, they don't. We want to fix the 
problem.
  For reasons that I fail to understand, the administration is very 
reluctant to address this problem with a strong proposal for 
identifying accountability in the Department of Energy. Unfortunately, 
Secretary Richardson is opposed to our amendment as it stands. When it 
came up the last time on the defense bill, Secretary Richardson sent 
two letters threatening a veto by the President. Why doesn't the 
administration want to do anything significant to correct this problem? 
They seem to be willing only to rearrange the deck chairs, so to speak. 
They seem to be willing to make changes, but only those that ultimately 
result in the status quo.
  We want to steer the ship in a different direction so that it won't 
hit another iceberg. This Nation should not have to suffer from another 
massive loss of our most sensitive nuclear weapons secrets. The 
President's own intelligence advisory board agrees with our legislative 
solution. That is what the Rudman report said.
  Our amendment is patterned after the Rudman report. Let me again 
quote from this report:

       The panel is convinced that real and lasting security and 
     counterintelligence reform at the weapons labs is simply 
     unworkable within the Department of Energy's current 
     structure and culture. Further, to achieve the kind of 
     protection that these sensitive labs must have, they and 
     their functions must have their own autonomous operational 
     structure, free of all of the other obligations imposed by 
     the Department of Energy management.

  Well, today we have a situation where everybody is pointing the 
finger at everybody else. No one wants to take the responsibility. No 
one wants to be held accountable.
  Fundamentally, the issue is how to create accountability and 
responsibility at the Department of Energy. I encourage my colleagues 
to examine our amendment because that is just what it does. It creates 
accountability. It creates responsibility. No longer can we have a 
situation such as we have seen within the Department, where it is 
impossible to determine who bears the responsibility for the Wen Ho Lee 
breach of security. It creates accountability and responsibility by 
establishing a new Agency for Nuclear Stewardship inside of the 
Department of Energy to be headed up by a new Under Secretary of 
Energy.
  This new agency is now made responsible for all aspects of our 
nuclear weapons programs, including the previously loosely-managed 
laboratories. If there is a problem in the future, we will know who to 
point the finger at, who to hold responsible, a single agency with a 
single person heading it and in charge of all aspects of nuclear 
weapons programs. Our amendment also requires the new Under Secretary 
to report to the FBI and Congress all threats to our national security. 
No longer will we be kept in the dark, having to pretty much depend on 
the New York Times to find out what is going on.

[[Page 16526]]

  The Secretary of Energy is uncomfortable with this reorganization. 
Evidently, his idea is to rely on the same old management team, 
everyone in charge but no one responsible, no clear identifiable 
accountability.
  In conclusion, let me quote the testimony of Mr. Vic Reis. This came 
up late last week. Mr. Reis is the Assistant Secretary of Energy for 
Defense Programs. He testified before the Energy Committee last week.
  I might add, Mr. Reis' responsibility in the line of command is that 
the lab directors report directly to Mr. Reis.
  Mr. Reis said:

       You may recall at previous hearings, Mr. Chairman, you 
     noticed me in the audience and you asked for my opinion as to 
     who or what was to blame for the security issues at the 
     national laboratories. I responded that I didn't think you 
     would find any one individual but that there were 
     organizational structures of the Department of Energy that 
     were so flawed that security lapses are almost inevitable.

  Now, this is the gentleman to whom heads of the labs report. He says 
that you can't find any individual to blame. The organizational 
structure was so flawed that security lapses were inevitable.
  Then Mr. Reis went on to say:

       The root cause of the difficulties at the Department of 
     Energy is simply that the Department of Energy has too many 
     disparate missions to be managed effectively as a cohesive 
     organization. The price of gasoline, refrigerant standards, 
     Quarks, nuclear cleanup and nuclear weapons just don't come 
     together naturally. Because of all this multi-layered 
     crosscutting, there is no one accountable for the operation 
     of any part of the organization except the Secretary, and no 
     Secretary has the time to lead the whole thing effectively. 
     By setting up a semi-autonomous agency, many of these 
     problems will go away.

  Madam President, in short, if you want espionage to continue at the 
laboratories and maintain the environment where it can occur, then 
stick with the present system. But if you, like me, want to stop this 
atmosphere where espionage can flourish, I think you should vote for 
the motion and invoke cloture for the amendment.
  What we have here is a situation where I think it is appropriate that 
we identify where the differences are between the Secretary, Senator 
Kyl, Senator Domenici, Senator Kerrey, and Senator Murkowski and in our 
amendment. What we do is we create a single semiautonomous agency, as I 
have indicated, that reports directly to the Secretary of Energy. The 
new Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship will be responsible for 
both setting policy and implementation of policy, subject to the 
overall supervision and direct control of the Secretary of Energy.
  I want to make that clear: Subject to the overall supervision and 
direct control of the Secretary of Energy.
  Evidently, that is not what the Secretary wants. The Secretary is 
willing to allow the new Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship to 
implement policy but not set policy. There is a big difference, 
implementing and setting. More significantly, the Secretary wants to 
allow any part of the Department of Energy to set the policies that the 
new Under Secretary would have to follow. So somebody else is setting 
it.
  The Secretary's proposal would violate our fundamental concept; that 
is, clear and identifiable lines of authority and responsibility--in 
other words, a direct chain of command. We have been discussing our 
differences, but so far we seem to be unable to resolve them.
  There is one other thing I will mention that was said the other day 
that relates to this matter under discussion. Two current nuclear 
weapons lab directors and one former lab director said at a hearing 
that while they could report their problems and issues to Mr. Reis, who 
is their supervisor, that Mr. Reis has no clear line of authority to 
pass those up through the chain of command to the Secretary.
  So here we have it. This substantiates the justification for our 
amendment. Here is the gentleman who is responsible to have the input 
from the lab directors report to him, the three labs, Livermore, 
Sandia, Los Alamos.
  But the gentleman in charge, Mr. Reis, under the current structure 
and chain of command within the Department of Energy, has no clear line 
of authority to pass those recommendations, those matters, up through 
the chain of command to the Secretary. So here you have the person that 
is responsible to get the information from the lab directors, but there 
is no provision, no requirement, no line of command up to the Secretary 
so that policy matters can be addressed. That one observation with 
these three lab directors illustrates the problem we are trying to fix 
with this legislation.
  As it stands today, there is no chain or lines of authority and 
responsibility. Right now, everybody is in charge, but nobody is 
responsible. I guess it is fair to say there are several missing links, 
if you will, in the DOE chain of command and authority. The purpose of 
the amendment is to fix that problem.
  I often think back to military concept and a ship at sea. Someone is 
in charge of the CON--in other words, the ship is under the direction 
of the officer in charge, and he has the CON. There is no question of 
where the responsibility sets. If he is relieved, the command of the 
ship is taken over and that person accepts the responsibility. In the 
DOE, we don't have those clear lines of authority, and that is the 
justification for the amendment pending before this body today.
  Is this thing broke to the point where it mandates that the Senate 
take action? I think it is fair to say that the answer is clearly yes. 
The ineptness, the bungling, the pure mismanagement at all levels are 
things that have occurred within this agency. The Department of Energy 
never took the most basic precautions to guard against the theft of the 
nuclear secrets. The FBI conducted feeble investigations. The 
Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Reno, virtually ignored 
requests for warrants to search Wen Ho Lee's computers. What we have 
here are the results of one of the worst cases in the history of this 
Nation of our national security being jeopardized.
  I have held about 9 hearings as chairman of the Energy and Natural 
Resources Committee on these matters, and three important discoveries 
were made by my committee. First, the Department of Energy and the FBI 
bungled the computer waiver issue. I have a chart here. The lab 
directors, the attorneys, and directors of counterintelligence all 
agree that the DOE had the authority to search Lee's computer because 
he signed a waiver. Well, this is the waiver. This is a copy of the 
waiver that actually Wen Ho Lee signed, dated April 19, 1995:

       Warning: To protect the LAN system from unauthorized use 
     and to ensure that the systems are functioning properly, 
     activities on these systems are monitored and recorded and 
     subject to audit. Use of these systems is expressed consent 
     to such monitoring and recording. Any unauthorized access or 
     use of this LAN is prohibited and could be subject to 
     criminal and civil penalties.

  Here is the part Wen Ho Lee signed:

       I understand and agree to follow these rules in my use of 
     the ENCHANTED LAN. I assume full responsibility for the 
     security of my workstation. I understand that violations may 
     be reported to my supervisor or FSS-14, that I may be denied 
     access to the LAN, and that I may receive a security 
     infraction for a violation of these rules.

  Now, the issue here is that the FBI claimed that the Department of 
Energy told him there was no waiver; no such waiver existed. The FBI 
wrongly assumed, then, that they needed a warrant to search. What is 
the result of this inept communication? Well, Lee's computer could have 
been searched, but instead was not searched for some three years. When 
the computer was finally searched, they discovered evidence that Wen Ho 
Lee had downloaded legacy codes to an unclassified computer.
  The fundamental problem is that nobody was looking at the big 
picture. Surely, protecting nuclear secrets and national security 
outweighs the feeble attempts that were made to get a possible 
conviction.
  What we have here is, one, the Department of Energy did not know that 
Wen Ho Lee had signed a waiver. They could not find it in his personnel 
file because the file had been mislaid. Had they known that, as I 
indicated earlier, they could have monitored his computer. Instead, the 
FBI said, no, they were doing an investigation, and since

[[Page 16527]]

they didn't have a waiver, his computer was not monitored by the 
Department of Energy. Yet, they found later that the waiver existed, as 
evidenced by the poster I just showed in evidence.
  The FBI and the Department of Justice next bungled the 
counterintelligence warrant or the FISA, as evidenced by chart 2. The 
FBI, not once or twice, but three times requested warrants from the 
DOE. This is chart 2. This is the FISA report. Department of Energy, 
FBI, Department of Justice, and the FISA warrant, approved or rejected. 
Notra Trulock briefs the FBI. An FBI request was made by John Lewis, 
then assistant director of the FBI National Security Division. An FBI 
request was made to Gerald Schroeder, Acting Director, Office of 
Intelligence Policy and Review. It was rejected. Here is the rejection. 
Here is the sequence of events. The first time we had the sequence of 
the DOE, FBI, and Department of Justice proceeding to authorize the 
FISA warrant to investigate the alleged counterintelligence and 
espionage charges alleged against Wen Ho Lee.
  The second time, Notra Trulock and others continued to prod FBI's 
investigation of Wen Ho Lee. FBI request made to John Lewis, then 
Assistant Director of the FBI National Security Division. FBI request 
made to Gerald Schroeder. Again, it was rejected. The second time it 
was rejected by the Department of Justice.
  Now, then the last time, Mr. Lewis, who is up there in the hierarchy, 
Assistant Director of the FBI, National Security Division, feels so 
frustrated that he makes a personal plea to Attorney General Janet 
Reno. Again, Notra Trulock and others continue to prod the FBI. John 
Lewis makes a personal request to the Attorney General because he feels 
so strongly that there is justification to authorize this 
investigation. But the personal appeal falls on deaf ears.
  Why was it rejected? What happened? We don't know. Nothing happened. 
But we do know that the Attorney General ignored two pleas for help. 
Notra Trulock, then DOE Director of Intelligence, personally briefed 
Janet Reno in ``great detail'' about the Lee case in August of 1997. 
John Lewis, FBI Director of Intelligence, also indicated he personally 
pled to Janet Reno to approve the FBI's request for a warrant to search 
Lee in August of 1997.
  Why did Attorney General Janet Reno ignore pleas from two top 
national security advisers? We don't know. We don't know because there 
is a great reluctance to provide the committees of jurisdiction with 
that information.
  I am personally disappointed in the FBI and the Department of 
Justice's refusal to testify publicly. Probably 90 percent of what has 
been found in closed sessions is not really classified, in my opinion.
  What we are looking for here is accountability. We in the Energy and 
Natural Resources Committee intend to continue to identify those 
persons whose inaction has led to one of the most potentially 
catastrophic losses in our national security history. Now we have a 
situation where they seem to want to hide behind the smokescreen of 
``national security'' or to finger-point and say it is not our 
responsibility. That is simply an unconscionable set of circumstances.
  Finally, as we address a couple of other points that may come up in 
the debate which I think deserve consideration, why create one 
semiautonomous agency within the Department of Energy? We are creating 
a hybrid that has no other identifiable comparison. Let me put that 
myth to rest. There are other semiautonomous agencies that function 
extremely well. That is what we are proposing with the amendment which 
has been laid down.
  Let's look at three of those semiautonomous agencies.
  DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, is a separate 
agency within the Department of Defense under a director appointed by 
the Secretary of Defense. It works.
  NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is the 
largest bureau within the Department of Commerce. It is a 
semiautonomous agency. It works.
  NSA, the National Security Agency, was established by Presidential 
directive as a separate department organized as an agency within the 
Department of Defense. It was structured in that manner and form 
because it was necessary that there be accountability and 
responsibility within the National Security Agency. It is a 
semiautonomous agency.
  I encourage my colleagues as we proceed to vote tomorrow--my 
understanding is that we are going to have one hour of debate equally 
divided on the cloture motion on the amendment--to recognize that the 
time to address this is now, that the responsibility clearly is within 
this body, and that the amendment we offered identifies the one thing 
that was lacking as we look at how this set of security breaches could 
have occurred, and that is, it addresses accountability and 
responsibility.
  For those who feel uncomfortable, I encourage them to recognize that 
they have a responsibility of coming up with something that will work. 
We think that the amendment pending, the Kyl-Domenici-Murkowski-Kerrey 
amendment--I understand that Senators Thompson, Specter, Gregg, 
Hutchinson, Shelby, Warner, Bunning, Helms, Fitzgerald, Lott, Kerry, 
Feinstein, and Bob Smith are a few of the other Members of the Senate 
who are cosponsoring this amendment.
  It is a responsible amendment. Let's get on with the job. Let's put 
this issue in the restructured form that provides for accountability 
and responsibility, and move on. The American people and the taxpayers 
certainly deserve prompt action by this body. We have that obligation. 
The time is on the vote tomorrow.
  I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.
  I see no other Senator wishing time. I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative assistant proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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