Nuclear Lab Polygraph Quotas Are Cut Sharply

WASHINGTON —  Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, under pressure from scientists and members of Congress, has sharply reduced the number of federal employees who will be required to take polygraph examinations about their handling of nuclear secrets.

Instead of imposing the “lie detector” tests on more than 5,000 scientists and other employees at the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, the Department of Energy will limit the testing to several hundred people per lab, or a total of about 1,000 employees, DOE officials said.

Richardson announced the polygraph testing early this year as one in a series of steps to tighten security at the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories after allegations that China had stolen U.S. nuclear secrets from the labs.

Congress subsequently ordered the tests, and the Energy Department held public hearings recently to develop regulations on who will have to take the exams, what questions will be asked and other procedural issues. The hearings found widespread anxiety at the labs about the unreliability of the tests, and key members of Congress wrote to Richardson to object to wholesale screening of thousands of employees.

Last month, John Browne, the director of the Los Alamos lab, told his employees that he had “considerable reservations” about testing large numbers of people as a deterrent to espionage. However, he said he would support polygraphs for those handling top-secret materials and working in the most sensitive, “special access” nuclear programs, where voluntary polygraphs already are administered.

The new regulations, scheduled to be released Nov. 1, will require testing of nuclear weapons designers, security and counterintelligence officials, some employees at nuclear weapons production plants and a few political appointees at DOE headquarters in Washington.

As an argument in favor of testing, DOE officials have pointed to the Pentagon’s experience. When polygraphs were administered last year to nearly 7,500 employees of the Defense Department and its contractors, they produced “significant security or criminal information” on more than a dozen individuals, according to a report submitted this year to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

One civilian employee of the National Security Agency who showed deception in the testing subsequently admitted that he had given classified information to his foreign-born wife, who was in contact with a foreign intelligence agency, according to the report. A Pentagon official said the NSA employee has resigned.