By Alan P. Zelicoff Physician and Scientist
After basking in the national spotlight — first as a peripatetic congressman meeting with rogue dictators, then U.N. ambassador and finally as a cabinet secretary — Bill Richardson hoped for a spot on the Democratic national ticket. But his "rising star" petered out, and he came to embody the Peter Principle instead.
Saddled with a disastrous security scandal not of his making, he rose to the level of his own incompetence by taking a bad problem at Department of Energy laboratories and making it even worse.
In this shameful and very sad story are lessons for New Mexicans who might still be thinking he'd make a good governor.
There is no question that Richardson's predecessor as secretary of energy, Hazel O'Leary, sowed the seeds that led to lost nuclear secrets and missing hard drives. O'Leary systematically deconstructed basic security measures at the labs by, among other things, removing guards and replacing them with turnstiles.
No longer would visitors (or even staff) be subject to search upon entering or leaving — hence the loss of an otherwise visible deterrent to spying or even careless handling of classified data and electronic media.
Predictable disaster followed in 1999, and when it did, Secretary Richardson — then running for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination and desperate to show how he could be "tough on national security" — slapped a counter-productive, sweeping polygraph program on all of the employees at Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs.
Senior administrators advised against this in the strongest terms, citing the obvious adverse effects on morale at a time when the labs were competing with Silicon Valley for talented engineers and computer scientists.
Senior scientific staff prepared detailed surveys of the track record of polygraphs, pointing out that the most damaging spies in U.S. history — double agents Aldrich Ames, Karl Koecher, Larry Wu-Tai Chin and Ana Belen Montes — all passed their CIA polygraphs multiple times and that polygraphs never caught any spies.
The scientists suggested that guards be reinstated, and that security clearances be limited to those workers who really needed them. Richardson listened to none of it, and when confronted at Sandia in 1999 about his obvious disregard for the basic dignity of loyal lab employees, Richardson waved his hand dismissively in the air and with a pained expression on his face complained with an exasperated huff: "Oh, it's all just politics." This from a cabinet secretary entrusted with nuclear weapons?
Richardson twisted arms in Congress to get funds for his polygraph program and crowed on the PBS News Hour, "What we have done since I came on board is we've instituted polygraphs for anybody that has sensitive access."
That decision sentenced 15,000 people to degrading four-hour inquisitions. He reiterated precisely the same words on CBS and ABC News several days later, ruling out any doubt that he meant exactly what he said.
But this week, the National Academy of Sciences released a two-year study on the efficacy of polygraphs. The study concluded: "Its accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies" — almost exactly what lab scientists told Richardson in 1999.
So, now Richardson is running away from his self-serving decision, claiming, "I only wanted a very narrow group of people to be polygraphed" — an obvious fib even to political partisans.
But his lying doesn't stop there. Richardson also now claims that it was he who asked for the National Academy study. But it was fellow Democrat and senator Jeff Bingaman who bravely questioned the secretary's security plans at an open DOE hearing that Richardson sponsored, and organized the Senate resolution that funded the NAS study.
Richardson's blatant lying is demeaning not only to the 10,000 New Mexicans who work at Sandia and Los Alamos; he thinks the rest of the citizenry are dupes as well.
Bill Richardson has failed his test as an executive, electing instead to put his own career before those of some of New Mexico's most talented and productive workers. While it is true he freed a few hostages in foreign lands, he condemned thousands of Americans to a useless, low-tech electronic inquisition that squandered millions of dollars and damaged the reputations of lab employees and the labs themselves.
I don't know if either of his opponents would make good governors, but if honesty is important, it would be very hard to do worse than Bill Richardson.
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