Wednesday, May 26, 1999 | 12:08 p.m.
Although Chinese visitors frequently tour the Nevada Test Site, no nuclear weapons secrets leaked from the field where nuclear experiments were conducted 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, according to a congressional report.
The 700-page report prepared by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., examined how the People's Republic of China stole information from U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., and Livermore, Calif.
The report, released Tuesday, has generated volumes of criticism of the nation's security measures. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., added his voice on Tuesday.
"The questionable and inept handling of counterintelligence matters at the Department of Energy, the insufficient attention paid to security at our national laboratories ... and the prominence of trade consideration over those of national security were all driving forces behind the disaster at hand," Gibbons said in a statement from Washington Tuesday.
The former Air Force pilot and member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence said the committee intends to examine whether Chinese agents were used to "subvert or otherwise manipulate" the U.S. political process.
"Without question we must get concrete answers to the lingering questions of intelligence security in the U.S.," he said.
However in Nevada, no one from the Test Site was interviewed for the report because the site is so isolated, DOE spokeswoman Nancy Harkess said Tuesday after the report was made public.
"We take very careful precautions with any foreign nationals who visit the site," she said.
Harkess outlined four reasons the Nevada Test Site has not been tainted by the Chinese spy scandal:
* The Test Site has no computer lines that can link it to other national laboratories.
* When researchers from labs such as Northern California's Lawrence Livermore use computers to transmit secret information from the Test Site to their home labs, they do so for very short periods of time, interrupting chances for hackers to gain access.
* The Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists bring their own secured computers with them to the Test Site.
* Any top secret information generated during experiments, such as the sub-critical tests, is hand-delivered by people with special clearance, which eliminates computer transmissions.
The sub-critical tests, which are underground blasts using high explosives to see how nuclear materials behave, are conducted periodically at the Test Site to ensure the safety of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
The Test Site's computers were secured long before the public became aware of the extent of the breach in U.S. nuclear weapons information, Harkess said.
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