Comment Senator Grassley Letters regarding Sandia Failures (Score 5, Informative) 171
It seems that the Carpenter debacle is only the latest of a string of management failures at the facility. A big of Googling turned up a cache of PDFs posted to a Los Alamos related web site (LANL, The Real Story). The site is no longer maintained, but available. The letters are PDFs of actual correspondence from Senator Grassley to the Secretary of Energy, the Department of Energy Inspector General, and other high-ranking officials regarding security problems and retaliation issues at Sandia. Sandia has a separate Corporate Investigations division, and in 2003 and 2004 they turned up some interesting items in their investigations. From the correspondence, however, it seems that Sandia management wasn't too pleased when they got the bad news from the investigators, who were simply trying to do their jobs.
The investigators were threatened, transferred to rodent-infested trailers, and were written up. According to two of the letters, Senator Grassley's office saved their jobs by intervening on their behalf, issuing several strong warnings to Sandia about retaliating against whistleblowers.
Here's some highlights: After investigating an incident in Sandia's SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) that involved alleged sexual liaisons between highly cleared staff members, the Sandia Vice President in charge at the time -- David Nokes -- ordered a subordinate to destroy a hard drive that was assigned as evidence to the investigation. The subordinate complied by "smashing the hard drive with a sledge hammer." The SCIF employee in question was also found to have been hacking into Sandia Intranet computers. It became impossible to find out exactly what the employee was doing after the drive was destroyed. The drive was presumably destroyed because the VP wanted to "avoid embarrassment" to the organization.
After being "forced" to resign, C. Paul Robinson and Mr. Nokes publicly sparred in the press. While this public display was going on, Dr. Robinson was quietly reinstating Mr. Nokes' security clearances and hiring him back as a "security consultant". Now that seems odd, given the circumstances of his departure. It was only until an unknown Sandia employee anonymously faxed Mr. Nokes' clearance reinstatement paperwork to Senator Grassley's office did the good Senator become aware of what was going on.
After the smoke cleared from Sandia executive management's "sham internal review" of what happened (the Senator's words, not mine), Sandia quietly handed out huge bonuses to the employees that toed the company line -- including the hard drive smasher (who was in charge of security at the SCIF). None of this became public until they were posted on the LANL site by -- you guessed it -- an anonymous person. The Albuquerque Journal ran a story about the huge bonuses and pay raises awarded to every employee that was disciplined in the matter in the fall of 2006. While disciplined publicly, they all received huge cash awards ($20,000 non-base award to the drive smasher) and unheard of pay raises. That seems like sort of a red flag to me, especially since the American tax payer is doling out the cash for this nonsense.
BTW, Sandia Corporation is a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation. It was set up as an at-will employer, so staff can be fired for any reason and at any time. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the Department of Energy reimbursement of contractor litigation expenses can be found here: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04148r.pdf
The GAO found that almost all claims are summarily reimbursed by the DOE, even in cases of malfeasance, fraudulent conduct, etc ($330 million between 1998 and 2003). DOE contractors only picked up a paltry $12 million of the tab.
There's all kinds of goodies in the PDFs, so I won't ruin the suspense for those of you that are interested.
The Sandia National Laboratories / Senator Grassley documents can be downloaded from the "LANL: The Real Story" archive here:
http://www.parrot-farm.net/~roberts/lanl-the-real- story/2005/12/congressional-correspondence.html
Happy reading! :^)
The investigators were threatened, transferred to rodent-infested trailers, and were written up. According to two of the letters, Senator Grassley's office saved their jobs by intervening on their behalf, issuing several strong warnings to Sandia about retaliating against whistleblowers.
Here's some highlights: After investigating an incident in Sandia's SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) that involved alleged sexual liaisons between highly cleared staff members, the Sandia Vice President in charge at the time -- David Nokes -- ordered a subordinate to destroy a hard drive that was assigned as evidence to the investigation. The subordinate complied by "smashing the hard drive with a sledge hammer." The SCIF employee in question was also found to have been hacking into Sandia Intranet computers. It became impossible to find out exactly what the employee was doing after the drive was destroyed. The drive was presumably destroyed because the VP wanted to "avoid embarrassment" to the organization.
After being "forced" to resign, C. Paul Robinson and Mr. Nokes publicly sparred in the press. While this public display was going on, Dr. Robinson was quietly reinstating Mr. Nokes' security clearances and hiring him back as a "security consultant". Now that seems odd, given the circumstances of his departure. It was only until an unknown Sandia employee anonymously faxed Mr. Nokes' clearance reinstatement paperwork to Senator Grassley's office did the good Senator become aware of what was going on.
After the smoke cleared from Sandia executive management's "sham internal review" of what happened (the Senator's words, not mine), Sandia quietly handed out huge bonuses to the employees that toed the company line -- including the hard drive smasher (who was in charge of security at the SCIF). None of this became public until they were posted on the LANL site by -- you guessed it -- an anonymous person. The Albuquerque Journal ran a story about the huge bonuses and pay raises awarded to every employee that was disciplined in the matter in the fall of 2006. While disciplined publicly, they all received huge cash awards ($20,000 non-base award to the drive smasher) and unheard of pay raises. That seems like sort of a red flag to me, especially since the American tax payer is doling out the cash for this nonsense.
BTW, Sandia Corporation is a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation. It was set up as an at-will employer, so staff can be fired for any reason and at any time. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the Department of Energy reimbursement of contractor litigation expenses can be found here: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04148r.pdf
The GAO found that almost all claims are summarily reimbursed by the DOE, even in cases of malfeasance, fraudulent conduct, etc ($330 million between 1998 and 2003). DOE contractors only picked up a paltry $12 million of the tab.
There's all kinds of goodies in the PDFs, so I won't ruin the suspense for those of you that are interested.
The Sandia National Laboratories / Senator Grassley documents can be downloaded from the "LANL: The Real Story" archive here:
http://www.parrot-farm.net/~roberts/lanl-the-real
Happy reading!
