The Plutonium Files (69 page)

But with the special status came the burden of expectations. O’Leary would have to be a shining example of her race. “My parents taught me that if you were reverent, honorable, clean, well-educated and smelled good—for some reason smelling good has always been important to my [stepmother]—you could transcend any obstacle,” she said in another interview.
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With her appointment to President Clinton’s cabinet, O’Leary had fulfilled everything anyone could have expected of her. But her work as energy secretary was just beginning. She soon learned that the agency she was charged with overseeing, the Department of Energy, was one of the most wasteful and distrusted bureaucracies in the federal government.
During its fifty years of operation, the weapons complex had manufactured tens of thousands of warheads and detonated more than one thousand bombs. The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project, a four-year research project directed by Stephen Schwartz, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, estimated that the U.S. nuclear weapons program cost taxpayers some $5.5 trillion in 1996 dollars.
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Although bomb makers recognized as far back as 1948 that disposal of radioactive wastes presented the “gravest of problems,” they focused only on the arms race against the Soviet Union and passed the daunting and unglamorous task of cleanup to future generations.
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By the mid-1990s, many facilities in the weapons complex had been shut down because of health and safety dangers. Plutonium, uranium, and other fission products had leaked into the groundwater and soil surrounding the plants and laboratories. A paper prepared by the DOE summarized the problems that existed at the beginning of O’Leary’s tenure:

The elaborate efforts by the DOE’s predecessors to protect the agency’s prestige and avoid public relations debacles had backfired with a vengeance. The credibility gap opened in the mid-1950s when serious concerns were first raised about the effects of fallout from atmospheric testing. Scandal after scandal ripped through the nuclear weapons complex. The defensive strategy was almost always the same: Deny the charges, classify the data, and destroy the reputation of the accuser. The modus operandus was developed by the veterans of the Manhattan Project and handed down from bureaucrat to bureaucrat in each of its successor agencies: the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration, and, finally, the Department of-Energy.

O’Leary, the first woman and the first African American to serve as energy secretary, waded fearlessly into the department’s macho world of nuclear weapons, a rarefied domain in which only a handful of women had succeeded in penetrating the uppermost ranks in fifty years. She was a striking contrast to her predecessor, Admiral James B. Watkins. She swore prodigiously, sweated in a noontime aerobics class, and was seen around headquarters from time to time in pink Lycra pants. A quick study, O’Leary had the ability to zero in on key issues during staff meetings. She was also imperious, egotistical, and sometimes difficult to get along with. “She could cut your legs off and you wouldn’t even know it until you walked out of the room,” said one staffer.

Just a few months after her swearing-in, O’Leary was asked to sign off on a document that would have given the green light for an additional fifteen underground detonations at the Nevada Test Site. Even though atmospheric testing had stopped in the 1960s, underground explosions had continued for the next three decades. In all, some 1,030 nuclear weapons had been exploded either above or below the ground. The last underground bomb, Divider, was detonated on September 23, 1992, just four months before O’Leary arrived.
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O’Leary was hesitant to approve the tests and went to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to find out if they were necessary. “She had the courage, as I understand it, to go down to the Pentagon, to essentially go to the Joint Chiefs and say, ‘Hey, why should we do this?’ ” Ray Kidder, a retired nuclear weapons designer from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recalled.
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O’Leary then summoned the directors of the nation’s weapons labs and several outside arms control experts to Washington for a top-secret meeting on May 18 and May 19, 1993. The meeting was held in a tomblike room known as a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, located in the basement of the DOE headquarters. There, in the windowless, carpeted room that radio transmissions could not penetrate or escape, the weapons experts gave their opinions. “I’d characterize it as a Quaker meeting in the sense there was lots of time,” said Frank von Hippel, a respected physicist from Princeton University who attended.
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Following the meeting, O’Leary and her staff concluded the tests weren’t needed. When she recommended they be canceled, President Clinton agreed with her and announced the indefinite extension of the testing moratorium on July 4, 1993. Although the bomb builders now knew that this energy secretary was different from any who had ever occupied the seventh-floor suite of DOE’s headquarters in downtown
Washington, the public would not have occasion to find out for another few months.

The test ban victory notwithstanding, O’Leary recognized that if she was going to succeed in making any permanent, long-term reforms, she would have to begin by reversing the “culture of secrecy” that had been created by the Manhattan Project. That meant, among other things, declassifying documents and revising the long-standing practice of com-partmentalization—the old idea promulgated by General Leslie Groves that workers should know only what they need to know to do their jobs and nothing more. Groves’s policy was beginning to backfire. As Jim Werner, director of strategic planning and analysis in DOE’s Environmental Management Office, put it, “The way secrecy works is you have to compartmentalize so that people know what they need to know and nothing more. When trying to clean up a nuclear weapons site, that’s just not very helpful.”

After five decades of indoctrination, though, the culture of secrecy was an integral part of the department, like the recycled air that streamed through vents at its headquarters in downtown Washington or its ancillary headquarters in Germantown, Maryland, which was built in the mid-1950s to ensure that the important functions of the AEC would continue even if the Capitol was flattened by an atomic attack.

Wanting to let some fresh air in, O’Leary made both sites more accessible to the public. She disarmed the security guards who stood at the entrance to the buildings, giving them billy clubs instead of guns. She also eliminated the requirement that they escort visitors to their destinations and to the bathroom (a policy that is still in place at other DOE facilities and at the nation’s weapons labs). The glass doors in the hallway leading to her suite were thrown open, the security officer who guarded the corridor was clothed in a dark business suit instead of a uniform, and benign images of windmills and other renewable energy sources replaced the doomsday photos that once lined the walls leading to the inner sanctum. As a sign of her intentions, O’Leary also changed the name of the Office of Classification to the Office of Declassification and instructed A. Bryan Siebert, the director, to develop a plan for making more documents available to the public. Siebert readily embraced O’Leary’s orders: “I have been in the program for twenty to thirty years and it has been clear to me that classification has been used against the public time and again.
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I thought it was wrong,” he said.

Siebert spearheaded the effort to declassify and review some 3 million documents. The declassification effort was greeted with resistance,
even outright hostility, by some of DOE’s entrenched bureaucrats. Some viewed it as a threat to national security; others as a threat to themselves. “They acted as if something personally were being taken away from them,” Siebert recalled.
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When Siebert and his team of reviewers began examining the files, they discovered a vast amount of information that could be released to the public without threatening national security or divulging important nuclear data. Page by page, DOE’s declassification experts began poring over the documents, making sure the records earmarked for release contained no information that could help anyone build a bomb. As the months passed, the pile grew.

On December 7, 1993, almost a year after she had been named energy secretary, O’Leary invited reporters to a press conference in the auditorium of the DOE headquarters. On the podium behind her was the first stack of newly declassified documents. It was the first of several “Openness Initiative” press conferences held by O’Leary, and it catapulted her from a relatively obscure member of President Clinton’s cabinet into one of the highest-profile figures of his first administration.

With a bank of cameras pointing at her on that cold December morning, O’Leary made a conscious effort to break with her predecessors, a line of steely-eyed patriots that stretched back to Leslie Groves. “We were shrouded and clouded in an atmosphere of secrecy.
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I would even take it a step further and call it repression,” she began.

Trim and confident looking, O’Leary paced back and forth across the stage, pausing occasionally to put up a transparency on an overhead projector to emphasize a point she was making. “The Cold War is over …we’re coming clean,” the first transparency announced. In the space of an hour or so, O’Leary disclosed many of the secrets that the DOE’s predecessors had struggled to keep under wraps for decades. Among them were the following: Weapons scientists had exploded 204 more nuclear bombs, or 20 percent more weapons, than the figure previously made public; nearly three-quarters of a million pounds of mercury—the equivalent of some 11 billion thermometers—had been dumped into a creek in Oak Ridge; the United States had manufactured eighty-nine tons of plutonium during the Cold War.
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Many tons of the highly radioactive material were stored at various research sites across the country, including Hanford, Los Alamos, and Argonne—just thirty miles from downtown Chicago.

Toward the end of the press conference, O’Leary paused and then put one of her last remaining transparencies on the overhead screen. In bold letters, it read, “The Human Radiation Experiments.” The department,
she admitted, had conducted several hundred radiation experiments on American citizens, including one in which eighteen people were injected with plutonium. O’Leary said she was shocked and appalled by the experiments and had hired an ethicist to look into them. “What I’ve read,” she said of the plutonium injections, “leads me to believe that by the standards of today informed consent could not have taken place.”
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O’Leary said she had hoped to release the names of the plutonium patients but had been advised against it by the department’s attorneys. “I’m attempting not to be sensational, but to balance the needs of the families with the public’s desire to know more.”

The acknowledgment of the radiation experiments was an astounding mea culpa for a high government official and certainly underscored the department’s new commitment to openness. The only hitch was that O’Leary’s admission wasn’t entirely voluntary. Her comments were prompted by the forty-five-page series the
Albuquerque Tribune
had published on the plutonium injections three weeks earlier. Nevertheless, her acknowledgment was a historic break with her predecessors. She was the leader of the department that in earlier incarnations had carried out the injections and had covered them up. O’Leary had not only confirmed that the federal government had sponsored these experiments, she had gone a step further and admitted that she found them appalling. Her reaction was exactly the same as my own, six years earlier, when I first stumbled across the footnote describing the injections.

From a darkened room at DOE’s regional office in Albuquerque, I watched O’Leary’s press conference by satellite. I had driven over to their office to see the briefing after hearing rumors that she might discuss the experiments. Sitting at the long table with me were a handful of DOE employees and a reporter for the competing newspaper. With each new graphic O’Leary put up on the overhead screen, the bureaucrats’ scowls seemed to deepen.

Although O’Leary portrayed the DOE as a revitalized department committed to openness and trust, the government employees I was dealing with still seemed to be part of the same old Cold War machine. My work on the plutonium experiment had begun long before O’Leary arrived, but the newspaper’s intense legal battle to obtain records occurred during her first ten months on the job. The DOE had steadfastly refused to provide the names of the patients, even though they were all dead and had no privacy rights.

While the legal skirmishes were going on, I followed the paper trail, hoping to uncover the identities of the patients on my own. After finding the footnote in 1987, it had taken me five years to uncover the identity of Elmer Allen. But when I returned to the story full-time in the spring and summer of 1993, I was able to find four other patients in quick succession by using the same kinds of clues that had helped me find Elmer.

The second patient I found was Albert Stevens, CAL-1, the California housepainter injected in California. The document that helped me unravel his identity came from history professor Barton Bernstein, whom I had met during my 1991–92 journalism fellowship at Stanford University. Bernstein just happened to be one of the few historians in the country who knew something about Joseph Hamilton and Robert Stone and their human experiments at Berkeley. I called him one afternoon and we talked at length about the two scientists. A couple of weeks later I received an unsolicited document in the mail from him. It was a copy of the July 7, 1945, letter that Hamilton wrote to Stone asking him whether he could pay CAL-1 fifty dollars a month to keep him in the Berkeley area.