Chapter 5

TARNISHED GOLD

THE EARLY 1990S were no more immune to nuclear threats than the early 1980s. Five locations were targets in 1990 alone: Denver, Colorado; El Paso, Texas; Sunnyvale, California (the headquarters of the Air Force Satellite Control Network); Washington, D.C.; and an undisclosed site in the United States. The threats included, respectively, a nuclear device, a nuclear weapon, an atomic bomb, a nuclear device, and two atomic bombs. Then there was Bethesda, Maryland, which merely had to face the specter of being threatened with plutonium dispersal.¹

In 1991, New York and Washington, D.C., were threatened with nuclear bombs. In March 1992, nine U.S. cities were targets. That September, several cities, unidentified by those making the threats, were also threatened with nuclear devices. Then a few days short of Christmas, the targets moved overseas, although the United States was apparently informed by the threateners. Someone claimed to have two atomic bombs ready to destroy Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. In April 1993, three atomic bombs were reported to be ready to cause devastation in Germany and the Vatican City.²

During the 1990s, the biggest deployment of NEST personnel and equipment took place in Louisiana. When the citizens of New Orleans and its suburbs woke up on Sunday, October 16, 1994, most were probably thinking of how they would spend their day or, possibly, about what the week ahead had in store for them. It is unlikely that more than a few, if any at all, had the danger posed by nuclear terrorists on their mind. The city was in the midst of Jeff Fest ’94, held at Lafreniere Park, a 155-acre site with seven sports fields (five soccer and two baseball), other multipurpose fields, and a two-mile walking track. The festival included food, craft, music, and games and attracted a crowd of ten thousand on its opening day, Saturday. Among the crowd was a couple from Pittsburgh, who planned their annual vacation around the festival. When interviewed by a local reporter, one gushed, “The music’s great. The food’s great . . . we’ll keep coming every year.”³

Of course, they had no idea that at 7:55 a.m. the same day, the FBI received word that one of its informants was being held hostage by a domestic terrorist group, the Patriots for National Unity, in a New Orleans safe house. The next morning, after electronic surveillance revealed plans to kill the hostage, a raid by the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team freed the informant. During the debriefing that followed, the informant reported that members of the terrorist group were looking to obtain nuclear material and assemble several nuclear devices, and not just as an intellectual exercise. Ultimately, they wanted to kill a lot of people. In response to the possible nuclear threat, the FBI alerted a variety of government organizations, including NEST.⁴

The FBI’s target, the Patriots for National Unity, called to mind other groups the FBI had tangled with in the past. It would be six months before the bureau would hear of Timothy McVeigh and witness the destruction that he unleashed in Oklahoma City. But, in the 1980s the FBI confronted the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord—a white hate group run by an Illinois-born ironworker and itinerant preacher named Jim Ellison. Former FBI agent Danny Coulson, who had helped arrange Ellison’s eventual surrender, described him as a “cross between John the Baptist and James Dean,” as “egocentric, insecure, and status-starved,” and as “the General Patton of the Christian Identity movement.” He preached that the Second Coming of Christ prophesied in the Book of Revelation was imminent. When it came, according to Ellison, 90 percent of the world’s population would fail to make God’s cut and perish in the Tribulation, a prophecy from the New Testament that promises fire and brimstone, rather than tolerance, for non-Christians.⁵

While waiting for the end to arrive, Ellison had established a heavily fortified compound on a 244-acre plot of land in the Ozarks, near Mountain Home, Arkansas. Activities at the compound included daily visits to the optimistically named Endtime Overcomer Survival Training School, in a mock village called Silhouette City. Inside, Ellison’s devotees could spend part of their day shooting at figures given the characteristics of Ellison’s pet hates. The figures were of policemen with a Star of David painted over their hearts.⁶

In addition to encouraging his followers to kill cardboard cutouts that couldn’t shoot back, Ellison had some very real death and destruction in mind. Sometime during 1983 and 1984, Ellison tried but failed to blow up the Red River natural-gas pipeline at Fulton, Arkansas—a town so small (occupying two-tenths of a square mile and with a population of around 250) as to be nearly nonexistent. The explosive fizzled. He also dispatched a senior lieutenant with a briefcase filled with explosives and instructions to bomb a homosexual church in Kansas City. That plot also failed when the lieutenant could not bring himself to complete his mission. When FBI agents searched the compound after Ellison’s surrender, they found a thirty-gallon drum of cyanide, which, Ellison told them, had been destined for the New York and Washington, D.C., water supplies.⁷

Unlike the Covenant, the Patriots for National Unity and their plans were just a figment of the imagination of NEST’s Scenario Working Group (which included William Chambers) and NEST chief planner Lewis Newby, a former Navy pilot who was head of the NEST contingent at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. They were part of the scenario for Mirage Gold, the search team’s first full field exercise since Mighty Derringer eight years earlier. Its purpose was to test how successfully various agencies could respond to such a threat and if they could work together effectively.⁸

Mirage Gold was the final exercise in a series designated Mile Shakedown. Planning had started by the summer of 1992. The series included a tabletop exercise designated Mica Dig (in the fall of 1993), with participants sitting at their desks and attempting to work through the problems they would face and the decisions they would have to make in the scenario given to them. The Defense and Energy departments would be represented by assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries, respectively. That was to be followed by a field site communications exercise called Mild Cover (planned for the spring of 1994 but actually carried out in September) to test communications systems and procedures, including the voice and data transmission systems, radios, telephone systems, and video displays that would be used to communicate within and between participant organizations. One point of the exercise was to strain the archival databases of the organizations, to identify the point at which they started to break down. Finally, there would be a command post exercise (CPX), in which senior officials or substitutes would manage the crisis from Washington, and a full field exercise in the fall of 1994 (Mirage Gold) to test the ability of NEST, the FBI, and other agencies (including assorted military units and the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to find and disable the hidden weapons. By the time the series of exercises concluded, they had involved over 1,000 people, with 850 participating in Mirage Gold alone.⁹

A tabletop exercise like Mica Dig did not require any extensive deployment of personnel, but other exercises did. For example, in June a “no notice” Emergency Deployment Readiness Evaluation had already been conducted to determine exactly how many hours it would take to get NEST personnel and equipment airborne from Travis, Nellis, Andrews, and Kirtland air force bases. Mild Cover required 120 controllers, evaluators, and players to spend four days in September at New Orleans Naval Air Station (also known as Alvin Callender Field) in Belle Chasse, a part of the New Orleans metropolitan area with a population of around nine thousand. They checked the secure voice and data transmission systems to be used in the exercise, each agency’s radios, microwave links, telephone systems, compressed video displays, and the tactical satellite installation at the Forrestal Operations Center.¹⁰

Among the organizations invited to participate in Mirage Gold were one or more “special mission units” of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which included the Navy’s Seal Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force. While the JSOC did initially agree to take part, with its anticipated role being designated Errant Knight, the command eventually limited its participation to the command post exercise.¹¹

In October 1992, FBI official W. Douglas Gow did accept the Energy Department’s invitation to the FBI to participate in the exercise, which would give the bureau a chance to test the adequacy of the FBI Nuclear Emergency Contingency Plan and the memoranda of agreement between the FBI, Energy, and other agencies concerning the response to nuclear extortion or terrorist incidents. Another FBI document, produced at about the same time, characterized Mirage Gold as a “5-day, 24 hour a day scenario” that would “include a maritime/site assault, one mobile target, and two stationary targets.” It also claimed that the variety of sites would provide the players “with a complex set of problems to resolve.”¹²

Among those problems was the potential hostage/barricade situation at the safe house that the FBI office in New Orleans anticipated, which led the office to request deployment, as envisioned by the Scenario Working Group, of almost a hundred members of the bureau’s HRT, one of a number of FBI units that participated in the exercise. While the HRT was being deployed, additional information about the house was collected and planning for an assault on the house began. In the early-morning hours of October 17, FBI eavesdroppers overheard instructions to kill the informant. Predictably, authorization for the HRT to storm the safe house followed. The elite FBI unit “killed” six terrorists, rescued the informant, and gathered up whatever evidence was to be found in the house.¹³

One of the FBI’s informants had revealed that the Patriots group was planning a series of bombings, involving conventional and high explosives. But the evidence gathered by the FBI’s raiders at the scene as well as interviews of the rescued informant indicated that the Patriots organization had much grander plans. It intended to obtain fissile material from foreign sources, assemble several nuclear devices, and search for a “prime target.” The evidence also provided some possible leads to a maritime vessel through a charter boat operator at Lake Michoud, located to the southeast of the intersection of Interstates 10 and 510. As FBI agents continued to investigate, their confidence grew that the authors of the scenario had included an “immediate and serious” nuclear threat to New Orleans as part of the exercise. Late in the afternoon, the bureau requested assistance from NEST, military explosive ordnance disposal units, and FEMA. Louisiana state officials were notified that a FEMA regional operations center had been established. The New Orleans Police Department, under investigation by the FBI for corruption, did not get a call.¹⁴

By early morning on October 18, participating military ordnance disposal units, representatives of FEMA, and the first wave of NEST search and support elements had arrived in the city and established their separate staging areas and command posts in an industrial complex across the Intercoastal Waterway from the New Orleans Naval Air Station. Located about twenty-seven miles southeast of New Orleans International Airport, the complex was owned by Brown and Root, a Texas-based company and subsidiary of Halliburton, which had built naval air stations and warships for decades. The complex had been unoccupied for several years but had been cleaned up for the exercise. The FBI’s Joint Operations Center was established in the same complex. The communications equipment, including secure voice, data, and video display systems, was already there, having been installed during the Mild Cover exercise the previous month. By the middle of the day, the airlift of NEST personnel and equipment had been completed, although not without incident as one NEST team member suffered a heart attack.¹⁵

NEST equipment included briefcases, rental vans, and aircraft packed with radiation detection equipment and other sensors. NEST personnel were divided into a number of working groups, reflecting the many tasks NEST would be expected to carry out during such an event: support, plans and operations, search and diagnostics, access (to the device), disablement, and containment and effects. Although disablement was actually the responsibility of military EOD personnel, NEST personnel would serve, at least, as advisors when it came to trying to cripple the device before it detonated.¹⁶*

Intelligence gathered by the FBI was the basis for initiating searches in a variety of locations, including the first one, conducted by NEST personnel, in the Federal Aviation Administration noise abatement area near the New Orleans International Airport. By late afternoon of October 18, the maritime target was located, anchored at Lake Michoud, and placed under surveillance. FBI investigators, possibly through electronic surveillance, also learned that there were four hostages aboard the vessel along with another homemade nuclear device.¹⁷

Early on October 19, additional information drew attention to a small flying service on an airstrip off Magazine Drive in the Belle Chasse area, several miles southwest of Lake Michoud and near the naval air base. NEST searchers were directed to the area and got a “hit” during a drive-by, detecting a mock nuclear device in an airport shed. The FBI established surveillance on the flying service, which was supplemented by NEST radiation monitoring of a nearby road. The HRT started planning for an emergency assault based on the activities under observation.¹⁸

At about noon, three men were spotted leaving the flying service carrying a small but heavy bag containing nuclear components, which they loaded into a closed van parked nearby. The NEST monitors were activated as the van left the area, and the FBI initiated mobile surveillance. The van was observed entering a property at 797 Walker Road in Belle Chasse, also south of the naval air station and off Belle Chasse Highway, and owned by the same individual who owned the house assaulted by the FBI’s rescue team on October 17.¹⁹

By midafternoon on October 19, the bureau had determined that there was no one left at the flying service after the van’s departure. The explosive ordnance personnel had initiated access to the buildings. An improvised nuclear device was found in a shed, along with information indicating it was armed and set to detonate on October 20 at noon. NEST and military explosive ordnance disposal personnel attempted to determine the specific characteristics of the device and develop a render-safe plan.²⁰

The device to be disabled, recalls Peter Zimmerman, the physicist behind Gadget, had been built by personnel from the Navy Explosive Ordnance Detachment Technical Division. And while they had never built such a bomb before, their device was “frighteningly plausible.” When Zimmerman asked a former weapons designer to give him an estimate of the yield of such a device, the answer he got back was not reassuring—a considerable number of kilotons.²¹

Authority to disable the device was obtained during the morning of October 20. NEST personnel constructed a thirty-five-foot cone-shaped tent around the shed and pumped in thick aqueous foam to limit the blast’s effects and absorb radioactive particles that would be emitted after the team destroyed the device with conventional explosives. The conventional explosives would turn the foam into billions of bubbles, which would dissipate. Unfortunately, after the foam was pumped in, it was decided to perform a “surgical disrupt”—cutting the proper wires and firing a shaped charge. Not only did this technique not require foam to mitigate the blast and absorb radioactive particles, but it also did not get rid of the foam. Since there was no way to get rid of the foam, early reentry for forensic purposes—to study the bomb’s design—became impossible.²²

Surveillance was maintained at the Walker Road site and plans were made to assault that site and the maritime target simultaneously to maintain the element of surprise, possibly with the help of Department of Defense “tactical resources.” The terrorists at the two locations were in contact and known to be uncertain about the cause of the apparent failure of the device at the flying service. The group’s leader, who was on board the boat, instructed some subordinates to return to the device and determine what went wrong. Neither they nor the group’s leader would escape, and the exercise wrapped up at 1:38 a.m. on October 21, the boat having been raided and the nuclear device on board having been disabled.²³

There was an initial “hot wash” of participants during the morning of October 21, where they gave their impressions of the exercise.²⁴ As with preceding exercises, Mirage Gold was also followed, in subsequent months, by a series of “after-action” reports by the agencies who were major participants. Such reports usually described the exercise, identified successes and failures, and offered recommendations to improve the chances of a successful response to a real nuclear crisis.

The FBI’s after-action report characterized Mirage Gold as an “effective exercise” and evaluated seven different aspects of the operation: the scenario, interagency coordination of forensic objectives, controller training, operation of the exercise control cells, interagency coordination of media issues, information management, and technical support. It also contained twenty-six recommendations.²⁵

In addition to its description of the background of the exercise and its planning, the FEMA report noted five exercise objectives, each followed by a discussion and evaluation. The summary that followed stated that “FEMA’s opportunity to participate in Exercise MIRAGE GOLD proved to be a valuable experience in several respects. The exercise clearly demonstrated the lack of understanding that exists in agencies not familiar with the FRP [Federal Response Plan] regarding the concept of consequence management in an environment where a catastrophic emergency/event is possible but has not yet occurred.” It also argued that “corrective actions that can be taken to address the problems noted . . . are generally straightforward.”²⁶

Of more relevance for NEST was the report prepared for the Nevada Operations Office by William Chambers, the former original NEST member, and Joel Carlson. Carlson was a former FBI agent who had joined Sandia laboratory after his FBI career and worked on NEST matters.²⁷ Their report was packed with discussions of the problems they identified and recommendations on how to rectify those shortcomings.

They noted problems with interagency agreements. The various directives for the federal response to a domestic nuclear terrorist incident were described as “fragmented, incomplete, or non-existent”—one of the consequences, according to Chambers and Carlson, being that the Defense Department expected to be involved in predicting the effects of the blast, which the authors asserted was the “sole responsibility” of the NEST Containment and Effects Team.* The Energy Department’s policies slowed the ability to respond to a threat, the authors found, because they required some communications to proceed in a series rather than simultaneously. Not surprisingly, they recommended a critical review of those procedures.²⁸

Chambers and Carlson mentioned deployment problems too, which had been evident in the emergency deployment readiness evaluation test prior to Mirage Gold. The problems extended across the board and concerned activation, notification, transportation, and deployment of NEST elements. As a result, personnel and resources had been artificially prepositioned in anticipation of the exercise.²⁹

There were also technical problems, including an “ineffective technical response” due to “unrealistic scenarios and timelines,” as well as “inefficient acquisition and distribution of critical IND [Improvised Nuclear Device] data” to NEST field and management personnel. An additional problem was the “inability to detonate disablement explosive charges on the New Orleans (Belle Chasse) Naval Air Station,” charges that would have dispersed the troublesome foam. The search was also flawed owing to the scarcity of escorting FBI agents, along with the agents’ lack of knowledge of search techniques as well as safety and security requirements.³⁰*

In addition, information management left much to be desired. The authors found the FBI’s intelligence collection effort deficient. The bureau “was narrowly focused on . . . learning what was necessary to identify and capture the terrorists, not how the device was constructed or configured,” which is “key to DOD and DOE efforts to diagnose the device, predict its effects, disable it, etc”—a complaint echoed in an after-action report prepared for the commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command, whose 52nd Ordnance Group provided disablement personnel. FBI agents either missed, or did not recognize as important to other elements of NEST, diagrams of the device’s firing system that had been located in an area the agents had searched during the raid of October 17. Such data was “critical to the Disablement Team; the lack thereof could have meant the difference between success or failure in the deployment of disablement tools.”³¹

In addition to the failure to collect vital information, Chambers and Nelson noted, there was a problem in sharing information among agencies owing to the security procedures for protecting classified information. The lack of equivalency of security classification levels among the participants “unnecessarily hampered interagency cooperation and the flow of vital information.” Not surprisingly, the authors concluded that all major NEST organizations needed to “develop procedures to reduce or eliminate institutional barriers affecting the flow of information.”³²

Another problem was the difficulty NEST personnel “at all levels” had in obtaining “accurate, timely information regarding the developing situation.” The authors noted that while the NEST mission, responsibilities, and number of deployed personnel had “grown dramatically,” available tools for information transfer had “not been used to maximum advantage.”³³

There was some additional displeasure with the FBI, which, according to the after-action report, “conducted Exercise operation in ‘Imperial fashion,’ failing to communicate or coordinate with other agencies,” a criticism that echoed from earlier exercises. And, according to the report, the FBI persisted in handling NEST situations on a case-by-case basis. (Participants would also tell congressional investigators that the FBI excluded non-FBI personnel from the Joint Operations Center, which was intended to include leaders from the different agencies).³⁴

Chambers and Carlson attributed some of the problems experienced in the exercise to the five-year lapse since the last major interagency exercise. As a result, many personnel “at all player levels” had never been involved in such an event. The deficiency was particularly noticeable with respect to participants in the command, control, and management areas, in contrast to those in the scientific and technical fields. The authors recommended that a major interagency NEST exercise be held in the United States once every three years, as required by the 1991 Department of Energy order specifying the mission and responsibilities of NEST.³⁵

Despite the many problems they identified, their conclusions looked at what they considered to be the positives of the exercise. Thus, they commented that in Mirage Gold, “four major agencies of the federal government melded their respective resources into developing a solution for a major criminal threat to a United States population center that had potential catastrophic consequences.” In addition, the authors believed that the smaller-scale exercises in the series (Mild Cover, Mica Dig) provided “efficient and controllable experiences” for establishing the activities, training needs, logistical requirements, and liaison relationships that would exist in the full-scale exercise.”³⁶

. . .

But the optimism felt by those who wrote the FEMA and Nevada Operations Office after-action reports was decidedly not shared by Rear Adm. Charles J. Beers Jr., whose professional title required thirteen words: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for Military Application and Stockpile Support, Defense Programs. Beers, the son of a naval officer, recalls that he had been a “submariner all my life,” which included a stint as commanding officer of the USS Minneapolis–Saint Paul in the mid-1980s. He had held the post of deputy assistant secretary since August 1993 (and would depart in September 1995). It was a job that had traditionally been held by Air Force or Army generals. But Secretary of Energy James Watkins, a former admiral and submariner himself, wanted a submariner in the position. Navy regulations required that an admiral’s first position be a “joint” one—that is, outside of the Navy alone. So Beers, who had just attained admiral status, found himself replacing Admiral Jerry Ellis as a deputy assistant secretary of energy.³⁷

Beers recalled that at the time he took over the position, there was a great deal of infighting over NEST, and there was an attempt to move it under the department’s Office of Intelligence. The problem was, according to Beers, that the individuals who made up NEST worked for laboratories such as Livermore and Los Alamos, and “lab people belong[ed] to me.” Ultimately, NEST remained his responsibility.³⁸

As a result, Beers had the authority to express his views in the type of memo that media accounts almost inevitably refer to as “brutal” or “scathing.” In the memo he informed the manager of the Nevada Operations Office,

Over the past several weeks, I have directed my staff to review the overall status of the readiness capabilities of NEST, focusing specifically on the recent full field exercise series, Mile Shakedown. The initial indications of this review are not promising, having indications that our overall stated capabilities are not as refined as they are required to be. Alleged shortcomings in the program focus on time lines, deployment, logistics, and overall integration of resources within DOE and the interagency community. I also have concerns about the integrity of the exercises we have conducted.³⁹

Beers went on to enumerate several areas of concern. One was that a real threat situation would move faster than the one in the Mirage Gold exercise, requiring “expedited procedures” that were “not consistent with actual practices.” In addition, Beers was concerned that “the huge NEST structure” inhibited rapid decision making and action. He also charged that information—including device location and type of nuclear source—“was inappropriately leaked to the players” during both Mirage Gold and the Emergency Deployment Readiness Evaluation. Another problem Beers identified was the “erroneous information/data” given to disablement teams.⁴⁰

Those four complaints did not exhaust the list of the admiral’s concerns. “The disablement procedure for the device was not appropriate,” he wrote and objected that “the NEST community has neglected to incorporate shortcomings which were brought out at past exercises.” There was also the predeployment of communications capabilities, which “created optimistic and unrealistic results” owing to the availability of equipment before it could have realistically arrived. Airlift resource expectations, the memo claimed, were unreasonable and appeared to be extremely out-of-date. There also needed to be considerable improvement in the arrangements made for the safety of the search team in a hostile environment. Finally, “interactions with and communications between our other emergency response assets and Federal agencies require improvement.”⁴¹

NEST veteran Alan Mode, who believed that the provision of advanced information compromised the ability to assess how NEST would respond in a real crisis, recalls that the Beers memo received a very negative reception at the labs. “Nobody wanted to hear criticism of NEST at the time.” The memo also resulted in a “lot of finger pointing,” Mode recalls.⁴²

Other NEST veterans believed Beer’s criticism to be less than fair. Some noted that limited funding required some prepositioning of equipment that would not actually be immediately available in the event of a crisis. Both William Chambers and William Nelson noted that the military had a very different view of the purpose of exercises than did the civilian leadership of NEST. They believed, from their experience with military participants, that for the military, which exercised repeatedly, the whole point of an exercise was to prove that the mission could be accomplished. In contrast, according to Chambers, the labs viewed exercises as an occasional means of getting all those who would be participating in a nuclear threat scenario together and taking them “over the edge”—identifying problems that would arise, which would lead to actions to correct those problems.⁴³

Beers’s reaction to those views was a laugh and the comment, “You could look at it that way”—although he clearly didn’t and doesn’t. In his view, a successful exercise would involve finding devices and disarming them.⁴⁴

Thus, while key participants from the labs did not consider the exercise a failure, Beers did. And he was in a position to order a review of the exercise and the NEST enterprise. In his memo to the Nevada Operations Office manager, in addition to voicing his disquiet about Mirage Gold, he “requested” a general assessment of NEST with respect to the concerns described in the memo.⁴⁵

To conduct that assessment, the Nevada Operations Office manager tapped Duane C. Sewell, one of NEST’s founders. In 1978, Sewell had left Livermore, where he was deputy director, to serve as assistant secretary for defense programs in the newly created Department of Energy. In 1981 he left government to run a consulting business. From 1989 to 1993 he again served as Livermore’s deputy director. In 1993 he retired from the laboratory and returned to his own consulting business.⁴⁶

In addition to Sewell, who served as chairman, the “Nuclear Emergency Search Team Assessment Team” included Delbert N. Dilbeck of the FBI, Deputy Manager Ray D. Duncan of the Nevada Operations Office, William F. Hartman of Sandia National Laboratories, and Ronald T. Stearns of the Nevada Operations Office.⁴⁷

Sewell and his colleagues studied existing policies and procedures as well as background documentation. In addition, the assessment team conducted 120 hours of interviews with sixty-five individuals representing a cross section of management, technical, and logistical support functions associated with the NEST program, as well as other participating organizations and agencies. Individuals from the Department of Energy headquarters, the Nevada Operations Office, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, EG&G Energy Measurements, the FBI, the Department of State Office of Counterterrorism, and the Department of Defense were questioned by the assessment team.⁴⁸

The team’s report, which Mode characterizes as “a benchmark in NEST history,” was completed in time to be in print on July 12, 1995, although it was available only to a very select audience. The main body of the report, consisting of sixty-one single-spaced pages, discussed NEST’s mission, management and organization, technical response capabilities, logistical and technical support, deployment readiness posture, deployment command and decision authorities, research and development, training, field exercises, interagency participation, intelligence, policies and procedures, and, finally, funding, budgeting, and planning.⁴⁹

The assessment team observed that during its formative years, NEST focused on developing a capability to search for an improvised nuclear device or special nuclear materials that had been lost or stolen. During that time, the most likely event was expected to be an extortion attempt using a device or dirty bomb. While the team noted that the potential for such an event still existed, it also observed that terrorists, at both the national and international level, had the will and intent to employ WMD “with little regard for human lives or property.”⁵⁰

With respect to management and organization, Sewell’s team reported that historically the Energy Department (and its predecessors) did not take an active role in the management and direction of the NEST effort but that the current Energy Department director had taken a more proactive role. Whereas the department’s Office of Emergency Response had once had a staff of three, in 1995 it had twenty-three people, including seven staff members and advisors who were directly involved in the NEST program on a full-time basis.⁵¹

That proactive role, Sewell and his colleagues reported, had caused tension between Energy Department headquarters, the Nevada Operations Office, and the NEST groups working at the laboratories and for contractors, as well as declining morale among NEST personnel. Subsequently, Dr. Victor H. Reis, assistant secretary of defense programs in the Energy Department, argued that along with the headquarters’ more proactive role came some significant changes that created tension, including the frequency and depth of exercises, the focus on long-standing technical issues, and an emphasis on dealing with the threat of nuclear terrorism rather than nuclear extortion.⁵²

The team also reported that under the present method of operation, there simply were not enough bodies to accomplish many of the tasks associated with the overall field management and direction of “a complex multi-faceted operation.” As a result, the Nevada Operations Office had to rely on other organizations or committees to provide support in areas such as the development of field policies and procedures as well as the planning, directing, and controlling of remedial actions.⁵³

The panel suggested that the Nevada Operations Office and the laboratories consider escalating NEST to full program status and allocating the manpower and management attention needed to ensure that the system was fully ready to deploy and able to respond effectively to potential terrorist incidents. At the same time, it recommended that the Nevada Operations Office “exercise assertive leadership and establish a prompt and authoritative policy and decision making process in order to ensure that level of response capability is achieved and sustained.”⁵⁴

In evaluating NEST’s technical response capabilities, Sewell’s group examined eight different aspects: search, access, diagnostics, device assessment, disablement, containment, effects prediction, and consequence management. Highlights of the report include the group’s findings on search, device assessment, containment, and effects prediction.

After examining search capabilities, the assessment group concluded that “the current suite of detection hardware and software are on the leading edge of the technology and, unless a breakthrough should occur which would increase sensitivity and detection ranges, any additional development will be limited to miniaturization, improvements in existing techniques and methods or the design and production of so called ‘smart instruments’ which can be utilized by untrained personnel in a search mode.”⁵⁵

The primary mission of the Device Assessment Team, the report stated, was to determine if the device, as constructed, could produce a nuclear yield and, if so, how large a yield and how various disablement options would affect the performance of the device. The expertise of the team’s personnel constituted “the most unique as well as greatest strength that the laboratories bring to the NEST program.”⁵⁶

Sewell, Dilbeck, and their colleagues reported that with regard to containment, aqueous foam had proved “to be a very practical and effective material for containment and mitigation purposes,” explaining that “aqueous foam possesses the capabilities required to rapidly attenuate blast pressures, and . . . is highly effective in capturing much of the radioactive material that might be associated with a high explosives detonation . . . Systems have been developed to contain the foam in place which can be erected quickly and have proven to be effective in field trials.” However, “additional engineering efforts are required to develop more effective methods of adapting these containment structures to unconventional locations or sites where an IND or RDD might be emplaced.” In addition, “effective techniques for the rapid dissipation of residual foam have yet to be developed. Such a capability could be useful in providing for immediate reentry to evaluate the effectiveness of the disablement efforts and to recover forensic evidence.”⁵⁷

The Containment and Effects Team included, the report informed its readers, a field-deployable component capable of processing and analyzing calculational models using the data gathered in the field. The models would take into account the effect of containment systems as well as climatological conditions in the immediate area. The team possessed computer-assisted techniques to provide decision makers with a complete description of all of the consequences that might be expected from such an event.⁵⁸

With respect to research and development, the report noted that the majority of systems then in use for detection were by-products of the U.S. nuclear weapons program and that “only limited research” had been conducted to design equipment specifically for the NEST program. The problem was that the “Weapons Program has now been curtailed to such an extent that the remaining research programs have very little potential to contribute anything of substance to the continuing needs of the NEST program.” Technical limitations of NEST could only be resolved, the panel wrote, by “the establishment and continued support of a steady state research and experimental program over an extended period.”⁵⁹

The panel continued on that theme, noting that Energy Department officials had never before been faced with a decision as to whether or not the department should sponsor a research and experimentation program specifically directed at NEST requirements. “As a result of changing circumstances,” the Energy Department “has now arrived at the crossroads where management must decide if they are willing to accept the risks associated with those known limitations and continue with the ‘status-quo’ or seek the resources required to improve this situation.” There were, however, “no guarantees that even a fully funded research program would resolve all of the current limitations.”⁶⁰

Its section with regard to field exercises, beginning on page 43, was the first time the panel explicitly referred to the Mirage Gold exercises that had led to its creation—only to dismiss the issue. The panel wrote that the “problems and concerns which resulted from the recent MIRAGE GOLD Exercise seem to have been adequately identified and described in the draft After Action Report as well as a number of other independent evaluations.” As a result, the assessment team did not examine Mirage Gold and other field exercises in detail except to determine if there were any systemic problems that needed to be investigated. The panel continued, observing, in defense of the Mirage Gold planners, that “many of the concerns were related to the design and conduct of that specific exercise including many of the artificialities and simulations which will always be reflected to some degree in any field exercise. Most of the artificialities and simulations were driven by efforts on the part of the design staff to minimize costs.”⁶¹

At the same time, the assessment team found that most organizations were in agreement that the next major field exercise should be strictly on a “no notice” basis in order to test the true response capabilities of NEST. Selected elements of NEST assets, such as communications, would not be predeployed to the exercise site. In addition, the group concluded that at the Washington level, there should be direct participation by appropriate members serving in their designated roles—in contrast to surrogates or a simulated response group.⁶²

Further, the team noted that most field personnel agreed that one of the next set of exercises should be conducted in a closed environment such as the Nevada Test Site to permit more realism in the design and conduct of the technical elements of the deployment. In addition, the exercises should be conducted on a “no fault, no recrimination basis.” Problems with detection systems or errors in judgment “should be used as the basis for remedial actions.”⁶³

The assessment team’s findings reflected those in the after-action report with regard to the issue of interagency participation. The team stated that the memorandum of understanding between the FBI, Defense Department, and Energy Department, which had last been amended in June 1982, was outdated and did not reflect several changes that had been agreed to by participating agencies. Meanwhile, the agreement between the State, Defense, and Energy departments relating to deployments overseas had lapsed, although the parties to the agreement had agreed to continue to honor the provisions.⁶⁴

The “continued absence of current agreements” between NEST and other participating agencies had created a hardship on the field organizations, since they had not been able to finalize many of their deployment operating procedures or command and control systems or develop training programs incorporating the provisions of the most recent agreements. “The consequences of the prolonged absence of formal agreements which clearly delineate roles, responsibilities and authorities were reflected in the recent MIRAGE GOLD field exercise,” Sewell and his colleagues wrote.⁶⁵

The assessment team reached at least three other conclusions of importance. A comparison of the Mirage Gold after-action reports with the reports from earlier field exercises revealed many similarities in the problems identified, particularly those involving command and control. That suggested to Sewell and the rest of the team that there was no system for assembling a comprehensive list of problems and assigning responsibility for resolving them.⁶⁶

Also, the team expressed concern that in the event of an actual nuclear terrorist threat, there was an inadequate process for obtaining review and approval of action plans from higher authority on short notice. It also questioned whether many of the officials in the chain of approval fully understood the kinds of decisions they would be asked to make or the potential consequences of such decisions.⁶⁷

In addition, the group reported a number of significant technological constraints that limited NEST’s ability to effectively respond to the full range of nuclear devices that a terrorist organization might use. Those constraints had been well known for many years, but Energy Department “management has not made a decision as to whether they are willing to continue to accept those limitations or seek the necessary resources to sponsor an appropriate level of research programs to address those limitations.”⁶⁸

Admiral Charles Beers, the man who was the catalyst for the Sewell report, recalls being pleased with it, characterizing it as a “good report,” which led to NEST becoming “a lot more realistic” in its planning and exercises and “a lot more professional.”⁶⁹

Some of the history of Mirage Gold, Beers’s criticism, the Sewell report, and the response of NEST management became the subject of hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, whose members included Ohio’s John Glenn and Georgia’s Sam Nunn, two senators for whom proliferation and nuclear terrorism were priority issues. The hearings began on the last day of October 1995, continued the next day, and concluded with four days of testimony the following March, with a substantial portion of the hearings on March 27 focusing on NEST and Mirage Gold.

The news reported by congressional investigators undoubtedly helped alleviate the bad feelings that followed the Beers memo. A staff statement presented to the committee reported “that NEST is clearly a national asset which could not be duplicated by other organizations because of the unique scientific capabilities and field operational experience of the nuclear weapons laboratories that directly support it with volunteers and [research and development].” John F. Sopko, the deputy chief counsel to the Democratic minority, testified that since Mirage Gold, NEST had “successfully completed its first truly no-notice full-field exercise overseas,” that “that had never been done before,” and that NEST had “deployed all of its resources within established timelines”—apparent references to an exercise held in Jordan. That was a truer test, Beers recalls, than previous ones that entailed picking up NEST members and “flying them around the West” before landing at the U.S. exercise site.⁷⁰

At the same hearings, Victor H. Reis, from the Energy Department, explained the change in philosophy, initiated at the department’s headquarters. Reis told the senators that “NEST was originally designed to respond to incidents of nuclear extortion in support of the FBI” and that “the extortion scenarios allowed planning and operations to be conducted over a period of several days because the intelligence and law enforcement communities believed that the extortionist would allow time for negotiations.”⁷¹

In addition, “the idea that a nuclear device would fall into the hands of terrorists and be detonated without notice” was not believed to be credible. As a result, “NEST capabilities were developed and based on large-scale deployments” and the “process was slow but very thorough.” According to Reis, the “NEST organization continued to believe that time was on their side when responding to nuclear threats,” although it is clear from the Sewell report and Reis’s testimony that the officials in Washington responsible for oversight of NEST did not.⁷²

One problem with the view of the NEST organization, Reis continued, was that it led to “an exercise program with large-scale deployments of personnel and equipment,” exercises that were “cost prohibitive and digressed from field exercises with challenging scenarios to grand scale training.” He was, however, “pleased to report that things have changed for the better.” Reis explained that in early 1992, as a result of intelligence estimates, Department of Energy officials reevaluated the nuclear incident scenarios that guided NEST planning and exercises, and decided to place more emphasis on scenarios involving nuclear terrorism. Since “we now know that terrorists are willing and able to use large explosive devices . . . without warning,” it was necessary to “assume that nuclear terrorist devices could be placed and detonated without warning.”⁷³

Therefore, according to Reis, NEST teams were practicing using a “wide variety of deployment scenarios from table top exercises to long range deployments to remote locations” in conjunction with the FBI and State and Defense departments. In addition, they conducted frequent, “smaller and more focused” terrorism-related exercises than in the past. The emphasis was on “rapid and customized deployment to a wide range of nuclear threats.”⁷⁴

NEST also had received praise a few months before the congressional hearings, from a representative of the Energy Department’s inspector general. Lawrence R. Ackerly, regional manager of the department’s Western Regional Audit Office, reported the findings of his audit of NEST and commented that in response to the Sewell report, NEST program management formed a strategic realignment committee and instructed it to begin addressing the report’s recommendations.⁷⁵

But the praise directed toward NEST and the Nevada Operations Office could not change the fact, illustrated by the Beers memo and Reis’s testimony, that the key officials involved in supervising and providing direction to NEST’s operations were now at Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., not at the Nevada Operations Office in Las Vegas. In particular, a former health physicist with Lawrence Livermore now held the reins to the nation’s nuclear emergency response team.

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*In NEST exercises, a “nuclear device” might actually consist of several devices, for safety purposes (so that radioactive material and explosives are not included in the same device) and to facilitate the participation of different groups involved in the disablement effort. William Chambers, e-mail, February 26, 2008.

*This view was not shared by military explosive ordnance personnel. An after-action report prepared for the commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command, stated that “DOE [Department of Energy] and DOD [Department of Defense] organizations are tasked with developing estimates of the radiation dose from both dispersal and nuclear detonation. These estimates are important for evacuation decisions and estimates for casualty predictions. Estimates for fallout, dispersal, and initial radiation were provided by NEST and FRMAC [Federal Radiation Monitoring and Assessment Center]. During this exercise, operationally significant differences in fallout, dispersal, and initial radiation were noted. These differences significantly affected both evacuation decisions and casualty prediction estimates. Some of these differences were resolvable and some were not. It is important that the hazard predictions presented to decision makers present a consistent clear picture,” and went on to recommend formation of a Joint Radiological Hazard Assessment Cell. See Maj. Gen. Joseph W. Kineer, Deputy Commanding General, Fifth U.S. Army, Memorandum for: Commanding General, FORSCOM, Subject: Exercise MirageGold After Action Report, November 15, 1994.

*One additional problem, according to a Mirage Gold participant, was that the FBI agents who were serving as drivers for NEST search personnel would respond to fictional reports of gunfire (as part of the exercise) rather than continue the search effort. Telephone interview with Robert Kelley, November 20, 2007.