In June 1999 a special investigative panel of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) issued a report documenting the growing threat of espionage at Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories and the inadequacy of security measures designed to protect America’s weapons-related research. According to the report, the Department of Energy “has advanced scientific and technological progress, but at the cost of an abominable record of security with deeply troubling threats to American national security.” The DOE was faced with a problem—how to tighten security without lowering the quality of research that depends on scientists from other nations.

In his June 22, 1999, testimony before the PFIAB, DOE Secretary Bill Richardson maintained:

A bureaucratic “Berlin Wall” between the weapons labs and the science labs would hamper the joint research they perform and weaken the...