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Sunday Morning News

FBI Examines Hard Drives and Looks For Clues at Los Alamos

Aired June 18, 2000 - 9:00 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: We begin in Los Alamos. The recovered computer hard drives at the nuclear weapons labs there are not a blueprint for building a bomb, but they do contain sensitive nuclear secrets all the same. Among other things, the computer files detail how to dismantle a warhead in the event of an accident and provide other critical weapons data that the U.S. government would not want to fall into the wrong hands.

That is precisely the issue the FBI's computer experts are trying to determine now as they examine the hard drives.

CNN's Bob Franken joins us from Los Alamos with the latest on the investigation -- Bob.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And, Kyra, the facility in back of me right now is crawling with FBI agents. They've swooped down, they are checking everywhere they can, fingerprinting, interrogating, giving lie detector tests, we're told, to find out if, in fact, it's even possible that they had been overlooked, the hard drives have been overlooked and had been for about a month behind a copying machine where nobody had noticed them.

Nobody is believing that, of course. We're going to find out today, we expect, whether, in fact, these are the original hard drives, the one that contained such vital national security information. We're also hopefully going to get some indication from the FBI whether, in fact, they had been there the whole time.

Now, officials say that that area had been twice thoroughly searched. They're extremely skeptical, including the head of the Los Alamos lab.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If these are validated by the FBI to be the actual hard drives that are missing, then it's clear that they have been in someone's possession for the entire time, and they were trying to find a way to get them back to the laboratory and to the FBI so that perhaps this would lessen the heat on them, I would presume.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FRANKEN: And of course none of this answers the question that is resonating and causing an uproar in Washington and elsewhere, which is, how could these possibly have disappeared in the first place? -- Kyra.

PHILLIPS: Bob, why does the weapons lab seem to have all these security breaches now?

FRANKEN: Well, it's interesting. I was talking to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright the other day, and she made the point that one of the things that's gone on is, with the end of the cold war, some people, some, have gotten a bit more blase. They don't believe that there are people out there who in fact want U.S. secrets, which, of course, we're finding out is not the case.

There was a spy case this week, and we found out that somebody who was accused of spying during the Cold War in fact still was expecting a relationship with his handlers that used to be with the KGB.

PHILLIPS: Bob Franken, live from Los Alamos, thank you.

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