The following are excerpts from the testimony of Notra Trulock before the Senate Armed Services Committee which met April 12, 1999 To continue to receive testimony on alleged Chinese espionage at Department of Energy laboratories.

"From May 1994 to May 1998, I was the director of intelligence and the senior intelligence officer of the Department of Energy. After February of 1995 until April of 1998, I was also responsible for counterintelligence. In both of these jobs, I was assisted by two highly-respected CIA professional officers...

By the spring of 1996, we were repeatedly warning about continuing targeting efforts by the Chinese against our national laboratories. Moreover, by early 1997 we had identified and warned about specific collection targets at both Los Alamos and Livermore national laboratories. I must tell you that our warnings were ignored, they were minimized and occasionally even ridiculed, especially by laboratory officials.

Twice in 1997, the director of the FBI urged DOE senior officials, including Secretary Pena and Deputy Secretary Moler, that FBI investigations should not prevent DOE from taking immediate action to protect sensitive information at the laboratories. And yet for another 14 months after these warnings, these suspects continued to retain their clearances and accesses. Mr. Chairman, I am not sure that we will ever know how much damage has been done to U.S. national security as a result of this inaction.

I would [also] note that over the four years, we briefed over 50 senior officials on the findings and judgments of our work...We briefed the National Security Council, Mr. Berger, twice; we briefed other members of the National Security Council. We briefed the secretary of Defense and his staffs. We briefed CIA, Director Tenet, before him Director Deutch; director FBI, the attorney general, the secretary of State. I think we briefed all of the relevant officials within the national security community....

Our conclusions were never challenged; our officials were satisfied that our assessments and analysis was comprehensive and had been thoroughly vetted...[Our] assessments came under attack only after we provided testimony to the House Cox-Dicks panel in fall of 1998.

I must also tell you that beginning in early 1997, senior DOE officials, including my direct supervisor, urged me to cover up and bury this case. For months these officials refused to authorize intelligence to brief the new secretary, Secretary Pena, of an ongoing espionage investigation at one of his national laboratories. These officials argued that this case was of historical interest only and not relevant to the contemporary missions and objectives of the national laboratories. They argued further that these inquiries would harm the credibility of the national laboratories...

As a consequence, it appears to us that the combined effect of these actions has been to suppress and withhold intelligence potentially important not only to the department but to also to the administration and U.S. national security. We repeatedly asked ourselves in the process of this: How could this happen? Aren't there safeguards to protect against such flagrant abuses? And in fact, intelligence activities at the department are governed by executive orders, by presidential decisions, and by congressional authorizations. And more specifically, we are governed by a set of intelligence procedures that were approved by the attorney general in 1992. Among these mandates is the role of the departmental inspector general. Executive orders mandate any persons involved in intelligence activities at the department to report what is known as "questionable activities," that is, any activity that may violate any law, procedure, policy, directives, or regulations. The inspector general, in turn, is to then investigate these questionable activities.

I'll tell you that beginning in August of 1997, we reported a steady pattern of interference, intervention, and suppression of intelligence and counterintelligence issues, as well as the potential consequences. A second, more specific report was submitted in November of 1997, but no action was taken by the inspector general at that time. Three days after I made a third report to the inspector general, in May of 1998, I was removed from my position as director of intelligence at the Department of Energy...

Not surprisingly, when all else fails, the Department resorted to a campaign of shoot-the-messenger. Even though the executive order expressly mandates the Department to ensure that no adverse action will be taken against any employee for reporting such questionable activities, in fact in the middle of 1997 we witnessed the beginning of a pattern of harassment, intimidation and retaliation that has continued over the next two years.

Now, let me wrap up with the following observations: First of all, based on my 25 years of experience in intelligence, I must tell you that I think the conduct of effective, non-politicized intelligence at the Department of Energy and the Laboratories must now be considered questionable. This is particularly so since the position of the director of intelligence is now to be occupied by a current, relatively junior, National Security Council official. I believe this is really a shame, because I also believe that the National Laboratories are the single best source of technical intelligence analysis on nonproliferation, nuclear deterrence and a variety of other related topics.

Secondly, I am concerned that this episode does indeed raise questions about the credibility of the laboratories. Our experience throughout has been that the laboratories prevaricate, they respond with vague and evasive answers and they occasionally lie in response to our legitimate inquiries. DOE officials responsible for managing the laboratories' track record has been as bad, if not worse. In my view as a citizen, the implications of this are particularly disturbing because ultimately the armed services, the Defense Department, the administration, this committee and the Congress as a whole must rely on the credibility of the labs...And finally, I think it is legitimate to question the long-term effectiveness of various counterintelligence reforms and measures that [current officials are] attempting to implement. I must note that many of the very people at both the labs and DOE headquarters who resisted, minimized, delayed and ultimately blocked our efforts to reform are actually now in charge of implementing the fixes. Therefore, I think we must be skeptical that the labs will prove themselves over time to be capable of effective self-policing."