Nuclear lab (Illustration)
Photo: AFP
US: How easy is it to leak documents from top secret facility?
In drug-raid on trailer home of Jessica Quintana, who works at Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in Texas, agents stumble upon extremely sensitive documents taken from facility
WASHINGTON – A severe case of a leak of classified information from one of the most top-secret facilities in the world was revealed this week in the United States. When police raided the trailer home of Jessica Quintana, a worker at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in Texas, in search of her drug-dealer boyfriend, they stumble upon extremely sensitive documents which Quintana had taken from the facility.
According to the expose on the CBS television network, the documents confiscated from 22-year-old Quintana’s home describe how to neutralize the locks of nuclear weapons, as well as data regarding strategic weapons design. It was further reported that the young woman, who worked in three safes in the facility, had “Sigma 15 Q” security clearance, which gave her access to additional data on subterranean nuclear trials in Los Alamos.
Quintana has not yet been arrested, and at this stage there are no charges against her. According to her lawyer, she took the documents to work on at home and forgot to return them.
At this stage there is no specific proof suggesting that the documents were sold or transferred to outside elements, but the US administration is not certain that the documents did not end up in foreign hands. The investigation at the moment is focusing on three USB thumb-drives storing 408 documents with intelligence and nuclear weaponry information and a 228 page document taken from the laboratory.
A federal source expressed concern that stolen information could reveal to terrorists "all they need to know" to operate nuclear weapons, and defined this possibility as “devastating”.
Meanwhile, security sources in England expressed concern that the documents Quintana took from Los Alamos may have included information on their Trident missiles, as trials and experiments on the Trident are carried out at the Texas lab.
Officials at the Los Alamos facility said that after a thorough and comprehensive check, they reached the conclusion that "the majority of the material was classified at the lowest levels and was twenty to thirty years old."
"None of the documents in question were classified Top Secret," read a statement released by the lab. "None of the materials included any of the most sensitive nuclear weapons information."
