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THE GUARDS WON'T shoot you. But you may die laughing when you hear the lame excuses for why it's so easy to wander around Los Alamos National Laboratory.
After I took a little trip in late February to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and wrote about how easy it was to get past security there, lab and Energy Department officials came up with some amazing stories: Some of Los Alamos's security barriers were put up by local farmers. At least one "highly sensitive" area really wasn't that big a deal. The security guards couldn't afford to have guns. Or they left them in their cars. Or they forgot them on a training mission.
For months, I had heard unnerving allegations of corruption and mismanagement at the lab. Particularly icky were the accusations that Los Alamos's security procedures seemed to be lifted straight out of a Hogan's Heroes script.
"General Motors guards the spark plugs at their factories better," said Steven Doran, one of a pair of ex-cops who were brought into Los Alamos to uncover fraud-and then fired when they did their jobs too well.
Security is particularly lax near the "alien morgue." According to local legend, Los Alamos's Technical Area 33 is where the government has long kept the corpses from a 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico.
Los Alamos officials say only that "TA-33" is a "former explosives testing area." In recent congressional testimony, lab lawyer Frank Dickson called TA-33 a "highly sensitive and secure location."
Los Alamos spokesperson Nancy Ambrosiano assured me that this was one of several areas at the lab that would be close to impossible for an...