WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors on Thursday
accused a low-level contract worker at the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory — birthplace of the
nuclear bomb — with stealing highly classified
information about how to make enriched uranium, a
key ingredient in nuclear weapons.
The suspect, identified as Roy Lynn Oakley, age
67, was allegedly caught trying to sell it to
someone he thought was representing another
country, someone who turned out to be an
undercover FBI agent. Federal officials will not
say which country the agent was pretending to represent.
Federal officials told NBC News that Oakley
worked as a contract employee at East Tennessee
Technology Park, located on the Oak Ridge reservation.
He worked at a site that is conducting clean-up
on Cold War items that are being decomissioned.
Sources reportedly said money, and not ideology, was the motive for the theft.
An official announcement about the sting was expected later in the day.
The alleged security breach was discovered before
it could do any damage, officials said. But the
incident also exposed another serious security
breach at the national laboratories.
Last fall, for example, a large cache of
classified documents from Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico was discovered when
police, looking for drugs, conducted a search of a mobile home.
The Oak Ridge National lab, located in eastern
Tennessee, near Knoxville, was established in 1943.
The lab was part of the governmentÂ’s secret
Manhattan Project, which was designed to build
the first atomic bomb. It is the Energy
DepartmentÂ’s largest science and energy laboratory.
Oakley is expected to be arraigned in federal court in Knoxville on Thursday.
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:22 CST