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Citing a "total breakdown in the system," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson recommended disciplinary action Thursday against a senior official and two other employees at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for failing to properly investigate allegations of Chinese espionage at the New Mexico facility. Richardson declined to identify the three.

How did they get in? That is the troubling question generated by revelations that foreign nationals successfully carried out terrorist attacks in the United States. Answers may be a while in coming. But calls are already emerging to tighten a system that critics say has two major failings: inadequate screening of visa-seekers and no permanent tracking of foreign visitors, many of whom remain illegally after their visas expire.

A federal investigation into suspected nuclear espionage by the Chinese has been riddled with incompetence, poor judgment and lackadaisical agents, according to a blistering, bipartisan report released Thursday that offers the most comprehensive account of the inquiry to date. New details in the Senate report underscore the difficulty federal prosecutors could face in bringing espionage charges against fired Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee or anyone else.

Allegations that an FBI agent had spied for the Russians prompted the Justice Department on Tuesday to order an investigation of FBI counterespionage procedures. But experts said the study panel will face a daunting challenge. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said he had asked William H. Webster, former head of the FBI and the CIA, to undertake a "comprehensive independent review of FBI procedures" used to prevent other nations from gathering U.S. secrets. Former U.S.

A former Energy Department intelligence official publicly denied Sunday that he singled out Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Wen Ho Lee as a possible spy for China because of Lee's ethnicity, also charging that a Clinton administration partisan blocked him from giving information about the case to Congress.

Responding to allegations of espionage at U.S. nuclear weapon labs, the Senate voted Wednesday to create an agency responsible for nuclear weapon development and security that would largely bypass the Energy Department bureaucracy. The vote was 96 to 1 on an amendment to a bill reauthorizing government intelligence programs. The intelligence legislation then passed on a unanimous voice vote.

The U.S. Department of Energy unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its security programs Tuesday amid mounting charges in Congress that it has ignored Chinese espionage and other major weaknesses at the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories for years.

Allegations that an FBI agent had spied for the Russians prompted the Justice Department on Tuesday to order an investigation of FBI counterespionage procedures. But experts said the study panel will face a daunting challenge. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said he had asked William H. Webster, former head of the FBI and the CIA, to undertake a "comprehensive independent review of FBI procedures" used to prevent other nations from gathering U.S. secrets. Former U.S.

Attorneys for Wen Ho Lee have made a spirited last-ditch effort to head off indictment of the fired nuclear weapon scientist, arguing in a confidential report to the Department of Justice and in recent private meetings with prosecutors that Lee "used considerable care" to protect the security of secret nuclear codes when he transferred data to an unclassified computer system.

A leading U.S. expert on biological warfare walked through security at the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday carrying 7 grams of powdered anthrax in a small plastic bottle, proceeding directly to a hearing about biological terrorism before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and displaying his deadly sample. The expert, William C.

* George Trofimoff, a retired Army Reserve colonel, was arrested in Florida and charged last year with spying for the former Soviet Union and Russia for 25 years. He is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage. A civilian worker in Army intelligence in Germany, he allegedly was recruited into the KGB in 1969. He is accused of photographing U.S. documents and passed the film to KGB agents, and was later recruited into the KGB.

With bogus police badges in hand, the infiltrators set to work. From one guarded federal facility to the next, the undercover agents wandered hallways almost at will, fooling guards and making their way near the offices of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and other senior officials. "We're friends of Janet's from Miami. We just wanted to say hello," an agent posing as a plainclothes police officer told a secretary outside Reno's door.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ordered a shake-up in the way her department protects national secrets Monday following the disappearance of a laptop computer loaded with classified information from a supposedly secure conference room. "Like several other recent serious lapses in security, this is inexcusable and intolerable," Albright said of the loss of the computer, which contained classified information about weapons proliferation and other matters.

A college student in Boston broke into military and government computers, gained control of a NASA system and interrupted business at an Internet service provider in a nationwide hacking outburst, federal prosecutors alleged. Ikenna Iffih, 28, a student at Northeastern University, was charged with three counts related to hacking that carry up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Prosecutors said there was no disruption to the nation's defenses and no meddling with satellite control.

The Cold War may be dead and gone, but old-time espionage is alive and well. That's the lesson of a startling series of spy-vs.-spy capers in the last week. The barrage of bizarre revelations about low-rent tradecraft and high-tech skulduggery offered a rare peek into the shadowy world of special ops and secret agents. Indeed, the clock itself seemed to have turned back more than a decade. And that's just fine with America's most senior spooks.

Stunned FBI agents and U.S. diplomatic security officers scrambled Thursday to determine how--and when--a Russian spy secretly planted a sophisticated eavesdropping device inside a State Department conference room used by high-level officials and whether national security was put in jeopardy as a result. U.S.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson accused Wen Ho Lee, a former government scientist suspected of giving China details about America's nuclear arsenal, of trying to use the "race card" to defend his actions. He also said Lee's claim that top-secret weapons code work is often done on unclassified computers was "pure bunk." Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Taiwan, was fired from his top-secret job at the weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M.

In an unusual dispute between two of President Clinton's key appointees, the chairman of an influential White House intelligence panel on Tuesday sharply criticized Energy Secretary Bill Richardson for appearing to resist fundamental reform of his troubled department, despite an ongoing espionage scandal. It "boggles my mind," former Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) said in an interview, that Richardson continues to publicly claim the nation's nuclear weapons secrets are now safe.

Distant forests dominate the view from the eighth-floor director's suite at the National Security Agency, America's largest intelligence gathering operation. But the talk inside is of a more troubling horizon: cyberspace. "Think of it as a physical domain, like land, sea and air," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden in his first interview since taking the NSA's helm in May. "Now think of America conducting operations in that new domain." These days, many in the U.S.

In what appears to be the most extensive cyber-attack ever aimed at the U.S. government, hackers apparently working from Russia have systematically broken into Defense Department computers for more than a year and plundered vast amounts of sensitive information, U.S. officials said Wednesday.