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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
An FBI agent alleges that the government hasn't come clean about the dumping of radioactive waste at a closed Colorado weapons plant -- and now the site is being turned into a park.
Jan 22, 2005 | The plotline sounds as absurd as a made-for-TV movie: An FBI agent exposes deadly contamination at an old nuclear-weapons plant, but the federal government conceals the findings. Years later, Congress votes to convert the tract into a wildlife refuge and open it to school field trips and public recreation. The site becomes a poster child for eco-friendly nuclear-waste disposal -- with a dangerous radioactive secret lurking below the surface.
Fact, of course, can be stranger than fiction -- even bad Sunday-night-on-CBS fiction -- and former FBI agent Jon Lipsky is one of several insiders who say this scenario is unfolding right beneath Uncle Sam's nose.
In 1989, Lipsky led an FBI raid on the Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant in Colorado after receiving reports that the plant posed a huge public-health threat. His raid, which took place over 18 days and involved more than 100 FBI and EPA officials, gave way to a nearly three-year criminal investigation into widespread radioactive contamination of the air, water and soil at the 6,240-acre site and the surrounding suburbs of nearby Denver.
The raid prompted the Department of Justice to assemble a special grand jury to investigate the evidence against U.S. government officials and Rockwell International, the private defense contractor that managed Rocky Flats from 1975 to 1989 on behalf of the Department of Energy. Rockwell pleaded guilty to certain counts of negligence and paid a fine, but never fessed up to the full extent of the crimes Lipsky says he witnessed. The case was settled with a plea bargain agreement, and the Department of Justice sealed the contamination evidence from the public.
Next month, Lipsky will be party to a lawsuit against the DOJ, along with Wes McKinley, the foreman of the Rocky Flats grand jury, and Jacque Brever, a former chemical operator at the plant who suffers from radiation exposure, in an effort to unseal the documents.
The plaintiffs are concerned, in particular, about a 2001 congressional decision to turn Rocky Flats into a wildlife refuge, which may have as many as 16 miles of trails for hiking and horseback riding. On Dec. 31, Lipsky retired early from the FBI to protest the agency's orders that he keep mum about the Rocky Flats controversy. "I left so I could help expose the truth," he told Muckraker. "Without the truth there can be no real understanding of the extent of this environmental crime, and there can be no thorough cleanup."
Lipsky describes the DOE's ongoing cleanup effort at the nuke site, scheduled to be completed in 2006, as "woefully inadequate -- a farce." As for the decision to make Rocky Flats a tourist destination, he says, "There is nothing safe or sane about it."
Before the vote on the Rocky Flats designation, Lipsky wrote an open letter to Congress putting his objections in no uncertain terms: "I am an FBI agent. My superiors have ordered me to lie about a criminal investigation I headed in 1989. The U.S. Justice Department covered up the truth ... I have refused to follow the orders ... Some dangerous decisions are now being made based on that government cover-up."
