University of California and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory officials met with their counterparts at the Department of Energy in early May to try to avoid a repeat of the embarrassment surrounding the near-appointment of physicist Ray Juzaitis as LLNL’s new director. Juzaitis, the associate director for weapons physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was only 30 minutes away from being named as the new director of LLNL on 26 April, when a phone call from DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham’s office put the announcement on hold.
Abraham had received word, apparently through the efforts of Bill Wattenburg, a scientist who has a radio talk show on KGO Radio in San Francisco, that Juzaitis had been one of Wen Ho Lee’s supervisors at Los Alamos. Lee, who was accused of security violations in 1999, worked in the division headed by Juzaitis. Several days after the Lee connection came to light, Juzaitis withdrew...
