The former highest-ranking intelligence officer in the Energy Department says you can blame the Clinton administration’s pervasive inattention to security throughout government leading to last month’s terrorist attacks.

Further, says Notra Trulock in an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, some Clinton appointees had a blame-America-first attitude. This in turn bolstered the belief in some government quarters that perhaps the world would be better off if the U.S. did share its nuclear secrets with China and other nations that hated us.

"It was a failure across the board,” says the man who blew the whistle on the Chinagate scandal, not just in intelligence (that much is all too obvious), but also "in law enforcement. It was a failure in imagination” and ultimately a failure of policy.

"I put it at the feet of the Clinton administration for the complacency they displayed on any threat to American security, not just terrorism, but anything that put in jeopardy their specious arms control and foreign policy objectives was really minimized and downplayed and dismissed as ‘a worst-case scenario,’” a phrase of ridicule that Trulock heard over and over again as he tried to warn the Clinton appointees in the department of the loose or almost non-existent security procedures.

Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has been taking remedial measures, though it took the new White House some time to begin to undo the damage.

The vulnerability to our nuclear secrets was "so difficult to close.” And this did not apply only to Trulock’s area of jurisdiction.

"My counterpart in the physical part of the Department of Energy encountered the same kinds of resistance and a will to disbelieve that there could be any serious threat to the nation’s laboratories or the material that they store out there," at Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico.

The same lackadaisical attitude prevailed in the Commerce and Defense departments during the Clinton years.

Aiding the Russians
The mantra that was heard all through that administration was: "After all, the Cold War was over, and we were in kind of a new era of globalization.” Commercial diplomacy, as it was called, replaced national security as any kind of priority. This was the kind of culture that allowed former Soviet, now Russian military officers to be issued badges and allowed to wander around the Pentagon unescorted.

This includes the unsolved case of the listening devices that were installed on the seventh floor of the State Department in a conference room just down the hall from the secretary of state’s office.

Everywhere in government where national security was a factor "felt the deadening hand of the Clinton administration,” Trulock says.

This also applies to the Transportation Department. And it is especially lax at the Federal Aviation Administration, which is supposed to protect airline and airport security.

Trulock recalls that Federico Pena had been DOT secretary before moving over to the Energy Department. This was the kind of blasé attitude "during the Air Florida debacle” that would later cause airport security to allow four airliners to be hijacked almost simultaneously. That same shrug-of-the-shoulders approach was thus transferred to the area of government supposedly protecting nuclear secrets. It was there that Trulock’s warnings were ignored or ridiculed.

So in trying to fathom the mentality behind this seemingly deliberate breaking down of security barriers, does one dare let the word "treason” escape his lips? Can anyone really be that naïve?

The Blame-America-First Left
Here is where Notra Trulock pinpoints "a certain ambivalence about American power” amongst people "who cut their teeth on the notions that America was to blame for much of what had happened in the last 30 or 40 or 50 years in the world.”

Time and time again, "we would see people in charge of the laboratories who were just hostile” to the notion that any scientist from China, Russia or North Korea would ever attempt to steal any of our secrets. Indeed some officials at energy felt "it might be a good thing if the Chinese sort of knew our secrets and how to build nuclear weapons. The world might be a better place."

This attitude is eerily familiar to those who recall that some nuclear scientists during and immediate after World War II also had this exact same philosophy. Some of them, such as Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, did pass secrets to the Soviet Union. In those days, that sort of action was plainly labeled treason, which is why Oppenheimer ultimately lost his security clearance. But in those days, there was a "consciousness of national security” that was missing in the Clinton era.

Hostility to security was coupled with a frivolity where "meetings would start late, there would be no agenda, and meetings would go on forever” which in itself can be attributed to bureaucratic inertia. But Trulock sees it as symptomatic of "a lack of seriousness” on security or counterintelligence.

Trulock does not want to be critical of the Bush administration. "I support the president, and I voted for him, but they were slow in addressing the legacy of the Clinton administration.”

For one thing, there are just "way too many holdovers. Too many Clintonites around,” in Trulock’s view.

Recently NewsMax.com reported on intelligence experts who called for the resignations of Jane Garvey at the FAA and George Tenet at the CIA. "But the tragedy of September 11 has certainly shaken people and made them wake up.”