Now, transplant those nightmare scenarios to Denver, and put yourself in the mind of Ed McCallum. The year is 1997. McCallum is the Department of Energy's top professional with hands-on responsibility for protecting the nation's vast stores of nuclear weapons-grade materials from theft or sabotage. McCallum has been reviewing the security performance at Rocky Flats, the nuclear site 17 miles northwest of Denver, and he sees the catastrophe of the century waiting to happen, on his watch.

"The workers at that plant, and the citizens of Colorado, are at extremely high risk" of a terrorist assault that could unleash "a little mushroom-shaped cloud" over Denver, McCallum confided in a phone call to a colleague that May. Such a blast would not only kill Denver's million-plus inhabitants, it would claim tens of millions of additional lives as its radioactive plume blew across the Midwest and on to the East Coast.

Not long after that phone call, Mark Graf, a security expert at Rocky Flats, agreed at McCallum's urging to blow the whistle on security lapses at the site. Now, in an ongoing legal wrangle about his whistle-blowing with his employer, Wackenhut Services, the company in charge of security at Rocky Flats, Graf and his attorneys have released a tape recording of the phone call in which Ed McCallum voiced his fears about security at Rocky Flats. It provides a disturbing window on the DOE's own worries about Rocky Flats.

The phone call was between McCallum and Jeff Peters, the former director of Protective Force Operations at Rocky Flats. As the man formerly in charge of the entire uniformed protective force on site, Peters had extensive firsthand knowledge of security deficiencies at Rocky Flats; indeed, he had butted heads about them for years with his bosses at Wackenhut before finally blowing the whistle to federal authorities himself and resigning under duress in 1996.

McCallum telephoned Peters because he wanted Peters' help bringing the problems at Rocky Flats into the open before tragedy struck. McCallum, as the director of DOE's Office of Safeguards and Security, had recently rated security at Rocky Flats as "unsatisfactory" in his confidential 1996 annual report to the president. (The DOE's security rating system has but three categories: satisfactory, marginal and unsatisfactory.)

In their phone call, which Peters taped, McCallum said he wanted Peters and Graf to start talking to the news media about the problems at the site. McCallum had been trying to warn superiors in the Clinton administration about the impending danger at Rocky Flats but with little success. If the media got interested in the story, though, the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington would have to do something.

Peters shared McCallum's concerns, and the two men went on to discuss some specific problems at Rocky Flats. Recently conducted internal tests had shown that the facility was highly susceptible to terrorist attack. In the tests, the "bad guys" had succeeded 100 percent of the time in entering the complex and gaining access to the approximately 20 tons of nuclear weapons-grade materials stored inside. (It takes only a softball-sized chunk of plutonium to create an explosion equivalent to three or four Hiroshima blasts.)

Once inside of Rocky Flats, McCallum observed, terrorists would only need to slap some high explosives on the nuclear materials, light a fuse and voilą: "a little mushroom-shaped cloud" would soon be rising over Denver and heading across the United States. Of course, the terrorists could also steal the nuclear materials and detonate them elsewhere. The bad guys had succeeded 80 percent of the time with that scenario in the recent tests.

McCallum said he could not understand why people living near Rocky Flats had not "gone absolutely wacko" about the danger. Peters replied, "It's only because they don't know ... they're being fed a line of shit the whole time."

Indeed, the American people almost never hear such brutal candor from their public servants; government officials only talk this honestly among themselves (and rarely even then). McCallum plainly never intended his comments to reach the public's ears. In a brief conversation with Salon News, McCallum said, "I've been officially told by my agency [DOE] that I'm not allowed to comment." He did say, however, that he had not known that Peters was recording their May 1997 phone call, and that he considers the release of the tapes, and indeed the taping itself, illegal, though he does not disagree with the larger point Peters and Graf are making with the tapes. (Peters vigorously disputed that McCallum did not know about the taping, the legality of which was affirmed in advance, according to Peters, by both the FBI and the DOE's Office of General Counsel.)

In any case, the tapes became the smoking gun of a legal hearing just concluded in Denver that may determine whether the American public ever learns the full truth about Rocky Flats. The hearing, which has gone uncovered by the mainstream media, pits Mark Graf against his employer, Wackenhut Services.

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