No. 2 Official At Los Alamos Resigns

By CBS News Capitol Hill correspondent Sharyl Attkisson

The resignation of John Mitchell, who had been Deputy Director at the Laboratory for less than a year, was quietly announced on internal Lab e-mails last week, the same day the CBS Early Show aired an exclusive report about how easy it was for a young lab worker to walk out with classified documents.

Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark said, however, that "John Mitchell's retirement has absolutely no connection to any security issues at the Laboratory."

In announcing his resignation, Mitchell told co-workers he wanted to concentrate on the next phase of his life. Watchdogs in Congress have been outraged at the continuing series of security breaches and management problems at Los Alamos, despite promises that things would be fixed.

Twenty-two-year-old Jessica Quintana, a former weapons data archivist at Los Alamos, has been under FBI investigation since October when police found the documents by accident in her trailer home while conducting a drug raid on her roommate. Authorities also found several portable storage devices called "thumb drives" containing classified documents.

Sources say Quintana had a top secret security clearance that allowed her access to such sensitive information as how to deactivate the locks on nuclear weapons. She was tasked with archiving data from decades of U.S. underground nuclear weapons tests. Quintana walked out of the lab unchecked last August with the documents and thumb drives in her backpack.

Today, Representative Ed Markey of the House Energy and Commerce Committee told CBS News: "No matter how many times you rearrange, re-design, retire or replace the deck chairs, Los Alamos is still the Titanic. Superficial attempts to demonstrate that there is any accountability at the lab will yield no useful results until the systemic and long-standing security failures associated with both management and lab culture are fixed."