WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI has launched a preliminary investigation to determine if Notra Trulock, a former Energy Department intelligence chief, included classified information in a yet to be published manuscript.
Trulock, who helped sound alarms in 1995 about possible espionage at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, has said the Clinton administration was slow to react to allegations of nuclear spying.
After an Energy Department inspector general's report last August that he called a "whitewash," Trulock resigned from the department. He said key political appointees of President Clinton blocked him from briefing Congress about allegations of espionage.
Trulock was acting deputy director of the Energy Department's Office of Intelligence when he resigned. He had been demoted to that position in 1998 after serving as the department's intelligence director for four years.
Manuscript rejected
Sources tell CNN the CIA received a copy of a manuscript Trulock wanted to have published at the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. The agency declined to publish the document, and some CIA officials and other government agencies expressed concern it might contain classified information.
The matter was referred to the FBI, which has asked the Energy Department to help determine if any of the information contained in the manuscript is in fact classified.
The FBI's preliminary probe has a number of goals:
• Determine whether the document did contain classified information.
• See where else Trulock may have sent the manuscript.
• Find out what materials, documents or computer files the information was based on.
Investigators get computer drive
A critical question investigators want answered: Did Trulock take any classified information with him when he retired from the Energy Department?
To that end, the FBI recently talked with an associate of Trulock who provided a computer hard drive Trulock had used in the past.
Trulock's allegations touched off a federal investigation centering on a Chinese-American physicist at Los Alamos, Wen Ho Lee, whom Trulock identified as the prime espionage suspect.
Lee was fired from the Los Alamos lab in March 1999. He never has been charged with espionage, but he has been jailed without bond since December on 59 counts of illegally copying data on nuclear weapons design. He pleaded not guilty and faces trial in November.
In court papers made available earlier this month, U.S. prosecutors acknowledged that Lee may have been job hunting rather than spying when he allegedly copied the nuclear secrets.
The filing by federal prosecutors said that in 1993 around the time he allegedly began downloading nuclear secrets from computers at Los Alamos, Lee addressed letters seeking employment in Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan.
The filing also reiterated previous government assertions that Lee "made contact" with representatives of China's Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, which is involved in the design of nuclear weapons.
CNN Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas and Reuters contributed to this report.
![[CNN Money]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/images/main/fn.logo.newsnet.gif){kind=logo}
![[SI.com]](http://i.cnn.net/cnn/images/main/si.logo.gif){kind=logo}
(
