Whistle-Blower Renews Harassment Charges : Safety: A third worker at the Hanford nuclear reservation makes allegations. Company says charges are preposterous.

RICHLAND, Wash. —  From the beginning, Paula Nathaniel’s story sounded odd, a combination of Karen Silkwood and James Bond.

It all started, she said, when she complained of safety problems at the Hanford nuclear reservation, where she worked. Someone tapped her telephone. Her home was broken into. She was followed by an unmarked car.

Preposterous, said officials of Westinghouse Hanford Co., operator of the nuclear weapons plant. The stories were fabricated--perhaps symptoms of paranoia, they said. And a U.S. Labor Department judge agreed, recommending that her complaints against Westinghouse be dismissed.

But Nathaniel persists--as do others who make seemingly outlandish accusations against this and other plants. And they are supported by a group of lawyers who defend these allegations, and insist that the deck is stacked against whistle-blowers.

“The average person doesn’t believe the government would engage in that kind of surveillance activity,” said Elaine Dodge, an attorney for the Government Accountability Project, a law firm that provides free services in whistle-blower cases. “It’s a huge burden to get over people’s biases.”

Hanford was created during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, and for four decades made much of the plutonium for U.S. nuclear weapons.

Whistle-blowers started going public with safety concerns in the mid-1980s, and most told a remarkably similar tale: They informed superiors about a safety problem, were told to cover it up, and then were persecuted when they went to higher authority or the media.

In those respects Nathaniel’s case seemed standard. She was a chemist, monitoring potentially explosive tanks that stored nuclear waste at Hanford.

In 1990, she reported a co-worker who lit a cigarette near a tank that routinely filled with explosive hydrogen.

Nathaniel contends that her managers ordered her to rescind the memo.

When she refused, she contends, they launched a harassment campaign, including numerous break-ins at her apartment, tapping her telephone and a high-speed chase with a mysterious car that followed her from Richland to Spokane, where she met with a Labor Department investigator.

It all recalled the case of Silkwood, the technician at a Kerr-McGee plutonium production plant who died in a mysterious auto accident in Oklahoma in 1974. At the time of her death she was driving to meet a New York Times reporter to discuss alleged safety problems at the plant.

But in early March, James J. Butler, a law judge for the Labor Department, said Nathaniel’s allegations were without foundation.

In a scathing, 24-page opinion, Butler questioned Nathaniel’s motives; she appeared more interested in causing problems for a fellow employee than ensuring safety, he wrote. He also noted a long history of personality clashes and “erratic behavior” in Nathaniel’s relationships with managers.

He pointed out that she had secretly tape-recorded her last performance evaluation, often carried a concealed handgun, and violated safety rules at her convenience.

Mike Berriochoa, a spokesman for Westinghouse, said Nathaniel’s most outrageous allegations were never presented in her complaints to the company, but only after the whistle-blower had conferred with her lawyers.

It is unreasonable to expect Westinghouse to embark on a campaign of burglaries, wiretaps and automobile surveillance against Nathaniel over such a minor issue, he said.

“If wiretapping is going on why not file with the Police Department or the FBI?” Berriochoa said. “They make wild accusations against the company.”

The lawyers, Berriochoa suggested, are to blame. “They are working on the paranoia of individuals,” he said.

But Tom Carpenter, a GAP lawyer who has represented numerous Hanford whistle-blowers, noted that it was revealed last year that Westinghouse did in fact own surveillance equipment that could be used on employees.

“It’s natural and to be expected that the company that retaliates against whistle-blowers would deny it and whine about the fact they were caught at it,” Carpenter said.

Still, three times in the last year, Westinghouse’s arguments have stood up in court; the whistle-blowers’ complaints have not.

Ed Bricker was the first. He sued for $30 million, alleging that his employers launched secret efforts to fire him after he spoke to the media and Congress about safety violations in 1987.

The U.S. Department of Labor in 1990 concluded that Bricker had been deliberately harassed.

But U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald of Yakima last September threw out the case against Westinghouse and former DOE contractor Rockwell-Hanford Co. McDonald ruled employees of federal contractors are not covered by whistle-blower protections. That decision has been appealed.

In late February, a Spokane judge issued a similar ruling in the case of Gary Lekvold, a Hanford security officer. And then came the Nathaniel case.

Westinghouse officials say the decisions show that employees should work within the company structure, rather than the courts, to resolve disputes.

Spokeswoman Penny Phelps said investigations usually reveal there is little merit to the complaints. The disputes are centered in personality conflicts between workers and managers, rather than safety problems, Phelps said, and without hard evidence, the harassment cases have little chance in court.

“What is so sad in all three cases is the attorneys they have chosen to represent them probably know this from the beginning,” Phelps said.

Carpenter said the legal system was flawed, not his clients’ cases. “There are problems with burdens of proof and some biases among judges, and in the system itself against whistle-blowers,” Carpenter said.

“You also face very rich law firms with unlimited access to federal funds to fight these cases,” Carpenter said. “You are staring down the barrel of the federal government’s legal power.”