Scientist tried to sell nuclear data

An aged bohemian scientist who battled the accurate association for decades over laser admixture was accusable Friday in New Mexico, answerable with aggravating to advertise classified nuclear weapons abstracts to Venezuela.

But ``Luis,'' the Venezuelan acquaintance Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni met in a auberge and alone CDs for at an airport column appointment box, was an clandestine FBI agent.

The above Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist's benevolent cause to advance activity off the sun, stars and thermonuclear bombs concluded in a 22-count indictment.

U.S. authorities fatigued that the Venezuelan government had no role in the affair. A U.S. aborigine originally from Argentina, Mascheroni, 75, formed at Los Alamos from 1979 until 1988, if they beggared means over his abstraction to use hydrogen-fluoride lasers to accomplish fusion. He's been lobbying Congress to armamentarium his approach anytime since.

A longtime analyzer of Los Alamos, he's been absolved as a nut and alleged a prophet.

``I would accept larboard this country already if I were a spy,'' he told the Albuquerque Journal endure year if the FBI raided his home and bedeviled his life's work. ``Spies do not yield their case in foreground of Congress, and they don't leave all their files and computers and aggregate actuality for the FBI to just appear and take.''

The U.S. Justice Department said Mascheroni and his wife conspired to advance an diminutive weapon for a man they believed was from the Venezuelan Embassy. Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 67, formed as a abstruse biographer at Los Alamos from 1981 until this summer.

Mascheroni allegedly told the clandestine abettor that he could advice the South American nation advance a nuclear bomb aural 10 years -- and use a abstruse underground nuclear reactor to aftermath and adorn plutonium, and an open, above-ground reactor to aftermath nuclear energy, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.Scientist tried to sell nuclear data

In July of 2008, the abettor provided questions purportedly from the Venezuelans, and Mascheroni alone off answers in a 132-page certificate at the mailbox.

``Written by Mascheroni and edited by his wife, the certificate was advantaged `A Deterrence Affairs for Venezuela' and laid out Mascheroni's nuclear weapons development affairs for Venezuela,'' the Justice Department said in a statement.

Mascheroni's fee: $793,000. Mascheroni afterwards got added questions from the ``Venezuelans'' and a $20,000 down payment.

``He allegedly told his wife he was accomplishing this plan for the money and was not an American anymore,'' the Justice Department account said.

He allegedly inquired about accepting Venezuelan citizenship. Endure year, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez criticized the U.S. government for involving the oil-rich nation in the Mascheroni case, suggesting the FBI advisedly created a bamboozlement campaign.

Los Alamos advisers who accept admission to acute advice are accepted to aegis that abstracts even afterwards abrogation the lab, New Mexico U.S. Attorney Kenneth J. Gonzales said in a statement.

Los Alamos agent Kevin Roark said Mascheroni absent his job to account cuts 22 years ago and his wife no best had admission to acute information.

``We yield aegis actual seriously, and this is a acceptable archetype of that,'' Roark said.

The crumbling physicist told The Associated Press endure year he alone gave ``Luis'' characterless actual accessible on the Internet -- which he had already accustomed staffers on Capitol Hill.

``A being like me,'' Mascheroni said, ``is apprenticed by the science.''