Word: vault
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This is the "sanctum sanctorum," said John A. Wolter, flinging open the door to the vault, which was cool and quiet as a tomb. "And this," he continued, sliding out a drawer, "is absolutely priceless." The item at hand was a map, faded so much that to take it in entire one had to squint. Drawn in 1791, it was Pierre L'Enfant's original layout of Washington. And here and there on the document, bleached so faint by time that the eye could not make out the words, were criticisms scribbled by the era's most brilliant fussbudget, Thomas...
Defense contractors and high-tech firms have been notorious for lax security. At TRW, according to Boyce, "security was a joke." He and his co-workers used the code-destruction blender in TRW's ultrasecret "black vault" for mixing banana daiquiris. The Boyce scandal forced TRW to tighten up, and other firms as well are becoming more careful, contend authorities in Silicon Valley. The military is also lax. Says retired Admiral Clarence Hill: "When I was a sub commander in World War II, we never sent anything over four lines. Everything had to be coded and decoded by hand...
Code names such as "D," "S" and "K" are sprinkled throughout. There are tales of a booby-trapped floor vault fortified with concrete, stacks of silver bars stashed in a safe-deposit box, hints of meetings in Europe and the Far East, and canes that become guns and daggers. There is even a woman who turns in her former husband. In hundreds of pages of documents, unsealed last week in Norfolk, Va., authorities describe how three members of a naval family allegedly schemed to supply U.S. military secrets to the Soviet Union, resulting in what Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger calls...
...Washington's most persistent fears is that a determined terrorist group might succeed in stealing plutonium and bomb components. A congressional subcommittee on energy disclosed in 1982 that the guard force at one of the country's weapons plants failed to respond to a mock raid on a plutonium vault until 16 minutes after the "attackers" had left...
...Wells Fargo executive offices on the second floor. Though the depot has an elaborate warning system, the robbers set off no alarms. Police investigators suspect that the thieves probably had inside information. The FBI says there are "concrete leads." Asked why the thieves left so much cash in the vault, Nicastro replied, "Maybe they got tired of lifting...