The many-​​faceted drama at the trou­bled Los Alamos National Laboratory has pro­duced some strange moments. But this has to be the weird­est of them all:

Los Alamos equip­ment buyer Lillian Anaya thought she was order­ing $30,000 worth of trans­duc­ers. But she dialed a num­ber that had been changed from an indus­trial equip­ment dealer to an auto parts shop, and wound up buy­ing a Mustang with gov­ern­ment money instead.
That’s the asser­tion of Los Alamos and University of California inves­ti­ga­tors, who today cleared Anaya of any wrong­do­ing in a case that helped engulf the world’s most impor­tant nuclear research cen­ter in a fog of scan­dal.
It’s a move, lab crit­ics said, that shows that the birth­place of the atomic bomb still hasn’t come to terms with the prob­lems of mis­man­age­ment and wide­spread fraud that have plagued it for years.

My Wired News story has more on this sur­real moment.

Three months ago, we found out that inves­ti­ga­tors were told to “fake their inves­ti­ga­tion” into secu­rity lapses at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the world’s most impor­tant weapons research facil­i­ties. Today, only after very pub­lic com­plaints from the Senate, has the Lab finally started to clean house.
Dave Nokes, vice pres­i­dent for national secu­rity, has been forced to resign. And Patricia Gingrich, who has been direc­tor of the Systems Assessment and Research Center, has been reas­signed.
“Labs man­age­ment,” accord­ing to a Sandia state­ment, “is con­tin­u­ing to review…what addi­tional per­son­nel actions and pol­icy changes may be appro­pri­ate” in light of the recent scandal.

“The Technical Support Working Group has been toil­ing against ter­ror for years, but its tech­no­log­i­cally advanced work has been over­shad­owed by DARPA,” Wired News says. “Now TSWG is step­ping into the lime­light.“

TSWG has his­tor­i­cally focused on short-​​term projects that cre­ate usable pro­to­types to solve real-​​world prob­lems. The group’s 2002 annual report points to the group’s suc­cess in cre­at­ing a bet­ter flat-​​panel X-​​ray machine to help bomb squads and a coun­tert­er­ror­ism kit to help edu­cate law enforce­ment and emer­gency work­ers how to rec­og­nize, by sight and smell, chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and radi­o­log­i­cal mate­ri­als.
Chemical– and biological-​​weapon escape masks devel­oped by TSWG have been ordered in the thou­sands by the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, accord­ing to Jeff David, deputy direc­tor of the Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office, which over­sees TSWG.
Other cur­rent projects include a lug­gage irra­di­a­tion machine that would destroy unde­tected bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal weapons, bet­ter bomb dis­posal robots, bullet-​​detecting radar to pre­vent assas­si­na­tions, a project to extract DNA from fin­ger­prints, a cool­ing sys­tem for body armor and a mass tran­sit sur­veil­lance cam­era system. 

In March, Energy Department offi­cials promised to fol­low up on alle­ga­tions of lax secu­rity at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the country’s most impor­tant mil­i­tary research cen­ters. Senate Finance Committee chair­man Charles Grassley says the Department has welched on that promise.
The New York Times reports:

The two inves­ti­ga­tors who raised ques­tions about secu­rity at Sandia, Pat O’Neill and Mark Ludwig, say they were trans­ferred from an office build­ing to a rodent-​​infested trailer, reas­signed to non­in­ves­tiga­tive work, and had their annual raises reduced, Mr. Grassley said.
The lab­o­ra­tory com­mis­sioned a for­mer United States attor­ney, Norman Bay, to inves­ti­gate prob­lems. Mr. Grassley quoted from a sum­mary of that report, which he received from the Energy Department. (He said he had obtained the whole report with dif­fi­culty but agreed to keep it secret.)
The let­ter from Mr. Grassley said the report cov­ered inves­ti­ga­tions of 5 of 100 secu­rity prob­lems iden­ti­fied by Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Ludwig.

(empha­sis mine)