Video of Sleeping Guards Shakes Nuclear Industry

For Wackenhut, controversy is nothing new.

Former FBI agent George Wackenhut founded the company in Miami in 1954 as a four-man detective agency and built it into a huge private security firm with 35,000 employees. Wackenhut, who died almost three years ago, wooed prominent people to his board, including former heads of the FBI, Secret Service and the Pentagon. Today the company is owned by a British firm, Group 4 Securicor, and does work ranging from guarding libraries to transporting immigration detainees for the Department of Homeland Security to guarding the government's Y-12 complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where nuclear weapons and materials are stored and maintained.

The company has a history of bad relations with its workers, which some experts say could undermine security procedures. The Union of Concerned Scientists said it has received complaints dating to 2001 from Wackenhut nuclear site workers, including one who was disciplined for declining to work a sixth 12-hour shift in one week while taking medication for a back injury.

In 2006, the NRC dispatched inspection teams to the Turkey Point nuclear plant in Florida to follow up on complaints of security problems. The Union of Concerned Scientists said that unhappy Wackenhut security guards at the plant had sabotaged their own equipment.

"Wackenhut's track record shows no regard for the welfare of their workforce or for public safety," said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than 25,000 security workers and has been organizing workers at Wackenhut sites.

"Wackenhut, along with the entire contract security industry, is the target of a massive effort by the SEIU to increase its membership and thereby its financial coffers," said Marc Shapiro, senior vice president of Group 4 Securicor.

It isn't only workers and the SEIU highlighting problems, though. Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman has cited Wackenhut for a series of problems at the nation's most sensitive nuclear weapons sites.

In 2003, a Wackenhut employee took two government-owned handguns and one of his own in a briefcase to the National Nuclear Security Administration's Nevada test site, according to an IG report.

In 2005, the inspector general said that at the NNSA's Oak Ridge site, Wackenhut had routinely worked security personnel more than the 60-hour-a-week maximum permitted there. In addition, Wackenhut had misled the government about worker training. It reported planned training as actual training time, and protective-force personnel had signed attendance rosters for on-the-job refresher training they had not attended, the IG report said.

Friedman's office also found that one Wackenhut unit, hired by the NRC to simulate an attack on nuclear facilities, had tipped off another Wackenhut unit charged with guarding the facilities at Y-12 about the attack strategy. Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, said in a 2004 letter to the NRC that "this is more than a case of the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse. It is not an apparent conflict of interest -- but a blatant conflict of interest."

Regulators and some Wackenhut employees say, however, that some notice is always given to plants about to undergo a test and that the attackers in such "force-on-force" exercises often succeed in penetrating defenses. Officials from the NNSA said the inspector general exaggerated.

Last summer, in testimony before a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Friedman said, "We did not use the word 'cheating' in the report, but it was. The test was compromised."