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The FBI Agent Who Led the Rocky Flats Raid: Jon Lipsky’s Story
Updated: Sep 7
On June 6, 1989, FBI and Environmental Protection Agency investigators entered the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant with a federal search warrant. The investigation became one of the defining events in Rocky Flats history.
Twenty-five years later, former FBI agent Jon Lipsky sat down with Rocky Mountain PBS to describe, in his own words, how the investigation began, what investigators encountered at the plant, and what happened after the search.
How the investigation began
Lipsky told interviewer Julie Speer that his involvement with Rocky Flats began several years before the raid. After arriving at the FBI's Denver office in 1984, he was assigned to work with the EPA on environmental enforcement. As he spoke with environmental activists and others around Colorado, he said one location repeatedly came up: Rocky Flats.
A significant development came in 1987, when Lipsky and an EPA investigator obtained an internal Department of Energy briefing document. According to Lipsky, the document raised serious questions about DOE's resistance to EPA regulation and Rocky Flats' compliance with environmental requirements. It helped provide a basis for further investigation.
Preparing to search a nuclear weapons plant
Rocky Flats presented an extraordinary challenge for federal investigators.
It wasn't simply an industrial facility. It was an operating nuclear weapons plant involved in producing plutonium components for the nation's nuclear arsenal. Before entering the site, participating investigators received radiological training. Lipsky describes obtaining respirators, protective clothing and other equipment so FBI personnel could safely conduct the search. Approximately 90 people from around the country were initially assembled for the operation. On the morning of June 6, Lipsky appeared before a federal magistrate with his 116-page affidavit supporting the search warrant. He remembered the moment as unusually solemn.
June 6, 1989
Investigators initially entered Rocky Flats under the pretense of attending a high-level security briefing. Once inside, Lipsky informed plant management that federal agents had a search warrant. The operation ultimately lasted 18 days. Lipsky recalled investigators collecting more than 600 environmental samples and approximately 300 boxes of material, involving what he remembered as more than a million pages of records. Documents taken during the search were copied for DOE and Rockwell while investigators retained the originals. What began as an environmental investigation had become an unprecedented federal search of a major facility within the nation's nuclear weapons complex.
What happened afterward
Lipsky's interview goes well beyond the mechanics of the raid.
He describes disputes over the direction of the investigation, decisions made by prosecutors, the evidence investigators gathered and his frustrations with what followed.
These are Lipsky's firsthand recollections and interpretations, and they should be understood as such. His interview provides the perspective of one of the central participants in the investigation rather than a comprehensive or neutral account of every disputed event.
That distinction is important—but so is preserving his testimony.
An important firsthand account
The Rocky Flats story exists in government documents, scientific studies, court records and news reports. It also exists in the testimony of people who were directly involved.
Jon Lipsky was one of them.
His 2014 interview provides an unusually detailed account of how a federal environmental investigation ultimately led agents through the gates of one of America's most important nuclear weapons facilities.
For anyone trying to understand the 1989 FBI raid and the events surrounding it, this oral history is an important primary source.
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