All Sides Blamed in Lee Case
By Jennifer McKee
Journal Staff Writer
The truth about what Wen Ho Lee did - or didn't do - will probably never be known, according to a U.S. Senate report on the affair released late last month.
The report blames government failures and Lee himself for muddying the waters and states that both sides lack the credibility to tell a believable story about what happened in the case and why.
The report, prepared by the Senate Subcommittee on Department of Justice Oversight with an introduction by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., states that if the volumes of sensitive information Lee downloaded from a secure part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory computer system didn't "fall into the wrong hands, it is a matter of mere luck."
"When the nation's most sensitive nuclear secrets are at issue, it is unacceptable that we should have to rely on luck to keep them safe," the report reads.
The Senate report pans widely held beliefs that Lee was unfairly persecuted by the government because he is ethnically Chinese. The report raises another theory, however, that one reason for Lee's harsh treatment - he was shackled and held in solitary confinement for almost a year - was to force a confession out of him.
Lee was a longtime Los Alamos lab employee fired in 1999 amid allegations that he passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the People's Republic of China. After spending 278 days in solitary confinement, Lee was released from prison in September 2000 after pleading guilty to just one charge of mishandling sensitive information. He and his wife, Sylvia, still live in the White Rock home where they raised their two children.
The turnaround in the government's case against Lee was so startling even President Clinton said he was at a loss to explain it.
The Senate report offers a brief chronology of Lee's life - from his birth in Nantou, Taiwan, in 1939 to his acquisition of U.S. citizenship in 1974 and his eventual hiring at Los Alamos in 1978.
Just four years after he was hired at the lab, according to the report, Lee became the subject of an FBI investigation. That probe ended in 1984. He was investigated again between 1994 and 1995, after it was discovered that Lee had apparently struck up a warm relationship with a high-ranking Chinese nuclear scientist, although he never reported meeting the man to the DOE, which he was required to do.
Around this time, the United States learned that the Chinese had apparently made rapid advances in their nuclear weapons program, possibly with the assistance of information secreted to them by an American spy. The Energy Department launched its own investigation of the incident, focusing on Lee.
While other government reviews of the Wen Ho Lee case faulted the DOE for focusing on Lee at the exclusion of other suspects, the Senate report said the DOE investigation was never intended to be the definitive word in the government's look at possible espionage. It faulted the FBI for basing its investigation too much on the DOE probe.
The Senate report also maintains that the information Lee downloaded from Los Alamos lab systems - some 400,000 pages in all - contained "extremely sensitive" information and "constituted a serious threat to the national security."
The report concludes by saying that some of the government's more "controversial and misguided steps" in the case may have been motivated more by a desire to protect the various agencies' images, rather than protecting national security.
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