'Spy' a Well-Timed Cautionary Tale
By Joseph Ditzler
Of the Journal
Let me say right up front, Ian Hoffman could be difficult to work with. Oh, I liked the guy, personally. But dealing with Hoffman at times elevated room temperature, blood pressure and ambient decibel level.
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"A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage" *** AUTHORS: Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, 384 pages PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster, 2002 COVER PRICE: $263 Book signings Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman will be in New Mexico to discuss and sign copies of their book, "A Convenient Spy," beginning Thursday. Their scheduled appearances: * In Los Alamos at 6 p.m. Thursday at R Books, 111 Central Park Square. * In Santa Fe at 2 p.m. Jan. 12, at Collected Works, 208-B West San Francisco St. * In Albuquerque at 7 p.m. Jan. 17, at Page One Bookstore, 11018 Montgomery N.E. * Again in Santa Fe at 2 p.m. Jan 19, at Waldenbooks, in the Villa Linda Mall. Wen Ho Lee's book "My Country Versus Me" will be available in bookstores, beginning Jan. 15. That day, he will be at Borders in Santa Fe at 7 p.m |
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He was pretty much your average old school newspaperman, constantly pushing those narrow newspaper columns to their bursting point and editor's nerves, including mine, into overload.
But I've got to hand it to him, his and co-author Dan Stober's book on the Wen Ho Lee scandal at Los Alamos National Laboratory is pure gold. Even for someone with a front-row seat, more or less, the whole two-year unraveling of this story proved somewhat stultifying. Part of that problem lay in the nature of newspapers themselves.
Day-to-day journalism leaves little room for deciphering the deeper context surrounding events as complicated as Lee's misdeeds, which translated poorly in terms of overall "story."
Hoffman, who reported for Journal North at the time, knew that as well as anyone but persisted nonetheless in pushing to include more, more, more. Problem was, newspaper editors look dimly on hyperbole, anonymous sources and reporters who ultimately rank themselves so well educated in their beats that they count as sources, too.
Hoffman was that way. He grew as a reporter to the point that reporting was too limited a field. What he needed was a push from the nest. This story gave him that.
"A Convenient Spy" reads like a suspense thriller. Hoffman and Stober, a Pulitzer prize-winning San Jose Mercury-News reporter who teamed with Hoffman to research and write the book, made judicious use of literary technique to flesh out the characters. Page after page builds toward a conventional climactic episode as several plot lines eventually converge.
Lee's story has a villain, for example, and that villain is not Lee. It's Notra Trulock, chief of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Energy Department's nuclear labs and factories. Trulock, in the account within "A Convenient Spy" was bent on finding a spy, period. When a "walk-in" Chinese source dumped reams of documents on weapons design in the laps of Taiwanese intelligence agents, Trulock grasped the episode as proof that a spy had given the Chinese the means to construct the world's most sophisticated and deadly thermonuclear warhead, the W88.
Never mind that those documents didn't explain the internal workings of the W88 or that the least likely source of the material was a place like Los Alamos. Trulock, with help from his pit bull investigator Dan Bruno, inflated, exaggerated, engineered and hyped a dire, worst-case scenario built on flimsy evidence and racial profiling. Without ever establishing that a crime had occurred, he went looking for a suspect. Enter Wen Ho Lee, conveniently.
Like its villains, "A Convenient Spy" has its heroes, too. Again, Wen Ho is not among them. Neither is Bill Richardson, former New Mexico congressman and, at the time, Secretary of the Department of Energy. The FBI and various intelligence branches within DOE aren't there, either, and neither is the U.S. Attorney's Office and Justice Department, all the folks you and I pay to make sure both national security and individual rights are safeguarded.
The press gets kicked, too, and not the lowly local rags, but The New York Times, loftiest of the nation's dailies.
But Los Alamos weapons scientist Walter Goad is a hero; so is Lee's defense attorney, Mark Holscher; U.S. District Judge James A. Parker; as well as Lee's White Rock neighbors, Don and Jean Marshall; among others.
Events of Sept. 11 and since threaten to overshadow the appearance of "A Convenient Spy" on bookstore shelves. They shouldn't. In fact, with overheated "patriotism" and talk of secret tribunals in the air and government approval ratings as high as they've ever been, "A Convenient Spy" is a well-timed cautionary tale. Anyone who thinks the government can be trusted to "do the right thing" might take pause to consider the case of United States v. Wen Ho Lee.
"A Convenient Spy" becomes, by virtue of its being first, the standard against which any other book on this subject will be judged. That's appropriate. The book is well-researched, even-handed and well-written. It is, as the authors themselves quoted J. Robert Oppeheimer, "technically sweet."
Excerpt:
"Together, Gorence and Messemer tried to put Kindred Spirit, with all its flaws and baggage, to eternal rest. Sea Change and the indictment of Lee were a clear break with the bumbling of the past, having 'no connection whatsoever with the original W88 investigation,' Messemer testified.
"It was disingenuous statement, made within Messemer's first three minutes on the witness stand. Sure, the FBI had put a different name on the investigation and had opened a new file. But Sea Change inherited a lot of evidence from Kindred Spirit and the earlier Tiger Trap - Lee's lies about calling Min in 1982, his admission to sending export-controlled information to Taiwan, Hu Side's expressions of gratitude for help with codes in 1994, Lee's failure to report his contact with Hu - not to mention at least 19 FBI interviews, four polygraphs and a no-holds-barred interrogation. All of these were pieces of evidence that federal prosecutors intended to use against Lee in court. Sea Change was clearly 'connected' to the earlier, flawed, case.
Synopsis:
This first book published on the Wen Ho Lee security scandal and misdirected spy hunt at Los Alamos National Laboratory that surfaced in 1999 is by two reporters who covered it from beginning to end.
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