by David Wise
In the spring of 1998 Edward J. Curran, a former counterspy for the FBI and the CIA, was brought in to the Energy Department to head its Office of Counterintelligence. A tall, athletic father of four, Curran had been named chief of the CIA's counterespionage group after the Aldrich Ames debacle. At DOE, he was appalled to find Wen Ho Lee still in X Division at Los Alamos.
In August the FBI ran a "false flag" sting against Lee. An FBI agent who was a Chinese American telephoned Lee, claiming he was "a representative of the 'concerned department' from Beijing." He identified himself with a false name, Wang Ming-Li. But like so much about the Wen Ho Lee case, the sting was badly handled. The agent posing as an MSS officer spoke only Cantonese, even though officials in Beijing speak Mandarin.
The original plan was to use a Chinese American agent who spoke both Mandarin and the Shanghai dialect, because the FBI suspected that Wen Ho Lee might have had some link to the Shanghai State Security Bureau, the MSS arm in that city. Because the FBI agent sent to Santa Fe spoke only Cantonese, he had no credibility as an intelligence officer from Beijing.
In a series of telephone calls, the undercover FBI agent explained to Wen Ho Lee that he had come to New Mexico to make sure that all was well with Lee in the wake of the conviction in California of another Chinese American scientist, Peter Lee, for passing defense information to China. He asked to set up a meeting with Wen Ho Lee. Lee was skeptical of the caller's pitch, and said he was required to report any meeting with a foreign official. He said he preferred to talk on the phone.
The undercover FBI agent pressed to meet Wen Ho Lee in person, saying there were other sensitive matters besides the Peter Lee case that he wanted to discuss. Wen Ho Lee then agreed to meet the agent at the Hilton hotel in Santa Fe. But ten minutes later, Lee called back to say he had changed his mind.
The next day, the FBI man posing as a Chinese intelligence agent called again to say he would be leaving Santa Fe and gave Lee a pager number that he said belonged to a trusted American friend and could be used if Lee wanted to get in touch with him. Lee did not report the phone calls, but told his wife, Sylvia, who told a friend, who told DOE security. When Lee was then questioned about the calls by DOE counterintelligence, he acknowledged the phone calls but did not mention that he had accepted the beeper number.
Two days before Christmas, with Curran still determined to pull Lee from X Division, he was finally transferred to T Division, which performs unclassified work, where he remained until Bill Richardson, the secretary of energy, dismissed him altogether.
Richardson, a seven-term congressman and a veteran diplomat, had stepped into a political minefield. Washington was in an uproar. President Clinton was facing impeachment for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky; charges that China had contributed money to try to influence Clinton's 1996 presidential election campaign continued to bubble up in the press; and Richardson knew that the Wen Ho Lee case was rapidly coming to a head. The Cox Committee, with Trulock as its key witness, was gearing up to issue its sensational report on Chinese espionage, and Republicans in Congress smelled blood.
Richardson now saw his chances of becoming the nation's first Hispanic vice presidential candidate evaporating. Despite his Anglo name, his mother was Mexican, and he had high hopes that his Latino credentials and diplomatic and legislative record might help catapult him onto the Democratic ticket in 2000. But Richardson was seasoned enough to know that the turmoil at the Energy Department, damaging reports of flawed security at the labs, and the Chinese spy scandal, although not of his making, meant his political ambitions would have to be put on hold.
Wen Ho Lee, meanwhile, was blissfully unaware that the FBI had been intensively investigating him for three years, or that he was the prime suspect in how China had acquired design details of the W-88. Life was good in White Rock, the Los Alamos County community where the Lees had bought their house. Wen Ho Lee liked to cook for his friends and garden, and he continued to indulge his lifelong passion for fishing. As a respected nuclear scientist, he had traveled far from his dirt-poor roots a world away in Taiwan.
All of that came crashing down on Saturday, March 6, 1999, with the publication of a front-page story in the New York Times. The story, later the subject of much controversy, reported that China had succeeded in building small nuclear warheads, a "breakthrough" that officials said was speeded "by the theft of American nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico." The story, by James Risen and Jeff Gerth, quoted Notra Trulock at length. It did not directly name Wen Ho Lee, but described "the main suspect" as "a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American."
It was apparent that Trulock had leaked the story to the Times, a fact he later publicly confirmed on CBS's 60 Minutes, in an interview with Lesley Stahl.
On the afternoon of Sunday, March 7, as the story reverberated throughout Washington, Wen Ho Lee was closeted in the El Dorado hotel in Santa Fe with two FBI agents, Carol Covert and John Hudenko. They shoved the Times story at him and warned, "It's not good, Wen Ho ... it's very bad ... There's a person at the laboratory that's committed espionage and that points to you!"
"But do they have any proof, evidence?" Lee asked.
In response, the agents pressed him, over and over again, about what had happened in the hotel room in Beijing in 1988 when Hu Side had visited him and he had been questioned about the detonation points of nuclear weapons. "Tell us what went on in that room," Covert demanded.
She warned, "You are going to be an unemployed nuclear scientist. You are going to be a nuclear scientist without a clearance. Where is a nuclear scientist without a clearance gonna get a job?"
He would not be able to get a job, Lee conceded. He could just retire.
"If you retire ... and we come knocking on your door, we have to arrest you for espionage! When somebody comes knocking on your door, Wen Ho ..."
"No, no, no," Lee protested.
"... they're not going to give you anything other than your Advice of Rights and a pair of handcuffs! That's all you're going to get. What are you going to tell your friends ... your family ... your wife and son? What's going to happen to your son in college ... when he hears the news? ... [A story] on the front page of the paper would say 'Wen Ho Lee arrested for espionage.' They're [reporters] going to find your son ... and they are going to say, you know your father is a spy?"
"But I'm telling you," Lee said, "I did not do anything like that."
Then the interrogation, hardly a walk in the park up to that point, turned really brutal.
COVERT: Do you know who the Rosenbergs are?
LEE: I heard them, yeah, I heard them mention.
COVERT: The Rosenbergs are the only people that never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case. You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho.
LEE: Yeah, I heard.
COVERT: The Rosenbergs professed their innocence. The Rosenbergs weren't concerned either ... The Rosenbergs are dead.
Wen Ho Lee, exhausted by now, stood his ground, insisting he had done nothing wrong. Always polite, he actually thanked the agents when the interrogation came to a close. When he finally left the FBI office, he was shaking.
On Monday morning, his name leaked out to the news media. At 11 A.M., he was called in and, on orders from Secretary Richardson, fired from Los Alamos for failing to report his encounter with Hu Side and other security infractions. After twenty years, his career at the laboratory was over.
When the Cox Report came out two months later, in May, it described how the 1995 "walk-in" to the CIA brought out the document containing design information on the W-88 and data about the other thermonuclear warheads. The report did not mention that Wen Ho Lee was DOE's prime suspect in the loss of the W-88 data, the real reason he was dismissed.
But the report did discuss two instances in which there had been leaks of information about the neutron bomb. Wen Ho Lee fell under suspicion in one of those cases as well. Referring to the
TIGER TRAP case without using that code name or identifying Gwo-bao Min, the report said that in the late 1970s "the PRC had stolen classified U.S. information about the neutron bomb."
The Cox Report also contained a cryptic reference to a second neutron bomb leak to China, discovered in 1996. DOE sleuths suspected that Wen Ho Lee might be linked to that second loss.
Behind the brief reference in the Cox Report to an alleged second loss of neutron bomb data was a series of events backstage at DOE. China had tested a neutron bomb in 1988, but analysts at Los Alamos thought that if Beijing had used data acquired from the TIGER TRAP operation it may have encountered some of the same problems that the United States had experienced in developing a neutron warhead.
Yet China by the mid-1990s had managed somehow to solve those problems. Some of the scientists at Los Alamos said this sounded like the Chinese had learned of the "pill boosting" solution to making a neutron bomb, a secret process that US scientists had explored. There had been a secret conference at Los Alamos in 1992 reporting how the United States had solved the problem of designing the neutron bomb. Pill boosting was discussed at the conference. DOE investigators decided that the report from the conference must somehow have been passed to China. Once again, DOE suspected Wen Ho Lee.
Had Wen Ho Lee attended the conference? The frustrated counterintelligence agents at DOE were not sure, because scientists with Los Alamos badges could enter and leave the conference freely. Scientists with Livermore badges were checked in and their names recorded, so it was known which of them attended, but that was not the case for their colleagues at Los Alamos.
Beyond that, there was a dispute over whether the additional information about the neutron bomb had been acquired by China. Other scientists thought the original tip about a second theft of neutron bomb data was actually about a neutron generator, which is not secret. A neutron generator, colloquially known by bomb designers as a "zipper," is a device for producing high-energy neutrons with a particle accelerator. Although miniature neutron generators, produced by the Sandia National Laboratories, a DOE facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are used in all US nuclear weapons, neutron generators also have a wide application in medicine, geology, and basic laboratory physics experiments.
In the aftermath of his dismissal from Los Alamos, Wen Ho Lee hired Mark Holscher, then with the high-powered Los Angeles law firm of O'Melveny & Myers, to represent him. The FBI had accused him of espionage and the news media was camped outside his house; he needed a lawyer. As a federal prosecutor, Holscher had made his reputation prosecuting Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam. He was joined on the defense team by John Cline, a shrewd expert on the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), a law that permits those parts of cases that might reveal government secrets to be heard by a judge in camera. It was enacted in an effort, only partly successful, to prevent defense attorneys from engaging in "graymail" by threatening to expose government secrets if prosecutors brought a case to trial.
But the more the government examined the case against Wen Ho Lee, the more prosecutors realized they could not charge him with espionage. There was, in fact, not a shred of evidence that Lee had passed information about the W-88, the neutron bomb, or any other secret to China. In searching his office at the lab, however, investigators discovered that he had downloaded computer files, the codes simulating nuclear explosions, from the classified computer to the open, "green" computer network. Moreover, he had then copied the codes onto tapes, and no one was sure how many tapes existed and what had become of them.
Operation KINDRED SPIRIT now metamorphosed into operation SEA CHANGE. If Lee could not be prosecuted for spying, he could be charged with mishandling nuclear secrets. The Justice Department began preparing a case against Lee for downloading the codes.
Ironically, DOE knew about Lee's massive downloading of classified files six years before the government indicted him for it. The computer office at Los Alamos had set up a system that it called Network Anomaly Detection and Intrusion Recording (with the inevitable acronym of NADIR) to ferret out unusual computer usage by the lab's scientists. The detection system flagged Wen Ho Lee's downloading in 1993. But the DOE official who knew about Lee's suspicious downloads failed to act and did not tell the DOE counterintelligence staff or the FBI.
In August 1999 Notra Trulock was forced out of DOE. To help deal with the counterintelligence crisis, Richardson had brought in Lawrence Sanchez, a veteran CIA officer who had been detailed to New York when Richardson was the US ambassador to the United Nations. He installed Sanchez above Trulock as chief of a newly created Office of Intelligence.
In the restructuring, Trulock was marginalized. He had touched off the chaos over Wen Ho Lee, leaked the original story to the New York Times, and spilled secrets to the Cox Committee. "I feel like a pariah in this department," Trulock said, accurately, a few days before he resigned. Still, given the political firestorm that had broken over DOE, Richardson found it prudent to give Trulock a hearty handshake and an award of $10,000.
That same month, Wen Ho Lee went on 60 Minutes, and the government lost its case before it ever started. Lee's appearance with a sympathetic Mike Wallace turned the tide of public opinion in Lee's favor, and the prosecutors never regained their footing.
"The truth is I'm innocent," Lee said on the CBS television broadcast. "I have not done anything wrong with—what they try to accuse me."
Had he never passed United States nuclear secrets to China? Wallace asked.
"No I have never done that.... I devote the best time of my life to this country, to make the country stronger ... so we can protect the American people."
Wallace then asked why Lee had downloaded the files. "To protect my code," he replied. "To protect my file."
Lee was asked why he thought he had become a target.
"My best explanation of this is they think I'm a, you know, Chinese people—I was born in Taiwan. I think that's part of the reason. And the second reason, they want to find out some scapegoat."
Lee's explanation on 60 Minutes of why he had illegally downloaded the codes was enigmatic. In later statements, he elaborated. He said he had once lost his work when the lab converted to a new computer system and did not want it to happen again. Government investigators theorized that it was more likely he wanted the material in case he ever left Los Alamos to look for a new job.
Four months later, on December 10, 1999, a federal grand jury in Albuquerque handed down a fifty-nine-count indictment charging Lee with mishandling classified information. If convicted he faced a sentence of life in prison. He was arrested by the FBI at his home, handcuffed, and taken to the Santa Fe County jail. Three days later, he was denied bail after Stephen Younger, the associate director of nuclear weapons programs at Los Alamos, warned ominously that the codes Wen Ho Lee had downloaded could, in the wrong hands, "change the global strategic balance."
Lee spent the next nine months in solitary confinement. Under the harsh special administrative measures, or SAM, ordered by the attorney general, he was placed in handcuffs, waist shackles, and leg irons during the one hour a week he was allowed outside his cell.
Lee's defense lawyers pressed unsuccessfully to have him released from the onerous prison conditions. But as the months dragged by, the government's case suffered a series of setbacks. Two lead prosecutors left. One quit to run for Congress, another was replaced because of reports he had an affair with a woman on his staff. Robert A. Messemer, an FBI supervisory special agent, admitted in court that he had given erroneous testimony about Lee.
John Cline was promising to force the government to produce highly classified evidence if the case went to trial. FBI director Louis J. Freeh worried that if Lee was convicted, the government would never find out why he had downloaded the nuclear weapons codes and transferred them to tapes, seven of which were missing.
Alberta Lee, Wen Ho Lee's daughter, was tireless and effective in appearing at rallies and on television on her father's behalf, asserting that
he was innocent and a victim of racial profiling because of his Chinese heritage. In August, James A. Parker, the federal district judge presiding over the case, said he was not persuaded that Lee should be kept in jail, and ordered him released. The government blocked his release. By September, however, prosecutors, their case unraveling, were ready to give up. They offered Lee a plea bargain.
The terms were worked out among the lawyers for the two sides; the government would drop fifty-eight of the fifty-nine counts in the indictment. In return, Lee would plead guilty to one count of mishandling defense data, a felony, and would tell the government why he had downloaded the secrets and what he did with his tapes.
Then Judge Parker stunned the hushed courtroom in Albuquerque with his words. "I believe you were terribly wronged by being held in custody pretrial in the Santa Fe County Detention Center under demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions. I am truly sorry that I was led by our executive branch of government to order your detention last December. Dr. Lee I tell you with great sadness that I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of our government.... They did not embarrass me alone. They have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.
"I might say that I am also sad and troubled because I do not know the real reasons why the executive branch has done all of this....
"Although, as I indicated, I have no authority to speak on behalf of the executive branch, the president, the vice president, the attorney general, or the secretary of the Department of Energy, as a member of the third branch of the United States Government, the judiciary, the United States Courts, I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner you were held in custody by the executive branch."
Wen Ho Lee was free. He walked out into the bright New Mexico sunlight, accompanied by his lawyers and Alberta, to face the television cameras. "For the next few days, I'm going fishing," he said.
