News Analysis: Still a Question of Who Stole Nuclear Secrets From
Los Alamos
By DAVID JOHNSTON
NYTimes
This article was reported by David Johnston, William J. Broad
and Neil A. Lewis, and was written by Mr. Johnston.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 — An investigation that began eight years
ago as an effort to determine how China obtained highly
classified information from American weapons labs about one of
the country's most advanced nuclear warheads appears to be back
where it started, with the mystery still unsolved.
Although Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear weapons scientist in New Mexico,
became the government's leading suspect in the investigation of
the alleged theft of warhead data, he was never charged with
espionage or accused of any crime connected with the loss of
information for a device known as the W-88. Nor did the
government ever obtain any direct evidence linking Mr. Lee to
the suspected theft.
Government officials said today that they were prepared to accept
a plea bargain in which Mr. Lee would plead guilty to a single
count of improperly downloading secret information.
The material Mr. Lee downloaded was unrelated to the suspected
warhead design theft that prompted the government's investigation
of possible Chinese espionage.
The agreement effectively means that prosecutors have ended their
long pursuit of Mr. Lee as a possible source of the stolen
warhead data, once described by government experts as "the crown
jewels" of the United States' nuclear secrets. It also leaves
them with no clear answer about how the Chinese obtained the
warhead data or from whom.
Nearly a year ago, when questions were raised about whether the
Justice Department had focused prematurely and unfairly on Mr.
Lee, Attorney General Janet Reno and Director Louis J. Freeh of
the F.B.I. ordered what law enforcement officials described as a
top-to-bottom re- investigation of the suspected W-88 theft.
But intelligence experts and scientists said they had made little
progress.
Today, the expected release of Mr. Lee was canceled as
prosecutors and defense lawyers in Albuquerque, who had signed a
plea agreement on Sunday, backed away from the settlement. But
United States District Judge James Parker said he would
reschedule a hearing for Wednesday.
"I must regretfully say that we cannot proceed with the hearing
this afternoon," Judge Parker said.
Initially, in December 1999, Mr. Lee was charged in a 59-count
felony indictment with gathering a huge amount of research and
design data from the computers at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory "with the intent to secure an advantage for a foreign
power."
In trying to explain how the case collapsed, government officials
acknowledged in interviews today that they had no clear idea what
Mr. Lee intended to do with the information he downloaded. This
proved an almost insurmountable problem since many of the
offenses with which Mr. Lee was charged would have required
prosecutors to prove Mr. Lee's motives.
The officials who spoke about how the case was viewed from inside
the government as it evolved over the last several months said
that prosecutors on the trial team had concluded recently that
the case was flawed and that they would never be able to
demonstrate convincingly at a trial why Mr. Lee had downloaded
the sensitive information or what he had done with it.
The officials said that the turning point that led them to agree
to the plea bargain was the realization that they would never
fully know Mr. Lee's motives in downloading the information.
At one point, government officials said, prosecutors and
investigators had competing theories as to which government Mr.
Lee might have been aiding. Some investigators had worked on the
theory that he might have been aiding China, where he had visited
and where he had made contacts with scientists. Others argued
that because he was a native of Taiwan, he might have been
helping that government.
At the same time doubts and misgivings were mounting within the
government, prosecutors became concerned as the case started to
unravel in the courtroom. And just as importantly, according to
law enforcement officials, the prosecutors realized that public
opinion about the case had begun to shift toward Mr. Lee.
His supporters, with his daughter serving as an effective
spokeswoman, mounted an aggressive effort to portray the
government's tactics against him as a racist campaign against
Chinese-Americans.
Gradually, prosecutors began to grow more receptive to overtures
to settle the case — especially after an embarrassing appearance
by a senior F.B.I. agent at an August bail hearing who said he
had testified falsely that Mr. Lee lied to a colleague about the
purpose of his downloading.
By the end, the case seemed vastly diminished, with the
government's acceptance of a guilty plea to only a single count
of mishandling classified information, from a prosecution that
began as a 59-count felony indictment. According to law
enforcement officials, the welter of charges were a tactical step
intended to pressure Mr. Lee into pleading to what some
officials suggested could be far more serious charges.
Some government investigators even suggested that once it was
fully understood, Mr. Lee's role was comparable to that of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as Soviet spies in
1953. In the end, the only resemblance to the Rosenberg affair
that was beyond dispute is that the Lee case will stir years of
debate as to what really occurred.
A number of government officials who were convinced that he
provided classified information to the Chinese government remain
unconvinced of his innocence, but they acknowledge, as a former
senior government official did today that, "There was smoke but
nothing you could hang your hat on."
The effort to investigate Mr. Lee for espionage began to unravel
almost as soon as it began in 1995 when Energy Department
officials gave to the F.B.I. a list of people, including Mr.
Lee, who they said might be responsible for a sudden and
unexplained advance in Chinese nuclear warhead technology.
Energy Department investigators concluded that the Chinese could
have only obtained the crucial information about the W-88
warhead, the most advanced American nuclear weapon, by stealing
it from the United States.
>From the start, the inquiry was hobbled by internal disagreements
over whether China might have gotten the information from other
sources. Some counterintelligence officials accused the F.B.I.
of failing to take the accusations seriously enough, and F.B.I.
agents became embroiled in time-consuming debates with the
Justice Department over whether they could legally justify
wiretapping to collect evidence against Mr. Lee.
After interviews and polygraph examinations, F.B.I. agents
searched Mr. Lee's office and home in early 1999. They
discovered that he had downloaded 806 megabytes of information,
which law enforcement officials said, amounted to 400,000 pages
of information. Mr. Lee transferred the data to computer tapes
which he said he either saved or destroyed.
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Lee has agreed to cooperate fully
and has promised to tell them in more detail what he did with the
tapes. But the officials said that they were not optimistic that
Mr. Lee was likely to add much to his statements that he
downloaded the information solely for his own use.
What remains of the inquiry is an investigation into whether
there exists another explanation or different suspect for the
loss of the W-88 technology, which began with a government effort
to pinpoint the source of the leak. The new inquiry included
looking for any possible clues and textual "finger prints" on a
Chinese document that the C.I.A. got in 1995 and had long
resided at the heart of the spy case.
It has previously been reported that its Chinese text cited five
key attributes of the W-88 warhead, including two measurements
accurate to within four-hundredths of an inch. That information
was a strong indicator that the Chinese had obtained national
secrets.
But last year, the experts said, a federal panel made up of
people from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the Energy
Department and its weapons laboratories was surprised to learn
that such secret information on the W-88 had been distributed
widely beyond Los Alamos, intelligence experts said.
Copies of one detailed description of the warhead were
distributed to 548 addresses, including ones in the Defense
Department, the military services, the National Guard, and
federal agencies and contractors like the Lockheed Missile and
Space Corporation. As a result, the lost secrets, it appeared,
were available to thousands of individuals scattered throughout
the nation's arms complex and thus available from myriad sources.
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FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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