September 15, 2000
Commentary
We'll Never Know the Truth About Wen Ho Lee
By Stuart A. Herrington. Mr. Herrington, a retired Army
colonel who specialized in counterintelligence, is author of
"Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World" (Harcourt,
2000).
It was any self-respecting counterspy's worst nightmare.
Nuclear espionage suspect Wen Ho Lee, for months the target of
the federal government's efforts to enshrine him in infamy
alongside the Rosenbergs in the nation's pantheon of traitors,
was released by a federal judge with barely a slap on the wrist
after the government dropped 58 of 59 charges against him.
The government's capitulation was so total that it prompted Judge
James Parker to apologize to Mr. Lee (convicted felon though he
was), and observe that senior government officials of the
Departments of Justice and Energy had "embarrassed the entire
nation" by their treatment of the 60-year-old Taiwanese-born
scientist. Worse than embarrassment, however, is that the
mistakes of Attorney General Janet Reno and others mean we'll
never know the truth about why Mr. Lee went to such lengths to
download those sensitive secrets into a computer far easier to
access than his approved machine, made copies of classified tapes
and then (he says) "destroyed" them.
The series of miscues and errors that saw the Los Alamos
investigation compromised in the media are not unprecedented.
One need only recall the late 1980s case of foreign service
officer Felix Bloch, captured on videotape passing an attache
case to a known Soviet intelligence officer, only to have the
investigation blown in the press. Mr. Bloch, a flawed fellow
with a penchant for high living, was considered guilty by all
those familiar with the case. Alerted by the publicity, Mr.
Bloch, no fool, went to ground, protested his innocence and was
never prosecuted.
The Lee and Bloch cases underscore a fundamental of the
spy-catching art: To make an espionage case against a suspect,
government investigators must pursue their quarry covertly. One
leak to the media, and the alerted suspect is unlikely to
communicate with his foreign agent handler or commit other acts
that will establish his disloyalty.
Concerning Beijing's targeting of our military secrets, we would
do well to remind ourselves that virtually all governments -- our
own included -- spy to obtain information in support of their
nation's goals. During my 30 years as a military intelligence
officer, had I or my agents encountered the opportunity to
recruit a Chinese nuclear-weapons research officer and not
pursued it, we would have been guilty of negligence.
This is not to condone Beijing's unrelenting targeting of our
secrets. But we must remind ourselves that any outrage in the
wake of the Lee debacle should be directed at more deserving
targets over whom we have a modicum of influence. My
nominations:
Those in the Department of Energy, from former Secretary Hazel
O'Leary on down, who presided over the deplorable degradation of
security in its facilities during the past eight years. Since I
once offered security advice to government laboratories, the Los
Alamos lapses were a familiar litany to me.
Security specialists (never popular in management circles) urge
prudent security measures on their superiors. Managers
(scientists and academicians are the hardest to handle) object
because they see stringent security precautions as inconvenient,
expensive and restrictive of the free exchange of ideas. Or,
incredibly, in Ms. O'Leary's Energy Department, somehow demeaning
to those unfortunate souls whose lower access levels restrict
their forays into top-secret areas and files.
This inevitablly leads to unauthorized disclosures of sensitive
materials, followed by vigorous finger-pointing. Management,
scenting danger, suddenly becomes more Catholic than the Pope
over security. Then after the heat is off, things return to
normal, causing demoralized security officers to relapse into
frustrated apathy.
Those government officials of any agency or department who failed
to see the Lee case for what it may have been -- our most serious
breach of security since the Rosenberg case. Or those like Ms.
Reno who, having seen this, failed for whatever reasons to make
it a top priority and pursue it aggressively -- or who may have
deliberately temporized for political reasons. If the classified
Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit requesting authority to
intrusively investigate Wen Ho Lee was packed with the kind of
probable-cause information that such affidavits normally contain,
denying the FBI the requested authority for wiretaps and more was
an egregious error by the attorney general.
The individual or individuals who condemned the investigation to
failure by airing it in the media. In 1988 I was directing an
investigation into suspected Army spy Clyde Lee Conrad when
reporter Jeff Gerth learned of the case while we were still
circling our target. We asked the New York Times not to break
the story. The Times showed commendable restraint, and Conrad
went to jail for life. Could not the Lee case have been handled
with this same sense of responsibility?
Those in the public arena who almost gleefully embraced charges
that Mr. Lee was a victim of racism, singled out for scrutiny
merely because of his ethnicity. As virtually any intelligence
professional knows, the Chinese intelligence service's modus
operandi places a high priority on spotting, assessing and
recruiting agents from the overseas Chinese community. Had
government investigators not focused their scrutiny on Mr. Lee,
an ethnic Chinese with access to nuclear secrets who had traveled
to the People's Republic of China, they would have been
negligent.
This affair was so abysmally mishandled that we'll never know
whether Mr. Lee was a nuclear spy who got away with it, or a
mild-mannered scientist who was unfairly accused and persecuted.
The American people can take no pride or comfort in what the Wen
Ho Lee case tells us about how we keep the nation's nuclear
secrets at a time when nuclear-weapons proliferation is one of
the principal threats we face.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[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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