-Caveat Lector-
December 13, 2000
Preliminary Analysis of Discarded Tapes Shows No Link to
Ex-Scientist at Los Alamos
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID JOHNSTON
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Federal officials said yesterday that investigators had found
several tapes in a landfill outside Los Alamos, N.M., and were
analyzing them to see if any were discarded by Dr. Wen Ho Lee,
the former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who has told
of filling computer tapes with nuclear secrets and then throwing
them in the trash.
The suspect tapes are cassettes, officials said, and thus
resemble those on which Dr. Lee illegally downloaded highly
sensitive weapons data.
But a preliminary analysis so far indicates that none of the
tapes are Dr. Lee's, federal officials said yesterday, adding
that further inquiry might reverse the tentative finding.
One expert cautioned that investigators digging through the muddy
Los Alamos County landfill had previously found tapes suspected
of being Dr. Lee's that turned out not to be.
"They have clearly found something," said one official, who added
that only detailed analysis by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation would tell if any of the recovered tapes could help
solve one of the case's central mysteries.
Late yesterday, officials said that they had asked the Los Alamos
laboratory to help analyze some of the tapes.
Julie Habiger, a spokeswoman for Los Alamos County, said the
F.B.I. started digging at the dump site on Nov. 28, and finished
last Friday, breaking for weekends and working a total of nine
days.
Workers, she said, used bulldozers and hand rakes to comb through
piles of trash, and security agents still guard the site
continuously.
Mrs. Habiger said F.B.I. workers did not return to the landfill
on Monday and, instead, agents told the county they were finished
for now.
"So they could come back," she said, "or maybe they have enough
information for their investigation."
Bill Elwell, an F.B.I. spokesman in Albuquerque, said no
decision had been made on whether the digging would resume at the
landfill.
The hunt started after Dr. Lee told investigators as part of a
plea agreement with the government in September that he had
thrown the tapes in the garbage, and that they had probably ended
up in the landfill.
Dr. Lee, a former weapon scientist at Los Alamos, had originally
been charged in a 59-count indictment with illegally downloading
a wealth of weapons data with the intention of aiding a foreign
nation and harming the United States.
Dr. Lee spent more than nine months in solitary confinement and
was described as a major risk to national security.
But the government dropped almost its entire case, and Dr. Lee
pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling secrets.
Dr. Lee won his freedom and agreed to explain why he had
downloaded the data and what had happened to the tapes, at least
seven of which are missing.
His lawyers said earlier that he had destroyed the missing tapes
and that no one else had access to them.
After Dr. Lee told of throwing the tapes in the trash, F.B.I.
agents determined roughly where the lab's garbage bins were
emptied at the landfill and began searching there two weeks ago.
The tapes are regarded by the government as having major
importance and have been the focus of an enormous investigation,
both to preserve them and to keep them from falling into enemy
hands. In court hearings, the tapes were described as containing
data that could aid the building of advanced nuclear weapons.
On the tapes, or at least on one of them, was a virtual library
of nuclear weapons testing and design data that Dr. Lee admitted
to having created over a period of many years.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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