-Caveat Lector-
Investigators Now Focusing on Lee's Ties to Taiwan
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 24, 2000 ; Page A03
Former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee has told the FBI that he
was a paid consultant in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a
Taiwanese businessman who later helped arrange for him to spend
four weeks at Taiwan's leading military research center,
according to sources close to the investigation.
That same businessman also paid for Lee's air travel to Taiwan in
December 1998, when Lee made a second, shorter visit to the
military research center, the Chung Shan Institute of Science and
Technology (CSIST), the sources said.
The disclosure of the consulting arrangement with and travel
assistance from the unnamed businessman – a resident alien who
has since returned to Taiwan – has prompted the FBI to review
Lee's links to his country of birth and, in particular, his ties
to Chung Shan. The institute 25 miles southwest of Taipei,
Taiwan's capital, allegedly was involved in past efforts by
Taiwan to develop nuclear weapons.
Lee has told investigators that while at Chung Shan for four
weeks in April and May 1998, he gave talks and "consulted on
matters related to unclassified computer codes" for which he
received "a modest fee of less than $5,000," according to a
person familiar with the case.
Lee did not report the payment from Chung Shan to officials at
Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1998, as lab rules required,
according to government sources.
Lee made the disclosures during 10 days of closed-door
questioning under oath by the FBI. He cooperated in the
questioning, which ended on Dec. 12, as part of a plea bargain
reached in September.
In return for pleading guilty to a single felony count of
mishandling classified information, he was released from jail
after nine months in solitary confinement. He was also given
immunity from further prosecution, as long as he tells the truth.
Lee initially had been targeted in 1996 by FBI agents and Energy
Department investigators looking into alleged espionage by the
People's Republic of China. The focus then was on two trips he
took to Beijing and meetings he held with Chinese nuclear
scientists.
Now, however, the government is exploring the possibility that
Lee may have accumulated a virtual library of nuclear weapons
secrets from computers at Los Alamos with the intention of
assisting Taiwan, which has long feared an invasion or missile
attack from the communist mainland.
Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked at Los Alamos from
1979 through 1999, has never been charged with espionage and
adamantly denies passing classified information to any foreign
government.
His attorney, Mark Holscher, said there was nothing improper
about Lee's trips to Taiwan, where Lee's two sisters live and
which he has visited roughly a dozen times over the past 25
years, according to recently compiled government records.
Before his visits to Chung Shan, Holscher said, "Dr. Lee
received laboratory approval and clearance to go to Taiwan for
unclassified speech and consulting."
Holscher also expressed frustration with what he views as
unscrupulous leaks aimed at tarring his client. He noted that
the FBI questioning is supposed to be confidential.
"It is perplexing and deeply concerning to us that anonymous
government sources are inaccurately describing approved,
unclassified visits," he said.
Senior Clinton administration officials, including FBI Director
Louis J. Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, have said the
goal of the questioning is to determine why Lee downloaded the
equivalent of 400,000 pages of nuclear data from computers at Los
Alamos to pocket-sized tapes and to find out exactly what became
of those tapes.
Sources previously disclosed that Lee told the FBI he threw the
tapes into a trash bin at the national laboratory in New Mexico
in January 1999. FBI agents then dug through tons of garbage in
the Los Alamos County landfill. They failed to turn up any of
the Lee tapes, although they did find others from the lab.
Officials said last week that they may renew the search of the
landfill. Up to now, they said, the government has no physical
evidence to prove or disprove Lee's account.
Lee celebrated his 61st birthday, and his freedom, at a party
this weekend paid for by 500 friends and supporters in
California's Silicon Valley. His supporters contend that he was
unfairly singled out for investigation by the FBI and the Energy
Department because of his ethnicity. Although nuclear secrets
allegedly obtained by China could have come from any of hundreds
of defense plants or government offices, they say, overzealous
investigators focused exclusively on Los Alamos and Lee.
While acknowledging serious mistakes in the investigation and
prosecution of Lee, government officials and FBI
counterintelligence agents still do not believe they have gotten
to the bottom of the matter.
As information continues to emerge, both sides in this long and
bitter struggle tend to see each new bit of evidence as
confirming their prior view of Lee as either a victim of
government persecution or a national security threat.
One significant change, however, is the FBI's interest in Taiwan.
Although for four years the FBI concentrated on Lee's possible
connections with mainland Chinese scientists, he has had much
tighter familial and professional bonds with Taiwan.
In 1984, after he was recorded by the FBI talking on the phone
with a fellow Taiwanese American scientist under investigation
for espionage, Lee admitted to the bureau he had delivered to
Taiwanese representatives in Washington documents about U.S.
nuclear reactors that were unclassified but not for distribution
to foreign officials.
He also told the FBI that in the early 1980s, Taiwanese
government representatives called him asking questions about
nuclear problems. The FBI never passed that information to Los
Alamos security officials, although "it would have raised flags
about him and perhaps cost him his [security] clearance," said
Edward J. Curran, the recently retired head of
counterintelligence at the Energy Department.
The Taiwanese government, which is friendly to the United States
and works hard to maintain supporters in Congress, denies that it
is trying to develop nuclear weapons or that it engages in
espionage in America.
James Lilley, a former U.S. representative in Taiwan as well as
CIA station chief and ambassador in China, said he did not
believe that the Taiwanese government "as a policy" would try to
steal U.S. nuclear secrets. "But I don't rule out some guy on
their side doing it," he said.
In 1969, about five years after mainland China's first nuclear
test, Taiwan made its first known attempt to acquire the ability
to reprocess nuclear fuel into weapons material. The United
States intervened to foil that effort. But the rapprochement
between Washington and Beijing under President Richard M. Nixon
in the early 1970s spurred Taiwan to try again to acquire
plutonium, according to Andrew Mack, an Australian expert on
Taiwan's nuclear program.
In 1976, under U.S. pressure, Taiwan agreed to stop reprocessing
spent fuel from a Canadian-supplied research reactor. Then, in
1982, Taiwan sought to acquire reprocessing technology from
France; the United States intervened again.
Six years later, Col. Chang Hsien-Yi, who had been deputy
director of the nuclear energy laboratory at the Chung Shan
Institute and an asset for the CIA, was secreted out of Taiwan.
Once in the United States, he disclosed that Taiwan had secretly
been building a plutonium separation facility. U.S. officials
pressed Taiwan to close it down.
Mack has said it would be difficult for Taiwan to build a nuclear
weapon in secret today because its facilities are inspected by
the International Atomic Energy Administration. But some U.S.
experts believe Taiwan might use the ability to build nuclear
weapons as leverage to obtain other weapons from the United
States, such as early-warning systems, submarines or destroyers.
In July 1995, right after China test-fired missiles into nearby
waters, Taiwan's then-President Lee Teng-hui told the country's
national assembly: "We should restudy the question [of nuclear
weapons] from a long-term point of view. . . . Everyone knows
we had the plan before."
A few days later, Lee responded to pressure from the United
States and said that although his country "has the ability to
develop nuclear weapons," it would not do so.
Chung Shan, which has 11,000 employees, is Taiwan's equivalent of
Los Alamos, a laboratory that works on many types of weapons.
"With its ultimate goals of achieving self-reliance on national
defense, CSIST is committed to the pursuit of the
state-of-the-art technologies and to the development of
next-generation weapon systems in close cooperation with
industry, government, academic and research communities," says
Lt. Gen. Chen Yu-wu, Chung Shan's president, in the institute's
brochure.
In his recent questioning by the FBI, Lee said Los Alamos
officials approved his month-long stay at Chung Shan in April and
May 1998. The lab, however, did not inform the Energy
Department's counterintelligence office. "We never had a chance
to cover what he may have done," one investigator said.
On his return from the Taiwanese institute, Lee mentioned at a
security debriefing that the trip was paid for by a friend who
owned a company that had connections with Chung Shan. But he did
not disclose that he had received a consulting fee from Chung
Shan itself, the sources said.
In December 1998, Lee again traveled to Taiwan, mostly on
personal business: He was taking back a nephew who had developed
a drug problem in Los Angeles, according to sources close to the
case. The Taiwanese businessman again paid for the tickets, and
Lee made a quick stop at Chung Shan, where he spoke at a
luncheon, the sources said.
Not long after his return, he was given a polygraph exam as part
of the FBI's espionage investigation. Because the FBI was
focused on China, he was never asked questions about Taiwan
during this "lie detector" test.
Although the name of the businessman has not been made public,
part of the connection is known. Lee filed reports at Los Alamos
in 1989 and 1990 saying he was consulting for a company called
Intelligent Systems Integration Inc., which had an office in
Albuquerque. Intelligent Systems listed itself as a "foreign
corporation" when it registered in the late 1980s in New Mexico
and California. Records indicate it surrendered its U.S.
registration in January 1990.
Investigators are still puzzling over an incident in May 1998,
when Lee used a computer at Chung Shan to try to gain remote
access to the classified computer system at Los Alamos. When
that access was denied, Lee used his password to get into his
personal, unsecured computer files, according to court testimony
earlier this year.
In his recent questioning, Lee told the FBI that there were some
classified files in the directory he accessed from Chung Shan.
But he said he extracted only unclassified data.
At Lee's bail hearing earlier this year, an FBI agent testified
that Lee's entry into his computer directory from Chung Shan left
an electronic trail that could have allowed a computer expert to
steal his password and gain access to all his files.
The final step in the government's inquiry, under the terms of
Lee's plea agreement, is for him to take another polygraph exam
"sometime after Christmas," according to a government source.
Unless the government can prove to a judge's satisfaction that
Lee has broken the agreement by lying, he cannot be prosecuted
again.
Staff writer Steven Mufson contributed to this report.
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