-Caveat Lector-
Wall Street Journal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Wen Ho Lee Diversion
The one thing the Clinton administration has shown the energy and
skill to protect is itself.
Tuesday, September 19, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
The Wen Ho Lee case ended last week with the former weapons
scientist pleading guilty to a single felony charge, with the
President of the United States distancing himself from his own
Justice Department, and now with Asian-American activists
charging that the Lee case was the product of racism. This has
the look of a classic fiasco. We're not so sure, though, that
the case didn't end just about the way Bill Clinton would have
liked--in a fog of non-conclusions. Before our jovial President
saunters away from another stink pile, it might be worth putting
this affair in its proper context.
Incredible to behold, "Wen Ho Lee" somehow became a household
name in the United States. To the casual viewer, the story line
ran that a sole Chinese-American computer scientist at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory, Wen Ho Lee, managed to become the
conduit for passing some of the nation's most sensitive nuclear
weapons data to China's government. Lee himself participated in
his inflation, appearing on "60 Minutes" last August to proclaim
his innocence. By then, needless to say, he had become an ethnic
martyr.
Let's review the actual timeline on the Lee affair:
Start with the atmosphere of unseriousness about security that
pervaded the administration. Early on, Rep. Frank Wolf held
hearings into the White House's slovenly process for issuing
security clearances to its own personnel. Russian intelligence
managed to place wiretaps in one of the most presumably secure
floors of the State Department, with sensitive laptop computers
disappearing. There was as well the gaudy cast of characters
rolling through the White House for campaign-contribution coffees
and photo-ops--Macau gangsters, Chinese arms dealers, Johnny
Chung and Charlie Trie, who later fled to China.
At an amazing press conference on Dec. 7, 1993, Energy Secretary
Hazel O'Leary unveiled the DOE's "openness initiative." "The Cold
War is over; we're coming clean," she said. She announced that
32 million pages of classified documents were now subject to
review and possible release to "put the United States out in
front as a nation willing to share." She joked: "During the Cold
War, I would have been arrested for what I said."
No wonder Wen Ho Lee thought the rules had changed. They had.
Indeed, in mid-1997, Attorney General Janet Reno turned down the
FBI's request to put a wiretap on Wen Ho Lee, whom they'd been
investigating for years. Given the stakes here, and the
by-the-books use of a wiretap under such circumstances, the
request should have been a routine slam dunk. But Ms. Reno
blocked it. Her justification: The evidence against Lee was too
fragmentary.
We know, however, that Wen Ho Lee copied sensitive data onto 10
computer tapes, a warehouse of information. Seven of those tapes
are still missing. He repeatedly failed polygraph tests. A
prima facie case was obvious; the wiretap was warranted. In the
event, he entered a guilty plea to one count and promised to
cooperate with investigators over the next year.
The Hazel O'Leary "willing to share" national security policy
ended in January 1999, with the release of the Cox Report,
asserting: "The PRC thefts from our National Laboratories began
at least as early as the late 1970s. Significant secrets are
known to have been stolen, from the laboratories or elsewhere, as
recently as the mid-1990s. Such thefts almost certainly continue
to the present."
Exactly two months later, the Energy Department announced that it
had fired Los Alamos computer scientist Wen Ho Lee. Quickly, Lee
ended up carrying responsibility for the whole sieve of data
leaking out of Los Alamos.
On March 19, 10 days after the Wen Ho Lee firing and two months
after the Cox Report, President Clinton was asked at a news
conference whether any of these Los Alamos security breaches took
place on his watch. The President replied: "To the best of my
knowledge, no one has said anything to me about any espionage
which occurred by the Chinese against the labs during my
presidency."
This is almost certainly a false statement. A New York Times
story the next day notes "different accounts" of when Mr.
Clinton was informed of China's espionage. A House committee was
told Mr. Clinton was briefed in 1998. But in the weeks prior to
the March 19 news conference, White House aides said National
Security Adviser Sandy Berger had briefed the President in July
1997.
According to the Times, NSC spokesman David Leavy "said that
since the completion of [the Cox] report, Berger and other aides
had refreshed their recollections. 'After the Cox committee
process, we've remembered more,' Leavy said."
Also at his March 19 news conference, Mr. Clinton hotly denied
that his administration suppressed reports of Chinese spying to
avoid association with reports of laundered Chinese contributions
to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. "That is not true," the
President asserted.
Our view of this "fiasco" would run like this:
With the issuance of the Cox Report, it was obvious that the
administration faced a massive security embarrassment involving
the very nation alleged to have funneled money into the
President's re-election. And so to divert attention from a
genuine fiasco, the Clinton brain trust found a scalp, a fall
guy, in Wen Ho Lee.
We may never know the truth about Lee's activities or guilt (of a
piece with the Chinese contributions), but the notion, allowed to
run for a year, that somehow this one man constituted the Los
Alamos breakdown was preposterous; it was a diversion. Now the
chase has ended in a predictable plea-bargain, and the
"investigation" will soon disappear into the mists, carrying with
it this presidency's responsibility for what happened at the
Energy Department on its watch, as with so many other security
lapses.
As we've learned, however, even embarrassments can be turned to
political advantage. Rendering the whole affair into mush the
day after the plea agreement, the President said, "It's very
difficult to reconcile the two positions-- that one day he's a
terrible risk to the national security, and the next day they're
making a plea agreement for an offense far more modest than what
had been alleged."
But yesterday, just four days later, a report appears in the New
York Times, in which government sources lay the primary blame for
the Wen Ho Lee case on FBI Director Louis Freeh: "The FBI sold
Janet Reno a bill of goods," says a voice from the shadows.
Director Freeh, with Charles La Bella, is the one administration
official in the Justice Department who recommended that Janet
Reno appoint an independent counsel to investigate Bill Clinton's
and Al Gore's fund-raising activities in the 1996 campaign.
Looking at this from top to bottom, it would appear that the one
thing the Clinton administration has shown the energy and skill
to protect is itself.
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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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