Infamous NYT article that started the ordeal

BREACH AT LOS ALAMOS: A special report.; China Stole Nuclear Secrets For Bombs, U.S. Aides Say
By JAMES RISEN AND JEFF GERTH
Published: March 6, 1999

Working with nuclear secrets stolen from an American Government laboratory, China has made a leap in the development of nuclear weapons: the miniaturization of its bombs, according to Administration officials.

Until recently, China's nuclear weapons designs were a generation behind those of the United States, largely because Beijing was unable to produce small warheads that could be launched from a single missile at multiple targets and form the backbone of a modern nuclear force.

But by the mid-1990's, China had built and tested such small bombs, a breakthrough that officials say was accelerated by the theft of American nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The espionage is believed to have occurred in the mid-1980's, officials said. But it was not detected until 1995, when Americans analyzing Chinese nuclear test results found similarities to America's most advanced miniature warhead, the W-88.

By the next year, Government investigators had identified a suspect, an American scientist at Los Alamos laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed. The investigators also concluded that Beijing was continuing to steal secrets from the Government's major nuclear weapons laboratories, which had been increasingly opened to foreign visitors since the end of the cold war.

The White House was told of the full extent of China's spying in the summer of 1997, just before the first American-Chinese summit meeting in eight years -- a meeting intended to dramatize the success of President Clinton's efforts to improve relations with Beijing.

White House officials say that they took the allegations seriously; as proof of this, they cite Mr. Clinton's ordering the labs within six months to improve security.

But some American officials assert that the White House sought to minimize the espionage issue for policy reasons.

''This conflicted with their China policy,'' said an American official, who like many others in this article spoke on condition of anonymity. ''It undercut the Administration's efforts to have a strategic partnership with the Chinese.''

The White House denies the assertions. ''The idea that we tried to cover up or downplay these allegations to limit the damage to U.S.-Chinese relations is absolutely wrong,'' said Gary Samore, the senior National Security Council official who handled the issue.

Yet a reconstruction by The New York Times reveals that throughout the Government, the response to the nuclear theft was plagued by delays, inaction and skepticism -- even though senior intelligence officials regarded it as one of the most damaging spy cases in recent history.

Initially the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not aggressively pursue the criminal investigation of lab theft, American officials said. Now, nearly three years later, no arrests have been made.

Only in the last several weeks, after prodding from Congress and the Secretary of Energy, have Government officials administered lie-detector tests to the main suspect, a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American. The suspect failed a test in February, according to senior Administration officials.

At the Energy Department, officials waited more than a year to act on the F.B.I.'s 1997 recommendations to improve security at the weapons laboratories and restrict the suspect's access to classified information, officials said.

The department's chief of intelligence, who raised the first alarm about the case in 1995, was ordered last year by senior officials not to tell Congress about his findings because critics might use them to attack the Administration's China policies, officials said.

And at the White House, senior aides to Mr. Clinton fostered a skeptical view of the evidence of Chinese espionage and its significance.

White House officials, for example, said they determined on learning of it that the Chinese spying would have no bearing on the Administration's dealings with China, which included the increased exports of satellites and other militarily useful items. They continued to advocate looser controls over sales of supercomputers and other equipment, even as intelligence analysts documented the scope of China's espionage.

But after learning that Mr. Samore had insisted that this case had no implications for China policy, the President's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, acknowledged tonight that the case was clearly relevant.

''We already knew that China was a country that ought not to get sensitive technology,'' said Mr. Berger. ''This reinforced that.''

Mr. Samore, the Security Council official, did not accept the Energy Department's conclusion that China's nuclear advances stemmed largely from the theft of American secrets.

In 1997, as Mr. Clinton prepared to meet with President Jiang Zemin of China, Mr. Samore asked the Central Intelligence Agency for a quick alternative analysis of the issue. The agency found that China had stolen secrets from Los Alamos but differed with the Energy Department over the significance of the spying.

The Whistle-Blower
An Energy Official As Secret Witness

In personal terms, the handling of this case is very much the story of the Energy Department intelligence official who first raised questions about the Los Alamos case, Notra Trulock.

Mr. Trulock became a secret star witness before a select Congressional committee last fall. In a unanimous report that remains secret, the bipartisan panel embraced his conclusions about Chinese espionage, officials said. Taking issue with the White House's view, the panel saw clear implications in the espionage case for U.S.-China policy, and has now made dozens of policy-related recommendations, officials said.

A debate still rages within the Government over whether Mr. Trulock was right about the significance of the Los Alamos nuclear theft. But even senior Administration officials who do not think so credit Mr. Trulock with forcing them to confront the realities of Chinese atomic espionage.

China's technical advance allows it to make small warheads for use in submarines, mobile missiles and long-range missiles with multiple warheads -- the main elements of a modern nuclear force.

While White House officials question whether China will actually deploy a more advanced nuclear force soon, they acknowledge that Beijing has made plans to do so at some point.

In early 1996 Mr. Trulock traveled to C.I.A. headquarters to provide evidence that his team had gathered on the apparent Chinese theft of American nuclear designs.

As Mr. Trulock gathered his charts and drawings and wrapped up his top-secret briefing, the agency's chief spy hunter, Paul Redmond, sat stunned.

At the dawn of the atomic age, a Soviet spy ring that included Julius Rosenberg had stolen the first nuclear secrets out of Los Alamos. Now, at the end of the cold war, the Chinese seemed to have succeeded in penetrating the same weapons lab.

''This is going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs,'' Mr. Redmond recalled saying.

The evidence that so alarmed him had surfaced a year earlier. Senior nuclear weapons experts at Los Alamos poring over data from the most recent Chinese underground nuclear tests had detected eerie similarities between the latest Chinese and American bomb designs.

From what they could tell, Beijing was testing a smaller and more lethal nuclear device configured remarkably like the W-88, the most modern, minaturized warhead in the American arsenal. In April 1995 they brought their findings to Mr. Trulock. Los Alamos scientists have access to a wide range of classified intelligence data and seismic and other measurements.

Just as Mr. Trulock, the scientists and others in his team were piecing the evidence together, they were handed an intelligence windfall from Beijing.

In June 1995, they were told, a Chinese official gave Central Intelligence analysts what appeared to be a 1988 Chinese Government document describing the country's nuclear weapons program. The document, a senior official said, specifically mentioned the W-88 and described some of the warhead's key design features.

The Los Alamos laboratory, where the W-88 had been designed, quickly emerged as the most likely source of the leak.

One of the major national weapons labs owned by the Energy Department, Los Alamos, 35 miles outside Sante Fe, N.M., was established in 1943 during the Manhattan Project. Mr. Trulock and his team knew just how vulnerable it was to modern espionage.

The labs had long resisted F.B.I. and Congressional pressure to tighten their security policies. Energy officials acknowledge that there have long been security problems at the labs.

Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, also in New Mexico, had in 1994 been granted waivers from an Energy Department policy that foreign scientists visiting for purposes of scientific exchange be subjected to background checks.

Lab officials resented the intrusions caused by counterintelligence measures, arguing that restrictions on foreign visitors would clash with the labs' new mandate to help Russia and other nations safeguard their nuclear stockpiles.

The Clinton Administration was also using increased access to the laboratories to support its policy of engagement with China, as had been done under previous, Republican Administrations.

In December 1996, for example, China's Defense Minister, Gen. Chi Haotian, visited Sandia on a Pentagon-sponsored trip. Energy Department officials were not told in advance, and they later complained that General Chi and his delegation had not received proper clearances, officials said.

Still, there is no evidence in this case that foreign visitors were involved in the theft of information.

The Suspect
A Scientist 'Stuck Out Like a Sore Thumb'

In late 1995 and early 1996, Mr. Trulock and his team took their findings to the F.B.I. A team of F.B.I. and Energy officials traveled to the three weapons labs and pored over travel and work records of lab scientists who had access to the relevant technology.

By February the team had narrowed its focus to five possible suspects, including a computer scientist working in the nuclear weapons area at Los Alamos, officials said.

This suspect ''stuck out like a sore thumb,'' said one official. In 1985, for example, the suspect's wife was invited to address a Chinese conference on sophisticated computer topics even though she was only a secretary at Los Alamos. Her husband, the real expert, accompanied her, an American official said.

By April 1996, the Energy Department decided to brief the White House. A group of senior officials including Mr. Trulock sat down with Mr. Berger, then President Clinton's deputy national security adviser, to tell him that China appeared to have acquired the W-88 and that a spy for China might still be at Los Alamos.

''I was first made aware of this in 1996,'' Mr. Berger, now national security adviser, said in an interview.

By June the F.B.I. formally opened a criminal investigation into the theft of the W-88 design. But the inquiry made little progress over the rest of the year. When Energy officials asked at the end of 1996, they came away convinced that the bureau had assigned few resources to the case.

A senior bureau official acknowledged that his agency was aware of Energy's criticism but pointed out that it was difficult to investigate the case without alerting the suspects.

The bureau maintained tight control over the case. The C.I.A. counterintelligence office, for one, was not kept informed of its status, according to Mr. Redmond, who has since retired.

Energy officials were also being stymied in their efforts to address security problems at the laboratories.

After Frederico Pena became Energy Secretary in early 1997, a previously approved counterintelligence program was quietly placed on the back burner for more than a year, officials said.

In April 1997, the F.B.I. issued a classified report on the labs that recommended among other things reinstating background checks on visitors to Los Alamos and Sandia, officials said. Energy and the labs ignored the F.B.I. recommendation for 17 months. An Energy spokeswoman was unable to explain the delay.

In early 1997, with the FBI's investigation making scant progress and the Energy Department's counterintelligence program in limbo, Mr. Trulock and other intelligence officials began to see new evidence that the Chinese had other, ongoing spy operations at the weapons labs.

But Mr. Trulock was unable to inform senior American officials quickly of the new evidence. He asked to speak directly with Mr. Pena, the Energy Secretary, but waited four months for an appointment.

In an interview, Mr. Pena said he did not know why Mr. Trulock had been kept waiting until July but recalled that he ''brought some very important issues to my attention and that's what we need in the Government.''

Mr. Pena immediately sent Mr. Trulock back to the White House -- and to Mr. Berger, who is known as Sandy.

''In July 1997 Sandy was briefed fully by the D.O.E. on China's full access to nuclear weapons designs, a much broader pattern,'' one White House official said.

Officials said Mr. Berger was told that there was evidence of several other Chinese espionage operations that were still under way inside the weapons labs.

That news, several officials said, increased the urgency of the issue. The suspected Chinese thefts were no longer just ancient history, problems that had happened on another Administration's watch.

Mr. Berger quickly briefed President Clinton on what he had learned and kept him updated over the next few months, a White House official said.

As Mr. Trulock spread the alarm, his warnings were reinforced by George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, and Louis B. Freeh, Director of the F.B.I., who met with Mr. Pena to discuss the lax security at the labs that summer.

''I was very shocked by it and I went to work on shifting the balance in favor of security,'' Mr. Pena said.

The bureau assigned more agents to the W-88 investigation, gathering new and more troubling evidence about the main suspect.

According to officials, the agents learned that the suspect had traveled to Hong Kong without reporting the trip as required. In Hong Kong, officials said, the bureau found records showing that the scientist had obtained $700 from the American Express office. Investigators suspect that he used it to buy an airline ticket to Shanghai.

The Alert
Unwelcome News Before Summit Talks

With Mr. Berger now paying close attention, the White House became deeply involved in evaluating the seriousness of the thefts and solving the counterintelligence problems at the laboratories.

Mr. Trulock's new findings came at a crucial moment in American-China relations. Congress was examining the role of foreign money in the 1996 campaign, as charges emerged that Beijing had secretly funneled money into Democratic coffers.

The Administration was also moving to strengthen its strategic and commercial links with China in 1997. President Clinton had already eased the commercial sale of supercomputers and satellite technology, and he wanted to cement a nuclear cooperation accord at the upcoming summit meeting, enabling American companies to sell China commercial nuclear reactors.

In August Mr. Berger flew to Beijing to prepare for the October summit meeting. He assigned Mr. Samore, a senior Security Council aide in charge of proliferation issues, to assess the Los Alamos damage.

After being briefed by Mr. Trulock in August, Mr. Samore asked the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence to seek a second opinion on how China had developed its smaller warheads. It was, a Security Council aide said, ''a quick study done at our request.''

The analysts agreed that there had been a serious compromise of sensitive technology through espionage at the weapons labs but were far less conclusive about the extent of the damage. Central Intelligence argued that China's sudden advance in nuclear design might be traced in part to other causes, including the ingenuity of Beijing's scientists.

As an American official described it: ''The areas of agreement between D.O.E. and C.I.A. were that China definitely benefited from access to U.S. nuclear weapons information that was obtained from open sources, conversations with D.O.E. scientists in the United States and China, and espionage.

''The disagreement is in the area of specific nuclear weapons designs. Trulock's briefing was based on a worst-case scenario, which C.I.A. believes was not supported by available intelligence. C.I.A. thinks the Chinese have benefited from a variety of sources, including from the Russians and their own indigenous efforts.''

Mr. Samore assembled the competing teams of Central Intelligence and Energy analysts in mid-October for a meeting in his White House office that turned into a tense debate.

The C.I.A. report noted that China and Russia were cooperating on nuclear issues, indicating that this was another possible explanation of Beijing's improved warheads.

Mr. Trulock said this was a misreading of the evidence, which included intercepted communications between Russian and Chinese experts.

The Russians were offering advice on how to measure the success of nuclear tests, not design secrets. In fact, Mr. Trulock argued, the Russian measurement techniques were used to help the Chinese analyze the performance of a weapon that Los Alamos experts believed was based on an American design.

''At the meeting,'' one official said, ''Notra Trulock said that he thought the C.I.A. was underplaying the effect that successful Chinese espionage operations in the weapons labs had had on the Chinese nuclear weapons program.''

Relying on the Central Intelligence report, Mr. Samore told Mr. Berger that the picture was less conclusive than Mr. Trulock was arguing. Officials said he began to relay that view before hearing Mr. Trulock's rebuttal of the C.I.A. study at the October meeting.

Mr. Samore told Mr. Berger, ''There isn't enough information to resolve the debate, there is no definitive answer, but in any event this clearly illustrates weaknesses in D.O.E.'s counterintelligence capability,'' said one official familiar with Mr. Samore's presentation.

Central Intelligence officials strenously deny that the agency's analysts intended to downplay Mr. Trulock's findings.

Yet when one senior Central Intelligence official familiar with Mr. Trulock's conclusions heard the findings of the C.I.A. report, he said he thought the report was not totally objective.

The Case
Suspect Worked For Over a Year

The F.B.I. inquiry was stalled. At a September 1997 meeting between bureau and Energy officials, Mr. Freeh concluded that his agency did not have enough evidence to arrest the suspect, according to officials.

Investigators did not then have sufficient evidence to obtain a wiretap on the suspect, which made it difficult to build a strong criminal case, according to American officials. Bureau officials say that Chinese spy activities are far more difficult to investigate than the more traditional espionage operations of the former Soviet Union.

But even if the bureau could not build a case, Energy could still take some action against someone holding an American security clearance. Mr. Freeh told Energy officials that there was no longer an investigative reason to allow the suspect to remain in his sensitive position, officials said.

But the suspect was allowed to keep his job and retain his security clearances for more than a year after the meeting with Mr. Freeh, according to American officials.

In late 1997, the Security Council did begin to draft a new counterintelligence plan for the weapons labs, and President Clinton signed the order mandating the measures in February 1998. In April a former F.B.I. agent, Ed Curran, was named to run a more vigorous counterintelligence office at Energy headquarters.

The Administration explained aspects of the case to aides working for the House and Senate intelligence committees beginning in 1996. But few in Congress grasped the magnitude of what had happened.

In July 1998, the House Intelligence Committee requested an update on the case, officials said. Mr. Trulock forwarded the request in a memo to and in conversations with Elizabeth Moler, then Acting Energy Secretary. Ms. Moler ordered him not to brief the House panel for fear that the information would be used to attack the President's China policy, according to an account he later gave Congressional investigators.

Ms. Moler, now a Washington lawyer, says she does not remember the request to allow Mr. Trulock to brief Congress and denies delaying the process.

Key lawmakers began to learn about the extent of the Chinese theft of American nuclear secrets late in 1998, when a select committee investigating the transfers of sensitive American technology to China, headed by Representative Christopher Cox, Republican of California. heard from Mr. Trulock.

Administration officials say that Congress was adequately informed, but leading Democrats and Republicans disagree. Norman Dicks, Democrat of Washington, the ranking minority member on the House intelligence panel and also a member of the Cox committee, said that he and Porter Goss, Republican of Florida, who heads the intelligence panel, had not been clearly informed.

''Porter Goss and I were not properly briefed about the dimensions of the problem,'' Mr. Dicks said, adding, ''It was compartmentalized and disseminated over the years in dribs and drabs so that the full extent of the problem was not known until the Cox committee.''

Last fall, midway through the Cox panel's inquiry, Bill Richardson took over as Energy Secretary.

After being briefed by Mr. Trulock, Mr. Richardson quickly reinstated background checks on all foreign visitors, a move recommended 17 months earlier by the F.B.I. He also doubled the counterintelligence budget and placed more former bureau counterintelligence experts at the labs.

But Mr. Richardson also became concerned about what the Cox panel was finding out. So in October he cornered Mr. Berger at a high-level meeting and urged him to put someone in charge of coordinating the Administration's dealing with the Cox committee.

Mr. Berger turned again to Mr. Samore, officials said.

By December Mr. Dicks, in his role as the ranking Democratic member of the Cox panel, was growing impatient with the Administration's slow response to committee requests and inaction on the Los Alamos spy case. Mr. Dicks told Mr. Richardson, a former House colleague, that he needed to take action, Mr. Richardson recalled.

On one day in December, Mr. Dicks's complaints caused Mr. Richardson to call Mr. Freeh about the inquiry twice, an official said.

Energy gave the suspect a polygraph, or lie-detector test, in December. Unsatisfied, the F.B.I. administered a second test in February, and officials said the suspect was found to be deceptive. It is not known what questions prompted deceptive answers.

As the F.B.I. investigation intensified, the Cox commitee completed a 700-page secret report in which it found that China's theft had harmed American national security, saving the Chinese untold time and money in nuclear weapons research.

After hearing from both Central Intelligence and Energy analysts, the bipartisan panel unanimously agreed with Mr. Trulock's assessment, officials said.

Now, Central Intelligence and other agencies, at the request of the Cox committee, are conducting a new, more thorough damage assessment, even as the debate continues to rage in intelligence circles over whether Mr. Trulock has overstated the damage from Chinese espionage.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trulock has been moved from head of Energy's intelligence office to its acting deputy. While Mr. Richardson and other Energy officials praise hiswork and deny that he has been mistreated, some in Congress suspect that he has been demoted because he helped the Cox committee.

Mr. Redmond, the C.I.A.'s former counterintelligence chief, who made his name by unmasking the Soviet spy Aldrich Ames, says he has no doubts about the significance Mr. Trulock's discoveries.

As he put it, ''This was far more damaging to the national security than Aldrich Ames.''

Correction: March 9, 1999, Tuesday A front-page article on Saturday about assertions by Clinton Administration officials that China stole nuclear secrets from an American Government laboratory owned by the Department of Energy misspelled the given name of the Energy Secretary who served for most of 1997 and 1998. He is Federico F. Pena, not Frederico.

From The Editors: September 26, 2000, Tuesday On March 6, 1999, The New York Times reported that Government investigators believed China had accelerated its nuclear weapons program with the aid of stolen American secrets. The article said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had focused its suspicions on a Chinese-American scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Two days later, the government announced that it had fired a Los Alamos scientist for ''serious security violations.'' Officials identified the man as Wen Ho Lee.

Dr. Lee was indicted nine months later on charges that he had transferred huge amounts of restricted information to an easily accessible computer. Justice Department prosecutors persuaded a judge to hold him in solitary confinement without bail, saying his release would pose a grave threat to the nuclear balance.

This month the Justice Department settled for a guilty plea to a single count of mishandling secret information. The judge accused prosecutors of having misled him on the national security threat and having provided inaccurate testimony. Dr. Lee was released on the condition that he cooperate with the authorities to explain why he downloaded the weapons data and what he did with it.

The Times's coverage of this case, especially the articles published in the first few months, attracted criticism from competing journalists and media critics and from defenders of Dr. Lee, who contended that our reporting had stimulated a political frenzy amounting to a witch hunt. After Dr. Lee's release, the White House, too, blamed the pressure of coverage in the media, and specifically The Times, for having propelled an overzealous prosecution by the administration's own Justice Department.

As a rule, we prefer to let our reporting speak for itself. In this extraordinary case, the outcome of the prosecution and the accusations leveled at this newspaper may have left many readers with questions about our coverage. That confusion -- and the stakes involved, a man's liberty and reputation -- convince us that a public accounting is warranted.

In the days since the prosecution ended, the paper has looked back at the coverage. On the whole, we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem of which officials had been aware for months, even years. Our review found careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking and vetting of multiple sources, despite enormous obstacles of official secrecy and government efforts to identify The Times's sources. We found articles that accurately portrayed a debate behind the scenes on the extent and importance of Chinese espionage -- a debate that now, a year and a half later, is still going on. We found clear, precise explanations of complex science.

But looking back, we also found some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt. In those months, we could have pushed harder to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee. Our coverage would have been strengthened had we moved faster to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions that led the F.B.I. and the Department of Energy to connect Dr. Lee to what is still widely acknowledged to have been a major security breach.

The Times neither imagined the security breach nor initiated the case against Wen Ho Lee. By the time our March 6 article appeared, F.B.I. agents had been looking closely into Dr. Lee's activities for more than three years. A bipartisan congressional committee had already conducted closed hearings and written a secret report unanimously concluding that Chinese nuclear espionage had harmed American national security, and questioning the administration's vigilance. The White House had been briefed repeatedly on these issues, and the secretary of energy had begun prodding the F.B.I. Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test; F.B.I. investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets.

The Times's stories -- echoed and often oversimplified by politicians and other news organizations -- touched off a fierce public debate. At a time when the Clinton administration was defending a policy of increased engagement with China, any suggestion that the White House had not moved swiftly against a major Chinese espionage operation was politically explosive.

But the investigative and political forces were converging on Dr. Lee long before The Times began looking into this story.

The assertion in our March 6 article that the Chinese made a surprising leap in the miniaturization of nuclear weapons remains unchallenged. That concern had previously been reported in The Wall Street Journal, but without the details provided by The Times in a painstaking narrative that showed how various agencies and the White House itself had responded to the reported security breach.

The prevailing view within the government is still that China made its gains with access to valuable information about American nuclear weaponry, although the extent to which this espionage helped China is disputed. And while the circle of suspicion has widened greatly, Los Alamos has not been ruled out as the source of the leak.

The article, however, had flaws that are more apparent now that the weaknesses of the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee have surfaced. It did not pay enough attention to the possibility that there had been a major intelligence loss in which the Los Alamos scientist was a minor player, or completely uninvolved.

The Times should have moved more quickly to open a second line of reporting, particularly among scientists inside and outside the government. The paper did this in the early summer, and published a comprehensive article on Sept. 7, 1999. The article laid out even more extensively the evidence that Chinese espionage had secured the key design elements of an American warhead called the W-88 while showing at the same time that this secret material was available not only at Los Alamos but ''to hundreds and perhaps thousands of individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms complex.''

That article, which helped put the charges against Dr. Lee in a new perspective, appeared a full three months before the scientist was indicted.

Early on, our reporting turned up cautions that might have led us to that perspective sooner. For example, the March 6 article noted, deep in the text, that the Justice Department prosecutors did not think they had enough evidence against the Los Alamos scientist to justify a wiretap on his telephone. At the time, the Justice Department refused to discuss its decision, but the fact that the evidence available to the F.B.I. could not overcome the relatively permissive standards for a wiretap in a case of such potential gravity should have been more prominent in the article and in our thinking.

Passages of some articles also posed a problem of tone. In place of a tone of journalistic detachment from our sources, we occasionally used language that adopted the sense of alarm that was contained in official reports and was being voiced to us by investigators, members of Congress and administration officials with knowledge of the case.

This happened even in an otherwise far-seeing article on June 14, 1999, that laid out -- a half year before the indictment -- the reasons the Justice Department might never be able to prove that Dr. Lee had spied for China. The article said Dr. Lee ''may be responsible for the most damaging espionage of the post-cold war era.'' Though it accurately attributed this characterization to ''officials and lawmakers, primarily Republicans,'' such remarks should have been, at a minimum, balanced with the more skeptical views of those who had doubts about the charges against Dr. Lee.

Nevertheless, far from stimulating a witch hunt, The Times had clearly shown before Dr. Lee was even charged that the case against him was circumstantial and therefore weak, and that there were numerous other potential sources for the design of the warhead.

There are articles we should have assigned but did not. We never prepared a full-scale profile of Dr. Lee, which might have humanized him and provided some balance.

Some other stories we wish we had assigned in those early months include a more thorough look at the political context of the Chinese weapons debate, in which Republicans were eager to score points against the White House on China; an examination of how Dr. Lee's handling of classified information compared with the usual practices in the laboratories; a closer look at Notra Trulock, the intelligence official at the Department of Energy who sounded some of the loudest alarms about Chinese espionage; and an exploration of the various suspects and leads that federal investigators passed up in favor of Dr. Lee.

In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later. Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.

An enormous amount remains unknown or disputed about the case of Dr. Lee and the larger issue of Chinese espionage, including why the scientist transferred classified computer code to an easily accessible computer and then tried to hide the fact (a development first reported in The Times), and how the government case evolved. Even the best investigative reporting is performed under deadline pressure, with the best assessment of information available at the time. We have dispatched a team of reporters, including the reporters who broke our first stories, to go back to the beginning of these controversies and do more reporting, drawing on sources and documents that were not previously available. Our coverage of this case is not over.