Lack of Evidence Led to Wider China Spy Inquiry

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/03/news/mn-18269
By Bob Drogin
October 03, 1999 in print edition A-34

The FBI decided to vastly expand its probe of alleged Chinese espionage after investigators determined that they had no evidence linking the chief suspect, former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, to the theft of nuclear weapons secrets, according to U.S. officials.

The FBI and Justice Department briefed Capitol Hill and the White House late last month on the revamped espionage inquiry, but haven’t publicly explained why they reversed course so sharply after nearly four years of targeting Lee, who has denied any wrongdoing.

Lee was alleged to have given Beijing highly classified design and engineering details about components of America’s most sophisticated thermonuclear warhead, the W-88. After the case became public last March, some counterintelligence officials, members of Congress and media accounts painted the shy, 60-year-old nuclear weapons expert as potentially one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.

Lee consistently denied being a spy, however, and the FBI now privately agrees.

“It seems abundantly clear that we can’t, from anything we have, conclude Wen Ho Lee disclosed the W-88 information,” said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Investigators are starting from scratch. They plan to screen hundreds of nuclear scientists, physicists, engineers, Navy personnel and others who helped design, build and maintain the W-88 nuclear warhead between 1984, when the weapon was first developed at Los Alamos, and 1995, when the theft was first confirmed in a Chinese military document.

The FBI also will examine other possible compromises of classified information that were uncovered during the numerous inquiries into the Los Alamos scandal by congressional committees, intelligence agencies and advisory boards last spring. “They may end up looking at a lot more than just the W-88,” said one U.S. official.

A team of Energy Department scientists, which helped the U.S. intelligence community form a damage assessment of the loss, will be reassembled to work with the FBI.

Lee was born in Taiwan, but became a naturalized American before joining the Los Alamos National Laboratory 20 years ago. He was fired from Los Alamos last March for security violations. His lawyer could not be reached Saturday.

Lee was initially targeted by the FBI in 1996 on the basis of an administrative inquiry by the Department of Energy, which owns the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The inquiry pinpointed Los Alamos as the only possible site of the leak and identified Lee as the most likely source.

But the FBI’s Albuquerque office recently discovered that numerous scientists and officials at Los Alamos had vehemently disagreed with the inquiry’s findings.