http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/us/politics/05richardson.html
WASHINGTON — Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for commerce secretary, withdrew from consideration for that job on Sunday, saying a pending investigation into whether his administration gave lucrative contracts to a political donor would have “forced an untenable delay” in his confirmation.
The president-elect and the governor, close friends as well as political allies, announced the withdrawal in joint statements. Mr. Richardson, one of the nation’s best-known Latino politicians, promised to stay on as governor and said his administration had “acted properly in all matters.” But he said he had concluded that the inquiry could last weeks or even months, drawing out his confirmation hearings and distracting the new administration as it grappled with the economic crisis.
Mr. Obama said he accepted “with deep regret” Mr. Richardson’s decision to bow out. People familiar with discussions between the two men said that while the president-elect did not press Mr. Richardson to step aside, neither did Mr. Obama try to talk him out of it.
The announcement, just days before the Senate is to begin confirmation hearings for some of Mr. Obama’s cabinet selections, was a setback for the president-elect, who has assembled his cabinet in near-record time. It raises questions about the thoroughness of Mr. Richardson’s vetting, deprives the Obama administration of a prominent Hispanic — Mr. Obama has, however, named two other Latinos, Representative Hilda L. Solis of California and Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, to cabinet posts — and leaves a hole in the new White House economics team at a critical juncture.
Obama officials could not say on Sunday how quickly the president-elect would move to fill the job, or who may be on his short list. Mr. Obama is hoping to persuade Congress to pass an ambitious economic stimulus plan that he can sign quickly after taking office, and he is set to meet with his economic advisers on Monday. The commerce secretary would play an integral role in that process, as Mr. Richardson himself noted on Sunday.
“Given the gravity of the economic situation the nation is facing,” the governor said, “I could not in good conscience ask the president-elect to delay for one day the important work that needs to be done.”
The investigation concerns CDR Financial Products Inc., a Beverly Hills, Calif., company that in 2004 was awarded two consulting contracts worth about $1.4 million to advise the State of New Mexico on a large bond issue for building infrastructure, one of Mr. Richardson’s initiatives. The company’s president, David Rubin, a major Democratic contributor, gave about $100,000 to two political action committees controlled by Mr. Richardson, as well as $10,000 to his re-election campaign in 2005, according to published reports.
The F.B.I. began examining the contracts last year; in August, the inquiry was reported in the New Mexico news media. But an Obama transition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the president-elect’s team, while aware that one of Mr. Richardson’s donors was being investigated, did not know that the inquiry extended to Mr. Richardson until after Mr. Obama announced the New Mexico governor as his commerce secretary choice in early December.
About two weeks after the announcement, newspapers reported that a federal grand jury was examining accusations that the Richardson administration had awarded the contracts because of the political contributions. Whether the Obama team learned of the grand jury inquiry through news reports, or perhaps from Mr. Richardson himself, was unclear on Sunday. Obama officials would not say.
But Robert Gibbs, the incoming White House press secretary, defended the vetting process. “The totality of our cabinet picks, it’s impressive and I think our vetters have done a good job,” he said.
Sunday’s announcement comes as Mr. Obama was still dealing with the uproar over another inquiry, this one into whether Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois had tried to sell Mr. Obama’s Senate seat. But while the president-elect has distanced himself from the Illinois governor, he praised Mr. Richardson on Sunday as “an outstanding public servant” who would have brought “great insights accumulated through an extraordinary career” to the Obama administration.
“It is a measure of his willingness to put the nation first that he has removed himself as a candidate for the cabinet in order to avoid any delay in filling this important economic post at this critical time,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Richardson and Mr. Obama spoke Friday, officials familiar with the conversation said, and Mr. Richardson informed the president-elect that he intended to withdraw his name from consideration. The Obama transition team had grown concerned that Mr. Richardson’s confirmation could be delayed because of the federal investigation, which would have kept Mr. Obama’s full economic team from being in place as the new president tried to jump start the economy.
Associates of Mr. Richardson said the governor was convinced that the investigation would clear him, and that ultimately he would be confirmed. But they said the inquiry was taking longer than he thought, and that he decided to drop out on his own.
Mr. Obama did not ask Mr. Richardson to step aside, associates close to both men said. But when Mr. Richardson offered to withdraw, the officials said, Mr. Obama simply accepted, without trying to persuade Mr. Richardson otherwise.
Mr. Richardson, whose mother is Mexican, has long been a fixture of Democratic politics and has deep experience in public life. He is known for his easy sense of humor — during the 2004 Democratic convention, he distributed jars of salsa with his picture on them — and remains popular in his home state. Prior to becoming governor, he served in Congress and in the Clinton administration as energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations. But after his own bid for the Democratic nomination for president failed last year, he made a public — and by his own account, painful — break with the Clintons to endorse Mr. Obama; in return, some speculated he might be selected for a top-tier cabinet position, like secretary of state.
Instead, Mr. Obama rewarded him with the commerce secretary’s job; at the press conference announcing the appointment, the president-elect dismissed the notion that the post was a “consolation prize,” adding, “I think the notion that somehow commerce secretary is not going to be central to everything we do is fundamentally mistaken.”
Jeff Zeleny and Adam Nagourney contributed reporting.
Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts
Monday, January 5, 2009
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Sen Byrd on Richardson
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/us/politics/04richardson.html
His tenure at the Energy Department was marred by reports of nuclear security lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory. At one contentious hearing, Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, told him that he would never again “receive the support of the Senate of the United States for any office to which you might be appointed.”
His tenure at the Energy Department was marred by reports of nuclear security lapses at Los Alamos National Laboratory. At one contentious hearing, Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, told him that he would never again “receive the support of the Senate of the United States for any office to which you might be appointed.”
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
His Baggages
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/us/politics/18webrichardson.html
New York Times, 11/18/2008
He has no landmark achievement as a diplomat and has said, in hindsight, that he was wrong on several important issues: the first invasion of Iraq (which he opposed), the second (which he supported), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (which he helped pass). In the late 1990s, he also was secretary of the Department of Energy during the disastrous security breeches at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the widely criticized prosecution of scientist Wen Ho Lee.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
NY Times 02/03/2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/us/politics/23richardson.html?pagewanted=2
Poor Judgment and Bad Management
Although not laid at Mr. Richardson’s door, corruption scandals have also tarnished the state —
“pay to play,” in the words of critics. Some of Mr. Richardson’s embarrassing appointees stepped down, including a former state police officer named to a magistrate judgeship who resigned after being caught ordering the release of a friend jailed on a drunken-driving charge.
“One bad judge out of 56,” Mr. Richardson said, acknowledging “our vetting procedures are not the most extensive.”
____________________
Sexual Harassment
In late 2005, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish told The Albuquerque Journal that Mr. Richardson
“pokes me” when they sit together, calling that more annoying and likely to be misconstrued than improper.
“He pinches my neck,” Ms. Denish said. “He touches my hip, my thigh, sort of the side of my leg.”
The governor waved that off, telling The Journal: “I tease Diane. I touch guys. It’s my way of lessening tension.”
Although not laid at Mr. Richardson’s door, corruption scandals have also tarnished the state —
“pay to play,” in the words of critics. Some of Mr. Richardson’s embarrassing appointees stepped down, including a former state police officer named to a magistrate judgeship who resigned after being caught ordering the release of a friend jailed on a drunken-driving charge.
“One bad judge out of 56,” Mr. Richardson said, acknowledging “our vetting procedures are not the most extensive.”
____________________
- Richardson opposed the 1st Gulf War but endorsed W's invasion of Iraq, "I think there is such intensive pressure on both sides that only one more deadline, only one more chance for Saddam Hussein is going to be allowable. So I think the administration is wise in pursuing this course that says OK, total disarmament in two weeks and that's it."
- He told a gay-rights forum, Logo, that homosexuality is a choice.
- He said Justice Bryon White who voted against Roe v Wade was his model Supreme Court justice. It appears that Justice White voted against Miranda rights and wrote the majority opinion on Bowers v Hardwick, banning homosexual sodomy, see comments section at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/27/113257/730
- He was reluctant to fire Alberto Gonzales because he is a fellow Hispanic.
- His stance on illegal immigration is troublesome to many--he doesn't want to build a wall on the Mexican border, he wants to legalized all illegal immigrants in this country. In http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/us/politics/24richardson.html,
- Richardson initially said he would support the immigration compromise announced earlier this week. But later on, he said that after reading it in detail, he had decided to oppose it, saying the measure placed too great a burden on immigrants — tearing apart families that wanted to settle in the United States, creating a permanent tier of second-class immigrant workers and financing a border fence that Mr. Richardson had long opposed.
- He said during the campaign, "Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary."
Monday, October 23, 2000
How the 'New York Times' Convicted Wen Ho Lee
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001023/scheer/print
By Robert Scheer
For me the most persuasive evidence that Wen Ho Lee was innocent of the wild spying charges lodged against him came hours after his release from jail, when he returned to his standard-issue tract house in the White Rock suburb of Los Alamos, New Mexico: It was the sight of all those neighbors and co-workers from the lab bringing over plates of potato salad and cold cuts to celebrate his freedom. These were the people who knew Lee and the inner workings of the weapons lab, and they had been there to support him throughout his ordeal, even when established human rights and civil libertarian groups had remained silent. His next-door neighbors, the Marshalls, both hold the highest security ratings; they had offered to pledge their house as bail.
Lee was a product of the lab's culture, and whatever his motive in downloading certain files, his co-workers knew that no one had ever been criminally prosecuted for such an act. It was not all that unusual for intellectually distracted scientists like Lee, who managed to begin writing a mathematics book while in solitary confinement, to be careless with the data that formed the clay they played with daily. Above all, they knew in their bones that Wen Ho Lee, their neighbor, was no spy.
Still, I was apprehensive at being introduced to Lee that evening. For one thing, there is always trepidation at finally meeting a person about whom one has written so much. In Lee's case, I'd done more than a dozen Op-Ed columns for the Los Angeles Times, being the first to challenge a spy story driven by the New York Times. Also, Lee had been through a prison nightmare, and I expected to find a broken man. Instead, I found a person still in shock but grateful, with a smile that suggested he was very much at peace with himself.
Yet Lee's ordeal had been real, and while that evening was not the time for him to go into it, he made it clear that it had been a harrowing experience. Imagine a man who has never been in trouble with the law suddenly detained in a tiny cell without a window or even bars to look through. "There was a peephole in the door, and there was someone who sat outside, and who was watching him and taking notes," recalls his Albuquerque attorney, Nancy Hollander, who visited him often in jail. "And you have to understand: Not only are they watching him eat and sleep, they're watching him use the toilet." His cell would change, but never the twenty-four-hour-a-day light or the shackles--hands and feet linked to a chain around his waist--that he wore during his one hour of permitted exercise, on the occasions he got to talk with his lawyers and during brief visits with his wife.
Hollander has spent decades representing the most hardened of criminals, but still, she says, she was shocked: "I've had murder clients, drug clients, clients accused of taking millions of dollars from the federal government, you name it, but I've never had a client treated like Wen Ho Lee."
A recent Washington Post article quotes one government insider as expressing the opinion that the decision to hold Lee under these circumstances was an attempt to break him. They weren't able to, and instead, it was the FBI and the US Attorney General who had to back down because, as the Post reported, they were convinced that the admitted deceptions in the case, including those used to make the case against bail, had turned Judge James Parker against them. Parker had gone along with the prosecutors for nine months, but eventually he was revolted by these deceptions. He saved the day, first by ordering that the government turn over evidence of racial profiling in targeting Lee, as well as potentially incriminating documents regarding the FBI's behavior; and second, by ordering Lee released on bail. In the end, Judge Parker made a broken judicial system work and sternly condemned those who had done it so much damage.
I: Here Comes the Judge
What a moment it was to sit in the Federal District Court in Albuquerque on September 13 and hear Judge Parker, a conservative Reagan appointee, say: "I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner [in which] you were held in custody by the executive branch." Parker described Lee's imprisonment to a hushed courtroom as having been under "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions," and he said that he was "sad and troubled because I do not know the real reasons why the executive branch has done all of this."
What is known is that the government's case against Lee crumbled, with the government agreeing to dismiss fifty-eight of fifty-nine counts that had been lodged against Lee, who faced life imprisonment for intending to betray the national security of the United States. Suddenly the government, which only a week before had said Lee's release could risk "hundreds of millions of lives," was willing to let him go for time served. As for Lee, the nine months of harsh imprisonment had taken their toll, and he was willing to plead guilty to a single felony count of mishandling classified data--a charge that defense lawyers might have been willing to settle on even before there was an indictment.
Parker went on to tongue-lash "the top decision makers in the executive branch," who, he said, "have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it."
I filed out of the courtroom with my media colleagues, who spoke of their eyes having welled up with tears at the judge's remarks but of feeling proud that the system had worked once again. As the judge had said, "The executive branch has enormous power, the abuse of which can be devastating to our citizens," and in this case it had been checked. That's how the story got reported.
But once I was outside in the bright heat of an early desert afternoon, it seemed outrageous that yet again the media were leaving out their own responsibility in the creation of this wicked tale. The torment of Wen Ho Lee did not begin in December of 1999, with his indictment and arrest, but rather the previous March, when the New York Times, the most respected media outlet in the country, laid out a tale of atomic spying that has been proved wrong on virtually every count, but that launched a witch hunt ending in Lee's incarceration [see Bill Mesler, "The Spy Who Wasn't," August 9/16, 1999].
There are too many low points in the history of this nation's journalism to permit one easily to employ superlatives about the Times's startling transgression. I don't know if it makes the all-time Top Ten list, but the trial and conviction of Lee in the pages of the Times--both in its news columns and on its editorial page--is certainly right up there. A leak from a Congressional committee chaired by California Republican Christopher Cox regarding the alleged theft of secrets about the W-88 nuclear warhead (a sophisticated, miniaturized bomb that fits on a MIRVed launcher) by Chinese spies--a nonevent that was never substantiated and was scoffed at by most experts--along with the contentions of a controversial and much-disputed source, was used by the newspaper to smear a Taiwan-born US citizen singled out for vilification simply because of his ethnic background.
Of course, the Times couldn't have done it alone. But what makes this primarily a media story is that without the backing of the Times, whose stories set the tone for TV journalism, not much of anything would have happened. If properly vetted through the normal channels, the case, based largely on the zealous pursuit of Lee by one disgruntled former government security sleuth and amplified by the ambitions of a right-wing Congressman, would have come to naught. Instead, the Clinton Administration, recovering from impeachment and mired in a campaign finance scandal linked to Asian funds--including the charge that Beijing had secretly funneled money to the Democrats--panicked. Cowed by its fear that the China issue could be used effectively against Gore in the election, the Administration was willing to play along, and it did so through its Energy and Justice departments.
Lee sat in jail for one reason and one reason only: The Administration wanted to prove to its critics that it was tough on Chinese spying, whether or not that spying existed and whether or not it had anything to do with Wen Ho Lee. In the end, the spy hysteria whipped up by the Cox committee and the Times has taken a terrible toll on the life of one scientist and has cast suspicion over the entire community of Asian-American scientists, many of whom are now boycotting employment in the nuclear weapons labs.
The assumption that Lee, whose roots are in Taiwan and who has no relatives on the mainland, would be the prime target of an investigation simply because of his skin color and ethnic identity has sent shock waves through the Asian-American community. The leading support for Lee has come from the Committee of 100, made up of highly influential Chinese-Americans alarmed that their entire community has been scapegoated as disloyal.
All the more bizarre, this resurfacing of cold war imagery occurred at a time when China was moving as fast as a nation possibly can down what Mao Zedong would have condemned as the capitalist road. The same week Wen Ho Lee was released, Congress approved permanent normal trade relations with China with overwhelming bipartisan support. Yet there were Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh still claiming that Lee was a great risk to the nation.
While Reno and Freeh defended their handling of the case before Congress, the New York Times, in one of the most contorted editors' notes in that paper's history, and on its editorial page two days later, defended its journalism in the Lee case while offering up some faint notes of apology. But like the ravings of an addict promising to abstain, the Times again committed egregious distortions in the very editors' note intended to set the record straight. For one thing, the September 26 note implied that Lee might have had something to do with espionage and also with the theft of information critical to building the W-88 warhead, even though he was never charged with either offense.
Most unbelievable was one sentence that was so ingenuously dishonest as to be worthy of the most effective editorialist for Pravda in the bad old days. The Times editors wrote that at the time of the newspaper's first story, "Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test; FBI investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets." The fact is that in December of 1998, three months before the Times's first story ran, Lee had passed an Energy Department lie-detector test with flying colors. What the note would seem to indicate is that the Times still could not acknowledge a single piece of evidence pointing to Lee's innocence.
In its very long editorial admitting to some errors, most important is the admission that "we find that we too quickly accepted the government's theory that espionage was the main reason for Chinese nuclear advances and its view that Dr. Lee had been properly singled out as the prime suspect." But then the editorial quickly segues into a non-sequitur argument about the need for increased security at the weapons labs. Sure, and it could probably save on its electricity bill with more prudent management as well. What the Times editorial never explains is why the paper uncritically accepted the leaks from the Cox committee as truth. Why did the newspaper ignore the massive amount of evidence in the scientific and intelligence commu- nity suggesting that Chinese nuclear weapons gains were very slight and could easily have been the product of the country's own internal research, and that in any case, China is a full four decades behind the United States and no threat in any way as a nuclear power? To this day the Times editorial page will not concede that the big scare of a growing Chinese nuclear power, which fueled the hunt for a spy, is bogus.
II: The Times Gets Its Man
The media nightmare for Lee began with a 4,000-word front-page Times story on March 6, 1999, under the shocking headline: "Breach at Los Alamos: A special report; China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, US Aides Say." It was written by two of the newspaper's more aggressive investigative reporters: Jeff Gerth, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting the alleged transfer of satellite technology to China (a controversial report that triggered the Cox investigation), and James Risen. The opening paragraph--never mind that it was false--stated, "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." This "breakthrough," the story claimed--also incorrectly--"was accelerated by the theft of American nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico." The story noted dramatically, "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."
The reporters relied heavily on unnamed sources and one named source, Notra Trulock, the former Energy Department Director of Intelligence, who had been involved in the Wen Ho Lee investigation. They credited Trulock with being the "star witness" at the Cox Congressional hearings. The Times described him as a "whistleblower" ignored by a Clinton Administration devoted to maintaining good ties with Beijing at any cost. Trulock's secret testimony, leaked to the Times reporters, was taken as unquestioned gospel and formed the basis of the newspaper's claim that China had stolen the secrets for the advanced W-88 warhead, an incident that the Times charged had led to what "senior intelligence officials regarded...as one of the most damaging spy cases in recent history." A simple background check on Trulock might have raised red flags about his motives in the case and his credibility as a source, but that would be revealed only later, by other reporters.
Gerth and Risen went on to chastise the Administration for not properly addressing what they alleged was a most egregious security leak: "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." The Times bemoaned the fact that after three years of investigation "no arrests have been made" and that the key suspect had been allowed to keep his high security clearance for more than a year after he'd been tagged a spy. They went on to identify the likely culprit, although withholding his name: "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."
Two days later, that suspect was revealed to be Wen Ho Lee. Lee was abruptly fired from his job at Los Alamos after three days of grueling questioning.
Because several errors were so widely reported in the media and will haunt Lee even though the government's case crumbled, it is important to dissect each of them. To begin with, there is no conclusive evidence that China stole the secrets to the W-88 warhead, and the consensus of experts in the field is that spying, if it occurred, was not decisive to China's still minuscule and primitive nuclear program. That was the conclusion of a June 1999 report by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, headed by former Republican Senator Warren Rudman. The board report concluded: "This information had been widely available within the U.S. nuclear weapons community, including the weapons labs, other parts of D.O.E., the Department of Defense, and private contractors, for more than a decade. For example, key technical information concerning the W-88 warhead had been available to numerous U.S. government and military entities since at least 1983 and could well have come from many organizations other than the weapons labs."
This was also the consensus in another Times cover story, reported five months after the original Gerth/Risen article, by William Broad, the paper's leading expert on nuclear weapons, which shredded the assumptions of the earlier Gerth/Risen stories. Broad interviewed Robert Vrooman, who was head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos during the investigation of Lee, who said a description of the W-88 had been widely disseminated. "A rather detailed description of the W-88 had a distribution of 548 copies," he said, adding, "Please note that I am referring to 548 mailing addresses, not people."
Even the original Gerth/Risen report stated that the CIA did not accept Trulock's dire assessment: "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." But that assessment was treated in the story as a minor caveat.
Trulock's sensational charges were based on what the Times story termed "an intelligence windfall from Beijing." In June of 1995, a Chinese official gave CIA analysts a document that, according to the Times, "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." And, of course, that is where Lee worked.
What the Times reporters either did not know or care to mention was that the CIA had quickly concluded that the Chinese official was a double agent still working for Beijing, and that the document had been planted for some devious purpose such as to impress Taiwan that Beijing might modernize its nuclear force. It also turned out that while the document was an authentic duplication of some design calculations, it contained several signature errors that had been made in the weapons design process after the W-88 had left Los Alamos and was being worked on at Lockheed Martin and at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Lee had no connection with that document, and as a result of that discovery and the fact that there was not a scintilla of any other evidence linking Lee with the theft of W-88 warhead secrets, at the time of his indictment in December of 1999 Lee was no longer a target of an investigation concerning the W-88. So much for the main evidence.
The rest of the Times's original indictment against Lee was at best circumstantial and again does not withstand serious scrutiny. First among those distortions was the suggestion that Lee had failed a lie-detector test. As the Times's original account put it, "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 subject was found to be deceptive."
As noted, Lee, willingly and without legal advice, took that polygraph--ordered by an Administration under pressure from the Cox committee to do something about alleged Chinese spying--on December 23, 1998. The test asked four basic questions: "Have you ever committed espionage against the United States? Have you ever provided any classified weapons data to any unauthorized person? Have you had any contact with anyone to commit espionage against the United States? Have you ever had personal contact with anyone you know who has committed espionage against the United States?"
Lee's answer to all four questions was a definitive "No," and the polygraph expert conducting the test concluded, "I am of the opinion [that] this person was not deceptive when answering the relevant questions pertaining to involvement in espionage, unauthorized disclosure of classified information and unauthorized foreign contacts." The manager of the polygraph test center, under contract to the Energy Department, also reviewed the result and stated that his judgments "concur with the Examiner that upon completion of testing the Examinee was not deceptive when answering the relevant questions."
According to CBS News, which later looked into the matter: "The polygraph results were so convincing and unequivocal, that sources say the deputy director of the Los Alamos lab issued an apology to Lee, and work began to get him reinstated in the X-division. Furthermore, sources confirm to CBS News that the local Albuquerque FBI office sent a memo to headquarters in Washington saying it appeared that Lee was not their spy."
Yet when the results of the polygraph test arrived in the FBI's Washington headquarters, those same results were reinterpreted to conclude that Lee had not passed. CBS raised the question of how the very same polygraph charts could be open to such contrary interpretation with Richard Keifer, chairman of the American Polygraph Association, who is a former FBI agent who ran the agency's polygraph program. According to CBS News: "We asked Keifer to look at Lee's polygraph scores. He said the scores are 'crystal clear.' In fact, Keifer says, in all his years as a polygrapher, he had never been able to score anyone so high on the non-deceptive scale. He was at a loss to find any explanation for how the FBI could deem the polygraph scores as 'failing.'"
A second test, in February of 1999, in which Lee later said he had been asked only one question, has never been made available to independent experts. According to the CBS report: "The FBI then did its own testing of Lee, and again claimed that he failed. Yet sources say the FBI didn't interrogate Lee at this time, or even tell him he had failed the polygraph--an odd deviation from procedure for agents who are taught to immediately question anyone who is deceptive in a polygraph."
What the CBS story suggested was that the FBI, under pressure from the Administration and/or Congress, was doing all it could to find someone to blame for some breach of security and that Wen Ho Lee, one of the many thousands with access to data concerning the W-88, was singled out as the target of opportunity.
The New York Times had originally planned to run its first story on March 5, but--the newspaper's executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld, later admitted to the Washington Post--at the request of the FBI, it held off publication for a day. The FBI took advantage of that delay to grill Lee yet again. After publication of the Times story, the FBI conducted another vicious, baiting interview of Lee, which stands as a classic of intimidation. During that interview, two FBI special agents--Carol Covert and John Hudenko--told Lee repeatedly that he had failed both the December polygraph and the February test.
Some excerpts from that session:
FBI: You're never going to pass a polygraph. And you're never going to have a clearance. And you're not going to have a job. And if you get arrested you're not going to have a retirement...if I don't have something that I can tell Washington as to why you're failing those polygraphs, I can't do a thing.
Lee: Well, I understand.
FBI: I can't get you your job. I can't do anything for you, Wen Ho. I can't stop the newspapers from knocking on your door. I can't stop the newspapers from calling your son. I can't stop the people from polygraphing your wife. I can't stop somebody from coming and knocking on your door and putting handcuffs on you....
Lee: ...I don't know how to handle this case. I'm an honest person and I'm telling you the truth and you don't believe it. I, that's it....
FBI: Do you want to go down in history? Whether you're professing your innocence like the Rosenbergs to the day that they take you to the electric chair?...
Lee: I believe [God] will make the final judgment for my case.
CBS carried that exchange, which is a part of the public record, while the New York Times, which did so much to raise the specter of espionage and first mentioned the Rosenberg precedent, ignored it. Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin later wrote that agent Covert, who had been asked to take a crash course in hostile interviews before meeting with Lee, "was so upset after conducting the interview that she took three months' sick leave and transferred out of the Santa Fe office."
The Times story contained other half-truths, omissions and falsehoods that helped construct a case against Lee. For example, it erroneously reported that "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." He didn't: The $700 withdrawal was used to permit his daughter, Alberta, to take a tourist trip to the nearby territories.
Some investigators. Lee's trips to China were made at the suggestion of his superiors at the Los Alamos laboratory, to whom he gave a full report upon his return.
Fortunately, somewhere between the Times attack on Lee and the government's move to indict him, Lee obtained highly competent legal counsel. Soon after the horrendous March 7 interview with the FBI, in which he was threatened with death in the electric chair, Alberta contacted a friend who had gone to Columbia Law School. As a result of that contact, Lee obtained the services of a brilliant former assistant US Attorney, 37-year-old Mark Holscher, who had become a partner in the old-line Los Angeles law firm of O'Melveny & Myers, which agreed to take the case on a pro bono basis with Holscher's bulldog-tough associate Richard Myers II. At the same time, Brian Sun, another former prosecutor with an equally impressive reputation, agreed to represent the family, also pro bono. Sun's contacts in the Asian-American community elicited most of the financial support that was to help Lee with the cost of investigators and other research. It also led to the hiring of an Albuquerque attorney, John Cline, who had extensive experience in national security cases, including a stint as Oliver North's attorney, and Cline's partner, Nancy Hollander, a highly regarded trial lawyer.
The defense team was able to explore the issue of racial profiling and unearthed evidence that it had dominated the hunt for Lee. Indeed, perhaps the most compelling reason for the plea bargain was that the judge approved a defense request by ordering the government to turn over thousands of pages of documents relating to that matter. The material was due to be handed over to the judge days after the plea bargain was accepted.
Gerth and Risen would have done well to investigate their "star witness," Trulock, the disenchanted Energy Department "whistleblower" who has tracked Lee for four years. The Times presented Trulock as a neutral observer, which was denied by other security experts, who claimed he had been building a case against Lee and was hostile to those who did not view the case his way.
Affidavits filed with the court at Lee's last bail hearing, just before the prosecution's sudden end, are devastating. Vrooman, the former head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos, declared under oath that "it is my opinion that the failure to look at the rest of the population [people with access to the same secret data as Lee] is because Lee is ethnic Chinese." Vrooman added that although there was a list of non-Chinese people with access, "Mr. Trulock made clear that Dr. Lee was his primary suspect." In a declaration dated June 22, 2000, Vrooman said, "The racial issue surfaced explicitly in comments made by Notra Trulock, the head of DOE's Office of Counterintelligence, who told me on November 20, 1996 that 'ethnic Chinese' should not be allowed to work on classified projects, including nuclear weapons."
Another devastating affidavit was filed under oath by Charles Washington, former acting director of counterintelligence at the Energy Department and currently a senior policy analyst at the DOE, who stated, "Based on my experience and my personal knowledge, I believe that Mr. Trulock improperly targeted Dr. Lee due to Dr. Lee's race and national origin." Washington, a decorated Vietnam veteran with extensive military intelligence experience, concludes:
According to the Los Angeles Times, Washington said Trulock "spat on me." Trulock is now under investigation by the FBI for allegedly mishandling classified material. Despite all the criticism of Trulock, the New York Times's Risen continued to write sympathetically about him and is still trusted by the paper to cover the Senate hearings on the Lee case objectively.
III: The Charges and What Followed
While it was a simple matter to fire Lee, it was altogether more difficult to charge him with espionage or any betrayal of US secrets, since there was absolutely no evidence. Lee had to be charged with something, but what? Once again, in an April 28, 1999, story, Gerth and Risen came through with the charge--again based on leaks from the ongoing investigation--that Lee had improperly downloaded computer files containing nuclear codes. This time their lead was even more frightening than the one in the first story: "A scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred huge amounts of secret data from a computer system at a government laboratory, compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal, government and lab officials say."
In fact, the material that Gerth and Risen referred to as "secret data" was not classified as secret when Lee downloaded it; rather, it carried the low-level designation "protect as restricted data" (PARD), which meant it could be sent to colleagues through registered US mail. Some of the material was reclassified as "secret" after Lee's firing, but never as "top secret." As to "compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal," that charge was dismissed as absurd by top weapons experts, who provided affidavits to Lee's defense attorneys. Former Los Alamos director Dr. Harold Agnew, a top adviser on nuclear weapons to five Presidents, testified that "if the People's Republic of China had already obtained these codes, or were to obtain these codes, it would have little or no effect whatsoever on today's nuclear balance."
When the government finally got around to arresting Lee, in December of 1999, it charged him only with the improper handling of files--and stretched to include the claim that the mishandling had been done "with the intent to injure the United States" and "secure an advantage to a foreign nation." But the indictment made no reference to the theft of the W-88 warhead data, which had led to his excoriation in the Times, and the prosecutors told the court they did not plan to make the case that Lee ever actually passed any secrets to a person or nation. (By contrast, former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, who downloaded some of the nation's top secrets to his home computer, has not yet been charged with any crime and remains a free man.)
For nine months after his arrest, Lee remained in prison without bail, while his attorneys mounted an aggressive effort to disprove the government's case against him. Finally, in August, after the lead FBI agent, Robert Messemer, admitted he'd misled the judge on several topics--including the claim that Lee had lied to a colleague to gain access to his computer--and witnesses came forward to say that much of the allegedly secret material was in the public domain, the judge agreed to bail for Lee.
IV: Conclusion
As the government's case came apart at the seams, more voices were raised in opposition, including The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Federation of American Scientists. Just before Lee's release, three of the nation's four scientific academies, endowed by Congress, demanded that Lee be given bail. That call even came to be echoed by the New York Times in a strong editorial, which noted that the judge had been lied to by the FBI on key aspects of the case in rendering his initial ruling denying Lee bail.
Judge Parker's decision to grant bail, which turned out to be moot because of the plea bargain in the case, was accompanied by a seventeen-page document that demolished key aspects of the government's case. As New York Times reporter James Sterngold summarized Parker's view: "The opinion is important in part because it casts deep doubts about many of the government's assertions about Dr. Lee's supposed deceptiveness and the value of the secrets he is accused of downloading, issues at the heart of the prosecution's case." And at the heart of the original New York Times reporting, one might add, not to take anything away from Sterngold's stellar reporting once he was assigned to the story.
Parker's words are worth quoting because they cut through all the hysteria about the losses to the US nuclear arsenal, which he himself had accepted in originally denying Lee's bail request. He cited, with apparent agreement, one top weapons expert who referred to the government's original claim that Lee had downloaded the "crown jewels" of America's nuclear program as "unbridled exaggeration."
On the matter of motive, the judge pointed out that the government had shifted its case from the claim that Lee was a potential, if not an actual, spy out to hurt the country's national security to the lame argument that he might have been attempting to burnish his credentials for future civilian employment in light of threatened massive layoffs at Los Alamos.
I have always believed this to be the most likely explanation for Lee's actions. During years of covering the labs for the Los Angeles Times, I frequently encountered complaints from scientists working there that they paid too heavy a professional price for not being able to share their work for public peer review, which is the basis of advancement in the academic world. The Los Alamos and Livermore labs are administered by the University of California, and most of the scientists are regarded as university faculty, but because of the secrecy requirements, they are forced to keep their best work hidden. Most of the time, that work is unnecessarily classified, and scientists must engage in heroic efforts to get it declassified for publication. Ironically, that is Trulock's problem right now, as he seeks to publish his own account of this escapade.
The government's case boiled down to nothing more than the possibility that Wen Ho Lee was attempting to gather evidence of his work in the hopes of securing employment at research institutes in non-Communist countries such as Germany and Switzerland. Even that claim proved to be false, however, when an FBI witness testified that there is no evidence that Lee mailed any such material or that any institute ever received it. Even if Lee had sought to use the data for that purpose, he might have intended to have it declassified first, before sending it out. But in any case, as Judge Parker stated, "enhancing one's résumé is less sinister than the treacherous motive the government, at least by implication, ascribed to Dr. Lee at the end of last year," when bail was denied.
From the crown jewels to an enhanced résumé. Quite a shift. None of this would have happened had the Times not been willing to broadcast leaks fed to its reporters by federal and Congressional investigators with a political agenda. Whether the goal was to nail Clinton on the campaign contributions issue or to revive the cold war with China, none of this had to do with the real concerns of national security.
Whatever Lee's transgressions, they do not involve issues of spying but only sloppiness in handling data. But to equate sloppiness with spying and to incarcerate a man for nine months under abysmal conditions in the hope that he will confess to something truly subversive is a clear violation of the standard of due process on which this country prides itself and which it seeks to export.
If this had happened in another country, there would have been a great outcry from human rights circles. But only late in the day did leading scientific organizations speak up, while human rights organizations failed to show they cared one whit about what has been a modern Dreyfus case. It is a sad confirmation of the hold of national security hysteria even now that so much dangerous mischief could have continued for so long, more or less unchallenged, by those who should know better.
As for Wen Ho Lee, the scientist came away thankful for a legal system in which the damage to him was limited by an ultimately courageous judge and a hopelessly bungled government case. But no one who cares about freedom of the individual in the face of abusive government power should ever forget how arrogant the FBI can be when backed by the shoddy reporting of this nation's premier newspaper. This was chillingly demonstrated on March 7, 1999, when Lee's FBI interrogators brandished the previous day's New York Times story as a weapon to threaten him:
FBI: Do you think that the press prints everything that's true? Do you think that everything in this article is true?
Lee: I don't think [so].
FBI: The press doesn't care.
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About Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve) and Playing President (Akashic Books). He is author, with Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press.) His weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in the San Francisco Chronicle. more...
By Robert Scheer
For me the most persuasive evidence that Wen Ho Lee was innocent of the wild spying charges lodged against him came hours after his release from jail, when he returned to his standard-issue tract house in the White Rock suburb of Los Alamos, New Mexico: It was the sight of all those neighbors and co-workers from the lab bringing over plates of potato salad and cold cuts to celebrate his freedom. These were the people who knew Lee and the inner workings of the weapons lab, and they had been there to support him throughout his ordeal, even when established human rights and civil libertarian groups had remained silent. His next-door neighbors, the Marshalls, both hold the highest security ratings; they had offered to pledge their house as bail.
Lee was a product of the lab's culture, and whatever his motive in downloading certain files, his co-workers knew that no one had ever been criminally prosecuted for such an act. It was not all that unusual for intellectually distracted scientists like Lee, who managed to begin writing a mathematics book while in solitary confinement, to be careless with the data that formed the clay they played with daily. Above all, they knew in their bones that Wen Ho Lee, their neighbor, was no spy.
Still, I was apprehensive at being introduced to Lee that evening. For one thing, there is always trepidation at finally meeting a person about whom one has written so much. In Lee's case, I'd done more than a dozen Op-Ed columns for the Los Angeles Times, being the first to challenge a spy story driven by the New York Times. Also, Lee had been through a prison nightmare, and I expected to find a broken man. Instead, I found a person still in shock but grateful, with a smile that suggested he was very much at peace with himself.
Yet Lee's ordeal had been real, and while that evening was not the time for him to go into it, he made it clear that it had been a harrowing experience. Imagine a man who has never been in trouble with the law suddenly detained in a tiny cell without a window or even bars to look through. "There was a peephole in the door, and there was someone who sat outside, and who was watching him and taking notes," recalls his Albuquerque attorney, Nancy Hollander, who visited him often in jail. "And you have to understand: Not only are they watching him eat and sleep, they're watching him use the toilet." His cell would change, but never the twenty-four-hour-a-day light or the shackles--hands and feet linked to a chain around his waist--that he wore during his one hour of permitted exercise, on the occasions he got to talk with his lawyers and during brief visits with his wife.
Hollander has spent decades representing the most hardened of criminals, but still, she says, she was shocked: "I've had murder clients, drug clients, clients accused of taking millions of dollars from the federal government, you name it, but I've never had a client treated like Wen Ho Lee."
A recent Washington Post article quotes one government insider as expressing the opinion that the decision to hold Lee under these circumstances was an attempt to break him. They weren't able to, and instead, it was the FBI and the US Attorney General who had to back down because, as the Post reported, they were convinced that the admitted deceptions in the case, including those used to make the case against bail, had turned Judge James Parker against them. Parker had gone along with the prosecutors for nine months, but eventually he was revolted by these deceptions. He saved the day, first by ordering that the government turn over evidence of racial profiling in targeting Lee, as well as potentially incriminating documents regarding the FBI's behavior; and second, by ordering Lee released on bail. In the end, Judge Parker made a broken judicial system work and sternly condemned those who had done it so much damage.
I: Here Comes the Judge
What a moment it was to sit in the Federal District Court in Albuquerque on September 13 and hear Judge Parker, a conservative Reagan appointee, say: "I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner [in which] you were held in custody by the executive branch." Parker described Lee's imprisonment to a hushed courtroom as having been under "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions," and he said that he was "sad and troubled because I do not know the real reasons why the executive branch has done all of this."
What is known is that the government's case against Lee crumbled, with the government agreeing to dismiss fifty-eight of fifty-nine counts that had been lodged against Lee, who faced life imprisonment for intending to betray the national security of the United States. Suddenly the government, which only a week before had said Lee's release could risk "hundreds of millions of lives," was willing to let him go for time served. As for Lee, the nine months of harsh imprisonment had taken their toll, and he was willing to plead guilty to a single felony count of mishandling classified data--a charge that defense lawyers might have been willing to settle on even before there was an indictment.
Parker went on to tongue-lash "the top decision makers in the executive branch," who, he said, "have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it."
I filed out of the courtroom with my media colleagues, who spoke of their eyes having welled up with tears at the judge's remarks but of feeling proud that the system had worked once again. As the judge had said, "The executive branch has enormous power, the abuse of which can be devastating to our citizens," and in this case it had been checked. That's how the story got reported.
But once I was outside in the bright heat of an early desert afternoon, it seemed outrageous that yet again the media were leaving out their own responsibility in the creation of this wicked tale. The torment of Wen Ho Lee did not begin in December of 1999, with his indictment and arrest, but rather the previous March, when the New York Times, the most respected media outlet in the country, laid out a tale of atomic spying that has been proved wrong on virtually every count, but that launched a witch hunt ending in Lee's incarceration [see Bill Mesler, "The Spy Who Wasn't," August 9/16, 1999].
There are too many low points in the history of this nation's journalism to permit one easily to employ superlatives about the Times's startling transgression. I don't know if it makes the all-time Top Ten list, but the trial and conviction of Lee in the pages of the Times--both in its news columns and on its editorial page--is certainly right up there. A leak from a Congressional committee chaired by California Republican Christopher Cox regarding the alleged theft of secrets about the W-88 nuclear warhead (a sophisticated, miniaturized bomb that fits on a MIRVed launcher) by Chinese spies--a nonevent that was never substantiated and was scoffed at by most experts--along with the contentions of a controversial and much-disputed source, was used by the newspaper to smear a Taiwan-born US citizen singled out for vilification simply because of his ethnic background.
Of course, the Times couldn't have done it alone. But what makes this primarily a media story is that without the backing of the Times, whose stories set the tone for TV journalism, not much of anything would have happened. If properly vetted through the normal channels, the case, based largely on the zealous pursuit of Lee by one disgruntled former government security sleuth and amplified by the ambitions of a right-wing Congressman, would have come to naught. Instead, the Clinton Administration, recovering from impeachment and mired in a campaign finance scandal linked to Asian funds--including the charge that Beijing had secretly funneled money to the Democrats--panicked. Cowed by its fear that the China issue could be used effectively against Gore in the election, the Administration was willing to play along, and it did so through its Energy and Justice departments.
Lee sat in jail for one reason and one reason only: The Administration wanted to prove to its critics that it was tough on Chinese spying, whether or not that spying existed and whether or not it had anything to do with Wen Ho Lee. In the end, the spy hysteria whipped up by the Cox committee and the Times has taken a terrible toll on the life of one scientist and has cast suspicion over the entire community of Asian-American scientists, many of whom are now boycotting employment in the nuclear weapons labs.
The assumption that Lee, whose roots are in Taiwan and who has no relatives on the mainland, would be the prime target of an investigation simply because of his skin color and ethnic identity has sent shock waves through the Asian-American community. The leading support for Lee has come from the Committee of 100, made up of highly influential Chinese-Americans alarmed that their entire community has been scapegoated as disloyal.
All the more bizarre, this resurfacing of cold war imagery occurred at a time when China was moving as fast as a nation possibly can down what Mao Zedong would have condemned as the capitalist road. The same week Wen Ho Lee was released, Congress approved permanent normal trade relations with China with overwhelming bipartisan support. Yet there were Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh still claiming that Lee was a great risk to the nation.
While Reno and Freeh defended their handling of the case before Congress, the New York Times, in one of the most contorted editors' notes in that paper's history, and on its editorial page two days later, defended its journalism in the Lee case while offering up some faint notes of apology. But like the ravings of an addict promising to abstain, the Times again committed egregious distortions in the very editors' note intended to set the record straight. For one thing, the September 26 note implied that Lee might have had something to do with espionage and also with the theft of information critical to building the W-88 warhead, even though he was never charged with either offense.
Most unbelievable was one sentence that was so ingenuously dishonest as to be worthy of the most effective editorialist for Pravda in the bad old days. The Times editors wrote that at the time of the newspaper's first story, "Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test; FBI investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets." The fact is that in December of 1998, three months before the Times's first story ran, Lee had passed an Energy Department lie-detector test with flying colors. What the note would seem to indicate is that the Times still could not acknowledge a single piece of evidence pointing to Lee's innocence.
In its very long editorial admitting to some errors, most important is the admission that "we find that we too quickly accepted the government's theory that espionage was the main reason for Chinese nuclear advances and its view that Dr. Lee had been properly singled out as the prime suspect." But then the editorial quickly segues into a non-sequitur argument about the need for increased security at the weapons labs. Sure, and it could probably save on its electricity bill with more prudent management as well. What the Times editorial never explains is why the paper uncritically accepted the leaks from the Cox committee as truth. Why did the newspaper ignore the massive amount of evidence in the scientific and intelligence commu- nity suggesting that Chinese nuclear weapons gains were very slight and could easily have been the product of the country's own internal research, and that in any case, China is a full four decades behind the United States and no threat in any way as a nuclear power? To this day the Times editorial page will not concede that the big scare of a growing Chinese nuclear power, which fueled the hunt for a spy, is bogus.
II: The Times Gets Its Man
The media nightmare for Lee began with a 4,000-word front-page Times story on March 6, 1999, under the shocking headline: "Breach at Los Alamos: A special report; China Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, US Aides Say." It was written by two of the newspaper's more aggressive investigative reporters: Jeff Gerth, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting the alleged transfer of satellite technology to China (a controversial report that triggered the Cox investigation), and James Risen. The opening paragraph--never mind that it was false--stated, "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." This "breakthrough," the story claimed--also incorrectly--"was accelerated by the theft of American nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico." The story noted dramatically, "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."
The reporters relied heavily on unnamed sources and one named source, Notra Trulock, the former Energy Department Director of Intelligence, who had been involved in the Wen Ho Lee investigation. They credited Trulock with being the "star witness" at the Cox Congressional hearings. The Times described him as a "whistleblower" ignored by a Clinton Administration devoted to maintaining good ties with Beijing at any cost. Trulock's secret testimony, leaked to the Times reporters, was taken as unquestioned gospel and formed the basis of the newspaper's claim that China had stolen the secrets for the advanced W-88 warhead, an incident that the Times charged had led to what "senior intelligence officials regarded...as one of the most damaging spy cases in recent history." A simple background check on Trulock might have raised red flags about his motives in the case and his credibility as a source, but that would be revealed only later, by other reporters.
Gerth and Risen went on to chastise the Administration for not properly addressing what they alleged was a most egregious security leak: "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." The Times bemoaned the fact that after three years of investigation "no arrests have been made" and that the key suspect had been allowed to keep his high security clearance for more than a year after he'd been tagged a spy. They went on to identify the likely culprit, although withholding his name: "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."
Two days later, that suspect was revealed to be Wen Ho Lee. Lee was abruptly fired from his job at Los Alamos after three days of grueling questioning.
Because several errors were so widely reported in the media and will haunt Lee even though the government's case crumbled, it is important to dissect each of them. To begin with, there is no conclusive evidence that China stole the secrets to the W-88 warhead, and the consensus of experts in the field is that spying, if it occurred, was not decisive to China's still minuscule and primitive nuclear program. That was the conclusion of a June 1999 report by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, headed by former Republican Senator Warren Rudman. The board report concluded: "This information had been widely available within the U.S. nuclear weapons community, including the weapons labs, other parts of D.O.E., the Department of Defense, and private contractors, for more than a decade. For example, key technical information concerning the W-88 warhead had been available to numerous U.S. government and military entities since at least 1983 and could well have come from many organizations other than the weapons labs."
This was also the consensus in another Times cover story, reported five months after the original Gerth/Risen article, by William Broad, the paper's leading expert on nuclear weapons, which shredded the assumptions of the earlier Gerth/Risen stories. Broad interviewed Robert Vrooman, who was head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos during the investigation of Lee, who said a description of the W-88 had been widely disseminated. "A rather detailed description of the W-88 had a distribution of 548 copies," he said, adding, "Please note that I am referring to 548 mailing addresses, not people."
Even the original Gerth/Risen report stated that the CIA did not accept Trulock's dire assessment: "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." But that assessment was treated in the story as a minor caveat.
Trulock's sensational charges were based on what the Times story termed "an intelligence windfall from Beijing." In June of 1995, a Chinese official gave CIA analysts a document that, according to the Times, "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." And, of course, that is where Lee worked.
What the Times reporters either did not know or care to mention was that the CIA had quickly concluded that the Chinese official was a double agent still working for Beijing, and that the document had been planted for some devious purpose such as to impress Taiwan that Beijing might modernize its nuclear force. It also turned out that while the document was an authentic duplication of some design calculations, it contained several signature errors that had been made in the weapons design process after the W-88 had left Los Alamos and was being worked on at Lockheed Martin and at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. Lee had no connection with that document, and as a result of that discovery and the fact that there was not a scintilla of any other evidence linking Lee with the theft of W-88 warhead secrets, at the time of his indictment in December of 1999 Lee was no longer a target of an investigation concerning the W-88. So much for the main evidence.
The rest of the Times's original indictment against Lee was at best circumstantial and again does not withstand serious scrutiny. First among those distortions was the suggestion that Lee had failed a lie-detector test. As the Times's original account put it, "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 subject was found to be deceptive."
As noted, Lee, willingly and without legal advice, took that polygraph--ordered by an Administration under pressure from the Cox committee to do something about alleged Chinese spying--on December 23, 1998. The test asked four basic questions: "Have you ever committed espionage against the United States? Have you ever provided any classified weapons data to any unauthorized person? Have you had any contact with anyone to commit espionage against the United States? Have you ever had personal contact with anyone you know who has committed espionage against the United States?"
Lee's answer to all four questions was a definitive "No," and the polygraph expert conducting the test concluded, "I am of the opinion [that] this person was not deceptive when answering the relevant questions pertaining to involvement in espionage, unauthorized disclosure of classified information and unauthorized foreign contacts." The manager of the polygraph test center, under contract to the Energy Department, also reviewed the result and stated that his judgments "concur with the Examiner that upon completion of testing the Examinee was not deceptive when answering the relevant questions."
According to CBS News, which later looked into the matter: "The polygraph results were so convincing and unequivocal, that sources say the deputy director of the Los Alamos lab issued an apology to Lee, and work began to get him reinstated in the X-division. Furthermore, sources confirm to CBS News that the local Albuquerque FBI office sent a memo to headquarters in Washington saying it appeared that Lee was not their spy."
Yet when the results of the polygraph test arrived in the FBI's Washington headquarters, those same results were reinterpreted to conclude that Lee had not passed. CBS raised the question of how the very same polygraph charts could be open to such contrary interpretation with Richard Keifer, chairman of the American Polygraph Association, who is a former FBI agent who ran the agency's polygraph program. According to CBS News: "We asked Keifer to look at Lee's polygraph scores. He said the scores are 'crystal clear.' In fact, Keifer says, in all his years as a polygrapher, he had never been able to score anyone so high on the non-deceptive scale. He was at a loss to find any explanation for how the FBI could deem the polygraph scores as 'failing.'"
A second test, in February of 1999, in which Lee later said he had been asked only one question, has never been made available to independent experts. According to the CBS report: "The FBI then did its own testing of Lee, and again claimed that he failed. Yet sources say the FBI didn't interrogate Lee at this time, or even tell him he had failed the polygraph--an odd deviation from procedure for agents who are taught to immediately question anyone who is deceptive in a polygraph."
What the CBS story suggested was that the FBI, under pressure from the Administration and/or Congress, was doing all it could to find someone to blame for some breach of security and that Wen Ho Lee, one of the many thousands with access to data concerning the W-88, was singled out as the target of opportunity.
The New York Times had originally planned to run its first story on March 5, but--the newspaper's executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld, later admitted to the Washington Post--at the request of the FBI, it held off publication for a day. The FBI took advantage of that delay to grill Lee yet again. After publication of the Times story, the FBI conducted another vicious, baiting interview of Lee, which stands as a classic of intimidation. During that interview, two FBI special agents--Carol Covert and John Hudenko--told Lee repeatedly that he had failed both the December polygraph and the February test.
Some excerpts from that session:
FBI: You're never going to pass a polygraph. And you're never going to have a clearance. And you're not going to have a job. And if you get arrested you're not going to have a retirement...if I don't have something that I can tell Washington as to why you're failing those polygraphs, I can't do a thing.
Lee: Well, I understand.
FBI: I can't get you your job. I can't do anything for you, Wen Ho. I can't stop the newspapers from knocking on your door. I can't stop the newspapers from calling your son. I can't stop the people from polygraphing your wife. I can't stop somebody from coming and knocking on your door and putting handcuffs on you....
Lee: ...I don't know how to handle this case. I'm an honest person and I'm telling you the truth and you don't believe it. I, that's it....
FBI: Do you want to go down in history? Whether you're professing your innocence like the Rosenbergs to the day that they take you to the electric chair?...
Lee: I believe [God] will make the final judgment for my case.
CBS carried that exchange, which is a part of the public record, while the New York Times, which did so much to raise the specter of espionage and first mentioned the Rosenberg precedent, ignored it. Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin later wrote that agent Covert, who had been asked to take a crash course in hostile interviews before meeting with Lee, "was so upset after conducting the interview that she took three months' sick leave and transferred out of the Santa Fe office."
The Times story contained other half-truths, omissions and falsehoods that helped construct a case against Lee. For example, it erroneously reported that "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." He didn't: The $700 withdrawal was used to permit his daughter, Alberta, to take a tourist trip to the nearby territories.
Some investigators. Lee's trips to China were made at the suggestion of his superiors at the Los Alamos laboratory, to whom he gave a full report upon his return.
Fortunately, somewhere between the Times attack on Lee and the government's move to indict him, Lee obtained highly competent legal counsel. Soon after the horrendous March 7 interview with the FBI, in which he was threatened with death in the electric chair, Alberta contacted a friend who had gone to Columbia Law School. As a result of that contact, Lee obtained the services of a brilliant former assistant US Attorney, 37-year-old Mark Holscher, who had become a partner in the old-line Los Angeles law firm of O'Melveny & Myers, which agreed to take the case on a pro bono basis with Holscher's bulldog-tough associate Richard Myers II. At the same time, Brian Sun, another former prosecutor with an equally impressive reputation, agreed to represent the family, also pro bono. Sun's contacts in the Asian-American community elicited most of the financial support that was to help Lee with the cost of investigators and other research. It also led to the hiring of an Albuquerque attorney, John Cline, who had extensive experience in national security cases, including a stint as Oliver North's attorney, and Cline's partner, Nancy Hollander, a highly regarded trial lawyer.
The defense team was able to explore the issue of racial profiling and unearthed evidence that it had dominated the hunt for Lee. Indeed, perhaps the most compelling reason for the plea bargain was that the judge approved a defense request by ordering the government to turn over thousands of pages of documents relating to that matter. The material was due to be handed over to the judge days after the plea bargain was accepted.
Gerth and Risen would have done well to investigate their "star witness," Trulock, the disenchanted Energy Department "whistleblower" who has tracked Lee for four years. The Times presented Trulock as a neutral observer, which was denied by other security experts, who claimed he had been building a case against Lee and was hostile to those who did not view the case his way.
Affidavits filed with the court at Lee's last bail hearing, just before the prosecution's sudden end, are devastating. Vrooman, the former head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos, declared under oath that "it is my opinion that the failure to look at the rest of the population [people with access to the same secret data as Lee] is because Lee is ethnic Chinese." Vrooman added that although there was a list of non-Chinese people with access, "Mr. Trulock made clear that Dr. Lee was his primary suspect." In a declaration dated June 22, 2000, Vrooman said, "The racial issue surfaced explicitly in comments made by Notra Trulock, the head of DOE's Office of Counterintelligence, who told me on November 20, 1996 that 'ethnic Chinese' should not be allowed to work on classified projects, including nuclear weapons."
Another devastating affidavit was filed under oath by Charles Washington, former acting director of counterintelligence at the Energy Department and currently a senior policy analyst at the DOE, who stated, "Based on my experience and my personal knowledge, I believe that Mr. Trulock improperly targeted Dr. Lee due to Dr. Lee's race and national origin." Washington, a decorated Vietnam veteran with extensive military intelligence experience, concludes:
Based upon my personal experience with Mr. Trulock, I strongly believe that he acts vindictively and opportunistically, that he improperly uses security issues to punish and discredit others, and that he has racist views towards minority groups. I am a black man of African-American origin, and I personally experienced his misconduct, and I know of other minorities who were victimized by Mr. Trulock. At one point I was forced to call outside police officers due to Mr. Trulock's abusive behavior, and I brought a lawsuit against the Department of Energy based on that incident, as well as other improper conduct by Mr. Trulock. That case was settled favorably to me by the Department of Energy this year with a pay raise, a cash award, restoration of leave, and other incentives.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Washington said Trulock "spat on me." Trulock is now under investigation by the FBI for allegedly mishandling classified material. Despite all the criticism of Trulock, the New York Times's Risen continued to write sympathetically about him and is still trusted by the paper to cover the Senate hearings on the Lee case objectively.
III: The Charges and What Followed
While it was a simple matter to fire Lee, it was altogether more difficult to charge him with espionage or any betrayal of US secrets, since there was absolutely no evidence. Lee had to be charged with something, but what? Once again, in an April 28, 1999, story, Gerth and Risen came through with the charge--again based on leaks from the ongoing investigation--that Lee had improperly downloaded computer files containing nuclear codes. This time their lead was even more frightening than the one in the first story: "A scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred huge amounts of secret data from a computer system at a government laboratory, compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal, government and lab officials say."
In fact, the material that Gerth and Risen referred to as "secret data" was not classified as secret when Lee downloaded it; rather, it carried the low-level designation "protect as restricted data" (PARD), which meant it could be sent to colleagues through registered US mail. Some of the material was reclassified as "secret" after Lee's firing, but never as "top secret." As to "compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal," that charge was dismissed as absurd by top weapons experts, who provided affidavits to Lee's defense attorneys. Former Los Alamos director Dr. Harold Agnew, a top adviser on nuclear weapons to five Presidents, testified that "if the People's Republic of China had already obtained these codes, or were to obtain these codes, it would have little or no effect whatsoever on today's nuclear balance."
When the government finally got around to arresting Lee, in December of 1999, it charged him only with the improper handling of files--and stretched to include the claim that the mishandling had been done "with the intent to injure the United States" and "secure an advantage to a foreign nation." But the indictment made no reference to the theft of the W-88 warhead data, which had led to his excoriation in the Times, and the prosecutors told the court they did not plan to make the case that Lee ever actually passed any secrets to a person or nation. (By contrast, former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, who downloaded some of the nation's top secrets to his home computer, has not yet been charged with any crime and remains a free man.)
For nine months after his arrest, Lee remained in prison without bail, while his attorneys mounted an aggressive effort to disprove the government's case against him. Finally, in August, after the lead FBI agent, Robert Messemer, admitted he'd misled the judge on several topics--including the claim that Lee had lied to a colleague to gain access to his computer--and witnesses came forward to say that much of the allegedly secret material was in the public domain, the judge agreed to bail for Lee.
IV: Conclusion
As the government's case came apart at the seams, more voices were raised in opposition, including The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Federation of American Scientists. Just before Lee's release, three of the nation's four scientific academies, endowed by Congress, demanded that Lee be given bail. That call even came to be echoed by the New York Times in a strong editorial, which noted that the judge had been lied to by the FBI on key aspects of the case in rendering his initial ruling denying Lee bail.
Judge Parker's decision to grant bail, which turned out to be moot because of the plea bargain in the case, was accompanied by a seventeen-page document that demolished key aspects of the government's case. As New York Times reporter James Sterngold summarized Parker's view: "The opinion is important in part because it casts deep doubts about many of the government's assertions about Dr. Lee's supposed deceptiveness and the value of the secrets he is accused of downloading, issues at the heart of the prosecution's case." And at the heart of the original New York Times reporting, one might add, not to take anything away from Sterngold's stellar reporting once he was assigned to the story.
Parker's words are worth quoting because they cut through all the hysteria about the losses to the US nuclear arsenal, which he himself had accepted in originally denying Lee's bail request. He cited, with apparent agreement, one top weapons expert who referred to the government's original claim that Lee had downloaded the "crown jewels" of America's nuclear program as "unbridled exaggeration."
On the matter of motive, the judge pointed out that the government had shifted its case from the claim that Lee was a potential, if not an actual, spy out to hurt the country's national security to the lame argument that he might have been attempting to burnish his credentials for future civilian employment in light of threatened massive layoffs at Los Alamos.
I have always believed this to be the most likely explanation for Lee's actions. During years of covering the labs for the Los Angeles Times, I frequently encountered complaints from scientists working there that they paid too heavy a professional price for not being able to share their work for public peer review, which is the basis of advancement in the academic world. The Los Alamos and Livermore labs are administered by the University of California, and most of the scientists are regarded as university faculty, but because of the secrecy requirements, they are forced to keep their best work hidden. Most of the time, that work is unnecessarily classified, and scientists must engage in heroic efforts to get it declassified for publication. Ironically, that is Trulock's problem right now, as he seeks to publish his own account of this escapade.
The government's case boiled down to nothing more than the possibility that Wen Ho Lee was attempting to gather evidence of his work in the hopes of securing employment at research institutes in non-Communist countries such as Germany and Switzerland. Even that claim proved to be false, however, when an FBI witness testified that there is no evidence that Lee mailed any such material or that any institute ever received it. Even if Lee had sought to use the data for that purpose, he might have intended to have it declassified first, before sending it out. But in any case, as Judge Parker stated, "enhancing one's résumé is less sinister than the treacherous motive the government, at least by implication, ascribed to Dr. Lee at the end of last year," when bail was denied.
From the crown jewels to an enhanced résumé. Quite a shift. None of this would have happened had the Times not been willing to broadcast leaks fed to its reporters by federal and Congressional investigators with a political agenda. Whether the goal was to nail Clinton on the campaign contributions issue or to revive the cold war with China, none of this had to do with the real concerns of national security.
Whatever Lee's transgressions, they do not involve issues of spying but only sloppiness in handling data. But to equate sloppiness with spying and to incarcerate a man for nine months under abysmal conditions in the hope that he will confess to something truly subversive is a clear violation of the standard of due process on which this country prides itself and which it seeks to export.
If this had happened in another country, there would have been a great outcry from human rights circles. But only late in the day did leading scientific organizations speak up, while human rights organizations failed to show they cared one whit about what has been a modern Dreyfus case. It is a sad confirmation of the hold of national security hysteria even now that so much dangerous mischief could have continued for so long, more or less unchallenged, by those who should know better.
As for Wen Ho Lee, the scientist came away thankful for a legal system in which the damage to him was limited by an ultimately courageous judge and a hopelessly bungled government case. But no one who cares about freedom of the individual in the face of abusive government power should ever forget how arrogant the FBI can be when backed by the shoddy reporting of this nation's premier newspaper. This was chillingly demonstrated on March 7, 1999, when Lee's FBI interrogators brandished the previous day's New York Times story as a weapon to threaten him:
FBI: Do you think that the press prints everything that's true? Do you think that everything in this article is true?
Lee: I don't think [so].
FBI: The press doesn't care.
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About Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve) and Playing President (Akashic Books). He is author, with Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press.) His weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in the San Francisco Chronicle. more...
Wednesday, December 8, 1999
White House meeting before indictment
Decision Nears on the Fate Of Ex-Los Alamos Scientist
By JAMES RISEN AND DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: December 8, 1999
The Federal authorities have intensified their deliberations about whether to prosecute a nuclear weapons scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on charges of mishandling highly classified atomic data, government officials said today.
A decision on whether to charge the scientist, Wen Ho Lee, is expected within days, the officials said, after a crucial meeting held on Saturday at the White House and attended by the administration's top security, law enforcement and energy officials.
The participants concluded after a lengthy intelligence review that should Attorney General Janet Reno decide to prosecute, the secrets that would probably be divulged at a criminal trial would not irreparably damage national security.
Among those present in addition to Ms. Reno were Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser; Energy Secretary Bill Richardson; Louis J. Freeh, the director of the F.B.I.; George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and John Kelly, the top federal prosecutor in Albuquerque, who has jurisdiction in the case.
Law-enforcement officials and Mr. Kelly have recommended going ahead with a case against Mr. Lee, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Mr. Richardson, who supports bringing a prosecution, indicated that he was prepared to exercise his statutory authority to declassify atomic secrets likely to be needed as evidence in the trial, the officials said. But they added that it was Ms. Reno who must decide whether to seek an indictment and that she had not given prosecutors final approval.
Mr. Lee, his lawyers and his supporters have repeatedly said that he has done nothing wrong and that no one has ever been criminally charged for similar conduct, for example, transferring classified information into a nonclassified computer. Mark Holscher, Mr. Lee's lawyer in Los Angeles, did not return telephone calls today.
In the past, Mr. Holscher and Mr. Lee's other supporters have said that Mr. Lee is a loyal American who has been unfairly singled out for investigation because of his Chinese ancestry. They say Mr. Lee is being made a scapegoat by law-enforcement and energy officials who have been under fire by Republicans in Congress for security lapses at the country's weapons laboratories. In a television interview in August, Mr. Lee also said he was innocent.
The highly unusual White House meeting reflects the acute political sensitivities and high stakes involved in a case that has become a battleground for the administration and Republican critics who have said that Chinese intelligence had used scientists to steal information from the weapons laboratories that was used to vastly speed the pace of Beijing's nuclear weapons program.
As expected, if he is charged, Mr. Lee will not be accused of espionage, the officials said, which would require prosecutors to show that information was not only stolen but passed to a foreign power. Prosecutors are now weighing whether to charge Mr. Lee with a lesser crime of mishandling and failing to adequately safeguard classified information.
The recent surge of activity in the case comes just before the expiration of the term of a federal grand jury in Albuquerque that has been hearing evidence. The grand jurors were to be dismissed this month, but their terms have been extended until early January.
Mr. Lee, who worked in the nuclear weapons design area of Los Alamos, was fired in March for security violations. By that time, he had been under investigation for nearly three years in connection with the government's inquiry into the suspected theft of United States nuclear secrets by China. United States investigators believe that design information related to the most advanced nuclear warhead in the nation's arsenal, the W-88, was obtained by China, in part through espionage. The W-88 warhead was designed at Los Alamos.
After Mr. Lee was fired, investigators found evidence that he had transferred vast amounts of secret nuclear data from the classified system at Los Alamos into an unclassified system. In a televised interview, Mr. Lee acknowledged that he transferred the data, but said he did so to protect the material from being lost in computer crashes.
Since the investigation into Mr. Lee became public, a furious debate has erupted over whether the inquiry was properly handled by the Energy Department and the F.B.I. Subsequently, F.B.I. officials said that the initial inquiry into the evidence of Chinese atomic espionage was flawed, and other current and former government officials argued that investigators had focused prematurely on Mr. Lee without first determining how widely accessible the information on the W-88 warhead had been at the time officials concluded the Chinese obtained it. Asian-American groups rallied to Mr. Lee's cause, saying he was the victim of racial stereotyping.
In September, Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh ordered federal agents to go back to square one and broaden their investigation into the evidence of China's theft of W-88 secrets, moving beyond Los Alamos to look at other labs and defense contractors that may have had access to the data.
But even as that broader inquiry into evidence of Chinese espionage is continuing, the government has been moving forward in its investigation of Mr. Lee over accusations of unauthorized computer transfers of nuclear secrets.
In addition to the unauthorized transfers of nuclear data into an unclassified computer system at Los Alamos, government investigators now believe that Mr. Lee also copied the nuclear secrets onto computer tapes and took those tapes out of the lab, officials said. The F.B.I. cannot account for those missing computer tapes, officials said. Officials have no evidence that the tapes have been handed over to any other unauthorized individuals, however.
The discovery that the computer tapes are missing appears to have convinced government officials that the evidence against Mr. Lee may be more serious than initially believed. Stephen Younger, associate laboratory director for nuclear weapons, who oversees the division where Mr. Lee worked, has completed a highly classified analysis of Mr. Lee's computer activities showing that the potential damage to national security could be extensive, officials said.
If he is charged in the computer downloading case, Mr. Lee's lawyers appear likely to respond by saying that he is the victim of selective prosecution for relatively common practices. The former C.I.A. director John Deutch, for example, who was investigated by the intelligence agency's inspector general for improperly handling classified information on his computer, had his security clearance stripped this year, but was not charged with a crime.
But Los Alamos officials have said that they disagree with Mr. Lee's assertions that his computer activities were routine.
John Browne, the director of Los Alamos, said in an interview in August: ''We have no evidence that anyone has ever done anything like this before at Los Alamos, and we have looked. I have no doubt that he violated Los Alamos security regulations, and I have no doubt that he deserved to be terminated. We have fired people for much less.''
By JAMES RISEN AND DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: December 8, 1999
The Federal authorities have intensified their deliberations about whether to prosecute a nuclear weapons scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on charges of mishandling highly classified atomic data, government officials said today.
A decision on whether to charge the scientist, Wen Ho Lee, is expected within days, the officials said, after a crucial meeting held on Saturday at the White House and attended by the administration's top security, law enforcement and energy officials.
The participants concluded after a lengthy intelligence review that should Attorney General Janet Reno decide to prosecute, the secrets that would probably be divulged at a criminal trial would not irreparably damage national security.
Among those present in addition to Ms. Reno were Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser; Energy Secretary Bill Richardson; Louis J. Freeh, the director of the F.B.I.; George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and John Kelly, the top federal prosecutor in Albuquerque, who has jurisdiction in the case.
Law-enforcement officials and Mr. Kelly have recommended going ahead with a case against Mr. Lee, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Mr. Richardson, who supports bringing a prosecution, indicated that he was prepared to exercise his statutory authority to declassify atomic secrets likely to be needed as evidence in the trial, the officials said. But they added that it was Ms. Reno who must decide whether to seek an indictment and that she had not given prosecutors final approval.
Mr. Lee, his lawyers and his supporters have repeatedly said that he has done nothing wrong and that no one has ever been criminally charged for similar conduct, for example, transferring classified information into a nonclassified computer. Mark Holscher, Mr. Lee's lawyer in Los Angeles, did not return telephone calls today.
In the past, Mr. Holscher and Mr. Lee's other supporters have said that Mr. Lee is a loyal American who has been unfairly singled out for investigation because of his Chinese ancestry. They say Mr. Lee is being made a scapegoat by law-enforcement and energy officials who have been under fire by Republicans in Congress for security lapses at the country's weapons laboratories. In a television interview in August, Mr. Lee also said he was innocent.
The highly unusual White House meeting reflects the acute political sensitivities and high stakes involved in a case that has become a battleground for the administration and Republican critics who have said that Chinese intelligence had used scientists to steal information from the weapons laboratories that was used to vastly speed the pace of Beijing's nuclear weapons program.
As expected, if he is charged, Mr. Lee will not be accused of espionage, the officials said, which would require prosecutors to show that information was not only stolen but passed to a foreign power. Prosecutors are now weighing whether to charge Mr. Lee with a lesser crime of mishandling and failing to adequately safeguard classified information.
The recent surge of activity in the case comes just before the expiration of the term of a federal grand jury in Albuquerque that has been hearing evidence. The grand jurors were to be dismissed this month, but their terms have been extended until early January.
Mr. Lee, who worked in the nuclear weapons design area of Los Alamos, was fired in March for security violations. By that time, he had been under investigation for nearly three years in connection with the government's inquiry into the suspected theft of United States nuclear secrets by China. United States investigators believe that design information related to the most advanced nuclear warhead in the nation's arsenal, the W-88, was obtained by China, in part through espionage. The W-88 warhead was designed at Los Alamos.
After Mr. Lee was fired, investigators found evidence that he had transferred vast amounts of secret nuclear data from the classified system at Los Alamos into an unclassified system. In a televised interview, Mr. Lee acknowledged that he transferred the data, but said he did so to protect the material from being lost in computer crashes.
Since the investigation into Mr. Lee became public, a furious debate has erupted over whether the inquiry was properly handled by the Energy Department and the F.B.I. Subsequently, F.B.I. officials said that the initial inquiry into the evidence of Chinese atomic espionage was flawed, and other current and former government officials argued that investigators had focused prematurely on Mr. Lee without first determining how widely accessible the information on the W-88 warhead had been at the time officials concluded the Chinese obtained it. Asian-American groups rallied to Mr. Lee's cause, saying he was the victim of racial stereotyping.
In September, Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh ordered federal agents to go back to square one and broaden their investigation into the evidence of China's theft of W-88 secrets, moving beyond Los Alamos to look at other labs and defense contractors that may have had access to the data.
But even as that broader inquiry into evidence of Chinese espionage is continuing, the government has been moving forward in its investigation of Mr. Lee over accusations of unauthorized computer transfers of nuclear secrets.
In addition to the unauthorized transfers of nuclear data into an unclassified computer system at Los Alamos, government investigators now believe that Mr. Lee also copied the nuclear secrets onto computer tapes and took those tapes out of the lab, officials said. The F.B.I. cannot account for those missing computer tapes, officials said. Officials have no evidence that the tapes have been handed over to any other unauthorized individuals, however.
The discovery that the computer tapes are missing appears to have convinced government officials that the evidence against Mr. Lee may be more serious than initially believed. Stephen Younger, associate laboratory director for nuclear weapons, who oversees the division where Mr. Lee worked, has completed a highly classified analysis of Mr. Lee's computer activities showing that the potential damage to national security could be extensive, officials said.
If he is charged in the computer downloading case, Mr. Lee's lawyers appear likely to respond by saying that he is the victim of selective prosecution for relatively common practices. The former C.I.A. director John Deutch, for example, who was investigated by the intelligence agency's inspector general for improperly handling classified information on his computer, had his security clearance stripped this year, but was not charged with a crime.
But Los Alamos officials have said that they disagree with Mr. Lee's assertions that his computer activities were routine.
John Browne, the director of Los Alamos, said in an interview in August: ''We have no evidence that anyone has ever done anything like this before at Los Alamos, and we have looked. I have no doubt that he violated Los Alamos security regulations, and I have no doubt that he deserved to be terminated. We have fired people for much less.''
Friday, August 13, 1999
Energy Secretary Urges Nuclear Lab to Punish 3 Over Security
By JAMES RISEN
Published: August 13, 1999
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has recommended disciplinary action against a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and two other officials for failing to handle properly the spy investigation at the lab, officials said today.
Mr. Richardson acted in response to a critical new report by the department's Inspector General that focused on the actions of 19 current or former officials at Los Alamos and at Energy Department headquarters who were involved in investigating evidence that China had stolen nuclear secrets.
The officials said one of Mr. Richardson's recommendations was aimed at Siegfried Hecker, director of Los Alamos in 1986-97, who still works there as a scientist. He also recommended to the current director, John Brown, that action be taken against Terry Craig, until recently a counterintelligence team leader at the lab, and Robert Vrooman, former chief of counterintelligence.
Mr. Craig is still employed at the lab; Mr. Vrooman has retired but works for a lab contractor. Mr. Craig and Mr. Hecker did not return telephone calls seeking comment; Mr. Vrooman could not be reached.
The form of discipline is up to Mr. Brown, but officials say Mr. Craig could be fired and Mr. Vrooman's ties to the lab could be ended. It is unclear what Mr. Hecker faces.
Mr. Brown said he would act soon.
The full report is classified, and does not assign specific blame. But it does include ''implied criticism'' of the actions of the former Energy Secretary, Federico Pena, and of the former Deputy Secretary, Elizabeth Moler, for not being more aggressive in handling the investigation, officials familiar with the report said.
In the face of mounting criticism, Mr. Richardson had promised action, but he decided to wait for the Inspector General's review.
In March a Los Alamos scientist, Wen Ho Lee, the chief suspect in the espionage investigation, was fired for security violations at the lab. He has not been charged with any crime, and he has denied that he spied for China. After he was fired, investigators found he had conducted unauthorized transfers of secrets from a classified computer into an unclassified network.
The United States Attorney in New Mexico has been considering whether to seek an indictment against Mr. Lee for his handling of classified information. Mr. Lee has stated that he transferred the data to protect the contents as a routine part of his job.
The Inspector General's report focuses on the investigation of Mr. Lee, particularly the failure of officials to restrict his access to classified material or to monitor his computer until long after he came under investigation.
Mr. Hecker was cited for failing to follow through on ''an express request by senior management to develop a plan for limiting the suspect's access, for failing to inform department's management that the plan had failed, and for failing to take alternative actions,'' according to a statement by Mr. Richardson. Though he did not name Mr. Hecker, other officials said his reference was to Mr. Hecker.
Mr. Vrooman was cited for allowing Mr. Lee continued access to nuclear secrets.
Mr. Craig, who was also not identified in the statement, was cited for failing to determine whether Mr. Lee had signed a waiver allowing monitoring of his computer. Mr. Lee signed the waiver in April 1995.
Published: August 13, 1999
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has recommended disciplinary action against a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and two other officials for failing to handle properly the spy investigation at the lab, officials said today.
Mr. Richardson acted in response to a critical new report by the department's Inspector General that focused on the actions of 19 current or former officials at Los Alamos and at Energy Department headquarters who were involved in investigating evidence that China had stolen nuclear secrets.
The officials said one of Mr. Richardson's recommendations was aimed at Siegfried Hecker, director of Los Alamos in 1986-97, who still works there as a scientist. He also recommended to the current director, John Brown, that action be taken against Terry Craig, until recently a counterintelligence team leader at the lab, and Robert Vrooman, former chief of counterintelligence.
Mr. Craig is still employed at the lab; Mr. Vrooman has retired but works for a lab contractor. Mr. Craig and Mr. Hecker did not return telephone calls seeking comment; Mr. Vrooman could not be reached.
The form of discipline is up to Mr. Brown, but officials say Mr. Craig could be fired and Mr. Vrooman's ties to the lab could be ended. It is unclear what Mr. Hecker faces.
Mr. Brown said he would act soon.
The full report is classified, and does not assign specific blame. But it does include ''implied criticism'' of the actions of the former Energy Secretary, Federico Pena, and of the former Deputy Secretary, Elizabeth Moler, for not being more aggressive in handling the investigation, officials familiar with the report said.
In the face of mounting criticism, Mr. Richardson had promised action, but he decided to wait for the Inspector General's review.
In March a Los Alamos scientist, Wen Ho Lee, the chief suspect in the espionage investigation, was fired for security violations at the lab. He has not been charged with any crime, and he has denied that he spied for China. After he was fired, investigators found he had conducted unauthorized transfers of secrets from a classified computer into an unclassified network.
The United States Attorney in New Mexico has been considering whether to seek an indictment against Mr. Lee for his handling of classified information. Mr. Lee has stated that he transferred the data to protect the contents as a routine part of his job.
The Inspector General's report focuses on the investigation of Mr. Lee, particularly the failure of officials to restrict his access to classified material or to monitor his computer until long after he came under investigation.
Mr. Hecker was cited for failing to follow through on ''an express request by senior management to develop a plan for limiting the suspect's access, for failing to inform department's management that the plan had failed, and for failing to take alternative actions,'' according to a statement by Mr. Richardson. Though he did not name Mr. Hecker, other officials said his reference was to Mr. Hecker.
Mr. Vrooman was cited for allowing Mr. Lee continued access to nuclear secrets.
Mr. Craig, who was also not identified in the statement, was cited for failing to determine whether Mr. Lee had signed a waiver allowing monitoring of his computer. Mr. Lee signed the waiver in April 1995.
Tuesday, March 9, 1999
Richardson Named WHL as Suspect
Here is a quote from http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/2004/feb-b.html
U.S. Fires Scientist Suspected Of Giving China Bomb Data
By JAMES RISEN
Published: March 9, 1999
A Taiwan-born scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory was fired today for security breaches after the F.B.I. questioned him in connection with China's suspected theft of American nuclear secrets, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said.
The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was questioned for three days by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, starting on Friday, but ''stonewalled'' during the questioning, Mr. Richardson said.
Mr. Lee, a computer scientist working in the nuclear weapons design area at Los Alamos, N.M., has not been charged with a crime, but he has been identified by Federal officials as the prime suspect in the spying.
China denies any such theft. But Administration officials said China, working with stolen data, has made a leap in developing nuclear weapons with much smaller warheads.
The handling of the spying case brought sharp criticism from Capitol Hill. Senator Fred Thompson, an influential Republican from Tennessee, attacked the Administration for failing to notify Congress in 1997 that China had stolen nuclear secrets when the Administration certified that Beijing was no longer helping other nations build nuclear bombs.
That certification ended a 12-year ban on the sale of nuclear technology to China, an action long sought by American companies eager to bid on the estimated $60 billion Chinese market for civilian nuclear plants.
Mr. Thompson said Senators would take up a ''serious and immediate review'' of the certification issue.
The F.B.I. began to question Mr. Lee on Friday to determine whether he had given American secrets to China. The questioning continued through late Sunday, but Mr. Lee failed to cooperate, according to Mr. Richardson.
F.B.I. officials acknowledged last week that they did not have enough information then to arrest Mr. Lee, but hoped that their questioning would lead to a break.
While he agreed to talk with investigators and nuclear experts, his failure to fully cooperate has apparently still left the investigators without enough evidence to prosecute.
But Mr. Richardson dismissed Mr. Lee for ''failure to properly notify Energy Department and lab officials about contacts with people from a sensitive country, specific instances of failing to properly safeguard classified material and apparently attempting to deceive lab officials about security matters.''
Reached at home in Los Alamos this afternoon, Mr. Lee's wife, Sylvia, a former secretary at Los Alamos, refused give his whereabouts or to comment on the matter.
Mr. Lee, who officials said is in his late 50's and has been working at the lab for more than a decade, did not hire an attorney to represent him during his questioning, officials said.
Mr. Lee has been the prime suspect in a nearly three-year investigation of reports of Beijing's theft of nuclear technology, senior officials from the bureau and the Energy Department said.
Until recently, China's nuclear weapon designs were a generation behind those of the United States, largely because Beijing had been unable to produce small warheads that could be launched from a single missile at multiple targets.
But by the mid-1990's, China had built and tested such small bombs, a breakthrough that officials say was accelerated by thefts from Los Alamos.
The espionage is believed to have occurred in the 1980's, officials said, but was not detected until 1995, when American experts from Los Alamos analyzing Chinese nuclear test results found similarities to America's most advanced miniature warhead, the W-88.
By February 1996, investigators from the Energy Department and the F.B.I. searching travel records and other data at Los Alamos and other weapons labs had identified five possible suspects, officials said.
Mr. Lee quickly emerged as the prime suspect, they added.
Investigators say they now believe that Mr. Lee gave the Chinese sensitive information on nuclear detonations during a 1988 seminar, senior Administration officials said.
But after opening a formal criminal investigation in June 1996, the bureau did not at first pursue the case aggressively, according to several senior officials.
Only in the last several weeks, after prodding from Congress and the Secretary of Energy, did officials administer lie-detector tests to Mr. Lee.
After a first test in December the bureau, unsatisfied with the results, gave Mr. Lee a second test in February, and the test indicated that he was being deceptive, officials said.
The F.B.I. then decided to interview Mr. Lee on Friday.
In response to criticism of their handling of the case, bureau officials said Chinese spying is far more difficult to investigate than the more traditional espionage of the former Soviet Union.
The Chinese often take advantage of scientific exchanges and other forms of informal contacts, gathering sensitive information from such a wide range of sources that it is often difficult to pinpoint exactly how American secrets leak out.
In fact, American officials say, they have concluded that Beijing is continuing to steal secrets as major nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States have been increasingly opened to visitors from other nations.
In this case, since the reported theft of the W-88 design information apparently occurred so far in the past, the Justice Department at first lacked the grounds to obtain a secret wiretap on the suspect, making it difficult initially to build a strong criminal case.
Still the Energy Department failed to move Mr. Lee out of his sensitive position or end his security clearances for more than a year after the bureau's director, Louis J. Freeh, told Energy Department officials in September 1997 that there was no longer any investigative reason to keep him on the job.
In espionage cases, the bureau often wants suspects left alone by their employers for fear of tipping them off to the investigations.
He was finally moved out of a sensitive area several weeks ago, officials said.
Mr. Lee's wife, Sylvia, stopped working at the lab sometime in the last year or two, Energy Department officials said.
F.B.I. and Energy Department officials said her activities had raised questions while she worked at Los Alamos. In the 1980's she was invited to China to give an academic paper on high-technology computer processing even though she was only a secretary at Los Alamos.
Her husband, who was the true expert, accompanied her, according to an American official.
Energy Department officials also said co-workers questioned why she frequently invited herself to gatherings at the lab with visiting Chinese delegations.
F.B.I. officials said she was not a target of their investigation, but said it is possible that others were involved in the theft of data. They have not yet identified any other suspects.
Meanwhile, in response to criticism of the lax security at Los Alamos and other weapons labs, Secretary Richardson said today that he is ordering polygraph examinations for a few thousand Energy Department and laboratory employees during the next few years.
The order does not cover all employees with ''Q'' security clearances, which give them access to nuclear secrets, Mr. Richardson said, but it does cover those who work in the most sensitive areas.
Currently only employees of the Central Intelligence Agency are required to submit to polygraph exams on a regular basis.
On March 9, Risen published Lee's name in a report of an interview he had conducted with Energy Secretary Richardson. Risen reported Richardson told him that Lee had been fired on March 8 "for security breaches after the FBI questioned him in connection with China's suspected theft of American nuclear secrets." Richardson would later deny that he had named Lee in this interview.
U.S. Fires Scientist Suspected Of Giving China Bomb Data
By JAMES RISEN
Published: March 9, 1999
A Taiwan-born scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory was fired today for security breaches after the F.B.I. questioned him in connection with China's suspected theft of American nuclear secrets, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said.
The scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was questioned for three days by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, starting on Friday, but ''stonewalled'' during the questioning, Mr. Richardson said.
Mr. Lee, a computer scientist working in the nuclear weapons design area at Los Alamos, N.M., has not been charged with a crime, but he has been identified by Federal officials as the prime suspect in the spying.
China denies any such theft. But Administration officials said China, working with stolen data, has made a leap in developing nuclear weapons with much smaller warheads.
The handling of the spying case brought sharp criticism from Capitol Hill. Senator Fred Thompson, an influential Republican from Tennessee, attacked the Administration for failing to notify Congress in 1997 that China had stolen nuclear secrets when the Administration certified that Beijing was no longer helping other nations build nuclear bombs.
That certification ended a 12-year ban on the sale of nuclear technology to China, an action long sought by American companies eager to bid on the estimated $60 billion Chinese market for civilian nuclear plants.
Mr. Thompson said Senators would take up a ''serious and immediate review'' of the certification issue.
The F.B.I. began to question Mr. Lee on Friday to determine whether he had given American secrets to China. The questioning continued through late Sunday, but Mr. Lee failed to cooperate, according to Mr. Richardson.
F.B.I. officials acknowledged last week that they did not have enough information then to arrest Mr. Lee, but hoped that their questioning would lead to a break.
While he agreed to talk with investigators and nuclear experts, his failure to fully cooperate has apparently still left the investigators without enough evidence to prosecute.
But Mr. Richardson dismissed Mr. Lee for ''failure to properly notify Energy Department and lab officials about contacts with people from a sensitive country, specific instances of failing to properly safeguard classified material and apparently attempting to deceive lab officials about security matters.''
Reached at home in Los Alamos this afternoon, Mr. Lee's wife, Sylvia, a former secretary at Los Alamos, refused give his whereabouts or to comment on the matter.
Mr. Lee, who officials said is in his late 50's and has been working at the lab for more than a decade, did not hire an attorney to represent him during his questioning, officials said.
Mr. Lee has been the prime suspect in a nearly three-year investigation of reports of Beijing's theft of nuclear technology, senior officials from the bureau and the Energy Department said.
Until recently, China's nuclear weapon designs were a generation behind those of the United States, largely because Beijing had been unable to produce small warheads that could be launched from a single missile at multiple targets.
But by the mid-1990's, China had built and tested such small bombs, a breakthrough that officials say was accelerated by thefts from Los Alamos.
The espionage is believed to have occurred in the 1980's, officials said, but was not detected until 1995, when American experts from Los Alamos analyzing Chinese nuclear test results found similarities to America's most advanced miniature warhead, the W-88.
By February 1996, investigators from the Energy Department and the F.B.I. searching travel records and other data at Los Alamos and other weapons labs had identified five possible suspects, officials said.
Mr. Lee quickly emerged as the prime suspect, they added.
Investigators say they now believe that Mr. Lee gave the Chinese sensitive information on nuclear detonations during a 1988 seminar, senior Administration officials said.
But after opening a formal criminal investigation in June 1996, the bureau did not at first pursue the case aggressively, according to several senior officials.
Only in the last several weeks, after prodding from Congress and the Secretary of Energy, did officials administer lie-detector tests to Mr. Lee.
After a first test in December the bureau, unsatisfied with the results, gave Mr. Lee a second test in February, and the test indicated that he was being deceptive, officials said.
The F.B.I. then decided to interview Mr. Lee on Friday.
In response to criticism of their handling of the case, bureau officials said Chinese spying is far more difficult to investigate than the more traditional espionage of the former Soviet Union.
The Chinese often take advantage of scientific exchanges and other forms of informal contacts, gathering sensitive information from such a wide range of sources that it is often difficult to pinpoint exactly how American secrets leak out.
In fact, American officials say, they have concluded that Beijing is continuing to steal secrets as major nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States have been increasingly opened to visitors from other nations.
In this case, since the reported theft of the W-88 design information apparently occurred so far in the past, the Justice Department at first lacked the grounds to obtain a secret wiretap on the suspect, making it difficult initially to build a strong criminal case.
Still the Energy Department failed to move Mr. Lee out of his sensitive position or end his security clearances for more than a year after the bureau's director, Louis J. Freeh, told Energy Department officials in September 1997 that there was no longer any investigative reason to keep him on the job.
In espionage cases, the bureau often wants suspects left alone by their employers for fear of tipping them off to the investigations.
He was finally moved out of a sensitive area several weeks ago, officials said.
Mr. Lee's wife, Sylvia, stopped working at the lab sometime in the last year or two, Energy Department officials said.
F.B.I. and Energy Department officials said her activities had raised questions while she worked at Los Alamos. In the 1980's she was invited to China to give an academic paper on high-technology computer processing even though she was only a secretary at Los Alamos.
Her husband, who was the true expert, accompanied her, according to an American official.
Energy Department officials also said co-workers questioned why she frequently invited herself to gatherings at the lab with visiting Chinese delegations.
F.B.I. officials said she was not a target of their investigation, but said it is possible that others were involved in the theft of data. They have not yet identified any other suspects.
Meanwhile, in response to criticism of the lax security at Los Alamos and other weapons labs, Secretary Richardson said today that he is ordering polygraph examinations for a few thousand Energy Department and laboratory employees during the next few years.
The order does not cover all employees with ''Q'' security clearances, which give them access to nuclear secrets, Mr. Richardson said, but it does cover those who work in the most sensitive areas.
Currently only employees of the Central Intelligence Agency are required to submit to polygraph exams on a regular basis.
Saturday, March 6, 1999
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.
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.
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