Espionage Case: Pleas for Fairness

PALO ALTO —  Wen Ho Lee’s daughter is losing it. Her voice suddenly drops to a whisper and she blinks back tears as she speaks to nearly 200 Asian Americans at Ming’s, an upscale Chinese restaurant in the heart of Silicon Valley.

“They’re trying to convince everyone that my father has done something terribly wrong,” Alberta Lee, a 26-year-old software engineer, finally blurts out. “He hasn’t. He was just doing his job. He’s innocent!”

The crowd applauds--and checkbooks come out. Soon, $23,000 is added to a defense fund that has raised nearly $290,000 since Dec. 10, when Lee was arrested for allegedly stealing a complete computer library of thermonuclear weapon designs and other secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The fund-raiser here, two days after a smaller event in San Francisco’s Chinatown, marks a mounting public effort by Lee’s family and supporters to fight what they insist is an injustice. The 60-year-old Taiwan-born physicist, they argue, is no spy. He has hurt no one, they say, and was singled out for his ethnicity.

The issue has galvanized the normally low-profile Asian American community. But even some of Lee’s closest friends concede that they cannot understand why Lee put America’s most valuable nuclear secrets at risk by copying them to an unprotected computer and portable tapes.

“The message is not necessarily that Dr. Lee is innocent,” explains Cecilia Chang, who runs the defense fund from her Fremont home and who has known Lee for two decades. “The message is we want him to have a fair trial.”

She and other supporters insist that Lee and his family are victims of a government witch hunt. Indeed, they see clear parallels between the case and Lee’s favorite novel: Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” the epic tale of a good man who is imprisoned for a minor crime, later breaks his parole and is hounded for years by an obsessive police official.

“The whole experience is very hard,” says Lee’s niece, Lori Janey. Like other Lee family members, the Taiwan-born Minnesota resident was forced to testify before a New Mexico grand jury last summer. “It’s totally destroyed what I’ve learned, heard and experienced about America.”

But prosecutors say that the evidence is clear. The 59-count indictment alleges that Lee surreptitiously copied the digital equivalent of 400,000 pages of nuclear weapon designs and top-secret data onto an open Los Alamos computer network in 1993 and 1994. He also allegedly transferred the classified codes onto portable computer tapes, seven of which have not been located.

U.S. Security Risk Called Incalculable

The risk to U.S. security is incalculable, the government contends. At court hearings in December, weapon experts warned in apocalyptic terms that the cassettes contain all the physics and engineering specifications needed to copy--or find vulnerabilities in--nearly every U.S. nuclear weapon ever built.

“In essence, Lee has denied the United States exclusive control over information that could lead to the military defeat of our conventional forces or could imperil the lives of millions of Americans,” prosecutors wrote in a Feb. 1 brief.

His bail denied, Lee today occupies a single cell in a privately run county jail in Santa Fe, awaiting trial Nov. 6. He can jog in a courtyard for an hour each weekday. He may not make or receive phone calls. Fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese, he now is studying German and Spanish from books.

Other than his lawyers, only his wife, Sylvia, and two children may visit. They may come once a week for an hour, and Lee wears wrist and leg shackles behind a glass partition. Two FBI agents, one fluent in Mandarin, listen in.

“It’s really hard,” says Lee’s son, Chung, a 27-year-old medical student. “My sister always breaks down. I almost do, and I can tell my dad comes pretty close.”

Lee, who has pleaded not guilty, is baffled by the charges, says his daughter, Alberta. “He’s lived in his own world all his life and never read the newspaper or watched TV. He’s so trusting, so wanting to help people, so naive.”

Born in 1939 in Nantou, Taiwan, Lee was one of 10 children in a poor farming family. During World War II, Japanese troops harshly questioned him about his parents, assuming a small child would not lie. He told his own children that he never forgot the fear he felt.

His aged parents died soon after the war and Lee moved in with relatives to attend high school in northern Taiwan. After attending Cheng Kung University, he came to the United States in September 1964 to attend Texas A&M; University in College Station, Texas.

His English was, and remains, halting. He was shy and short, 5 feet 4 inches. But he quickly adapted. He attended Aggie football games, drove a light blue Mustang and was awarded a master’s in 1966 and a doctorate in mechanical engineering in 1969. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen the next year.

Lee joined Los Alamos in 1980 and soon was assigned to the top-secret X Division, where America’s nuclear warheads and bombs are designed. An expert in fluid dynamics, he focused on how high-explosives can create shock waves to compress a sphere of plutonium, which forms the trigger for hydrogen bombs. His computer codes were used to help develop and test the weapons.

The strange, secretive world of Los Alamos soon became a family affair.

Lee’s Chinese-born wife obtained clearance for top-secret work at the lab and was a computer programmer until she retired in 1995. Their son had a lower clearance and tested computer codes during summer breaks from UC San Diego. Alberta, an English major at UCLA, also worked summers mapping data from the Nevada nuclear test site.

The family lived on a quiet street in White Rock, a modest suburb. Lee did all the cooking and cleaning at home, growing vegetables in a backyard garden and fishing on weekends. He enjoyed Mozart and 19th century novels by Hugo, Flaubert and Dickens.

But in 1996, Energy Department officials concluded that someone at Los Alamos had given China secret design data in the mid-1980s about America’s most modern warhead, the W-88. Lee’s lab-approved visits to China with his wife in 1986 and 1988 became a focus of the FBI inquiry.

In polygraphs and FBI interviews, Lee denied passing secrets. He hoped to retire, he told the FBI last March 7, and open a Chinese restaurant. He was fired the next day for security violations after news reports revealed that he was the prime suspect in the W-88 espionage inquiry.

Home Search Shows Terrifying Scenario

In September, long after high-profile congressional hearings and headlines had turned Wen Ho Lee into a household name, the FBI admitted that it could not prove he had turned over classified information to any foreign government and that it had wrongly focused on Los Alamos as the only possible source of the W-88 leak.

But shortly after Lee was fired, a search of his office, his computer and his home revealed a far more terrifying scenario: the possible loss of not just one but all of America’s nuclear weapon designs.

The FBI went all-out to trace Lee’s digital footsteps. Indeed, experts say that they analyzed so much data at Los Alamos that, if printed out, the stack would be as tall as 1,250 Washington Monuments. They also interviewed more than 1,000 people, from lab workers to Alberta Lee’s boyfriend.

The result: According to prosecutors, in 1993 and 1994, Lee repeatedly lied to colleagues so he could illicitly transfer top-secret files from the lab’s internal network for classified material to a separate system that is used for unclassified data and is open to the Internet.

Prosecutors concede that no evidence yet suggests that cyber-spies stole America’s premier nuclear secrets during the five years the files sat in that system. But they do not rule that out.

Similarly, prosecutors argue that the failure by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies to find the tapes simply proves that Lee is hiding them--or has handed them off. Lee’s lawyers say that he destroyed them but will not say where, when or how.

“What do they want, to see his garbage can?” asks Brian Sun, the Los Angeles lawyer who represents Lee’s family.

Agents probably already have. The FBI has checked what a prosecutor called “every safe deposit box and storage locker in most of New Mexico.” They put an electronic “locater” bug under Lee’s Honda Accord. They also investigated his family.

On June 9, two agents arrived at Alberta’s office in Chapel Hill, N.C., to serve a subpoena. She quickly called her brother in Cleveland moments before agents buzzed his apartment too. Later, the agents got a search warrant and examined computer files and e-mail in the Cleveland clinic where he was doing graduate research on heart valve mechanics.

Other agents simultaneously interviewed Wen Ho Lee’s younger brother, Wen Ming, in San Mateo; his younger sister, Angela Liang, in Arcadia; and his infirm older brother, Wen Tou, in an assisted care facility in Arcadia.

The FBI also visited niece Lori Janey in Minneapolis. She and her husband, Steve, answered questions for two hours and then consented to a search. Ten agents scoured the house before hauling away four computers for further analysis. Then they handed Mrs. Janey a subpoena.

“It was straight out of ‘The Godfather,’ ” complains Alberta Lee. “They orchestrated a hit on all my relatives across the country at exactly the same time.”

Except for the invalid Wen Tou Lee, who was excused, the relatives all testified before the grand jury June 18. Among the topics: the unsolved slaying by masked gunmen of Wen Tou Lee’s wife and son during a home invasion robbery in Rosemead in 1997.

Other queries sought to determine if Wen Ho Lee had financial problems--or hidden riches. Family members were grilled about his $16,000 loan to his older brother, two rental properties he owns in Albuquerque and whether he liked to gamble.

“They were looking for motivation, money . . . for giving away secrets,” says Chung Lee. “They knew we often drove to California and usually stopped at Las Vegas. The reason was my mom likes the buffet and loves to shop. So my dad and I would go gamble. They wanted to see if my dad was losing a lot and needed money, so they asked what’s the most he ever lost. I told them I once saw him lose $50 and he was really upset and stopped playing for a long time.”

Alberta and Chung Lee also testified that they had used their father’s password to gain access to the Los Alamos computers. Chung says that he signed on from his parents’ home during summers and vacations to e-mail his girlfriend in San Diego.

Alberta says that she logged on to the Los Alamos system, especially in 1993, from UCLA. She was “addicted” to an Internet-based version of Dungeons and Dragons, she says, and the lab’s powerful computers provided a high-speed portal.

At fund-raisers and rallies for the nuclear scientist, speakers regularly denounce the FBI for what they consider racist profiling and unfair treatment of Lee and his family. Petitions are passed to protest his detention without bail. Sympathetic e-mail has flooded the defense fund’s Web site.

“To me, this is an attack on all Asian Americans,” explains Barry Chang, a Cupertino real estate agent who organized the Palo Alto lunch.

“The fear is this can happen to anyone,” he adds. “The government can accuse you of anything and then the media jumps in and convicts you. That’s not justice.”