Paranoia Strikes Deep

The alarm spread fast three years ago: China had made ominous breakthroughs in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and the strategic balance in Asia--and perhaps globally--was shifting. Espionage and treason were suspected, and there appeared to be serious reasons to believe that Beijing had stolen key secrets from Washington’s nuclear arsenal and was in a position to threaten the United States and its Asian allies. Suddenly the 50-year love-fear relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China had taken a turn for the worse.

With the 2000 presidential campaign shaping up, the political frenzy grew, and the FBI, searching for a leak, came to focus on a 59-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, who had come from Taiwan as a student in 1964 and was working as a nuclear weapons scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Suspected of spying for China, for giving to Beijing the United States’ most closely held nuclear secrets, its so-called crown jewels, Wen Ho Lee was charged with 59 counts of violating the Atomic Energy Act and the Federal Espionage Act, 39 of the counts punishable by life imprisonment.

A congressional investigation had already concluded that “without the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States, it would have been virtually impossible for [China] to fabricate and test successfully small nuclear warheads....” Lee was suspected of giving China the technology to miniaturize the warheads.

The government’s case against Lee ultimately collapsed as his legal team, granted top secret security clearances and tutored by Lee in the physics of nuclear weapons, picked apart the charges to the point where, in a plea bargain, all but one were dismissed and Lee pleaded guilty to downloading classified information and to copying that information on to a computer tape.

The prosecution, orchestrated by the FBI and the Department of Justice in the name of national security, was one of the most shameful since the McCarthy era. Beginning with no more than a surmise--that China might have developed an advanced nuclear warhead similar to those deployed on the missiles on Trident submarines--the investigation was founded on the rawest of racial profiling and pursued with bungling and incompetence. It moved forward in an atmosphere of race-baiting Sinophobia abetted by numerous politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, and by key elements of the news media, which rather than challenging the charges, added to the atmosphere, forgetting that in such times its role is not only to look after national security but also to defend civil liberties. As a result, China was portrayed as the new post-Cold War rival of the United States, and Lee was compared repeatedly to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 after being convicted of nuclear espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

In the end, however, the prosecution’s failed charges against Lee brought an extraordinary and profound apology from U.S. District Judge James A. Parker. “The top decision makers in the executive branch, especially the Department of Justice and the Department of Energy and locally ... have caused embarrassment by the way this case began and was handled,” Parker declared from the bench, as he freed Lee after 278 days in harsh pre-trial detention. “They did not embarrass me alone. They have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.... I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner in which you were held in custody by the executive branch.”

In an excellent piece of forensic journalism, “A Convenient Spy,” reporters Dan Stober of the San Jose Mercury News and Ian Hoffman of the Albuquerque Journal deconstruct the many bad decisions in Lee’s case, following each blunder to the top of the FBI, the Justice Department and the Clinton White House. The prime mover in the case was Notra Trulock, the chief of intelligence and counterintelligence for the Department of Energy’s nuclear laboratories and factories, but there were dozens of officials who failed to question his flawed logic or challenge his racism. Fearing that they, too, might be blamed for the loss of U.S. strategic superiority, these officials moved the case forward.

“The Wen Ho Lee affair was an ugly chapter in U.S. history,” Stober and Hoffman conclude. “It was a time when democratic ideals were forgotten in the name of national security, when ideology and ambition overpowered objectivity, and when partisan warfare trumped statesmanship.”

Senior scientists, veterans of the nuclear weapons program, came forward during the prosecution to debunk the government’s working premise--that China must have been helped by agents within the U.S. program--and disputed whether the material that Lee was suspected of providing would have even helped Beijing’s nuclear weapons program. And as Stober and Hoffman point out, the United States had gathered far more intelligence on China’s development of nuclear weapons than Beijing had obtained in the United States.

But Lee, as a Chinese American scientist, was virtually pre-ordained for prosecution, according to Stober and Hoffman’s analysis. Investigators were looking for someone of Chinese ancestry with access to U.S. nuclear secrets and only for such a person. That Lee was politically naive, sloppy in observing security protocols, alarmingly forgetful and at times deceitful added greatly to his vulnerability.

With the help of journalist Helen Zia, Lee gets his right of reply in “My Country Versus Me.” He explains that he had made copies of the computerized codes used to model nuclear explosions, and thus to test atomic weapons, because computer crashes at Los Alamos had cost him a lot of hard work, destroying years’ worth of code writing. He says that he had kept all the copied material secure, much of which was not even classified, until the investigation was well underway. Panic set in and, fearing discovery, he deleted the files from an unsecure computer he had used and threw away the magnetic tapes onto which he had copied them.

“It was simply inconceivable to me that any rational person who had the facts could think that I was a spy,” Lee writes. “As a scientist, I thought of facts as indisputable. I clung to the simple belief that the facts would prove the truth and that in America a person is innocent until proven guilty.”

In their exhaustive examination of the case, however, Stober and Hoffman do not entirely exonerate Lee, and they do raise serious doubts about his behavior. Copying the computer codes was “an egregious security offense,” they write. “Lee broke the fundamental trust that underlies the weapons world and, in the end, his betrayal of that trust--witting or not--seriously eroded America’s confidence in the weapons labs and the ability of his colleagues to protect secrets.”

Certainly, Lee’s actions could arouse suspicion and, as he acknowledges, deserved official reprimand, but they cannot justify the espionage charges against him nor his pre-trial incarceration in solitary confinement. Some politicians and commentators have argued that despite the dismissal of all but one charge, Lee’s own behavior and his “enigmatic character” were responsible for his fate, but in this they are blaming the victim for the injustice he suffered.

From the outset, the Lee case was far from simple, and even with the information available for the first time in these two books, there remain many difficult issues, unresolved questions and new concerns. It is clear, however, that the government’s prosecution of Lee severely undercut U.S. security interests. The investigation by the congressional committee led by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) into unauthorized transfers of highly sensitive technology to China was so caught up in Washington’s anti-China hysteria and was so influenced by Trulock that its conclusions cannot be trusted. Whether there was ever a leak of nuclear weapons secrets appears very uncertain, at least from what we can gather from the public record. What is the real state of China’s nuclear weapons program? We may not know for quite a while.

Is China the United States’ principal global rival, as Cox and others asserted? Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has focused on international terrorism as the gravest threat to the United States, and China so far has supported the U.S. effort against it. What will Washington’s relationship be with Beijing going forward? The strong anti-China sentiments, so evident in the Lee case, undermined what had been a key strategic partnership for the United States since the Nixon administration.

What is worse is that Asian Americans were again suspected of having divided loyalties. They were portrayed by some in the country’s political establishment as well as the intelligence community as almost an enemy column within, and gifted young Asian American scientists had serious reasons not to work in national laboratories, such as Los Alamos, or in the country’s defense industries.

The news media fanned this Sinophobia. Fed by Trulock and other federal officials motivated by self-interest, New York Times investigative reporters Jeff Gerth and James Risen raised the alarm about the supposed theft of the country’s “crown jewels” and compared the case to that of the Rosenbergs. Knowledgeable specialists in the paper’s own newsroom, however, should have quickly exposed the many holes in the case, and its editors should have questioned the bias of the sources. In fact, six months later, William Broad, a Times’ science writer with much experience reporting on nuclear armaments, interviewed physicists and weapons specialists at Los Alamos for another major piece and concluded that there was strong disagreement about how much help China had received, or needed, to advance its nuclear arsenal. However, the Times’ two reexaminations of the case were, in the view of Stober and Hoffman, largely self-exculpatory, trying not to admit any failure on the paper’s part while setting the record straight.

But The New York Times’ first story, the 3,800-word account by Gerth and Risen of the investigation at Los Alamos, set other news organizations in pursuit of the agents that China allegedly had within the U.S. weapons establishment. As editor of the Los Angeles Times through most of this period, I pressed our reporters to catch up with The New York Times, but they came back highly skeptical of the Cox report and of the case against Lee. Columnist Robert Scheer, based on his own reporting, argued on this newspaper’s Commentary page that Lee was a victim of racism and the case against him was fatally flawed.

Investigative reporting is an important defense of American democracy, but in the case of Wen Ho Lee, it contributed to the fear-mongering political atmosphere in Washington and nearly subverted justice. First Amendment rights imply the obligations to be factual and accurate, truthful and fair and, in my view, compassionate as well. As a profession, we failed this test in the Lee case and consequently diminished the credibility of investigative journalism.

All this leaves unresolved how the United States can best protect not only the secrets of its nuclear arsenal, but other technology with weapons potential, such as ballistic missiles, reconnaissance satellites or biological and chemical agents. A botched case like Lee’s could deter counterintelligence officers from pursuit of real leaks. So bungled was the Lee investigation, as Stober and Hoffman show, that one wonders how the FBI manages to catch real traitors. And it prompts concern that even now we may be repeating the errors of the Wen Ho Lee case as we search for terrorists within the Arab American community.

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From ‘My Country Versus Me’

‘My ordeal is a wound that will be hard to heal. I’m not sure how to recover from it. At my age, I don’t want to spend energy feeling hate or bitterness. It will be hard for me to trust people again the way I used to accept people’s friendliness and kindness at face value. At the same time, so many Asian, white, black, Hispanic, and Native American people were willing to help me. I wish I could thank every person individually. I also know that if I had been accused of such a thing in China or Russia, I would probably be dead. I would have been shot if this happened in Taiwan under the Kuomintang. The fact that I could be released after being so wrongly accused is evidence of the good in America. I can still say that I am truly glad that I am an American ....

The main reason for us to stay here is the warmth of our neighbors, our friends, and the real community we are part of. Sylvia [my wife] has her places to shop, to hike, to do yoga. I have my work, my garden, my secret fishing holes where I can catch a 27-inch trout, where I can find some peace of mind in the natural beauty that surrounds us. These are the important things that make a place a home.

This is my home, this is my place in America. This is why America is, after all, my country.’